The Cambridge Companion to Quine (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy) by Unknown
Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2004-03-28T16:00:00+00:00
4. THE DOMESTIC CASE
If Quine is right, relations of synonymy are not matters of fact even when they are supposed to hold between sentences of one and the same language. I tend to presuppose that, for each sentence of our shared language, what you mean by it is also what I mean by it (usually, of course, there may be exceptional circumstances). I “translate” each sentence of your language by that same sentence. Quine thinks that if I were perverse and ingenious, I could “scorn” that homophonic scheme of translation and devise an alternative that would attribute to you “unimagined views” while still fitting all the relevant objective facts, including facts about your verbal and other behavior (see WO 78).
But it is still not clear what he is driving at, since there is room for different interpretations of ‘fitting the facts’. Two questions have become urgent: What are the relevant objective facts, and what is it for a translation manual to fit them?
5. THE FACTS
If the facts are defined too narrowly, the doctrine is trivialized. As we have noticed, Quine often writes in terms of behavioral dispositions, but these may be construed more or less broadly. It might be useful now to get acquainted with an idea he uses in Word and Object . At any moment each of us is undergoing a certain pattern of sensory stimulation, which may influence our dispositions to say ‘Yes’, ‘No’, or ‘Maybe’ when a sentence is pronounced with a rising (querying) intonation. Faced here and now with the queried sentence ‘The sun is shining’, for example, I am disposed to indicate assent. To ‘There’s a rabbit on the desk’ I will indicate dissent. To ‘That man is a father’ (queried on spotting a stranger) I will withhold a verdict. These dispositions to assent, dissent, or withhold a verdict when hearing a given sentence uttered queryingly while at the same time being exposed to a particular brief pattern of sensory stimulation provide the basis for a very narrow conception of behavioral dispositions. Suppose we say it is exclusively those narrowly conceived verbal dispositions that are to be the facts that schemes of translation must fit. And suppose we add that for a scheme of translation to fit those facts is simply for it to pair off sentences in such a way that for each possible pattern of stimulation (within some brief time interval) mature speakers of the two languages share the same dispositions to assent, dissent, or withhold a verdict when the sentence is queried. (That would be to match up “stimulus meanings”; see §7.) Notice now that for all practical – and Quinean – purposes, we are disposed to assent to familiar mathematical truths under all patterns of stimulation. That being so, the indeterminacy doctrine, when fitting the facts is construed as above, can be quickly seen to be true even for the domestic case. We could render ‘2 + 2 = 4’ by ‘There is a prime greater than 2’ and vice
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