Willard Van Orman Quine

Willard Van Orman Quine 17
is not merely underdetermined but indeterminate. (See Chapter 5
for a discussion of Quine’s thesis of indeterminacy of terms.) In
what sense is the translation of theoretical sentences indeterminate?
In the sense that the same foreign sentence can be translated
equally well by two (or more) different home language sentences. 1
This is the core idea of Quine’s famous thesis of indeterminacy of
translation.
But if indeterminacy is accepted, then sentence meanings do not
have identity conditions and therefore cannot serve as propositions
or as objectively valid translation relations, for there is no entity
without identity. Quine’s argument assumes, reasonably enough,
that a necessary condition for the identity of propositions is as follows:
If P1, P2, and P3 are propositions, then if P1 = P2 and P1 = P3,
then P2 = P3. But this is just the identity condition that indeterminacy
of translation shows that sentence meanings lack. Consider: if
S1, S2, and S3 are sentence meanings, then if S1 = S2 and S1 = S3,
it does not follow that S2 = S3. In Quine’s own words, “What the
indeterminacy of translation shows is the notion of propositions as
sentence meanings is untenable” (PTb 102). Finally, note that the indeterminacy
of translation is not a problem confronting translation;
in particular, it is not the claim that some sentences are untranslatable.
On the contrary, it is the claim that some sentences have
more than one acceptable translation. Thus indeterminacy is good
news, not bad news. (See Chapter 6 for an in-depth analysis and
evaluation of Quine’s indeterminacy thesis, and see Chapter 1 for
the claim that Quine’s thought experiment of radical translation is
inconsistent with his professed naturalism.)
summary and conclusion
As we have seen, Quine regarded himself to be a systematic thinker
insofar as the bulk of his philosophy, to include his repudiation of the
two dogmas of empiricism (viz., the analytic-synthetic distinction,
and reductionism), and his advocacy of moderate holism, underdetermination
of physical theory, and indeterminacy of translation,
as well as his advocacy of physicalism and empiricism, consists in
corollaries of his naturalism and extensionalism. This systematic
philosophy established Quine as the most influential philosopher of
the latter half of the twentieth century: his philosophical interests
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