Willard Van Orman Quine

174 robert kirk
the foreign expression ‘gavagai’ must be matched with the English
term ‘rabbit’ rather than with any of the exotic alternatives Quine
offers, since that scheme is both simpler and easier to accommodate
in our existing theory of the world. Similarly, within our own language
any rivals to the homophonic scheme will inevitably be more
complicated and harder to fit into the rest of our theory. Rorty, for
example, has maintained that Quine faces a dilemma: “[H]e should
either give up the notion of ‘objective matter of fact’ all along the
line, or reinstate it in linguistics.” 24
This objection overlooks the question of how the statements of
linguistics are related to statements in terms of physics. In spite
of the admitted underdetermination of physical theory, Quine does
regard statements in terms of physics as stating facts. Now, some
nonphysical sentences are such that it is undeniable that their truth
is fixed by the purely physical truths. Given the physical facts, the
existence and natures of sticks, stones, and stars, for example, are
thereby determined: God could not have set up those same physical
truths without thereby creating sticks, stones, and the rest. Although
it seems conceivable that the same should have been so for relations
of synonymy – in which case they could safely have been counted
among the objective facts, too – that is just what Quine denies. If
he is right, statements about sameness of meaning float free of the
physical facts so obstinately that the latter are consistent with statements
of synonymy that actually contradict one another. It seems
fully in accord with Quinean principles to refuse to count such statements
as genuinely fact stating. Quine’s philosophy of science does
not compel him to accept determinacy of translation.
The “argument from structure” is inadequate by itself; perhaps it
can be supplemented on the basis of reflections on how the structure
of a language may be built up. It is common, and reasonable, to
assume a language can be acquired by a succession of steps (parents
tend to think of them as a matter of acquiring “words”). Imagine
a pair of twins who acquire English by the same sequence of steps,
and consider a very early stage – when they have only some hundred
or so words and only simple constructions. Is there room for
indeterminacy at that early stage? Most of the expressions of this
fragmentary language will be highly observational, such as the oneword
utterance ‘Dog’, but even those that are not so observational
will be very simple, such as ‘Dog nice’. True, if the question were how
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