Truth and the Absence of Fact by Hartry Field

Author:Hartry Field [Field, Hartry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0199242895

end p.199

[K]nowledge, mind, and meaning are part of the same world that they have to do with, and . . . are to be studied in the same empirical spirit that animates natural science. There is no place for a priori philosophy. (p. 26)

He then goes on to suggest that once this position is taken seriously, one is bound to recognize the existence of indeterminacy. Suppose, for instance, that we are interested in determining the extension of the foreign term 'gavagai.' If we look at the matter physicalistically, we see that there is no sense in saying that 'gavagai' has the set of rabbits as its extension as opposed to the set of undetached rabbit parts, unless we can find physical facts— facts about the speaker's behavioral dispositions, his causal relations to rabbits, and so on1 — which determine that it is the set of rabbits rather than the set of undetached rabbit parts that is the real extension of the term. And Quine thinks it is obvious that there are no physical facts underlying the use of the term that could allow us to say that the term signifies one of these sets rather than the other.

To set out the matter in a bit more detail, let us suppose that 'gavagai' and 'potrzebie' are foreign terms that are most naturally translated as 'rabbit' and 'dinosaur,' and that 'glub' is a term of the same language that is most naturally translated as 'is identical to.' Then according to Quine, there is no fact of the matter as to whether (i)

'gavagai' signifies the set of rabbits, 'potrzebie' the set of dinosaurs, and 'glub' the identity relation; or

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