Behavioral Criteria of Radical Translation

Abstract

For all its impressive merits, Word and Object seems to me a book whose two ends do not quite meet. The difference in approach between the early and the late parts of Word and Object is in fact quite striking. With some oversimplification, it can be said that the last few chapters of the book are dominated by the idea of canonical idiom of a well-known quantificational variety. Problems of vagueness, ambiguity, opacity, tense, modality, and ontic commitment are studied partly or wholly by showing how the problematic sentences can be paraphrased in the applied first-order language which serves as our canonical notation or how this language can in other ways serve the same purposes as the ‘limpid vernacular’ of everyday life as well as of science. This vernacular is our familiar English. As Quine writes, in most of the later parts of Word and Object “the language concerned… is specifically English” (op. cit., p. 80).