7. Radical Translation

Philosophy of Language

7. Radical translation

Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000)

• a philosopher and logician

• probably the most important American philosopher of the 20th century

• studied under supervision of Rudolf Carnap in Prague during the winter of 1932-33

• teacher at Harvard of Donald Davidson and Noam Chomsky

Writings

• Word and Object (1960)

• From Stimulus to Science (1995)

“Imagine a dog idling in the foreground, a tree in the middle distance, and a turnip lying on the ground behind the tree. Either of two hypotheses, or a combination of them, may be advanced to explain the dog's inaction with respect to the turnip: perhaps he is not aware that it is there, and perhaps he does not want a turnip.” (“On the Nature of Moral Values”, 1978, p. 55)

Philosophy of language

• Quine overcame problems of ideal and ordinary language philosophy:

• we have found the ideal language for the use of science, it is first-order logic and set theory

• we can analyse natural language logic in so-called regimentation; the stuff we lose is probably not very important

• regimentation: using means of formal logic to understand the natural language

Behaviourism

• he is behaviourist

• we can study languages only through verbal/behavioural output

• we don’t need the stuff in our heads when dealing with linguistic meaning, similar to beetle in the box

“In psychology one may or may not be a behaviourist, but in linguistics one has no choice. Each of us learns his language by observing other people's verbal behaviour and having his own faltering verbal behaviour observed and reinforced or corrected by others. We depend strictly on overt behaviour in observable situations. As long as our command of our language fits all external checkpoints, where our utterance or our reaction to someone's utterance can be appraised in the light of some shared situation, so long all is well. Our mental life between checkpoints is indifferent to our rating as a master of the language. There is nothing in linguistic meaning beyond what is to be gleaned from overt behaviour in observable circumstances.” Pursuit of Truth, 1995, p. 37-38

Criticism of behaviourism

• it is still favourite, but sometimes criticised

• linguistic behaviourism was criticized by Noam Chomsky because of the failure to explain language acquisition; Chomsky’s first important paper was a review of Verbal Behaviour by behaviourist Burrhus F. Skinner (Language, Vol. 35, No. 1, 1959, pp. 26-58)

• mastery of a language is not a matter of being trained what to say:

“It is simply not true that children can learn language only through 'meticulous care' on the part of adults who shape their verbal repertoire through careful differential reinforcement.” (p. 42)

• “poverty of the stimulus” argument: language cannot be learned by mere sensory input, its deep and abstract structure must be innate

Radical translation

• a method to translate a completely unknown and unrelated language

• when translating an exotic language, a field linguist can depend only