Abstract

This dissertation provides a comprehensive and critical examination of Quine's and Davidson's theories of meaning. In four chapters, I mainly discuss Quine's naturalistic approach to meaning, Davidson's truth theory of meaning and their commitment to the indeterminacy thesis. ;The two tenets of Quine's and Davidson's theories of meaning concern me most are: meaning is a public phenomenon---any semantic fact of any particular language, by its nature, must in principle lie open to the epistemic reach of speakers through the publicly observable evidence; to understand a language is to form a set of interconnected hypotheses which, taken as a whole, generate theoretical inferences explaining linguistic material. I call "the theorization approach to meaning." ;Thesis is plausible only if the following two claims are demonstrated. Linguistic evidence is publicly accessible. Were linguistic evidence beyond the epistemic reach of anyone besides the speaker of that language, no one except the speaker of that language would be able to acquire the evidence to justify the belief that he understands the language. Every semantic feature can be determined publicly by means of observable evidence alone. ;Correspondingly, I argue in this essay for the following two theses: both Quine and Davidson fail to furnish a satisfactory account of the adamantine objectivity of linguistic evidence; and the combination of the theorization approach to meaning and the empirical stance toward evidence does not cohere with the idea of the publicity of language. To put more precisely, I show that the theorization approach to meaning implies that we use terms with a unique reference in the first person context. The unique reference in the first person case, cannot be, as the indeterminacy thesis suggests, empirically detected by speakers other than the agent in question. In other words, unique reference in the first person case conjoined with the indeterminacy thesis leads to an inescapable semantic solipsism. The result renders the theorization approach to meaning dubious