BA (Hons) Law and Philosophy final year student, Morton Thornton gives us an insight into his recent Philosophy of Language essay.
By Morton Thornton
Final year, BA (Hons) Law and Philosophy
We use words all the time to communicate with each other, from writing articles about why words are interesting, to telling your friends to go and read that article about why words are interesting. But have you ever stopped to consider what the words you are using actually mean? Some suggest that meaning comes from the intention of the speaker; some that there is an external source of meaning to which we all refer. Neither of these matter though if, according to W. V. Quine, there is no such meaning at all. This is what I shall be looking at in this two-part blog series.
Quine viewed philosophy as a branch of science. His study of language and meaning should be tested empirically through, he suggests, radical translation (Quine, 1960). Say a field linguist encounters a people who speak a language nothing like anything encountered before. In order to communicate with them, he must learn their language from scratch. If the language can be successfully translated from scratch, then there must be some sort of external meaning that underpins all languages. Some translation can be done through observation: a rabbit runs by and the foreign speaker shouts ‘gavagai’, so the linguist can note ‘rabbit’ as a reasonable translation of ‘Gavagai’. Once several words have been identified, these can be tested: if the linguist has identified sentences S1 (‘Animal’), S2 (‘White’), and S3 (‘Rabbit’), then by repeating each in different situations, he can work out that S3 will apply to every rabbit they see, but not to, say, the platypus; that S1 will apply to all rabbits and platypodes generally; and that S2 applies specifically to the white rabbit and the rare albino platypus, but not their dull brown cousins. Eventually, the linguist will be able to put together a translation manual of all identified foreign words and their equivalent meanings in the linguist’s home language.
Once the translation manual is complete, Quine (1970) then uses what he calls his ‘arguments from above and from below’ to prove there is no such thing as meaning. Firstly, his ‘argument from above’ goes that all scientific theories are underdetermined by evidence. Put simply, a theory may fit with all the evidence we have now, but could later be disproved by new future evidence. ‘Swan’ once meant ‘that elegant white bird with the long neck’, until suddenly a black swan was spotted. ‘Gavagai’ might, through all observations, correspond perfectly to ‘rabbit’, but it only takes one person to use the word in a completely new situation for the linguist to have to re-evaluate his theory. Because philosophy is a science, a translation manual will be underdetermined in the same way as any scientific theory, so at no point can we be certain it contains a definite theory of meaning. Secondly, his ‘argument from below’ suggests that despite identifying ‘rabbit’ as a reasonable translation, ‘gavagai’ could just as likely mean ‘rabbit stage’ or ‘undetached rabbit part’. This would not change the way the word was used, and testing would not narrow down a clearer answer, but nonetheless it changes the meaning of the word. Because of both the underdetermination of theories and the ‘inscrutability of terms’, Quine concludes that translation is indeterminate, and therefore there is no sort of meaning that underlies languages.
Stay tuned for Part 2, coming next week!