Davidson and Indeterminacy of Meaning

Abstract

According to Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of translation there are no facts of matter which could determine the choice between two or more incompatible translation schemes which are in accordance with all behavioral evidence. Donald Davidson agrees with Quine that an important degree of indeterminacy will remain after all the behavioral evidence is in, but he believes that this indeterminacy of meaning (IM) should not be seen as either mysterious or threatening. In this paper I argue that IM is not as innocuous as Davidson believes it to be and has consequences which do not sit easily with some core elements of the Davidsonian project. I argue that IM leads to the nontrivial thesis of the indeterminacy of language ascription which is not captured by the mundane examples of indeterminacy of measurement that Davidson frequently cites. Davidson makes a liberal use of the principle of charity in order to lessen the effect of IM. In recent years he has broadened the scope of the principle of charity by arguing that a radical interpreter, at least in some basic cases, should identify the object of a belief with the cause of that belief. Davidson agrees with Quine and Putnam that the concept of causality is applied to the world according to human interests. For Quine and Putnam, however, the interest-relativity of causal relations has relativistic consequences. Given Davidson. s long-standing opposition to all types of relativism this conclusion should not be welcome to him. Relativism may be avoided by imposing a great deal of social and biological homogeneity on all language-users which is an equally unwelcome view.