Indeterminacy of translation: is gavagai a structural feature of meaning or a methodological artefact of behaviourist evidence-restrictions?

W.V.O. Quine, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Indeterminacy of translation is the structural thesis that, given any language and any total body of behavioural-evidential evidence about its speakers, there are mutually incompatible translation manuals from that language into another, each compatible with all the evidence, and no fact of the matter selects between them.¹ The radical-translation thought experiment makes this vivid: the field linguist confronted with gavagai uttered in the presence of a passing rabbit cannot, on behavioural-stimulus evidence alone, determine whether the native means rabbit, undetached rabbit-part, temporal stage of rabbit, or one more instance of rabbithood.²³

The choice between these is not arbitrary in the sense of random but is non-factual in the sense that no empirical evidence settles it. Stimulus meaning — what radical translation can determine — is what behavioural evidence about meaning can support; the rest is interpretive choice within the constraints stimulus meaning provides.⁴

Sources

1. I have directed my indeterminacy thesis on a radically exotic language for the sake of plausibility, but in principle it applies even to the home language. For given the rival manuals of translation between Jungle and English, we can translate English perversely English by translating into it into Jungle by one manual and then back by the other.

   Pursuit of Truth, pp. 57–59

2. Other adjustments still might accommodate translation of "gavagai" as "rabbithood," or in further ways. I find this plausible because of the broadly structural and contextual character of any considerations that could guide us to native translations of the English cluster of interrelated devices of individuation.

   By finding out roughly which non-verbal stimulations tend to, pp. 43–44

3. For my own part, I think the empirical slack in physics extends to ordinary traits of ordinary bodies and hence indeterminacy translation likewise affects level discourse. But it is important, for those who would not go so far, to note the graduation of liabilities. Gavagai, whose troubles shall review, extreme scale. It was an observation sentence.

   Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist, pp. 211–212

4. He develops such a system by abstraction and hypothesis. He abstracts native particles and constructions from observed native sentences and tries associating these variously with English particles and constructions.

   By finding out roughly which non-verbal stimulations tend to, pp. 42–43

Where the argument is made

• Word and Object (MIT, 1960), especially Chapter 2 on radical translation and the gavagai thought experiment, Chapter 3 on the ontogenesis of reference, and the later chapters on the indeterminacy theses
• 'On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation' (1970, in The Ways of Paradox)
• 'Three Indeterminacies' in Theories and Things (1981)
• the relevant passages in Pursuit of Truth (1992) Chapter 3

How the argument was received

The indeterminacy theses are among the most contested doctrines in twentieth-century philosophy of language. Donald Davidson's radical interpretation programme (1973-) preserved the structural indeterminacy while replacing Quine's behaviourist evidence- restriction with the principle of charity and a Tarskian truth-conditional semantics; the result is a friendlier extension that has become the standard framework. Noam Chomsky ('Quine's Empirical Assumptions,' 1968) mounted the most influential opposing case: that Quine's behaviourism mis-restricts the relevant evidence, that mentalist-cognitive evidence about the underlying linguistic competence is admissible, and that under those richer evidence-conditions the indeterminacy collapses. The contemporary debate inherits both the Davidsonian extension and the Chomskian challenge.