Abstract

SummaryCertain problems in Quine's philosophy of language are discussed. The first issue is his theory of how an observation sentence is understood. This is part of the more general problem of constructing a theory for how any single cognitive sentence is grasped. Quine's thesis of the inscrutability of reference, according to which it is senseless to ask what the referent of a term is, is our second subject. The content and truth of this thesis is discussed. In this context three rather precise versions of the thesis are presented. The third issue to be treated is the relationship between the inscrutability thesis and theories of observation sentence understanding. The main conclusion of the paper is that the inscrutability thesis can hardly be true