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Quine’s Behaviorism and Linguistic Meaning: Why Quine’s Behaviorism is not Illicit

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Abstract

Some of Quine’s critics charge that he arrives at a behavioristic account of linguistic meaning by starting from inappropriately behavioristic assumptions (Kripke 1982, 14; Searle 1987, 123). Quine has even written that this account of linguistic meaning is a consequence of his behaviorism (Quine 1992, 37). I take it that the above charges amount to the assertion that Quine assumes the denial of one or more of the following claims: (1) Language-users associate mental ideas with their linguistic expressions. (2) A language-user can have a private theory of linguistic meaning which guides his or her use of language. (3) Language learning relies on innate mechanisms. Call an antecedent denial of one or more of these claims illicit behaviorism. In this paper I show that Quine is prepared to grant, if only for the sake of argument, all three of the above claims. I argue that his claim that “there is nothing in linguistic meaning beyond what is to be gleaned from overt behavior in observable circumstances” is unscathed by these allowances (Quine 1992, 38). And I show that the behaviorism which Quine does assume should be viewed as a largely uncontroversial aspect of his evidential empiricism. I conclude that if one sets out to dismiss Quine’s arguments for internal-meaning skepticism, this dismissal should not be motivated by the charge that his conclusions rely on the illicitly behavioristic assumptions that some have suggested that they do.

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Notes

  1. In his, “Indeterminacy and Mental States”, Dagfinn Føllesdal argues that Quine’s indeterminacy of translation thesis is compatible with the existence of mental ideas (Føllesdal 1990, 98). One way that the present paper differs from Føllesdal’s is that herein it is shown that this compatibility is acknowledged by Quine himself as early as Word and Object.

  2. The indeterminacy thesis is, of course, intended as an attack on the notion of synonymy. In defending the legitimacy of synonymy, Carnap makes use of the idea of a translation manual in order to argue that synonymy is an empirically respectable notion. See for example, Carnap’s “Meaning and Synonymy in Natural Languages” and his reply to Quine in The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (Carnap 1955 p.33; Carnap 1997, p.915).

  3. By “Quinean underdetermination” I mean a view according to which more than one theory implies all the same possible data. See Quine’s, “Comment on Bergstrom” (Quine 1990, p.53). I take it that this view entails that in some cases of theory choice there can be no crucial experiment.

  4. There is disagreement about whether Quine denies the existence of mental states. Searle explicitly avoides attributing this denial to him (Searle 1987, p.124). However, Paul Roth locates and analyzes an argument in Quine’s work that looks like just such a denial (Roth 2003, p. 275).

  5. In Quine, Peter Hylton uses the same passages to make a similar point (Hylton 2007, p.102).

References

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Nick Alvarez, Craig Derksen, Luke Doughty, Kristian Kemtrup, Isabelle Peschard, and Bas van Fraassen for their valuable help.

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Fisher, T. Quine’s Behaviorism and Linguistic Meaning: Why Quine’s Behaviorism is not Illicit. Philosophia 39, 51–59 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-010-9277-2

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