Willard Van Orman Quine

obert kirk
6 Indeterminacy of Translation
1. introduction
Quine’s doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation has been described
as “the most fascinating and the most discussed philosophical
argument since Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the
Categories.” 1 Yet it has proved extraordinarily hard to state clearly
without trivializing it. An illustration will give a preliminary idea of
what it is about.
Suppose a German physicist remarks, ‘Das Neutrino hat keine
Masse’. Then any English-speaking physicist with a knowledge of
German will translate that sentence by ‘Neutrinos have no mass’.
That meshes perfectly with the going scheme for translating between
the two languages and raises no problems at all. However, if Quine
is right, it would be possible to devise an alternative scheme for
translating between German and English that fitted all the relevant
objective facts yet offered as its own version of ‘Das Neutrino hat
keine Masse’ an English sentence that we should all agree was not
even loosely equivalent to ‘Neutrinos have no mass’. I cannot say
what such an alternative translation would be like. The trouble, according
to Quine, is that to produce a complete alternative scheme
for translating between a given pair of languages would require too
much time and effort to be seriously considered. (The project seems
unlikely to attract a grant.) Attempts have been made to construct
simple examples, but they are not compelling (see §11). Still, that illustration
will serve to convey the general idea – except that without
further explanation it is likely to create misunderstandings. I will try
to forestall the commonest ones straight away.
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