Understanding Meaning and World

Reviews / Votes

"Understanding Meaning and World is a clearly written and careful assessment of some key aspects of the debate on semantic externalism and its metaphysical consequences. Sanjit Chakraborty covers the views of key protagonists of the debate, including Putnam, Chalmers, Bilgrami, and Fodor, admirably and offers his theory of 'internalistic-externalism' as a novel solution. This is a welcome addition to an important topic."Professor Maria BaghramianMRIA, Chair of American Philosophy, School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, Ireland"Sanjit Chakraborty engages intensely with the nature of meaning and related issues at the heart of philosophy of mind and of language. His new proposal is very promising: a 'reformed' version of externalism that can accommodate many of the intuitions that motivate internalists. Many of the foremost figures are covered in compelling detail, including Quine, Kripke, Burge, Evans, and Bilgrami, and there is a fascinating digression on Heidegger. But the hero here is Putnam, whose work the author obviously knows intimately and whose direct, unforced style he adopts. Food for thought is rarely such a pleasure to read."Professor Maximilian de GaynesfordHead of the Department of Philosophy, University of Reading, UK'In the preface to Reason, Truth and History Putnam says: 'The mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world'. Understanding Meaning and the World can be read as an exegesis of the position Putnam was trying to capture by this metaphor-a theory of meaning that does justice to the links between language and objective reality and, at the same time, to the freedom language enjoys vis a vis that reality. Beginning with Putnam's celebrated externalism, the book moves on to examine a series of arguments for and against Putnam's conception of meaning. In the light of these arguments, Chakraborty seeks to put forward a synthesis of externalist and internalist insights. Two points are particularly significant. Firstly, the book argues convincingly that Frege's philosophy of language has been a source of inspiration for both externalists and internalists and can thus serve as a basis for the said synthesis. Secondly-and this is a novel and more controversial idea-the book uses Heidegger's notion of Dasein as a platform for its modified externalism.'Professor Yemima Ben-MenachemDepartment of Philosophy, Hebrew University of Jerusalem