Ernest
LePore says that if semantic holism (as well as, perhaps, the indeterminacy of meaning) were true, then
The
obvious question to ask here is: Is
that really is such a bad thing?
Indeed do the implications of LePore's statement actually amount to much?.
Ask
yourself what it would mean – yes, mean
– to say:
You
and I mean the same thing by the word ‘dog’.
Of
course we can both say that we mean
dog by
the word ‘dog’; though that won't get us very far.
The
claim
(i.e., “you
and I mean different things when we say 'dog'”)
doesn’t
seem quite so outlandish if we speak instead of a word like
‘democracy’. Namely:
You
and I mean different things when we say 'democracy'.
Most
of us would happily accept the fact that what you and I mean by the
word ‘democracy’ will be different – if only to some extent.
Why shouldn’t the same - or something similar – also be the case
with the word ‘dog’?
Of
course the word ‘democracy’ is an abstract noun; whereas ‘dog’
isn't. Does that difference make much of a difference? It's of course
easier to refer to - or pick out - a dog that it is to do the same
with democracy.
Though the ease of referring to - or picking out - a dog with the
word ‘dog’ doesn’t necessarily mean that you and I mean the
same thing – or exactly the same thing – when we use that word.
Both you and I always – or nearly always - successfully pick out
(or refer to) dogs with the word ‘dog’. It doesn’t follow that
we do so because we mean the same by the word.
Does
it matter, for example, that you may think of - or mean - mutts
with wagging tails, and I think of - or mean - canine
creatures, when we both use the word ‘dog’? Despite the
differences, both you and I both still refer to - or pick out - the
same things when we use the word ‘dog’.
Perhaps
we don’t really mean anything
when we pick out or refer when we use the word 'dog'. Or,
alternatively, perhaps it's our causal and historical connections
with dogs - rather than our internal meanings - that really matter.
In addition, perhaps you (in homage to Quine) pick out dog-parts,
temporal
dog-slices
or doghood
with the word ‘dog’; whereas I - being the very sensible person
that I am - pick out dogs
with my usage of the word ‘dog’.
LePore
goes on to say that
“this
line of argument leads to such surprising claims as that natural
languages are not, in general, inter-translatable”.
Quine,
according to LePore, believed this. Quine could speak fluent German –
so how could he believe this?... Of course I'm being slightly rhetorical
here.
What
Quine did believe is that the “facts of the matter” (his own
words) about, say, German meanings aren't kept complete and intact in
any translation. That's because there are no facts of the matter when
it comes to translation and therefore meaning! (All of this is
captured in Quine's
paper 'Ontological Relativity'.)
There can be no one-to-one correspondence between the
translation-language and object-language. There's nothing determinate
to translate and there's no determinate translation. This isn't only
because of the banal reason - among others - that there are certain
German words which don't (really) have an English translation (at
least not a precise one). It's because there are no abstract meanings
– or even meanings simpliciter
– to correctly (or incorrectly) translate in the first place.
In
Quine’s case, all we have is “stimuli-synonymy” (as well as behavioral-response-synonymy) when it comes to translation. And when
it comes to such a circumscribed translation, even if all the
physical and behavioral facts are available, various translations –
perhaps indefinitely many – will always be possible. Thus it will
be our choice of which “translation manual” to use which will
really determine the translation. No translation will capture the
“true meaning” better than any other translation because there's
no true meaning to capture. However, some translations will
indeed be better or worse (say for pragmatic reasons).
The
only way it would be possible to capture the true
meaning
would be if there were true meanings to capture in the minds of the
speakers of another language. There are no such things; as
Wittgenstein and others have forcefully shown. Even if there were
such private things,
then how could we - as third parties - gain access to them? If they
did exist (as also with Locke’s ‘ideas’), then the only way we
could access them would be if the translated person overtly expressed
them. Consequently, if there's no lacuna
when it comes to such behavioral expressions (in that they don’t
really lose anything of the mental meaning), then perhaps the mental
meaning can be entirely dropped from the picture because it's a - to
use two of Wittgenstein's phrases - “mechanism
without a function” and
a possible “beetle
in a box”.
LePore
himself goes on to admit that what he calls “mitigated holists”
needn't be concerned with meaning indeterminacy in that to them
“a
notion of similarity of meaning (of mental content) somehow replaces
the notion of semantic identity”.
Thus
perhaps we simply don't require any identity of meaning in order to
understand other people when they use the same words which we use.
However, if we can’t have meaning
identity,
it can also be asked why then can have meaning
similarity.
Perhaps if meaning identity isn't available, then neither is meaning
similarity. A further question is:
What
would count as similarity of meaning and how would that in itself
solve the problem of meaning indeterminacy?
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