Willard Van Orman Quine

164 robert kirk
the two languages, the linguists’ task has hardly begun. To translate
the countless nonobservational sentences, they have to construct analytical
hypotheses. ‘Gavagai’ itself is a one-word sentence. But the
language also has what appears to be a term, ‘gavagai’. The most natural
analytical hypothesis would match it with the English term ‘rabbit’.
That would imply that they were coextensive terms, “true of the
same things.” But Quine invites us to consider that ‘gavagai’ might
refer not to rabbits at all but to “mere stages, or brief temporal segments,
of rabbits” (WO 52). That would be entirely consistent with
‘Rabbit’ and ‘Gavagai’ having the same stimulus meanings as whole
sentences, for we are never stimulated by a rabbit without at the
same time being stimulated by a rabbit phase, and vice versa. Alternatively,
he suggests, ‘gavagai’ might be matched up with ‘undetached
rabbit part’. Or yet again, it might be equated with the “fusion” of all
rabbits, “that single though discontinuous portion of the spatiotemporal
world that consists of rabbits.” Finally, it might be taken to be
“a singular term naming a recurring universal, rabbithood.”
We might suspect that a uniquely correct rendering of ‘gavagai’
could be established by means of “a little supplementary pointing
and questioning.” But Quine notes that in pointing to a rabbit you
are at the same time pointing to “a stage of a rabbit, to an integral
part of a rabbit, to the rabbit fusion, and to where rabbithood is manifested.”
Similarly, in pointing to any of the other things, you are
pointing to each of the rest (see WO 52 ff). No doubt, we may think
that some well-designed questions would surely settle the matter.
The trouble is that to be in a position to assess the outcome of our
questioning we need to know what the questions themselves mean.
Suppose we imagine we are asking, ‘Is this the same gavagai as that?’
or ‘Do we have here one gavagai or two?’ How do we know such
questions mean what we think they mean? Quine maintains that
“[W]e could equate a native expression with any of the disparate
English terms ‘rabbit’, ‘rabbit stage’, ‘undetached rabbit part‘, etc.,
and still, by compensatorily juggling the translation of numerical
identity and associated particles, preserve conformity to stimulus
meanings of occasion sentences” (WO 54). If that argument works,
he has established the thesis he calls the ‘inscrutability of reference’
(or ‘of terms’). It is exactly the same as the thesis of indeterminacy
of translation except that it applies to terms rather than whole sentences
(substitute ‘term’ for ‘sentence’ in the statement of the thesis
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