Merleau-Ponty introduces the term "positive indeterminacy" in The Phenomenology of Perception, where he uses it to describe visual illusions such as the Müller-Lyer...
Which line is longer?
...and the duck-rabbit. His point is that perception is often ambiguous, and he concludes that we must accept this ambiguity as a "positive phenomenonon". Indeterminacy, according to Merleau-Ponty, can sometimes be a feature of reality, rather than a puzzle to be explained.
Is it a duck? Is it a rabbit? Nobody knows!
Positive indeterminacy, then, is the identification of features of the world that are in some sense inherently indeterminate. Quine argues that any act of translation between languages is fundamentally indeterminate, as there will be always be a number of competing translations, each of which is equally compatible with the evidence. Of course in practice we are able to translate, at least well enough to get by, but we can never we be sure that a word actually means what we think it does. Thus Quine concludes that meaning itself is indeterminate, and that there is no fact of the matter about what a word means.
Hilary Putnam comes to similar conclusions about the notion of truth. According to his doctrine of "internal realism", whether or not some statement is true can only be determined relative to a "conceptual scheme", or a frame of reference. Truth is also indeterminate, in that there is no objective fact of the matter about whether or not something is true. Putnam takes care to try and avoid what he sees as an incoherent form of relativism, and stresses that from within a conceptual scheme there is a determinate fact of the matter about truth. Nonetheless, this truth remains in an important sense subjective - it's just that Putnam thinks that this is the best we can hope for.
More recently Dennett has reiterated this kind of "Quinean indeterminacy", with specific reference to beliefs. According to his (in)famous intentional stance theory, what we believe is broadly determined by what an observer would attribute to us as rational agents. In some (perhaps most) situations, there will be no fact of the matter as to which beliefs it makes most sense to attribute. The same goes for other mental states, such as desires or emotions.
Dennett draws attention to Parfit's classic account of the self as another example of positive indeterminacy. There will be cases, such as dementia or other mental illness, where it is unclear what we should say about the continuity of the self. Rather than treating this as a puzzle that we should try and solve, Parfit argues that our concept of self is simply indeterminate, and that there is sometimes no "right" answer.
All of the above cases are much more complex than I have been able to go into here, but they give a taste of the importance of positive indeterminacy. I am most interested in how it can be applied to puzzles in the philosophy of mind, but it seems that it might well be a more fundamental part of how we should think about the world.
Quine: a dapper chap
More recently Dennett has reiterated this kind of "Quinean indeterminacy", with specific reference to beliefs. According to his (in)famous intentional stance theory, what we believe is broadly determined by what an observer would attribute to us as rational agents. In some (perhaps most) situations, there will be no fact of the matter as to which beliefs it makes most sense to attribute. The same goes for other mental states, such as desires or emotions.
Dennett draws attention to Parfit's classic account of the self as another example of positive indeterminacy. There will be cases, such as dementia or other mental illness, where it is unclear what we should say about the continuity of the self. Rather than treating this as a puzzle that we should try and solve, Parfit argues that our concept of self is simply indeterminate, and that there is sometimes no "right" answer.
All of the above cases are much more complex than I have been able to go into here, but they give a taste of the importance of positive indeterminacy. I am most interested in how it can be applied to puzzles in the philosophy of mind, but it seems that it might well be a more fundamental part of how we should think about the world.
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