The inscrutability of reference and the indeterminacy of translation

Suppose you and I were each individually to attempt to devise transla-tion 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 suc-cessful, 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 impec-cable correctness, there is no reason to deny that we could devise manuals that do not converge in this way. The two manuals could cor-rectly 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 sci-ence. 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 inequiva-lent verdicts are respectively each part of a complete analysis of a given person’s language – an analysis that painstakingly catalogues all the per-son’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 lin-guistic 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 def-inition 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.

To find out whether the term ‘gavagai’ has the same reference as

‘rabbit’ or ‘rabbit-stage’, we need to translate some native expression as

‘is the same as’ or equivalent. Suppose we have identified the native construction ‘ipso’ as a candidate for ‘is the same as’, and ‘yo’ as a demonstrative pronoun, like ‘that’ in English. The native, we find, affirms:

(1) Yo gavagai ipso yo gavagai.

He affirms this, we find, when and only when we point at the same rab-bit the whole time. This would seem to confirm the hypothesis that

‘gavagai’ means rabbit rather than rabbit-stage. But it doesn’t. Here are two translations of the sentence (1):

(2) That rabbit is the same as that rabbit.

(3) That rabbit-stage is part of the same animal-history as that rabbit-stage.

(2) and (3) are correlated with the same sensory receptors; indeed we have the same rabbit if and only if we have rabbit-stages that are part of the same animal-history (OR, p. 4). So the native’s speech-disposi-tions will not fix the reference of the term ‘gavagai’. Of course, the expressions involved in (1) – ‘gavagai’, ‘ipso’ – have uses in the rest of Language X, so the translations of these will have ramifications for other translations. But just as the data left us with choices in assigning references to the parts of (1), so these choices can be compensated for where other choices emerge in connection with other parts of the translation manual (WO, pp. 71–2; see also OR, pp. 1–3, 30–5). This not to say we or the natives do not know the difference between rab-bits and rabbit-stages – within a language such as English, ‘rabrab-bits = rabbit-stages’ remains false – but all the same we can translate the word of Language X in either way, so long as corresponding adjust-ments are made elsewhere.

A more general and abstract version of this argument came swiftly after the initial presentation in Word and Object, called now ‘Ontologi-cal Relativity’ (and later still the ‘Indeterminacy of Reference’). Suppose we imagine a language with all linguistic dispositions charted, plus a reference scheme. Formulate what Quine calls a function: a proxy-function assigns for each input x a unique correlate that is not x itself.

Now formulate a new reference scheme: where the original had a given object in the set of things a given term is true of, then the new scheme has the proxy of that object in the new set (e.g. ‘spatio-temporal com-plement of’ – the universe minus the object – is a proxy-function with respect to physical objects). The two reference schemes are equivalent, in the sense that the new scheme leaves unaffected the truth-value of every sentence: for example ‘Sally smokes’ is equivalent to ‘The proxy of Sally is the proxy of a smoker’. Furthermore, the set of sensory receptors associated with each sentence has not been altered. So there is nothing observable, nothing objective to decide between the two schemes; thus

as a pair of hypotheses about the language in question, the difference is unreal.

Early on, Quine referred to this cluster of arguments as ones that

‘press from below’ to the general conclusion of the indeterminacy of translation or meaning. However he soon began to emphasize that these arguments deliver only the indeterminacy of reference of terms.

This is not as radical as the purported indeterminacy of translation of entire sentences. (Of course ‘There is a rabbit’ and ‘There is a rabbit-stage’ do not intuitively mean the same thing, as they do not contain reference to the same objects, but in some sense they amount to the same thing.)⁶

It is difficult to imagine arguments for indeterminacy of translation of whole sentences, but there is one argument Quine gives, an argument that ‘presses from above’. Like many philosophers of science, Quine holds that science is underdetermined by its evidence. More exactly, if we think of all the evidential statements – the observation categoricals – past, present and future, as having their truth-values determined, then the actual theory which implies them, A (our actual scientific theory), could be replaced by another, different theory, B, which nevertheless has the same exact set of observational implications. Of course that is very much an ‘in principle’ prospect, as it is vanishingly unlikely that such an alternative will actually be produced. But suppose that the pos-sibility is real. The translator has no trouble with observation sentences and truth-functional connectives, and thus not with observation categor-icals. But he has no direct evidence for standing sentences, and in par-ticular not for theoretical sentences such as ‘Light travels at 186,000 miles per second’. So in principle he could attribute either A or B to them. Thus undetermination of theory implies indeterminacy of translation.

In subsequent years, however, Quine tended not to cite this argu-ment; partly because of various underlying complexities concerning the undetermination of theory thesis itself, and partly because those issues tend to obscure the main point. He tended rather to clarify and to refine the thesis itself, without providing arguments for it. In a late piece –

‘Indeterminacy without Tears’ – Quine wrote:

The following . . . is an aseptic restatement of the imagined conflict between the two impeccable manuals. We have a recording of a long native discourse, and we

have smooth, clear English translation of it from the two manuals; but if we mesh the translations, alternating them sentence by sentence, the result is incoherent.

(Quine, 2008a [1994], pp. 447–8)

This is rather vague, but its significance is that Quine wishes to enunciate a thesis which by his lights makes relative sense in terms of linguistic behaviour, which a thesis including the word ‘meaning’

would not.

If the more radical thesis is thus clarified, the argument for it is not.

Yet – and this is crucial to understanding Quine – it is ultimately not so important whether the radical indeterminacy thesis is true. Quine takes it as quite reasonable to suppose that if a language can be translated one way, then it’s likely that there will be other ways. But the fate of Quine’s scheme does not rest on that of the indeterminacy thesis. The scheme as outlined in the last section says or implies nothing about it, and in fact Quine, in later years, after having discussed the thesis in print on number of occasions, said that the thesis is merely a ‘conjec-ture’, that is, with no knock-down reasons either for it or against it.

That a scheme of language allows the possibility of such a thing is itself the important fact; it flies the face of our intuitive expectations.

And if within the bounds of Quine’s conception of language it so hap-pened that there are no such cases, that would not threaten the con-ception; indeed it would benefit from the consonance with common sense. If there were no indeterminacy, then classes of translationally equivalent sentences could be called ‘the meaning’ of a sentence – but the explanation of why the classes are as they are would nevertheless be independent of and prior to the application of the concept of meaning.

Quine doesn’t officially use the concept of meaning, but is well-aware that the word ‘meaning’ is a part of language. He devotes several pages over the years to explaining how in fact the word is employed, not by philosophers or theoretical linguists but by lexicographers and ordinary persons, and finds rather a rag-bag of different uses that do not add up to anything like a systematic theory. And if they did, then perhaps the conceivability of indeterminacy shows that the intuitive notion of meaning is contradictory and so must be rejected from sci-ence, like the pre-Russell intuitive or naive notion of set.