INTRODUCTION

Quine’s doctrine of the indeterminacy of translation has been described as “the most fascinating and the most discussed philosophical argument since Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Categories.” Yet it has proved extraordinarily hard to state clearly without trivializing it. An illustration will give a preliminary idea of what it is about.

Suppose a German physicist remarks, 'Das Neutrino hat keine Masse'. Then any English-speaking physicist with a knowledge of German will translate that sentence by 'Neutrinos have no mass'. That meshes perfectly with the going scheme for translating between the two languages and raises no problems at all. However, if Quine is right, it would be possible to devise an alternative scheme for translating between German and English that fitted all the relevant objective facts yet offered as its own version of 'Das Neutrino hat keine Masse' an English sentence that we should all agree was not even loosely equivalent to 'Neutrinos have no mass'. I cannot say what such an alternative translation would be like. The trouble, according to Quine, is that to produce a complete alternative scheme for translating between a given pair of languages would require too much time and effort to be seriously considered. (The project seems unlikely to attract a grant.) Attempts have been made to construct simple examples, but they are not compelling (see §11). Still, that illustration will serve to convey the general idea – except that without further explanation it is likely to create misunderstandings. I will try to forestall the commonest ones straight away.