Quine revolutionized the understanding of verbal communications by taking seriously the fact that there can be no more to meaning than an adequately equipped person can learn and observe. Thus, the interpreter’s point of view is the revealing one to bring to the subject. By espousing a distal rather than a proximal theory of meaning, he recognized and fully exploited the active role of the interpreter; a role that requires the interpreter to correlate his own responses and those of the speaker by reference to the mutually salient causes in the world of which they speak.
Keywords: meaning, Quine, empiricism, evidence, stimulus, proximal theory, distal theory, interpreter