文档介绍：Indeterminacy, Empiricism, and
the First Person 34
JOHN R. SEARLE
The aim of this article is to assess the entities. We are not supposed to think that
significance of W. V. Quine's indeterminacy there is any consciousness, intentionality,
thesis. If Quine is right, the thesis has vast thoughts, or any internal "meanings" connect-
ramifications for the philosophy of language ing the stimuli to the noises. There is just the
and mind; if he is wrong, we ought to be able pattern of stimulus and the pattern of learned
to say exactly how and why. response. There will, of course, be neu-
rophysiological mechanisms mediating the in-
put and the output, but the details of their
structure do not matter to a theory of mean-
Let us begin by stating the behaviorist assump- ing, since any mechanism whatever that sys-
tions from which Quine originally proceeds. tematically associated stimulus and response
For the sake of developing an empirical theory would do the job as well. For example, any
of meaning, he confines his analysis to correla- computer or piece of machinery that could
tions between external stimuli and disposi- emit the right sounds in response to the right
tions to verbal behavior. In thus limiting the stimuli would have "mastered" a language as
analysis, he does not claim to capture all the well as any other speaker, because that is all
intuitions we have about the pretheoretical there is to the mastery of a language. Quine, I
notion, but rather the "objective realityn1 that take it, does not deny the existence of inner
is left over if we strip away the confusions and mental states and processes; he just thinks
incoherencies in the pretheoretical "mean- they are useless and irrelevant to developing
ing." The point of the "behavioristic ersatz" is an empirical theory of language.
to give us a scientific, empirical account of the Such a view is linguistic behaviorism with a
objective reality of meaning. On this