Quine on Meaning in Linguistics
Quine's discussion of the role of convention in science seems right; but how about the role of meaning in ordinary natural language? Is it really true that in the “pale grey lore” of all the sentences we accept, there aren't some that are “white” somehow “by virtue of the very meanings of their words”? What about our examples in our earlier set II? What about sentences that merely link patent synonyms, as in “Lawyers are attorneys,” or “A fortnight is a period of fourteen days”? As Grice and Strawson (1956) and Putnam (1962) pointed out, it is unlikely that so intuitively plausible a distinction should turn out to have no basis at all in fact. Quine addresses this issue, first, in his (1953/80, chs. 1 and 3), and then in a much larger way in chapter 2 of his (1960) and many subsequent writings.
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Quine (1960) further supported his case by sketching a full-fledged theory of language that does without any theory of determinate meaning. Indeed, a consequence of his theory is that translation (i.e., the identification of two expressions from different languages as having the same meaning) is “indeterminate”; there is “no fact of the matter” about whether two expressions do or do not have the same meaning (see Indeterminacy of Translation). And it's a consequence of this view that there are pretty much no facts of the matter about people's mental lives at all! For, if there is no fact of the matter about whether two people mean the same thing by their words, then there is no fact of the matter about whether they ever have mental states with the same content; and consequently no fact of the matter about what anyone ever thinks. Quine himself took this consequence in stride –he was, after all, a behaviorist– regarding it as “of a piece” with Brentano's thesis of the irreducibility of the intentional; it's just that for him, unlike for Brentano, it simply showed the “baselessness of intentional idioms and the emptiness of a science of intention” (1960, p. 221). Needless to say, many subsequent philosophers have not been happy with this view, and have wondered where Quine's argument has gone wrong.