..., indeterminacy of . W. V. Quine argued that there are no uniquely correct translations between languages. This is not the banal point that languages contain words with no precise equivalents in others, but the extraordinary claim that there is no such thing, ever, as a uniquely correct translation of a word . It forms part of Quine's argument that ‘there is no objective matter to be right or wrong about’ where the meaning of words is concerned ( Word and Object , 73), and it has implications in the philosophy of mind: if words have no meaning,...
... of translation The doctrine of Quine unveiled in ch. 2 of Word and Object , that the totality of subjects’ behaviour leaves it indeterminate whether one translation of their sayings or another is correct. Since there is nothing more than the totality of behaviour to fix one interpretation as the true one, the very notion of a determinately correct interpretation, or equivalently a single meaning that their sayings have, is undermined. Quine argued for his thesis ‘from below’ by pointing out that consistently with what we see of someone’s...
The doctrine of Quine unveiled in ch. 2 of Word and Object, that the totality of subjects' behaviour leaves it indeterminate whether one translation of their sayings or another is correct. Since ...
A thesis advanced by W. V. Quine on the basis of his famous argument for the indeterminacy of translation. Meaning is what we aim to preserve in translating between languages ...
The doctrine due to Quine that no empirical evidence relevant to interpreting a speaker's utterances can decide among alternative and incompatible ways of assigning referents to the words used; hence ...
The same process as radical interpretation, but the term even more notably implies that the process is entirely to be thought of in terms of translation; whereas in principle a language can come to ...
The process of interpreting a foreign language without reliance on existing linguistic knowledge or help from bilinguals. The term is sometimes used as if it applied to any process of coming to ...
[scrip‐teebl]A term used by the French critic Roland Barthes in his book S/Z (1970), and usually translated as ‘writerly’. In contrast with the easily readable or ‘readerly’ text (textelisible), the ...
Unpredictability in outcome, because a very large number of interrelated factors are involved and/or because understanding of the particular system is still quite limited.
Term originally used by Heidegger to characterize the central mistake of western metaphysics. In his vision, metaphysics from Plato to Nietzsche postulates a self-knowing and self-propelling ...
A view of literary interpretation associated with the American critic Stanley Fish. It holds that meaning does not reside in the text, but in the mind of the reader. The text functions only as a ...
Whatever it is that makes what would otherwise be mere sounds and inscriptions into instruments of communication and understanding. The philosophical problem is to demystify this power, and to relate ...
A word or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word or phrase in the same language, for example shut is a synonym of close.
(1908–2000)US philosopher, logician, and radical critic of modern empiricism.Born at Akron, Ohio, Quine was educated at Oberlin and Harvard, where he completed his PhD under the supervision of A. N. ...
(1917–2003).American philosopher who developed a widely admired and influential theory of mind and language. Davidson's deepest influence was Quine, with whom he shared a commitment to the ...
Celebrated animal introduced by the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) in 1935, in a thought experiment showing the strange nature of the world of quantum mechanics. The cat is thought ...
The provision of an expression in one language meaning the same as that of another. In so far as different languages reflect different cultural and social histories, because of the holism of meaning, ...
(Greek, eidos, visible form)A notion stretching all the way from one pole, where it denotes a subjective, internal presence in the mind, somehow thought of as representing something about the world, ...
(eth-nol-ŏji)the study of the different races of mankind, concerned mainly with cultural and social differences between groups and the problems that arise from their particular ways of life.—ethnic ...
1 The meaning conveyed by a declarative sentence, a declarative sentence being one that asserts or denies something, or in other words one that is capable of being true or false. The proposition is ...
