The aim of the paper is to give a partial but systematic account of Willard van Orman Quine's philosophical work. At the beginning the influence of neopositivism on Quine's philosophical attitude is sketched and the role that the criticism of the analytic-synthetic dichotomy played in the development of modern empiricism is shown. These and other issues are seen in the context of the doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation, which is the main topic of the paper. The most important consequences of the radical translation experiment are discussed, especially ontological relativity, the indeterminacy of translation and Quine's criticism of traditional semantical concepts. In the context of the empirical underdetermination thesis, the ontological character of the indeterminacy of translation is displayed. In the last part of the paper, physicalism and the assumption of the universal translatability of languages are also briefly discussed. The assumption made implicitly by Quine exemplifies his anti-relativistic standpoint.
The paper analyzes notions of indeterminacy of translation and indeterminacy of reference. The author discusses the differences between the two and contrasts them both with the cases of merely verbal differences that can arise when several translators attempt to translate one text. He then sets apart the different mechanisms that generate the two kinds of incongruence. He takes indeterminacy of translation to be the effect of the existence of two concurrent translations of a given expression that are stimulus-synonymous but syntactically different. Because of the close connection between the indeterminacy of translation and the indeterminacy of reference the latter does not occur between people speaking their native language. It is so, because they have internalized their grammatical apparatus without possessing a prior grammatical apparatus to correlate it with .
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