As an empiricist, Quine was concerned with rectifying what he thought were mistakes in the logical-positivist program. But here he made unwitting contact with a very different tradition in the philosophy of language, that of hermeneutics. Hermeneutics refers to the practice of interpretation, especially (and originally) of the Bible. In Germany, under the influence of the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911), the hermeneutic approach was conceived as definitive of the humane sciences (history, sociology, anthropology) as distinct from the natural ones. Whereas nature, according to this view, can be thoroughly explained in completely objective terms, human activity, and human beings generally, can be understood only in terms of inherently subjective beliefs, desires, and reasons. This in turn requires understanding the meanings of the sentences human beings speak and understanding the practical and theoretical concepts and norms they employ. Such historical understanding, if it is possible, must be the product of self-conscious interpretation from one worldview into another.

But historical understanding may not be possible. As Davidson argued in connection with conceptual relativism, it could be that human beings of each historical age face a dilemma: either they attempt to understand the worldviews of other periods in terms of their own, thereby inevitably projecting their own form of life onto others, or they resign themselves to permanent isolation from other perspectives. The first option may seem the less pessimistic, but it faces evident difficulties, one of which is that different interpreters read different meanings into the same historical texts. Quine’s view may be considered a way out of—or at least around—this dilemma, since there can be no distortion or misunderstanding of meaning if there is no determinate meaning to begin with.

This picture is radical but not in its own terms skeptical. Its character may be illustrated by considering a criticism frequently and easily made by some historians against others. The English philosopher R.G. Collingwood (1889–1943), for example, uncharitably charged Hume with having no real historical understanding, since Hume interpreted the characters he described as though they were Edinburgh gentlemen of his own time. In Hume’s defense it can be said, first, that he simply exemplified a universal problem: no historian can do otherwise than to use the meanings and concepts accessible to him. Peering into the depths of history, the historian necessarily sees what is already familiar to him, at least to some extent. Second, however, this problem need not condemn history to being a distortion, since on the radical picture there is no original meaning to distort. If any coherent charge of distortion is possible, it must be significantly qualified to acknowledge the fact that both the author and the object of the distortion are being interpreted from an alien perspective. Thus, a 21st-century historian may charge Hume with distorting Cromwell if, according to the historian, the words Hume uses to report a statement of Cromwell differ in meaning from the words Cromwell actually used. But the charge could equally well be repudiated by those who interpret Hume’s report and Cromwell’s statement as meaning the same. This is the import of Derrida’s celebrated remark that il n’y a pas de hors-texte: “there is nothing outside the text.” Every decoding is another encoding.

Indeterminacy and truth

Many philosophers have found the notion of hermeneutic indeterminacy very unsettling, and even Quine seems to have been ambivalent about it. His apparent response was to claim that such indeterminacy is mitigated in practice within the shared dispositions of one’s native language—what he called a “home language.” This point is connected in Quine’s thought with a curious complacency about truth. Although truth might seem to require meaning—because one cannot say something determinately true without saying something determinate—Quine took Tarski’s work to show that attributions of truth to sentences within one’s home language are perfectly in order. They require only that there be a widely shared disposition within the linguistic community to affirm the sentence in question. Given that the sentence Dogs bark is true just in case dogs bark, if one’s linguistic community is overwhelmingly disposed to say that dogs bark, then Dogs bark is true. There is nothing more to say about truth than this, according to Quine.

The notion of a secure home language, however, may seem a capitulation to the myth of the given. Arguably, it does nothing to ameliorate indeterminacy. Even within a home language, for example, indeterminacies abound—as they do for English speakers attempting biblical interpretation in English. Hume likewise shared a home language with Cromwell, but this did not prevent Hume’s misinterpretation—at least in the estimation of some. Lawyers usually speak the same language as the framers of statutes, but the meanings of statutes are notoriously interpretable. In a situation such as this, in which there seems to be little if any restriction on what one’s sentences may mean, it is little comfort to be assured that it is still possible for them to be “true.”