Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Problem of Consciousness
- 2 How to Study Consciousness Scientifically
- 3 Consciousness
- 4 Animal Minds
- 5 Intentionality and Its Place in Nature
- 6 Collective Intentions and Actions
- 7 The Explanation of Cognition
- 8 Intentionalistic Explanations in the Social Sciences
- 9 Individual Intentionality and Social Phenomena in the Theory of Speech Acts
- 10 How Performatives Work
- 11 Conversation
- 12 Analytic Philosophy and Mental Phenomena
- 13 Indeterminacy, Empiricism, and the First Person
- 14 Skepticism About Rules and Intentionality
- Name Index
- Subject Index
13 - Indeterminacy, Empiricism, and the First Person
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 The Problem of Consciousness
- 2 How to Study Consciousness Scientifically
- 3 Consciousness
- 4 Animal Minds
- 5 Intentionality and Its Place in Nature
- 6 Collective Intentions and Actions
- 7 The Explanation of Cognition
- 8 Intentionalistic Explanations in the Social Sciences
- 9 Individual Intentionality and Social Phenomena in the Theory of Speech Acts
- 10 How Performatives Work
- 11 Conversation
- 12 Analytic Philosophy and Mental Phenomena
- 13 Indeterminacy, Empiricism, and the First Person
- 14 Skepticism About Rules and Intentionality
- Name Index
- Subject Index
Summary
The aim of this essay is to assess the significance of 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.
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 ersatz” 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 external 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 is just the pattern of stimulus and the pattern of learned response.
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- Information
- Consciousness and Language , pp. 226 - 250Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002