Willard Van Orman Quine

Indeterminacy of Translation 157
into compound statements, rendering ‘It’s raining and 2 + 2 = 4’ by
‘It’s raining and there is a prime greater than 2’, which again would
not ordinarily be counted as meaning the same. (Notice, by the way,
that it would not help to apply to the question of conflict between
schemes of translation the same very loose conception of equivalence
implied by mere agreement in dispositions to respond. By that
standard, the above pairs of sentences would count as equivalent – in
which case the two schemes of translation would not be in conflict,
and the corresponding indeterminacy thesis would lose its support.)
The resulting thesis, though true, has no interesting philosophical
implications. It construes ‘fitting the facts’ much too narrowly. However,
the facts must not be allowed to include too much. To include
beliefs, desires, and intentions among them, for example, would demolish
the doctrine, for if such were assumed to be objective, they
would fix meanings and block the indeterminacy. As Quine remarks
in Word and Object, “[U]sing the intentional words ‘believe’ and ‘ascribe’,
one could say that a speaker’s term is to be construed as ‘rabbit’
if and only if the speaker is disposed to ascribe it to all and only the
objects that he believes to be rabbits” (WO 220–1). He could hardly
resist such further definitions as this: ‘S means that p (in language L)
if and only if S would typically be used by L-speakers to express the
belief that p.’ So if we had some independent basis for maintaining
the objective soundness of such intentional notions as those of belief
and desire, that would be a quick way to refute Quine’s position.
But as the quotation referring to Brentano’s thesis showed, Quine
thinks the indeterminacy reveals the “baselessness” of such notions.
If it is a mistake to think that relations of synonymy and translation
are matters of fact, then it is also a mistake to think that people’s
beliefs, desires, intentions, and the rest are matters of fact. The implications
of the indeterminacy doctrine cannot be kept caged inside
the philosophy of language. They strike at psychology and the philosophy
of mind as well.
What should be counted as objective facts in this context? Critics
have objected to Quine’s sometimes seeming to restrict the objective
facts to verbal dispositions, even to verbal dispositions construed in
the narrow sense just discussed – “dispositions to respond verbally to
current stimulation” (WO 28). One reason why the facts had better
not be restricted so tightly is that a lot of the behavioral capacities
that bear on our understanding and use of language cannot be
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