This semester I’m teaching an intro semantics course for the first time and I decided to use Saeed’s Semantics as a textbook. Its seems like a good textbook; it gives a good survey of all the modern approaches to semantics—internalist, externalist, even so-called cognitive semantics—though the externalist bias is clear if you know what to look for. For instance, the text is quick to bring up the famous externalist thought experiments—Putnam’s robotic cats, Quine’s gavagai, etc—to undercut the internalist approaches, but doesn’t really seem to present the internalist critiques and counterarguments. So, I’ve been striving to correct that in my lectures.
While I was preparing my most recent lecture, something struck me. More precisely, I was suddenly able to put words to something that’s bothered me for a while about the whole debate: The externalist case is strongest for natural kinds, but the internalist case is strongest for human concepts. Putnam talks about cats and water, Kripke talks about tigers and gold, while Katz talks about bachelors and sometimes artifacts. This is not to say that the arguments on either side are unanswerable—Chomsky, I think has provided pretty good arguments that even, for natural kinds, our internal concepts are quite complicated, and there are many thorny issues for internalist approaches too—but they do have slightly different empirical bases, which no doubt inform their approach—if your theory can handle artifact concepts really well, you might be tempted to treat everything that way.
I don’t quite know what to make of this observation yet, but I wanted to write it down before I forgot about it.
There’s also a potential, but maybe half-baked, political implication to this observation. Natural kinds, are more or less constant in that, while they can be tamed and used by humans, we can’t really change them that much, and thinking that you can, say, turn lead into gold would mark you as a bit of a crackpot. Artifacts and social relations, on the other hand, are literally created by free human action. If you view the world with natural kinds at the center, you may be led to the view that the world has its own immutable laws that we can maybe harness, maybe adapt to, but never change.
If, on the other hand, your theory centers artifacts and social relations, then you might be led to the conclusion, as expressed by the late David Graeber, that “the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.”
But, of course, I’m just speculating here.