Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine on Reference and Ontology 141
which I can determinately say what I mean. This language would be
private to me alone, since anything I can utter, anything I can make
public, is, we are supposing, subject to reconstrual along the lines
indicated, whereas my language is not.
This picture is tempting, and it is to some extent reinforced by remarks
of Quine in which he suggests that to understand someone’s
words is to translate them. 29 But the tempting picture cannot be a
correct account of Quine’s views. The idea of a language that is in
this sense private, in which my real (determinate) meaning never gets
expressed – this idea is completely foreign to the man who began the
preface to Word and Object with the sentence “Language is a social
art.” It is completely foreign to his whole naturalistic, antimentalistic
outlook. Apart from the sorts of remarks just mentioned, nothing
in Quine’s work even suggests such a view of language. 30 Also, as we
shall see, he does suggest other ways of stopping the regress that the
private language was invoked to stop.
If not by a private language, then how is the regress of languages
to be stopped? If I do not understand your words by translating them
into my own language, how are we to think of understanding? Take
this second question first. I may occasionally do something like
translating you if you use words that I do not immediately understand
or if you make a remark that strikes me as excessively odd
when taken in the sense that first comes to mind. But normally
I do not translate your words. Normally I simply respond to what
you say – by uttering some remark or by modifying my actions in
some way (at the least, my dispositions to act change). To understand
someone’s utterances is not, in the usual case, to translate them into
some other language; it is simply to be disposed to respond to them in
appropriate ways, linguistic and nonlinguistic, immediate and long
term. And this provides the clue that we need to attempt to answer
the first question. When I say of you that your word ‘Rover’ refers
to the family dog and not to its space-time complement, what gives
my words meaning is simply that they are part of our familiar shared
language, which, for the time being at least, is unquestioned. It is
not a place at which we find real reference – in the sense of reference
that is in some more or less mysterious fashion not susceptible to the
inscrutability argument. But it is a language that we can and do for
the most part simply use, without attempting to consider it from the
vantage point of some other language. As Quine says, “[I]n practice
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