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38 THE ROLE OF CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS
I of course hold against Lycan that if we give up too many of the properties common sense associates with belief as
represented by the folk theory of belief, we do indeed change the subject, and are no longer talking about belief. The
role of the intuitions about possible cases so distinctive of conceptual analysis is precisely to make explicit our implicit
folk theory and, in particular, to make explicit which properties are really central to some state's being correctly
described as a belief. For surely it is possible to change the subject, and how else could one do it other than by
abandoning what is most central to defining one's subject? Would a better way of changing the subject be to abandon
what is less central?
I think that Lycan and others; I choose Lycan's formulation because of its clarity and directness misconstrues the
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relevance to folk theory of what we learnt from Putnam (and Kripke). Putnam built his impressive case concerning
the reference of theoretical terms out of intuitions about how to describe possible cases. He told stories about, for
famous example, Twin Earth, and invited us to agree with him that what counted as water on Twin Earth was not the
stuff on Twin Earth with the famous superficial properties of water being a clear potable liquid and all that; for
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short, being watery but rather the stuff that on Earth made up (most of) the watery samples that we were
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acquainted with when the term water was introduced. We agreed with Putnam. But we were not under external
instruction from some linguistic dictator to agree with him. Our agreement was endogenous. It, therefore,
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Kripke, Naming and Necessity ; Putnam, The Meaning of Meaning .
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Or the watery stuff, as Chalmers puts it, The Conscious Mind, 57.
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Some of us agreed with him less whole-heartedly than others. See e.g. Frank Jackson, A Note on Physicalism and Heat , Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 56 (1980): 26 34.
I am sympathetic to the view advanced most especially by David Lewis, Reduction of Mind , in Samuel Guttenplan, ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1994), 412 31, see p. 424, that in the mouths and from the pens of the folk it is indeterminate whether it is H2 O or the watery stuff on Twin Earth that counts
as water on Twin Earth, and the effect of the stories was to resolve the indeterminacy in the direction of H2 O at least when we are in philosophical contexts. For
simplicity I will suppress this complication in what follows and will suppose, with the majority, that the stories did not resolve an ambiguity but rather made conspicuous a
hitherto unremarked feature of our use of the word water and like natural-kind terms.
THE ROLE OF CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS 39
reflected our folk theory of water. Putnam's theory is built precisely on folk intuitions.
Indeed, and I mention this now because it will be important later, we learn two things from Putnam's story. As has
been widely noted, we can think of the Twin Earth story in two different ways, depending on whether we think of
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Twin Earth as somewhere remote from Earth but in our, the actual, world, or as in another possible world altogether.
From the first version, we learn the importance of acquaintance in determining the reference of the word water . The
reason the watery XYZ on Twin Earth a planet located, let's suppose, in Earth's orbit but on the opposite side of the
Sun does not count as water is that it was not XYZ that we were acquainted with when the word water and its
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cognates in other languages were introduced (and have continued to be acquainted with). From the second version,
we learn that the term water is a rigid designator. Even if Twin Earth is simply Earth (or its counterpart) in another
possible world, and in that possible world XYZ is both watery and the stuff we not the Twin Earthians are
acquainted with, it does not count as water. The term water in our mouths and from our pens rigidly denotes
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whatever actually is both watery and is what we are, or certain of our linguistic forebears were, acquainted with. The
reference in all worlds is settled by what is watery and the subject of the relevant acquaintance in the actual world. But
both our lessons were
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Though sometimes when the point is noted, it is suggested that it is of no moment which way we think of the Twin Earth parable. If what I say in the text is right, this is a
mistake. The discussion in Hilary Putnam's retrospective piece on Twin Earth, Is Water Necessarily H2 O? , in James Conant, ed., Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 54 79, suggests that he was more concerned with the remote place in our world reading of the parable.
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There are nice questions of when historical acquaintance does and does not trump current acquaintance in determining reference, when it is indeterminate which trumps
which, and how conversational context affects these matters. But, for our purposes, we can set them to one side. There is also the question of how it comes to be that some
kind of causal acquaintance is important in determining reference. I favour the view, sometimes known as causal descriptivism (see e.g. Fred Kroon, Causal Descriptivism ,
Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 65 (1987): 1 17) that it does so because we use the word water for something that we believe to have, among other properties, the
property of being the subject of a certain kind of causal acquaintance.
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To put the point in the terms of Martin Davies and Lloyd Humberstone, Two Notions of Necessity , Philosophical Studies, 38 (1980): 1 30.
40 THE ROLE OF CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS
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lessons about folk theory because they were supported by folk intuitions about possible cases.
As it happens, I do not find very appealing Lycan's view that the term belief is a term for an informational natural
kind whose identity will be revealed by psychological investigation of (presumably) us exemplars of believers. I think
the folk are strongly against
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Two cautionary notes about terminology. First, Lycan is clearly writing in the same tradition as I am, a broadly Quinean (and for that matter Kripkean) one, I take it, in
which were it the case that water was simply an abbreviated definite description, it would still be true that water referred. But there is another, more Russellian tradition, I
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