ABSTRACT

The term "opacity" can refer either to reference and meaning or to mind. As it is used to characterize meaning and reference, the term means that the referent of a given word is inscrutable, and cannot be uniquely determined, even by ostension. This claim gives rise to the problem of the indeterminacy of translation, discussed most famously in Anglo-American analytical philosophy by W.V Quine and Donald Davidson. Quine argued that words had meaning only within a complete theory of "going concerns," and even ostension failed to define a term without such a theoretical background. Davidson argued that translation could only take place with reference to the translator's theoretical commitments and beliefs, and that any translation had to assume that the majority of the translated beliefs were true. On this basis, Davidson argued against the claim that beliefs were relative to conceptual schemes, since one could not make sense of conceptual schemes that were completely alien to one's own conceptual background.