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Meaning, Understanding and Translation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Extract
When I hear someone speaking and understand what is said, do I translate the words I hear into words of my own? I think the answer in general is ‘No.’ Of course, I might sometimes have to translate what I hear if I am not very good in the language the other person is speaking. But if I speak that language well, and the other person is speaking clearly and intelligbly enough, I simply understand. There is no question of translating what I hear into words of my own. If I speak the language, the words I hear are words of my own. I don’t need any others.
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- Copyright © The Authors 1990
References
1 See, e.g., Jerry Fodor, The Language of Thought (New York: Crowell 1975).
2 This way of stating what a competent speaker knows is not, strictly speaking, always grammatical. When it is, it can fail to state what is intended (e.g., ‘Nothing’ means nothing). I choose to put it this way in order to emphasize that what the speaker knows is not the sameness of meaning of two expressions. The only expression mentioned is the one between the quotation marks. I think the grammatical ‘true of’ location could replace the vernacular ‘means’ throughout without affecting the import of anything I want to say here.
3 The idea of ‘homophonic translation’ is introduced by W. V. Quine in Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press 1960). In speaking of it as the ‘normal tacit method’ that is ‘so fundamental to the very acquisition and use of one's mother tongue’ (59) he strongly suggests that he thinks that that is how we come to understand one another. The point that a ‘translation manual’ alone is not sufficient for understanding is central to Donald Davidson's theory of ‘radical interpretation.’ See ‘Radical Interpretation’ and other essays in his Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984).
4 See, e.g., Saul A. Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1982), 8ff.
5 Kripke's ‘skeptic’ sometimes seems to be invoking this demand. See, e.g., Kripke 13-14, 16. Each candidate answer to the question ‘What do you mean by “+ “?’ is found wanting on the grounds that the meanings of the words used in that answer are open to the same kinds of doubts as the meaning of ‘+’ was. The ‘skeptic’ does not appear to accept the consequences of insisting on this requirement in general.
6 This seems to be the demand that Kripke's ‘skeptic’ most often insists on. It appears to be behind the second of the two conditions he says any successful answer to the ‘skeptical’ challenge must meet (Kripke, 11). See also, e.g., 13, 19.
7 The regress involved in the appeal to a rule or schema which guides or instructs us in the interpretation of a given sign is a major theme of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell 1953).
8 See Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1955) 72-83 - the (still unanswered) prototype of all skeptical arguments of this general form.