Abstract
In his early paper ‘Truth by Convention’ Quine asked what the thesis that the truths of logic and mathematics are true by convention comes to — what it means. His unsuccessful attempts to give it a plausible sense showed that the theory is deficient in crucial respects and that therefore the appeal to conventions cannot account for our knowledge in logic and mathematics. He concluded with the remark:
We may wonder what one adds to the bare statement that the truths of logic and mathematics are a priori, or to the still barer behavioristic statement that they are firmly accepted, when he characterizes them as true by convention in such a sense. (W of P, p. 99)1 Much of Quine’s subsequent philosophical effort has been to show that conventionalism adds nothing whatever to that barer behavioristic statement.
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References
W of P stands for W.V. Quine, The Ways of Paradox, Random House, New York 1966, and FLPV for W.V. Quine, From a Logical Point of View, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1953. Page references alone in parentheses always refer to W.V. Quine, Word and Object, M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1960.
Cf. e.g. R. Carnap, ‘Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology’, Appendix A in Meaning and Necessity ( 2nd ed. ), University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1956.
To the claim that we could discover completely disparate total schemes “… one may protest that two systems of analytical hypotheses are, as wholes, equivalent so long as no verbal behavior makes any difference between them; and, if they offer seemingly discrepant English translations, one may again argue that the apparent conflict is a conflict only of parts seen out of context…. When two systems of analytical hypotheses fit the totality of verbal dispositions to perfection and yet conflict in their translations of certain sentences, the conflict is precisely a conflict of parts seen without the wholes. The principle of indeterminacy of translation requires notice just because translation proceeds little by little and sentences are thought of as conveying meanings severally” (pp. 78–79).
N. Goodman, Fact, Fiction, and Forecast, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1955, esp. ch. IV.
Cf. e.g. FLPV, pp. 78–79. This theme is elaborated in Quine’s recent Dewey Lectures, published as ‘Ontological Relativity’, Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968) 185–212.
“Yet we must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We can change it bit by bit, plank by plank, though meanwhile there is nothing to carry us along but the evolving conceptual scheme itself” (FLPV, pp. 78–79).
This point is expounded and defended in more detail in Gilbert Harman, ‘Quine on Meaning and Existence, I’, Review of Metaphysics 21 (1967) 124–151, especially 148–150.
I am not satisfied that the whole point of the objection is met in this way. There is a difficult and largely unexplored problem of how conceptual novelty, which seems to occur, is really possible. I suspect that this is a problem for everyone, not just for Quine.
For a good discussion of some of these factors and how they operate see Hilary Putnam, ‘The Analytic and the Synthetic’, Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. Ill, (ed. by H. Feigl and G. Maxwell ), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1962.
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© 1969 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Stroud, B. (1969). Conventionalism and the Indeterminacy of Translation. In: Davidson, D., Hintikka, J. (eds) Words and Objections. Synthese Library, vol 21. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1709-1_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-1709-1_7
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