Abstract

According to W. V. O. Quine translation is indeterminate. The thesis has attracted a good deal of attention and criticism. In spite of this fact, however, there seems to be little understanding of the nature of the thesis itself and Quine's reasons for it, at least on the part of those commentators and critics who have committed themselves in print. Thus, in my study of Quine I am primarily concerned with answering the following three questions: Exactly what does the indeterminacy thesis amount to, i.e. just what is being claimed? What are Quine's reasons/arguments for the thesis? What is the role of the thesis in Quine's philosophy, i.e. how does it relate to other doctrines embraced by Quine? ;I give what I take to be the real grounds for the indeterminacy thesis and then I examine this rationally reconstructed argument from the perspective of its relationships with and impact on other Quinean doctrines, e.g. the rejection of the notion of analyticity, underdetermination, holism, etc. This rationally reconstructed argument is found to turn on two fundamental theses which pervade Quine's thought: individual sentences do not have their own objective evidence, i.e. an indeterminacy thesis with respect to the allocation of objective evidence to individual sentences, and cognitive meaning is objective evidence, i.e. a version of the verificationist theory of cognitive meaning. ;I then examine the thesis of referential inscrutability and present an argument for it. This argument depends upon what I call 'the indeterminacy of truth' which will be the fourth identifiable indeterminacy thesis in Quine's thought. And the indeterminacy of truth is itself shown to be a consequence of the thesis of translational indeterminacy. ;Finally, I consider the question of whether Quine can sharply contrast physics with linguistics/translation or, more generally, whether he can sharply contrast truth in general with truth in translation