I’m not quite sure why it matters that the world Putnam creates is “scientifically incoherent”—which I take to mean it conflicts with our current understanding of science?
As far as we know, the facts of science could have been different; hell, we could still be wrong about the ones we currently think we know. So our language ought to be able to cope with situations where the scientific facts are different than they actually are. It doesn’t matter that Putnam’s scenario can’t happen in this world: it could have happened, and thinking about what we would want to say in that situation can be illuminating. That’s all that’s being claimed here.
I wonder if the problem is referring to these kinds of things as “thought experiments”. They’re not really experiments. Imagine a non-native speaker asking you about the usage of a word, who concocts an unlikely (or maybe even impossible scenario) and then asks you whether the word would apply in that situation. That’s more like what’s going on, and it doesn’t bear a lot of resemblance to a scientific experiment!
I’m not quite sure why it matters that the world Putnam creates is “scientifically incoherent”—which I take to mean it conflicts with our current understanding of science?
As far as we know, the facts of science could have been different; hell, we could still be wrong about the ones we currently think we know. So our language ought to be able to cope with situations where the scientific facts are different than they actually are. It doesn’t matter that Putnam’s scenario can’t happen in this world: it could have happened, and thinking about what we would want to say in that situation can be illuminating. That’s all that’s being claimed here.
I wonder if the problem is referring to these kinds of things as “thought experiments”. They’re not really experiments. Imagine a non-native speaker asking you about the usage of a word, who concocts an unlikely (or maybe even impossible scenario) and then asks you whether the word would apply in that situation. That’s more like what’s going on, and it doesn’t bear a lot of resemblance to a scientific experiment!