Inquiry On Quine’s Indeterminacy Of Translation

Indeterminacy of Translation comes into a philosophical issue, when Quine tried to construct his scientific semantics, which are based on his strategy of semantic ascent and empirical enterprise. After the five milestones of empiricism, what become to three backgrounds for his construction are insisting on semantic ascent everywhere, two tenets of empiricism and recasted observation sentence with intersubjective agreement from protocol sentence. The aim of recasted observation sentence is to characterize the relationship between the stimulations in empiricism and the system of sentences as theories in semantic ascent.Indeterminacy of translation is related to underdetermination of theory and inscrutability of reference, but meanwhile there are difference among them too. The former is broader and stronger than the both latters. Relative to a given theory or a term with determined referent, there is still indeterminacy of translation in their each own. The inscrutability of the term’gavagai’is not an argumentation for indeterminacy of translation, but just a helpful illustration for the subject. The two subjects can be separated from each other, and be expressed in totally different ways. Underdetermination of theory is indeed the argumentation for indeterminacy of translation, which was named as’press from above’by Quine. Indeterminacy of translation is not a particular case of underdetermination of theory in despite of both theses are about beyond all possible data and are thus in/under-determined. Furthermore, Quine thought that he had illustrated the difference without appealing to the distinction which is that underdetermination of theory has facts, that is, microphysical states as fact and reality, versus indeterminacy of translation has not. Quine, however, realized the relevance with difference between underdetermination of theory and indeterminacy of translation by shifting his position among’what there is’,’saying what there is’and his metaphysical microphysical states.Over 35 years, the changes in formulation and the difficulties in argumentation of indeterminacy of translation are connected closely with the definition of fundamental concepts in the theme. Quine had difficulties in defining stimulation and observation sentence. After abstaining from matching observation sentences by shared same stimulus meaning, the responsibility of stimulation in the theme is partly shared by the readjusted observation sentence. Therefore, stimulation can remain to stay at proximal end, i.e., proximal stimulation. Observation sentence has a problem on sharing neuroceptor among people in the past. The readjusted observation sentence overcome the problem so that it continue to have its one character as intersubjective agreement, but meanwhile it has to leave away from its another character as proximal stimulation. In characterizing the relationship between the stimulations from empiricism and the system of sentences as theories, observation sentence play a Janus-faced role as holophrastically and analytically simultaneously in order to bear the double functions of theory-laden and theory-free. But it is not successful to achieve the goal by sharing of words.Based on the three backgrounds, the difficulties in defining the fundamental concepts and in arguing the theme are related to the criterion of presupposing the three backgrounds. Social tool, empirical meaning, cognitive meaning are the criterions for choosing stuff to study, such as words, sensory stimulation and observation sentence. They are all from Quine’s interpretation on from within scientific heritage.