Few, if any,
analytical philosophers of the past forty or so years have exerted as much
influence over their subject as have Willard van Orman Quine and Donald
Davidson. One reason for this is the wide territory covered by each; from
mathematical logic, to the philosophies of mind, language, science, and action,
the impact of Quine or Davidson or both has been, and continues to be,
dramatic. An inevitable consequence of their eclectic range of interests is
that studies of their work must narrow the field and choose which area of their
work to focus on. Hans-Johann Glock chooses to locate his study firmly within
the philosophy of language. This is a decision to be applauded, for although
those looking for analysis of Quine’s elegant and often revolutionary work in
formal logic and set theory will not find it here, and Davidson’s philosophy of
action features only in small measure, there is no field in which these two
philosophers have had a greater impact, an impact which has reverberated across
most other areas of philosophy, than in the philosophy of language. It is also
doubtful that any philosophers of Quine and Davidson’s generation have
attracted as much attention from their contemporaries. It is somewhat
surprising therefore that this book is the first to examine the work of both
Quine and Davidson together and to explore the connections between them. That
in itself makes this work a welcome addition to the sizeable pile of literature
already devoted to each of these two.

Focusing on Quine
and Davidson’s work in the philosophy of language allows Glock to bring to the
fore the most important shared component in their philosophies: the so-called
‘indeterminacy of translation (or interpretation)’ thesis. Quine’s most famous
work is still probably his seminal 1951 article "Two Dogma’s of
Empiricism" which contained a withering attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction.
However, it was 1960’s Word and Object
which presented the attack in its most devastating form by supplementing his
earlier arguments with the indeterminacy of translation thesis. Quine’s
argument proceeds from a thought experiment wherein a field linguist is faced
with the task of drawing up a translation manual for a hitherto unknown
language. The field linguist must embark on a project of ‘radical translation’,
attempting to extract the meanings of the natives’ utterances from the only
data available to her, namely the observable behaviour of her subjects and how
it latches onto the environmental features that stimulate it. The result is a
behaviourist theory of meaning but, importantly, one which affords the field
linguist with resources sufficient only for a translation manual radically
underdetermined by the available evidence. In short, the evidence is
sufficiently meagre to allow for competing and incompatible translation
manuals, each of which will have an equal claim to accuracy as each will match the
available evidence perfectly. If, for example, translation T translates the native utterance ‘gavagai’ as ‘rabbit’, while
translation T* proffers rather
‘undetached rabbit part’ or ‘rabbit-stage’, then there will be no empirical
resources for establishing which is correct. Both translations will attribute
different meanings to the term on the grounds of precisely the same set of
stimuli. Quine’s conclusion is that there is no fact of the matter as to which
translation is correct; there is, simply, no such thing as meaning beyond the ‘stimulus meaning’ that impinges on our neural
states when confronted by our environment. Any other concept of meaning that
outstrips this minimal concept is illusory and to be banished from
philosophical and scientific discourse (the two are, for Quine, continuous)
henceforth. The indeterminacy thesis has sent shockwaves through philosophy,
spawning the anti-realist ‘under-determination’ argument in the philosophy of
science, and is drawn on by Quine himself in proposing his ‘naturalized
epistemology’ (the argument that epistemology and philosophy as a whole must
fall into line as simply another branch of empirical science) and ‘ontological
relativity’ (the claim that ontology is similarly indeterminate and can only be
understood relative to a pre-established theoretical background). In addition,
it is the starting point for much of Davidson’s work.

Davidson appears
on the surface to retreat from these austere Quinean conclusions, being after
all most renowned for his theory of meaning. However, Davidson’s theory is
distinctly Quinean in spirit, seeking to explain meaning without ‘meanings’, in
other words to provide a theory that provides all that we ask of a theory of
meaning without ever invoking any such things as ‘meanings’ along the way. His
preferred method of doing so, as influential in its own right as Quine’s
contributions to philosophy, is to seek to do so by appeal to a theory of
truth. Davidson’s claim is that the meanings of sentences can be reduced to the
conditions under which they are true and then to show how the truth conditions
of every sentence of a language can be captured by an formal axiomatic theory
of truth for that language modelled on Tarski’s momentous semantic analysis of
the artificial languages of formal logic. In other words the theory of meaning
is intended to fall out of a theory of truth, hence Davidson is in alignment
with Quine: words don’t have meanings, they simply have a role in fixing the
truth-conditions of sentences. The systematic explanation of this role is all
that is required of a theory of meaning.

Glock’s exposition
of these often complicated and technical issues is lucid and accurate. He
manages to balance the demands of providing clear exposition with critical
engagement in a way which ensures that this book will be of benefit to those
who are seeking a better understanding of its two protagonists as well as
offering stimulating criticisms for those who are already acquainted with its
subjects. Of course, the book is primarily aimed at an academic audience, but
it is sufficiently accessible to offer plenty for graduate students and the
more adventurous among undergraduates and general readers. The links between
the core areas of Quine and Davidson’s philosophy and their consequences for
issues concerning, for example, the relation between thought and language, the
role of logic in determining ontological commitments, and the applicability of
techniques and results in mathematical logic to the study of natural languages
are fully explored, allowing significant disputants of Quine and Davidson such
as Dummett, McDowell, and Strawson to be introduced. This is again to be
commended as it yields a clear picture of just how important the two
philosophers under discussion and their philosophies have been in shaping the
general landscape of current analytical philosophy. To a large extent, modern
philosophers can be defined in relation to the positions taken up by the two
subjects of this study. A hard-nosed Quinean or Davidsonian will not, I suspect,
be convinced by Glock’s criticisms to resituate themselves. For those who, like
Glock, have a more cautious and sensitive nose for philosophy, this book will
help to make clear just what is at stake in siding with or against them.

© 2003 Graham Stevens

Graham Stevens lectures in
philosophy at the University of Manchester and has also taught at the
University of Southampton. He is the author of articles in the philosophies of
language, logic, and mathematics.

Categories: Philosophical