| For over twenty five years W. V. Quine and Noam Chomsky have been arguing over the significance of Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of translation. After two-and-a-half decades of debate, a consensus has emerged that the indeterminacy thesis rests upon Quine's behaviorist bias, and so begs the question against Chomsky's cognitivism. The underlying assumption of this standard interpretation of Quine is that the dispute between Quine and Chomsky is either an a priori disagreement over the status of Chomskyan linguistics as a science, or else it is an empirical dispute over Quine and Chomsky's competing accounts of language. My aim in this thesis is to show that there is, in fact, no debate between Quine and Chomsky, and thus that the standard interpretation of Quine is fundamentally misconceived. |
