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Philosophy 155: Carnap and Quine Professor Warren Goldfarb Lecture 26 (Final Lecture): December 3, 2012 Inscrutability of Reference

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Philosophy 155: Carnap and Quine Professor Warren Goldfarb Lecture 26 (Final Lecture): December 3, 2012 Inscrutability of Reference Philosophy 155: Carnap and Quine Professor Warren Goldfarb Lecture 26 (final lecture): December 3, 2012 Inscrutability of reference Note. Material in square brackets is additional to what was in the lecture as delivered. I have spent the last lectures going closely over what I take to be Quine’s argument for the indeterminacy of translation in chapter 2 of Word and Object, and some re- sponses to it. A part of the argument is the consideration as to what could possibly be relevant to translation by way of behavioral evidence. Quine wants you to think about what the task is—how you will be able to guard against the idiosyncrasies of the individual linguistic informant, and how you will eliminate collateral informa- tion as affecting the way you translate. All that will restrict what the objective evi- dence could be. Indeterminacy has the force that it does for Quine because he takes it that there are no further physical facts that could be relevant, over and above the behavioral things that we have isolated in thinking about what the project of translation is. This is where Quine’s view of language learning, and of us as being socialized (cf. the image of the elephantine bushes), comes in and plays an argumentative role. Once one sees that there are no further physical facts that are relevant, Quine will take it that there are no further facts at all. For there are no further facts: physics tells us what the stuff of the world is. There is no need to think that there might be more, unless you have some sort of explanatory breakdown that leads you to expand your physics. But Quine doesn’t think that we have any such breakdown. Let us turn now to the 1968 paper “Ontological Relativity.” This is probably the most controversial article that Quine published. In it he focuses attention on a par- ticular aspect of indeterminacy, namely, what he calls “inscrutability of reference”. The thesis is that it is indeterminate what to ascribe as the extensions of the predi- cates of the person you are translating, and what to ascribe as the referents of his singular terms. He illustrates this with the familiar example of rabbits vs. rabbit stages vs. undetached rabbit parts. But he has some new examples too. E.g., he talks about distinguishing alpha as a type, an abstract sign, from alpha as a token. He claims that we could change our translation so that any occurrence of “alpha” could be parsed one way rather than the other way. Indeterminacy generally has to do with pairings of sentences with sentences. In- scrutability is what happens when you go to the level of the subsentential parts. When you look at the framing of the thesis of indeterminacy of translation, you are just talking about the existence of different sentence-sentence mappings that are equally consonant with all of the evidence. But when you talk about inscrutability you are asking how it is that you ascribe extensions and referents to subsentential parts. Quine’s idea is that you could even keep the sentence-to-sentence pairings fixed, and that would still not determine how you ascribe extensions and referents to the subsentential parts. For you need to fix the apparatus of singular reference, “apparatus of individuation,” as he puts it: i.e., the apparatus of identity, the quan- tifiers, and plurals. All of that is additional to just the sentence-sentence pairings. But it turns out that even that much is not enough. Quine argues in “Ontological Relativity,” in the case of abstract objects, that even if you fix the apparatus of indi- viduation you still get inscrutability of reference. For you can substitute one ab- stract object for another in certain sorts of ways (e.g., Gödel numbers for formulas). But later he streamlines the argument into a more general argument. This is the argument from “proxy functions.” In “Things and their Place in Theories,” he talks about reinterpreting the language: the sort where we save nothing but merely change or seem to change our objects without disturbing either the structure or the empirical support of a scientific theory in the slightest. All that is needed in either case, clearly, is a rule whereby a unique object of the supposedly new sort is assigned to each of the old objects. I call such a rule a proxy function. Then, instead of predicating a general term ‘P’ of an old object x, saying that x is a P, we reinterpret x as a new object and say that it is the f of a P, where ‘f’ expresses the proxy function. Instead of saying that x is a dog, we say that x is the lifelong filament of space-time taken up by a dog. Or, really, we just adhere to the old term ‘P’, ‘dog’, and reinterpret it as ‘f of a P’, ‘place-time of a dog’…. The apparent change is twofold and sweeping. The original objects have been supplanted and the general terms reinterpreted. There has been a revision of ontol- ogy on the one hand and of ideology, so to say, on the other; they go together. Yet verbal behavior proceeds undisturbed, warranted by the same observations as be- fore and elicited by the same observations. Nothing really has changed. By permuting the universe and reinterpreting your general terms, you can always give yourself another interpretation of the language where the ontology is differ- ent—the items referred to are different. This seems to be an argument that Quine is completely happy with. He writes in Pursuit of Truth, p. 31: Reference and ontology recede thus to the status of mere auxiliaries. True sen- tences, observational and theoretical, are the alpha and omega of the scientific en- terprise. They are related by structure, and objects figure as mere nodes of the structure. What particular objects there may be is indifferent to the truth of obser- vation sentences, indifferent to the support they lend to the theoretical sentences, indifferent to the success of the theory in its predictions. The point can be accentuated by invoking what I have called proxy functions. And he gives the same argument. This seems to be his streamlined argument for the inscrutability of reference. The whole proxy-function argument, notice, keeps the truth-conditions of whole sentences the same. The argument is an (attempt at) underlining the artificiality of analyzing sentences further down, i.e., of isolating and interpreting the subsentential parts. (I have no settled opinion on whether the argument for inscrutabililty should invoke the indeterminacy-like considerations, as in “Ontological Relativity”, or whether the quick proxy-function argument is really sufficient.) Well, inscrutability of reference upset people greatly. The indeterminacy of transla- tion upset them too, of course; but inscrutability upset them far more. It is one thing, you might say, to attack meaning (the target of the indeterminacy thesis). Quine is quite open about that, and you can barely turn two pages of Quine from very early on without finding yet some other attack on the notion of meaning, or on the “mental myth,” or on propositions, etc. So it is no surprise. But here, in inscru- tability, he is attacking the objectivity of reference. And that seems more difficult, and difficult to make compatible with Quine’s own distinction between theory of meaning as bad and theory of reference as good. From early on, e.g., the paper “Notes on the Theory of Reference” in From a Logical Point of View, Quine distin- guishes theory of meaning from theory of reference; he finds the theory of reference to be in acceptable shape, while the theory of meaning is not. (The paradigms “—” is true iff — and “—” refers to — give the notions of truth and reference “a peculiar clarity”, Quine says.) The problem, we might say, starts with this. First, you must realize that indetermi- nacy and inscrutability are not just about foreign languages. They hold in the home language as well. In fact, even though you speak English I can variously translate you in ways completely consonant with all of your dispositions to speech behavior, variously translate you so as to ascribe to you different ontologies. Ordinarily, Quine says, we adopt the homophonic translation, i.e., equating your words with my words, although there may be special reasons to depart from this. For example, you might on occasion want to invoke the principle of charity, where you depart from homophony in order to render me as saying something more credible. (Twenty- seven years ago, I spent a semester teaching at Berkeley. The next-door neighbors were a bunch of Berkeley women soccer players. They spent a lot of their time on the phone, often outside the apartment, since they didn’t want their roommates to hear. (No cell phones back or even wireless landline phones — they had long exten- sion cords.) So I heard a lot of California-speak in 1984, in particular many re- countings that parties they had attended were “radical.” So I had to translate that in a non-homophonic way. They weren’t attending left-wing events; “radical”, for them, was to be equated with “awesome”, or some such.) You have to translate the home language in order to specify an ontology. And that seems to threaten a collapse, when you claim that there is inscrutability here. And so we get probably the most dramatic three pages of Quine that he ever wrote, pp. 47-9 of “Ontological Relativity.” We seem to be maneuvering ourselves into the absurd position that there is no dif- ference on any terms, interlinguistic or intralinguistic, objective or subjective, be- tween referring to rabbits and referring to rabbit parts or stages; or between refer- ring to formulas and referring to their Gödel numbers.
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