Quine

Analytic philosophy has at its canonically identified points of origin commitments to a problematic notion of meaning, one found, I would maintain, both in G. Frege and in G. E. Moore. It presupposes a certain notion of propositional content, of ideas or concepts that terms and statements express independently of their contingent linguistic forms. Determinacy connotes just this presumed independence of a notion of meaning irrespective of expressive form. On this view, translation translates expressions “meaningful independently of translation, namely by virtue of being used and explained in their home language.” Call translation of meaning so conceived the “recapture view.” On this account, when translation succeeds it “recaptures” or re-expresses whatever meaning the target statement had. This paper examines what philosophical assumptions Quine calls into question in maintaining indeterminacy of translation and his reasons for doing so. Surprisingly, commentators ignore what characterising translation as indeterminate actually implies for Quine. By putting together Quine’s worries about meaning and unpacking the determinacy/indeterminacy distinction, the stage is set for a close examination of just how Quine’s thought experiment of radical translation—the case where one confronts a language previous unknown or untranslated—makes both explicit and compelling arguments for indeterminacy of translation. Thus where a “recapture” view of translation assumes a fixed or determinate meaning existing prior to translation, indeterminacy of translation suggests that meaning in important respects results from a translation and cannot be independent of it. In the process, it links Quine’s skepticism about meaning to Davidson’s famous claim that “that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed” and identifies the roots of this skepticism in Quine’s criticisms of Carnap’s views on linguistic frameworks.