Quine in his Word and Object states that the talk of sense-experience gives way to talk of stimuli. From this, he brings in the notion 'stimulus meaning' into the discussion.5 There are two sorts of stimulus meaning.
- Affirmative stimulus meaning (ASM)
- Negative stimulus meaning (NSM)
He defines ASM as the class of all stimulations that would prompt a speaker's assent and NSM is the class of all stimulations that would prompt his dissent.6 The stimulus meaning of a speaker comprises of the ordered pair of its affirmative and negative stimulus meanings. Thus, he asserts that sentences about the external world cannot be assigned stimulus meaning one-by-one, but only collectively, in sets.7 In his words, 'I did intend the stimulus meaning to capture the notion of meaning for the linguistic community in the case of an observation sentence, and for the individual speaker in the case of many other occasion sentences'.8
In conglomeration of Duhem and Quine's view on epistemological nature of meaning, the theses have given a combined view that the falsity of the observation categorical does not conclusively refute the hypothesis. "What it refutes is the conjunction of sentences that was needed to imply the observation categorical. In order to retract that conjunction we do not have to retract the hypothesis in question; we could retract some other sentences of the conjunction instead" (Quine, 1990, pp.13-14).
Thus, on the account of Quine, "no statement, taken in isolation from its fellows, admits confirmation at all. Our statements face the tribunal of sense-experience only as a corporate body. Hence, he says, it is not significant, in general, to speak of the confirmation of a single statement".9
| 5 | Please see, Quine, W.V. (1960). Words and Object. Massachusetts: The MIT Press. |
| 6 | Ibid, p.32. |
| 7 | Hale, B. and Wright, C. (eds.) (1999). A Companion to Philosophy of Language. UK: Basil Blackwell Publication, p. 231. |
| 8 | Quine,W.V. (1986). Reply to H. Putnam. In The Philosophy of W.V.Quine. Edited by P.Schillp, Illinois: Open Court, pp.427-428. |
| 9 | Wanger, S.J. (1986). Quine's Holism, Analysis. 46 (1), p.1. |