Quine's behaviorist underdetermination therefore undermines itself: meaning is public by constitution, making behavioral criteria for understanding non-accidentally reliable among competent speakers.

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Behavioral criteria(how we tell if someone knows what a word means): Observable, measurable signs or tests based on what people actually do that help us judge whether someone understands something.
Non-accidentally reliable(why behavioral tests work for detecting understanding): Working reliably not by accident or chance, but for a genuine, systematic reason—the method actually works because of how things fundamentally are, not by coincidence.
Public by constitution(the essential nature of meaning): The idea that meaning is fundamentally social and shared by nature—it only exists because a community of speakers agrees on it, not because it's locked inside individual minds.
Quine(as a proper name referring to the philosopher whose theory is being discussed): Willard Van Orman Quine was a 20th-century American philosopher who wrote about how we know things and how language works. In this statement, we're discussing one of his specific ideas about observation.

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