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A Scrutiny of Reference

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 May 1971

Graham Nerlich
Graham Nerlich*
Affiliation:
University of Sydney
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Extract

In many of his writings, Quine has argued that language is indeterminate in various ways. He has pursued, at length and often, an ingenious conclusion about one such way, which he sometimes calls the inscrutability of reference and, sometimes, the inscrutability of terms. It is the conclusion that one dimension of indeterminacy leaves the references of general terms unfixed among a number of alternatives; further, that no sort of scrutiny of the terms or of the occasions of their utterance could, in principle, provide a means for settling objectively which referent to assign to a term. This single doctrine assumes various guises: there is a firm claim about incompatible but equally acceptable translations of certain Japanese classifiers; there is a somewhat less clear commitment to the inscrutability of a choice between expressions and their Godel numbers as referents for quoted expressions; further, there is a yet more tentative endorsement of Harman's example of the various referents of numerical expressions given by competing set theoretic reductions of number.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , March 1972 , pp. 315 - 326
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1972

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References

1 I shall be referring mainly to the following writings, adopting the abbreviatory devices indicated: Word and Object (M.I.T. Press, 1960), WO; “Ontological Relativity” Journal of Philosophy LXVI (1968), 185-212, OR; “Replies” in Synthese XIX (1968) Synthese; “On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation”, Journal of Philosophy LXVII (1970), 178-183, RIT. OR and Synthese have each been reprinted: the first in Quine's, Ontological Relativity and other essays (Columbia U.P., 1970)Google Scholar; the second in Words and Objections, ed. Davidson, D. and Hintikka, J. (Reidel, 1968).Google Scholar My references here are to pagination in the journals, however.

2 OR 191 ff.

3 Synthese 14.

4 Its conjectural status is clearest in RIT 182.

5 This is the theme of RIT.

6 Synthese 22; 268.

7 OR 91; WO 51-2.

8 OR 189.

9 OR 199.

10 That is, sentences using articles, plural endings, identity, etc.

11 WO 72; OR 187, 190.

12 Language, 35 (1959), 261.

13 Op. cit. 35.

14 Synthese 22.

15 Synthese 268-9.

16 Synthese 285-6.

17 Synthese 279-80.

18 Quine says not, OR 189, and we must grant him that the relevant occasion sentences will all be true in the circumstances.

19 For suggestions that delay might not always be the measure we want see Chomsky op. cit. 35.