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Semantic Indeterminacy and Scientific Underdetermination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Philip L. Peterson
Philip L. Peterson*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Syracuse University
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Abstract

Some critics believe Quine's semantic indeterminacy (indeterminacy of radical translation at home as well as abroad) thesis is true, but innocent, since it is just scientific underdetermination in linguistics. The Quinean reply is that in scientific underdetermination cases there are facts of the matter making claims true or false (whether knowable or not), whereas in semantic indeterminacy cases there simply are not. The critics' rejoinder that there are such facts, studied in linguistics, is met by the final reply that linguistics either on the whole or in part is riddled with appeals to “meanings” and is, thereby, as suspect as analyticity and radical translation. I recommend “saving”(?) linguistics by holding that it is permanently entangled in epistemology. Finally, the argument the critics should have made concerns paralleling semantic indeterminacy to indeterminacies in current quantum mechanics.

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Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 51 , Issue 3 , September 1984, pp. 464 - 487
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1984

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Footnotes

†

I thank William Alston for a discussion which prompted this paper. Also, I am very grateful for helpful comments, corrections, and criticisms from the following people: Jonathan Bennett and William Ritchie (on an early draft), Robert Butts (on a distant ancestor), and Noam Chomsky and W. V. Quine (on the penultimate version).

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