Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine on Reference and Ontology 149
Russian, and Chinese would presumably, from this point of view, count
as minor variants on modern scientific English – although from the point
of view of the poor language-learner they are very diverse languages
indeed.
24. This account perhaps plays down Quine’s holism – the view that it
is in general not individual sentences in isolation that have links to
stimulations but only more or less inclusive classes of sentences. But
there is no contradiction between the holistic point and the way I am
putting the matter here. If a given sentence has links to stimulations
only as part of a more inclusive class of sentences, then it is, we might
say, linked to the other sentences that make up that class. Such links –
and hence the more inclusive class – would have to be taken into account
in considering the meaning of the individual sentence. Part of
the complexity here can be seen from the fact that many sentences will
occur in indefinitely many such classes.
25. Quine has also argued that it is conceivable, at least, that two
Martians might come up with equally correct translations that did not
attribute the same net import to each human sentence but diverged in
exactly this particular. That is the doctrine known as “the indeterminacy
of translation,” discussed in Chapter 6 of this volume. The two doctrines
– indeterminacy of translation and ontological relativity – were
presented at a single point in Word and Object (chap. 2), and Quine was
not immediately clear on the differences between them. More recently
he has emphasized their differences. In particular, as we saw, he thinks
that the latter can be proved whereas he has spoken of the former as a
“conjecture” (RJW 728).
26. This is, of course, an extremely controversial claim. There is no room
here to go into the controversy; I am simply trying to represent the
matter as I think Quine sees it.
27. Compare Quine: “Ontological relativity is the relativity of ontological
ascriptions to a translation manual” (RPR 460).
Note that once the general scheme of translation is in place, there
is room for factual dispute. Two Martians who have both adopted the
complement translation may argue about whether ‘Rover’ refers to the
complement of the family dog or to the complement of the family cat. In
this case, one of them is right and one wrong, and the matter is settled in
exactly the same way as the analogous dispute between two adherents
of the other general scheme of translation.
28. I have attempted a more discursive treatment of the issues discussed
over the next few pages in my essay “Translation, Meaning, and Self –
Knowledge,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 91, pt. 3 (1990–1):
269–90.
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