Mind, Matter, and Meaning

Author: gordon swobe

  • What the Wiring Diagram Leaves Out

    MIND · MATTER · MEANING No. 26 · May 2026

    What the Wiring Diagram Leaves Out

    What the wiring leaves out isn’t a soul. It’s a world.

    An essay mindmatterandmeaning.com

    We now live among machines that behave, in narrow stretches, exactly as though someone were home. They answer the question, finish the sentence, console the griever. And a tempting thought follows hard behind: if a system is organized the right way — the same inputs producing the same outputs, the same inner states feeding into one another in the same pattern — then it doesn’t matter what the system is built from. Get the organization right and the mind comes along for free. The hardware is incidental. The wiring diagram is the whole story.

    That thought has a respectable name and a distinguished pedigree. Philosophers call it functionalism, and for several decades it was the closest thing the philosophy of mind had to an orthodoxy.1 It deserves the respect. Functionalism solved a real problem, and any account of the mind that ignores what it got right will be poorer for it. The trouble is only that it stops one step short — and the step it skips is the one that matters most for the question we now keep asking about machines.

    Start with what functionalism got right, because it is genuinely a lot. Its founding move, due to Hilary Putnam, was to define mental states by their roles rather than their materials.2 A pain is not, on this view, a particular kind of stuff in the head — not “C-fibers firing,” as the old identity theory had it. A pain is whatever state gets caused by bodily damage, causes wincing and avoidance, and interacts with your beliefs and desires in the way pain does. Define it by the job it does, and you free the mind from any particular substrate. An octopus, with its alien nervous system, can be in pain. So could a Martian, or — the live question — a machine, provided its internal organization plays the same role. This is multiple realizability, and it is almost certainly true. There is no good reason to think only carbon can mind. Functionalism earned its dominance by saying so first and saying it clearly.3

    So the wiring-diagram picture starts out looking not naive but sophisticated. Then Ned Block built a machine that breaks it.

    Imagine replacing each neuron in your brain with a tiny person — billions of them — each doing the one small job that neuron did, signaling to its neighbors on cue.4 Or scale it up: recruit the population of a large nation, hand each citizen a two-way radio and a simple rule about whom to call when, and have them collectively implement, for one hour, the exact functional organization of a human brain in pain. The input-output profile is right. The internal state-transitions are right. By functionalism’s own criterion, the system as a whole is in pain. Now look at it and ask the plain question: is anyone home? Does the nation hurt?

    The intuition that it does not is hard to shake. And that is the trouble, stated precisely: functionalism, by its own definition, must say the nation feels pain, while most of us find it nearly impossible to believe. The wiring is perfect and the lights seem to be off. Block called these absent qualia cases, and their point is not that functionalism is obviously false but that it has left something out. It specified the form of the organization and said nothing about what, if anything, fills it.

    Here is where the diagnosis matters, because there are two ways to react and only one of them is right. The dualist reacts by concluding that the missing ingredient is a non-physical extra — a glow, a soul, a spark of consciousness that the wiring fails to capture and that no physical story ever could. Resist that. The absent-qualia case does not show that what’s missing floats outside nature. It shows something more specific and more useful: the homunculus-nation’s states are not about anything.5 A real pain represents damage to a particular body. A real perception of red represents a feature of a surveyed world. The nation’s frantic radio traffic represents nothing; it is a pattern of signaling with no answering object, syntax with no semantics, a role played in a vacuum. Functionalism gives you the grammar of a mind and forgets that grammar is not yet meaning.6

    And meaning is not the kind of thing you can install by tightening the diagram, because what a state means is not fixed inside the system at all. It is fixed by the system’s history of commerce with a world — by the fact that this state has been reliably caused by that feature of the environment, in a body that could be harmed and a creature that had stakes in the outcome.7 This is why the fix for functionalism is not a retreat to dualism but an advance into the world. It also welds the two halves of the argument together — for the slide from “the nation’s states are about nothing” to “the nation feels nothing” needs a premise, and here it is: on the view I defend, the felt character of an experience is not something added to its content but identical with it, representational content of the right embodied kind. To settle what a state is about is therefore already to settle whether there is anything it is like to be in it. Add genuine, world-directed content to the functional story — let the states actually represent damage, actually track red, through the right embodied causal engagement — and the absent-qualia worry loosens its grip. A system whose states really are about the world, in the way an embodied animal’s states are, is no longer a nation passing meaningless notes. The missing ingredient was never a ghost. It was a world.8

    The committed functionalist has a reply, and it deserves a hearing at full strength. Bite the bullet, he says: the nation does feel pain, however bizarre that sounds, and your refusal to believe it is mere parochialism. Our intuitions were trained on creatures with faces; they are unreliable witnesses about radios and populations, and “it just seems obvious that nobody’s home” is feeble evidence on which to sink a theory. He is half right, and the honest thing is to grant it: intuition-pumping about exotic systems proves little by itself, and if absent qualia were the whole case against functionalism, the bullet-biter could chew his way out.

    But notice what the reply does not supply. It does not explain why the right organization should bring experience along — it simply insists that it must, and then dares you to deny it. That is not an answer to the absent-qualia case; it is a refusal to feel its force. The case was never meant to prove by gut reaction that the nation is dark. It was meant to expose that functionalism stipulates the sufficiency of organization without ever earning it — and that the moment you ask what would actually make the difference between a system that feels and one that merely computes, the functionalist has nothing to point to, while the rest of us can point to something definite: whether the states are anchored to a world in the way that gives them content. The bullet-biter keeps the wiring and waves away the question. The better view keeps the question and answers it.

    Which returns us to the machines. The interesting question about an artificial system was never whether its organization is complex enough — a large model’s organization is complex past anyone’s grasp. The question is whether that organization is grounded: whether its states have been fixed by the right kind of traffic with a world, in something with a body and a history and something at stake, or whether they are the most elaborate radio network ever assembled, signaling in a vacuum. Get the wiring perfect and you have built the syntax of a mind. Whether anyone is home depends on something the diagram has never shown — and what it leaves out is not a soul. It is a world.

    References

    Block, Ned. (1978). “Troubles with Functionalism.” In Perception and Cognition: Issues in the Foundations of Psychology, edited by C. Wade Savage, 261–325. Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 9. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

    Putnam, Hilary. (1967). “Psychological Predicates.” In Art, Mind, and Religion, edited by W. H. Capitan and D. D. Merrill. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. (Reprinted as “The Nature of Mental States.”)

    Searle, John. (1980). “Minds, Brains, and Programs.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3(3): 417–457.

    Searle, John. (1990). “Is the Brain a Digital Computer?” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 64(3): 21–37.

    Tye, Michael. (1995). Ten Problems of Consciousness: A Representational Theory of the Phenomenal Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Tye, Michael. (2006). “Absent Qualia and the Mind-Body Problem.” The Philosophical Review 115(2): 139–168.

    Notes

    1. Block opens “Troubles with Functionalism” (1978) by noting that functionalism “may now be dominant,” and immediately observes that the label covers several distinct projects — reformulations of behaviorism, mind-machine analogies, applications of empirical psychology, and arguments about mind-brain identity. The version pressed here, and the version Block targets, treats each mental state as identical to a functional state: a state defined by its causal relations to inputs, outputs, and other inner states. Nothing in the argument turns on the machine-table formalism specifically; it turns on the claim that functional role is sufficient for mentality. ↩
    2. Putnam (1967). The functional-state hypothesis individuates mental states by their place in a causal network — sensory input, behavioral output, and relations to other states — rather than by physical composition. This is the sense in which a mind, on the strong reading, is like a program: specifiable independently of the hardware that runs it. (Putnam himself later abandoned functionalism, partly on externalist grounds congenial to the diagnosis offered below.) ↩
    3. Multiple realizability is the part of functionalism this argument keeps. The objection here is not that mind requires a special substrate — that would be to trade functionalism’s error for the identity theory’s chauvinism, or for a biological essentialism about neurons. The claim is narrower: functional organization is necessary but not sufficient, and what must be added is not a substrate but a relation to a world. Substrate-independence survives; organization-sufficiency does not. ↩
    4. Block’s “homunculi-head” and the “Chinese nation” (or “China-body system”) cases, both from “Troubles with Functionalism” (1978). The scenarios are constructed so that the system’s functional organization is, by stipulation, identical to a human’s, isolating the question of whether that organization suffices for phenomenal consciousness. A parallel pressure comes from the inverted spectrum: two subjects functionally identical but with systematically swapped color experience, which would show phenomenal character outrunning functional role. I leave inversion aside here because turning it against a representational theory of consciousness (rather than against functionalism) opens a separate and harder debate; against functionalism specifically, the absent-qualia case is enough. ↩
    5. This is the load-bearing move, and it is worth marking that it cuts against the dualist as sharply as against the functionalist. The dualist and the bare functionalist share a premise — that the only thing the wiring could be missing is an intrinsic felt quality — and disagree only about whether wiring supplies it. The diagnosis here rejects the shared premise: what the homunculus-nation lacks is not an inner glow but intentional content, states that are genuinely about a world. Cf. the project’s general anti-reification line: “consciousness” and “qualia” name relational, world-involving achievements, not inner substances that organization either secretes or fails to. ↩
    6. That formal organization, however elaborate, does not by itself constitute aboutness is Searle’s point, made sharpest in “Minds, Brains, and Programs” (1980) — the Chinese Room — and extended in “Is the Brain a Digital Computer?” (1990), which argues that syntax itself is not intrinsic to the physics of a system but assigned by an interpreter. The present essay borrows Searle’s diagnosis of the gap while declining his further moral: Searle concludes that the missing ingredient is the brain’s specific biological causal powers; the view here holds that it is grounding — the right causal-historical engagement with an environment — which is substrate-neutral. One can keep Searle’s gap without his biology. ↩
    7. This is semantic externalism applied to the theory of consciousness: what a state represents is not settled by anything internal to the system at a time, but by its causal-historical relations to the environment. Two systems can be internally, functionally identical while differing in what their states are about, because they are embedded in different worlds with different histories. This is precisely the resource functionalism lacks: it specifies internal role exhaustively and says nothing about the world-relations that fix content. ↩
    8. Tye’s response to the absent-qualia objection (Tye 2006; the positive theory is developed in Ten Problems of Consciousness, 1995, as the PANIC theory — Poised, Abstract, Nonconceptual, Intentional Content). Tye’s point is that the homunculus-head with absent qualia does not refute a representational theory of consciousness, because such a theory requires the functional states to carry the right intentional content, not merely to occupy the right role. A system that genuinely represented damage in the right way would feel pain; Block’s case earns its intuitive force precisely by describing a system whose states are not genuinely about anything. Functional role plus world-directed content, not functional role alone. ↩

  • What a Machine Would Have to Earn

    MIND · MATTER · MEANING No. 29 · May 2026

    What a Machine Would Have to Earn

    Understanding is earned in a world, not performed on a screen.

    An essay mindmatterandmeaning.com

    A friend sent me a transcript last spring. He had asked a chatbot what a sunburn feels like the morning after — that specific tight, hot, can’t-find-a-way-to-lie-down misery — and the machine answered better than he could have. It named the flinch when a shirt seam drags across the shoulders. It knew the small betrayal of forgetting for a second and leaning back into a hot car seat. He found it uncanny, a little moving, and he wanted to know: does it understand what a sunburn is?

    Good question, asked at the right moment. The honest answer takes a while to earn, so let me start with the answer most of us reach for first — because it’s reasonable, and because it’s wrong.

    The reasonable view goes like this. Understanding shows up in what you can do. A student who can answer any question about the French Revolution, field the follow-ups, catch the trick ones, and explain the whole thing to a ten-year-old — that student understands the French Revolution, and we would be cranks to deny it on the grounds that we can’t peer inside her skull. Understanding is as understanding does. So if a machine handles every question about sunburns as well as a sunburned person could, the difference between the machine and the person starts to look like a difference we invented to feel special about ourselves. The picture has a respectable pedigree: it descends from behaviorism, and it has a famous instrument in Alan Turing’s imitation game, where the test for thinking just is indistinguishable performance.

    Notice the quiet assumption, though. The picture takes understanding a word to be a matter of using it correctly, and takes “correctly” to be settled by looking only at the outputs. Pull on that thread and the whole thing comes apart in your hands.

    Stevan Harnad, a cognitive scientist with a gift for naming traps, named this one in 1990: the symbol grounding problem.1 Imagine trying to learn Chinese from a Chinese-only dictionary. Every definition sends you to other entries, which send you to others, and you ride that merry-go-round forever without once touching the ground. A system whose symbols are defined only by more symbols never means anything by them. Meaning gets in only when some of the symbols connect to the things they are about by some route other than further symbols — when “red” hooks to red, not merely to “crimson,” “scarlet,” and “the color of a stop sign.”

    What supplies the hook is not anything inside the system. Hilary Putnam made the case unforgettable with a thought experiment about Twin Earth — a planet just like ours except that the stuff they call “water” there is some other compound with all of water’s surface features.2 A person here and their molecular duplicate there can be internally identical, down to the atom, and still mean different things by “water,” because the word answers to the stuff in the world, not to the state of the head. “Meanings,” Putnam wrote, “just ain’t in the head.” Tyler Burge pushed the same point from the social side: what your word “arthritis” picks out depends on the practice of the community you defer to, not on a private definition you carry around.3 Content lives in a relation — between a system, a world, and the company it keeps.

    There is even a natural story about how the relation gets built. On teleosemantic accounts — Ruth Millikan’s and Fred Dretske’s, chiefly — a state comes to be about something by acquiring the function of tracking it, the way a frog’s strike comes to be about flies through a long history in which catching flies is what kept frogs going.4 The clinching detail is misrepresentation: to get something wrong, a system has to have been in the business of getting it right. A state can mean fly and fire at a passing pellet only because its job, fixed by history, was flies. No history, no job; no job, nothing to be mistaken about; nothing to be mistaken about, no content.

    So understanding a word turns out to be an achievement, not a knack: it consists in having states that are genuinely about the world — not states that merely accompany the right answers, but states directed at the very things the words name — and aboutness is something a system earns over time. Your “red” means red because red things have been pushing on you, through eyes and skin and the small stakes of an actual life, since before you could pronounce the word. This is what people are gesturing at, usually too vaguely, when they say minds are embodied. The word invites mysticism, so let me drain it of any. Embodiment names three sober requirements: the system takes in the world through senses and acts back on it; its inner states have been shaped by real traffic with the features they represent; and those states are there to track a world the system inhabits, not merely to emit the right strings. Michael Tye — who spent three decades building the most careful theory we have of how experience could be nothing more than representational content, and then argued that even his own theory needs history — makes the sharpest version of the point. Two creatures could be intrinsically identical at an instant, he argues, and still differ in what they experience, because one has a past of tracking the world and the other was assembled, atom for atom, five minutes ago.5 History is not decoration on content. It is part of what fixes it.

    Which lets me say, at last, what a machine would actually need. Not the right stuff — I don’t think the barrier is silicon, and here I part company with John Searle, who ties understanding to the specific causal powers of biological brains.6 The barrier isn’t carbon; it’s a world. A system understands when its inner states have been shaped by, and stay answerable to, the things they represent — when it senses and acts, lives under stakes, and can get things wrong and pay for it. Build that, and the door to genuine artificial understanding stands open. I mean open, not slyly closed. The claim here is not the tired one that machines could never understand. It is that understanding is earned through engagement, and there is no coupon for skipping the engagement.

    Skipping the engagement is precisely what today’s text-only language models do. A large model learns the statistics of how we talk — the staggeringly intricate shape of which words follow which — from a corpus of descriptions of the world, never from the world.7 It has read everything ever written about sunburns and has never once had skin. Its “red” is a position in an immense map of words, anchored to other words, anchored to nothing outside the map. The fluency is real and the achievement is genuine; it is simply not the achievement of understanding.

    Here the strongest objection arrives, and it deserves a real hearing rather than a brush-off. If the machine’s answers became indistinguishable — in principle, not merely in today’s practice — from an understander’s, then insisting it still lacks understanding looks like clinging to a ghost. A difference that makes no detectable difference, the objection runs, is no difference at all. That is the whole moral of the imitation game, and it is not a silly one.

    But “makes no difference you can detect in the output” is the definition of a good simulation, not the absence of a difference. Simulate a hurricane to any precision you please: the equations are flawless and your desk stays bone dry. Modeling a process is not running it.8 Two systems can produce the very same words while one means them and the other reports the statistics of how the word gets used — because meaning was never a property of the output. It lives in the history behind the output, and that history is exactly what an output test cannot see. The objection mistakes the instrument for the quarry. It notices that the meter reads the same and concludes there is nothing the meter is missing.

    So: does the machine understand what a sunburn is? It has never had skin. It has never flinched, never dreaded an evening because of how the sheets would feel. It holds the words and not the world the words are about. Ask the question again in some later decade, of some later system that has spent years bumping into things and paying for its errors, and the answer could come back different — that is the part the doom-mongers and the hype-merchants both manage to miss. Understanding is not a performance a system delivers. It is a debt a system pays, to the world, in the one currency the world accepts: contact. Until the bill comes due, fluency is only fluency. It was always going to be the easy part.

    References

    Burge, Tyler. 1979. “Individualism and the Mental.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4: 73–121.

    Dretske, Fred. 1988. Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Harnad, Stevan. 1990. “The Symbol Grounding Problem.” Physica D 42: 335–346.

    Harnad, Stevan. 2002. “Symbol Grounding and the Origin of Language.” In Computationalism: New Directions, edited by Matthias Scheutz. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Havlík, Vladimír. 2025. “Meaning and Understanding in Large Language Models.” Synthese 205: 9.

    Millikan, Ruth Garrett. 1989. “Biosemantics.” Journal of Philosophy 86 (6): 281–297.

    Putnam, Hilary. 1975. “The Meaning of ‘Meaning.’” In Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2, 215–271. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Searle, John R. 1980. “Minds, Brains, and Programs.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (3): 417–457.

    Searle, John R. 1990. “Is the Brain a Digital Computer?” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 64 (3): 21–37.

    Tye, Michael. 2019. “Homunculi Heads and Silicon Chips: The Importance of History to Phenomenology.” In Blockheads! Essays on Ned Block’s Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness, edited by Adam Pautz and Daniel Stoljar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Notes

    1. Harnad (1990) coined “the symbol grounding problem” and framed it with the Chinese-dictionary regress; he later tied it to the origin of language (Harnad 2002). The problem is older than the label — it is the computational heir of the externalist worry about how any representation latches onto its object — but Harnad’s formulation is the one the AI literature inherited, and it is sharper than the Chinese Room for present purposes because it isolates grounding from Searle’s further claims about consciousness. ↩
    2. Putnam (1975). The conclusion is specifically about reference and extension: the content that fixes what “water” is true of does not supervene on the speaker’s intrinsic states. Note that Putnam later qualified his own semantic externalism in several directions; nothing here turns on the most contested versions of the thesis, only on the minimal claim that reference depends on causal-environmental relations the head alone does not settle. ↩
    3. Burge (1979) extends externalism from natural-kind reference (Putnam) to social content: holding a thinker’s physical history fixed while varying the surrounding linguistic community varies which concept the thinker exercises. The two cases are independent routes to the same structural conclusion — internal organization underdetermines content — which is why the essay leans on both rather than treating Burge as a footnote to Putnam. ↩
    4. The teleosemantic tradition, principally Millikan (1989) and Dretske (1988), grounds content in proper function: a state represents what it has the function of tracking, where functions are fixed by selection or learning history. Misrepresentation is the standard adequacy test for any naturalistic theory of content, since a theory on which states cannot be false has not yet described representation. Rival tracking theories handle reliable misrepresentation differently, but the historical structure — content fixed by what a state was for — is common ground and is what the embodiment argument borrows. ↩
    5. Tye (2019). The thesis is that two beings intrinsically alike at a time can differ in phenomenal character because they differ in history — a representationalist’s concession that current intrinsic structure does not suffice. Ned Block replies in the same volume (“Fading Qualia: A Response to Michael Tye”) that a subject could be radically wrong about their own phenomenology; the disagreement is real and unresolved, and the essay sides with Tye while granting that Block has located the genuine pressure point. That Tye, of all people, reaches for history is the relevant fact: the most developed representationalism on offer does not think structure alone fixes content. ↩
    6. Searle (1990) argues that computation is observer-relative — a physical system “computes” only under an interpretation we assign — so computational description cannot, by itself, explain intrinsic intentionality. The essay takes this negative point and leaves Searle’s positive doctrine behind. Searle’s biological naturalism holds that only the specific causal powers of brains can produce understanding; the view defended here replaces “the right biology” with “the right causal-environmental engagement,” which a non-biological system could in principle possess. The negative argument survives the amputation of the positive one. ↩
    7. Not everyone takes the contact gap to be fatal, and the most direct contrary voice deserves naming. Vladimír Havlík (2025) argues the reverse of this essay’s conclusion — that large language models do ground the meanings of their expressions, by way of what he calls semantic fragmentism, so that grounding in worldly reference is not a precondition of understanding. I think this mislocates the gap rather than closing it. Semantic fragmentism can explain how a model’s tokens come to bear stable relations to one another; the externalist and teleosemantic considerations above concern what fixes the relation between a token and the world, which is precisely what a text-only training signal never touches. The architectural premise is not what divides us — a text-only model is trained to predict the next token over a corpus of text, full stop — what divides us is whether that suffices for content, and Havlík’s affirmative answer is the live position this essay rejects. ↩
    8. The simulation/realization distinction is Searle’s reply to the Brain Simulator objection in “Minds, Brains, and Programs” (1980), generalized: a model of a process is not an instance of it, and whatever a process owes to its physical realization is not delivered by a description of that realization, however exact. The hurricane example makes the point without the contested premises about consciousness — no one is tempted to say the simulated storm is wet — which is why it does cleaner work here than the Chinese Room. ↩

  • Multimodality and the Symbol-Grounding Problem

    MIND · MATTER · MEANING No. 31 · May 2026

    Multimodality and the Symbol-Grounding Problem

    Adding eyes to a language model gives it more pictures, not a world.

    An essay mindmatterandmeaning.com

    Hold a bruised avocado up to the newest chatbot and it will tell you, with a confidence you have never once earned at a produce counter, that the fruit has about a day left and you should make the guacamole tonight. It can see the avocado. That is the pitch, anyway, and it lands. After years of watching these systems shuffle words around — predicting the next token the way a very well-read parrot predicts the next syllable — here at last is one that looks at your kitchen and answers.

    The demos impress, and the feeling they produce is specific: the machine has finally made contact. The symbols have touched down. Whatever was missing in the text-only models — the thing that made us suspect the parrot didn’t know what it was saying1 — surely closes the moment you give the thing eyes.

    Here is the story almost everyone now tells, and I told a version of it myself for longer than I’d like to admit. The old language models lived sealed in a room of words. “Apple” meant nothing to them beyond its statistical company — the other words it tends to travel with. No wonder they made things up; they had never met an apple. But bolt on a camera and a microphone, and “apple” stops being a token rubbing shoulders with other tokens and becomes the round red thing on the counter. Multimodality, on this telling, just is grounding. It is the rope that finally ties the words to the world.

    It is a natural thought, and something in its neighborhood is even correct. But the conclusion doesn’t follow, and seeing why it doesn’t pays better than any demo.

    Start with what a multimodal model actually eats. It does not eat avocados. It eats images of avocados — arrays of numbers, paired during training with text that humans wrote about them. A photograph has not smuggled a piece of the world into the machine. A photograph is a representation: a flat, frozen, human-made encoding, every bit as much a symbol as the word “avocado,” only written in a richer alphabet. Feed a model a billion captioned pictures and you have fed it a billion more descriptions of the world. You have handed it more symbols, in a new code. You have not handed it more world.

    This is the trap Stevan Harnad named in 1990, and Harnad — a cognitive scientist who has spent the better part of his career worrying about how a symbol ever comes to be about anything — gave it a form worth keeping.2 Imagine trying to learn Chinese from a Chinese-Chinese dictionary. Every word gets defined in terms of other words, which lead to still other words, around and around, and you never once step outside the circle of symbols to the things they name. No amount of definition conjures meaning out of more symbols; the chain has to touch ground somewhere. Somewhere a symbol has to connect to the thing — not to another symbol — through the system’s own capacity to pick that thing out, sort it, act on it.

    Harnad had a sharp way of pricing this. Language, he wrote, lets us “steal” categories quickly and cheaply, through hearsay — I can tell you what a zebra is and spare you the safari. But theft works only because somebody, somewhere, earned the category the hard way, through what he called sensorimotor “toil”: the trial and error of dealing with actual zebras, guided by the cost of getting it wrong. It cannot be theft all the way down.3

    And theft all the way down is exactly what multimodality quietly proposes. It tries to buy grounding with a bigger pile of borrowed representations. But a photograph of a zebra is more hearsay, not the safari. The richer alphabet is still an alphabet, and an alphabet, however many characters you add to it, is the kind of thing that needs grounding — never the kind of thing that supplies it.

    There’s a deeper reason the input’s richness can’t do the job, and it arrives from the least mystical corner of philosophy. Hilary Putnam — who revised his own positions so often, and so cheerfully, that the restlessness became part of his reputation — argued in 1975 that meanings “just ain’t in the head.”4 What a thought is about depends on how the thinker stands to the world, not only on what is happening inside. Two systems can be alike down to the last detail and still mean different things, because they have different histories of contact with different surroundings. Michael Tye, who built one of the most careful versions of the view that an experience just is a way of representing the world, pressed the same point about minds: what a state represents depends partly on the causal history through which the system came to have it.5 A system that has tracked ripeness — reached for fruit, been right, been wrong, paid the difference in a bad lunch — has states that are about ripeness. A system assembled from a frozen archive of ripe-labeled photographs has states that are about how humans tended to label photographs. Which is not nothing. It is just not ripeness.

    So here is the distinction the grounding story walks straight past. Multimodality adds modalities of representation — more kinds of symbol the system can take in. It does not add modalities of engagement — sensors wired to actuators in a world the system inhabits, a history of tracking real features, and some stake in getting it right.6 The first is a matter of feeding the model new file formats. The second is a matter of putting the model on the line. They are not the same project, and no quantity of the first sums to the second. The avocado demo feels like seeing. But seeing is something a creature does in a world it can be wrong about and suffer for being wrong about. What the model does is map an array of numbers onto a likely sentence.7 It has never been hungry. It has never been fooled. It has never cut into one and found mush.

    The strongest reply grants most of this and turns it around. Fine, the objector says — you’ve already admitted an embodied system could mean things. And multimodal models are precisely the perception stack going into embodied systems: the same vision encoders that caption your avocado get bolted onto robots that pick things up. So you’re knocking down a strawman. Nobody serious claims a static image model is grounded; the claim is that multimodality is step one toward a system that is. The trajectory is the point.

    This objection is right about nearly everything, and I want to be careful, because where it’s right is exactly what matters. Yes — a robot that acts in a world, tracks what it touches, and pays for its mistakes could come to mean something by “avocado.” I have no objection in principle; the door stands open. But notice what does the work in that story. The grounding gets accomplished by the acting-in-a-world — the closed loop, the tracking, the stakes — and not by the number of input channels feeding the network. A simple creature with one sense and a body on the line stands nearer to meaning than a thousand-modality oracle trained on a frozen scrape of the internet. So the honest version of the trajectory claim is not “multimodality grounds language.” It is “embodiment might, and multimodality is some of the plumbing.” Those two sentences advertise very different products. The first hands you grounding you have not paid for. The second admits the bill is still outstanding.

    The avocado on your counter is ripe or it isn’t, and you settle the question the only way anyone ever has: you cut it open — a small risky act in a world that pushes back and now and then embarrasses you. The model has never once been embarrassed, because it has never been anywhere it could be wrong. Giving it a camera changed what it can be shown. It did not change what it can be answerable to — and answerability to the world, not access to more pictures of it, was the whole of what we were missing. We did not open the model’s eyes. We widened the window of the room it was always in, and hung a sharper picture in the glass.

    References

    Burge, Tyler. 1979. “Individualism and the Mental.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4: 73–121.

    Dretske, Fred. 1988. Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Dretske, Fred. 1995. Naturalizing the Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Harnad, Stevan. 1990. “The Symbol Grounding Problem.” Physica D 42: 335–346.

    Harnad, Stevan. 2002. “Symbol Grounding and the Origin of Language.” In Computationalism: New Directions, edited by Matthias Scheutz, 143–158. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Havlík, Vladimír. 2024. “Meaning and Understanding in Large Language Models.” Synthese 204: 71.

    Putnam, Hilary. 1975. “The Meaning of ‘Meaning.’” Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 7: 131–193.

    Searle, John R. 1980. “Minds, Brains, and Programs.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3 (3): 417–457.

    Tye, Michael. 2019. “Homunculi Heads and Silicon Chips: The Importance of History to Phenomenology.” In Blockheads! Essays on Ned Block’s Philosophy of Mind and Consciousness, edited by Adam Pautz and Daniel Stoljar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Notes

    1. The suspicion is not universal, and honesty requires flagging the dissent. Vladimír Havlík argues that Searle’s assumption of an unbridgeable gap between syntax and semantics is unjustified, and that meaning of a kind can emerge from the distributional and inferential structure a large model internalizes (Havlík 2024). I take the disagreement seriously but read it as a quarrel over what “meaning” must answer to. If content is individuated by world-involving causal relations (see notes 4–6), then distributional structure recovers how a linguistic community uses a term without recovering what anchors the term to the world. On that reading the parrot worry is relocated, not dissolved — which is why this essay presses on grounding rather than on usage. ↩
    2. Harnad, “The Symbol Grounding Problem” (1990), poses the problem through the image of trying to learn a first language from a Chinese-Chinese dictionary: an endless circuit of symbol-to-symbol definition that never reaches the world. The claim is not that symbols can never refer, but that reference cannot be conferred by further symbols alone — the regress must terminate in a non-symbolic capacity to identify a category’s members. Note that Harnad’s diagnosis is considerably friendlier to connectionism than Searle’s: the grounding he demands is sensorimotor categorization, a task he takes neural networks to be well suited to learn, given the right embodiment. The argument here is therefore not anti-connectionist; it is anti–disembodied-connectionist. ↩
    3. Harnad, “Symbol Grounding and the Origin of Language” (2002): “What language allows us to do is to ‘steal’ categories quickly and effortlessly through hearsay instead of having to earn them the hard way, through risky and time-consuming sensorimotor ‘toil.’” The theft/toil contrast is his. The application is mine: a model trained exclusively on representations attempts the theft with no underwriting toil anywhere in its causal history — not its own, and not, in any content-fixing way, the photographers’. The captioned-image corpus is a vast ledger of other people’s earnings that the model never made. ↩
    4. Putnam, “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” (1975). Twin Earth fixes the individuation of content by external relations: my molecular twin and I, internally identical, mean different substances by “water” because our environments differ (H₂O here, the look-alike “XYZ” there). Burge (“Individualism and the Mental,” 1979) extends the externalism to the social environment. I lean only on the modest thesis — that internal richness underdetermines content — and not on any stronger claim about whether phenomenal character itself is wide. The modest thesis is enough to sink “more pixels equals more meaning.” ↩
    5. Tye, “Homunculi Heads and Silicon Chips: The Importance of History to Phenomenology” (2019). Tye accepts Block’s verdict that a “China-body system” duplicating our functional organization at a moment would have no experiences, but argues the reason is historical rather than organizational: the system lacks the causal history through which its states would come to track — and therefore represent — worldly features. Because Tye holds that phenomenal character just is representational content of the right kind, a historical condition on content becomes a condition on experience. (The library’s copy carries a “2011” preprint stamp; the published version appears in the Pautz and Stoljar Blockheads! volume, MIT Press 2019.) For the record, Tye announced a move toward panpsychism in 2024; nothing here depends on that later turn — the historical thesis stands on its own. ↩
    6. This is the teleosemantic ingredient, and it is doing quiet but essential work. On Dretske’s account (Explaining Behavior, 1988; Naturalizing the Mind, 1995), a state represents what it has the function of indicating, and functions are acquired through a learning or selectional history in which getting it right and getting it wrong carried consequences. “Stakes” is shorthand for that history: a system for which misrepresentation costs nothing is, on this view, not yet in the business of representation at all. A frozen training corpus supplies correlations in abundance but no such history — which is why scaling the corpus, in any modality, changes the quantity of correlation without manufacturing the one thing teleosemantics says content requires. ↩
    7. I bring in Searle’s syntax/semantics argument (“Minds, Brains, and Programs,” 1980) only here, and deliberately not at the front: the educated reader has largely filed the Chinese Room under “answered,” by way of the Systems and Robot replies. But notice that the Robot Reply — the proposal that grounding the symbols in sensors and effectors would supply understanding — concedes precisely this essay’s point. It locates the missing ingredient in embodiment, not in more or richer symbols. Searle himself resists even that, on the ground that bolting transducers onto the room changes nothing happening inside it; whether he is right about that further step is a dispute this essay can leave open, because its target — the claim that multimodal input alone grounds meaning — is one the Robot Reply and Searle both reject. ↩

  • The Monster Under the Bed and the Puzzle of Intentional Inexistence

    MIND · MATTER · MEANING May 2026

    The Monster Under the Bed and the Puzzle of Intentional Inexistence

    The fear is real; the monster is not. What, then, is it about?

    An essay mindmatterandmeaning.com

    The Monster Under the Bed and the Puzzle of Intentional Inexistence

    A child lies awake at three in the morning, absolutely certain there is a monster under the bed. The monster is large, the child is convinced, and somewhat damp — these details are vivid. The child’s fear is entirely real. And the monster, of course, does not exist.

    Here is a question that is harder than it looks: what is the child afraid of?

    Not the monster — there is no monster. But “nothing” seems like the wrong answer too. The child fears something. There is a definite target: the large damp monster. The child’s mental state has a focus, a content, an object. The fear does not free-float; it is fear of the monster under the bed. The monster has, in a medieval phrase that Franz Brentano revived in 1874, intentional inexistence. The phrase has been misread for over a century, and the misreading is half the puzzle — but for now, take it to mean roughly this: the monster figures in the fear without figuring in the world.1

    This is the puzzle of intentional inexistence, and it is one of the most philosophically productive problems in the study of mind. It is also, unusually for philosophy, one you can explain to anyone who has ever been afraid of the dark.

    The Mark of the Mental

    Franz Brentano — the nineteenth-century Austrian philosopher who trained Edmund Husserl and thereby launched phenomenology on its long continental career — thought intentionality marked off the mental from everything else. Writing in 1874, he held that every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the medieval Scholastics called the intentional inexistence of an object: every mental state directs itself at something, holds something as an object within itself.2 Here is the famous sentence, the one every philosophy-of-mind course eventually arrives at: “Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object… In presentation, something is presented, in judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate hated, in desire desired, and so on.”3 Almost everyone’s first gloss on that phrase gets Brentano backwards — though the backwards version proves more useful than the correct one, which is why it survived. Hold that thought.

    Beliefs, desires, fears, hopes, perceptions, memories — all intentional in Brentano’s sense. My belief that Caesar crossed the Rubicon is about Caesar crossing the Rubicon. My desire for coffee is about coffee. My experience of the red tomato is about the red tomato. In each case there is an object: something the state is directed at, something it concerns.

    Physical states, by contrast, lack this feature. A rock on a hillside is not about anything. A thermostat registering 68 degrees does not represent the temperature in the way a mind represents its objects — or at least not in the same sense, a point worth returning to. Intentionality, for Brentano, marks off the mental from the physical.

    Intentional Inexistence

    Here is where the misreading lives, and where it earns its keep. Generations took “intentional inexistence” to mean non-existence — that Brentano’s insight was the mind’s power to aim at what is not there. A lovely idea, and not what he said. He meant the Latin in-existence: existence in, the object dwelling inside the mental act the way an Aristotelian form dwells in the thing it shapes. The object is immanent, not absent from the world.4 The slide from “in-existence” to “non-existence” came later, through Roderick Chisholm’s mid-century reformulation, and it stuck because it named a genuine problem the original sentence never raised.5 So keep the problem; drop the false pedigree. The puzzle is real — it just isn’t Brentano’s. Call it the puzzle the misreading discovered.

    And it is this: many mental states aim at objects that do not exist. The child fears the monster. Ponce de León sought the Fountain of Youth. Devoted readers worry about a detective at 221B Baker Street who never drew breath. The astrologer trusts the stars; the bigot fears a threat that was never there.

    In each case the state genuinely concerns something — it has a target — yet the object either does not exist, or is mischaracterized, or is presented in a way nothing in the world answers to. The state is real. Its directedness is real. The object is not, or not as presented.

    So a puzzle. If a mental state is fixed by its object — if my fear simply is fear-of-the-monster-under-the-bed — then the monster seems to have to exist, somehow, to be the thing feared. But it doesn’t. So what is the intentional object?

    Various answers have been tried, and the most extravagant came from inside the family. Alexius Meinong, Brentano’s student, proposed grades of being: some objects exist (the table, the tomato), some merely subsist (numbers, relations), and some have no being whatever yet remain available to thought (the golden mountain, the round square). The golden mountain has no being — and still it is what the thought the golden mountain is about.

    Most philosophers find this hard to swallow — a polite way of saying they would rather not stock the universe with homeless non-existent objects to settle a question about a child’s bedroom. Bertrand Russell — ruthless with a view he thought confused, and he thought this one confused — argued there is no need to go there at all.6 We can read intentional states through their content rather than through an object they relate to. To fear the monster is not to be related to a monster; it is to be in a state whose content is there is a monster under the bed — present whether or not anything under the bed obliges.

    Why the Inner Picture Fails

    Before Russell, a tempting alternative was to locate the intentional object inside the mind. The child fears not the actual monster but an inner idea, image, or representation of the monster. Mental states are always directed at inner objects; external objects are only indirectly involved.

    This is the inner-picture model, and it generates the veil of perception: you never think directly about the world, only about your inner representations of it. It does solve the puzzle, in a way — the monster exists as an inner image, and the fear is directed at the image, so there is always an object.

    But the cure is worse than the disease. If mental states always aim at inner images, then even when I think about the real tomato I am thinking about an image of it, not the tomato. My mental life gets sealed off from the world. The whole dismal procession of indirect realism follows: how does the inner image hook onto the outer world? How would I ever know my images represent anything accurately? What makes one image a representation of the tomato and another of the monster?7

    The inner-picture model trades one puzzle (how can intentionality be directed at nonexistent objects?) for a more serious puzzle (how can mental states connect with the world at all?). It is a bad trade.

    The Representation Is Real; the Object Need Not Be

    The better solution is Russell’s, refined and developed by contemporary philosophy of language and mind. Mental states have representational content — they represent the world as being a certain way. That content is real whether or not the world cooperates.

    My fear of the monster carries the content there is a monster under the bed. That content gives the fear its character, its determinateness, its particular object. The fear does not free-float; it fixes on the monster. But the monster’s existing out in the world is no part of what makes the content present in the fear. The content is the intentional object, and it belongs to the mental state as a property of that state even when nothing in the world answers to it.8

    This harmonizes with what we know about perceptual experience and its transparency. A veridical perception of the tomato carries the content there is a red tomato here; if all goes well, the world contains such a tomato and the experience is accurate. Hallucinate the tomato, and the experience carries that same content — still about something, still intentional — but now the content goes unsatisfied. No tomato. The experience misrepresents. The intentional object, the tomato-as-represented, lives on as content; the tomato itself does not. The child’s fear runs the same course: specific content, fixing what the fear is of, doing its work whether or not the world supplies a monster.

    What the Mark of the Mental Really Marks

    Brentano was right that intentionality is the mark of the mental, but the intentionality of mental states is not best understood as a relation between the mind and an inner object. It is the property of having representational content — of representing the world as being a certain way, of being directed outward toward how things are (or might be, or are feared to be).

    This outward directedness is what makes a mental state genuinely intentional rather than merely inner. The child’s fear takes the monster-as-represented for its object, and the representation aims outward: it concerns what is, or might be, under the bed — not some inner mental trinket. The content points at the world. The fear is about the world, even when the world declines to supply a monster.9

    A sharp objection waits here, and it deserves a full answer. Some philosophers — Tim Crane among them, and he has thought about this as carefully as anyone alive — insist we cannot dispense with intentional objects this cheaply. When the child fears the monster and not the burglar, the fear has an object; and saying so, the objection runs, commits us to no shadowy realm, since “intentional object” means only whatever a state is directed at, existence left open. The honest reply concedes the grammar and denies the metaphysics. Yes, we speak of the object of the fear; no, that figure of speech need not name an extra item alongside the world’s furniture. To have the monster as one’s intentional object just is to be in a state with monster-involving content — content fine-grained enough to tell monster from burglar. The object-talk is the content-talk, seen from the side of what the state concerns. Nothing homeless gets housed.10

    This deflates the puzzle without inflating any realm of non-existent objects. The monster has no flat in Meinong’s tenement of homeless objects — and no cell in an inner gallery sealed off from the world either. It exists as the content of a fear: a representation of how things stand under the bed, one that happens to be wrong.

    The child is afraid of something. That something is the monster as represented — the large, damp, intentionally inexistent occupant of the space beneath the mattress. The fear is real. Its object is real as content. And the monster, happily, is not real at all. Which is good news, philosophically and practically: the fear is explained, the puzzle dissolved, and nobody has to check under the bed.

    Notes

    1. The promissory note is paid off below: “intentional inexistence” does not mean the object fails to exist (see note 4). The neutral gloss offered here — the monster figures in the fear without figuring in the world — captures the explanandum both Brentano’s original doctrine and its later analytic descendants are trying to accommodate, without prejudging which diagnosis is correct. ↩
    2. Brentano, Franz (1874/1995). Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, ed. Oskar Kraus, trans. A. C. Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and L. L. McAlister (London: Routledge), p. 88. The standard Anglophone text descends from Kraus’s 1924 second edition, itself based on the 1874 first volumes plus appendices Brentano added in 1911; Kraus’s own editorial footnotes are not always reliable as exposition and should be handled with care. See Crane, Tim (2017), “Brentano on Intentionality,” in Uriah Kriegel (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Franz Brentano and the Brentano School (London: Routledge), pp. 41–48, at 41–42, on the text’s transmission. ↩
    3. Brentano (1874/1995), p. 88. Brentano flags the alternative glosses himself — “reference to a content, direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as meaning a thing) or immanent objectivity” — and adds, in a footnote on the same page, the Aristotelian pedigree of the doctrine. ↩
    4. This is the crux, and the most consequential point of scholarship in the essay. “Intentional inexistence” renders the Latin in-existentia: existence in, not non-existence. Brentano’s claim is that the object is immanent in the mental act — “in” it as an Aristotelian form is in the substance it informs, not as a separate Platonic item standing outside experience; “content and object are the same thing for Brentano, and the ‘objectivity’ of mental phenomena is just a matter of them having an object” (Crane 2017, p. 44, glossing Brentano 1874/1995, p. 88). As Barry Smith puts it, the thesis that “every mental phenomenon includes something as object within itself” is “to be taken literally — against the grain of a seemingly unshakeable tendency to twist Brentano’s words at this point” (Smith, Barry [1994], Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano [Chicago: Open Court], p. 40; quoted in Crane 2017, p. 44). Crucially, “Brentano’s original 1874 doctrine of intentional inexistence has nothing to do with the problem of how we can think about things that do not exist” (Crane 2017, p. 44). The non-existence problem entered Brentano’s own thinking only with the 1911 revisions, where he reclassified mental directedness as merely “quasi-relational” — “the object of his thinking need not exist at all” (Brentano 1874/1995, p. 272) — and treated talk of non-existent objects “having being” as a convenient looseness, “just as we allow ourselves to speak of the sun ‘rising’ and ‘setting’” (p. 291). ↩
    5. The slide from immanent-object doctrine to a criterion of non-existence (and of the mental’s irreducibility) was effected in the analytic tradition chiefly by Roderick Chisholm, “Sentences about Believing,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 56 (1955–6): 125–148, which recast Brentano’s mark of the mental as a set of tests for intensional (non-extensional) linguistic contexts — failure of substitutivity, of existential generalization, of truth-functionality. As Crane notes, “Brentano’s distinction was not a distinction between linguistic contexts,” nor did he use it to refute physicalism, yet “analytic philosophers persisted for a few decades in associating Brentano’s ideas with Chisholm’s, which only obstructed the proper understanding of Brentano” (Crane 2017, p. 47; see also Quine, Word and Object [1960], p. 219, and Davidson, “Mental Events” [1970], repeating the conflation). I retain the misreading deliberately because the problem it isolates — directedness at the non-existent — is genuine and is what the child’s monster dramatizes; only the attribution to the 1874 Brentano is false. ↩
    6. Russell, Bertrand (1905). “On Denoting,” Mind 14(56): 479–493. The theory of descriptions analyzes a sentence like “the present King of France is bald” as a quantified claim — there is exactly one present King of France, and he is bald — which comes out simply false, with no need to posit a non-existent king as subject. Russell aimed the apparatus squarely at Meinong’s “theory of objects,” arguing it dissolves apparent reference to non-existents into ordinary quantification over what exists. Strictly, Russell’s target is singular reference in language rather than the directedness of mental states; the essay extends his strategy to intentional content, which is the contemporary representationalist’s move rather than Russell’s own. ↩
    7. The regress of the inner picture is the Cartesian predicament: if every mental act terminates on an inner representation, the representation’s own connection to the world becomes a further, unanswerable question, and the threat of a “veil of perception” follows directly. Descartes’ guarantor — a non-deceiving God (Meditation VI) — persuaded few for long. The representationalist’s escape is to deny that the act terminates on an inner object at all; cf. Harman, Gilbert (1990), “The Intrinsic Quality of Experience,” Philosophical Perspectives 4: 31–52, on the transparency of experience: attending to one’s experience of a tree turns up no mental object, only the tree as represented. ↩
    8. Crane, Tim (2001). Elements of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press), ch. 1. Crane treats intentionality as a primitive, irreducible feature of the mental, and content (the way the object is presented, its “aspectual shape”) as essential to fixing what a state is about — so that two states can concern the same object under different aspects, or concern no existing object at all while still being fully determinate. The present essay borrows Crane’s content-centred framing while declining his realism about intentional objects (see note 10). ↩
    9. Dretske, Fred (1995). Naturalizing the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), esp. ch. 1. Dretske’s informational-teleological account supplies the naturalistic backstory the representationalist owes: a state comes to have determinate world-directed content in virtue of what it has the biological function of indicating, given its causal-historical role. This is why the content can be about the world — and can therefore misrepresent it, as in the child’s fear — without any appeal to a second realm. The directedness is outward by construction, which is precisely what the inner-picture model could never secure. ↩
    10. The objection is Tim Crane’s considered position (2001, Elements of Mind, ch. 1; and “Intentional Objects,” Ratio 14 [2001]: 336–349), and it is the strongest in the neighbourhood, so it is worth stating at full strength: directedness is a genuine relation to an object, and “intentional object” need carry no ontological freight — it denotes simply what a state is directed at, with existence left an open question, so that admitting intentional objects is not yet Meinongianism. The reply conceded in the main text grants the description and resists the reification: “the object of the fear” is a perfectly good locution, but on the representationalist reading it does not pick out an entity over and above the world’s contents; it redescribes, from the side of what-the-state-concerns, the very same fact that fine-grained content already records. Where Crane takes object-directedness as primitive and content as derivative, the line taken here reverses the order of explanation — content is primary, and “the intentional object” is content seen from the object side. The disagreement is real but narrow: both deny that thinking of the non-existent requires non-existent things to think of. ↩

  • Twin Earth and Semantic Externalism

    MIND · MATTER · MEANING May 2026

    Twin Earth and Semantic Externalism

    Meaning isn’t in the head. The word reaches past the skull to the world.

    An essay mindmatterandmeaning.com

    Stand in the kitchen and point at the kettle and say water. Nothing about that performance feels mysterious. You meant water; the kettle holds water; the word landed where you sent it. The whole transaction belongs to ordinary life — the kind of thing a competent five-year-old manages a hundred times a day without philosophical assistance.

    Now suppose, while you weren’t looking, the kettle had been swapped for one filled with a clear, tasteless liquid whose molecular structure happens to differ from water in every respect that matters at the bench. You can’t tell. The five-year-old can’t tell. The kettle whistles. You pour. You drink. Did you mean water when you said the word, even though no water was anywhere in the room?

    This is the question Hilary Putnam asked in 1975, and the answer he gave reshaped the philosophy of mind. The short version: no. You meant water, in the way you ordinarily do, only because real water exists out in the world and your linguistic community has been pointing at it for generations. The pointing happens partly outside your skull. The meaning, accordingly, lives partly outside it too. As Putnam put it, in the line that has been quoted ever since: “meanings just ain’t in the head” (Putnam, 1975).1

    The slogan has the feel of something half-rhetorical. It isn’t. What follows explains why it turns out to be true, what bad picture it replaces, and what difference it makes — including for one of the more aggressive claims you’ll hear at the confident end of contemporary AI discourse.

    The picture we usually carry

    The bad picture is so familiar it barely registers. When you think of meaning, you probably think of something happening inside a head. A word floats up; an image, or a definition, or a feeling of recognition attaches itself to it; out the word goes, freighted with its little inner cargo. Whatever it is that makes water mean water, the picture says, is some inner state of yours — a concept, a representation, a private mental something — that the word is hooked up to.

    The picture has a long pedigree. Descartes built half his metaphysics around it. The British empiricists stocked the mind with ideas the way one stocks a pantry, and spent a great deal of energy reassuring themselves that the pantry tracked the outside world accurately. The cognitive scientists of the 1960s gave the pantry a computational paint job and called the contents internal representations. Same picture throughout: meaning sits inside the head, the head has a private inventory, the word inherits its meaning from the inner item it labels.

    What Putnam’s 1975 paper does, with one of the cleanest thought experiments in philosophy, is show that the picture cannot be right.

    Twin Earth, and why it bites

    Imagine a planet exactly like ours, down to the molecule, except that in every place our world has water, Twin Earth has a different stuff. Putnam called it XYZ. It looks, feels, tastes, and behaves indistinguishably from H₂O at the rough scale of human life. People on Twin Earth wash with it, drink it, complain about its hardness; they call it water. The chemistry beneath the surface differs, but no Twin Earther in 1750 has any way of detecting that difference.

    Now consider Oscar on Earth and his molecule-for-molecule duplicate Twin Oscar on Twin Earth, both in 1750, before chemistry exists. Stand them side by side, look inside their skulls, take inventory of every inner item the bad picture would care about: the same brain states, the same images, the same feelings, the same dispositions, the same everything. By the bad picture’s lights, when each says water, each means the same thing.

    But each does not mean the same thing. When Oscar says water, his word reaches for H₂O and lands on it, because that is the stuff the linguistic practice he inherited has been about. When Twin Oscar says water, his word reaches for XYZ. They cannot mean the same thing, because their words have different references — different things in the world that they pick out, different conditions under which what they say is true. The meaning differs even though everything inside the head is identical (Putnam, 1975).2

    Notice what the thought experiment is not claiming. Oscar and Twin Oscar do not have different inner lives; they have qualitatively identical ones, by stipulation. The point is that those inner lives, however rich, do not by themselves fix what their words are about. Something else does — namely, the actual stuff the community’s linguistic practice has been latching onto across time.

    This is what philosophers call semantic externalism — the view that the meaning of a word, and the content of a thought, depends constitutively on factors outside the speaker or thinker. Outside the skull, outside the inner inventory, outside whatever the bad picture wanted to keep tucked away in private mental space.

    Why the result generalizes

    The water case is the showpiece, but Putnam’s argument doesn’t depend on natural kinds with hidden chemistry. Tyler Burge spent a career defending a more sweeping version — the view he calls anti-individualism — arguing that the same lesson runs through perception, concept possession, and the categories that structure ordinary cognition (Burge, 2010). The reason is structural. A representation succeeds or fails at hitting its target, and what counts as the target gets settled by relations the representation bears to a world. Burge’s signature example: a patient tells his doctor he has arthritis in his thigh. He is simply wrong — arthritis by definition is a disease of the joints — and crucially he is wrong about what his own word means, not because his inner state is defective but because his community’s medical practice has settled the term against him. What a word reaches for is fixed by the practice the word participates in, not by what the speaker pictures when uttering it.3

    Alex Byrne and Michael Tye have argued that on the strongest version of representationalism, even the felt character of experience — the qualia earlier philosophy treated as the last private redoubt — depends on the world the experience represents (Byrne & Tye, 2006). If they are right, even the most intimate-seeming features of mental life have an outside leg — a claim Ned Block has pressed hard against, and one the externalist has to earn rather than assume.4

    The lesson, told plainly: minds reach into a world to do their work. A mental state has the content it has partly in virtue of what, out there, it latches onto. That latching runs through causal, historical, social, and environmental relations all at once. The inside contributes half the mechanism. The outside contributes the other half.

    What the LLM defender wants to say

    Once you see why meanings can’t be in the head, an objection arrives almost immediately, and these days it usually concerns language models. A defender of the strong-AI line will say something like this: very well, meaning is not in any individual head — but it doesn’t need to be. Modern large language models are trained on the entire textual output of a civilization. The hookings, the practices, the patterns of use, are all there, distributed across the corpus. Whatever fixes meaning for human speakers should fix it for a model that has internalized the practice at scale. The model’s words reach into the same world ours do, through the same network of usage. Why call this anything less than understanding?

    Vladimír Havlík defends a sophisticated version of this view. He argues that the meanings of linguistic expressions in LLMs are grounded — in his words — “neither in the world, nor in an internal idea of the world,” but within the linguistic corpus as a whole, and that this turns out to be sufficient for what he calls referential grounding (Havlík, 2024). The picture deserves a fair hearing. If meaning lives in patterns of public use, and a model has absorbed those patterns at civilization scale, then the model — the argument runs — has whatever it takes.5

    I think the argument fails. And where it fails reveals what Twin Earth really showed.

    What Twin Earth really showed

    Putnam’s thought experiment said something stronger than meaning lies outside the speaker. It said that meaning depends on the world the practice latches onto. Oscar and Twin Oscar both participate in fluent verbal practice; both communities use water the same way; the difference is only what their respective practices are anchored to. The anchoring fixes which stuff the word reaches for. Talk that is not anchored does not reach.

    A language model has the corpus. It does not have the anchoring. It has the residue of the anchoring, frozen in token statistics, with no living relation to the stuff the tokens came from. When the model produces water, no path runs from the word back to any water — not in training, not in deployment, not even, in any straightforward sense, in the data. The data records human anchoring in compressed form; the model inherits a derivative shadow of that anchoring; the shadow does informative work, sometimes spectacularly so — but a shadow of an anchor does not anchor anything. John Searle, the Berkeley philosopher whose Chinese Room argument we will meet again, made an adjacent point four decades ago — syntax, however elaborate, does not constitute semantics (Searle, 1980) — and the externalist diagnosis converges with his from the other side: both isolate the same missing thing, a relation between symbols and the world they purport to describe.6 The model does not lack complexity. It lacks that relation.7

    This isn’t a denial of the model’s achievement, which is real and genuinely impressive in ways I don’t want to minimize. Fluent next-token prediction over a record of meaning counts for something — but it does not count as the same accomplishment as meaning. Meaning is what the record records. The record itself, separated from the activity it records, has no pointing power of its own. Twin Earth tells us so: without the right anchoring, even an inner life qualitatively identical to ours fails to mean what we mean. A model without any anchoring at all does no better.

    Where this leaves the reader

    The point isn’t to settle the AI question in one essay — that takes a longer argument — but to remove a misleading picture that gets in the way of seeing the question clearly. The picture says meaning is a stuff inside heads, and minds reach into the world by carrying that stuff outward. The picture is wrong. Meaning is what minds do when they reach — a relation, not an inner cargo. The kettle whistles, the word lands, the kettle holds water, and the linguistic community has been latching onto water for a long time. That whole arrangement is what makes your word work. None of it lives between your ears alone.

    The mind doesn’t make meaning by storing it. It makes meaning by reaching — and a reach with nothing at the far end is not a reach. It’s a gesture.

    Notes

    1. Putnam’s argument runs through “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’” (in K. Gunderson, ed., Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. 7 [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1975], 131–193), with the slogan at p. 144. The slogan is often quoted as if it were the conclusion; in Putnam’s text it sits midway through the development, after the Twin Earth case has done its work and before the apparatus of stereotype, normal form description, and the division of linguistic labor is introduced. The full position is more structural than the slogan suggests: meaning, on Putnam’s account, supervenes on a four-element vector (syntactic markers, semantic markers, stereotype, extension), and only the first three live “in the head.” The extension — the actual stuff the word picks out — lies outside, and the extension is constitutive of meaning. The division of linguistic labor does additional load-bearing work the slogan hides: a lay speaker can mean gold without being able to tell gold from pyrite, because the community houses experts whose discriminations the lay speaker defers to. Reference is thus a collective achievement distributed across a community and its history, not a private hookup renewed in each head — a point that matters directly when the question turns to a system that has the corpus but stands in no deferential relation to any expert in it. ↩
    2. The Twin Earth argument depends on two further commitments Putnam developed in parallel with Saul Kripke’s work in Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980; the lectures were delivered in 1970). Natural-kind terms like water are rigid designators: they pick out the same kind in every possible world in which that kind exists. And the identity water = H₂O is a necessary truth discovered a posteriori: not derivable from the concept of water alone, but, once established, holding of metaphysical necessity. These two commitments together explain why Oscar’s water and Twin Oscar’s water cannot have the same reference even when their inner states are identical. It bears emphasis against a standard misreading: the indexicality of water (Putnam’s “this liquid, the same liquid as that“) does not relocate the difference back inside the head as a difference in narrow content. The demonstrative reaches its referent only through a causal-historical relation to a sample, and it is that relation — not any inner accompaniment of the demonstrating — that differs between the twins. ↩
    3. Burge’s case is developed first in “Individualism and the Mental,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4 (1979): 73–121, and expanded across decades into the systematic anti-individualism of Origins of Objectivity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), esp. chaps. 2–3. Burge’s claim is stronger than Putnam’s along two axes. First, it needs no hidden microstructure: the arthritis case turns on a purely social fact — that “arthritis” is, in the speaker’s community, a disease of the joints — so the externalist conclusion extends to artifact and institutional terms (sofa, contract) that have no chemical essence at all. Second, and more carefully than the main text’s compression allows: Burge’s point is not that the patient is ignorant of a dictionary entry, but that the content of his belief is fixed by his community’s practice despite his incomplete grasp of the term. The patient genuinely believes that his arthritis has spread to his thigh — a false belief about arthritis, deferring to a practice that determines what “arthritis” picks out — rather than a true belief about some idiosyncratic private concept. Strip away the community and the very identity of the concept he is deploying goes indeterminate. Content, that is, is constitutively dependent on relations the thinker bears to a wider linguistic and physical environment, not merely causally downstream of them. ↩
    4. Byrne and Tye, “Qualia Ain’t in the Head,” Noûs 40, no. 2 (2006): 241–255. The argument runs as an externalist extension of Tye’s strong representationalism (Ten Problems of Consciousness [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995], esp. chaps. 4–5): if phenomenal character is identical to representational content of the right kind, and if representational content is itself externally determined (per Putnam, Burge, and the wider tradition), then phenomenal character cannot be wholly internal to the perceiving system. The strongest objection is Ned Block’s “mental paint” line (Block, “Mental Paint,” in M. Hahn and B. Ramberg, eds., Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003], 165–200): there are, Block argues, intrinsic phenomenal features — the “paint” on the inner canvas — that vary independently of any represented worldly property, as in cases of phenomenal inversion or in afterimages, so that two experiences could represent the same scene yet differ in felt character. Met at full strength, the objection is answered, not conceded, by holding the line on the identity claim: the cases Block adduces are redescribed as differences in what is represented (a difference in represented hue, an afterimage represented as a colored region of the visual field) rather than as residue left over once representational content is fixed. “Mental paint” names exactly the inner cargo the externalist denies; to grant it as an independent variable would be to smuggle the bad picture back in under a new label. The present essay endorses the strong representationalist line and takes the burden Block identifies — to redescribe every putative case of paint without remainder — to be one the view can carry. ↩
    5. Havlík, “Meaning and Understanding in Large Language Models,” Synthese 204, article 71 (2024). Havlík distinguishes three candidate locations for the grounding of LLM meanings — the world, an internal world-model, and the linguistic corpus itself — and argues that the first two cannot be required of an LLM without begging questions about what counts as grounding; his positive proposal is that meaning in LLMs is grounded intra-linguistically, within the corpus, so that referential success becomes a property of distributional structure rather than of any speaker-world relation. The objection pressed in the main text grants Havlík his negative point — referential grounding is indeed not the only way to fix meaning for a symbolic system — while denying the positive one: intra-linguistic structure can do real semantic work (disambiguation, inference, paraphrase) precisely because it inherits the compressed trace of relations the original speakers bore to the world, but it cannot do the constitutive work the externalist tradition has identified, because the relation that did that work was severed at training time and the trace is not the relation. Compare the converging diagnosis of Emily M. Bender and Alexander Koller, “Climbing towards NLU: On Meaning, Form, and Understanding in the Age of Data,” Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (2020): 5185–5198, who argue from the side of form what externalism argues from the side of reference: a system exposed to form alone, however much of it, has no route to communicative intent or to the world that intent is about. ↩
    6. Searle, “Minds, Brains, and Programs,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3, no. 3 (1980): 417–424; followed up in “Is the Brain a Digital Computer?” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 64, no. 3 (1990): 21–37. For the present essay’s externalist diagnosis, Searle’s two arguments converge from different directions: the 1980 paper isolates the syntax/semantics gap from the side of what symbol manipulation alone delivers (a syntactic engine, however fast, never crosses into semantics by running faster); the 1990 paper isolates it from the side of what counts as a symbol in the first place (syntax is not intrinsic to physics — it is assigned by an interpreter, which threatens any account that hopes to read off semantics from a system’s formal structure). The externalist arrives at the same gap from a third direction: even granting determinate symbols, their reference is fixed by relations to a world, and those relations are not among the system’s formal properties. Three independent roads, one missing ingredient. ↩
    7. The relevant technical distinction: training statistics encode the distributional facts about how speakers in a corpus deploy tokens relative to one another, but do not encode the referential facts about which extensions those deployments succeeded in picking out. The two are correlated — because the human speakers were anchored — but the correlation does not survive the move from the speakers to the trained model: the model has access to the shadow the anchoring cast on usage, not to the anchoring. This is why the natural reply — “but a model can be grounded, via multimodal training, robotic embodiment, or retrieval against a live environment” — is not a counterexample but a concession in disguise. Each such proposal works precisely by restoring some causal-historical relation between the system’s symbols and the world, which is the externalist’s point: reference is purchased by anchoring, and where genuine anchoring is added the verdict can change (cf. Michael Tye, “How Can We Tell if a Machine is Conscious?” Inquiry [advance online publication, 2024], https://doi.org/10.1080/0020174X.2024.2434856, on the embodied conditions under which machine reference could succeed). The claim of this essay is narrow and exact: a text-only model trained on a static corpus has no such relation, and so its fluency, however vast, is fluency over a record of meaning rather than an instance of it. ↩