Willard Van Orman Quine

Indeterminacy of Translation 155
the “name of explanation,” the physiological is “deepest and most
ambitious,” but for practical purposes we must rest content with the
third variety: explanations in term of behavioral dispositions. That
is “what we must settle for in our descriptions of language, in our
formulations of language rules, and in our explications of semantical
terms” (MVD 88).
The indeterminacy thesis appears to give powerful support to
Quine’s views on the shortcomings of the notion of meaning. If two
schemes of translation can both fit all the relevant objective facts yet
still be in substantial conflict with one another, sameness of meaning
itself cannot be a matter of objective fact. For Quine, that whole
scheme of description and explanation is misconceived. One way in
which he has expressed this point is in terms of Brentano’s view that
“intentional” notions cannot be defined in other terms.
One may accept the Brentano thesis either as showing the indispensability
of intentional idioms and the importance of an autonomous science of intention,
or as showing the baselessness of intentional idioms and the emptiness
of a science of intention. My attitude, unlike Brentano’s, is the second. 4 (WO
221)
4. the domestic case
If Quine is right, relations of synonymy are not matters of fact even
when they are supposed to hold between sentences of one and the
same language. I tend to presuppose that, for each sentence of our
shared language, what you mean by it is also what I mean by it (usually,
of course, there may be exceptional circumstances). I “translate”
each sentence of your language by that same sentence. Quine thinks
that if I were perverse and ingenious, I could “scorn” that homophonic
scheme of translation and devise an alternative that would
attribute to you “unimagined views” while still fitting all the relevant
objective facts, including facts about your verbal and other
behavior (see WO 78).
But it is still not clear what he is driving at, since there is room
for different interpretations of ‘fitting the facts’. Two questions have
become urgent: What are the relevant objective facts, and what is it
for a translation manual to fit them?
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