Willard Van Orman Quine

292 burton s. dreben
deeming sentences the primary vehicles of meaning. The indeterminacy
ascribed to ‘gavagai’ comes under the head rather of indeterminacy
of reference, or ontological relativity. This indeterminacy is
proved, unlike my conjecture of the indeterminacy of holophrastic
translation. Its proof is trivial and undebatable. In essence it comes
down to the equivalence of ‘x is an F’ to ‘the proxy of x is the proxy
of an F’. It does not imply the indeterminacy of holophrastic translation,
because the indeterminacy of reference of a term can commonly
be pinned down by the rest of the sentence.
If we take ‘gavagai’ not as a term but as a one-word sentence, ‘Lo,
a rabbit’, it still does not illustrate the indeterminacy of holophrastic
translation. It is an observation sentence, and hence, according
to Word and Object, determinate in translation. ‘Lo, a rabbit’, ‘Lo,
undetached rabbit parts’, and ‘Lo, rabbithood’ are all equivalent.
[M]isunderstanding surfaces also where [some have] me assuming
that the only route to meaning is via translation. This was not
the idea. [And do not] misinterpret my thought experiment in radical
translation as an inquiry into the child’s acquisition of language.
That is quite another matter, and a fascinating one. But in my writings
I have limited my concern with it to the minimum necessities
of ontology, the structuring of science, and the meeting of minds regarding
events in the external world: [three] traditional concerns of
philosophy.
The abdication of epistemology to psychology, in which I connive,
is less abject than [some] see it. The pertinent motivations
and aptitudes remain those of the analytic philosopher rather than
the experimental psychologist. Analysis of reification was called for,
which had been passed over by psychologist and philosopher alike.
This analysis branched into settling on what counts as reification
and what service it discharges in the structuring of science and our
spatiotemporal conception of the world. An incidental question, germane
to epistemology but not traditional, was as to what aspects of
our ontology are essential to science and what ones are merely subjective.
There is philosophical progress here for which we would not
look to psychology.
Another dimension into which these speculations lead is subjective
similarity of perceptions. This is recognizable as psychology,
but I doubt that the intersubjective harmony of these subjective
standards was looked into and accounted for until motivated by
Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006