(published in Hilary Putnam / edited by Yemima Ben-Menahem, Cambridge University Press 2005)

Floyd’s paper begins with an overview of main characteristics of Putnam’s externalism which he offers in his “Meaning of ‘Meaning’”. She subsumes them under three major points:

1. Meaning “is object- or reality-involving”, in the sense that it is “significantly determined by reference rather then vice versa”.
2. “Concept possession, and much grasp of meaning is essentially social in character”.
3. She points out, that our “individuation of meanings, concepts, beliefs” are dependent on the language games in which they take place (she doesn’t use Wittgenstein’s term).

All the famous keywords like the inversion of Frege’s “intention implies extension”, indexicality, linguistic division of labour, the principle of charity and the causal theory of reference, “meanings are not in the head” can be subordinated under these points. The principles are realized by the way we apply Putnam’s meaning vector. I made an overview of her argumentation in a concept map.

Floyd’s new accentuation of Putnam’s critique of Frege is, that the primary issue was, beside attacking the descriptional/intensional theory of meaning and Frege’s Gedanken-platonism, also to demonstrate the inadequacy of Frege’s “universal conceptual scheme” (which he tried to realize as ‘Begriffsschrift’). She points out that this leads to ‘Proto-Kuhnian incommensurability problems’ between the ideal language and everyday language. As Frege considers a concept to be a function, ‘it must yield one and only one output for the inputs on which it is defined: the sharpness of a concept’s application [...] is intrinsic to it’s concepthood.’ This stands in contrast to everyday language where we do not have the sharpness demanded, even experts do not have a ‘full grasp of the sense of their concept words.’ Putnam contrasts this with a language-game dependent ‘polymorphousness of concept-individuation and contribution’.