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Putnam's account of the traditional theory of meaning.


 * 1. The intension/extension distinction. Also known as the Sinn/Bedeutung distinction, or the sense/reference distinction. The intension is also called the concept.
 * 2a. A term is not just a word, but an ordered pair consisting of a word + a sense. This ordered pair is what has a reference.
 * 2b. There is fuzziness in extension membership: Some things are not obviously members of the extension, others are more or less so. This is an extension of the problem of vagueness, the Sorites paradox, the problem of the heap, metaphysical indeterminacy, etc.
 * 2c. Given 2a, one might assume a terms with multiple intensions can be expressed with subscripts as follows: rabbit1, rabbit2, rabbit3, etc. But there is fuzziness in intension membership too: Someone might mean more than one intension, or a mix of two or more.
 * 3.a. There is an ambiguity where sometimes 'meaning' is thought to mean 'intension' and at other times, 'meaning' is thought to mean 'extension'.
 * 3.b. The result of this intension/extension distinction is the idea, held by many philosophers, that 'concepts' (aka intensions) are mental.
 * 4.a. The above view, pejoratively called psychologism, was rejected by Frege, and later Carnap and his followers. They wanted meaning to be public property, intersubjective rather than subjective. Multiple people should be able to grasp meanings, so they cannot be mental states but must be abstract objects. (Nevertheless, the graspings of meanings can be mental states; mental states that grasp abstract objects).
 * 4.b. The intension/extension distinction led to the idea that two terms with the same extension can have different intensions (renate v. chordate example). This means intensions possess necessary and sufficient conditions for extensions. But on the other hand, two terms with the same intension but different extension was taken to be impossible.
 * 5.a. In the positivistic era, this resulted in two assumptions about meaning: (i) Knowing the meaning of a term = being in a certain mental state. (ii) Intension determines extension.
 * 6. Putnam: No notion of meaning meets both those conditions.