more from this thinker     |     more from this text

Single Idea 1632

[filed under theme 19. Language / F. Communication / 6. Interpreting Language / b. Indeterminate translation ]

Full Idea

Translation of our remote past or future discourse into the terms we now know could be about as tenuous and arbitrary a projection as translation of a heathen language was seen to be.

Gist of Idea

Translation of our remote past or language could be as problematic as alien languages

Source

Willard Quine (Speaking of Objects [1960], pt.V,p.25)

Book Ref

Quine,Willard: 'Ontological Relativity and Other Essays' [Columbia 1969], p.25

A Reaction

Is he seriously saying that we can't understand Shakespeare, because holism implies that we would have to be Elizabethans? So scholarship is in vain? Is yesterday the 'past'?

The 19 ideas with the same theme [full translation may be a logical impossibility]:

6318 The doctrine of indeterminacy of translation seems implied by the later Wittgenstein [Wittgenstein, by Quine]
18963 Indeterminacy translating 'rabbit' depends on translating individuation terms [Quine]
1631 You could know the complete behavioural conditions for a foreign language, and still not know their beliefs [Quine]
1632 Translation of our remote past or language could be as problematic as alien languages [Quine]
3988 Indeterminacy of translation also implies indeterminacy in interpreting people's mental states [Dennett on Quine]
6311 The firmer the links between sentences and stimuli, the less translations can diverge [Quine]
6312 We can never precisely pin down how to translate the native word 'Gavagai' [Quine]
6313 Stimulus synonymy of 'Gavagai' and 'Rabbit' does not even guarantee they are coextensive [Quine]
6317 Dispositions to speech behaviour, and actual speech, are never enough to fix any one translation [Quine]
6270 The correct translation is the one that explains the speaker's behaviour [Putnam]
6283 Language maps the world in many ways (because it maps onto other languages in many ways) [Putnam]
14206 There are infinitely many interpretations of a sentence which can all seem to be 'correct' [Putnam]
6399 Criteria of translation give us the identity of conceptual schemes [Davidson]
6179 Should we assume translation to define truth, or the other way around? [Blackburn on Davidson]
3495 Shared Background makes translation possible, though variation makes it hard [Searle]
3083 Many predicates totally resist translation, so a universal underlying structure to languages is unlikely [Harman]
3698 Indeterminacy of translation is actually indeterminacy of meaning and belief [Bonjour]
2763 There is an indeterminacy in juggling apparent meanings against probable beliefs [Dancy,J]
6341 Right translation is a mapping of languages which preserves basic patterns of usage [Horwich]