On this, the 97th anniversary of the year of his birth, thoughts turn naturally to Willard Van Orman Quine.  Quine, known as ‘Van’ to his friends but ‘That putz with the beret’ to everyone else, was one of the great systematists of the last century.  The range of topics he addressed is awesome: epistemology, confirmation, philosophical logic, set theory, analyticity, modality, and, perhaps most familiarly, the indeterminacy of translation.  My focus in this, my final and most challenging address as Chair of the Department of Philosophy, will be on this last topic. 

Quine’s concerns about the indeterminacy of translation received their first formal expression in 1960, in chapter two of Word and Object.  However, biographers of Quine find evidence of a much earlier statement of these concerns.  As a youth, Quine, then known as “Willy” to his friends but as “That little putz with the beret” to everyone else, traveled to France.  Here he developed a startling hypothesis.  The French, he claimed, do not speak English.  In retrospect, this hypothesis should not have been as startling as it was, and scholars continue to puzzle why it took a man of Quine’s evident genius to notice this, might we now say with confidence, fact?  I leave this puzzle to the smaller minds of others. 

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          Of course, Quine’s focus was not merely on the possibility of translating French, but on what he called radical translation: “translation of the language of a hitherto untouched people,” (p. 28).  I choose not to side with those critics of Quine who believe his goal was to render these untouched people touched.  I agree that Quine’s near obsession with stimulus meaning, patterns of stimulation, correlations of stimulation, visual stimulation, rabbit stimulations, stimulations as irradiation patterns, and self-stimulation add some credence to this charge, but Quine was nothing if not something, and I think that should be the end of the matter. 

Let’s take a look at how the Master suggests we approach the task of radical translation.  First, the linguist must identify the native signs of assent and dissent.  Quine cautions that we are not to take gestures at face value, noting with some satisfaction that, “the Turks’ are nearly the reverse of our own.”  I once asked Berent whether this was true and he claimed not.  He said that it was only Quine’s high opinion of himself that led him to interpret the upright middle-finger as a gesture of respect.

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          But what next?  Suppose we have figured out the natives’ signs of assent and dissent.  Quine suggests that the natives will use the word ‘Evet’ for ‘yes’ and ‘Yok’ for no.  But, we must ask, why?  Just as reasonable, it seems to me, is that the natives would use ‘Evet’ for ‘no’ and ‘Yok’ for yes.  Indeed, this seems more reasonable than Quine’s suggestion because ‘yok’ and ‘yes’ start with the same letter, and, more importantly, ‘evet’ and ‘no’ do not.  What could be more natural? 

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          We all know that this untouched people assent to the question ‘Gavagai?’ when a rabbit runs past.  Of course, what bothers Quine is that at the same instant a rabbit runs past, so does a collection of undetached rabbit parts, a time slice of rabbit, a premature rabbit Bourguignon, and so on.  Mere assent underdetermines which of these things the native means by ‘Gavagai.’  Quine’s conclusion is not just that we can’t know what the natives really mean, but that there is no fact of the matter about what they really mean.

 

          This last claim comes too quick.  Evidence always underdetermines hypotheses, but we don’t for this reason reject the idea that there might be some fact of the matter in question.  Why should we in the case of translation?  Here, I think, we must consider the work of the mathematician Kurt Grelling, whose eponymous paradox so impressed Quine that he chose to be born in 1908 – the year of its invention. 

 

          Some background.  Grelling defined ‘heterological’ to mean an adjective that does not describe itself, while autological adjectives are those that do.  ‘Short’ is autological, because it is short.  ‘Monosyllabic’ is heterological because it is not.  Interestingly, people may be described as heterological or autological.  J.J.C. Smart is autological. Wesley Salmon is not.  Nor, except in unusual circumstances, is Elliott Sober.  George Bush is not.  Dick Cheney is.  If one accepts the Papuan translation of ‘Quine’, meaning ‘putz in a beret,’ then Quine is also autological.  But I digress.  The paradox: is ‘heterological’ heterological?  It is if it ain’t, but then it is.  I submit that it is Grelling’s paradox that justifies Quine’s strong conclusions about indeterminacy.  The argument is complex, so please give it your undetached attention.

 

          Consider the adjective ‘indeterminate.’  Is it heterological or autological?  Well, if Quine’s right that there is no fact of the matter about meaning, ‘indeterminate’ must be autological.  This fits with our intuitions, because who really knows what ‘indeterminate’ means anyway?  But, if ‘indeterminate’ is autological, it follows that ‘Gavagai’ is heterological.  Proof:

Assume it were not.  That would mean that it is autological.  But if ‘Gavagai’ were autological, then it would have a button nose and a cotton tail.  It does not, hence it must be heterological. 

           

          Let’s put the pieces of the puzzle together now.  We want to know why Quine thinks that there is no fact of the matter about what people mean.  I have argued, compellingly to anyone who thinks like I do, that ‘indeterminate’ is autological while ‘Gavagai’ is heterological. It follows, Q.E.D., that there is no meaning.

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            Had I the time, I would have liked to resolve other pressing issues in Quine’s philosophy.  In particular, there is a question regarding Giorgione, who was so-called because of his size, and Ortcutt, who was not so-called because of his spies.  Why couldn’t Giorgione be a spy?  Again, I think the answer reduces to Grelling’s distinction. Giorgione was a big man with a big name.  He’s clearly autological.  Ortcutt was a shady character with a name that suggests minced scraps of food.  I don’t know where to go with that, but it is suspicious, I think, that Giorgione and Ortcutt have been seen together, and both were wearing berets.