Abstract

In his recent paper "Indeterminacy, empiricism, and the first person" John R. Searle tries to refute Willard V. O. Quine's famous "indeterminacy of translation thesis" by arguing that this thesis is in fact a reductio ad absurdum of Quine's own "linguistic behaviorism". Searle accuses Quine of being "antimentalistic" and suggests that the "absurdity" of Quine's thesis might be avoided if a full-fledged "intentionality" were tolerated in the debate on meaning. - This anti-Quinean approach in some respects reminds of the "improbable debate" between Searle and Jacques Derrida ten years ago, when Derrida had split and "deferred" intentionality by showing that the essential "iterability" of signs inevitably infects every intentional act with an unremovable "non-presence". In this paper it is argued that Searle's attacks on Quine and Derrida have both failed - and that there are structural similarities between these two failures which reveal some interesting parallels between Quine's and Derrida's philosophy