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Single Idea 6312

[filed under theme 19. Language / F. Communication / 6. Interpreting Language / b. Indeterminate translation ]

Full Idea

There is no evident criterion whereby to strip extraneous effects away and leave just the meaning of 'Gavagai' properly so-called - whatever meaning properly so-called may be.

Clarification

'Gavagai' is an imagined native word which somehow refers to a passing rabbit

Gist of Idea

We can never precisely pin down how to translate the native word 'Gavagai'

Source

Willard Quine (Word and Object [1960], §09)

Book Ref

Quine,Willard: 'Word and Object' [MIT 1969], p.38

A Reaction

Quine's famous assertion that translation is ultimately 'indeterminate'. Huge doubts about meaning and language and truth follow from his claim. Personally I think it is rubbish. People become fluent in very foreign languages, and don't have breakdowns.

The 29 ideas from 'Word and Object'

6891 Quine's naturalistic and empirical view is based entirely on first-order logic and set theory [Quine, by Mautner]
4630 Two theories can be internally consistent and match all the facts, yet be inconsistent with one another [Quine, by Baggini /Fosl]
3131 Quine expresses the instrumental version of eliminativism [Quine, by Rey]
3988 Indeterminacy of translation also implies indeterminacy in interpreting people's mental states [Dennett on Quine]
6310 Enquiry needs a conceptual scheme, so we should retain the best available [Quine]
6311 The firmer the links between sentences and stimuli, the less translations can diverge [Quine]
6312 We can never precisely pin down how to translate the native word 'Gavagai' [Quine]
6313 Stimulus synonymy of 'Gavagai' and 'Rabbit' does not even guarantee they are coextensive [Quine]
6314 Weird translations are always possible, but they improve if we impose our own logic on them [Quine]
6317 Dispositions to speech behaviour, and actual speech, are never enough to fix any one translation [Quine]
6315 We should be suspicious of a translation which implies that a people have very strange beliefs [Quine]
12798 Plurals can in principle be paraphrased away altogether [Quine]
16462 The quest for ultimate categories is the quest for a simple clear pattern of notation [Quine]
8464 Physical objects in space-time are just events or processes, no matter how disconnected [Quine]
8482 Mathematicians must be rational but not two-legged, cyclists the opposite. So a mathematical cyclist? [Quine]
12136 Cyclist are not actually essentially two-legged [Brody on Quine]
8504 Quine aims to deal with properties by the use of eternal open sentences, or classes [Quine, by Devitt]
15725 Normal conditionals have a truth-value gap when the antecedent is false. [Quine]
15724 Counterfactuals have no place in a strict account of science [Quine]
15722 Conditionals are pointless if the truth value of the antecedent is known [Quine]
15719 We feign belief in counterfactual antecedents, and assess how convincing the consequent is [Quine]
15721 Counterfactuals are plausible when dispositions are involved, as they imply structures [Quine]
15723 Either dispositions rest on structures, or we keep saying 'all things being equal' [Quine]
15490 Explain unmanifested dispositions as structural similarities to objects which have manifested them [Quine, by Martin,CB]
15720 What stays the same in assessing a counterfactual antecedent depends on context [Quine]
17594 We can paraphrase 'x=y' as a sequence of the form 'if Fx then Fy' [Quine]
7924 The notion of a physical object is by far the most useful one for science [Quine]
17905 Any progression will do nicely for numbers; they can all then be used to measure multiplicity [Quine]
9556 Nearly all of mathematics has to quantify over abstract objects [Quine]