Reply to Gibson

Abstract

1. Gibson defends Quine against the criticisms in chapter 5 of MM. Gibson's first set of comments concerns Quine's indeterminacy argument. He echoes Quine's complaint in Comments on (in Perspectives on Quine, Basil Blackwell, 1990, p. 199) that I misconstrue his argument for the indeterminacy of translation and his argument in Two Dogmas of Empiricism: crux of the matter is that when Katz construes Quine's argument as an attempt to prove the thesis of indeterminacy he misconstrues Quine's intent (p. 170). I hoped that this red herring had been disposed of in the appendix to chapter 5 where I replied to Quine's responses to my Refutation of Indeterminacy, The Journal of Philosophy, 1988, pp. 227-252 (from which the material in the body of chapter 5 was taken). I pointed out that I did not claim that Quine's argument is proof by cases, but only that it had a form like a proof by cases (p. 199). Rather than asking for proof -surely an absurd demand in philosophyI asked only for a reason of the sort that normally counts as grounds for a philosophical claim. My conclusion was that Quine failed to provide even a minimal reason for thinking that sense concepts cannot be made objective sense of or for believing that translation is indeterminate.