Holophrastic indeterminacy, or indeterminacy of sentence translation, is one of two kinds of
indeterminacy of translation The indeterminacy of translation is a thesis propounded by 20th-century American analytic philosopher W. V. Quine. The classic statement of this thesis can be found in his 1960 book ''Word and Object'', which gathered together and refined much of Qu ...
to appear in the writings of philosopher
W. V. O. Quine W. may refer to:
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.
[ According to Quine, "there is more than one correct method of translating sentences where the two translations differ not merely in the meanings attributed to the sub-sentential parts of speech but also in the net import of the whole sentence".][ It is holophrastic indeterminacy that underlies Quine's argument against synonymy, the basis of his objections to Rudolf Carnap's analytic/synthetic distinction.][ Another kind of indeterminacy introduced by Quine is the "]inscrutability of reference
The inscrutability or indeterminacy of reference (also referential inscrutability) is a thesis by 20th century analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine in his book ''Word and Object''. The main claim of this theory is that any given sentence ca ...
", which refers to parts of a sentence or individual words.
Indeterminacy of translation
Quine's work on indeterminacy of translation, stemming from the basic forms of indeterminacy,[ is widely discussed in modern analytic philosophy:
Quine's approach to translation, ]radical translation
Radical translation is a thought experiment in ''Word and Object'', a major philosophical work from American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine. It is used as an introduction to his theory of the indeterminacy of translation, and specifically to p ...
, takes the perspective of trying to establish the meaning of sentences in a foreign language by observing and questioning native speakers of that language.[ It is a hypothetical version of what could be an empirical investigation. By an armchair analysis of such an adventure, Quine argues that it is impossible to construct a unique translation that can be defended as better than all others. The reason is predicated upon an argued ''unavoidable'' introduction of the two indeterminacies above. According to ]Hilary Putnam
Hilary Whitehall Putnam (; July 31, 1926 – March 13, 2016) was an American philosopher, mathematician, and computer scientist, and a major figure in analytic philosophy in the second half of the 20th century. He made significant contributions ...
, it is “what may well be the most fascinating and the most discussed philosophical argument since Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Categories”.[
]
Naturalized epistemology
Holophrastic indeterminacy is important to the understanding of Quine's naturalized epistemology. As Quine states his thesis:
Quine's naturalized epistemology in brief is the view that instead of traditional attempts to connect how our beliefs relate to evidence, epistemology should focus upon how experience leads to beliefs: the causal connections between our sensory evidence and our beliefs about the world. .[
]
See also
*Analytic–synthetic distinction
The analytic–synthetic distinction is a semantic distinction, used primarily in philosophy to distinguish between propositions (in particular, statements that are affirmative subject–predicate judgments) that are of two types: analytic propos ...
*Duhem–Quine thesis
The Duhem–Quine thesis, also called the Duhem–Quine problem, after Pierre Duhem and Willard Van Orman Quine, is that in science it is impossible to experimentally test a scientific hypothesis in isolation, because an empirical test of the ...
*Meta-ontology
Meta-ontology is the study of the field of inquiry known as Ontology. The goal of meta-ontology is to clarify what ontology is about and how to interpret the meaning of ontological claims. Different meta-ontological theories disagree on what the go ...
*Naturalized epistemology
Naturalized epistemology (a term coined by W. V. O. Quine) is a collection of philosophic views concerned with the theory of knowledge that emphasize the role of natural scientific methods. This shared emphasis on scientific methods of studying k ...
*Two Dogmas of Empiricism
"Two Dogmas of Empiricism" is a paper by analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine published in 1951. According to University of Sydney professor of philosophy Peter Godfrey-Smith, this "paper ssometimes regarded as the most important in all o ...
References
Further reading
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External links
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*{{InPho, idea, 1328
20th-century philosophy
Philosophy of language
Willard Van Orman Quine