Willard Van Orman Quine

Quine on Quine 291
I countenance mentalistic predicates when their applicability is
outwardly observable enough for practical utility. Our materialistic
predicates, after all, are likewise vague in varying degrees, and
I would apply the same standards. But mental entities I dispense
with, and extensionalism I insist on for applicability of our quantificational
logic.
Two acceptable manuals of translation might translate a foreign
sentence into English sentences that both translators recognize as
opposite in truth value. The two translations would be English sentences
on whose truth values neither translator had an opinion except
for agreeing that they must be opposite. Probably the foreigner
was likewise open-minded about the truth value of his original sentence.
Open-mindedness does not banish truth values.
A good manual will seldom state an integral translation for a
sentence, but will support many by implication as acceptable paraphrases
of one another. I picture my fiction of a manual of translation
as an exhaustive account in the home language of the vocabulary and
grammar of the foreign lenguage. The manual should afford, by implication,
many equivalent translations of a sentence.
Two rival manuals will disagree on what set of translations of
a foreign sentence they by implication support. This is where, by
my lights, open-mindedness does give way to truth-valuelessness:
there is no fact of the matter. Such is indeterminacy as distinct from
under-determination. But I anticipate.
[I] see science in the broadest sense as an inclusive, loosejointed
theory of reality. Linguistics is part of it. The whole system becomes
more closely knit here and there, as science progresses. Our successes
in prediction and technology assure us that we are on the
right track on the whole, but some irreducibly different turn, deep
in the fundamentals, might have fared as well; such is the conjecture
of under-determination.
My conjecture of indeterminacy of translation is a different sort
of thing. It is that in the general interlinguistic case the notion of
sameness of meaning is an objectively indefinable matter of intuition.
This implies that the notion of meanings as entities, however
abstract, is untenable, there being no entity without identity. I reject
introspection as an objective criterion, however invaluable heuristically.
[M]y conjecture of indeterminacy of translation concerned not
terms like ‘gavagai’ but sentences as wholes, for I follow Frege in
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