Department of Philosophy

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The Department of Philosophy, University of North Bengal has been awarded Special Assistance by UGC to carry on research on ‘The Problem of Meaning in Classical Indian Philosophy and Contemporary Western Philosophy’ including translation of Sanskrit texts into regional language.
Department of Philosophy, North Bengal University, Siliguri, is one of the very accomplished centers of learning and research in Philosophy. Siliguri is surrounded by four countries and the nearest Bagdogra airport is five KM, and the New Jalpaiguri railway station is 18 KM away from University campus. We pride ourselves in being a department where equal emphasis is placed on quality research as well as on development and training of students through teaching/learning and extensive teacher-student interaction.

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Author: search.filters.author.Adhikari, NiranjanStart date: 2023

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    A critical exposition on quine’s notion of meaning and indeterminacy
    (University of North Bengal, 2024-03) Adhikari, Niranjan
    This paper contained a critical discussion of Quine’s theory of meaning in terms of his indeterminacy thesis. In analytic philosophy, especially in semantics, language is used as a tool to interpret the knowledge of the world. A language consists of propositions. Every proposition in our language must be meaningful. So, meaning is the fundamental component of a proposition. Now the problem is: how do we determine the meaning of a proposition? Quine exemplified that every way to determine the meaning of a linguistic expression by traditional semantics is totally wrong about meaning. Instead of following the traditional semantics, Quine relies on a behaviouristic approach towards meaning. He qualified traditional semantics as a “myth of museum” that exhibits meaning in a certain kind of entity. This article consists of four different sections. In the very first section of this paper, I intended to explain the argument of Quine against traditional semantics on meaning as an entity. The second section deals with a critical evaluation of Quine’s notion of stimulus meaning and conceptual scheme. In the third section, I attempted to explain Quine’s critical observation on meaning in terms of the indeterminacy thesis. This final section holds concluding remarks, in which I object to some misconceptions regarding Quine’s theory of meaning.