Willard Van Orman Quine

140 peter hylton
might come up with translations that agreed about the net import of
each sentence but still differed in the ontology they ascribed to the
person being translated. I might translate you as speaking the proxyfunction
language, and my translation would have just as much claim
to correctness as the translations of your friends and neighbors, who
translate you as speaking our normal language. There would be no
fact of the matter as to which translation was correct and thus no
fact of the matter as to which language you were really speaking or
which ontology you really accepted.
At this point one may think that the whole idea of ontological
relativity collapses into incoherence. 28 For of course my words too
are subject to various translations equally correct. Suppose I speak
(what appears to be) the object language but translate you as speaking
the complement language. Someone else can with equal justice
claim that I am in fact speaking the complement language so that
when I translate you I am actually attributing to you the object ontology,
not the complement ontology. We seem, in short, to be in
danger of a regress. I translate your use of the word ‘Rover’ as referring
to the space-time complement of the family dog, but if my
words themselves are subject to various translations, what claim do
they actually make? And if someone were to answer this question,
still her words would be susceptible of various translations, and so
on. The idea of translation seems to be undermined here by the lack
of a stable language into which to translate – a language that simply
says what it says.
It is tempting to put an end to this difficulty by positing for each
person a language that is in this sense stable. Or never mind the
others: It is tempting for me to suppose that I have a language in
which I can simply mean what I mean – objects and not their complements.
If my words are always subject to reconstrual, then this
simply shows that they do not fully capture what I mean: My meaning
at least must be fully determinate. This line of thought is, as I
say, tempting. And it goes along with the idea that understanding
someone always involves translating them. For if I understand you
by translating you, then I must have some language into which I
translate. And if we are to avoid a regress, I cannot understand that
language by translating it into yet another language. On the contrary,
at some point I have to have a language that I understand in some
altogether more immediate fashion; this would be the language in
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