Quine, Willard Van Orman;
Word and Object
MIT Press, 1960, 294 pages
ISBN 0262670011, 9780262670012
topics: | philosophy | language
§ 7.First steps of radical translation (Ch.2 Translation and Meaning)
p.26-27:
... surface irritations generate, through language, one's knowledge of the
world. One is taught so to associate words with words and other stimulations
that there emerges something recognizable as talk of things, and not to be
distinguished from truth about the world. The voluminous and intricately
structured talk that comes out bears little evident correspondence to the
past and present barrage of non-verbal stimulation; yet it is to such
stimulation that we must look for whatever empirical content there may be.
[Here] we consider how much of language can be made sense of in terms of its
stimulus conditions, and what scope this leaves for empirically unconditioned
variation in one's conceptual scheme.
A first uncritical way of picturing this scope for empirically
unconditioned variation is as follows: two men could be just alike in all
their dispositions to verbal behavior under all possible sensory
stimulations, and yet the meanings or ideas expressed in their identically
triggered and identically sounded utterances could diverge radically, for the
two men, in a wide range of cases. To put the matter thus invites, however,
the charge of meaningless: one may protest that a distinction of meaning
unreflected in the totality of dispositions to verbal behavior is a
distinction without a difference.
Sense can be made of the point by recasting it as follows: the infinite
totality of sentences of any given speaker’s language can be so permuted, or
mapped onto itself, that (a) the totality of the speaker’s disposition to
verbal behavior remains invariant, and yet (b) the mapping is no mere
correlation of sentences with equivalent sentences, in any plausible sense of
equivalence however loose
from § 17. Words and Qualities, p.80 (Ch.3: The Ontogenesis of Reference)
We saw that the specific objective reference of foreign terms is
inscrutable by stimulus meanings or other current speech dispositions. When
in English we decide whether a term is meant to refer to a single inclusive
object or to each of various of its parts, our decision is bound up with a
provincial apparatus of articles, copulas, and plurals that is untranslatable
into foreign languages save in traditional or arbitrary ways undetermined by
speech dispositions. Toward understanding the workings of this apparatus,
the most we can do is examine its component devices in relation to one
another and in the perspective of the develonment of the individual or the
race. In this chapter we shall ponder the accreting of those devices to the
speech habits of the child of our culture. The phylogenetic aspect will be
neglected, except in a few speculative remarks toward the end of the chapter;
and in what I shall have to say even of the ontogenetic aspect I shall
venture no psychological details as to actual order of acquisition. As
remarked, the language now concerned is specifically English; this
parochialism becomes increasingly marked from § 19 onward.
An oddity of our garrulous species is the babbling period of late
infancy. This random vocal behavior affords parents continual opportunities
for reinforcing such chance utterances as they see fit; and so the rudiments
of speech are handed down.
Mathematicians may conceivably be said to be necessarily rational and not
necessarily two-legged ; and cyclists necessarily two-legged and not
necessarily rational. But what of an individual who counts among his
eccentricities both mathematics and cycling? Is this concrete individual
necessarily rational and contingently twolegged or vice versa? p.199
Language consists of dispositions, socially instilled, to respond observably
to socially observable stimuli. Such is the point of view from which a noted
philosopher and logician examines the notion of meaning and the linguistic
mechanisms of objective reference. In the course of the discussion, Professor
Quine pinpoints the difficulties involved in translation, brings to light the
anomalies and conflicts implicit in our language's referential apparatus,
clarifies semantic problems connected with the imputation of existence, and
marshals reasons for admitting or repudiating each of various categories of
supposed objects. He argues that the notion of a language-transcendent
"sentence-meaning" must on the whole be rejected; meaningful studies in the
semantics of reference can only be directed toward substantially the same
language in which they are conducted.
Chapter I. Language and Truth 1. Beginnging with ordinary things 2. The objective pull; or, e pluribus unum 3. The interanimation of sentences 4. Ways of learning words 5. Evidence 6. Posits and truth Chapter II. Translation and Meaning 7. First steps of radical translation 8. Stimulation and stimulus meaning 9. Occasion sentences. Intrusive information 10. Observation sentences 11. Intrasubjective synonymy of occasion sentences 12. Synonymy of terms 13. Translating logical connectives 14. Synonymous and analytic sentences 15. Analytical hypotheses 16. On failure to perceive the indeterminacy Chapter III. The Ontogenesis of Reference 17. Words and qualities 18. Phonetic norms 19. Divided reference 20. Predication 21. Demonstratives. Attributives 22. Relative terms. Four phases of reference 23. Relative clauses. Indefinite singular terms 24. Identity 25. Abstract terms Chapter IV. Vagaries of Reference 26. Vaguenesss 27. Ambiguity of terms 28. Some ambiguities of syntax 29. Ambiguity of scope 30. Referential opacity 31. Opacity and indefinite terms 32. Opacity in certain verbs Chapter V. Regimentation 33. Aims and claims of regimentation 34. Quantifiers and other operators 35. Variables and referential opacity 36. Time. Confinement of general terms 37. Names reparsed 38. Conciliatory remarks. Elimination of singular terms 39. Definition and the double life Chapter VI. Flight from Intension 40. Propositions and eternal sentences 41. Modality 42. Propositions as meanings 43. Toward dispensing with intensional objects 44. Other objects for the attitudes 45. The double standard 46. Dispositions and conditionals 47. A framework for theory Chapter VII. Ontic Decision 48. Nominalism and realism 49. False predilections. Ontic commitment 50. Entia non grata 51. Limit myths 52. Geometrical objects 53. The ordered pair as philosophical paradigm 54. Mumbers, mind, and body 55. Whither classes? 56. Semantic ascent Bibliographical References Index