A critical exposition on quine’s notion of meaning and indeterminacy

Abstract

This paper contained a critical discussion of Quine’s theory of meaning in terms of his indeterminacy thesis. In analytic philosophy, especially in semantics, language is used as a tool to interpret the knowledge of the world. A language consists of propositions. Every proposition in our language must be meaningful. So, meaning is the fundamental component of a proposition. Now the problem is: how do we determine the meaning of a proposition? Quine exemplified that every way to determine the meaning of a linguistic expression by traditional semantics is totally wrong about meaning. Instead of following the traditional semantics, Quine relies on a behaviouristic approach towards meaning. He qualified traditional semantics as a “myth of museum” that exhibits meaning in a certain kind of entity. This article consists of four different sections. In the very first section of this paper, I intended to explain the argument of Quine against traditional semantics on meaning as an entity. The second section deals with a critical evaluation of Quine’s notion of stimulus meaning and conceptual scheme. In the third section, I attempted to explain Quine’s critical observation on meaning in terms of the indeterminacy thesis. This final section holds concluding remarks, in which I object to some misconceptions regarding Quine’s theory of meaning.