Quine’s Indeterminacy Thesis and the Case for Relativity
Willard Van Orman Quine’s Indeterminacy and Relativity in Language Theory is not a single book in the conventional sense but a collection of his thinking on the theory of meaning and translation, centered on the claim that the meanings of words and sentences are not fixed by the totality of evidence available to a speaker or a field linguist. The work gathers material that develops the ideas first set out in his major treatise Word and Object (1960), and it is best read as a sustained effort to defend and clarify what he called the indeterminacy of translation, together with its corollary, the inscrutability of reference. Its governing concern is whether there is any fact of the matter that settles which of several incompatible translations of a foreign language is correct, and Quine’s answer is that there is not, at least not in the sense that a realist about meaning would want.
The problem of radical translation
The starting point is a thought experiment Quine developed at length in Word and Object: radical translation. Imagine a linguist confronted with a language entirely unrelated to any known tongue, with no bilingual informants, no dictionaries, and no shared background. The only data available are observable behavior: the utterances speakers make in response to stimuli in their environment, and the circumstances in which they assent to or dissent from sentences. The translator must produce a manual that pairs native expressions with English ones. Quine’s question is what, in this situation, could make one manual correct and another mistaken.
He argues that the evidence available to the translator underdetermines the translation. Two manuals may both fit every piece of observable behavior and yet assign incompatible meanings to the same native expressions. The classic illustration is the native word that a field worker hears as “gavagai” when a rabbit runs by. One translation says it means “rabbit,” another that it means “undetached rabbit-part” or “temporal stage of a rabbit,” and still others pair it with yet different English terms. Each reading can be made consistent with the speakers’ assent and dissent across all the observed occasions, and no observation the linguist could make would decide between them. The point is not that a linguist might be unlucky; the point is that the difference between the rival translations is not a difference in anything the evidence could reveal.
Analytical hypotheses and the arbitrariness of translation
To carry out translation at all, the linguist must form what Quine calls analytical hypotheses: working guesses about how native logical particles, such as the words for “not,” “and,” and “or,” as well as expressions for quantification and identity, should be rendered. These hypotheses go beyond the directly observable data, and they too are underdetermined. The translator must select among them using considerations of charity, the principle that one should assume the speakers are largely right and rational by one’s own lights, and that their sentences should come out mostly true. Quine stresses that charity is a methodological policy rather than a discovered fact about speakers, and that it narrows but does not eliminate the range of acceptable manuals.
The upshot he draws is that there is no fact of the matter about which translation is correct beyond what is shared by all the acceptable ones. Translation is indeterminate. This is what he means when he speaks of the indeterminacy of translation, and it is the doctrine that gives the book its name. Quine insists that the thesis is not a counsel of despair about communication. Competent speakers of a language can understand one another perfectly well, and the translator’s manuals serve that practical end. What the thesis denies is that meaning, in the sense of a determinate proposition or a fixed correspondence between word and thing, is something the evidence could ever pin down uniquely.
Inscrutability of reference
A closely related point concerns reference. If the translation of a native term is indeterminate, then so is the question of what that term refers to. Quine’s concept of the inscrutability of reference says that alternative manuals may pair the same native word with different English words that stand for different objects, and yet each manual remains consistent with all the evidence. The same device that generates “rabbit” and “undetached rabbit-part” generates divergent accounts of what the native term is about. This is the sharpest form of the thesis, because it threatens the picture on which words stand for definite things and the business of semantics is to say which things.
Quine does not conclude that reference is meaningless. He argues instead that reference is relative to a manual of translation. Once a background translation has been adopted, the reference of a term is fixed relative to that scheme of translation, but there is no absolute reference that the scheme could be checked against. This is the relativism that gives the second half of the title its weight. Relativity here does not mean that anything goes; it means that the notions of meaning and reference are meaningful only relative to a choice of background language or manual.
Ontological relativity
The book’s most philosophically provocative extension is the doctrine of ontological relativity. Quine applies the same reasoning not only to translation between languages but to the question of what objects a theory is about. Since the reference of a theory’s terms is fixed only relative to a background manual, the ontology a theory commits us to is likewise relative. Two theories that agree on all observable consequences may nonetheless differ in what they say exists, and when we ask what a theory’s variables range over, we can answer only by reference to some background scheme that we ourselves choose.
Quine’s illustration here draws on the familiar contrast between a theory of physical bodies and one that treats them as arrangements of points or particles. He argues that the choice of which ontology to adopt is a matter of pragmatic convenience and theoretical simplicity rather than of getting the one true inventory of reality. The commitment to objects is, for him, something we read off from our best regimentation of a theory into the language of first-order logic, and the regimentation itself is a choice. This pragmatic and holistic picture of theory, in which sentences face the tribunal of experience only collectively, is the backdrop against which the relativity claims are made.
The role of behaviorism and empirical grounding
The argument depends on a broadly behavioristic conception of the evidence available to the translator. Quine holds that the only data genuinely accessible to a linguist are publicly observable responses, and that mental states are not directly available as independent facts about meaning. Critics have pressed this point repeatedly, and Quine’s replies in the book and in related essays concede that the behavioristic framing is a methodological decision with costs, but he maintains that the decision is what gives the thesis its force. If one allowed a privileged access to meanings in the speakers’ minds, the indeterminacy would be dissolved, but at the price of positing facts that no one could check. Quine’s wager is that a theory of meaning constructed from observable evidence alone is both the honest one and the one that reveals the underdetermination.
Responses and objections
A substantial part of the book’s interest lies in how Quine defends the thesis against objections. The most common worry is that indeterminacy is self-undermining, since the claim that translations are indeterminate seems to require a determinate understanding of what it says. Quine responds that the thesis is itself stated within a background language, and that its truth is relative to the same kind of scheme it describes; he does not treat this as a paradox but as an instance of the general relativity he is defending.
A second objection holds that the doctrine is too strong: surely some translations are simply better than others, and surely there are facts about what speakers mean that go beyond their behavior. Quine’s reply is that the difference between acceptable and unacceptable translations is real, and that the indeterminacy concerns only the residual freedom left after all the evidence has been taken into account. He grants that many translations can be ruled out, and that the range of admissible manuals is narrow in practice. What he denies is that the evidence singles out one of the admissible ones as uniquely correct.
A third line of objection concerns the status of charity. Critics ask whether the principle of charity smuggles in a substantive assumption about speakers’ rationality that the behavioristic framework cannot justify. Quine accepts that charity is a policy rather than a finding, and he treats it as one of the constraints that makes translation possible at all, since without some assumption of shared rational standards the linguist could make no progress.
Significance and reception
The book’s significance lies in the sharpness with which it formulates a question that has continued to shape philosophy of language and of mind. The indeterminacy of translation has been read as a challenge to the idea that meaning is a determinate matter of fact, as a motivation for a holistic and pragmatic conception of theory, and as a source of argument about whether psychological states can be treated as realistically individuated. It has provoked a large secondary literature, including attempts by philosophers such as Donald Davidson, who sought to ground interpretation in truth-theoretic constraints and was partly sympathetic to Quine’s skepticism, and critics who argued that the thesis rests on an overly restrictive view of evidence.
Within Quine’s own body of work, the material gathered here forms a bridge between his logical and ontological writings and his later naturalistic turn in epistemology. The doctrine of ontological relativity connects to his broader claim that ontology is answerable only to the best total theory of the world, and that questions about what exists are to be settled within science rather than from a vantage point outside it. Readers approaching the book should therefore see it as an argument about the limits of determinacy in meaning, reference, and ontology, pursued through the concrete image of the field linguist and sustained by a steady effort to show that the apparent facts about meaning are, on close inspection, facts only relative to a chosen framework of description.
