W.V.O. Quine, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Inscrutability of reference is the thesis that reference is determined only relative to a translation manual or background language.12 Within a single language, the question whether rabbit refers to rabbits or to undetached rabbit-parts cannot be answered without relativizing reference to a coordinate system — typically the disquotational schema, 'rabbit' refers to rabbits, which fixes reference relative to the home language but does not fix it absolutely. Ontological relativity generalizes the point: ontology is determined only relative to a chosen translation manual or background language.34
There is no absolute ontology of a theory taken in isolation from the linguistic apparatus in which the theory is regimented. This is not a relativism about what exists; it is a structural claim about the relativity of reference and ontology to coordinate systems, analogous to the relativity of position and motion in physical theory.5
Inscrutability of Reference thick imposing periodical philosophy language published in Spanish twice a year in the Canary Islands under the title Gavagai. A book by David Premack, on his language experiments with chimpanzees, lately under title Gavagai. Hubert Dreyfus California vanity plates Volkswagen Rabbit spell 'Gavagai'.Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist, pp. 374–375
His rival translations, the homophonic and its dual, conflict on every sentence. A weakness of this construction is that the dual manual depends on viewing the natives' volunteered sentences as denied rather than affirmed—a gratuitous reversal of the translator's conventional orientation. Still, in view of Levy's construction if not Massey's, one can scarcely question the holophrastic indeterminacy thesis.Pursuit of Truth, pp. 60–61
Surely this is absurd, for it would imply that there is no differ- ence between the rabbit and each of its parts or stages, and no difference between a formula and its Gédel number. Reference would seem now to become nonsense not just in radical translation but at home. Toward resolving this quandary, begin by picturing us at home in our language, with all its predicates and auxiliary devices.I first urged the inscrutability of reference with the help, pp. 57–58
The background language gives the query sense, if only relative sense; sense relative in turn to it, this background language. Querying reference in any more absolute way would be like asking absolute position, or absolute velocity, rather than position or velocity relative to a given frame of refgrence.I first urged the inscrutability of reference with the help, pp. 58–59
The issue is palpably unreal, and the doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation depends in no way upon it. gavagai example was at best an example only of the inscrutability of terms, indeterminacy translation sentences.Confessions of a Confirmed Extensionalist, pp. 212–213
The inscrutability and ontological-relativity theses are among the most influential twentieth-century claims in philosophy of language and metaphysics. Hilary Putnam's model-theoretic argument (1976/1980) generalized the inscrutability to the semantic-realist position itself, arguing that any intended interpretation of a formal theory is unintended at the level of models. Donald Davidson's 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme' (1974) raised the question of whether ontological relativity collapses into a self-undermining relativism. The contemporary debate inherits both Putnam's extension and Davidson's structural worry.