Willard Van Orman Quine

Aspects of Quine’s Naturalized Epistemology 33
conclude that at least one of its premises is false, but on the basis
of this information, we are not, in general, able to determine which
premise is false. The possibility of multiple possible revisions arises
for the following reason. If a valid argument has a false conclusion,
then at least one of its premises stands in need of revision, but given
multiple premises, this generates the possibility of multiple possible
revisions. The next step is to extend these reflections to theories –
evidently accepting something like the hypothetico-deductive conception
of science in doing so.
Sometimes...anexperience implied by a theory fails to come off; and then,
ideally, we declare the theory false. But the failure falsifies only a block of
theory as a whole, a conjunction of many statements. The failure shows
that one or more of those statements is false, but it does not show which.
The predicted experiences, true and false, are not implied by any one of the
component statements of the theory rather than another. The component
statements simply do not have empirical meaning...but a sufficiently inclusive
portion of the theory does. (EN 79)
We then reach the doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation in
a somewhat curious way. Here Quine does not begin by speaking
generally about translating one language into another; instead, he
considers the special case of translating a theory from one language
into another.
[I]t is to be expected that many different ways of translating the component
sentences, essentially different individually, would deliver the same empirical
implications for the theory as a whole; deviations in the translation of
one component sentence could be compensated for in the translation of another
component sentence. Insofar, there can be no ground for saying which
of two glaringly unlike translations of individual sentences is right. (EN 80)
As stated, this passage only concerns the translation of theories from
one natural language to another and thus does not seem to apply
broadly to language. The transition to a more encompassing doctrine
of the indeterminacy of translation occurs in these sentences:
[I]f we recognize with Duhem that theoretical sentences have their evidence
not as single sentences but only as larger blocks of theory, then the indeterminacy
of translation of theoretical sentences is the natural conclusion.
And most sentences, apart from observation sentences, are theoretical. (EN
80–1, emphasis added)
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