Inferentialism and indeterminacy at home

Abstract

According to W.V. Quine his thesis of the indeterminacy of radical inter-linguistic translation applies to the home language as well. This view implies that the usual homophonic understanding of our interlocutors' utterances at home can be replaced by a non-homophonic understanding without the least semantic drawback. In my thesis I will argue that it is possible to accord a semantic superiority to the homophonic understanding at home provided that one adopts an inferentialist account of meaning. I will note that inferentialism with its stress on inferential relations between sentences as a determinant of their meaning enables us to attribute a semantic relevance to the verbal circumstances and sequels of the use of sentences, which is overlooked by Quine except in the case of sentences that contain logical vocabulary. I will then argue that even though attention to the verbal circumstances and sequels of the use of sentences is not sufficient to overrule different but equally acceptable manuals of translation from a radically foreign language into English, it is sufficient to rule out the English-English non-homophonic manual as a manual semantically on a par with the homophonic manual.