Willard Van Orman Quine

Indeterminacy of Translation 177
Another philosopher influenced by Quine is Dennett. He appeals
to Quine’s reasoning in support of the view that interpretations of
people’s intentional states are subject to an indeterminacy. 31
Although there is not such a torrent of publications on Quine’s
indeterminacy doctrine today as there was a couple of decades ago,
that is not a sign that the issue has been decided. His suggestions
continue to challenge and excite.
notes
1. H. Putnam, “The Refutation of Conventionalism,” in Mind, Language
and Reality: Philosophical Papers, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1975), 159.
2. Note that Quine prefers to represent the conflict between translation
manuals as a matter of one excluding the other. Later, Quine writes
of “translations each of which would be excluded by the other system”
(WO 73 ff.); and still later, he writes, “[I]t is just that one translator would
reject the other’s translation” (RWO 297). There is a further modification
in Pursuit of Truth, where he suggests the following statement of
the thesis: “A manual of Jungle-to-English translation constitutes a recursive,
or inductive, definition of a translation relation together with
a claim that it correlates sentences compatibly with the behavior of
all concerned. The thesis of indeterminacy of translation is that these
claims on the part of the two manuals might both be true and yet the
two translation relations might not be usable in alternation, from sentence
to sentence, without issuing in incoherent sequences” (PTb 48).
In spite of differences in emphasis, especially the rather indirect way
in which conflict is represented, this appears to be essentially the same
thesis.
3. “Hypostasis of meanings is a red herring. I keep urging that we could
happily hypostatize meanings if we could admit synonymy. We could
simply identify meanings with the classes of synonyms” (RWA 73).
4. For a late statement of Quine’s view on the relations between the indeterminacy
doctrine and “the old notion of separate and distinct meanings,”
see ITA.
5. Although he maintains that physics is itself underdetermined by all the
possible evidence, he formats the indeterminacy doctrine on the basis of
the assumption that physics is construed realistically: “[T]here is no fact
of the matter even to within the acknowledged under-determination
of a theory of nature (RWO 303). Now the relation between the
interchangeable but incompatible manuals of translation that I have
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