Quine's Radical Translation and Indeterminacy Thesis

Quine's Radical Translation and the Indeterminacy Thesis

What is Quine's Radical Translation Experiment?

Quine advocates for a radical empiricism, incompatible with the idea of knowledge independent of experience and a qualitative separation between science and philosophy. This concept, combined with a strict behavioral methodology in language research, forms the basis of his hostility towards the intuitive concept of meaning and related concepts (synonymy, etc.).

In support of his skepticism toward notions of meaning and synonymy, Quine discusses the concept of translation because the meaning of a linguistic expression is what a translation into another language is or is not correct. That is, a linguistic expression is a good translation of another only when the two expressions are synonymous with each other.

Quine's Radical Translation Experiment

To explore the concept of translation, Quine proposes a radical translation experiment that should be carried out using a behaviorist methodology. This methodology uses criteria for translation based on information from the observable behavior of native speakers.

The Thesis of the Indeterminacy of Radical Translation

From this experiment, Quine draws the conclusion of the thesis of the indeterminacy of radical translation. The thesis states that there are sentences in the native language for which we have different translations into our language that are equally correct but incompatible with each other; they are not synonymous with each other.

This incompatibility may reside in the fact that, in compliance with our intuitive pre-theoretical assessment of statements, we would say that their meaning is not the same; they are not synonymous.

General Conclusions About the Significance of This Theory

This characterization presents a radically skeptical overview of meaning and synonymy. The dissertation refutes the equivalence relationship between synonyms. Quine thus would want to show that the concepts of meaning (and synonyms), understood according to usual pre-theoretical criteria, are inconsistent.

Quine addresses the proposed bypass of the concepts of meaning and synonymy by the application of behavioral methodology in making translations. For Quine, language and others are comparable.