Reframing Meaning Through Experience: A Synthesis of Putnam and Block
Introduction:
In this paper, I aim to portray meaning as a correlate of experience. I will utilize Hilary Putnam’s “Twin Earth” argument to identify an ambiguity in the conceptualization of meaning, and in doing so will attempt to identify experience as a sufficient origin of meaning. I hope to go beyond the traditional categories of internalist or externalist theories of meaning and instead posit a comprehensive and understandable model of where meaning comes from. After articulating this model, I will raise some concerns about the inherent ambiguity and subjectivity of experience as a basis for the ambiguity that lies in our meaning of words. From here, my thesis is such that in order to precisely determine meaning, we must first precisely identify what constitutes our subjective experiences. I will then review a method of identifying our experiences as put forth by Ned Block. The basis of this review is to ponder the question of whether our experiences can be “so divorced from cognitive access that a subject can have an experience that [they] do not and cannot think about” . Entertaining Block’s conception of phenomenal versus access consciousness, I will propose an interpretation of meaning that identifies precisely where the ambiguity lies.
Meaning:
Historically, theories of linguistic meaning in philosophy have been developing since the Middle Ages at least. Early writers on the theory of meaning noticed a particular ambiguity that exists in the meaning of words and of the objects that they refer to. The most salient example of this is in cases where there is no clear “yes/no” delineation between whether certain objects fit into a category dependent on their name. For example, we know what the word “chair” refers to and the term seems to have a straightforward meaning – a chair is “anything that is a chair”. But in the case of attempting to identify a chair which has no backing and only three legs, we can see how some could debate whether or not this object fits the bill and can subsequently be labeled “chair”. The difficulty in this classic conundrum of meaning is that some would consider this three legged object a chair, while others would not. This seems to suggest an ambiguity in methods of articulating the meaning of words – IE our meanings are subjectively granted. Such conundrum is the basis of the historical background of the 20th century’s renaissance of philosophy of language. One such 20th century language philosopher was Hilary Putnam. Putnam put forth an argument which means to challenge theories like descriptivism, which holds that a person’s conception or internal description of an entity determines the reference of their words. Putnam’s Twin Earth thought experiment attempts to show that two individuals can have the same internal descriptions or conceptions, but still refer to different things. The conclusion that follows from this line of thinking is that meaning cannot be determined solely by internal states because the same, identical, internal state can correspond to different objects in different environments.
Twin Earth
The Twin Earth argument goes as follows. Imagine a planet identical to Earth called “Twin Earth”. On this planet, everything and everyone is exactly the same as on Earth down to the very atom– everything except one substance. On Earth the substance is H2O, and on twin-Earth, the substance is XYZ. XYZ, for the sake of the argument, is functionally “identical” to H2O, but is a different chemical compound. Now imagine you have a twin on twin Earth who is identical to you in every way – physically, biologically, psychologically, etc. When you say “water” you are referring to H2O, but when your twin says “water” they are referring to XYZ. Putnam posits that both you and your twin’s internal mental states are identical, and even though you have the exact same mental state, you are each referring to different entities. It is from this reasoning that Putnam posits that there must be something additional to the construction of meaning besides the internal state of the subject in question – something external.
I will now outline some of my concerns and criticisms regarding the argument that Putnam has put forth, and attempt to demonstrate how these concerns may render Putnam’s conclusion invalid. This argument relies on the narrator to already understand the implicit difference between the two substances. In this example, we (the reader) already have accessible knowledge about the difference between the two substances and have names for them (H2O and XYZ). Be it that the subject and twin-subject only know of each of their respective substances as “water” the issue now simply becomes the inability for the subject and the twin-subject to identify the detailed chemical structure of the substance which they are interacting with. To help illustrate how this clouds the validity of the argument, I will describe another example of Putnam’s Twin Earth.
Imagine the exact same scenario that Putnam put forth, but imagine that the subject and the twin subject are both chemists. They each have access to machinery which can identify the chemical composition of H2O and XYZ respectively. They both still refer to their respective substances as “water”, but they are also familiar with the chemical composition of such substances. If the subject were somehow able to communicate with their twin-subject and analyze and compare their substances, they would now be capable of having differing experiences of each other’s “water”, and as such, would exhibit different internal mental states.
The particular issue that I take with Putnam’s characterization of meaning is the assumption that the subject or the twin-subject can ever have access to an object’s real state, or in this case, chemical composition without having an experience of such. The only reason that Putnam is even capable of making a distinction between the subject’s “water” and the test subject’s “water” is because he has assumed an experience and applied the subsequent information into a more detailed description of each substance. Putnam, by even making the classification of the different substances, assumes an experience that necessitates classifying each substance as either H2O or XYZ. If this thought experiment were created in real life, in order to make the distinction between each substance, the operator in charge of the experiment would have had to have had an experience such that necessitated a distinction between the two “waters”.
It seems to then follow that the accuracy of our meanings of objects is only as good and detailed as our experiences of them. That is to say, our meanings seem to inherently derive from our experiences. In Putnam’s twin Earth thought experiment, the narrator of the story assumes the role of some “objective observer” but then proceeds to contribute information about each substance that could only have been garnered through experience and analysis of each substance. Any information pertaining to chemical composition of some object has only ever been accessed through the experience of certain machinery or scientific hypothesizing which leads to a mental state that represents the conceptualization of a “chemical composition”. This implicit assumption in the experiment seems to invalidate, or at least confuse, the conclusion which Putnam presents.
Experience:
The conclusion which I present, that meaning derives exclusively from experience, does raise some concerns about the validity of our meanings. One may rebut that “if our experiences of objects are ambiguous, imprecise, and subjective, how do we communicate so effectively?” To this, I argue that the significant overlap and similarity between all of our experiences allow us to practically communicate about objects. Though my personal meaning of an object may be slightly different than yours (as it is exclusively derived from my personal experiences of the object, of which you have not shared with me) the characteristics of such an object that are pertinent to communicate (characteristics like color, position, certain obvious associations, etc.) are all represented in my internal mental state not identically to yours, but similarly enough that you are capable of understanding me and relating my communication of meaning to your internal mental state of such object. Or similarly, that when I utilize my internal mental state to refer to an object by naming it to you – say “chair”, your internal mental state which is prompted by the word “chair” is similar enough to mine that we can converse about the various aspects and characteristics of “chair” which we share in our respective mental states. Conversely, when we have internal mental states which differ in some regard about “chair”, our conversations will tend to be more confused or ambiguous and we will have more difficulty in discussing said “chair”.
This model of construction of meaning is capable of explaining the distinction that Putnam makes about “internalist words” and “externalist words”. To Putnam, externalist words are words like “chair”, “apple”, “Obama”, etc. whereas internalist words are things like “7”, “consciousness”, “causation” and other more vague or hard to define words. By characterizing the construction of meaning through experience, and supposing that each word has its own intrinsic subjective meaning for each person, we are able to identify why some words are ambiguous and others aren’t. Putnam’s examples of externalist words are referring to experiences of objects that can be routinely seen and are very often experienced in the “same” manner by every human. Whereas his internalist words are referring to experiences that can be interpreted widely differently. For example, the reason that myself and someone else may have different meanings of the word “consciousness” is because “consciousness” in the english language is not precisely defined or routinely engaged with, thus my experience of the word can give rise to many different associations, many of which are likely different enough from someone else's that we have difficulty communicating about its meaning. That is not to say that either of us have a “correct” internal mental state of “consciousness”, but that by the very nature of language development, our experiences and words tend to assimilate similarly only when we share similar environments, and when words are associated with more diverse environments or experiences, we have more difficulty in communicating a shared meaning.
One concern about this approach to meaning however, is how difficult it is now to precisely define the meaning of anything. We can’t exactly point to the “sum of our experiences as related to said object” and declare that as its meaning. To do so, we must first be able to precisely define our experiences. To qualitatively define or identify what constitutes our “experience” seems an impossible task. Nate Block, however, developed a model of distinction between two modes of consciousness which aim to categorize and qualitatively delineate between what he calls our “phenomenal consciousness” and “access consciousness”.
Phenomenal and Access Consciousness:
The purpose of this section is to deliberate on the idea that if meaning is a correlate to experience, what then constitutes our experience? I will review Ned Block’s essential distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness and then implement his schema into the argument about meaning. Using Block’s model of experience, I will pose two different definitions of the origin of meaning, and relate them with their respective implications.
Phenomenal consciousness refers to experience. To have phenomenal consciousness is “what it is like to be in that state.” Access consciousness on the other hand is described as the availability for use in “reasoning and rationally guiding speech and action”. To help articulate this distinction, I aliken phenomenal consciousness to the state of mind of someone who is blacked-out drunk, and access consciousness to the alert and oriented consciousness which we exhibit when not under the influence. This reference to a blacked-out drunk person is not necessarily consistent with the genuine distinction between the two modes of consciousness, but it helps to demonstrate the idea that a conscious state can persist even without a significant influence from access-consciousness. That is to say that to be in a blacked-out drunk state seems akin to just “being”, as there is very little or no ability to recall or reflect – as is the primary characteristic of so-called “wakeful consciousness”.
Ned Block’s best empirical evidence for the existence of this subjective state of phenomenal consciousness as a separate module from access consciousness is in trials of patients with “blindsight”. Blindsight is a phenomenon where someone who is completely blind, be it from trauma or neural inflammation, but whose retina and ocular systems are still wholly functional – that is, someone who has only suffered damage in the cortical neural correlates to conscious recognition of objects and vision, NOT suffered damage to their eyes or orbital nerves - is not capable of consciously or verbally expressing anything that they see, but when asked questions about particular information regarding objects in front of them, are highly successful at guess-answering these questions correctly. Block takes from these scenarios that there must be some underlying subjective process which is still recognizing and analyzing visual information, but that this information is simply not communicating with the part of the brain which is consciously recalling and formatting information. These phenomenological experiences however are still capable, as documented in trials with blindsight patients, of influencing action. The blindsight patients exhibit a disconnection between their phenomenal and access consciousness. Block goes on in his later paper Consciousness and Cognitive Action to suggest that there exists even in a healthy and operative brain particular separate modalities of consciousness. This suggestion now leads us to a couple questions regarding our thinking about how we can identify and characterize our experiences.
Implications for Meaning
The problem seems to be whether we should characterize our experiences as exclusively what we have access to, or what we perceive in the entirety of our phenomenally conscious and access conscious states. The standard, intuitive answer seems to be that our experiences are wholly made up by our wakeful conscious state – that is, the accessible information and processes that produce our actions. The issue presented by Block’s research shows however that there may be unconscious (or phenomenally conscious) systems which also influence our wakeful behavior, and thus should be included in our identification of what makes up our experience. The ambiguity in how these two modalities of consciousness seem to influence our behavior has implications when it comes to determining what our precise meaning of objects are. For example, in a patient with blindsight, would repeated experiences of associations between a chair and an image of something repulsive, say vomit, influence the associated meaning that that person applies to their conceptualization of “chair”? We cannot possibly know the answer to this without empirical trials, however I would argue that the assumption is, yes, the patient would develop over time an averse association to the word chair, despite not having accessible conscious activity to the reasoning behind this association. That is to say that, the patient’s phenomenal, non-accessible consciousness contributes to their decided meaning of the word “chair”. The conclusion of this point is that our phenomenally conscious states (which are inaccessible to our waking conscious identity) influence and guide our experiences. If this is the case, it then seems to follow that we cannot correctly characterize our experiences as exclusively what is made up through our access-consciousness. That is that there are components which contribute to our experience, which we do not consciously experience – or rather that we do consciously experience, but are inaccessible to our access-consciousness.
To further articulate this point, I will narrate a story and pose a question. There is a video on the internet which went viral many years ago in which you (the viewer) are asked to keep track of a group’s throwing of a basketball between each other. You are tasked with keeping track of how times the players wearing white throw the basketball. This video continues for a minute or so and at the end of the video, it is revealed to you that while you were paying attention to the iterations of the basketball throws, a man in a gorilla costume has walked directly through your line of vision across the screen. The typical outcome is that you did not notice this gorilla, a seemingly absurd and obvious interruption, walking through the screen because your attention was focused elsewhere.
The implication of this is that though you surely “saw” the gorilla – IE your ocular system received and processed to some extent the photons of light which represent the gorilla, its presence was never made cognitively accessible to you. Utilizing Ned Block’s conception of phenomenal and access consciousness, this process could be characterized as follows: Your phenomenal consciousness gathers a vast breadth of subjective experience of your environment, including the gorilla, but your access-consciousness did not apply attention to this information and as such, it was not made accessible to you. Block, in his 2008 paper Consciousness and Cognitive Access, creates an example which is adjacent to this, and attempts to showcase more clearly the process by which our brain still experiences and processes information that is inaccessible to our waking conscious state because we do not focus any attention on it.
In the case of the gorilla, let's attempt to define or identify the meaning of this experience. If we were to use the model which I have outlined to derive meaning, we would first want to qualitatively identify what makes up our experience of the gorilla experiment. If I wanted to articulate what precisely makes up my experience of this experiment, would I include the gorilla? Imagine I showed two groups two identical videos except that in one video there is a gorilla which walks through the center, and in the other video the gorilla is doctored out. The two groups of viewers seem to have had the same experience – they gathered the same relevant information and when asked to report what they saw they all have similar characterizations of the events which occurred. But the same events did not occur - one group “saw” a gorilla and the other did not. The group which saw the gorilla of course does not know that they saw a gorilla, because they do not have cognitive access to it, however the gorilla’s presence still made it to their phenomenal subjective experience and can (as demonstrated by Block’s blindsight patients and his experiment on rectangular models) influence their behavior, thus altering the meaning which they associate with the event. Both groups exhibit different internal mental states, but they report as having the same internal mental state because their accessible conscious mental states are very similar to each other.
Conclusion and Further Implications and Thoughts
This is all to say that somebody’s “meaning” of an object is inherently characterized by their experience of that object, but their meaning is derived from experiences which include information which is not accessible to their waking conscious mental state. Such is to say that Putnam is correct in supposing that there is something other than what he called our “internal state” (what I would call our access-conscious state) that contributes to our construction of meaning. My articulation on this point however is that it is not some wholly external element of the object as it exists in reality which guides our meaning, as Putnam believes, but rather that there is a more fundamental, phenomenal state of experience which further guides our characterization of meaning. This experiential method of constructing meaning is what constitutes the ambiguity in meaning of objects. It is not that there is objective information which exists in some external plane of reality that contributes to our construction of meaning, but rather that we have phenomenally subjective conscious experiences which can gather a wide breadth of varying information that contributes to each of our subjective constructions of meaning.
Bibliography
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