Quine on Meaning and Translation1

² Quine, W. V. O., Word and Object (Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), 27.

³ Op. cit., note 2, Ch. II; also ‘Meaning and Translation’, in On Translation, Brower, R. A. (ed.) (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1959).

⁴ Op. cit., note 2, 68.

⁵ Quine, W. V. O., particularly ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, in From a Logical Point of View, (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1953). Also op. cit., note 2, Ch. I.

⁶ Op. cit., note 2, 68 f.

⁷ As is apparent from Quine's need to clarify his position in ‘On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation’, Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970), 178–183.

⁸ Quine, W. V. O., particularly ‘Ontological Relativity’ and ‘Speaking of Objects’, both in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays, (New York, London: Columbia University Press, 1969).

⁹ Op. cit., note 2, 51–52.

¹⁰ Ibid., 72.

¹¹ Op. cit., note 7, 178 and 183.

¹² Ibid., 183.

¹³ Harman, Gilbert, ‘An Introduction to Translation and Meaning’, Synthese 19 (1968), 14–26. Also in Words and Objections, Davidson, D. and Hintikka, J. (eds) (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1968).

¹⁴ Op. cit., note 7, 178 and 183.

¹⁵ Ibid., 178–179.

¹⁶ Ibid., 180.

¹⁷ In a recent paper, ‘The Nature of Natural Knowledge’, in Mind and Language, Guttenplan, S. (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), Quine says that the significant difference between the two empirically equivalent theories comes perhaps where we no longer see how to state rules of translation that would bring the theories together. But this reply is unsatisfactory, because it still does not say what the difference is between the two theories, which makes translation from one to the other problematic.

¹⁸ Op. cit., note 8. ‘Epistemology Naturalized’, also in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (op. cit., note 8).

¹⁹ Op. cit., note 18, 80–81.

²⁰ See ‘Ontological Relativity’, op. cit., note 8, 30 and 37. The analogy permeates the whole of ‘Epistemology Naturalized’, op. cit., note 18.

²¹ Op. cit., note 5, 38.

²² Op. cit., note 2, 26.

²³ It appears so, for example, to Steiner, George, see his Beyond Babel: Aspects of Meaning and Translation (Oxford University Press, 1975), 295n. It should be remarked in the present context that Dr Steiner's attribution to Wittgenstein of a view ‘closely parallel’ to Quine's Principle of Indeterminacy, seems without foundation. The sections of the Philosophical Investigations to which Dr Steiner refers in support of his claim (23, 206, 243, 528) make no mention of indeter minacy in translation, still less of the kind postulated by Quine.

²⁴ ‘Speaking of Objects’, op. cit., note 8, 25.

²⁵ Whorf, B. L., ‘An American Indian Model of the Universe’, International Journal of American Linguistics 16 (1950), 67–72. Reprinted in Language, Thought and Reality, Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Carroll, J. B. (ed.) (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1956).

²⁶ Op. cit., note 2, 234f.

²⁷ The conception of language briefly described here is meant, of course, to be Wittgenstein's; Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), particu larly sections 1–34, and see also throughout On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969).

²⁸ Op. cit., note 2, 76.

²⁹ See for example ‘Ontological Relativity’ (op. cit., note 8), 26–29.

³⁰ Op. cit., note 2, 32–33; and particularly the paper ‘Prepositional Objects’, in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (op. cit., note 8).

¹ This is a slightly revised version of a paper read to a post-graduate philosophy seminar in 1970 at Cambridge University. I should like to thank those present for their criticisms and help.