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Modality, Mechanism and Translational Indeterminacy*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2010

Duncan MacIntosh
Duncan MacIntosh
Affiliation:
Dalhousie University
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Extract

How does Quine argue to the indeterminacy of translation? It has always been hard to tell, but one construction goes like this: A fact is determinate only if it is empirically determinable, for empirical evidence under-determines truth about the trans-empirical; theory is underdetermined by data. Therefore, facts about the unobservable, facts of theory, are indeterminate. A fact about the meaning of a person's sentence is only determinate if it is empirically determinable. The meaning of a person's sentence is empirically determinable only if it is empirically determinable under what conditions he assents to it. The meaning of a person's sentence about something unobservable is determinable only if it is determinable what unobservable events are occurring whenever he assents to a sentence supposedly about the unobservable. It is not empirically determinable what is going on in the unobservable realm whenever someone assents to a sentence supposedly about the unobservable. Therefore it is undeterminable what a person's theory sentence means. Therefore what it means is indeterminate.

Type
Articles
Information
Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 28 , Issue 3 , Summer 1989 , pp. 391 - 400
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 1989

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References

Quine, W. V., 1960 Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Quine, W. V., 1969 Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Warmbōd, Ken, 1988 “Behaviourism, Neuroscience and Translational Indeterminacy”, paper presented at the 1988 meetings of the Canadian Philosophical Association, Windsor, Ontario, Canada; revised version forthcoming in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy (March 1991).Google Scholar