Metaphorical Indeterminacy and the Primacy of Language

Wheeler Metaphorical Indeterminacy page 1

Metaphorical Indeterminacy and the Primacy of Language

Samuel C. Wheeler IIIUCONN, Philosophy [email protected]

This essay is an argument for a Davidsonian-Quinean

conception of language and its relation to the world via an

argument for the reality of indeterminacy. In the process,

it discusses indeterminacy of metaphorical utterance. This

phenomenon is quite evident and commonplace, but has been

ignored in the literature.

The first section (1) sketches some of the features of

the conception of language common to Davidson, Quine, and

Derrida and argues that indeterminacy is a prediction of

this conception. Thus a plausible intuitive class of cases

of indeterminacy would be a powerful argument for the

conception.

The next section (2) outlines this class of cases, the

indeterminate metaphors. The following section (3) outlines

the simple technical fix available on Davidson’s theory that

accommodates indeterminate metaphors, and justifies it.


Section (4) returns to the general phenomenon of

indeterminacy and applies the technical fix to vagueness and

indeterminacy of interpretation. A Davidsonian has available

a simple harmless epistemicist account of vagueness and

indeterminacy of interpretation, as well as of indeterminacy

in metaphor. Given that it is an epistemicist account,

“indeterminacy” should be rephrased as “indeterminability.”

1) The issue of indeterminacy

A fundamental affinity between Jacques Derrida, W.V.

Quine, and Donald Davidson is the shared thesis that meaning

is language. That is, language is not an arbitrary medium

for encoding thoughts that have intrinsic meaning, but the

fundamental meaningful phenomenon. Language is as good as

“representation” gets. One way I have expressed this thesis1

is as the denial that there is a “magic language,” a

language whose elements are self-interpreting, about which

there is no question of interpretation.

If there are no intrinsically meaningful entities

behind language, then, since words are have the meanings

1 In “ Derrida, Davidson, Knapp and Michaels on Intentions in Interpretation,” in Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy, Stanford UP, 2000.


they do only contingently, meaningful language must derive

its meaning from relations to speaking organisms and their

environments. A plausible consequence2 of this conception of

language is that on occasion, at least, interpretation is

indeterminate, in the sense that the words plus the total

surroundings do not fix the interpretation. For reasons

discussed below, such relations to speakers and environments

underdetermine both meaning and the application of the

intentional concepts connected with meaning. So

indeterminacy in that derivation is indeterminacy in

principle—there is no deeper fact of the matter. Quine’s

indeterminacy of translation, Davidson’s indeterminacy of

interpretation, and various Derridean metaphors name this

phenomenon.

Without self-interpreting meanings behind language

there is no longer any explanatory “correspondence”3 between

2 The detailed arguments for this “consequence” are discussed not only in Quine’s 1960 and 1969 and in Davidson’s 1984, but in numerous secondary sources on Quine and Davidson. The arguments in Derrida’s workare discussed in my 2000.3 Davidson discusses “correspondence” and the differences between his formulaic correspondence (“`Fred is a frog’ is true if and only if Fred is a frog”) and metaphysical notions of correspondence in numerous essays, including his 1996.


the words and the reality the words represent. For Derrida,

demonstrations of indeterminacy undermine the applicability

of “true.” Derrida takes metaphysical correspondence, word-

meanings matching a given reality, to be the central idea of

truth. If such correspondence does not obtain, then “truth”

turns out not to strictly apply to any of our talk or

writing. The idea of truth is, roughly speaking, a

metaphysical fiction, according to Derrida. Very briefly,

Derrida’s approach takes as a premise the metaphysical point

of view about truth, that truth is supervenient on being and

a privileged mapping of utterances onto being, and argues on

that basis for the conclusion that nothing corresponds to

truth. I find Derrida’s argument quite persuasive, but

cannot accept the conclusion. Therefore, I have to reject

the thesis that the metaphysical notion of truth as

correspondence of self-interpreting meanings to a given

reality is the correct notion of truth. In this I follow

Davidson.

Davidson takes the consequence that truth cannot be

“correspondence” as usually conceived to be a thesis about


what a theory of truth must be like rather than a

demonstration that there is no such thing as truth.

Davidson, following Quine’s “On What There Is,”4 takes being

to be supervenient on truth. Quine’s empiricist background

required that a question about “what exists” be put in

empirically comprehensible terms. Quine’s view is that such

a phrase can only be sensibly interpreted as “what must

exist in order for the sentences we accept to be true.”

Quine’s empiricism thus leads to the reverse order of

precedence between being and truth from the metaphysical

one. Beings are what must be postulated to organize or

account for the truths according to our theory. In effect,

beings are, for Quine, an organizational feature of a

theory. What are organized are stimulus inputs. Different,

non-equivalent organizational accounts can organize inputs

equally well.

Davidson argues that this relativism in Quine’s account

can only arise if Quine violates central empiricist, anti-

essentialist premises in supposing a metaphysically basic

4 In Quine 1963.


given starting point. Davidson thus modifies Quine’s

approach by replacing “truth in our theory” with “true.”

Beings are what must exist in order that the truths obtain.

That is, a theory of reference is conceptually posterior to

a theory of truth. Beings for Davidson organize truths.

An “organized” set of truths for Davidson requires that

the truths be part of a language that has a truth-

definition. A truth-definition is an algorithm that

generates the meanings of new sentences on a finite basis. A

truth-definition, a compositional theory of the meanings of

the sentences of the language, is required to explain the

simple fact that speakers and readers can comprehend novel

sentences. As the name implies, truth is the central concept

of a truth-definition.

A truth-definition is constructed for an individual at

a time by applying the intentional scheme, that is, by

interpretation. The intentional scheme consists of the

concepts of belief, desire, action, meaning, intention, etc.

Belief, desire, intention, and action are characterized by

ascribing content to them. A particular belief is specified


as, for instance, the belief that Fred is a frog. A truth-

definition is thus a systematic account of possible contents

of beliefs, desires, etc. The truth-definition is arrived at

simultaneously with the assignment of contents, i.e.

meanings, to exactly such attitudes. Hypotheses about a

actor’s beliefs and desires justify ascription of contents

to speech actions. In such application, essentially

normative or probabilistic connections between the

environment and elements of the intentional scheme are

applied in order to ascribe contents to beliefs and desires

and meanings to utterances produced intentionally. An

interpretation is the outcome of such application to a

speech act in an environment. Given the normative and

probabilistic connections on which an interpretation is

based, multiple incompatible equally well-founded

interpretations can be given for a speech action.

For Davidson, this indeterminacy is an unsurprising

technical problem. Given that meaning is truth-conditions

and that semantic compositionality amounts to an account on

which the truth-conditions of a compound sentence are a


function of the truth-conditions of the components of the

sentence, components must have truth-conditions or

satisfaction-conditions. Such conditions have the form “`Joe

is a frog’ is true if and only if Joe is a frog”, for truth,

and “`Is a frog’ is true of Joe if and only if Joe is a

frog,” for satisfaction. Such truth-conditions just relate

mentioned and used language, and do not support a

metaphysical notion of correspondence.

Indeterminacy is a prediction of the central thesis of

a Davidsonian and a Derridean account of language and

thought. Is that prediction confirmed? “Confirmation” would

consist of intuitive judgments about what goes on when we

use language. But intuitions that bear decisively on

indeterminacy are hard to separate from theory. Consider the

thesis an opponent to Davidson would advance that “We know

what we mean.” Davidson and Derrida would concede that we

know what we mean. In the disquotational sense, everyone

knows what they mean. If Joan says, “Joe is a frog,” she

knows the truth-conditions of what she says to be that Joe

is a frog. If Davidson is right, speakers do know what they


mean, in the robust sense his theory acknowledges. Likewise,

we seem to know what we believe, know what we intend, and

know what we want. Quine’s attempt in his “Ontological

Relativity”5 to persuade readers that “regress to a

background language” somehow leaves reference relative is

thus unpersuasive to very many readers.

Likewise, for most readers who are analytical

philosophers, neither Derrida’s arguments against Husserl6

nor his attempts to persuade the reader of the hopelessness

of supposing determinate meanings behind words are

effective. A metaphysician willing to posit transcendent

Fregean senses or to adopt a version of modern essentialism

is unmoved. For such metaphysicians, essences and abstract

propositions are theoretical posits required to explain the

phenomena of determinate meaning.

A persuasive intuitive case of indeterminacy would be a

persuasive argument for an account of language that predicts

it. Thus the fundamental metaphysical issue, “Are there

5 Quine 1969.6 In Derrida 1973. Derrida’s arguments there do for phenomenology what Quine’s “On What There Is,” in Quine 1963 do for analytic philosophy, inmany ways.


self-interpreting meanings that underlie language?” would be

addressed by a case of indeterminacy that yielded intuitions

that indeed there is nothing but language here.7 The next

section displays a class of cases of indeterminacy that are

intuitively persuasive.

2) Metaphorical indeterminacy

a) metaphor and intention

One of the widely-accepted Davidsonian analyses is his

account of metaphor and other figural uses of language.

7 There are indeed a lot of phenomena connected with language—imagery, history, associated probabilistic generalizations, learning phenomena and so forth, not to mention the brain activity discussed by the Churchlands. But, given the irreducibility of truth and true-of to any other phenomena, and given that meaning is truth and true-of conditions,that “more” doesn’t constitute something that gives us “the meaning” of a predicate. So, we don’t know what we mean in any semantical way that goes beyond knowing the Davidsonian truth-conditions of what we say.

The “more” that many philosophers of language wish to add to the meaning of terms and sentences is the collections of evidence that make an assignment of meaning to an utterance reasonable. Such collections would give rise to formulae such as “the meaning of a word is a functionof its role in the culture” or “the meaning of an utterance is given by the pattern of inferential relations it bears”. Such formulae would be good definitions only if any of truth, meaning, belief, intention, and so forth were reducible to some subset of the others. A Davidsonian has given up on such reductions of some of the notions to some of the others. Roughly, according to Davidson, all the connections are “necessarily mostly” connections—that is, there are a priori synthetic connections among each of the concepts in the “intentional scheme,” and of the concepts collectively to an objective world outside the mind, butno such connections are absolutely general. A part of holism, given thatone is not willing to write off the existence of intentional phenomena altogether, as Quine seems to have been, is that truth, meaning and propositional attitudes, including intentions, are irreducible.


Davidson gives a pragmatic or rhetorical account of

metaphor. An utterance or an application of a predicate to

an object is figural if the speaker intends to bring about a

figural effect by uttering something literally8 false. The

key idea is that of distinguishing the truth-conditions of

the sentence said or written from the purposes the speaker

or writer has in producing it. Metaphor and other figural

language is thus, for Davidson,9 a rhetorical phenomenon

rather than a matter of a “metaphorical meaning” that is

generated from the literal meaning.10

An analogy is with sarcasm. Few would think that a

sarcastic remark is uttered with a special derived sarcastic

meaning in addition to the literal meaning of “good job,”

when the bucket of paint spills. Rather, since it is

apparent that the event was an error, and it is apparent

8 “Literally false” can be understood as “believed false by the speaker,” when the topic is one the speaker is not likely to be mistakenabout. Davidson, realizing the implicit appeal to non-linguistic meanings that “literal” implies, switches to “first meaning” in later discussions.9 In agreement with Paul DeMan and other “deconstructive” thinkers. See Wheeler, “Davidson and DeMan on Metaphor,” in Deconstruction as AnalyticPhilosophy.10 This is an aspect of “semantic innocence,” the view that words do notchange their meanings according to context. “Semantic innocence” can be construed as an application of Occam’s Razor.


that the speaker knows this, the remark is understood as

sarcastic by ascribing to the speaker an intention other

than that of saying what is the case. In a similar way, a

live metaphor is achieved by saying something false in a

situation in which it is obvious that the speaker or writer

knows that it is false. Interpretation of speech and writing

is the interpretation of action. Since the speaker cannot

plausibly be held to be trying to communicate a belief that

the truth-conditions obtain, another motive must be

understood.

Davidson, as most writers on metaphor and figure,

concentrates on live and exciting metaphors. These are

utterances with truth-conditions that do not obtain,

produced with the clear intention that something other than

that the truth-conditions obtain be communicated.11 For our

purposes, the interesting phenomena occur when a metaphor is

dying or dead. Such uses are, arguably, the vast majority of

metaphorical utterances.

11 On my view, we are unlikely to get a completely clear definition of precisely the intentions that a metaphor requires, one that will separate it from sarcasm, hyperbole, and the like.


Many of those who have thought about metaphor and its

fuzziness have been concerned with diachronic shift from

“metaphor” to “literal,” which would make the metaphorical-

literal distinction just another case of a sorites. English

etymology, for instance, is in large part the history of

figures that became literal, passing beyond the “dead” stage

to the stage where the trace of figuration is available only

to the scholar. Nothing in the minds of current speakers

would give a clue that “fornicate” was originally a

metonymy, an indirect way of alluding to activities in

fornice, the arches.12

For Davidson, this kind of cultural drift would not be

very interesting or relevant to semantics, since there is no

12

? Let me just list some other examples, which could be multiplied at dictionary length:“Berth” was originally a space for a ship to pass at sea, then place fora ship to dock, now place on a train to sleep. “Sobriquet”, now meaning “nickname” originally was a chuck under the chin.“Futile” from flowing, by a complicated figure for the flowing of words from the foolish, then, by another turn, came to mean hopeless“Understanding,” “verstehen,” and “episteme” are three relations to standing“Foundational,” “grundwerke” and “funds” (the resources we have beneath us) are all developments of “bottom,” which shows up anatomically as “fundament,” of course.


such determinate thing as the “common language” on

Davidson’s account of language.13 For Davidson, the

phenomenon of figural use takes place at the level of

individual intention. On the assumption that the intention

is clear, the vagueness of the borderline between figural

and literal historically would just be a problem of

determining the intentions of the long-dead, rather than a

genuine sorites. Thus any question of genuine indeterminacy

between metaphorical use or literal use it arises at the

level of the individual speaker.

b) Indeterminate metaphorical14 uses

On examination, it is clear that, for a great many

applications of predicates,15 it is indeterminate whether 13 See “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs” for the considerations that are relevant to this conclusion.14 Analogous issues can be raised about hyperbole and metonymy. “Terrific” at some point ceased to always mean “terrifying,” and someonecould be a terrific dancer. But does “terrific” in “terrific explosion” just mean “big”?15 Other examples, which could be multiplied indefinitely, would be “drove” in “John drove a Ford to work and his wife to drink,” “bloated” in “The budget for administration is bloated.” Consider also “head of the line,” “head of the class,” and “come to a head,” said of a crisis, which appears to be a metaphor on a metaphor. Consider also “frosted class”: are there two ways of being frosted, or is one class of cases metaphorical?

Might these matter philosophically? Consider “view” in “In my viewDavidson is right,” and “clear” in “This explanation is perfectly clear.”The last two examples follow Derrida’s “White Mythology,” in Derrida, 1982, pp.207-271. Some indeterminate metaphors may shape our thinking.


the predicate is used literally or figuratively, and that

this indeterminacy applies to the speaker herself. Neither

the speaker nor the audience knows, for instance, whether

“crush” in an utterance of “John was crushed by Susan’s

remark” is literal or not. As I will show, this

indeterminacy does not matter, since the communication

result is exactly the same on either interpretation. On the

other hand, the utterance has truth-conditions: The result

of applying the homophonic theory will be the theorem,

“`John was crushed by Susan’s remark’ is true if and only if

John was crushed by Susan’s remark.” It is indeterminate

whether the utterance is true or not.

In such indeterminate metaphorical16 uses, the

application of a predicate can be understood in two ways:

Either 1) the predicate is applied literally in a different

sense, so that there are two senses (two predicate clauses

giving the meaning in the language-processing algorithm), or

2) the predicate is used metaphorically and there is only

16 It may be overstating things to call such applications “metaphors,” with the poetic overtones that implies. In general, whenever there is doubt about whether a word has more than one sense, or is being used in an “extended” sense, the same issues can arise.


one sense (one predicate clause giving the meaning.) This

indeterminacy is not just an indeterminacy from the outside

observer’s point of view. The speaker or writer herself has

no special access to any fact that bears on the issue.

Intuitive judgments about about meaning something

metaphorically or literally seem to be a poor guide in any

case. Before last year, if someone had asked me whether

“swim” in “If you keep doing that, you’ll be out of here so

fast it will make your head swim” is metaphorical, I

probably would have said “Yes,” even though the basis of the

“metaphor” would be quite obscure. Before asking me, it had

never occurred to me whether “swim” in that utterance was

the same or a different predicate from “swim” in “Jones swam

the English Channel.” The etymological facts, for what that

is worth, do not support the “metaphor” hypothesis.

“Swimmen” is an Old English word with an independent

Germanic root meaning “dizzy.”

The point is that, before I looked it up, it had never

occurred to me whether my utterances using “make your head

swim” were literally true or false. My intentions in


speaking did not depend on having any other “propositional

content” than “makes your head swim” is true of A if and

only if A makes your head swim. I said “…make your head

swim,” intending that I be understood as meaning something

like “make you dizzy.” But that would happen whether I was

speaking metaphorically or literally. In the former case, I

would be saying something false, but appropriate; in the

latter something true. It was of no importance which truth-

value my utterance had, and so of no importance which of two

propositional contents my utterance had. But the utterance

had truth-conditions I understood: “`This drug makes my head

swim’ is true if and only if this drug makes my head swim.”

If the rhetorical account of metaphoricity is correct,

the indeterminacy of metaphorical use is an indeterminacy

along the same pattern as indeterminacy of interpretation,

as analyzed by Quine and Davidson. Indeterminacy of

interpretation arises because a single kind of phenomenon,

“what a person says in what circumstances” is the entire

data set for ascribing intended actions, including speech

actions. Actions are the result of belief and desire. But


many combinations of belief and desire can account for the

same action or set of actions, no matter how rich the data

are. In the specific case of speech actions, different

combinations of belief and meaning will explain the

utterance. Roughly speaking, we are solving for more than

one variable simultaneously, and multiple solutions are

equally good.

Since on the Davidsonian perspective there are no self-

interpreting meanings behind language, any concepts that

involve “propositional content”, that is beliefs,

intentions, desires, and actions, are subject to

interpretation in the same way in which language itself is.

Since the assignment of meaning to language itself involves

multiple propositional attitudes, not single propositional

attitude can be determined independently of the others. If

there were a way to assign contents to any one of the

concepts of the “intentional scheme” independently of the

others, that would be the foundation on which the

propositional contents of all the others could be founded.

But since intentional concepts have meanings, and meanings


not self-interpreting but are rather given in language,

there can sometimes be a choice in the ascription of

contents.

For the much-discussed cases of indeterminacy of

interpretation, the trade-off is between belief and desire

or between some content of a propositional attitude and

meaning. Different and incompatible beliefs, with

correspondingly adjusted desires, will describe the same

behavior under different intentional descriptions. Different

truth conditions for an utterance will yield different

contents for a belief. In the case of indeterminate

metaphors, the adjustment is between intention and truth-

conditions. The alternative interpretations are quite

simple: 1) The predicate “crush” has one sense (corresponds

to one predicate) and the speaker intends to say something

false, but illuminating. 2) The predicate “crush” has two

senses, and so two distinct truth-conditions, and the

speaker intends to say something true.

Just as in cases of indeterminacy of interpretation,

the practical differences in consequences of the two


alternatives are nil. In practice, the communication is

achieved on whichever interpretation one chooses. The

difference from indeterminacy of interpretation, however, is

that with indeterminate metaphor, almost everyone agrees

that they had neither interpretation in mind. They just said

the words, but did not determinately intend either the

intention to say something true or to say something false.

This kind of indeterminacy, the indeterminacy of intention

and truth-conditions, is a robust piece of intuitive

empirical evidence that propositional contents are nothing

but language.

One could deny this indeterminacy by claiming that

brain science answers such questions. On some models of

language-use, there would be a determinate answer whether

“crush” has one sense or two, even though neither

introspection nor interpretation yields that answer. The

“language of thought” might have a neurologically readable

dictionary. It could be that there are distinctive neural-

groups for distinct predicates, and that a neural re-

configuration characterizes a metaphorical versus a literal


use of a predicate. Without going in to details, such models

expect a great deal more isomorphism between brain and

language than is likely to exist. Davidson’s anomalous

monism17 is a plausible picture of the relation between

intentional and brain predicates. The nearly universal view

that the fit between brain and meaning will not be

neurophysiologically general seems right. Given that there

are beliefs and desires, they have no thorough-going

systematic relation to brain configurations. So we can

ignore the remote possibility that there is a hidden

determinacy because facts about the brain will resolve

apparent indeterminacy and always discriminate when a word

has one or more than one sense, i.e. corresponds to one or

more than one predicate..

3) Truth-conditions and unknowable truth-conditions

An indeterminate metaphorical utterance might seem to

have neither truth-conditions nor a truth-value, since

neither seems to matter for communication. But each

interpretation above assigns the utterance truth-conditions

17 Anomalous monism is stated and defended in “Mental Events,” in Davidson 1980.


and truth-value. That is, on either interpretation, the

utterance has a truth-value. In the utterance “Fred was

crushed by Susan’s remark,” if the speaker has two

predicates “crush” then the truth-value is true; if the

speaker has only one predicate “crush”, it is false.18

If the utterance had no truth-value, neither

interpretation would be correct. But the disjunction of the

two interpretations is true, given that a successful

communication takes place. That is, the possibility of

understanding requires that one or the other hypothesis be

true. So a precondition of successful communication is that

these indeterminate utterances have truth-values.

A Quinean or a Davidsonian has a simple answer that is

not available to the metaphysician: Since truth is primary

and beings are posited in order to organize truths, there

are no facts or states of affairs, i.e. configurations of

entities that “ground” truths. Beings supervene on truths,

rather than the other way round. “`Fred is a frog’ is true 18 Another way to put this point about metaphor is as a point about distinct “senses” of terms as opposed to using terms “strictly” or “loosely.” The main idea is that we cannot tell either from the inside or from the outside whether a usage is strict (i.e. strictly true) or not.


if and only if Fred is a frog” describes adequately what the

world has to be for the utterance to be true. With this

conception of truth, a Davidsonian or Quinean can

legitimately accept truths for purely theoretical reasons.

So, indeterminate metaphorical utterances have truth-values,

but they are unknowable truth-values. They are unknowable

“in principle,” the “principle” being the theory of how

utterances have meaning and what that meaning consists in.

So, A Davidsonian can hold that the disjunction of the

one-sense hypothesis and the two-sense hypothesis is true

and known to be true, while it is unknown and in principle

unknowable which disjunct is true, even though one or the

other disjunct is true. The basis for holding that one or

the other disjunct is true is that communication takes place

and one interpretation or the other must be true.

Furthermore, the general result that every utterance has a

truth-value, coming from logic as opposed to communication-

theory, justifies this thesis.

The difference from a “metaphysical” view that supposes

that truth is supervenient on beings is that, for Davidson,


there are no ontological correlates to true sentences and

applicable predicates. So, since posited beings organize

truths, utterances can be reasonably held to have a truth-

value for organizational, theoretical reasons. For

indeterminate metaphors the theoretical reason is that

having truth-values universally interprets meaningful

utterances as meaningful.

So, Davidson can say of an indeterminate metaphorical

utterance that it is either true or false. That doesn’t mean

that there is a hidden fact of the matter, just that the

truths are better organized under bivalence, and successful

interpretation, which of course happens, presupposes that

utterances have truth-values. That is, since the

interpretation of a metaphorical utterance requires that an

utterance have a truth-value on either possible

interpretation, it must have a truth-value.

The thesis that indeterminate utterances have truth-

values, albeit unknowable ones, for purely theoretical

reasons is analogous to the set-theoretical claim that the

null set is a subset of every set. That the null set is a


sub-set of every set is likewise counted as true for purely

theoretical reasons. Intuitively, given the natural notion

of set as a bunch of objects, it would not occur to us to

include a set with no members as, say, a subset of my

Tupperware pieces, alongside the containers and spatulas.

The thesis that the null set is a subset of every set

is justified solely because it makes better set-theory and

has no serious costs. We can say that VxVy(xy <-> Vz(zx -

>zy)) without having to add a clause to deal with the case

where z has no members, for instance.

Another example of a true “pure theoretical” claim

would be the truth that there is just one zero-tuple of

objects. This thesis is assigned truth so that names can be

assimilated to function-names and sentences to 0-place

predicates. Likewise the thesis that x to the zero-power

equals 1 is true so that x to the y-z power can be regarded

as x to the y power minus x to the z power. In the latter

example, “our intuitive concept” would tell us that there is

no such thing as multiplying a number by itself 0 times—that


the notion is senseless, and the expression “x0” is

necessarily vacuous.19

There is no cost and no practical difficulties in

asserting these theses. Every other truth about sets that

matters is still true, and the over-all theory is better

with the addition of the theses that every set has the null

set as subset, that there is exactly one zero-tuple, and

that N0= 1 for all N. So they are true and known to be true.

In a similar way, the thesis that every utterance with

truth-conditions has a truth-value simplifies the logic of

our over-all theory, allows interpretation of obviously

interpretable utterances, and is cost-free. All that has to

be abandoned is the idea that we can, in general, know what

those truth-values are. With a Davidsonian-Quinean semantics

that eschews truth-making facts or states of affairs, there

are no ontological costs to epistemicism and no speculations

about the inaccessible concepts or thoughts need be invoked.

From a Davidsonian perspective on reference and truth,

epistemicism is harmless. However, one adjustment has to be

19 I owe the last two examples to Scott Lehmann.


made. Given that indeterminate metaphorical utterances have

truth-values, their characterization as “indeterminate” has

to be denied.20 After applying the above epistemicist fix, a

Davidsonian should characterize such sentences as

“indeterminable” rather than “indeterminate.” That is, while

there is no fact of the matter in a correspondence sense,

there is a fact of the matter in the disquotational sense.

We are entitled to go from “It is true that A or not-A” to

“Either it is true that A or it is true that not A.”

4) Indeterminacy as indeterminability in other cases

The well-known kinds of indeterminacy are indeterminacy

of interpretation and vagueness. The same fix that a

Davidsonian can apply in the case of metaphors can be

applied as well to these kinds of indeterminacy. I will

briefly discuss how the solution to indeterminate metaphor

is applied to both indeterminacy of interpretation and

vagueness and then reiterate the defense of this “harmless

epistemicism.”

20 This point was made by Sanford Shia when a version of this paper was presented at Wesleyan University.


a) Indeterminate of Interpretation as “Indeterminable

interpretation.”

Davidson’s and Quine’s characterization of

indeterminacy of interpretation as cases in which “there is

no fact of the matter” hardly distinguishes cases of

indeterminacy from “normal” utterances, since there are no

“facts,” as referents of utterances or sentences in any

case. 21

On the suggested fix of treating every utterance as

having a truth-value, every equally-good interpretive

hypothesis is known to be either true or not true, even

though no two such hypotheses can be true. “There is no fact

of the matter” is reinterpreted as “the alternative

hypotheses are equally practically acceptable.” Whereas in

the case of indeterminable metaphors there are typically

21 “No fact of the matter” means different things for Quine and Davidson. Quine treated indeterminacy as a relativism, relativity to a theory. The relativity for Quine is no more problematic than the fact that we get different numbers when we use metric units rather than feet and inches. Davidson has characterized indeterminacy in much the same way, but points out in “Indeterminism and Antirealism”, in Davidson 2001, p.83, that the arbitrary measurement model misses the fact that there is no interpretation-free measure of the meanings of utterances. Thus the different standards by which we measure meanings would themselves be arrived at by interpretation.


just two hypotheses,22 in the case of indeterminacy of

interpretation there may be several.

For indeterminability of interpretation, the hypotheses

are in principle unknowable for much the reasons that

indeterminable metaphorical utterances have unknowable

truth-values. The “principles” are the theory of how

utterances have meaning and how propositional attitudes have

content.

b) Vagueness

In the literature of vagueness, the fix suggested for a

Davidsonian account of indeterminable metaphors and

indeterminacy of interpretation is the “epistemicist”

position on vague predicates such as “tall” and “bald.”

Epistemicism holds that there is a sharp line between, for

instance, the tall men and the men who are not tall, that

there is a determinate set of tall men. The well-known

epistemicist23 views hold that there is a real line either

in nature or in our concepts that determines whether a man 22 “A crisis coming to a head” might generate three hypotheses, if the raised and pussy part of a swelling is a metaphorical extension of “head” as body part, and the political situation a metaphor of that physiological phenomenon. 23 See Roy Sorensen’s 2001 and Timothy Williamson’s 1994.


is a tall man or not. This line, while objectively there in

nature or in our concept, is in principle unknowable.

Epistemicism has the substantial advantage of preserving

bivalence and classical logic, but the substantial

disadvantage of seeming to almost everyone to be completely

implausible. It seems to most people that there is nothing

to baldness or tallness that is not implicit in our verbal

behavior with such words. And such verbal behavior leaves

gaps between the bald and the not bald.

A Davidsonian epistemicism, though, is harmless in this

respect. No “given” facts are truth-makers for vague

utterances. No properties corresponding to predicates except

in a trivial sense are in question. So a Davidsonian

epistemicist can hold that “Fred is a tall man” is either

true or false, because every utterance is true or false,

without supposing that the world has a fact “making” the

utterance true.

Since indeterminability is a feature of predicate use

generally, given the nature of predication and language, we

should not be surprised that for some degree-based


attributive adjectives like “tall,” there are cases where

nothing in the situation determines that they apply or don’t

apply. Given that truth is primary, and that beings and

properties are posited (correctly) to accommodate those

truths, we need not suppose that there are hidden facts.24

Why should we think that a solution to the sorites

argument and other cases of vagueness would have the same

solution as indeterminability of interpretation and

metaphorical utterances?

Let me offer a conjecture: Just as the fundamental

phenomenon underlying indeterminability of interpretation

and indeterminability of metaphor is a lack of “fit” between

mental, intentional concepts and physical concepts,

according to Davidson’s anomalous monism, so sorites

24 A further advantage of this account of vagueness over some other technical fixes is that vague predicates that do not clearly involve a slippery slope can be accommodated just as easily as “regular” predicates such as “tall.” That is, predicates such as “bald” and “nice”are such that the comparative is sometimes indeterminable. The features of “bald” that disqualify it from being a genuine simple sorites are outlined in my 1979. The much more persuasive example of “nice” is borrowed from Rosanna Keefe’s 1998.Whether John is balder thanFred can be indeterminable because baldness is not a matter of the number of hairs, but on their distribution. It is likewise indeterminable whether John is nicer than Fred, since the parameters forniceness are numerous and themselves vague.


arguments depend on lack of fit between different sorts of

concepts.

“Family of concepts” would be explicated by unpacking

the implicit proto-theories that constitute the content of

concepts. Such “proto-theories” would consist of lawlike

truths using the predicates. There are laws connecting tall

and short (whatever is a tall F is not a short F), but not

connecting tall and n meters high. There are truths about,

for instance, tall men and their height in meters, but those

truths do not form a system, in a sense of “system” that

needs explication.

“Bald,” “heap,” “nice,” “red” and “tall” do not have

law-like relations to “number of hairs,” “grain of sand,”

“remembers birthdays,” “reflects light of n angstroms” and

“is 2 meters in height,” even though there are truths using

terms across these families. Sorites arguments illustrate

this lack of law-like relations between concepts.

If some such account is right, then indeterminacy or

indeterminability reflects one kind of phenomenon.

Indeterminacy occurs because different predicates and


families of predicates are not suited to one another, not

related in a law-like way. Since these predicates apparently

occur in true utterances, and so sometimes apply to things.

On the Davidsonian perspective on ontology, these truths

mean that there are tall men, tables, and the rest of the

entities that the truths require us to quantify over.

On a metaphysical perspective, such “families of

predicates” that do not have law-like relations with the

law-connected concepts of the sciences would be an argument

that nothing in reality corresponds to members of such

families. So, there would be no mental events, no tall men,

and no tables. Since on such a perspective there are

ontological correlates, facts, corresponding to truths,

there is a strong and familiar argument that, if the

concepts really do not fit with the privileged ones, the

entities do not exist. There seems to be room, as it were,

for only one set of entities filling the universe. Since the

entities posited by the privileged predicates (the micro-

particle predicates) do fill the world, the bizarre

conclusion of my 1975 and 1979 would be very plausible.


Anything other than eliminativism further leads to questions

about causal over-determination and other conceptual

difficulties of a metaphysical-correspondence-based

conception of language and the world.

On a Davidsonian perspective, kinds of entities that do

not fit together raise no ontological difficulties. Since

the project is not to “sort” a given domain into the

entities there really are, but rather to account for the

truths, multiple overlapping mutually irreducible domains

are to be expected. Thus not only would Davidsonian harmless

epistemicism resolve every sort of indeterminacy, there

would also be a reason why that is the case.

Works referred to:

Davidson, Donald (1980) Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford UP.

Davidson, Donald, (1984) Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation,

Oxford UP.

Davidson, Donald, (1996) “The Folly of Trying to Define Truth”, Journal of Philosophy 93, pp.263-278.


Davidson, Donald, (2001) Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford

UP.

Derrida, Jacques (1973) Speech and Phenomena and other essays on Husserl's Phenomenology, Northwestern UP.

Derrida, Jacques, (1982) Margins of Philosophy, Chicago UP.

Keefe, Rosanna, (1998) “Vagueness by Numbers,” Mind 107,

Volume 427, pp. 565-579.

Quine, W. V. O., (1960) Word and Object, MIT Press.

Quine, W. V. O., (1963) From a Logical Point of View, New York:

Harper & Row.

Quine, W.V. O., (1969) Ontological Relativity, Columbia UP.

Sorenson, Roy, (2001) Vagueness and Contradiction, Oxford UP.

Wheeler, S. C., (2000) Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy,

Stanford UP.

Wheeler, S. C., (1975) “Reference and Vagueness", Synthese

30, pp.367-379.

Wheeler, S. C., (1979) “On That Which is Not", Synthese 41,

pp.155-173.

Williamson, Timothy, (1994) Vagueness, Routledge.

Metaphorical Indeterminacy and the Primacy of Language

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