QUINE AND DAVIDSON

QUINE AND DAVIDSON

Quine and Davidson took philosophy to be especially concerned with issues about language and logic, among other things, although they conceived of these issues in somewhat different ways. They both denied that there are distinctive philosophical methods or issues and they conceived of philosophical inquiry as continuous with other sorts of inquiry, principally scientific inquiry for Quine, while Davidson took a wider view.

For Quine, philosophical theories are to be assessed in the ways that scientific hypotheses are, and good philosophical method is continuous with good scientific method. This led him to reject two basic principles accepted by almost all philosophers in the previous century and a half. This he did in the “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.”

Quine and Davidson were especially concerned with language but harbored very different attitudes. Quine wrote a great deal about method in linguistics and about translation of one natural language into another. The central idea that sparked the philosophical feud between Quine and Davidson is Quine’s Indeterminacy of Translation Thesis. The indeterminacy thesis is a consequence of the thesis of the under-determination of theory by experience, as well as Quine’s behaviouristic view of language and his rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction.

According to Quine's famous thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, there are no facts of matter that could determine the choice between two or more incompatible translation schemes that are in accordance with all behavioural evidence. In his book Word and Object (1961), Quine argues that there is no correct translation of a word. All translations of words are equal. This is due to the competing claims made by different translators, neither of which can establish the correctness of their translation by referring to an independent standard. For Quine, there is no correct way to translate a word such as “gavagai”. There must be a non-circular way to define a term. One thus cannot use a term to define itself. One needs an independent referent to establish the meaning of the word. If one takes a behaviorist method and tries to translate the word “gavagai” into say “rabbit”, due to the competing translations available, one finds that such a word cannot have any objective, independent meaning, due to the incapability of oneself to identify which specific meaning a word has. If one observes someone use the word “gavagai” to refer to a rabbit, one must ask if the word is referring to a rabbit or undetached rabbit parts. Because one cannot establish with certainty what the user of the word means, one cannot correctly translate the word into one’s own language. Because all translators use this method it follows that there are no correct translations. Hence it follows, Quine thinks, that words lack meaning in and of themselves. In other words, there is no fact of the matter about what a word like “gavagai” means.

Reflection on the possible evidence for translation led Quine to the radical and surprising conclusion that translation is not determinate. According to his thesis of the indeterminacy of translation, there are always many equally good but mutually incompatible ways to translate sentences of one language into those of another---with nothing to choose among them. Similar reflection suggested to him that reference was also indeterminate, which led to Quine's thesis of ontological relativity. To take one of his famed examples as above, if we can interpret a speaker to be talking about rabbits, we can also equally well interpret the speaker to be talking about the property of being a rabbit, or about (undetached) rabbit-parts, etc. Nothing in nature will distinguish these different translations (or ontologies).

Donald Davidson, on his own, views a theory of translation alone as insufficient to ensure understanding of the language it translates (the translation may be into a language we do not understand), so the notion of ‘translation’ is replaced in the Davidsonian account with that of ‘interpretation’. Radical interpretation is a matter of interpreting the linguistic behaviour of a speaker ‘from scratch’ and so without reliance on any prior knowledge either of the speaker's beliefs or the meanings of the speaker's utterances. This lays bare the knowledge that is required if linguistic understanding is to be possible, but it involves no claims about the possible instantiation of that knowledge in the minds of interpreters.

According to this Davidsonian view, one cannot assign meanings to a speaker's utterances without knowing what the speaker believes, while one cannot identify beliefs without knowing what the speaker's utterances mean. We must then, says Davidson, provide both a theory of belief and a theory of meaning at one and the same time. Davidson claims that the way to achieve this is through the application of the so-called ‘principle of charity’ (Davidson has also referred to it as the principle of ‘rational accommodation’).

If we assume that the speaker's beliefs, at least in the simplest and most basic cases, are largely in agreement with our own, and so, by our account, are largely true, then we can use our own beliefs about the world as a guide to the speaker's beliefs. And, provided that we can identify simple assertoric utterances on the part of a speaker (that is, provided we can identify the attitude of holding true), then the interconnection between belief and meaning enables us to use our beliefs as a guide to the meanings of the speaker's utterances — we get the basis for both a rudimentary theory of belief and a rudimentary account of meaning. So, for example, when the speaker with whom we are engaged uses a certain sequence of sounds repeatedly in the presence of what we believe to be a rabbit, we can, as a preliminary hypothesis, interpret those sounds as utterances about rabbits or about some particular rabbit. Once we have arrived at a preliminary assignment of meanings for a significant body of utterances, we can test our assignments against further linguistic behaviour on the part of the speaker, modifying those assignments in accordance with the results. Using our developing theory of meaning we are then able to test the initial attributions of belief that were generated through the application of charity, and, where necessary, modify those attributions also. This enables us, in turn, to further adjust our assignments of meaning, which enables further adjustment in the attribution of beliefs, and so the process continues until some sort of equilibrium is reached. The development of a more finely tuned theory of belief thus allows us to better adjust our theory of meaning, while the adjustment of our theory of meaning in turn enables us to better tune our theory of belief. Through balancing attributions of belief against assignments of meaning, we are able to move towards an overall theory of behaviour for a speaker or speakers that combines both a theory of meaning and of belief within a single theory of interpretation.

The similarities and the differences between Davidson and Quine's view on indeterminacy of translation are: (4)

1-Davidson agrees with Quine that truth may be indeterminate. That is a certain sentence may be true according to one manual of translation and the same sentence false according to a second manual. But, as we shall see, he argues that the application of the principle of charity on an across the board basis would lessen the scope of this type of indeterminacy.

2-Quine has argued that logical form may be indeterminate. That is, two theories or manuals of translation for the same language may differ in their assignment of the underlying logic to the language being interpreted. Davidson limits the extent of this type of indeterminacy by attributing a uniform quantificational structure to all languages through the application of Tarskian truth schema by the radical interpreter.

3-Davidson also agrees with Quine that there may be differences in the references assigned to the same words and phrases, (the inscrutability of reference thesis). However, he argues that Quinean ontological relativity does not follow from the thesis of inscrutability of reference, for we cannot make sense of the suggestion that the ontologies of different languages may be totally different for the very idea that different languages may present differing conceptual schemes is unintelligible.

In short, these two philosophers have contributed crucially to a vast range of the most significant topics in philosophical study on both sides of the ocean for over the past 50 years. They adopted and marshalled support for their views through their own writings and those of through numerous able colleagues and students.