McCarthy develops a theory of Radical Interpertation - The project of characterizing from scratch the language and attituteds of an agent or population - and applies the theory to the problems of indeterminacy of interperation first descrided in the writings of Quine. The major theme in McCarthy's study is that a relatively modest set of interpertive principles, properly applied, can serve to resolve the major indeterminacies of interperation. Its most substantive contribution is in proposing a solution to problems of indeterminacy that remain unsloved in the literature.