Must We Know What We Mean?

Abstract

In his 1987 article “Indeterminacy, Empiricism and the First Person”, John Searle argues that we actually know what we mean; therefore, W. V. O. Quin ’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation must be wrong. In this paper, I will try to identify the mistakes in Searle’s criticism of Quine’s story. I will argue that Quine’s indeterminacy thesis can be construed as containing two theses— that is, the immanent indeterminacy and the transcendent indeterminacy. With these two indeterminacies in mind, Quine’s indeterminacy thesis will still remain tenable even if we actually know what we mean