05-08-08 1 Publicness and Indeterminacy Peter Pagin This paper is concerned with one rather specific question: Is indeterminacy of translation a consequence of the publicness of meaning? As I understand professor Quine, he thinks that the answer to this question is yes . 1 I shall provide some support for this interpretation. Personally, I believe that the answer is no , but I shall not try to establish that answer. I don’t know how to do that, or even if it is possible to do it. Instead, I shall examinine what I take to be Quine’s reasoning from the publicness thesis to the indeterminacy thesis. I shall reconstruct the reasoning into an explicit argument, and try to show that this argument cannot be successful. It is not easy to say in advance in what way that argument cannot be successful, since that depends on the structure of the argument, but I shall make it explicit below (section 3). 1. What is publicness of meaning? The thought that linguistic meaning is public has been a main theme for a long time in the 20th century (analytic) philosophy of language. It features in different versions in Wittgenstein, Quine, Donald Davidson, Michael Dummett and others. The common element in these versions is primarily the rejection of a certain picture of linguistic meaning, according to which mental factors, private in the sense of being epistemically inaccessible to others than the speaker himself, determine what his 1 .