Willard Van Orman Quine

34 robert j. fogelin
Setting aside observation sentences, which we will discuss later, language
itself is presented as a theoretical structure, or perhaps better,
given Quine’s retreat from extreme holism, as a set of theoretical
structures. With this, we arrive at the strong version of the indeterminacy
of translation associated with Quine.
When we stand back and examine these passages from a naturalistic
perspective, it is hard not to be struck by their a priori character.
What, for example, are we to make of the claim that “it 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”? What precisely
would lead us to expect this? Well, if linguists routinely returned
from their fieldwork with radically different manuals translating
the same native language, then the matter of radical translation
would arise in the context of empirical inquiry. Yet nothing as radical
as this actually happens. There are, admittedly, disagreements
among linguists concerning proper translations of a target language,
but on nothing like the scale one would expect given Quine’s doctrine
of the indeterminacy of translation. The facts go against Quine,
and that, from a naturalistic standpoint, is something that should
matter.
From a naturalistic standpoint, a more interesting question is this:
Given that endlessly many equally adequate but incompatible translations
are abstractly possible, how are we to explain the broad convergence
in translation? Quine, in fact, has interesting and important
things to say on this matter, for example, in his essay “Natural
Kinds.” There he notes that our inductive procedures, both common
and theoretical, depend on treating certain similarities as salient
while ignoring others. As noted earlier, Quine invokes Darwinian
evolution as an account of the origin of these similarity factors. From
a naturalistic standpoint, this is the way to go. Why then does Quine
stress the doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation instead of
dismissing it as no more than an “uninteresting legalism”? Quine
could, after all, have argued in the following way: Given their own
commitments – and taking them seriously – the logical empiricists
should have recognized that theory is always underdetermined by
evidence. If the logical empiricists had simply thought this through,
they would have come to recognize that their position implied a wide
range of indeterminacies, including indeterminacy of translation.
Quine does, in fact, argue in just this way. What is peculiar from
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