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Radical interpretation is interpretation from scratch -- as would be necessary if we found ourselves in a community whose language and way of life were completely alien to us, without bilingual guides, dictionaries, grammars, or previous knowledge of the culture. Recent interest in radical interpretation focuses on two related but significantly different sets of investigations, the first initiated by Quine (1960), the second by Davidson ("Truth and Meaning," 1967, collected with other relevant papers in his 1984). It will be convenient to start with Davidson's work which, though later, is the more immediately intelligible (as will be seen when Quine's views are presented).
If we knew what the foreigners meant by their sentences, we could discover their beliefs and desires; if we knew their beliefs and desires, we could discover what they meant. Knowing neither, "we must somehow deliver simultaneously a theory of belief and a theory of meaning" (Davidson 1984: 144). Davidson offers suggestions about both the form of a theory of meaning and how to make sure we have the correct one for a given language.
It seems reasonable to require a theory of meaning for English to tell us things like "'Snow is white' means (in English) that snow is white." To do so, it must presumably explain how the meanings of whole sentences depend on the meanings of their parts. Davidson's suggestion is that this can be done by a theory of truth for the given language, of broadly the type proposed by Tarski (1936). Tarski aimed to explain what it was for the sentences of a language to be true without introducing into the explanation either the notion of truth itself or other problematic notions such as reference (see SENSE AND REFERENCE; REFERENCE, THEORIES OF). To get some idea of his approach, which in detail is technical, notice that if we knew all the basic predicates of a given language, we could explain what it was for them to be true of things by listing "axioms," one for each basic predicate, on the lines of "'Snow' is true of x (in English) if and only if x is snow." To ensure that such a theory genuinely explained what it is for the sentences of the given language to be true, Tarski required it to entail all sentences such as:
These are the famous T-sentences . In contrast to Tarski, Davidson assumes we start with an adequate understanding of truth: "Our outlook inverts Tarski's: we want to achieve an understanding of meaning or translation by assuming a prior grasp of the concept of truth" (1984: 150).
He points out that the T-sentences may be regarded as giving the meanings of the sentences named on the left-hand side -- provided the theory of truth satisfies sufficiently strong constraints. One powerful constraint is the circumstances in which the foreigners hold true the sentences of their language. He invokes a "principle of charity": optimize agreement with the foreigners unless disagreements are explicable on the basis of known error.
One acknowledged difficulty is that Tarski's theory as it stands applies only to formalized languages, which lack many important features such as INDEXICALS AND DEMONSTRATIVES, proper names, and indirect speech (see Davidson 1984 and essays in LePore 1986).
Davidson believes that although there will be some indeterminacy of interpretation, it will be superficial: just a matter of stating the facts in alternative ways, as with Fahrenheit and Celsius scales. In this and other respects, his position contrasts strongly with Quine's, which has also proved more liable to be misunderstood.
Suppose the radical interpreter has worked out a translation manual that, given a foreign sentence, enables a translation to be constructed. Quine maintains we could devise a rival manual so different that it would reject "countless" translations offered by the first. Both manuals would fit all the objective facts, yet competing versions of the same foreign sentence would not even be loosely equivalent (Quine 1960, 1969, 1990).
Here is a famous line of supporting argument. Imagine the foreigners use the one-word sentence "Gavagai" in situations where English speakers would use "Rabbit." Quine suggests that this does not establish that the native term "gavagai" refers to rabbits. It might refer instead to such radically different items as undetached rabbit-parts, or rabbit-phases, or rabbithood. Nor could we rule out any of these alternatives by pointing, or by staging experiments, since those operations would depend on untestable assumptions. Such "inscrutability of reference" appears to involve indeterminacy of sentence translation (Quine 1960, 1969).
All this is part of Quine's wider campaign against our tendency to think of MEANING and synonymy as matters of fact. He argues that the notion of meaning is not genuinely explanatory. It makes us think we can explain behavior, but it is a sham. It fails to mesh in with matters of fact in an explanatorily useful way. The indeterminacy thesis, if true, would powerfully support that contention.
Quine's thesis is easily confused with others. It is not, for example, an instance of the truism that there is no limit to the number of different ways to extrapolate beyond finite data. He claims that two schemes of translation could disagree with one another even when both fitted not just actual verbal and other behavior, but the totality of relevant facts. The indeterminacy "withstands even . . . the whole truth about nature" (Davidson and Hintikka 1969: 303). Nor is it any ordinary sort of scepticism. The idea is not that we cannot know we have hit on the right interpretation, but that there is nothing to be right or wrong about (Quine 1960: 73, 221; 1969: 30, 47). Nor will bilinguals help, since he thinks their translations are as much subject to the indeterminacy as others. Nor, finally, is he laboring the familiar point that in translation between relatively remote languages and cultures, nonequivalent sentences of one language will often do equally well as rough translations of a sentence of the other. This is made clear by his application of the indeterminacy thesis to the "translation" of sentences within one and the same language. We assume that for each sentence of our shared language, what you mean by it is also what I mean by it. Quine thinks that if I were perverse and ingenious I could "scorn" that scheme and devise an alternative that would attribute to you "unimagined views" while still fitting all the relevant objective facts.
Quine's indeterminacy thesis is highly contentious (see Kirk 1986 for discussions). But if correct it has profound implications for psychology and philosophy of mind. If beliefs and desires were matters of objective fact, those facts would settle significant differences over translation. So if it is a mistake to think translation is determinate, it is also a mistake to think our beliefs and desires are matters of fact. Quine and others (e.g., Stich 1983) regard his arguments as undermining intentional psychology and supporting ELIMINATIVE MATERIALISM.
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Copyright © 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology