Abstract

Quine himself relates these much-quoted remarks to his indeterminacy of translation thesis and his rejection of the attitudes (Quine 1960:221). But in this paper I try to show that the remarks are more fruitfully developed by exposing their suggestive links with a version of the _epistemological Real Distinction. This is the key idea of the _Verstehen tradition, to the effect that understanding others and their doings and productions as the manifestations of minds involves a methodology and a kind of knowledge that is radically different from the methodology and knowledge involved in the physical sciences. (edited)