Quine on Indeterminacy

W.V. Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation is the theory which launched a thousand doctorates. During the 1970s it sometimes seemed to be as firmly entrenched a dogma among North American philosophers as the existence of God was among medieval theologians. Although now subject to much more by way of critical appraisal, Quine’s work is still, rightly, at the forefront of contemporary philosophy of language. Moreover though propounded and defended by the doyen of analytical philosophy, as hard-nosed a logician as one can find, Quine’s questioning of the determinacy of meaning is of interest to a much wider audience than logicians. Indeed the idea of indeterminacy of meaning has more than a whiff of smoke-filled cafés on the banks of the Seine about it, though Quine’s arguments for indeterminacy belong firmly to the tradition of logical empiricism.