what are some of your thoughts about Kripke and Putnam’s analyses of natural kind terms? will the essentialists please stand up? i agree that meanings ain’t in the head, but does that commit me to the view that “water = h2o” is a necessary truth? i can certainly imagine a world in which water isn’t h2o, and no contradiction obtains. furthermore, it’s difficult to imagine that in 1750, when people talked about water, they were referring to hydrogen hydroxide. i have no argument; just an intuition, which is nothing less than what Kripke offers.
I don’t think you need to be an essentialist to believe water=H20. It’s a perfectly good and useful definition and it gets necessarily cluttered when we describe the natural world anyway. That is, in order to claim it is a natural kind, we have to get rid of all those impurities that are always in the things we refer to water. Kripke’s point gets interesting however when he applies it to pain (more on that later though I’ll probably just quote Kripke).
Also, I’m not sure that Putnam’s twin earth example concerning water is really is best described as essentialist – at least in Reason, Truth, and History – after his turn against metaphysical realism so to speak. Admittedly, I usually see it from a first person point of view, how would I react to being spirited away to a planet exactly like earth with the exception that what they call water is what I call water plus 10% grain alcohol (rather than arguing that what they call water is XYZ rather than H20).
I don’t think “meaning ain’t in the head” necessarily means we have to accept representational theories of language when we can say that language is causally oriented.
Is this where you were heading?
I believe words and defintions are the quite natural extensions of things. This is even true for formulas. I also believe that if the designation H20 didn’t exist, and two people on opposite sides of the glode had to find a symbolization of water, they would both come up with something similar to H20. Perhaps I am just very Heideggerian in this respect.
I may be way off base here, but perhaps Kant’s notion of analytic vs. synthetic statements could be of use.
That I can imagine that Water is not=H2o does not show it is nevertheless not a necessary truth. Someone may claim he can imagine a triangle whose angles are not equivalent to a straight angle (and, for all I know, he has imagined (or pictured that); and in “Through the Looking Glass” the Cheshire Cat was imagined as disappearing little by little until we could imagine him grinning-but with no lips. As Descartes pointed out; he doubted anyone could imagine (picture to himself) a chilagon (thousand-sided figure-doesn’t the picture in your mind have, perhaps, only 998 sides? Did you count them?) But geometers know necessary truths about chilagons. But they do not depend on their imaginations. They depends on conception. They can conceiveof a chilagon. We may not be able to imagine four dimensional space, but physicists talk about it a lot.
The fact that people talked about water but not H2o is neither here nor there. People still talk about sunset and sunrise although we are all (I hope) Copernicuns. And in Moby Dick whales were talked about as “great fish.” They are mammals. They only look like fish. So, a colorless, tasteless, odorless, liquid may for all the world look like water. But, not be water, nevertheless. We have to distinguish between what Locke called, “nominal essence” and “real essence.” Between surface properties and deep properties of kinds of things. As Bishop Berkeley advised, “Speak with the vulgar, but think with the wise.”
Note, of course you may be right anyway. Maybe water is H2o is not a necessary truth (although it is true). And nothing I have written is an argument for Kripke’s position. But your arguments don’t show it isn’t true. By the way, the identification of analyticity and necessity is just what Kripke is rejecting. So I don’t suppose that using it to attack his view would help much, since it would be question-begging.
I don’t know what the deal is? Ants, bugs, flys, whales, do these creatures have terribly alot to do with philosophy? From a certain perspective a whale can be seen as a fish. Just because it shares some traits with us and some scientists rushed to make the link doesn’t mean it can’t be looked at in another way. Truthfully, I do not think that highly of a creature that can’t make it on to dry ground as we did (at least according to the theory of evolution). Face it, a whale is a big fish with mammel attributes. You have to remember that classifying animals is only a convention and is not neccessarily the law. In his book Lila, Robert Pirsig gives the example of the platypus as a quite strange animal that the scientists couldn’t easliy decide what group to put in it, what to name it or what it was, because of its apparent strangeness.
We can see whales as fish, or as large impediments to navigation, or as anything else we like. But that isn’t the point. The point is how whales fit in with, or accord, with biological science and with the theory of evolution. It is science which “directs” us to classify whales as mammals. To say that a whale is a big fish with mammalian characteristics is like saying that a triangle is a peculiarly shaped square with triangular characteristics.
Pens can be seen or classified as simply pencils, although it would cause some inconvenience, because pens and pencils are man-made, and we can see man-made objects as we like. But human beings did not make whales. They were found or discovered, and they are natural kinds, not artificial kinds like pens or pencils. So our classifications have to fit into their nature; and it is science, in this case biology, that tells us what their nature is.
Yes, but my point is that I didn’t create the science, I am a “free thinker” and can think about things anyway I want, its my freedom, new theories are expounded all of the time, sometimes it is profitable to think things through on your own and from scratch instead of just listening to what the textbooks or the experts have to say.
When you freely think through whether the Earth is shaped like a rhomboid or a triangle or is spherical, let me know your conclusion.
But, I hope you will not be offended when I, nevertheless, accept the authority of astronomers and think that the Earth is spherical.
my friend, accept the authority of anyone you would like. From a certain perspective (out in space) the earth does indeed look round. Yet, however from the human perspective on the ground it does very much appear like it is a flat plain. This mysterious thing to me is that you would think they would have figured the earth was round from the sun disappearing regularly into the horizon. I mean where did they think the sun was going, to hell. 
How else could the sun disappear? It is a strange and telling fact that they didn’t and probably couldn’t figure that the suns setting meant the earth was round. This is because reality conditions us, not the other way around.
Well, so much for a discussion on Kripke or Putnam. 
I don’t think this is a possible position to have. The difference is only that between knowing where you get your ideas and not knowing. Critical thinking is one thing, but you have to start somewhere.
This is, of course, correct, but it seems that Kennethamy had restricted the point to the shape of the earth, so I don’t quite see the relevance here.
Underneath a flat earth. What’s wrong with that assumption (except of course that it’s wrong.)?
I’m not sure what ‘reality conditions us’ means here.
I don’t necessarily get my ideas from other people, sometimes I do, but it wasn’t the way I originally proceeded. I have eyes that see. People that rely on others for their ideas are really just butt kissers.
I’m not questioning your sincerity if that’s what you mean. I just don’t see how ideas come out of nowhere. You may have eyes that see, but you’ll describe any scene you see using words others gave you.