Putnam on Intentionality

Abstract

In recent writings Hilary Putnam has challenged contemporary efforts to treat intentionality (and semantics) with the methods and resources of what he terms "scientific realism"-an approach committed to finding some "scientifically respectable" structural property common to all cases of phenomena having intentional content or symbolic meaning.' If none should be discovered, and Putnam sides with those who maintain that there is none to be discovered, this leaves the scientific realist obliged to eliminate such phenomena from the realm of the factual. Putnam's response is to question even the coherence of the latter option and to trace its error to the assumption that the only acceptable notion of reality is that favoured by the sort of realism which he takes to lie behind current scientific approaches to mind and meaning. This response will initially be congenial to many who urge that science is given unwarranted dominance in Scientism-in the view that the only real objects, properties and relations are those posited in scientific theory. However, this welcome may subsequently be withdrawn when it is discovered that, in Putnam's scheme, intentionality is protected from reduction or elimination not by locating it in a realm of non-scientific or non-empirical reality, but by rejecting the claim that there is a(ny) World, independent of human conception, to which belong the favoured posits of science but from which intentional phenomena are absent. Nothing is altogether not of our making, everything bears the marks of human manufacture-"the trail of the Human Serpent is over all".2 If semantics lacks features of seismology and shares features with art, that only locates it elsewhere within the fabric of man-made reality not outside mind-independent reality. For there is no