Willard Van Orman Quine

168 robert kirk
thought, we could concede them immediately, noting only that in
that case they would have slight philosophical interest. For they
would give no support to the claim Quine has actually based on his
indeterminacy doctrine, to the effect that relations of meaning and
associated notions are not matters of fact. Even Plato, that archexponent
of the myth of the meaning museum, could have conceded that
different languages pick out different meanings (or Forms) while still
insisting that it was a matter of hard objective fact which meaning
each expression picked out.
In general, the effect of two languages having different resources
will be that there is no exact translation between them, whether we
are talking about the translation of whole sentences or of referring
expressions. Granted, exactness is a matter of degree, and it is not
news that rough translations and assignments of reference may be
inequivalent. That has no tendency to support Quine’s interesting
claims. To clinch the point, notice that a single manual of translation
could consistently offer a set of different rough translations in
English for a given single sentence of the foreign language – without
actually rejecting any of those rough translations. As Quine himself
clearly recognizes, the only interesting sort of indeterminacy would
be where one manual actually rejected the other’s translations or
assignments of reference. There is no interesting indeterminacy or
inscrutability at all unless it holds also for the domestic case, which
is free from syntactic and semantic differences.
Before leaving the inscrutability thesis, we should note that Quine
offers further considerations in support of it in later writings, notably
in Ontological Relativity (1969). Davidson and Putnam have also
defended versions of the thesis. 11 (For more on this thesis, see Chapter
5.)
10. pressing from above
In Word and Object, the dominant argument for the indeterminacy
of translation seems to be the inscrutability of reference: pressing
from below. In “On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation,”
Quine suggests there has been a misapprehension: “The real ground
of the doctrine [of indeterminacy of translation] is very different”
(RIT 178), namely, his thesis of the underdetermination of our theory
of nature.
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