國立臺灣大學哲學論評

Abstract /

Quine and Davidson advocate the thesis that assignment of semantic contents and intentional states is underdetermined by the totality of behavioral evidence. More specifically, given all the empirical data, the decision as to how to attribute semantic and intentional content s arbitrary. Given the indeterminacy thesis and Davidson`s contention that semantic and intentional content are, in principle, publicly accessible, it follows that there is no such things as unique reference, determinate meaning and definite mental content. Furthermore, since such things are not factual matters in anyone`s language and mind, they are not objects for anyone, including the agent himself, to know of. However, Davidson also endorses the view that even though we sometimes are not certain about what other speakers believe and mean, we are nonetheless usually certain about what we ourselves believe and mean. This view seems to be at a conflict with the thesis of indeterminacy as it applied to the first person case. It has been argued, most pointedly by Malpas, that in Davidson`s account there is no incompatibility between the indeterminacy in the first person case and the intuition that we usually have knowledge of our the content of own utterances and intentional states. In this paper, I mainly argue for two points:first, Malpas` reconciliation for Davidson is based on a seriously misunderstanding of some of Davidson`s own ideas and is therefore fore inadequate; second, so long as we distinguish two kinds of knowledge involved in the seemingly conflict propositions, the conflict will be proved to be merely apparent.