Hilary Putnam - Aristotle after Wittgenstein

ELI5/TLDR

When you say the word “tree,” how does that word actually latch onto a real tree in the world? Hilary Putnam’s paper tests whether an old idea from Aristotle — that things have built-in “forms” and language can hook onto those forms — might solve this puzzle better than the popular causal theory of reference. He finds Aristotle’s approach more promising than the alternatives but still not quite workable, mainly because things might not have the neat, unique essences the theory needs. His real conclusion: you probably cannot explain meaning without already using the concept of meaning.

The Full Story

The Problem: How Words Grab the World

Think of it like this. You say “cat,” and somehow that sound picks out actual furry animals rather than, say, cherries. This is the problem of reference — explaining the invisible cable that runs from language to reality. Putnam calls it language “hooking onto the world.” It sounds obvious until you try to explain the mechanism.

Two Ancient Ideas About Form

Putnam brings together Aristotle and the early Wittgenstein because both used the concept of “form” when thinking about how minds and language connect to reality. But their versions are very different.

For Aristotle, form is metaphysical and thick. The form of a human being is “rational animal.” The form of a dog is whatever makes it a dog. These are the deep natures of ordinary things — people, sheep, tables. When you perceive something, its form enters your mind. Imagine a stamp pressing into wax: the wax takes on the shape without becoming the stamp.

“The thinking part of the soul, while impassible, must be capable of receiving the form of an object, that is, must potentially be the same as its object without being the object.” — Aristotle, De Anima

Wittgenstein’s form in the Tractatus is thinner and more abstract. It is purely logical — an object’s form is just the set of possible ways it can combine with other objects. And nobody knows what Wittgenstein’s objects even are. He never says. They are mysterious elementary constituents of reality, not the tables-and-chairs objects of daily life.

Why the Causal Theory Fails

Before testing the Aristotelian route, Putnam dismantles the dominant rival: the causal theory of reference. The idea is simple — “cat” refers to cats because there is a causal chain linking our use of the word back to actual cats. Reduce meaning to cause and effect, and the puzzle is solved.

Putnam spots two problems. First, causation connects events, not objects. My clapping causes your hearing — but reference connects words to things. There is a category mismatch. Second, borrowing from Donald Davidson, Putnam notes that the same event can be described in wildly different ways. “Someone gave me a pair of apples” and “someone gave me an even prime number of apples” describe the same event, but one seems to involve prime numbers and the other does not. Nature does not come with labels telling us which description is correct.

Then comes Putnam’s permutation argument, originally from his 1981 book Reason, Truth, and History. You can define bizarre alternative references — where “cat” sometimes means cats and sometimes means cherries — and arrange it so that every sentence keeps the same truth value in every possible world. If nature alone cannot distinguish between these interpretations, nature alone cannot determine what words refer to.

Can Aristotle’s Form Do the Job?

Wittgenstein’s logical form is too thin to help — his objects all share roughly the same abstract structure, so form cannot pick out what any particular word refers to. Even Wittgenstein himself treated reference as coming through primitive naming, not through form.

Aristotle looks more promising. His forms are metaphysically rich and different from each other. A rational animal is not a tree is not a stone. If language has matching forms, then maybe reference is just form-matching: the word connects to whatever shares its form in reality. Imagine two puzzle pieces clicking together — language-form meets world-form, and reference is born.

Putnam notes that David Lewis, a self-described neo-Humean, does something surprisingly similar with his theory of “natural properties.” Lewis says certain properties — like electric charge — are intrinsically fundamental, and language naturally hooks onto those. But Putnam finds this magical: on Lewis’s view, even a brain in a vat with zero contact with the external world still refers to external things. Reference without any connection is, for Putnam, indistinguishable from sorcery.

Three Problems for the Neo-Aristotelian

Putnam identifies three reasons the Aristotelian approach still falls short:

The magic problem. If reference is just form-matching, you can refer to things you have never been in contact with. That feels like cheating.
The error problem. Aristotle’s science was deeply wrong about many things. If reference depends on getting the forms right, did Aristotle fail to refer to water because he had no idea it was H2O? That seems absurd — we want a theory where Aristotle was already talking about water, even with bad metaphysics.
The essence problem. Do things even have unique essences? Is it part of the essence of a dog that it descends from wolves? An evolutionary biologist says yes. A molecular biologist says no. Different scientific perspectives carve the world differently. Putnam rejects the Kripke-style idea that each thing has one privileged essential description. Without unique essences, form-matching has nothing stable to match against.

The Real Punchline

Putnam’s conclusion is that no theory of reference — causal, Wittgensteinian, or Aristotelian — can be reductive. You cannot explain meaning, reference, and intentionality in terms that do not already involve meaning, reference, and intentionality. The intentional vocabulary is irreducible. You are stuck in the circle.

The Aristotelian approach is not worthless. It is more promising than the causal theory. But it does not escape the circle either.

Key Takeaways

Reference is the philosophical problem of explaining how a word connects to the thing it picks out in the world — the invisible cable between language and reality.
Aristotelian form is not shape. It is the deep nature of a thing — “rational animal” for a human, not their height or hair color.
Wittgenstein’s form (in the Tractatus) is purely logical: the set of possible combinations an object can enter into. It is too thin and abstract to ground reference.
The causal theory of reference tries to reduce meaning to cause-and-effect chains. Putnam’s permutation argument shows you can scramble references while preserving all truths, so causation alone cannot pin down what words mean.
Putnam’s permutation argument: you can construct an alternative interpretation where “cat” sometimes means cherries, and every sentence stays true. This proves that the bare logical structure of the world underdetermines reference.
David Lewis’s “natural properties” are a quasi-Aristotelian move by a non-Aristotelian — claiming certain properties are intrinsically fundamental. Putnam finds this magical because it allows reference without any contact.
The essence problem: different branches of science assign different essences to the same thing (dogs’ essence differs for evolutionary vs. molecular biologists). If essences are not unique, form-matching cannot ground reference.
Putnam’s core thesis: intentional vocabulary (meaning, reference, interpretation) is irreducible. You cannot naturalize it away into non-intentional terms.

Claude’s Take

This is a philosophy lecture doing exactly what it should — walking through an academic paper carefully, with honest commentary about where the argument lands. Victor Gijsbers is a clear explainer, and the video is a useful entry point into a cluster of hard problems (reference, intentionality, essentialism) that sit at the intersection of philosophy of language and metaphysics.

That said, the content is a lecture about a single exploratory paper that Putnam himself treats as a thought experiment. It is not a major paper announcing a breakthrough. Putnam is explicitly trying something out and concluding it does not quite work. The value is in the journey — you get a tour of the causal theory, the permutation argument, Aristotelian form, Lewis’s natural properties — but the destination is modest: intentionality is irreducible. If you already suspected that, there is not much new ground.

Score of 6. Solid philosophical content, well-presented, but narrow in scope and low in surprise. The permutation argument is the most genuinely interesting move, and it gets only brief treatment here. The Lewis digression and the brain-in-a-vat sidebar are engaging but underdeveloped. Worth watching if you are already interested in philosophy of language; not the video that will pull you in if you are not.