Direct translation
As a first step, the linguist will use direct translation on occasion sentences. Hearing a lot of utterances of the one-word-sentence 'Gavagai' whenever the linguist sees rabbits, he suspects the one-word-sentence 'Rabbit' to be the correct translation and starts a process of questioning and pointing until he is reasonably certain that the native has the verbal disposition to assent to 'Gavagai' if seeing the stimulus, a rabbit. This stimulus is the affirmative stimulus meaning of 'Gavagai', and the linguist can conclude this is a correct translation.
The translation of occasion sentences may be complicated through collateral information. A native, with full expertise of the local surroundings, may already assent to 'Gavagai' when not even seeing a rabbit, but is sufficiently satisfied to assent when spotting a specific rabbit-fly that only flies around rabbits. The linguist on the other hand has no such expertise, and will wonder why the hypothesis seems off. Collateral information can also create a difference of stimulus meaning between members of the same language community. To solve this issue, the linguist will determine intrasubjective stimulus synonymy, enabling the pairing of non-observational occasion sentences such as 'Bachelor' and 'Unmarried man'. While they may differ in stimulus meaning between various speakers, they are stimulus synonymous for the entire language community.
Stimulus analyticity
It is also possible for the linguist to determine stimulus analytic sentences, to which the native will assent given any (or no) stimulus. Social analytic sentences are sentences that are stimulus analytic for the entire language community.
Words and grammar
So far the linguist has taken the first steps in the creation of a translation manual. However, the linguist has no idea if the term 'gavagai' is actually synonymous to the term 'rabbit', as it is just as plausible to translate it as 'one second rabbit stage', 'undetached rabbit part', 'the spatial whole of all rabbits', or 'rabbithood'. To question these differences, the linguist now has to translate words and logical particles.
Starting off with the easiest task, to translate logical connectives, the linguist formulates questions where by pairing logical connectives with occasion sentences and going through several rounds of writing down the assent or dissent to these questions from the natives to establish a translation. Any further translation of logical particles is however impossible, as translation of categorical statements (for example) relies on the translation of words, which in turn relies on the translation of categorical statements.
Inscrutability of reference
As it appears impossible to determine a unique correct translation of 'gavagai' caused by the limits of translation, the linguist can take any of the mentioned possibilities and have it correspond to the stimulus meaning through adaption of the logical connectives. This implies there is no matter of fact to which the word refers. An example is to take the sentence 'Gavagai xyz gavagai', of which the linguist assumes it translates to 'This rabbit is the same as this rabbit', and to which the native assents. Now, when 'gavagai' is taken as 'undetached rabbit part' and 'xyz' as 'is part of the same animal as', the sentence 'This undetached rabbit part is part of the same animal as this undetached rabbit part', to which the native would also assent. Both sentences have the same stimulus meaning and truth condition. It therefore is impossible to derive the (object of) reference of the term 'gavagai' from the verbal disposition of the native.
Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century". He served as the Edgar Pierce Chair of Philosophy at Harvard University from 1956 to 1978.
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Rudolf Carnap was a German-language philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism.
In analytic philosophy, a fundamental distinction is made between the use of a term and the mere mention of it. Many philosophical works have been "vitiated by a failure to distinguish use and mention". The distinction can sometimes be pedantic, especially in simple cases where it is obvious.
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Philosophy of logic is the area of philosophy that studies the scope and nature of logic. It investigates the philosophical problems raised by logic, such as the presuppositions often implicitly at work in theories of logic and in their application. This involves questions about how logic is to be defined and how different logical systems are connected to each other. It includes the study of the nature of the fundamental concepts used by logic and the relation of logic to other disciplines. According to a common characterisation, philosophical logic is the part of the philosophy of logic that studies the application of logical methods to philosophical problems, often in the form of extended logical systems like modal logic. But other theorists draw the distinction between the philosophy of logic and philosophical logic differently or not at all. Metalogic is closely related to the philosophy of logic as the discipline investigating the properties of formal logical systems, like consistency and completeness.
Word and Object is a 1960 work by the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, in which the author expands upon the line of thought of his earlier writings in From a Logical Point of View (1953), and reformulates some of his earlier arguments, such as his attack in "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" on the analytic–synthetic distinction. The thought experiment of radical translation and the accompanying notion of indeterminacy of translation are original to Word and Object, which is Quine's most famous book.
This is an index of Wikipedia articles in philosophy of language
This is a list of articles in analytic philosophy.
The inscrutability or indeterminacy of reference is a thesis by 20th century analytic philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine in his book Word and Object. The main claim of this theory is that any given sentence can be changed into a variety of other sentences where the parts of the sentence will change in what they reference, but they will nonetheless maintain the meaning of the sentence as a whole. The referential relation is inscrutable, because it is subject to the background language and ontological commitments of the speaker.
Holophrastic indeterminacy, or indeterminacy of sentence translation, is one of two kinds of indeterminacy of translation to appear in the writings of philosopher W. V. O. Quine. According to Quine, "there is more than one correct method of translating sentences where the two translations differ not merely in the meanings attributed to the sub-sentential parts of speech but also in the net import of the whole sentence". It is holophrastic indeterminacy that underlies Quine's argument against synonymy, the basis of his objections to Rudolf Carnap's analytic/synthetic distinction. Another kind of indeterminacy introduced by Quine is the "inscrutability of reference", which refers to parts of a sentence or individual words.
