Understanding Quine: Radical Translation and Linguistic Meaning

Quine on Radical Translation and Indeterminacy

5. Arguments in favor of Quine on the radical translation of the indeterminate.

The core premise is that an expression b is a good translation of a if and only if a and b are synonymous. Given these links between the concepts of translation, meaning, and synonymy, Quine proposes to investigate these indirectly by adopting the perspective of a linguist in a situation of radical translation of a foreign language.

The Linguist's Framework

• The linguist must elaborate a manual for translating the foreign language.
• The foreign language must be one for which the linguist has no prior knowledge or benchmarks.
• The only data available to the linguist are the utterances of the natives and the circumstances in which they are spoken.

The Thesis of Radical Indeterminacy

As a result of this research, Quine concludes the thesis of the radical indeterminacy of translation: there are statements in the native language for which there are multiple translations in the linguist's own language that are incompatible with each other.

The criteria for selecting a translation and the procedure used for the elaboration of the manual are based on the direct empirical observation of the speakers: specifically, the observation of their conduct in relation to their environment. Quine justifies these restrictions through a strictly behaviorist methodology, which is a fundamental premise in his argumentation regarding indeterminacy.

Behaviorism and Linguistic Meaning

Regarding these restrictions, Quine argues:

• The behaviorist method is what we have all used in the learning of our own language.
• Whatever linguistic meaning is, we have managed to grasp and know it through this method.

Everything that exists in meaning is something that can be extracted from the observation of the behavior of speakers. Anything that cannot be known based solely on such conduct is irrelevant regarding meaning. Therefore, we can perform multiple, mutually incompatible translation manuals, as from an objective point of view, they may be equally appropriate.

Conclusion on Epistemological Limitations

The thesis establishes that the procedure of radical translation can produce at least two manuals—native language to target language—that are both correct but satisfy the following condition: at least one utterance in the native language is translated by one manual as A1 and by the other as A2, where A1 and A2 are incompatible statements.

Quine's purpose is to highlight the epistemological limitations of our ability to discriminate which manual is correct, asserting that there is no objective difference because no such difference is manifested in behavior.