To exclude the intentions of the speakers, but to forge in some way the referential bond, a strong ontology would have to presuppose a Divine Mind, or an Infinite one, if you will. Taking for granted that the world exists independently of our knowledge of it, and that it exists as a population of essences reciprocally governed by laws, only a Mind that knows the world exactly as it is (and as It created it), and that indulgently accepts that the same essence can be referred to in different languages, can “fix” the referent in a stable manner.
To return to the well-known example from Putnam (1975: 223–27), if there existed on a twin Earth something that resembled the water of this planet in every way, something that looked the same, had the same flavor and biochemical effects, but nonetheless was not H2O but XYZ, in order to say that whoever (on both planets) spoke of water would be referring to H2O but not to XYZ, we would have to assume that some Infinite Mind sees things in exactly this way, because only its thought would guarantee the connection between names and essences. But it was Putnam himself (1981, III), in setting up an internal realism in opposition to the externalist point of view, who said that for the latter position to be tenable, we would need to presuppose a Divine Eye.
But postulating a Divine Mind poses an interesting problem in terms of intentionality. We must admit that the Divine Mind “knows” that every utterance of the term water refers to the essence of water, and that the nature of the intentional relation that binds the Divine Mind to the content of its “knowledge” eludes our understanding (and in fact we postulate that things happen this way, but we do not say how they happen). But what guarantees that all our utterances of the term water correspond to the intentionality of the Divine Mind? Clearly nothing, if not our good intentions, i.e., that when we speak of water, we intend to do, so to speak, the will of God and intend (voluntarily) to correspond to the intention of the Divine Mind.
Note that I say the “intention” and not the “intentionality” of a Divine Mind. Wondering about the intentionality of a Divine Mind goes beyond the limits of these humble reflections—and beyond those of far prouder reflections too. The problem is that it is also difficult to decide what corresponding to the intention of a Divine Mind means.
I admit that there is now a phenomenon that might serve as a model of a Divine Mind, and of an absolutely rigid designation. It is the phenomenon of the e-mail address. The “name” constituted by this address (let’s say: adam@eden.being) corresponds to one entity and one alone (it is not necessarily a physical individual, it might be a company, but only that company and not another). We can be entirely ignorant of any properties the addressee might have (Adam might not be the first man, might not have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, might not be the husband of Eve, etc.), but we know that that name (address) points to (via a chain of electrical phenomena that it is not worth analyzing in detail here but whose efficiency we witness daily) an individual entity distinguishable from all others, independently of our beliefs, opinions, lexical knowledge, and of the knowledge we have about the way in which it “points.” In the course of time we could associate many properties with that name, but we do not need to: we know that if we type it into our mail program, we will reach that address and not another.12 And we know that everything depends on a baptismal ceremony, and that the referential power of the address we use is causally due to that baptism.
But a phenomenon of this kind (so absolutely “pure” and beyond argument, independent of the intentions and the competence of all correspondents) exists only in e-mail. That the e-mail system may be a model of the Divine Mind may appear both reassuring and blasphemous, but there is no doubt that it is the only case in which we use an absolutely rigid designation in accordance with what is at least the model of a Divine Network, if not of a Divine Mind.
From the Divine Mind to the Intention of the Community
How do we withdraw from a strong ontology, guaranteeing at the same time a certain objectivity of the reference? By thinking up a weak ontology of the Mind of the Community (whose privileged representatives are, depending on the field, the Experts). In this sense referring correctly to water means referring to it in the same way as the community of experts—who agree that water is H2O today but tomorrow, by taking the fallibilism of knowledge into due account, might opt for another definition. But in no way does this solve the problem posed by the hypothesis of the Divine Mind: what guarantee do we have that when we use the word water in an act of reference, we are using it as the Mind of the Community does? The answer lies simply in our (voluntaristic) decision to use that word in the same sense as the experts do.
Now, in the sketch about the sarkiapone, was Chiari doing anything different when he decided to use the word sarkiapone the same way Campanini used it? Chiari simply assumed that Campanini was an Expert. Is there is an ontological difference between Campanini’s opinion and Einstein’s? There is only our persuasion that, statistically speaking, our encyclopedias register Einstein as a qualified expert while they do not mention Campanini (and I grant there are good reasons for this preference). This means to say that, when we speak, we have an idea, sometimes vague and sometimes precise, about some matters covered by the consensus of the Community.
But while the terms describing so-called natural kinds (such as water and gold) suggest that there is an expert as a Privileged Interlocutor (an interpreter authorized by the Community), this is not the case with my cousin Arthur, Mafalda’s cat, or the first hominid to reach Australia. Here there is ample possibility of a contract, because here Campanini’s word is as good as Einstein’s.
For example, faced with the sentence Napoleon was born in Cambridge, convinced as I am that my Napoleon was born in Ajaccio, by no means do I agree to use the name according to the intentions of the Community, because, out of the principle of char ity at least, I immediately suspect that the speaker intends to refer to another Napoleon. Therefore I do my best to check the appropriateness of the reference, trying to induce my interlocutor to interpret the NC that he makes correspond to the name Napoleon, to discover perhaps that his Napoleon is a used car salesman born in this century, and so I find myself faced with a banal case of homonymy. Or I realize that my interlocutor intends to refer to my Napoleon, and therefore intends to make a historical proposition that defies current encyclopedic notions (and therefore the Mind of the Community). In such a case I would proceed to ask him for convincing proof of his proposition.
But now let us try to take seriously the decision to use a term according to the intention and the consensus of the Experts or the Community. Let us suppose that, faced with the threat of extinction of the African elephant, the ECO (Elephant Control Organization) realizes that (i) there are three thousand elephants in the Kwambia area, more than the number that the ecological balance can sustain (the elephants ruin the crops and therefore the population is led to slaughter them, whereas, if their number were lower, they might be tolerated); (ii) in the Bwana area, the elephants, slaughtered by ivory poachers, are on the verge of extinction (strict laws have been passed that might ensure their survival, but the number of them in circulation is too low to guarantee the continuity of the species); (iii) it is necessary to capture a thousand elephants in Kwambia and transfer them to Bwana; (iv) the confederation of African States and the World Wildlife Fund have approved the operation and have ordered the officers of the ECO to carry it out. In the course of these preliminaries, reference was made to Kwambia and Bwana, and the supposition is that there is an agreement regarding the referent of these territorial names.
Now all the three thousand elephants in Kwambia are being designated, one by one, and the assertion is that one thousand of these will have to be transferred to Bwana. It is not yet known which animals the one thousand will be, but, just as we can designate a child about to be born, it is possible to designate a thousand elephants that, on the day of the transfer to Bwana, will be exactly those and not other individuals. The problem is ensuring that the officers of the ECO have an exact knowledge of the meaning of the term elephant and do not transfer rhinoceroses or hippopotamuses by mistake.
It is not enough to say that the officers of the ECO intend to use the term elephant to
