I read the extended discussion in the comments section yesterday with considerable interest. This is not a subject to which I have ever devoted any attention so my comment maybe off the point or ignorant. I have on several occasions when watching YouTube segments heard Noam Chomsky observe that little children, as they are learning language, learn words at the rate of about one hour. He cites this fact as evidence that the behavioral explanation is wrong, but it seems to me that it might also be pertinent to the question being discussed about Quine’s views. The little child is in the same situation as an adult trying to understand a new language from the statements of a native speaker of the language. If the child is not in some sense genetically predisposed to divide the world in certain ways, as it were, how could she so quickly acquire the new words?
She has a theory of mind. She knows what it's like when her attention is drawn to something, so she anticipates what it will be like for other people to have their attention drawn. Hence pointing when she wants them to look at something. So, pointing at something means "look at that over there!" Of course this all happens more or less automatically, she doesn't have to explicitly reason in this way.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly, when I want to talk about animals, I don't refer to collections of undetached animal parts (or whatever), I just talk about the animal. When I hear "gavagai," I don't suspect someone to be referring to collections of undetached rabbit parts. I expect them to be referring to rabbits. This is because I anticipate them having similar ends, interests, desires, capacities, etc. to me. That is, I expect them to have a mind like mine.
Quine's point about the indeterminacy of translation is supposed to be a problem for a particular view of what language is and how it works. It's not supposed to pose a practical problem for translators.
To TJ:
ReplyDeleteYou note--- "Quine's point about the indeterminacy of translation is supposed to be a problem for a particular view of what language is and how it works. It's not supposed to pose a practical problem for translators."
Quite right! That is exactly the point of Quine's thought experiment: to mount an argument against a certain view of linguistic meaning, one which appeals to mental entities as thekey explanatory elements in an account of semantics.
Whether Quine's radical methodological, ontological and semantic behaviourism is correct is, of course, another matter entirely. He wrote "Word and Object" at the tail end of the dominance of behaviourism (a la Skinner and Hull) in mainly American psychology and linguisitics and before the rise of the "cognitivist revolution" in those fields, Chomsky's "Syntactic Structures" and his devastating review of Skinner's "Linguistic Behavior" being perhaps the signal contributions at the beginning of that movement.
Enough with the Buddhists and Sufis (and heaven knows who else) anticipated Quine.
I think Chomsky is right about there being a language faculty comparable to other biological organs. I also think Heidegger is right that belonging to a family and that family is part of a culture upon which we find our way in it, like fish in water. We learn, some with more brain power, at the start than others. Some come from families, schools, and neighborhoods that are more suited to the growth of meaning culture, and life experience. Take a person who had a traumatic early childhood that creature still speaks a language even if it's diminished in comparison to a more fortunate person from a family with more than adequate disposable income. But even though we all can't be great poets, philosophers, or scientist we still have 1% more DNA than our closest relative creatures, and our linguistic prowess manifest that.
ReplyDeleteIn looking to see whether there might be a video of Daniel Dennett commenting on Quine, I found that there is a whole video of an extended discussion between Quine and Dennett, and others, apparently from 1994.
ReplyDeleteJump to 28:30 if you're short of time
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1wlNvfASaU