Willard Van Orman Quine

142 peter hylton
we end the regress of background languages by acquiescing in our
mother tongue and taking its words at face value” (OR 49).
It is crucial here that what give our words their meaning is our use
of them, not our translations of them. For it is with translation, but
only with translation, that the issue of inscrutability arises; while
we are simply using our language, there is no such issue. Let us look
at two longer comments of Quine’s on this subject:
To say what objects someone is talking about is to say no more than how
we propose to translate his terms into ours....
The point is not that we ourselves are casting about in vain for a mooring.
Staying aboard our own language and not rocking the boat, we are borne
smoothly along on it and all is well; ‘rabbit’ denotes rabbits, and there is
no sense in asking, ‘Rabbits in what sense of “rabbit”?’ Reference goes inscrutable
if, rocking the boat, we contemplate a permuational mapping of
our language on itself, or if we undertake translation. (TPT 20)
And again:
Within the home language, reference is best seen (I now hold) as unproblematic
but trivial, on a par with Tarski’s truth paradigm. Thus ‘London’ denotes
London (whatever that is) and ‘rabbit’ denotes rabbits (whatever they are).
Inscrutability of reference emerges only in translation. (RPR 460)
The point here, I think, is that while we are speaking our familiar
language (or a language whose translation into it is well established),
the inscrutability of reference simply gets no grip. It does not in
anyway interfere with language use or force us to modify our account
of that use. And this is true also of that special case of language
use in which we use some words to say what other (or indeed nonother)
words refer to. There is, of course, no saying what objects a
word refers to except by using, and thereby taking for granted, some
language. But this should not seem threatening or paradoxical: There
is no saying anything except by using and taking for granted some
language and indeed, on Quine’s account, some substantive theory of
the world. If this continues to seem paradoxical, it is perhaps because
the point of §I is hard to absorb. We tend to treat the notion of an
object as fundamental rather than seeing objects merely as “neutral
nodes [in] the structure of [our] theory” (PTb 33). We tend, therefore,
to think that there should be something that an object really and
truly is, is in itself – something that outruns the role it plays in our
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