Willard Van Orman Quine

Indeterminacy of Translation 165
toward the end of §7). 8 According to it, two schemes of reference for
a pair of languages could both fit all the Quine-acceptable facts yet
conflict in their pairings of referring expressions. It is a highly significant
thesis in its own right, since it implies that there is no matter
of fact as to what we are referring to (see Chapter 5). Quine also
seems to suppose (at any rate in Word and Object, but see the end
of this paragraph) that if there is inscrutability of terms, then there
is also indeterminacy of translation of whole sentences. That seems
right. If there is indeterminacy of translation at all, it holds in the
“domestic” case. So if translation in the domestic case is not subject
to the indeterminacy, statements such as ‘“Rabbit” refers to rabbits
and not rabbit stages’ are determinately translatable by other English
speakers. In that case, we can hardly represent English speakers as
believing that ‘rabbit’ refers to anything but rabbits or as intending
to use that expression to apply to anything but rabbits. So if reference
is after all inscrutable (in the strong sense so far considered), translation
is subject to the indeterminacy. (It is true that in “On the
Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation” Quine stated that there
is “little room for debate” over the inscrutability thesis and also that
this thesis does not entail indeterminacy of sentence translations. 9
However, both those claims rest on an example of translation from
Japanese into English that depends essentially on the two languages
having different syntactic and semantic resources. Since the example
admittedly fails to support the indeterminacy of translation, I will
not set it out here.)
Does the ‘gavagai’ argument work? There has been a great deal
of discussion in the literature, and some further considerations have
been advanced, not all by Quine himself. But the argument stated
above appears to be defective. Quine is right to say that pointing by
itself cannot settle the matter – though it does seem to constrain
the radical translators to connect ‘gavagai’ with rabbits in some way
or other. Where the reasoning falls short is in its treatment of the
prospects for settling the matter with the help of intelligent questioning.
Certainly, if the translation of our questions is itself subject
to indeterminacy, then questioning cannot establish determinacy of
reference. And of course Quine’s opponents must not assume that the
questions are free from indeterminacy. But by the same token, Quine
himself must not presuppose indeterminacy, since pressing from
below is intended to establish it. It is true that isolated questions
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