Philosophy Now Forum

I'm about to read a translation of Immanuel Kant's Grounding of the Metaphysics of a Moral (loosely) into English. It strikes me that it's possible to say that a sufficient or good translation has to stay within a certain scope! This is what I level against Quine as he appears on my Foe-list. Not only that, but his project of Philosophy seems to be sceptical and of the kind of minimalist philosophy without connecting him with Paul Horwich in any way...

I'm coming back to this, but this project is now open!

Cheers!

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"The indeterminacy of translation is a thesis propounded by 20th century analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine. The classic statement of this thesis can be found in his 1960 book Word and Object, which gathered together and refined much of Quine's previous work on subjects other than formal logic and set theory. The indeterminacy of translation is also discussed at length in his Ontological Relativity (1968).

In these books, Quine considers the methods available to a field linguist attempting to translate a hitherto unknown language. He notes that there are always different ways one might break a sentence into words, and different ways to distribute functions among words. Any hypothesis of translation could be defended only by appeal to context, by determining what other sentences a native would utter. But the same indeterminacy will appear there: any hypothesis can be defended if one adopts enough compensatory hypotheses about other parts of the language.

..........

Quine denies an absolute standard of right and wrong in translating one language into another; rather, he adopts a pragmatic stance toward translation, that a translation can be consistent with the behavioral evidence. And while Quine does admit the existence of standards for good and bad translations, such standards are peripheral to his philosophical concern with the act of translation, hinging upon such pragmatic issues as speed of translation, and the lucidity and conciseness of the results. The key point is that more than one translation meets these criteria, and hence that no unique meaning can be assigned to words and sentences."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indetermin ... ranslation

This morning I finished reading Linguistics and Philosophy: An Essay on the Philosophical Constants of Language by Etienne Gilson http://www.amazon.com/Linguistics-Philo ... t_ep_dpt_6
I conclude from my reading that Gilson agrees with Quine's hypothesis.

Thank you, tbieter! Very nice.

I'd also like to add that I also think meaning has to lie within this scope. You can't make a Flying Spaghetti Monster from the Bible and you can't make the US American constitution support Nazism. There are clear limits to how far you can extrapolate language before you sound like a lunatic...

So while I am on the limits, Quine is on the possibilities...

I'll see what I get out of it. Until then, my description of Quine stands...

Cheers!

Regarding the indeterminacy of language, here is Gilson at page 105:

"I imagine a French reader opening the Tractatus. The work is composed, it is said, of aphorisms, of which this is the first: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist. Our reader naturally asks himself what this proposition means. The question amounts to asking what it means for a reader different from him, for whom German would be his mother tongue, and even what it signified in the thought of Wittgenstein himself who wrote it.18"

And here is footnote 18 at page 191:

"18.On the problem of the translation of philosophical writings see the remarks of M. Heidegger in Questions I (Paris: Gallimard, 1968), "Author's Prologue," pp. 9-11. These few pages may require long reflection, for if the language in them is clear, their thought is profound. The position of the philosopher of Fribourg is that: "by the translation, the labor of one's mind [pensee] finds itself transposed into the spirit [esprit] of another tongue [langue], and thus undergoes an inevitable transformation. But this transformation can become fecund, for it causes the fundamental position of the question to appear in a new light." (p. 10). What he wants to say appears to me thus: first, that faithful translation from one language [lanfue]to another is not possible (without changing the meaning); second, that translation ought, therefore, to consist in an effort to think anew the same problem from the lexical and syntactical givens of another language [langue]; third, the question being the same, translation into another language [langue] of the response proposed by a philosopher constitutes in itself "a breaking of new ground for the question posed in common. It conduces to mutual comprehendion in a superior sense." (p. 11) Linguistics & Philosophy, supra; (Emphasis added)

A short comment: I've never heard that bilinguists (I know 3 languages to varying degree) report on deficiencies going from one language to another. The bil. must be able to communicate in both languages and be meaningful and respectful to the transition, yet I've never heard of a single problem about it! What are these problems supposed to be?

I'm a supposed to be unable to translate a New York Times article, perfectly meaningful, to fx. Norwegian. This becomes even more obscene in scientific contexts because one may be forced to say that science in different languages is different which is absurd!

I'll level more at this later...!

Cheers!