The other day me and my girlfriend were in
a store buying a lightbulb for an old fluorescent lamp we'd found. We both knew nothing about fluorescent lamps
so we handed it to the clerk and asked him to find the right kind of bulb. When
he found the right bulb (a standard 5 watt one)
he remarked that because the lamp was old it was very noisy. I asked him if it was a ballast problem (when
a fluorescent light had flickered and buzzed my dad had said it had bad
ballast) he immediately brightened up and explained that it wasn't a problem
with the ballast but simply the fact that the old style of ballast was noisier
than the new style. After we left my girlfriend was indignant that I knew no
more about fluorescent lights than she did but by saying the right words I
could make everyone think I did.
Hillary Putnam pointed out that people can
talk about things without knowing the details of what those words denote. His
example was beach tree. He doesn't know what they look like, and he couldn't
pick one out of a police lineup, but he has the verbal distinction and when
someone tells him that beech nuts are edible he can pass that knowledge on,
even though it has no grounding in his own experience.
From this perspective money serves a
similar function in the economy, without money debt is grounded as a specific
relationship between people, with money debts can be bought and sold and travel
far beyond their original context.
Similarly there are two ways of doing
algebra, one is to think about the objects and what operations would make sense
on them, another is to move symbols around according to symbol manipulation
rules.
Many facts about the world can appear in a
languages as rules about how to combine words so that someone can then speak
coherently about things they don't understand. There is a fuzzy boundary
between pragmatics and grammar.
Citations
Putnam, H. (1975/1985) The meaning of 'meaning' . In Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2: Mind, Language and Reality. Cambridge University Press.
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