Indeterminacy of Translation: A Non-Quinean Function of Content-Indeterminacy

Abstract

At what point, one might ask, do the considerations about language assume crucial relevance to our approach to the philosophical problems of science? Or are the linguistic and non-linguistic (= mathematical) aspects of science so disparate and wide apart that only one of them, but not both, carries methodological relevance in the context of the philosophy of science? An answer in the affirmative to the latter question is actually implied by the Sneed-Stegmüller type set-theoretic structuralist approach to the problems of the structure and growth of scientific knowledge.¹ Scientific theories must be, on this view, treated as mathematical entities (= set-theoretic structures) of a certain kind before one attacks the philosophical problems concerning them, notably those of inter-theory relations, theory-reduction/replacement and theory-choice. Only on an approach as radical as this, so is it claimed, can we deal with the Kuhn-Feyerabend type problem of incommensurability. But how? This problem, we are told, is simply dissolved if we adopt this new radical approach. That is, different scientific theories cannot be cognitively compared, one with the other, so long as they are treated as structures consisting of true or false statements. On this view, then, there is no question of our considerations about language having a bearing on those about science and vice versa.