Philosophy of Language: the Key Thinkers by Lee Barry;

Author:Lee, Barry;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2011-10-14T16:00:00+00:00

4. The inscrutability of reference and the indeterminacy of translation

Suppose you and I were each individually to attempt to devise translation manuals of a foreign tongue, where the language in view – call it ‘Language X’ – was previously untranslated. Since surely one expression correctly translates another if and only if it has the same meaning as the other, we should expect our respective manuals, insofar as they are successful, to converge; in particular, with respect to a given expression of Language X, we should expect them to deliver the same translation (allowing of course for discrepancies on points of emphasis, style, and other grammatical and lexical alternatives that, as we say, amount to the same thing).

Quine, however, famously claims that translation is ‘indeterminate’ – that even if you and I were to go about our respective tasks with impeccable correctness, there is no reason to deny that we could devise manuals that do not converge in this way. The two manuals could correctly translate one sentence of Language X into different sentences of English that ‘stand in no plausible relation of equivalence, however loose’ (WO, p. 27); there is thus no ‘fact of the matter’ as regards meaning. Meaning itself is not something objective; the assignment of particular meanings to expressions is irreducibly intuitive and interest-relative, not something that could be validated by the impersonal procedures of science. And as emphasized, the notion plays no role in Quine’s account of language. Indeed from the naturalistic point of view, it is completely unclear what role such a notion could play. If we find that two inequivalent verdicts are respectively each part of a complete analysis of a given person’s language – an analysis that painstakingly catalogues all the person’s linguistic dispositions – then the only way to maintain that the two verdicts herald different ascriptions of meaning is to suppose that the differences of meaning are real but do not show up in the person’s linguistic dispositions. This would be to commit the sin of private language as discussed by Wittgenstein.5

A simple argument for indeterminacy involves what Quine calls the inscrutability of reference. Observation sentences are, according to Quine, the ‘entering wedge’ into a language; since they are by definition the ones that a creature’s disposition to assent to them varies with changes in the environment, we can think of a translator as beginning by observation of the native, looking out for environmental changes that go with changes in the native’s disposition to assent to observation sentences. Suppose then that the native’s ‘Gavagai!’ is found to correlate with the presence of rabbits, which presumably stimulate his visual nerves in certain distinctive ways. The observation sentences ‘Rabbit!’ and ‘Rabbit-stage!’ – a momentary stage of a rabbit – are associated with the same sensory receptors in a given individual (other ‘stimulus-synonymous’ sentences are ‘Undetached rabbit-part!’, ‘Rabbithood manifestation!’, and other more artificial things). Thus the fact that ‘Rabbit!’ and ‘Gavagai!’ are equivalent in this respect does not imply that ‘rabbit’ and ‘gavagai’ are synonymous or co-extensive terms.

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