As another example, assume that you believe that Trump is the President. If you were to claim that the President lives in Mar-a-Lago then you would be wrong because Joe Biden doesn't live in Mar-a-Lago. Regardless of who you believe is the President, the term "the President" refers to Joe Biden.

the term "the President" refers to Joe Biden. — Michael

This is grounded in community usage, as well as in this case legalisms. My argument is that meaning derives from community usage, not objective reality. (A more analogous example would be, suppose there was some bylaw which meant that legally Kamela Harris was in fact president. This law was so obscure that on one ever noticed, now or in the future. Would we all be wrong who say "Joe Biden is president?").

In 2000BC, "The center of the universe" generally had the extension of "The earth". Factually this was incorrect. Nonetheless, that is what people meant by it.

You have to divorce the concept of meaning from factual. How would you otherwise understand the history of science? When ancient philosophers mentioned "substance" did they mean all the details of quantum theory? Factually, that is what they were referring to, but their meaning contained no trace of wave equations.

Arent we condemned to a world of ideas? — Joshs

Yes, this is why I disagree with Putnam. Putnam believes that differences in the thing in itself, differences which we have no access to, can impose change on our meaning. These differences can only impose changes in the absolute facticity of our claims.

See the SEP article on names — Michael

If this is true, then meaning is divorced from extension. Names have extension, but according to this no corresponding intension.

Let A and B be any two terms which differ in extension. By assumption (II) they must differ in meaning (in the sense of "intension").

must be wrong. Two names differ in extension, but have the same (absent) intension.

Proper names behave differently to common nouns.

Yes, this is why I disagree with Putnam. Putnam believes that differences in the thing in itself, differences which we have no access to, can impose change on our meaning. These differences can only impose changes in the absolute facticity of our claims — hypericin

I think Putnam became more and more dissatisfied with his original Twin Earth argument over time. After all , he was a conceptual relativist. He didn't believe that it was coherent to talk of a world determinable independently of our concepts.

“…the success of science cannot be anything but a puzzle as long as we view concepts and objects as radically independent; that is, as long as we think of "the world" as an entity that has a fixed nature, determined once and for all, independently of our framework of concepts." “So much about the identity relations between different categories of mathematical objects is conventional, that the picture of ourselves as describing a bunch of objects that are there "anyway" is in trouble from the start.” “…what leads to "Platonizing" is yielding to the temptation to find mysterious entities which somehow guarantee or stand behind correct judgments of the reasonable and the unreasonable.”

Would we all be wrong who say "Joe Biden is president?" — hypericin

I just did it. It is conflation.

In this case, yes we would be wrong, at least legally. Nonetheless we (by "we" I emphatically exclude batshit Trumpies) all mean Joe Biden, not Kamela Harris, not Trump, by "The President of the US".

In debates between semantic internalists vs externalists it isn't clear that matters of fact are being debated. Both sides of the debate seem only to be cheerleading different linguistic conventions that emphasize different semantics for different purposes. To think otherwise is to grant linguists powers of omniscient authority.

In the first person, when ones uses a name to refer to a present acquaintance, the distinction between sense and reference disappears. The distinction only comes into play when utterances are interpreted as referring to 'non-present' entities. But then it must be asked what is the meaning and usefulness of interpreting such words as designating what is absent? Doesn't designation amount to postponing an extensional interpretation of a name until a satisfactory object is recognised as passing into view?

cheerleading different linguistic conventions that emphasize different semantics for different purposes. — sime

I wouldn't put it that way. It is about our concepts. "Meaning" is a word for a concept. What is it? Specifically here, does it include features of objective reality, even ones we are unaware of?

The debate is factual to the extent you consider the contents of our concepts as matters of fact.

To think otherwise is to grant linguists powers of omniscient authority. — sime

Not sure what you mean here.