The prospects for a naturalistic philosophy of language after Quine

The purpose of this essay is to discuss the prospects for the development of a select number of themes in the naturalistic philosophy of language that had emerged as particularly contentious following Quine's influential critique of the intuitive semantics. Quine's equation of language with a theory or a collection of theories, led him to believe that the content of our sentences must be assigned holistically, which, in turn, led him to argue that the meaning of our sentences, in the context of understanding and translation, cannot be determined in a strict and formal manner characteristic of the descriptions in physical sciences. This has often been interpreted as a challenge to the possibility of a naturalistic account of language as such.;In the course of the essay, I examine two powerful alternatives to Quine's theory, which, respectively, claim to eliminate indeterminacy or to render it innocuous. One is Chomsky's linguistic theory and the other is Davidson's theory of radical interpretation. I conclude that Chomsky's theory lives up to its promise with regard to indeterminacy but only at the price of abandoning the conception of linguistic meaning as "use," which Quine considers central to our understanding of the human communication. Davidson's theory, on the other hand, retains a conception of meaning very similar to Quine's but fails to advance a supporting argument for its larger claims which would fit the naturalistic line of inquiry broadly construed.;In conclusion of my argument, I suggest that Quine's conception of indeterminacy does not have to have the deleterious consequences that its opponents envision, especially if we broaden the naturalistic framework to include a pragmatic version of naturalism. On the contrary, it can help us make sense of the possibility of meaningful productive exchanges in the space of social discourse. I, moreover, suggest that, with proper elucidation and working out of Quine's notion of "observational sentence," we may gain access to a picture of moderate holism, advocated by Quine, that could supply a flexible and versatile model for generating locally circumscribed theories of the portions of our changing social discourse that could help us account for its dynamic nature and historical situatedness.