DAG PRAWITZ MEANING AND EXPERIENCE The theme of this paper, chosen by the organizers of the symposium at which it was delivered, is appropriate at a F¢llesdal birthday sympos- ium, because it is an important theme in his philosophical work. One of F¢llesdal's essays even has this very title 'Meaning and Experience', I and I have been told that a course recently given by F011esdal at Stanford University had the same title. l. FOLLESDAL'S ESSAY 'MEANING AND EXPERIENCE' In 'Meaning and Experience', F011esdal ties together some of his many interests, in particular, his interests in Husserl's phenomenology and the analytical philosophy of language. The larger part of F¢llesdal's essay deals with the latter interest, however, and as a starting point I shall shortly recapitulate part of what F¢llesdal says about meaning and evidence from the point of view of analytical philosophy. The main question raised by F¢llesdal is how we know meanings, and it is ans- wered in an empiricist vein by investigating the role that experience plays as evidence for a theory of meaning. F¢llesdal pays special atten- tion to Quine as one of the first philosophers to engage seriously in such investigations, and I shall in particular be concerned with what F¢llesdal says about two of Quine's theses, viz., the inextricability thesis - saying roughly that one cannot separate meaning from information or, in other words, what we mean from what we believe - and the indeterminacy thesis - affirming the existence of different translation manuals that are equally compatible with all the evidence and denying any objective content to the question whether one is more right than the other. According to F011esdal, the inextricability thesis is the crux of the indeterminacy thesis, but, in his outline of arguments for the latter thesis, other points are emphasized. F011esdal summarizes Quine's argu- ment for indeterminacy with the formula "Duhem plus Peirce yields Indeterminacy": 'Duhem' here stands for the thesis that theoretical sentences are tested against experience not one by one but together, .~vnthese 98: 131-t41, 1994, (~ 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.