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bryjnar comments on Be careful with thought experiments - Less Wrong
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I think many of the other commenters have done an admirable job defending Putnam's usage of thought experiments, so I don't feel a need to address that.
However, there also seems to be some confusion about Putnam's conclusion that "meaning ain't in the head." It seems to me that this confusion can be resolved by disambiguating the meaning of 'meaning'. 'Meaning' can refer to either the extension (i.e. referent) of a concept or its intension (a function from the context and circumstance of a concept's usage to its extension). The extension clearly "ain't in the head" but the intension is.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Two-Dimensional Semantics has a good explanation of my usage of the terms 'intension' and 'extension'. Incidentally, as someone with a lot of background in academic philosophy, I think making two-dimensional semantics a part of LessWrong's common background knowledge would greatly improve the level of philosophical discussion here as well as reduce the inferential distance between LessWrong and academic philosophers.
I have to say, I think Chalmers' Two-Dimensional Semantics thing is pretty awesome! Possibly presented in an overly complicated fashion, but hey.
As for Putnam, I think his point is stronger than that! He's not just saying that the extension of a term can vary given the state of the world: no shit, there might have been fewer cats in the world, and then the extension of "cat" would be different. He's saying that the very function that picks out the extension might have been different (if the objects we originally ostended as "cats" had been different) in an externalist way. So he's actually being an externalist about intensions too!
You're right that Putnam's point is stronger than what I initially made it out to be, but I think my broader point still holds.
I was trying to avoid this complication but with two-dimensional semantics, we can disambiguate further and distinguish between the C-intension and the A-intension (again see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article for explanation). What I should have said is that while it makes sense to be externalist about extensions and C-intensions, we can still be internalist about A-intensions.