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The Intentionality of Observation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Edwin Martin Jr.
Edwin Martin Jr.*
Affiliation:
Indiana University
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Extract

A main thrust of much of Quine's work is that meaning, belief, desire, motive and other so-called “intentional phenomena” are under-determined by all possible evidence: the totality of possible evidence could not determine whether two persons meant, believed, desired, or had as motives the same thing. One way to identify a person's beliefs, desires and motives is to frame a theory of his meanings, for then we could ask him what he believed and desired; this will be a theory of translation for his language. But such a theory of meaning, according to Quine, is also not uniquely determined by all the evidence. Thus

To accept intentional usage at face value is … to postulate translation relations as somehow objectively valid though indeterminate in principle relative to the totality of speech dispositions… Such postulation promises little gain in scientific insight …

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , September 1973 , pp. 121 - 129
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1973

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Footnotes

*

Thanks are due Romane Clark and especially David W. Smith for guidance; they are not responsible, however, for remaining defects.

References

1 Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, M.I.T. Press, 1960), p. 221Google Scholar, hereafter cited as W&O.

2 Quine, “Grades of Theoreticity,” in Expereince and Theory. Edited by Foster, Lawrence and Swanson, J. W. (Amherst, The University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), p. 4Google Scholar, hereafter cited as “GOT.”

3 Wallace, John reached the same conclusion in “A Query on Radical Translation,” Journal of Philosophy Vol. LXVIII (1971), p. 148.Google Scholar Our routes to this conclusion are different, though, as are some of our other conclusions.

4 The correlated body states are “functionally equivalent.” Cf. Fodor, Jerry Psychological Explanation (New York, Random House, 1968), pp. 107–120.Google Scholar

5 Cf. W&O, p. 45, “GOT,” p. 3, Quine, and Ullian, J. S. The Web of Belief (New York, Random House, 1970), pp. 16fGoogle Scholar, hereafter cited as TWOB, and Quine, Philosophy of Logic (Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1970), p. 6Google Scholar, hereafter cited as POL.

6 Quine, “Propositional Objects,” in Ontological Relativity (New York, Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 158CrossRefGoogle Scholar, hereafter cited as “PO.”

7 Cf. Words and Objections. Edited by Davidson, and Hintikka, (Dordrecht, D. Reidel, 1969), pp. 303fGoogle Scholar, hereafter cited as Ws&Os.