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Critical Pluralism is the thesis that artworks admit of alternative, equally acceptable (”correct”) interpretations, some of which are incompatible with others; it asserts that if there is a way to get an artwork right, then there are many ways. This chapter explores several likely strategies in support of Critical Pluralism. The issue is approached by exploring parallel puzzles concerning the metaphysics of linguistic meaning, specifically the applicability of Quine's arguments for the indeterminacy of translation to artworld interpretation: there are enough points of contact between artworld interpretation and natural language translation to render such explorations illuminating.

This chapter discusses the achievements of W. V. O. Quine and his place in analytic philosophy. It begins with Carnap’s logical empiricism, which set the context for Quine’s first major article in philosophy, “Truth by Convention” (1935). It explains both Quine’s largely effective critique of analyticity and the problems that plagued his combination of holistic verificationism with an underdetermination thesis that paired each consistent empirical theory T with alternative theories logically incompatible with, but empirically equivalent to, T. It discusses the impetus for Quine’s movement from his critique of analyticity to his later doctrines of the Indeterminacy of Translation and the Inscrutability of Reference. The chapter closes with an explication of these radical doctrines, the role played by Quine’s physicalism, and his ineluctable march to a so-called radical and self-undermining semantic eliminativism.

This chapter responds to some further arguments against analyticity, including the Regress Argument, arguments based on the widespread phenomenon of vagueness, arguments from semantic externalism and scepticism about meaning and arguments based on individual sentences, such as ‘all cats are animals’ and ‘gold is yellow’.

Davidson continues the analysis of the evidential base required for radical interpretation from Essay 9 and extends it into a systematic methodology. The ascription of meanings to utterances and intentions to speakers must proceed simultaneously because we lack a prior grasp on either (Davidson illustrates this by appeal to Ramsey's work on subjective probability); by the same token, if interpreters are to get anywhere at all they must start by an interpretative ‘Principle of Charity’ on which they assume at the outset that the speaker's beliefs are mostly true and that his utterances are, for the most part, assertions of what he believes or ‘holds true’. Consequently, interpreters must avoid attributing inexplicable error to the speaker, but rather ‘maximize agreement’. Davidson explains how these assumptions operate independently of detailed knowledge of what the speaker believes or asserts, and why they are indispensable to the process of radical interpretation; in specific, how we can have no independent foothold on propositional attitudes or speaker meaning (see Appendix); and he discusses the degree to which his interpretative constraints leave it indeterminate what the speaker means.

Argues for postulating an inner ‘language’ in which thinking takes place, and proposes a means by which this postulate can be construed on functionalist lines. The functional theory is a purely causal one, and makes sense of only the syntactic and conceptual role properties of the inner language; and it is argued that, while the representational semantics of the ‘inner language’ might conceivably be construed functionally as well, this would require a broader theory whose nature is not obvious, and the functionalist construal would not remove the need of theories of reference‐like relations to show how the functional theory is physically realized. It is argued that much of the explanatory work of mental representations is done by the syntactic/conceptual role theory (which includes causal input and output laws), though suggestions are made about a possible explanatory role for the representational semantics. There is also a discussion of the distinction between intrapersonal and interpersonal synonymy, with a characterization of the former in terms of conceptual role, and sceptical remarks about the clarity of the latter. Includes a long new postscript focusing largely on questions about the explanatory role of representational semantics.

This chapter presents the basics of Donald Davidson’s philosophy of language. It explains the essential principles of truth-conditional semantics, and briefly looks into Alfred Tarski’s project of defining truth for formal languages through T-theories. It considers Davidson’s adoption and use of these theories as formal semantic theories for natural languages and enumerates some of the issues raised in using them. It then focuses on the radical interpretation argument by citing William Van Orman Quine’s Word and Object; uses the thought experiment of the linguist as an example of finding the correct T-theory based on the data collected; and discusses the indeterminacy of translation that emerges. It also investigates Davidson’s own approach of radical interpretation with his notion of anti-conventionalism.

This is a response to W. V. Quine’s claim that a certain term ‘gavagai’ in a remote language cannot be uniquely translated into English, and to the accompanying claim that hypotheses about the reference of ‘gavagai’ are underdetermined by all possible evidence. After an argument that identity predicates have distinguishing properties that make unique translations of such predicates possible, it is maintained that a unique translation of ‘gavagai’ can be leveraged by taking account of the ways in which the term interacts with the identity predicate in its home language.