Willard Van Orman Quine

162 robert kirk
the “subjects” culture. The linguists have to produce a “manual of
translation” between the jungle language of their subjects and their
own language, English. The objective data, Quine remarks, “are the
focus that [the radical translator] sees impinging on the native’s surfaces
and the observable behavior, vocal and otherwise, of the native”
(WO 28). Toward the end of the chapter, he comments – optimistically,
in light of the ensuing debate – “One has only to reflect on
the nature of possible data and methods to appreciate the indeterminacy”
(WO 72). Two main ideas are brought into play with a view to
making this alleged indeterminacy manifest.
One is that of stimulus meaning. It exploits the idea of responding
to queried sentences that we noted earlier. For any given sentence,
there is a set of (relatively brief) stimulations that will prompt
me to assent to it, a set that will prompt me to dissent from it,
and a set that will leave me undecided. Together they make up that
sentence’s stimulus meaning. For some sentences, assent or dissent
are forthcoming only after “an appropriate prompting stimulation.”
They are the occasion sentences, whose affirmative and negative
stimulus meanings are nonempty sets. Examples are ‘Red’, ‘It hurts’,
‘His face is dirty’. All other sentences are standing sentences, assent
and dissent to which is typically not affected by current stimulation,
although there is no sharp division between the two types. An
important subset of occasion sentences consists of observation sentences,
whose stimulus meanings for different speakers do not vary
significantly under the influence of information not accessible to
simple inspection (“collateral information”). Observation sentences
are highly significant for Quine: They “afford our only entry to a
language” (EN 89). Observationality is a matter of degree, but translation
of observation sentences is supposedly pretty firm. These sentences,
together with a few other types of sentences, are “translatable
outright, translatable by independent evidence of stimulatory
occasions”; however, they are “sparse and must woefully underdetermine
the analytical hypotheses on which the translation of all
further sentences depends” (WO 72).
These analytical hypotheses embody the other main idea Quine
uses to press the case for indeterminacy. To produce a translation
manual for a potential infinity of pairs of sentences, the linguists
have among other things to correlate sentence parts with sentence
parts – subject to any number of conditions. The linguists apparently
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006