BA (Hons) Law and Philosophy final year student, Morton Thornton gives us an insight into his recent Philosophy of Language essay. This is the second and final part in the blog post series, ‘Do our words mean anything?’. In case you missed Part 1, you can read it here.
By Morton Thornton
Final year, BA (Hons) Law and Philosophy
Following on from Part 1, languages cannot be fully translated, and therefore there is no meaning. But if you are following me this far, then you might be thinking surely there has to be some meaning because you can (hopefully) understand what I am saying. Critics of Quine claim that his approach is too strict. All of science is underdetermined. Any theory could be disproved and revised at any time, but science would be pointless if it just stopped for fear of revision. Scientists use existing knowledge as a framework to create probable, inductive theories (Chomsky, 1968), so we should not fear using language by holding it to a higher standard of proof than even physics! Donald Davidson (1967) suggested, alternatively, that translation should better be seen as a way to understand the foreign speakers’ beliefs. Once the linguist has radically translated enough of the language to understand how the speakers think, he can apply the principle of charity – i.e. make an informed guess that their beliefs are rational – to issues regarding the inscrutability of terms, and then work out the most likely meaning of several possibilities. But there are problems with this.
Linguistic relativity is the idea that languages influence the way their speakers think, which would mean that a direct translation of terms is not possible because it requires thinking differently to understand it. For example, in Swedish (as in English), time is described as a distance (short and long), but in Spanish it is a volume (big or small). A study of bilinguals by Bylund and Athanasopoulos (2017) found that when given a visual prompt (either a bar growing across the screen or a container being filled up), both Swedes and Spaniards would answer questions about how much time had passed depending on which prompt they were being shown. But, when asked in their second language, their answers changed based on the language and were unaffected by the prompts, thereby showing language is the primary influence on speakers’ thought processes, even over sensory stimuli. It does not affect translation on a practical level; ‘mucho tiempo’ can simply be equated to ‘en lång tid’ and used in the same way. But they mean different things, and to understand this meaning requires knowing that the foreign speakers have a different perception of the world, and how this perception affects the way they speak. (For a great exploration of this idea involving giant space aliens, I recommend Ted Chiang’s short story, Story of Your Life, and/or the 2016 film Arrival).
Davidson’s principle of charity is a pragmatic way forward to deal with the fact we can never be one hundred percent certain on the exact meaning of a translated word. Based on what the linguist has observed, it is fair to make a reasonable, educated guess. But this will always involve making highly ethnocentric assumptions about a people whose thoughts we have no way of knowing. Just as some cultures perceive time in a different way, so might they find it more natural to speak of rabbit parts instead of rabbit wholes. Their beliefs might align exactly with the linguist’s, but suddenly change drastically on this one point, with no conceivable explanation or logic. Charity cannot account for this. Pragmatically, of course, this makes little difference. We might not know precisely if they mean ‘rabbit’ or ‘undetached rabbit part’, but what realistic difference does it make so long as you can tell what is in your stew? Quine was not after a realistic difference though. He was looking for a strict account of meaning. And a strict account of meaning cannot have charitable assumptions, or uncertainties of meaning, or the possibility to be proven wrong. If these flaws cannot be solved, then there can be no theory of meaning in the strict sense. We can make do with loose theories based on likely predictions, but there can be no exact account of meaning behind any of our words. ‘Meaning’ is, therefore, meaningless.