Willard Van Orman Quine

Indeterminacy of Translation 161
engages with our actual notions of translation and the rest is to rely
on the dispositions of competent linguists, for example, as follows:
By applying ordinary notions of sameness of meaning to a given pair
of languages but disregarding the usual constraints of simplicity and
practicality, rival manuals of sentence translation could be produced
that linguists would judge to be substantially conflicting yet empirically
adequate.
By invoking the judgment of linguists, we ensure that our ordinary
notions of meaning and translation are brought to bear in a competent
way. The resulting version of Quine’s thesis is neither obviously
false nor obviously true, and it has the implications for our ordinary
notions that he supposes his thesis to have. From now on, that is
what I shall take the indeterminacy thesis to be. (I distinguish this
thesis of the indeterminacy of sentence translation from Quine’s indeterminacy
doctrine as a whole, which includes, notably, the thesis
of the inscrutability of reference, to be noted below.)
7. quine’s reasons
If that thesis is true, it has profound, not to say disturbing, implications
for our ordinary conceptions of meaning and translation and
indeed for all the interlocking intentional notions. Some philosophers
have been so impressed that they have regarded it as justifying
the view that those ordinary notions are serious candidates for elimination.
However, unscientific sampling of colleagues’ opinions suggests
that a majority of philosophers remain unconvinced. Indeed,
one reason for the continuing fascination of Quine’s doctrine may
be that neither the arguments for it, nor those against, have seemed
compelling. (That suggests to me that, although the indeterminacy
doctrine would, if true, support several other Quinean claims, its falsity
would not do very much damage to his overall position. In spite
of appearances, it is itself only loosely supported by his other views.) 7
Given a nontrivial interpretation, it is clearly very important, yet it
remains tantalizingly hard both to defend and to attack. It is high
time to consider Quine’s own defense of it.
The classic text remains Chapter 2 of Word and Object, where
Quine describes the situation of linguists engaged in the famous
project of “radical translation.” This is translation from scratch, unaided
by interpreters, dictionaries, grammars, or any knowledge of
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