INDETERMINACY AND THE FIRST PERSON PERSPECTIVE

Karsten R. Stueber
Department of Philosophy
College of the Holy Cross
Worcester, MA 01610
kstueber@holycross.edu

Published in Verdad: logica, rerpresentacion y mundo,ed. by C. Martinez Vidal, (Universidade

de Santiago De Compostela, 1996): 333-341. Please quote according to the published version.
If you need a hard copy of the article please feel free to contact me at kstueber@holycross.edu.
 ABSTRACT

KARSTEN R. STUEBER
INDETERMINACY AND THE FIRST PERSON PERSPECTIVE

In this paper, I will discuss Searle's main argument for the first person perspective in regard to
meaning and intentionality. He claims that Quine's and Davidson's arguments for the indeterminacy
of meaning and inscrutability of reference should be understood as a reductio ad absurdum of the
third person methodology. I will defend the third person perspective by reevaluating the claims for
the inscrutability thesis. It will be shown that Searle's argument for the first person perspective is not
conclusive and that the inscrutability of reference does not follow from the analysis of radical
interpretation.
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In recent years several philosophers have claimed that it is impossible to adequately characterize
mental states within the predominant third person perspective because of their irreducible subjective
nature. John Searle has argued specifically that both Quine's and Davidson's arguments for the
indeterminacy of meaning and reference have to be understood as a reductio ad absurdum of the
third person methodology. i In this paper, I will analyze this debate between the first person and third
person methodology in regard to intentional states and I will defend the third person perspective by
reevaluating the claims for the inscrutability thesis. As we will see, neither is Searle's argument for
the first person perspective conclusive nor does the inscrutability of reference follow from the
analysis of radical interpretation.

I. Davidson's Arguments for the Inscrutability of Reference and for Indeterminacy of meaning

Both Quine and Davidson argue for the inscrutability of reference and the indeterminacy of
meaning, i.e. they claim that there is no fact of the matter to what we refer. Quine's argument in
Word and Object depends, however, on a narrow empiricist and behaviorist conception of what
constitutes objective evidence for the radical translator. His thesis of indeterminacy can be rejected
by pointing out that he evaluates the practice of meaning attribution according to a standard which is
external to our practice of translation, because he subscribes to the dogma of the distinction between
scheme and content.
Davidson's argument for the inscrutability of reference, on the other hand, does not depend
on such questionable assumptions and has to be taken more seriously. He claims that even an
undogmatic explication of our notion of meaning through the philosophically appropriate thought
experiment of radical interpretation supports the inscrutability thesis. ii Schematically his argument
for the inscrutability thesis has the following structure:

1.) Semantic properties supervene in some way on or are constituted in regard to non-
semantic properties which are publicly accessible from the perspective of the radical
interpreter and which form the evidence for radical interpretation.

2.) This evidence does not uniquely determine an interpretative theory of truth. Different
schemes of reference are compatible with the evidence of the radical interpreter.
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3.) Because of 1.) and 2.) meaning and reference are indeterminate and as Davidson further
maintains that "since every speaker must, in some dim sense at least know this, he cannot
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even intend to use his words with a unique reference, for he knows that there is no way for his words
to convey this reference to another." iii
Intuitively this conclusion seems to be absurd. Does not the success of communication depend on
our ability to recognize the intention of the speaker a la Grice? How can we even rationally engage
in a meaningfully discourse if we cannot convey anything determinate? If nothing determinate can
be intended, communication seems impossible. For Searle, the above conclusion is therefore
obviously false. He suggests that the inscrutability thesis is pragmatically inconsistent because in
order to sensibly maintain the indeterminacy thesis, we have to assume that our terms have a
determinate reference and that we can distinguish between the references of different terms. iv Since
the argument is deductively valid, Searle concludes that semantic properties are not supervening on
publicly accessible properties and that one should reject the first premise of the argument. Instead of
adopting the third person perspective, as Davidson does in his analysis of radical interpretation, he
suggests that we should adopt a first person methodology for the purpose of investigating the
phenomena of meaning and intentionality.
In order to be able to evaluate the validity of Searle's consideration it is, however, important to
first fully understand the reasons for accepting or rejecting the premises on which Davidson bases
his inscrutability argument. As Quine has already pointed out in his discussion of the
analytic/synthetic distinction, to justify a philosophical distinction or position based solely on
ordinary linguistic intuitions is not sufficient, unless these intuitions can be accounted for only by
that particular philosophical position. In Kantian terms one might say that intuitions without
philosophical reflections are blind. v
Here then is a brief outline of the arguments that one can reconstruct from Davidson's work in
support for the first two premises. Giving up the third dogma of empiricism means that we can
understand the relationship between world and language only in terms of truth. Hence, we can
conceive of the empirical significance of a sentence only in terms of truth conditions but not any
more in terms of sensory stimulation. Something can be understood as a conceptual scheme or a
language only insofar as it allows for the distinction between truth and falsity, i.e. only insofar as its
linguistic expressions have certain truth conditions. But if we accept that our intuition about the
general concept of truth is best expressed through Tarski's convention T - `P' is true iff p - then we
can understand something as being a language only insofar as it can in principle be interpreted.
Convention T requires that its right side is an interpretation of the object language sentence by a
sentence of the meta-language. Our conception of languagehood and of linguistic meaning can
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therefore be only analyzed in regard to our practice of interpretation and the criteria which are
constitutive for this interpretative practice. The analysis of radical interpretation is the attempt to
bring into open all of the criteria and principles on which we implicitly rely to justify particular
interpretations and decide whether a particular behavior constitutes linguistic behavior. For that
reason an analysis of the interpretation of a familiar language is philosophically insufficient because
in these interpretive processes it is already decided that a particular behavior manifests linguistic
behavior or that a certain expression has a certain linguistic meaning.
If these considerations are plausible, then one has to accept that the criteria which are revealed
through the analysis of radical interpretation are not only constitutive for meaning attribution to
another speaker of a foreign language but that they constitute the framework in which we can
sensibly talk about any meaning at all. If meaning and reference turn out to be indeterminate and
inscrutable within the framework of radical translation, then linguistic meaning and reference as
such are indeterminate even in our own case, or at least so Davidson argues.
Davidson's argument for the inscrutability of reference depends on the assumption that the
reference of a particular expression is determined in the context of constructing a particular theory of
truth for the language of a speaker. The reference assignments to specific words can be only
indirectly argued for by justifying the interpretation of full sentences, since for Davidson a
systematic relation between a speaker and its environment which forms the evidence for the radical
interpreter, exists only on the level of the sentence. Only if we assume that the speaker holds
something true and that it is true by the interpreter's standard can radical interpretation get off the
ground. According to Davidson different, assignments of schemes of reference are compatible with
the totality of evidence even while interpreting according to the principle of charity and even after
the logical form and the total ontology of a language is fixed.
Davidson's argument is based on the conviction that it is always possible to construct an
alternative and equally justifiable scheme of reference by constructing a function which maps each
object one to one on another, a so-called permutation of the universe. To stay with Davidson's
fictional example, just assume that each object has a shadow. It is then possible to construct function
f (the shadow of) which maps each object onto its shadow. vi Davidson now maintains that within the
framework of radical interpretation we are equally justified to interpret `Wilt' as referring to Wilt or
the shadow of Wilt and tall as referring either to tall things or shadows of tall things. We can
therefore not decide between interpreting the utterance `Wilt is tall' as Wilt is tall and the shadow of
Wilt is the shadow of a tall thing. Thus, reference remains fundamentally inscrutable.
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However, it is important to understand that in maintaining the inscrutability of reference,

Davidson is not claiming that we cannot distinguish between Wilt and the shadow of Wilt within a
particular language. Such a claim would obviously validate the complaint that Davidson's thesis of
the inscrutability of reference leads to a pragmatic contradiction because in order to state the thesis
one would need to make a distinction which the thesis itself denies. Davidson does not claim that the
distinctions within a language are obsolete but that it is indeterminate what language -which is
identified through a particular reference scheme- we are speaking. The inscrutability thesis should
therefore not be understood as implying that we are not able to distinguish between Wilt and the
shadow of Wilt within a language, but rather as implying that our intuitions about these distinctions
are not sufficient to determine one unique reference scheme within which these distinctions can be
accounted for. Davidson himself regards the indeterminacy of meaning as a rather harmless
consequence of his analysis of meaning and compares it to the possibility of measuring temperature
according to different scales of measurement such as Fahrenheit or Celsius. vii
Nevertheless, this response to the indeterminacy thesis remains unsatisfactory. In the case of
measuring temperature we at least know which measuring scale we are using even though another
one might be just as adequate. viii In my opinion, Searle is right to be dissatisfied with the
inscrutability thesis but for a slightly different reason than the one he articulates. To accept such a
thesis for one's own language seems to require that one disengages oneself from the very same
linguistic practice with which we need to formulate the inscrutability thesis. This engagement in a
linguistic practice however cannot be understood as being merely a practical necessity from which
we can free ourselves on a more theoretical or philosophical level.
A comparison to the discussion of external world scepticism might be helpful to illustrate this
problem. Global scepticism is obviously unacceptable from the perspective of our ordinary cognitive
practices, but the sceptic maintains that it is unassailable from a theoretical level which transcends
the restricted and arbitrary constraints of our ordinary practices. Furthermore, the sceptic claims that
on a theoretical level the skeptical worries are based on certain platitudes about objectivity and truth
which we are committed to in our ordinary practices themselves. ix But this distinction between a
merely practical and a theoretical level of reflection cannot be made in the case of the inscrutability
thesis. To maintain that it is not possible to decide what language one is speaking, because
assignments of different referent schemes are compatible with the totality of the evidence, requires at
the very least a perspective from which these languages are recognized as different languages and as
possessing different referent schemes. In this case the distinction seems to be made from the
 5

perspective of the language we speak. To claim that the reference of our own language is inscrutable
would require one to entertain a linguistic cosmic exile or the no language point of view. But that
seems to be impossible and unintelligible.

II. Indeterminacy and the First Person Perspective

Even though I am dissatisfied with the inscrutability thesis I am more than reluctant to follow
Searle in his rejection of the first premise and his adoption of a first person methodology. First of all,
to think about meaning and intentionality as being constituted within the first person realm makes it
impossible to explain how meaning could in principle be intersubjectively accessible. As
Wittgenstein argued already, if meaning is constituted within the first person perspective then one
cannot conceive in principle how somebody else can have thoughts with the same contents as
oneself. x Secondly, even if one cannot accept the inscrutability thesis and rejects the first premise of
Davidson's argument, this does not automatically lead to the acceptance of the first person
perspective. To object to the first premise means to reject the specific analysis of intentionality
within the framework of radical interpretation but not to oppose the third person perspective per se.xi
One could argue that semantic properties like reference are determinately supervening on natural
properties besides those that are accessible from the point of view of radical interpretation. In this
context one could, for example, think of the various attempts to reduce semantic content to the
notion of information or consider the proposal to account for reference in terms of causal relations.
Most of the current naturalization attempts, however, do not escape the problem of indeterminacy,
since it is not clear how one can be justified to single out one particular causal relation as the
reference relation. Just to insist that causation itself fixes reference determinately, even though we
might not be able to construct a causal theory of reference, is to put oneself outside the realm of
scientific naturalism. It is not clear what differentiates such a "naturalistic" position from the claim
that reference is a relation sui generis. xii
I propose, hence, that one should reject the second premise of the argument. I will argue that the
indeterminacy thesis is not even intelligible from the perspective of radical interpretation, since we
justify an interpretation of a particular speaker's utterances not only in the context of making sense
of her linguistic but also her non-linguistic behavior. The interpretation of the non-linguistic
behavior of a particular person is thus further evidence for the interpretation of her linguistic
utterances. The radical interpreter does not only observe the linguistic behavior of a particular
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speaker but also her non-linguistic interaction with the world. She for example does not only observe
the speaker saying "Ich öffne die Tür" but she also sees him opening the door. Now it might be
possible to construct truth-conditions for the German sentence according to which "ich öffne die
Tür" is interpreted as I open* the shadow of the door. However, from the perspective of our
linguistic practice it does not seem to be possible to describe her action as an opening* of the shadow
of the door, since we cannot totally abstract from our way of describing the world. If this is indeed
the case then we are forced to interpret the interpretee in the standard mode in light of the principle
of charity, otherwise her linguistic and non-linguistic action cannot be regarded as being consistent
with each other or even caused by one agent.
Now, one might object that in arguing in the above manner I dogmatically prefer our way of
describing the world. One could claim that those persons using a supposedly permuted scheme of
reference might make a similar argument from their perspective. Ramberg in his explication of the
Davidsonian thesis of inscrutability asks us, for example, to imagine the case of two Gods who
speak permuted languages and who are both equally and objectively justified in their interpretation
of the speaker. xiii In appealing to such a God's eye point of view one is leaving the context of the
thought experiment of radical interpretation and appealing to a cosmic exile position, a position
Davidson normally regards as unintelligible because it appeals to a notion of truth outside the realm
of interpretation. xiv To argue conclusively for the inscrutability thesis one would have to show that
even from the perspective of the radical interpreter one cannot distinguish between different schemes
of reference. To insist on a God's eye perspective and to maintain that there might be two permuted
languages as in the above example is to beg the question since it assumes the truth of the
inscrutability thesis without arguing for it. The thesis of the inscrutability of reference is therefore
not consistent with the claim that our conception of semantic properties can be fully analyzed
through the thought experiment of radical interpretation, or to say it differently, the acceptance of
premise 1 is not consistent with assertion of premise 2.

Conclusion
As I have shown, Searle's arguments for the first person perspective as the philosophically
appropriate basis for the analysis of meaning and intentionality have proven neither to be conclusive
nor are his objection against the perspective of radical interpretation in the end well founded.
Contrary to what Davidson maintains, the inscrutability thesis cannot be sensibly asserted from the
perspective of radical interpretation.
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The above argument, though, does not refute what I would like to call the general indeterminacy
of meaning, which one should strictly distinguish from the inscrutability thesis. The thesis of the
indeterminacy of meaning is a consequence of giving up the analytic/synthetic distinction and the
holism involved in the construction of an interpretive theory of truth. The only criteria for the correct
interpretation of a specific sentence is in the end the overall fit between the interpretation of a
specific sentence and the interpretation of all the other sentences. In this context the interpreter has
certain room to construct different interpretations which are equally well justified because she is able
to pragmatically trade off belief and concept attribution. To give an example, even under the
guidance of the principle of charity it is not fully determined if we should interpret the ancient Greek
term "arete" as expressing the same concept as our term "virtue," and attribute different beliefs to
the Greeks or if we should rather say that the Greeks possessed a concept for which we do not really
have one linguistic expression, since we in contrast to them would not attribute virtue to horses. In
whichever manner we decide to interpret this particular term, both interpretive options would
account for the differences in linguistic behavior and are equally supported by the evidence.
This kind of indeterminacy of meaning is, however, compatible with the assumption of a special
first person authority in regard to our own mental states. We do not at all expect that everybody is
able to explicate all concepts in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. We rather assume that
our concepts are characterized by a certain amount of vagueness and openness and that it is not
always clear whether a particular concept applies in a certain situation. This is a general
characteristic of our conceptual scheme and no appeal to the first person perspective will change it,
because even from that perspective we are at a loss to come up with necessary and sufficient
conditions. There is, therefore, no need to be particularly worried about Searle's assault on the third
person perspective insofar as intentional states are concerned.
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Endnotes

i. See his "Indeterminacy, Empiricism and the First Person", Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987),
pp. 123-146 and The Rediscovery of Mind, Cambridge (Mass.), MIT Press, 1992, esp. chap.7.

ii. For this evaluation of Quine see my Donald Davidsons Theorie sprachlichen Verstehens,
Frankfurt a.M., Beltz Athenäum, 1993, Kap.1. For a recent critique of Quine from the
perspective of our actual translation practices see also D. Bar-On, "Indeterminacy of Translation
- Theory and Practice," in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 53 (1993):, I defend
radical interpretation as the philosophically appropriate context for the analysis of meaning
against objections from Fodor and LePore in "Holism and Radical Interpretation," in Analyomen
2, ed. by.G.Meggle and P. Steinacker, Berlin/New York, DeGruyter (Forthcoming).

iii. See Davidson "The Inscrutability of Reference, in "Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation,
Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1984, p.235. For our purposes it is not necessary to define the notion
of supervenience in an exact fashion. For the argument, it is only of importance that semantic
properties cannot be regarded as properties which are utterly independent of other non-
semantical properties. As it is known, Davidson himself is a proponent of a rather weak
conception of supervenience according to which it is impossible that two events are identical in
all their physical properties but differ in their mental or semantical properties. For different
conceptions of supervenience see the relevant article in J. Kim, Supervenience and the Mind,
Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1993.

iv. See Searle, "Indeterminacy, Empiricism and the First Person," p. 140, ftnte. 13.

v. See Quine's response to objection from Grice and Strawson in Word and Object, p.67.

vi. See Davidson, "The Inscrutability of Reference", p.229/30. For another more complex
example see Putnam, Reason, Truth and History, Cambridge, Cambridge UP, 1881, chap.2.

vii. See for example Davidson, "Reality without Reference," in Inquiries into Truth and
Interpretation, p.224/25 and "Towards a Unified Theory of Meaning and Action," in Grazer
Philosophische Studien 11 (1980), p.6.

viii. In my discussion of the inscrutability of reference in Donald Davidsons Theorie

sprachlichen Verstehens, pp.159ff I did not stress this fact sufficiently enough.

ix. This line of argument is most forcefully represented by B. Stroud, The Philosophical
Significance of Scepticism, Oxford, Clarendon Press 1984. I argue against the claim that these
platitudes have unavoidable skeptical consequences in "Practice, Indeterminacy and Private
Language: Wittgenstein's Dissolution of Scepticism", Philosophical Investigations, pp.11-36.

x.Searle seems to be committed to a projective account of understanding based on analogical

reasoning, i.e. I project my intentional thoughts onto you if I observe that you behave similarly
and your behavior is caused by similar internal non-semantical states. See Searle, The
Rediscovery of the Mind, p.22. Within the context of such an account, it is however not clear
how it is possible to establish that type-identical intentional states supervene causally on type-
identical neurophysiological states as Searle seems to maintain (See ibid., p.124), because the
notion of type-identity in regard to intentional states seems to be unintelligible within the first
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person perspective.

xi. See for example Fodor's and LePore's critique of radical interpretation in Holism, Oxford,
Blackwell, 1992, p.81.

xii. For opposing views in this debate see J. Van Cleve, "Semantic Supervenience and
Referential Indeterminacy,", in Journal of Philosophy 1992, pp.344-361 and
E.LePore/B.Loewer, "A Putnam's Progress," in Midwest Studies in Philosophy XII (1988), pp.
459-473. In The Elm and the Expert, Cambridge, MIT Press 1994, Fodor addresses the
referential indeterminacy which plagued his earlier account of content. He admits that a purely
atomistic account of content is not possible but that he can avoid semantic holism and the threat
of indeterminacy by appealing to the logical syntax of a language, such as the linguistic
construction of predicate conjunction. This argument does not, however, even remotely address
the argument for the inscrutability of reference which is based on the idea of a permutation of the
universe.

xiii. See B. Ramberg, Donald Davidson's Philosophy of Language, Oxford, Blackwell, 1989,
p.94/95.

xiv. Davidson's appeal to the idea of an omniscient God in his argument against skepticism is in
my opinion another example of a transgression of his own paradigm of radical interpretation. See
Davidson, "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge," in Truth and Interpretation, ed. by
E. LePore, Oxford, Blackwell, p.317.