Putnam's Semantic Externalism Revisited

From “Is Semantics Possible?” (1970) to his seminal work “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” (1975), Hilary Putnam developed his semantic externalism about the meaning and reference of natural kind terms. His metasemantic position, especially his idea of ‘indexicality’, is typically interpreted as a form of physical externalism. Such a view is committed to both natural kind realism (as a basis for reference determination) and causal-historical chains (as a basis for reference preservation). I contend that this interpretation requires reconsideration. Some scholars have presented textual evidence that Putnam did not presuppose natural kind realism when he developed his metasemantic position during the relevant period. Nonetheless, the question of how Putnam’s semantic externalism should be reformulated remains open. In this paper, I reconstruct his metasemantic position as what I term convergent externalism. On this account, the diachronic identity of reference is both guided by norms inherent to our linguistic practices and retroactively secured. While Putnam revised his general philosophical views throughout his career, my thesis demonstrates that the metasemantic and epistemological foundations of his thought were more unified than is often recognized.