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Quine on Meaning and Translation1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

D. E. Bolton
Affiliation:
Institute of Psychiatry, University of London

Extract

In Word and Object Professor Quine formulated his Principle of Indeterminacy of Translation as follows:

Manuals for translating one language into another can be set up in divergent ways, all compatible with the totality of speech dispositions, yet incompatible with one another. In countless places they will diverge in giving, as their respective translations of a sentence of the one language, sentences of the other language which stand to each other in no plausible sort of equivalence however loose. The firmer the direct links of a sentence with non-verbal stimulation, of course, the less drastically its translations can diverge from one another from manual to manual.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1979

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References

2 Quine, W. V. O., Word and Object (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), 27.Google Scholar

3 Op. cit., note 2, Ch. II; also ‘Meaning and Translation’, in On Translation, Brower, R. A. (ed.) (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1959).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Op. cit., note 2, 68.

5 Quine, W. V. O., particularly ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, in From a Logical Point of View, (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953)Google Scholar. Also op. cit., note 2, Ch. I.

6 Op. cit., note 2, 68 f.

7 As is apparent from Quine's need to clarify his position in ‘On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation’, Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970), 178183.Google Scholar

8 Quine, W. V. O., particularly ‘Ontological Relativity’ and ‘Speaking of Objects’, both in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, (New York, London: Columbia University Press, 1969).Google Scholar

9 Op. cit., note 2, 51–52.

10 Ibid., 72.

11 Op. cit., note 7, 178 and 183.

12 Ibid., 183.

13 Harman, Gilbert, ‘An Introduction to Translation and Meaning’, Synthese 19 (1968), 1426CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also in Words and Objections, Davidson, D. and Hintikka, J. (eds) (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1968).Google Scholar

14 Op. cit., note 7, 178 and 183.

15 Ibid., 178–179.

16 Ibid., 180.

17 In a recent paper, ‘The Nature of Natural Knowledge’, in Mind and Language, Guttenplan, S. (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)Google Scholar, Quine says that the significant difference between the two empirically equivalent theories comes perhaps where we no longer see how to state rules of translation that would bring the theories together. But this reply is unsatisfactory, because it still does not say what the difference is between the two theories, which makes translation from one to the other problematic.

18 Op. cit., note 8. ‘Epistemology Naturalized’, also in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (op. cit., note 8).

19 Op. cit., note 18, 80–81.

20 See ‘Ontological Relativity’, op. cit., note 8, 30 and 37Google Scholar. The analogy permeates the whole of ‘Epistemology Naturalized’, op. cit., note 18.

21 Op. cit., note 5, 38.

22 Op. cit., note 2, 26.

23 It appears so, for example, to Steiner, George, see his Beyond Babel: Aspects of Meaning and Translation (Oxford University Press, 1975), 295nGoogle Scholar. It should be remarked in the present context that Dr Steiner's attribution to Wittgenstein of a view ‘closely parallel’ to Quine's Principle of Indeterminacy, seems without foundation. The sections of the Philosophical Investigations to which Dr Steiner refers in support of his claim (23, 206, 243, 528) make no mention of indeter minacy in translation, still less of the kind postulated by Quine.

24 ‘Speaking of Objects’, op. cit., note 8, 25.Google Scholar

25 Whorf, B. L., ‘An American Indian Model of the Universe’, International Journal of American Linguistics 16 (1950), 6772CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Reprinted in Language, Thought and Reality, Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Carroll, J. B. (ed.) (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1956).Google Scholar

26 Op. cit., note 2, 234f.

27 The conception of language briefly described here is meant, of course, to be Wittgenstein's; Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953)Google Scholar, particu larly sections 1–34, and see also throughout On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969).Google Scholar

28 Op. cit., note 2, 76.

29 See for example ‘Ontological Relativity’ (op. cit., note 8), 2629.Google Scholar

30 Op. cit., note 2, 32–33; and particularly the paper ‘Prepositional Objects’, in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (op. cit., note 8).