Willard Van Orman Quine

170 robert kirk
It seems that this argument depends on essentially the same
question-begging assumption as was made in defense of the inscrutability
of reference in Word and Object. This is that the only
objective basis for analytical hypotheses is the matching up of observation
sentences. As we noticed when discussing that earlier argument,
the assumption is at best implausible. Its implausibility is
highlighted by the present argument. For this focuses on the foreign
physicist’s theory. In order to tell what that theory is – even to tell
which sentences belong to it – it is necessary to take account of a
lot more than observation sentences. The dispositions of the foreign
physicist that are relevant are not merely ones to assent to sentences
belonging to the theory. There are higher-order dispositions to be
taken into account as well, for example, dispositions to revise the
first-order dispositions in various circumstances. If Quine is saying
only that all those dispositions are to be disregarded and that there is
“indeterminacy” if we do disregard them, then for reasons noted earlier
the indeterminacy doctrine is trivially true (see §5). To avoid trivializing
it, therefore, all such facts must be allowed to be taken into account.
Once that is seen, pressing from above appears to be a failure.
It provides no independent support for the indeterminacy thesis. 13
11. alleged instances
The weakness of other arguments for the indeterminacy thesis would
not matter if there were well-established instances of it. Quine himself
has been wary of suggesting such instances, 14 but others have
offered to fill the gap. Here are some of them.
Hartry Field’s example is that “we can translate certain outdated...physical
theories into current theory in a variety of ways.” 15
For example, Newton’s ‘mass’ can be translated either as ‘relativistic
mass’ or as ‘rest mass’. Field claims there is no fact of the matter as
to which translation is correct. That is surely right. However, since
Newton’s theory is significantly different from current theory, this
appears to be no more than an example of the familiar phenomenon
noted earlier: There are likely to be a number of different rough translations
and assignments of reference from one theory or conceptual
scheme into another.
Other suggested instances have been taken from mathematics and
set theory. For example, it has been argued that “a shining example of
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