Quine on the Indeterminacy of Translation: A Dilemma for Davidson

Khani, Ali Hossein

doi:10.1111/1746-8361.12217

Cited by 7 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 65 publications

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“…Thus, he claims that the Quinean indeterminacy at most leads to the (epistemological) problem that there are different ways of capturing the same facts about what the speaker means and believes. Unpacking his reading of Quine goes beyond the scope of this article (on Davidson's puzzling reading of Quine, see Hossein Khani, 2017, 2018a; Kemp, 2012). But one way (and I think the best way) to explain why Davidson reads Quine this way and what he thinks of the facts about meaning and mental content is to view him, as this article does, as a factualist, i.e., a non-reductionist about meaning — which goes against Quine's position.…”

Section: Consequencesmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…1 It helps to clarify his complex remarks on triangulation, by treating it as an analogy sustaining his non-reductionism, rather than an argument for meaning determination. Davidson's non-reductionism can also explain why his treatments of the Quinean indeterminacy-underdetermination distinction and Kripke's Wittgenstein's sceptical problem are often viewed as extremely puzzling or even wrong, that is, his view of these problems as epistemological (see, e.g., Hossein Khani, 2017Khani, , 2018aKhani, , 2018bKhani, , 2019Kemp, 2012;Verheggen, 2017;Verheggen & Myers, 2016). These fruitful outcomes, among others, form the main motivation for my attempt to construe Davidson's view of intending as a non-reductionist JD account.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“… 16 The disposition-like theoreticity of the concepts of meaning and intention points to the fact that they are answerable in disposition-like ways to a subject's sayings and doings. See also Hossein Khani, 2017, 2020b; Miller, 2009.…”

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Davidson on Pure Intending: A Non-Reductionist Judgement-Dependent Account

Khani

2021

Dialogue

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I will argue that Davidson's account of pure intending can be construed as a first-person-based judgement-dependent account of intention. For Davidson, pure intending to do φ is to make an all-out judgement that φing is desirable. On this anti-reductionist account, intention is treated as an irreducible state of the subject. I will draw a comparison between this account and Wright's and I will show that Davidson's account can be viewed as a non-reductionist judgement-dependent account along the lines suggested by Wright. I then explain how this account can help deal with various perplexities in Davidson's later view of meaning and mental content.

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Section: Consequencesmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Davidson on Pure Intending: A Non-Reductionist Judgement-Dependent Account

Khani

2021

Dialogue

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“…there is no such thing as a determinate meaning, there is no such thing as knowing it, directly 1 See, e.g., Gibson (1986;2004), Hossein Khani (2018;2021a;2023), Hylton (2007), Kemp (2006), Soames (1999), Orenstein (2002). and Verhaegh (2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Quine and First-Person Authority

Khani¹

2023

Logos &Amp; Episteme

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Blackburn and Searle have argued that Quine‘s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation results in a denial of the sort of first-person authority that we commonly concede we have over our mental and semantical content. For, the indeterminacy thesis implies that there is no determinate meaning to know at all. And, according to Quine, the indeterminacy holds at home too. For Blackburn, Quine must constrain the domain of indeterminacy to the case of translation only. Searle believes that Quine has no other choice but to give up on his behaviorism. Hylton, however, has attempted to defend Quine against these objections, by arguing that Quine‘s naturalistic claim that speaking a language is nothing but possessing certain dispositions to act in specific ways would enable him to accommodate first-person authority. I will argue that the objections from Blackburn and Searle, as well as Hylton‘s solution, are all problematic when seen from within Quine‘s philosophy. I will introduce a sort of Strawsonian-Wittgensteinian conception of first-person authority and offer that it would be more than compatible with Quine‘s naturalistic philosophy.

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“…There are weaker versions of this doctrine too. See, for example, Allen (2010), Hossein Khani (2018), Bergström (1993), and Laudan (1990).…”

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confidence: 99%

Islam and Science: The Philosophical Grounds for a Genuine Debate

Khani¹

2020

Zygon

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What does it take for Islam and science to engage in a genuine conversation with each other? This essay is an attempt to answer this question by clarifying the conditions which make having such a conversation possible and plausible. I will first distinguish between three notions of conversation: the trivial conversation (which requires sharing a common language and the meaning of its ordinary expressions), superficial conversation (in which although the language is shared, the communicators fail to share the meaning of their theoretical terms), and genuine conversation (which implies sharing the language and the meaning of ordinary as well as theoretical terms). I will then argue that our real concern with regard to the exchange between Islam and science is to be to specify the conditions under which their proponents can engage in a genuine conversation with each other and that such a conversation to take place essentially requires sharing a common ontology. Following Quine, I will argue that Muslims, like the followers of any religion, would have no other choice but to work from within science. Doing so, however, would not prevent Muslims from having a genuine conversation with the proponents of other worldviews because when the shared ontology fails to offer any potentially testable answer to our remaining questions about the world, the Islamic viewpoint can appear as a genuine alternative among other underdetermined ones, deciding between which would be a matter of pragmatic criteria.

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Quine on the Indeterminacy of Translation: A Dilemma for Davidson

Cited by 7 publications

References 65 publications

Davidson on Pure Intending: A Non-Reductionist Judgement-Dependent Account

Davidson on Pure Intending: A Non-Reductionist Judgement-Dependent Account

Quine and First-Person Authority

Islam and Science: The Philosophical Grounds for a Genuine Debate

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