Quine's thesis of indeterminacy states that the truth conditions of a sentence sub-determine the reference of the terms that occur in it. The question is: what is the scope of that sub-determination? In Reason, Truth and History Putnam claims that the sub-determination is greater than might be expected from Quine's arguments and proposes, with his "argument theoretical model," to radically extend these results. In this article I show that the theoretical model of Putnam's argument is not a mere extension of Quine results, but it is an argument that represents a different interpretation of the model underlying the latter argument. If I'm right, there would be two ways of understanding the interpretation and, depending on how we understand it, the extension of the sub- determination or the reference for truth values. I believe therefore that, although Putnam's argumentrepresents a radicalization of Quine's conclusions, it introduces an interpretation model different from the one developed in Word and Object.
Quine; Putnam; Interpretation; Model theoretical argument; Meaning; Indeterminacy