Journal of Philosophy, Inc.

Indeterminacy, Empiricism, and the First Person

Author(s): John R. Searle
Reviewed work(s):
Source: The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 84, No. 3 (Mar., 1987), pp. 123-146
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 - -+- 0 -_

THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

VOLUME LXXXIV, NO. 3, MARCH 1987

.--- 0 --

INDETERMINACY, EMPIRICISM, AND

THE FIRST PERSON*

HE aim of this article is to assess the significanceof W. V.

Quine's indeterminacy thesis. If Quine is right, the thesis has
vast ramifications for the philosophy of language and mind; if
he is wrong, we ought to be able to say exactly how and why.
I
Let us begin by stating the behaviorist assumptions from which
Quine originally proceeds. For the sake of developing an empirical
theory of meaning, he confines his analysis to correlations between
external stimuli and dispositions to verbal behavior. In thus limiting
the analysis, he does not claim to capture all the intuitions we have
about the pretheoretical notion, but rather the "objective reality"'
that is left over if we strip away the confusions and incoherencies in
the pretheoretical "meaning." The point of the "behavioristic er-
satz" is to give us a scientific, empirical account of the objective
reality of meaning. On this view, the objective reality is simply a
matter of being disposed to produce utterances in response to ex-
ternal stimuli. The stimuli are defined entirely in terms of patterns of
stimulations of the nerve endings, and the responses entirely in terms
of sounds and sound patterns that the speaker is disposed to emit.
But we are not supposed to think that between the stimulus and the
verbal response there are any mental entities. We are not supposed
to think that there is any consciousness, intentionality, thoughts, or
any internal "meanings" connecting the stimuli to the noises. There

* I am indebted to a large number of people for comments and criticism of earlier

drafts of this paper. I especially want to thank Noam Chomsky, Dagfinn F0llesdal,
Ernest Lepore, Brian McLaughlin, George Myro, Dagmar Searle, and Bruce Ver-
mazen.
' Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press; New York: Wiley, 1960), p. 39.

0022-362X/87/8403/0123$02.40 (? 1987 The Journal of Philosophy, Inc.

123
124 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

is just the pattern of stimulus and the pattern of learned response.

There will, of course, be neurophysiological mechanisms mediating
the input and the output, but the details of their structure do not
matter to a theory of meaning, since any mechanism whatever that
systematically associated stimulus and response would do the job as
well. For example, any computer or piece of machinery that could
emit the right sounds in response to the right stimuli would have
"mastered" a language as well as any other speaker, because that is
all there is to the mastery of a language. Quine, I take it, does not
deny the existence of inner mental states and processes; he just
thinks they are useless and irrelevant to developing an empirical
theory of language.
Such a view is linguistic behaviorism with a vengeance. It has often
been criticized and, in my view, often refuted, for example, by Noam
Chomsky in his review of B. F. Skinner.2 On one construal, my
Chinese room argument can also be interpreted as a refutation.3
One way to refute this version of extreme linguistic behaviorism (let
us call it "behaviorism" for short) would be to offer a reductio ad
absurdum of its basic premises; and, indeed, it seems to me that
Quine has offered us one such famous reductio (op. cit., ch. 2). If
behaviorism were true, then certain distinctions known indepen-
dently to be valid would be lost. For example, we all know that, when
a speaker utters an expression, there is a distinction between his
meaning rabbit and his meaning rabbit stage or undetached rabbit
part. But, if we actually applied the assumptions of behaviorism to
interpreting the language of an alien tribe, we would find there was
no way of making these distinctions as plain facts of the matter about
the language used by the native speakers. Suppose, for example, the
natives shouted "Gavagai!" whenever a rabbit ran past, and suppose
we tried to translate this into our English as "There's a rabbit!" or
simply, "Rabbit!". The stimulus-which, remember, is defined en-
tirely in terms of stimulations of nerve endings-is equally appro-
priate for translating "Gavagai!" as "There's a stage in the life his-
tory of a rabbit!" or "There's an undetached part of a rabbit!". The

2 "Review of B. F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior," in Jerry Fodor and Jerrold Katz,

eds., The Structure of Language (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964), pp.
547-578.
3 In the Chinese room argument, the man in the room follows a computer pro-
gram that makes his verbal behavior indistinguishable from that of a Chinese
speaker, but he still does not understand Chinese. He satisfies the behavioral crite-
rion for understanding without actually understanding. Thus, the refutation of
strong AI is a fortiori a refutation of behaviorism. [See my "Minds, Brains, and
Programs," Behavioral and Brain Sciences, iII (1980): 417-457; and Minds,
Brains, and Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1984).]
 INDETERMINACY AND THE FIRST PERSON 125

same pattern of stimulation of the photoreceptor cells does duty for

all three translations. So, if all there were to meaning were patterns
of stimulus and response, then it would be impossible to discriminate
meanings, which are in fact discriminable. That is the reductio ad
absurdum.
It is crucial to this argument to see that, even if we got more
patterns of stimulus and response for our tribe, that still would not
enable us to make the discriminations we need to make. Suppose we
learned their expression for 'is the same as' and tried to use it to
enable us to tell whether they meant rabbit or rabbit stage or unde-
tached rabbit part. We could get the rabbit to run past again, and if
they said "Same gavagai," we would have at least pretty good evi-
dence that they did not mean, for example, rabbit stage by 'gavagai'.
But this would be no help to us at all, because exactly the same sorts
of doubt that we had about 'gavagai' in the first place would now
apply to the expression for 'is the same as'. As far as matching stimuli
and responses is concerned, we could equally well translate it as 'is a
part of' or 'belongs with'. The conclusion we are forced to is this:
assuming linguistic behaviorism, there will be endlessly different and
inconsistent translations, all of which can be made consistent with all
actual and possible evidence concerning the totality of the speech
dispositions of the native speakers. As far as the behavioral evidence
is concerned, there is nothing to choose between one translation and
another even though the two are inconsistent.4
On Quine's view, the unit of analysis for empirically testing trans-
lations is not words or individual expressions but whole sentences.
The only direct empirical checks we have on translations are for
those sentences which are associated directly with stimulus condi-
tions, the "observation sentences." On this view, 'Gavagai!', 'Rab-
bit!', 'Rabbit stage!', 'Undetached rabbit part!' all have the same
determinate stimulus meaning; they have "stimulus synonymy,''
since the same stimulus conditions would prompt assent to or dissent
from them. The indeterminacy arises when we attempt to form "ana-
lytical hypotheses" that state the meanings of particular words or
other elements of the sentence. The indeterminacy that attaches to
the elements of observation sentences is at least constrained by the
stimulus conditions that prompt assent to or dissent from those

4 In what sense exactly can two translations be inconsistent? We cannot simply say
that they have different meanings, for that would seem to imply the existence of
determinate meanings. Rather, we must say that they are inconsistent in the sense
that one system of translation will accept translations that the other system would
reject [Quine, "Reply to Harman," Synthese, XIX, 1/2 (December 1968): 267-269;
also, Word and Object, pp. 73/4.]
126 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

sentences. The determinate stimulus meaning that attaches to ob-

servation sentences should at least seem puzzling to us, however,
since sentences that have the same stimulus meaning do not in any
ordinary sense of 'meaning' have the same meaning. By any reason-
able standard of objective reality, it is a matter of objective reality
that "There's a rabbit" and "There's an undetached rabbit part" just
do not mean the same things. The significance of this point for the
over-all theory will emerge later.
Now, why exactly is Quine's argument a reductio ad absurdum of
extreme linguistic behaviorism? There are two positions which are
inconsistent:
(1) The thesis of behaviorism:The objectiverealityof meaningconsists
entirelyof correlationsbetweenexternalstimuliand dispositionsto
verbalbehavior.5
(2) In a given case of speech behavior,there can be a plain fact of the
matter about whether a native speakermeant, e.g., rabbit, as op-
posed to rabbitstage,or undetachedrabbitpart,by the utteranceof
an expression.
If alternative and inconsistent translation schemes can all be made
consistent with the same patterns of stimulus and response, then
there cannot be any fact of the matter about which is right, because,
according to (1), there isn't anything else to be right about. But this is
inconsistent with (2); so if we accept (2), (1) must be false.
I think it is clear which of (1) or (2) we have to give up. Quine has
simply refuted extreme linguistic behaviorism. But why am I so con-
fident about that? Why not give up (2)? The answer is the obvious
one: if behaviorism were correct, it would have to be correct for us as
speakers of English as well as for speakers of Gavagai-talk. And we
know from our own case that we do mean by 'rabbit' something
different from 'rabbit stage' or 'undetached rabbit part'. If my En-
glish-speaking neighbor, having read Quine, decides that he can't tell
whether by 'rabbit' I mean rabbit, undetached rabbit part, or rabbit
stage, then so much the worse for him. When I saw a rabbit recently,
as I did in fact, and I called it a rabbit, I meant rabbit. In all discus-
sions in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind, it is
absolutely essential at some point to remind oneself of the first-per-
son case. No one, for example, can convince us by argument, how-
ever ingenious, that pains do not exist if in fact we have them, and
similar considerations apply to Quine's example. If somebody has a
theory according to which there isn't any difference between my

5 Sometimes Quine talks about behavior simpliciter, sometimes about disposi-

tions to behavior. I think the notion of dispositions to behavior is the one he prefers.
 INDETERMINACY AND THE FIRST PERSON 127

meaning rabbit and my meaning rabbit part, then I know that his
theory is simply mistaken; and the only interest his theory can have
for me is in trying to discover where he went wrong. I want to
emphasize this point, since it is often regarded as somehow against
the rules in these discussions to raise the first-person case.
In a different philosophical environment from the one we live in,
this might well be the end of the discussion. Linguistic behaviorism
was tried and refuted by Quine using reductio ad absurdum argu-
ments. But, interestingly, he does not regard it as having been re-
futed. He wants to hold behaviorism, together with the conclusion
that, where analytical hypotheses about meaning are concerned,
there simply are no facts of the matter, together with a revised
version of (2), the thesis that we can in fact make valid distinctions
between different translations. And some authors, such as Donald
Davidson6 and John Wallace,7 who reject behaviorism, nonetheless
accept a version of the indeterminacy thesis. Davidson, in fact, con-
siders and rejects my appeal to the first-person case. Why does the
thesis of the indeterminacy of translation continue to be accepted?
And what larger issues are raised by the dispute? I now turn to these
questions.
II
We need to consider three theses:
(A) The indeterminacy of translation
(B) The inscrutability of reference
(C) The relativity of ontology
In this section, I will first explain the relations between (A) and (B),
and then try to say more about the character of the thesis Quine is
advancing. In the next section, I will try to show that (C) is best
construed as an unsuccessful maneuver to rescue the theory from
the apparently absurd consequences of (A) and (B).
The thesis of the indeterminacy of translation is that, where ques-
tions of translation and, therefore, of meaning are concerned, there
is no such thing as getting it right or wrong. This is not because of an
epistemic gulf between evidence and conclusion, but because there is
no fact of the matter to be right or wrong about.
From (A), so stated, (B) follows immediately. For if there is no fact
of the matter about whether or not a speaker meant rabbit as op-

6 "The Inscrutability of Reference," Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, x

(1979): 7-19, reprinted in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (New York:
Oxford, 1984), pp. 227-241; page references are to this version.
7"Only in the Context of a Sentence Do Words Have Any Meaning," Midwest
Studies in Philosophy, II: Studies in the Philosophy of Language (1977).
128 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

posed to rabbit stage, then equally, there is no fact of the matter

about whether or not he is referring to a rabbit or a rabbit stage. In
Fregean terminology, indeterminacy of sense entails inscrutability of
reference.
Now, if we were to construe (A) as just the claim that there are no
psychological facts of the matter about meanings in addition to facts
about correlations of stimulus and response, then it would seem
puzzling that we didn't derive that conclusion immediately from
extreme linguistic behaviorism. It would seem puzzling that there is
so much heavy going about 'gavagai', etc. But thesis (A) is stronger
than just the thesis of behaviorism; that is, it is stronger than the
claim that there isn't any meaning in addition to correlations of
stimulus and response. It says further that there are an indefinite
number of equally valid but inconsistent ways of correlating stimulus
and verbal response in the vocabulary of an alien language with that
of our language. The thesis that there are no objectively real mean-
ings in addition to dispositions to verbal behavior was already as-
sumed at the beginning of the discussion. Quine rejected any appeal
to meanings, in any psychological sense, from the start. That was
never at issue. What was at issue was the possibility of empirically
motivated correct translations from one language to another, given
behaviorism; the issue was whether or not there is an empirically
motivated notion of sameness of meaning left over after we have
adopted extreme linguistic behaviorism.
We will see the importance of this consideration when we see why
several criticisms that are made of Quine miss the mark. Chomsky,
for example, has repeatedly claimed that Quine's thesis of indeter-
minacy is simply the familiar underdetermination of hypothesis by
empirical evidence.8 Because any empirical hypothesis makes a claim
that goes beyond the evidence, there will always be inconsistent hy-
potheses that are consistent with any actual or possible evidence. But
underdetermination, so construed, does not entail that there is "no
fact of the matter." Now Quine's response to Chomsky's objection
seems at first sight puzzling. He grants that indeterminacy is under-
determination, but claims that it is underdetermination at one re-
move and, therefore, that there is no fact of the matter. He claims
that, even if we have established all the facts about physics, semantics
is still indeterminate. He writes:
Then when I say there is no fact of the matter, as regards, say, the two
rival manuals of translation, what I mean is that both manuals are com-

Cf., for example, his "Quine's Empirical Assumptions," Synthese, XIX, 1/2
(December 1968): 53-68.
 INDETERMINACY AND THE FIRST PERSON 129

patible with all the same distributions of states and relations over ele-
mentary particles. In a word, they are physically equivalent.9
But this answer seems inadequate to Chomsky and at one time
seemed inadequate to me, because underdetermination at one re-
move is still just underdetermination. It wouldn't be sufficient to
show that there is no fact of the matter. The objection to Quine that
Chomsky makes (and that I used to make) is simply this: for any given
higher-level "emergent" or "supervenient" property, there will be
(at least) two levels of underdetermination. There will be a level of
the underdetermination of the underlying physical theory, but there
will also be a theory at the higher level, for example, at the level of
psychology; and information at the level of microphysics is, by itself,
not sufficient to determine the level of psychology. As Chomsky once
put it, if you fix the physics, the psychology is still open; but equally,
if you fix the psychology, the physics is still open. For example, the
theory of all the dispositions of physical particles that go to make up
my body, by itself, would leave open the question of whether or not I
am in pain. The thesis that I am in pain is underdetermined at one
remove. Now why is it supposed to be any different with meaning? Of
course, there are two levels of underdetermination, but in both cases
there are facts of the matter-in one case, facts of psychology, and in
the other case, facts of physics. I now believe that this answer misses
Quine's point altogether because it fails to see that he is assuming
from the start that there is no psychologically real level of meaning
beyond simple physical dispositions to respond to verbal stimuli. To
repeat, Quine assumes from the very start the nonexistence of (ob-
jectively real) meanings in any psychological sense. If you assume
that they are so much as possible, his argument fails. But now it
begins to look as though the real issue is not about indeterminacy at
all; it is about extreme linguistic behaviorism.
Many philosophers assume that Quine's discussion is sufficient to
refute any sort of mentalistic or intentionalistic theory of meaning.
But what our discussion of Chomsky's objections suggests is that this
misconstrues the nature of the discussion altogether. It is only as-
suming the nonexistence of intentionalistic meanings that the argu-
ment for indeterminacy succeeds at all. Once that assumption is
abandoned, that is, once we stop begging the question against men-
talism, it seems to me that Chomsky's objection is completely valid.
Where meanings psychologically construed are concerned, there is
the familiar underdetermination of hypothesis by evidence, and that
underdetermination is in addition to the underdetermination at the

9 Theories and Things (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1981), p. 23.

130 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

level of physical particles or brute physical behavior. So what? These

are familiar points about any psychological theory. There is nothing
special about meaning and nothing to show that where meaning is
concerned there is no fact of the matter.
To deepen our understanding of these points, we must now turn
to the thesis of the relativity of ontology.
III
Quine recognizes that the proofs of the indeterminacy of translation
and of the inscrutability of reference seem to be leading to absurd
consequences. He writes:
We seem to be maneuveringourselves into the absurd position that
there is no difference on any terms, interlinguisticor intralinguistic,
objective or subjective,between referring to rabbitsand referring to
rabbitpartsor stages;or betweenreferringto formulasand referringto
their G6delnumbers.Surelythis is absurd,for it would implythat there
is no differencebetweenthe rabbitand each of its partsor stages,and no
differencebetween a formulaand its Godel number. Referencewould
seem now to become nonsense not just in radical translation but
at home.'o
The indeterminacy thesis seems to have the absurd consequence
that indeterminacy and inscrutability apply to the first-person case,
to oneself: "If it is to make sense to say even of oneself that one is
referring to rabbits and formulas and not to rabbit stages and Godel
numbers, then it should make sense equally to say it of someone else"
(ibid., 47).
Quine recognizes something that many of his critics have missed,
and that is the real absurdity of the indeterminacy argument once
you follow out its logical consequences: followed to its conclusion,
the argument has nothing essentially to do with translating from one
language to another or even understanding another speaker of one's
own language. If the argument is valid, then it must have the result
that there isn't any difference for me between meaning rabbit or
rabbit stage, and that has the further result that there isn't any
difference for me between referring to a rabbit and referring to a
rabbit stage, and there isn't any difference for me between some-
thing's being a rabbit and its being a rabbit stage. And all of this is a
consequence of the behaviorist assumption that there isn't any
meaning beyond behaviorist meaning. Once we concede that as far
as behaviorist "stimulus meaning" is concerned, 'There's a rabbit'
and 'There's a rabbit stage' are "stimulus synonymous," then the rest

10 Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia, 1969), pp.
47/8.
 INDETERMINACY AND THE FIRST PERSON 131

follows, because on the behaviorist hypothesis there isn't any other

kind of objectively real meaning or synonymy. I think, with Quine,
that these consequences are absurd on their face, but if there is any
doubt about their absurdity, recall that the whole argument about
'Gavagai' was understood by me (or you) only because we know the
difference for our own case between meaning rabbit, rabbit stage,
rabbit part, etc.
I said in the last section that the thesis of indeterminacy is the
thesis that there cannot be empirically well-motivated translations of
the words of one language into those of another, given behaviorism.
But if this thesis is correct, then there cannot even be "correct"
translations from a language into itself. By observing my idiolect of
English, I can't tell whether by 'rabbit' I mean rabbit stage, rabbit
part, or whatnot. Quine need not have considered Gavagai speakers.
He could have simply observed in his own case that there was no
"empirical" difference between his meaning one thing or the other
and, therefore, that there was no real difference at all. And that
result, as he correctly sees, is absurd. If the indeterminacy thesis were
really true, we would not even be able to understand its formula-
tion; for when we were told there was no "fact of the matter" about
the correctness of the translation between rabbit and rabbit stage, we
would not have been able to hear any (objectively real) difference
between the two English expressions to start with.
Here is Quine's picture: I am a machine capable of receiving
"nerve hits" and capable of emitting sounds. I am disposed to emit
certain sounds in response to certain nerve hits; and, objectively
speaking, that is all there is to meaning. Now the stimulus meaning of
"There's a rabbit stage" is the same as that of "There's a rabbit,"
since the sounds are caused by the same nerve hits. It isn't just that
Quine has a technical notion of "stimulus meaning" which he wants
to add to our common-sense notion of meaning. No, he thinks that,
as far as objective reality is concerned, stimulus meaning is all the
meaning there is. And it is his notion of stimulus meaning which
generates the absurdity.
The resolution of this "quandary," according to Quine, lies in
perceiving the relativity of reference and ontology. "Reference is
nonsense except relative to a coordinate system" (ibid., 47), and the
coordinate system is provided by a background language. The ques-
tion for me of whether I am referring to a rabbit by 'rabbit' is
answered by simply taking the English background language for
granted, by "acquiescing in our mother tongue and taking its words
at face value" (49). Just as in physics it makes sense to speak of the
position and velocity of an object only relative to a coordinate sys-
132 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

tem, so analogously it makes sense to talk of the reference of an

expression only relative to some background language. Indeed,
where translation from another language is concerned, reference is
doubly relative: relative first to the selection of a background lan-
guage into which to translate the target language, and relative sec-
ond to the arbitrary selection of a translation manual for translating
words of the target into the background.
Now, does this answer remove the apparent absurdity? I do not see
how it does; indeed I shall argue that it simply repeats the problem
without solving it.
I believe that with the thesis of reiativity we have reached the crux
of the indeterminacy argument. For this issue we can forget all about
'gavagai' and radical translation; they were merely picturesque illus-
trations of the consequences of behaviorism. The crucial thesis can
be exemplified as follows:
There is no empiricaldifferencebetween the claimthat I meant rabbit
by 'rabbit'and the claim that I meant, e.g., rabbitstage by 'rabbit'.
This is a consequence of the original thesis of Word and Object,
and it is now admitted to be absurd. So to get out of the absurdity we
substitute a revised relativity thesis:
Relativeto one arbitrarilyselected translationscheme we can trulysay
that I meant rabbit,relativeto anotherscheme,equallyarbitrary,that I
meant, e.g., rabbitstage, and there is no empirical difference between
the two schemes.
But the revised thesis is just as absurd as-and indeed expresses
the same .absurdity as-the first. And this should not surprise us,
because the original absurdity arose in a discourse that already was
relativized; it arose relative to my idiolect of English. The absurdity is
that, if I assume my idiolect is a fixed set of dispositions to verbal
behavior, then any translation of one word into itself or another of
my idiolect is absolutely arbitrary and without empirical content.
There is no way for me to tell whether by 'rabbit' I mean rabbit,
rabbit stage, rabbit part, etc. This applies even to simple disquota-
tion: there is no way even to justify the claim that by 'rabbit' I mean
rabbit. Now, it does not meet this difficulty to say that we can fix
meaning and reference by making an arbitrary selection of a transla-
tion manual. The arbitrariness of the selection of the translation
manual is precisely the problem, since it is a reflection of the arbi-
trariness of the selection from among the original range of alterna-
tive analytical hypotheses. Quine's thesis of relativity does not re-
move the absurdity; it simply restates it.
When Quine advises us to acquiesce in our mother tongue and
 INDETERMINACY AND THE FIRST PERSON 133
take words at their face value, we have to remind ourselves that, on
his account, our mother tongue consists entirely of a set of disposi-
tions to verbal behavior in response to sensory stimuli, and, so con-
strued, the empirical face value of 'rabbit' and that of 'rabbit stage'
are indistinguishable. We really cannot have it both ways. We cannot,
on the one hand, insist on a rigorous behaviorism that implies that
there is no fact of the matter and then, when we get in trouble,
appeal to a naive notion of a mother tongue or home language with
words having a face value in excess of their empirical behavioral
content. If we are serious about our behaviorism, the mother tongue
is the mother of indeterminacy, and the face value is counterfeit if
it suggests that there are empirical differences when in fact there
are none.
But what about the analogy with physics? Will that rescue us from
the absurdity? One of the peculiar features of this entire discussion is
the speed with which breath-taking conclusions are drawn on the
basis of a few sketchy remarks and underdescribed examples. To try
to get at least a little bit clearer about what is going on, let us try to
state this particular issue a little more carefully. To begin, I want to
state some more of the common-sense, pre-Quinean intuitions that
lead me, and to a certain extent Quine himself, to think that the
theses of indeterminacy and inscrutability lead or threaten to lead to
absurd results. To make it intuitively easier, let us consider the case
of translation from one language to another, though it is important
to remember that any difficulty we find with translation from one
language to another we will also find with the case of one language
alone. Let us suppose that, as I am out driving with two French
friends, Henri and Pierre, a rabbit suddenly crosses in front of the
car, and I declare, "There's a rabbit." Let us suppose further that
Henri and Pierre do not know the meaning of the English 'rabbit', so
each tries to translate it in a way that is consistent with my disposi-
tions to verbal behavior. Henri, we may suppose, concludes that
'rabbit' means stade de lapin. Pierre, on the basis of the same evi-
dence, decides it means parti non-detache'e d'un lapin. Now ac-
cording to our pre-Quinean intuitions, the problem for both Henri
and Pierre is quite simple: they both got it wrong. It is just a plain fact
about me that when I said "rabbit," I did not mean stade de lapin or
partie non-detache'e d 'un lapin. Those are just bad translations. Of
course, when I say that, I am making certain assumptions about the
meanings of these expressions in French and, therefore, about the
meanings that Henri and Pierre attach to these expressions. And
these assumptions, like any other empirical assumptions, are subject
to the usual underdetermination of hypotheses by evidence. Assum-
134 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

ing that I got the assumptions right, Henri and Pierre are just mis-
taken. But even assuming that I got my assumptions wrong, if they
are wrong in a certain specific way, then Henri and Pierre are just
right. That is, if, for example, Henri means by stade de lapin what I
mean by lapin, then he understands me perfectly; he simply has an
eccentric way of expressing this understanding. The important thing
to notice is that, in either case, whether they are right about my
original meaning or I am right in thinking that they are wrong, there
is a plain fact of the matter to be right or wrong about."
These are some of the common-sense intuitions that we need to
answer. Does the analogy with the relativity of motion get us out of
this quandary? Let's take the idea seriously and try it out. Suppose
that in the car during our rabbit conversation Henri expresses the
view that we are going 60 miles an hour, while Pierre on the other
hand insists we are going only 5 miles an hour. Later it turns out that
Pierre was observing a large truck we were passing and was estimat-
ing our speed relative to it, while Henri was talking about our speed
relative to the road surface. Once these relativities are identified
there is no longer even the appearance of paradox or disagreement.
Pierre and Henri are both right. But are they analogously both right
about the translation of 'rabbit' once the coordinate systems have
been identified? Is it a case of moving at different semantic speeds
relative to different linguistic coordinate systems? It seems to me that
these absurdities are just as absurd when relativized.
On Quine's view, I am right relative to English in thinking that I
meant rabbit, Pierre is right relative to French in thinking that I
meant partie non-detache'e d 'un lapin, and Henri is also right rela-
tive to French in thinking that I meant stade de lapin-even though
Henri and Pierre are inconsistent with each other, and both are
inconsistent with the translation I would give. And it is not an

l One of the most puzzling aspects of this whole literature is the remarks people
make about the ability to speak two or more languages and to translate from one to
the other. Quine speaks of the "traditional equations" (Word and Object, p. 28) for
translating from one language into another. But, except for a few odd locutions,
tradition has nothing to do with it. (It is a tradition, I guess, to translate Frege's
Bedeutung as 'reference', even though it doesn't really mean that in German.)
When I translate 'butterfly' as papillon, for example, there is no tradition involved
at all; or, if there is, I certainly know nothing of it. I translate 'butterfly' as papillon
because that is what 'butterfly' means in French. Similarly, Michael Dummett speaks
of "conventions" for translating from one language to another [see "The Signifi-
cance of Quine's Indeterminacy Thesis," Synthese, XXVII, 3/4 (July/August 1974):
351-397]. But the point is that, if you know what the words mean, there isn't any
room for further conventions. By convention, the numeral '2' stands for the num-
ber two in the Arabic notation, 'II' stands for the same number in the Roman
notation. But, for these very reasons, we don't need a further convention that '2'
can be translated as 'II'.
 INDETERMINACY AND THE FIRST PERSON 135

answer to this point to maintain that the appearance of inconsistency

derives from the fact that we each have different translation man-
uals, because the problem we are trying to deal with is that we know
independently that both of their translation manuals are just plain
wrong. It was the apparent wrongness of the translation manuals that
we were trying to account for. To put the point more generally, the
aim of the analogy with physics was to show how we could remove the
apparent paradoxes and absurdities by showing that they were just as
apparent but as unreal as in the physics case. We see that there is no
absurdity in supposing that we can be going both 5 and 60 miles an
hour at the same time, once we see that our speed is relative to
different coordinate systems. But the analogy between physics and
meaning fails. Even after we have relativized meaning, we are still left
with the same absurdities we had before.
Why does the analogy break down? In physics the position and
motion of a body consist entirely in its relations to some coordinate
system; but there is more to meaning than just the relations that a
word has to the language of which it is a part; otherwise the question
of translation could never arise in the first place. We can't detach the
specific motion or position of an object from a reference to a specific
coordinate system and translate it into another system in the way we
can detach a specific meaning from a specific linguistic system and
find an expression that has that very meaning in another linguistic
system. Of course, a word means what it does only relative'2 to a
language of which it is a part, but the very relativity of the possession
of meaning presupposes the nonrelativity of the meaning possessed.
This has no analogue in the relativity of physical position and motion.
Someone might object that I seem to be assuming the very "myth
of the museum" that Quine is challenging, the view that there exists a
class of mental entities called "meanings." But my point is neutral
between the various theories of meaning. Let meaning be a matter of
ideas in the head a la Hume, dispositions to behavior a la Quine, uses
of words a la Wittgenstein, or intentional capacities a la me. It
doesn't matter for this point. Whatever meaning is, we need to distin-
guish the true thesis that a word has the particular meaning it has
only relative to a language from the false thesis that the meaning
itself is relative to a language. Indeed, we are now in a position to
state the argument in a way that is independent of any particular
12 I argue elsewhere that the functioning of a speaker's meaning is also relative to

a whole Network of intentional states and a Background of preintentional capaci-

ties. I believe that this relativity is vastly more radical than has been generally
appreciated and, indeed, more radical than Quine's indeterminacy thesis, but it is
irrelevant to this part of the indeterminacy dispute. [See my Intentionality: An
Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (New York: Cambridge, 1983), chaps. 1 and 5.]
136 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

theory of meaning: grant me that there is a distinction between

meaningful and meaningless phonetic sequences (words). Thus, in
English, 'rabbit' is meaningful, 'flurg' is meaningless. Such remarks
are always made relative to a language. Perhaps in some other lan-
guage 'flurg' is meaningful and 'rabbit' is meaningless. But if 'rabbit'
is meaningful in English and 'flurg' is meaningless, there must be
some feature that 'rabbit' has in English which 'flurg' lacks. Let's call
that feature its meaning, and the class of such features of words we
can call meanings. Now, from the fact that 'rabbit' has the particular
feature it has relative to English, it does not follow that the feature,
its meaning, can exist only relative to English. Indeed, the question
whether 'rabbit' has a translation into another language is precisely
the question whether in the other language there is an expression
with that very feature. The analogy between relativity in physics and
semantics breaks down because there are no features of position and
motion except relations to coordinate systems. And Quine's argu-
ment is a reductio ad absurdum because it shows that the totality of
dispositions to speech behavior is unable to account for distinctions
concerning the feature, meaning, which we know independently to
exist, the distinction between the meaning of 'rabbit' and that of
'rabbit stage', for example. You cannot avoid the reductio by calling
attention to the fact that 'rabbit' has the feature, its meaning, only
relative to English, because the reductio is about the feature itself,
and the feature itself is not relative to English.
My aim so far has not been to refute extreme linguistic behavior-
ism, but to show:
First,the thesisof the indeterminacyof translationisjust as well (indeed,
I think better) construed as a reductio ad absurdumof the premises
from whichit was derivedas it is construedas a surprisingresult from
establishedpremises.
Second, the theory of the relativityof ontology does not succeed in
answeringthe apparentabsurditiesthat the thesisof indeterminacyand
inscrutabilityleads us into.
What about refuting linguistic behaviorism on its own terms?
There have been so many refutations of behaviorism in its various
forms that it seems otiose to repeat any of them here. But it is worth
pointing out that Quine's argument has the form of standard and
traditional refutations of behaviorism. We know from our own case,
from the first-person case, that behaviorism is wrong, because we
know that our own mental phenomena are not equivalent to disposi-
tions to behavior. Having the pain is one thing, being disposed to
exhibit pain behavior is another. Pain behavior is insufficient to
 INDETERMINACY AND THE FIRST PERSON 137

account for pain, because one might exhibit the behavior and not
have the pain, and one might have the pain and not exhibit it. Anal-
ogously, on Quine's argument, dispositions to verbal behavior are
not sufficient to account for meanings, because one might exhibit
behavior appropriate for a-certain meaning, but that still might not
be what one meant.
If someone has a new theory of the foundations of mathematics
and from his new axioms he can derive that 2 + 2 = 5, what are we to
say? Do we say that he has made an important new discovery? Or do
we say, rather, that he has disproved his axioms by a reductio ad
absurdum? I find it hard to imagine a more powerful reductio ad
absurdum argument against behaviorism than Quine's indetermin-
acy argument, because it denies the existence of distinctions that we
know from our own case are valid.
IV
I have tried to show how the doctrines of indeterminacy and inscru-
tability depend on the special assumptions of behaviorism and that,
consequently, the results can equally be taken as a refutation of that
view. But now an interesting question arises. Why do philosophers
who have no commitment to behaviorism accept these views? I will
consider Donald Davidson, because he accepts the doctrine of inde-
terminacy while explicitly denying behaviorism. Davidson takes the
frankly intentionalistic notion of "holding a sentence true" (i.e.,
believing that it is true) as the basis on which to build a theory of
meaning. What then is the area of agreement between him and
Quine which generates the indeterminacy? And what does he have to
say about the "quandary" that Quine faces? How does he deal with
the first-person case? Davidson answers the first question this way:

The crucialpoint on which I am with Quine might be put: all the evi-
dence for or againsta theoryof truth (interpretation,translation)comes
in the formof factsaboutwhateventsor situationsin the worldcause,or
wouldcause, speakersto assentto, or dissentfrom, each sentencein the
speakers'repertoire(op. cit., 230).
That is, as long as the unit of analysis is a whole sentence and as long
as what causes the speaker's response is an objective state of affairs in
the world-whether the response is assent and dissent, as in Quine,
or holding a sentence true, as in Davidson-Davidson agrees with
Quine about the indeterminacy thesis. (There are some differences
about the extent of its application.)
But how exactly does the argument work for Davidson? How does
Davidson, who rejects behaviorism, get the result that reference is
inscrutable? I believe a close look at the texts suggests that he does
138 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

accept a modified version of Quine's conception of an empirical

theory of language. Though he accepts an intentionalistic psychol-
ogy, he insists that semantic facts about the meanings of utterances
must be equally accessible to all the participants in the speech situa-
tion, and thus for him the first-person case has no special status.
Quine grants us an apparatus of stimuli and dispositions to verbal
response. Davidson grants us conditions in the world (corresponding
to Quine's stimuli), utterances, and the psychological attitude of
"holding true," directed at sentences. But, since the unit of empirical
test is still the sentence, as opposed to parts of the sentence, and
since different schemes of interpreting sentences in terms of parts of
sentences can be made consistent with the same facts about which
sentences a speaker holds true and under what conditions the
speaker holds those sentences true, Davidson claims we still get in-
scrutability. The basic idea is that there will be different ways of
matching up objects with words, any number of which could equally
well figure in a truth theory that explained why a speaker held a
sentence true.
The puzzle about Davidson is that, if you set out the argument as a
series of steps, it doesn't follow that there is inscrutability unless you
add an extra premise concerning the nature of an empirical theory of
language. Here are the steps:
(1) The unit of empiricalanalysisin radicalinterpretationis the sen-
tence (as opposed to subsententialelements).
(2) The onlyempiricalevidencefor radicalinterpretationis the fact that
speakers"hold true" certainsentences in certain situations.
(3) Thereare alternativewaysof matchingwordswithobjectswhichare
inconsistent,but any number of which could equallywell explain
why a speakerheld a sentence true.
But these three do not entail any inscrutability or indeterminacy
about what the speaker actually meant and what he is referring to.
For that you need an extra premise. What is it? I believe that it
amounts to the following:
(4) All semanticfacts must be publiclyavailableto both speaker and
hearer. If the interpretercannot make a distinctionon the basis of
public, empiricalevidence,then there is no distinctionto be made.
Here is one of his examples: if everything has a shadow, then in a
circumstance in which a speaker holds true the sentence 'Wilt is tall',
we can take 'Wilt' to refer to Wilt and 'is tall' to refer to tall things, or
we can with equal empirical justification take 'Wilt' to refer to the
shadow of Wilt and 'is tall' to refer to the shadows of tall things. The
first theory tells us that 'Wilt is tall' is true if Wilt is tall. The second
 INDETERMINACY AND THE FIRST PERSON 139
theory tells us that 'Wilt is tall' is true if the shadow of Wilt is the
shadow of a tall thing.
Davidson summarizes the argument thus:
The argumentfor the inscrutabilityof reference has two steps. In the
firststep we recognizethe empiricalequivalenceof alternativereference
schemes.In the secondstep we showthat,althoughan interpreterof the
schemercan distinguishbetweenthe schemer'sschemes,the existenceof
alternativeschemes for interpreting the schemer prevents the inter-
preter from uniquelyidentifyingthe reference of the schemer'spredi-
cates, in particularhis predicate 'refers' (whetheror not indexed or
relativized).What an interpretercannot on empirical grounds decide
aboutthe referenceof a schemer'swordscannot be an empiricalfeature
of those words. So those words do not, even when chosen from among
arbitraryalternatives,uniquelydeterminea reference scheme (235; my
italics).
In order to understand this argument it is crucial to see that it rests
on the special assumption I mentioned about the nature of an empir-
ical account of language and about the public character of semantics.
From the mere fact that alternative reference schemes are consistent
with all the public empirical data it simply doesn't follow by itself that
there is any indeterminacy or inscrutability. Indeed, this is simply the
familiar undetermination thesis all over again: different hypotheses
will account equally for the speaker's "hold true" attitudes, but, all
the same, one of the hypotheses may be right about exactly what he
meant by his words while another hypothesis may be wrong. In order
to get the result of inscrutability, an additional premise is needed:
since language is a public matter, all the facts about meaning must be
public facts. Meaning is an "empirical" matter, and what is empirical
about language must be equally accessible to all interpreters. Only
given this assumption, this special conception of what constitutes the
"empirical" and "public" character of language, can the argument
be made to go through.
In order to deepen our understanding of what is going on here, let
us contrast the common-sense account of the speech situation with
Davidson's account. On the common-sense account, when I make
the assertion, "Wilt is tall," by 'Wilt' I refer to Wilt, and by 'is tall' I
mean: is tall. When I say "Wilt," I make no reference explicitly or
implicitly to shadows, and, similarly, when I say "is tall," I make no
reference to shadows. Now these are just plain facts about me. They
are not theoretical hypotheses designed to account for my behavior
or my "hold-true" attitudes. On the contrary, any such theory has to
start with facts such as these. But, on Davidson's view, there is no
empirical basis for attributing these different intentional states to
140 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

me. Since all the empirical facts we are allowed to use are facts about
what sentences I hold true and under what (publicly observable)
conditions, there is no way to make the distinctions that our com-
mon-sense intuitions insist on. As with behaviorism, different and
inconsistent interpretations at the subsentence level, at the level of
words and phrases, will all be consistent with all the facts about what
sentences I hold true under what conditions. But now it begins to
look as if Davidson's version of inscrutability might also be a reductio
ad absurdum of his premises, just as Quine's account was a reductio
ad absurdum of behaviorism.
Before we draw any such conclusion, let us first see how Davidson
deals with the obvious objection that is suggested by the common-
sense account: since we do know in our own use of language that we
are referring to Wilt, for example, and not to Wilt's shadow, and
since what we seek in understanding another person is precisely what
we already have in our own case, namely (more or less) determinate
senses with determinate references, why should anyone else's refer-
ences and senses be any less determinate than our own? Of course, in
any given case I might get it wrong. I might suppose someone was
referring to Wilt when really it was the shadow he was talking about.
But that is the usual underdetermination of hypotheses about other
minds from publicly available evidence. It does not show any form of
inscrutability. What, in short, does Davidson say about the "quan-
dary" that Quine faces, the first-person case?
Perhapssomeone (not Quine) will be tempted to say, 'But at least the
speakerknowswhat he is referringto.' One should stand firm against
this thought. The semantic features of language are public features.
Whatno one can in the natureof the case figureout from the totalityof
the relevantevidence cannot be a part of meaning. And since every
speaker must, in some dim sense at least, know this, he cannot even
intend to use his wordswith a unique referencefor he knowsthat there
is no way for his words to convey the referenceto another (235; my
italics).
Quine tries to avoid the quandary by an appeal to relativity, but on
Davidson's view there really isn't any quandary in the first place.
Semantic features are public features, and since the public features
are subject to the indeterminacy, there is no such thing as unique
reference. Furthermore, "in some dim sense" I must know this; so I
can 't even intend to refer to rabbits as opposed to rabbit parts, and I
can't intend to refer to Wilt as opposed to Wilt's shadow.'3

13 Kirk Ludwig has pointed out to me that this seems to lead to a pragmatic

paradox, since it looks as if, in order to state the thesis, we have to specify distinc-
tions that, the thesis says, cannot be specified.
 INDETERMINACY AND THE FIRST PERSON 141

Now, I believe this is a very strange view to hold, and I propose to

examine it a bit further. First of all, let us grant that, for "public"
languages such as French and English, there is at least one clear
sense in which semantic features are, indeed, public features. I take it
all that means is that different people can understand the same
expressions in the same way in French and English. Furthermore, let
us grant, at least for the sake of argument, that the public features
are subject to underdetermination in at least this sense: I could give
different but inconsistent interpretations of someone's words, all of
which would be consistent with all of the actual and possible evidence
I had about which sentences he held true. Now what follows? In our
discussion of Quine's view we saw that indeterminacy, as opposed to
underdetermination, is a consequence only if we deny mentalism
from the start; it is not a consequence of underdetermination by
itself. But, similarly, on Davidson's view the indeterminacy follows
only if we assume from the start that different semantic facts must
necessarily produce different "publicly observable" consequences.
Only given this assumption can we derive the conclusion that
speaker's meaning and reference are indeterminate and inscrutable.
But, I submit, we know quite independently that this conclusion is
false, and, therefore, the premises from which it is derived cannot all
be true. How do we know the conclusion is false? We know it because
in our own case we know that we mean, e.g., Wilt as opposed to Wilt's
shadow, rabbit as opposed to rabbit stage. When I seek to under-
stand another speaker, I seek to acquire in his case what I already
have for my own case. Now, in my own case, when I understand
myself, I know a great deal more than just under what external
conditions I hold what sentences true. To put it crudely: in addition,
I know what I mean. Furthermore, if another person understands
me fully, he will know what I mean, and this goes far beyond just
knowing under what conditions I hold what sentences true. So, if his
understanding me requires much more than just knowing what sen-
tences I hold true under what conditions, then my understanding
him requires much more than knowing what sentences he holds true
under what conditions. Just knowing his "hold true" attitudes will
never be enough for me fully to understand him. Why should it be? It
would not be enough for me to understand me; and since, to repeat,
what I need to acquire in his case is what I already have in my own
case, I will need more than just these attitudes.
But what about Davidson's claim that what an interpreter cannot
figure out from the totality of the relevant evidence cannot be part of
meaning? Well, it all depends on what we are allowed to count as
"figuring out from the totality of the relevant evidence." On the
common-sense account, I do figure out from the relevant "evi-
142 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

dence" that by 'Wilt' you mean Wilt and not Wilt's shadow, and the
"evidence" is quite conclusive. How does it work? In real life I
understand the speech of another not only within a Network of
shared assumptions, but more importantly against a Background of
nonrepresentational mental capacities-ways of being and behaving
in the world which are both culturally and biologically shaped and
which are so basic to our whole mode of existence that it is hard even
to become aware of them (see my Intentionality, op. cit., ch. 5).
Now, given the Background, it will, in general, be quite out of the
question that, when you say in English, "Wilt is tall" or "There goes a
rabbit," you could with equal justification be taken to be talking
about Wilt's shadow or rabbit stages. We get that surprising result
only if we forget about real life and imagine that we are trying to
understand the speech of another by constructing a "theory," using
as "evidence" only his "hold true" attitudes directed toward sen-
tences or his dispositions to make noises under stimulus conditions.
Language is indeed a public matter, and, in general, we can tell what
a person means if we know what he says and under what conditions
he says it. But this certainty derives not from the supposition that the
claim about what he means must be just a summary of the (publicly
available) evidence; it is rather the same sort of certainty we have
about what a man's intentions are from watching what he is doing. In
both cases we know what is going on because we know how to inter-
pret the "evidence." And in both cases the claims we make go
beyond being mere summaries of the evidence, in a way that any
claim about "other minds" goes beyond being a summary of the
"public" evidence. But the fact that the interpretation of the speech
of another is subject to the same sort of underdetermination14 as any
other claim about other minds does not show either that there is any
indeterminacy or that we cannot, in general, figure out exactly what
other people mean from what they say.
I conclude that our reaction to Davidson's version should be the
same as our reaction to Quine's: in each case the conclusion of the
argument is best construed as a reductio ad absurdum of the prem-
ises. Davidson's view is in a way more extreme than Quine's because

14 Here is an example of such undetermination from real life. Until he was in

middle age, a friend of mine thought that the Greek expression hoi polloi as used in
English meant the elite of rich people, but that it was characteristically used ironi-
cally. Thus, if he saw a friend in a low-class bar he might say, "I see you have been
hobnobbing with the hoi polloi." Since he spoke ironically and interpreted other
people as speaking ironically, there were no behavioral differences between his use
and the standard use. Indeed, he might have gone his whole life with this semantic
eccentricity undetected. All the same, there are very definite facts about what he
meant.
 INDETERMINACY AND THE FIRST PERSON 143

he holds a view which is, I believe, literally incredible. Plugging in the

first-person example to what he literally says, Davidson holds that
what no external observer can decide from external evidence cannot
be part of what I mean. Since such observers can't decide between
inconsistent interpretations, and since I must, in some dim sense at
least, know this, I cannot even intend to use 'rabbit' to mean rabbit as
opposed to rabbit stage or undetached rabbit part, for I know there
is no way for my words to convey this reference to another. This does
not seem to me even remotely plausible. I know exactly which I
mean, and though someone might get it wrong about me, just as I
might get it wrong about him, the difficulty is the usual "other-minds
problem" applied to semantics.
v
In any discussion like this there are bound to be issues much deeper
than those which surface in the actual arguments of the philosophers
involved. I believe that the deepest issue between me on the one
hand and Davidson and Quine on the other concerns the nature of
an empirical theory of language.
Both Quine and Davidson adopt the thought experiment of "radi-
cal translation" as a model for building an account of meaning. In
radical translation an interpreter or translator tries to understand
speakers of a language of which he has no prior knowledge whatever.
On Davidson's view, "all understanding of the speech of another
involves radical interpretation."'5 But the model of an unknown
foreign language enables us to make more precise what sorts of
assumptions and evidence we need to interpret someone else's
speech.
Notice that the model of radical translation already invites us,
indeed forces us, to adopt a third-person point of view. The question
now becomes, How would we know the meaning of the utterances of
some other person? And the immediate difficulty with that way of
posing the question is that it invites confusion between the epistemic
and the semantic; it invites confusion between the question, How do
you know? and the question, What is it that you know when you
know? But the linguistically relevant facts must be the same in the
questions, What is it for me to understand another person when he
says "It's raining"? and What is it for me to understand myself when
I say "It's raining"? since, to repeat, what I have when I understand
him is exactly what he has when he understands me. But then I
already understand me; so anything I can learn from studying his
case I could learn from studying my case.
15 "Radical Interpretation," Dialectica, xxvii (1973): 313-328, reprinted in In-
quiries into Truth and Interpretation, pp. 125-139.
144 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

Still, the thought experiment of radical translation can be very

useful in semantic theory because it focuses the question of how we
communicate meaning from one speaker to another. The difficulty is
that both Quine and Davidson set further constraints on the task of
radical translation than those which any field linguist would in fact
employ. I have twice watched the linguist Kenneth L. Pike'6 perform
the "monolingual demonstration" where he begins to construct a
translation of a totally alien language into English. And it seems quite
clear to any observer of Pike that he does not confine his conception
of translation to that described by Davidson and Quine. For exam-
ple, Pike does not confine his investigation to matching verbal behav-
ior and sensory stimuli in the manner of Quine, nor does he confine
it to hold-true attitudes in the manner of Davidson. Rather, he tries
to figure out what is going on in the mind of the native speaker, even
at the level of particular words. And he can do this because he
presupposes that he shares with the speaker of the exotic language a
substantial amount of Network and Background (see fn 12 above).
Now granted that the thought experiment of radical interpreta-
tion is useful in understanding the notion of communication, why
shouldn't the problem of radical interpretation be posed in com-
mon-sense mentalistic terms? Why should we place on it the further
behavioristic or "empirical" constraints that Quine and Davidson so
obviously do? Quine's writings contain scattered remarks of the fol-
lowing sort: "Our talk of external things, our very notion of things, is
just a conceptual apparatus that helps us to foresee and control the
triggering of our sensory receptors in the light of previous triggering
of our sensory receptors. The triggering, first and last, is all we have
to go on."''7
Such a remark has the air of discovery, but I believe it simply
expresses a preference for adopting a certain level of description.
Suppose one substituted for the phrase "triggering of our sensory
receptors" in this paragraph, the phrase "the movement of mole-
cules." One could then argue that the movement of molecules, first
and last, is all we have to go on. Both the "movement of molecules"
version and the "sensory receptors" version are equally true and
equally arbitrary. In a different philosophical tradition, one might
also say that all we have to go on, first and last, is the thrownness
(Geworfenheit) and the foundedness (Befindlichkeit) of Dasein in
the lifeworld (Lebenswelt). Such remarks are characteristic of philo-

1 Pike's work appears to be the original inspiration for the idea of radical trans-
lation (see Quine, Word and Object, p. 28).
17
Theories and Things, p. 1.
 INDETERMINACY AND THE FIRST PERSON 145

sophy, but it is important to see that what looks like a discovery can
equally be interpreted as simply the expression of preference for a
certain level of description over others. The three choices I gave are
all equally interpretable as equally true. How do we choose among
them? I believe that all three-sensory receptors, molecules, and
Dasein-are insufficient levels of description for getting at certain
fundamental questions of semantics. Why? Because the level of se-
mantics that we need to analyze also involves a level of intentionality.
Semantics includes the level at which we express beliefs and desires
in our intentional utterances, at which we mean things by sentences
and mean quite specific things by certain words inside of sentences.
Indeed, I believe that the intentionalistic level is already implicit in
the quotation from Quine when he uses the expressions 'foresee' and
'control'. These convey intentionalistic notions, and, on Quine's own
version of referential opacity, they create referentially opaque con-
texts. No one, with the possible exception of a few neurophysiolo-
gists working in laboratories, tries to foresee and control anything at
the level of sensory receptors. Even if we wanted to, we simply don't
know enough about this level. Why then in Quine do we get this
round declaration that all we have to go on is the stimulation of the
sensory receptors? I think it rests on a resolute rejection of mental-
ism in linguistic analysis, with a consequent insistence on having a
third-person point of view. Once you grant that a fundamental unit
of analysis is intentionality, then it seems you are forced to accept the
first-person point of view as in some sense epistemically different
from the point of view of the third-person observer. It is part of the
persistent objectivizing tendency of philosophy and science since the
seventeenth century that we regard the third-person objective point
of view as preferable to, as somehow more "empirical" than, the
first-person, "subjective" point of view. What looks then like a sim-
ple declaration of scientific fact-that language is a matter of stimu-
lations of nerve endings-turns out on examination to be the ex-
pression of a metaphysical preference and, I believe, a preference
that is unwarranted by the facts. The crucial fact in question is that
performing speech acts-and meaning things by utterances-goes
on at a level of intrinsic first-person intentionality. Quine's behavior-
ism is motivated by a deep antimentalistic metaphysics which makes
the behaviorist analysis seem the only analysis that is scientifically
respectable.
A similar though more subtle form of rejection of the first-person
point of view emerges in Davidson's writings in a number of places.
Davidson tacitly supposes that what is empirical must be equally and
publicly accessible to any competent observer. But why should it be?
146 THE JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY

It is, for example, a plain empirical fact that I now have a pain, but
that fact is not equally accessible to any observer. In Davidson, the
crucial claims in the passages I quoted are where he says, "What an
interpreter cannot on empirical grounds decide about the reference
of a schemer's words cannot be an empirical feature of those words";
and prior to that where he claims, "What no one can in the nature of
the case figure out from the totality of the relevant evidence cannot
be a part of meaning." Both of these have an air of truism, but in
actual usage they express a metaphysical preference for the third-
person point of view, a preference which is assumed and not argued
for; because, as in Quine's case, it seems part of the very notion of ani
empirical theory of language, an obvious consequence of the fact
that language is a public phenomenon. What Davidson says looks like
a tautology: What can't be decided empirically isn't empirical. But
the way he uses this is not as a tautology. What he means is: What
can't be conclusively settled on third-person objective tests cannot be
an actual feature of language as far as semantics is concerned. On
one use "empirical" means: subject to objective third-person tests.
On the other use it means: actual or factual. There are then two
different senses of "empirical"; and the argument against the first-
person case succeeds only if we assume, falsely, that what isn't con-
clusively testable by third-person means isn't actual. On the other
hand, once we grant that there is a distinction between the public
evidence available about what a person means and the claim that he
means such and such-that is, once we grant that the familiar un-
derdetermination of evidence about other minds applies to semantic
interpretation-there is no argument left for inscrutability.
The rival view that is implicit in my argument is this. Language is
indeed public; and it is not a matter of meanings-as-introspectable-
entities, private objects, privileged access, or any of the Cartesian
paraphernalia. The point, however, is that, when we understand
someone else or ourselves, what we require-among other things-
is a knowledge of intentional contents. Knowledge of those contents
is not equivalent to knowledge of the matching of public behavior
with stimuli nor to the matching of utterances with conditions in the
world. We see this most obviously in the first-person case, and our
neglect of the first-person case leads us to have a false model of the
understanding of language. We think, mistakenly, that understand-
ing a speaker is a matter of constructing a "theory," that the theory is
based on "evidence," and that the evidence must be "empirical."
JOHN R. SEARLE
University of California/Berkeley