
translation, indeterminacy of Reference library
Gregory McCulloch
The Oxford Companion to Philosophy (2 ed.)
..., 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,...

indeterminacy of translation Quick reference
A Dictionary of Philosophy (3 ed.)
... 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...

indeterminacy of translation

indeterminacy of meaning

inscrutability of reference

radical translation

radical interpretation

scriptible

indeterminacy

metaphysics of presence

reader-response theory

meaning

synonym

W. V. O. Quine

Donald Davidson

Schrödinger's cat

translation

idea

ethnology
