Abstract
Quine's translation argumnent figures centrally in his views on logic. The goal of this paper is to get clear on that argument. It can be interpreted as an argument to the effect that one should never translate somebody’s speech as going against a law of the translator’s logic. Key to this reading of the translation argument is the premise that one should never translate somebody's speech such that their speech is unintelligible. Ultimately, it is my aim to reject this reading. I argue that only a weaker conclusion—one that says “not most of the time” instead of the stronger “never”—should be attributed to Quine. Accordingly, I propose and defend a weaker version of the first premise that better coheres with the weaker conclusion of the translation argument. Instead of the claim that one should never translate somebody’s speech such that their speech is unintelligible I argue that we should only ascribe to Quine the claim that one should not most of the time translate somebody’s speech in a way that makes it unintelligible. I go on to sum up the results of my discussion and respond to a criticism of my reading.
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Notes
Quine here includes in a footnote, “Cf. Wilson’s principle of charity: “We select as designatum that individual which will make the largest possible number of… statements true” (Wilson, “Substances without substrata”)” (Quine 2013, 54 fn. 2).
Berger writes, “According to Quine, there are no ‘alternative logics’ in the sense of logics that reject any of our classical logical truths as not true at all” (Berger 1990, 17).
This reading was suggested to me by David Rosenthal.
It is worth noting a story about Quine. In the nineties Quine presented a paper at the CUNY Graduate Center. David Rosenthal was in attendance. He pressed Quine on this very issue to which Quine reluctantly agreed that strictly speaking it is only all but impossible that there be enough evidence to outweigh evidence to the contrary and justify one in construing somebody as going against a law of logic.
It might be objected that the fact that the revisability doctrine is more influential does not provide sufficient reason to conclude that the anti-prelogicality thesis was an overstatement of Quine’s views. After all, perhaps he simply did not perceive the conflict between the two claims. The goal of this paper ultimately, however, is to put together a reading of Quine that on balance is most charitable. Unless there is overwhelming evidence in favor of such an interpretation, I think interpretations that ascribe oversights to philosophers are less preferable than ones that do.
Levin, before going on to argue against the view, writes, “The most natural reading of Quine’s translation argument is this: it is always more likely that a deviant translation is erroneous than that the translated party S has dissented from a logical law” (1979, 52). Note that those are Levin’s italics.
Chen also argues for a weakening of the principle of charity as relates to the tension discussed in the previous Sect. (2014, 231–2).
One might ask: to what extent “Neutrinos lack mass” is translatable into the everyday person’s language, even if that language is post 1930′s English? While the 1930′s layperson might find “Neutrinos lack mass” unintelligible, it is not clear how much better off the layperson of today would fare. This point arose in discussion with David Rosenthal.
I thank my second reviewer for this objection.
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Alexis Peluce, V. On Quine’s Translation Argument. Topoi 38, 315–320 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9434-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9434-8