Interpretation And Translation Research Paper

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If we are to make sense of people’s behavior, we need to understand their utterances and identify their beliefs and desires, as well as grasp the meanings of other cultural artifacts and practices. Philosophers have described this as ﬁnding an ‘interpretation’ of the agents’ behavior and mental states; ‘translation’ is the more speciﬁc task of ﬁnding sentences in a person’s own language that express the same meanings as sentences in some another language. Both issues have been central to philosophical investigations since the 1950s.

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The topic raises important issues about how knowledge is possible in the social sciences, and it also engages with some central philosophical issues about how humans can have knowledge of the minds of other people, and how linguistic communication is possible. It presents a pair of closely related problems:

(a) The ﬁrst is an issue in the philosophy of language. How are we able to discover the meanings of words and sentences? This problem arises in diﬀerent forms: how are people able to be sure that fellow English speakers understand words as they do? Also, how (if at all) can they understand the speech of those whose languages are diﬀerent from their own?

(b) The second is a problem in the philosophy of mind. How is it possible to understand the behavior of other people by identifying the beliefs, desires, and other mental states that lead them to act as they do? Once again, this can take several forms. How is it possible to understand the people we live with, people who share a common culture’ and how are we able to understand those whose ways of life are very diﬀerent from our own?

These two sets of issues are closely related, and seem to be two aspects of the same problem. Unless people’s beliefs and desires can be identiﬁed, it will be diﬃcult to make sense of their speech. Moreover, unless account is taken of what people say, it will often be diﬃcult to make sense of their mental states.

These issues became fundamental to the philosophies of language and mind when Willard van Orman Quine challenged the underlying dogmas of logical positivism in books such as From a Logical Point of View (Quine 1953) and Word and Object (Quine 1960). He did so by arguing that the positivists made assumptions about language and mind that could not be combined coherently with the sort of account of interpretation and translation that was required by their empiricist epistemology. In addition, Donald Davidson’s distinctive anti-reductionist account of mind, developed in a series of papers in the 1960s (reprinted in Davidson 1980, 1984), grew out of related reﬂections about how we are constrained in interpreting people’s behavior, verbal and otherwise. For these philosophers, and those inﬂuenced by them, examining problems about translation and interpretation was our best clue to the nature of linguistic meaning and of mental states such as beliefs and desires. These discussions have focused on how translation can capture the cognitive aspects of meaning, leaving to one side issues arising when we consider the translation of, for example, literary works.

As these remarks suggest, investigation of these topics has had two diﬀerent kinds of focus or motivation. In Quine’s work, it was originally a device for criticizing the views of others: examining the nature of translation shows that meanings are much messier and more indeterminate than most analytical philosophers have supposed. Davidson’s eﬀorts, largely endorsed by Quine in his later writings, have a more constructive intent: studying the standards that guide our practice of interpretation is supposed to show that our thought about mind is guided by acceptance of normative standards of rationality rather than by a search for natural laws that govern mental phenomena. The remainder of this introduction explores these motivations further, with a view to seeing why this focus on meaning and interpretation has seemed so important.

Logical positivists typically endorsed two views. First, rationality depends upon the use of principles and standards that are analytic. They are ‘true by virtue of meaning,’ reﬂecting the conventional rules that ﬁx the meanings of words and sentences. For example, my grasp of the word ‘bachelor’ reveals that that bachelors must be adult unmarried males, and this ﬁxes the criteria for the truth of claims about some person being a bachelor. Once I grasp the rules determining the meaning of a proposition, I recognize some propositions as necessarily true and I have standards for evaluating arguments and propositions. For most positivists, rationality depends upon a set of rules and principles that are analytic. Second, understanding a proposition involves knowing what evidence would show that it was true. What implications does this have for an account of how we understand other speakers? In order to obtain knowledge of their beliefs and desires, and of the meanings of their utterances, we must discover which propositions they treat as analytic, and what veriﬁcation conditions they associate with their assertions. Also, since we understand people on the basis of their verbal and nonverbal behavior, we must rely solely upon that. The position is coherent only if this is indeed possible. Quine argued that it is not possible: behavior does not provide a suﬃcient basis for identifying propositions held to be analytic, and identifying which veriﬁcation conditions are associated with particular sentences. He argued for this by examining the epistemology of translation: that there are alternative translations of one language into another which are intuitively nonequivalent, but which observations of verbal behavior are powerless to choose between. The consequence of this is the indeterminacy of translation: the idea that our utterances have determinate meanings, like the view that our beliefs have determinate contents, is ‘metaphysical’ and nonrespectable (Quine 1960, Chap. 2).

Even if we do not share Quine’s empiricism, it is plausible that we understand other people’s speech on the basis of their behavior. Although I have so far treated issues about the identiﬁcation of people’s mental states and issues about the meanings of their words as on a par, Quine’s more recent writings suggest that this is potentially misleading (Quine 1990). There may be limits to how much we can know with certainty about people’s thoughts and other mental states. This need not undermine the thought that studying interpretation is the best way of explaining just what our grasp of concepts such as belief and thought consists of. We have already noted that Davidson adopts this strategy, and a similar view is found in the work of Daniel Dennett. But the case of meanings and language is diﬀerent. Language is a public means of communication, and meanings are ‘open to view.’ It makes little sense to suppose that all speakers of some language may associate diﬀerent conventional meanings with its expressions. Hence we need an account of the epistemology of language use that in some way makes room for the publicity of these linguistic facts. Quine has claimed that although behaviorism is implausible as an account of the mind, it is compulsory in linguistics (Quine 1990 pp. 37–8).

In Word and Object, Quine emphasized that he was concerned with ‘radical’ translation. Also, Davidson’s writings on related topics were focused on ‘radical’ interpretation (Davidson 1984, Chap. 9). Hence we must begin by explaining what this means, and why it is important. Ordinary domestic issues of translation arise when we wonder whether one of our fellows understands properly some word or idiom: we can discover that some person uses the word ‘refute’ with the same meaning as ‘deny,’ and we can discover that this does not conform to normal usage. Or we work out the meaning of some word or construction that we do not currently understand. In doing this we may be guided by the explicit explanations of other speakers, and we exploit our understanding of some of the other things that the people say. Our problem then arises against a background of shared knowledge of the meanings of at least some words and sentences. Something similar often arises when translating a language that is unfamiliar to us. If we already understand languages that are related to the one we wish to translate, this can provide valuable clues that enable us to get started. We may even rely upon the expertise of bilinguals who speak both the language we are studying and some other language with which we are already familiar. In such cases, once again, we take for granted extensive knowledge of meanings, mental states, and cultural practices, and we use this as a springboard for making sense of particular words and utterances in familiar or unfamiliar languages. Radical translation occurs when none of these aids is available: We approach a wholly unfamiliar language and understand it without relying upon any dictionaries or bilinguals, or prior understanding of languages we know to be related to the object of our study. We have nothing to go on, it seems, but verbal behavior. Quine believed that if our aim is to advance our philosophical understanding of meaning and mind, this is the fundamental case. Similarly, Davidson approached questions of interpretation by asking how we arrive at an account of the beliefs, desires, and meanings of people without any prior knowledge of their mental states or their language. This makes our epistemological position wholly transparent when we attempt translation or interpretation.

This emphasis on radical translation is controversial. Some philosophers inﬂuenced by Wittgen- stein—for example Peter Winch (1958, and see Wilson 1974)—argue that understanding of a culture or community is only possible ‘from the inside,’ that we must enter a community and learn to cooperate in its practice before understanding is possible. Otherwise, interpretation will be a distortion that imposes our values and standards of rationality upon the community we wish to understand.

So far, I have presented these issues as if their interest was wholly epistemological. But there is a further motivation for focusing on radical translation, one that is metaphysical (see, especially, Lewis 1973). Many philosophers believe that human beings are fundamentally physical objects; indeed, that the universe is a physical system. There are important questions about the place of mental states, such as beliefs and desires, and facts about the semantics of languages in this physical world. For thinkers such as Dennett (1979, Chap. 1) and Davidson, studying our practice of interpretation helps us to see how phenomena such as minds and meanings are related to physical phenomena. Radical interpretation relies on no evidence about the contents of the subjects’ thoughts and the meanings of their words. Hence, it encourages us to focus on the relations between evidence that is characterized in nonsemantic, nonpsychological terms, and propositions that have a semantic or psychological subject matter. This leads to another reason for taking radical interpretation seriously, and another way of characterizing what makes such interpretation radical. The behavioral evidence for interpretation is characterized initially in ways that make no use of problematic psychological or semantic vocabulary. Thus, it provides one way of studying the relations between the physical facts and these distinctive ways of thinking about them. Davidson, for example, uses his study of interpretation to argue that mental phenomena are real, and are grounded in physical facts without being reducible to them (Davidson 1980).

1. Quine’s Claims And Arguments

As the remarks above may suggest, Quine remained true to the empiricism of the positivists. He held that the main evidence for arriving at translations of an unfamiliar language is information about the experience that speakers take to be relevant to the acceptability of claims expressed in their language (Quine 1960, Chap. 2). We can describe the ‘sensory stimulations’ that would lead someone to assent to a sentence, as well as the stimulations that would lead them to reject it. Putting this into terminology inherited from behaviorism, Quine claimed that such descriptions would identify the positive and negative ‘stimulus meaning’ of the sentence in question. ‘Observation sentences,’ such as ‘that is green’ or ‘there is a rabbit over there’ will have a fairly determinate stimulus meaning, varying little among speakers and across time; but relatively few sentences will meet this condition. Some sentences will be agreed upon by all speakers in pretty much any stimulus conditions; for example, ‘green is a color’: these are ‘stimulus analytic.’ Some pairs of sentences will turn out to be accepted in the same circumstances—they are ‘stimulus synonymous.’ Translations should then be tested by seeing whether they preserve ‘stimulus meanings,’ translation observation sentences by sentences which are accepted in the same circumstances, stimulus analytic sentences by stimulus analytic sentences, and so on. But this only gets us so far. A huge variety of sentences will be stimulus analytic: consider ‘three plus three is six,’ ‘birds can ﬂy,’ and ‘the Earth has existed for many years.’ Hence there is much freedom in how they are translated. Also, many sentences will neither be stimulus analytic nor have a deﬁnite stimulus meaning. Some sentences (both occasion and standing) will be controversial, speakers disagreeing about whether they should be accepted in particular circumstances. Others will be problematic, because most speakers simply will be agnostic about whether they can be accepted, and will have no disposition to accept or reject them in any circumstances. If we adhere to the requirements of an empiricist account of meaning, the possible evidence for the correctness of a translation seems very limited.

In Word and Object, Quine seems to claim that these facts about stimulus meanings, stimulus synonymy, and stimulus analyticity provide the only evidence that can be relevant to translating the cognitive meanings of the utterances of some alien language. When we recall that one target of his account is to attack some positive ideas about meaning, this may not be implausible. For empiricists, who defend a veriﬁcationist theory of meaning, these links between the acceptance of sentences and experience may indeed be all that could be relevant to identifying the meanings of words and sentences. A suitably empiricist account of translation would then require us to map sentences of the alien language on to sentences of the home language in a way that preserves empirical content: we map observational sentences on to observational sentences with the same stimulus meaning; we map stimulus analytic sentences on to stimulus analytic sentences; and so on.

Quine’s famous thesis of the indeterminacy of translation holds that, given this empiricist account of what makes a translation correct, there will be many intuitively nonequivalent manuals of translation between any two languages that ﬁt all possible evidence equally well (Quine 1960, Chap. 2). There is no objective basis for choosing between them, and hence no fact of the matter which is correct. This challenges the assumption which grounded positivist epistemology: that an adequate scientiﬁc language embodies a determinate structure of analytic principles and a body of sentences associated with determinate criteria of veriﬁcation. There is not enough space to examine in detail Quine’s reasons for supposing that this is true, but all exploit the idea that the relations between language and experience have a holistic character. Our evidence for translation will always involve associations between experience and particular sentences or sets of sentences. But whether a stimulation will lead a speaker to assent to some sentence can depend on background knowledge. Consider Quine’s famous example ‘Gavagai,’ supposedly accepted whenever rabbits are present. However, in practice it can make a diﬀerence whether the informant believes that there are other animals superﬁcially like rabbits, or believes that some insect is a sure sign of the presence of rabbits. Once we consider very theoretical sentences, the links with experience are so remote and dependent on the support of other sentences taken to be true, it would be surprising if there were not ways of adjusting translations systematically that were equally compatible with the evidence. Even when we could associate a ﬁxed stimulus meaning with some observation sentence, the translation of many non-observation sentences will depend on how we read syntactic and semantic structure into that sentence, and how we assign meanings to its subsentential parts. Again, it would be surprising if there were not ways of doing that which led to radically distinct translations for sentences which are more remotely linked to experience (see Hookway 1988, Chaps. 8–9, Wright 1997).

As arguments against a fairly austere empiricist view about distinct meanings, these arguments—albeit schematic—may carry conviction. But what this shows is unclear. Quine concludes that meanings and propositions, synonymies and analyticities are not scientiﬁcally respectable: if translation is indeterminate, then so is meaning and intentionality. Others may interpret it as a reductio ad absurdum of the empiricist views about meaning that Quine employed in his argument. As a constructive account of how translation proceeds, Quine’s story seems to fail to take account of all the resources that are normally available to a translator or interpreter. He appears to conclude that we do employ criteria that help us to select one among the ‘correct’ translation manuals, but that these guide a practical choice among correct manuals rather than a further criterion of correctness. However, it is not wholly clear that this is his view, and, in his most recent writings, his commitment to the indeterminacy of translation is qualiﬁed. Inﬂuenced by the views of Davidson that will be discussed below, Quine now acknowledges that there are more constraints on the correctness of translation than were listed above, and even grants that the indeterminacy of translation is an empirical thesis that could turn out to be false (Quine 1990).

The discussion of Word and Object makes passing use of another ‘maxim of translation,’ one that subsequently has acquired much greater prominence. The ‘principle of charity’ rests on the idea that ‘one’s interlocutor’s silliness … is less likely than bad translation’ (Quine 1960, p. 59), and this urges us not to trust translation manuals according to which our subjects make assertions that are ‘startlingly false on the face of them.’ Occurring in a discussion of the anthropological idea of a ‘pre-logical mentality,’ Quine argues that it is rational to expect speakers of other languages to adopt the same logical standards as we do, and to reject translations that defeat this expectation. So a good translation should preserve stimulus meanings, etc., and it should avoid attributing to our informants beliefs that are strikingly and inexplicably false.

2. Davidson And Radical Interpretation

Although Donald Davidson has always emphasized the continuities between his work and Quine’s, many readers ﬁnd in his writings some innovative ideas that transform the position found in Word and Object radically. Most strikingly, Davidson abandoned Quine’s empiricism and gave center stage to a development of Quine’s claims about the principle of charity (Davidson 1984). The result was a very distinctive epistemological and metaphysical position that provided underpinning for a general philosophical vision which appeared in a series of papers expressing views that have been enormously inﬂuential. Davidson’s contributions can be divided into two kinds: he oﬀered a new way of describing the enterprise of translation and interpretation; and he transformed our understanding of the evidence that was available for testing interpretations. We shall examine these in turn.

First, Davidson was emphatic that he wanted a theory of interpretation, not a theory of translation. As we have seen, this means that he seeks a systematic speciﬁcation of the beliefs, desires, and other mental states of an agent, along with an account of what they mean by the words and sentences that are uttered. These tasks are inseparable: unless we have opinions about a speaker’s beliefs and desires (etc.), we shall be unable to make a reasonable guess about what they are saying; and since speech is often a crucial clue to beliefs and desires, we cannot decipher someone’s beliefs and desires before beginning to make sense of their linguistic behavior. The two tasks must be attempted as a uniﬁed whole. Hence we defend a particular assignment of meanings to someone’s sentences as part of the best overall account of their mental states and linguistic behavior.

From early papers such as ‘Truth and Meaning’ (Davidson 1984), Davidson emphasized that a semantic theory for a natural language should use the notion of truth: understanding a sentence requires knowledge of its (possibly context relative) truth conditions. So an adequate theory should assign truth conditions to all the sentences of the language, drawing on axioms about the semantic properties of parts of sentences, and taking into account the signiﬁcance of the ways in which the parts are combined in meaningful sentences. His proposal for doing this, drawing on the work of Alfred Tarski in formal semantics, need not detain us here. The correct interpretation of a sentence in an unfamiliar language will be the statement of its truth conditions that forms part of the best overall interpretation of the beliefs, desires, and behavior of its speakers. Like Quine, Davidson asks what evidence we can rely upon in establishing the correctness of interpretations (Davidson 1984, Chaps. 10–11).

Davidson’s early account of how we test such theories is apparently simple. He assumed that we could identify when our subjects accept sentences as true, when they take them to be true. Ignoring the worry that this presupposes there is no diﬃculty in identifying expressions of acceptance and dissent, its value as evidence appears limited: even if we can identify the circumstances in which the informants believe that these sentences are true, it does not follow that we can identify when they are true—that we can pin down their truth conditions. The speakers may have systems of beliefs that contain extensive false-hood. Davidson simply denies this possibility: our practice of interpretation is guided by a principle of charity which requires us to assume, other things being equal, that when agents assent to sentences, those sentences are in fact true. We can indeed make sense of people having beliefs that are false, but we can only do so by relying on the background assumption that their other beliefs are predominantly true. Error is possible about some abstract or theoretical matters, and about everyday matters in unusual circumstances. But they are normally reliable about uncontroversial everyday matters: whether something is a blade of grass; whether it is green when seen in good lighting conditions; whether two plus two is four, and so on. Without this bridgehead of unproblematic true belief, we could not interpret our subjects’ behavior by reference to beliefs and desires, and making utterances at all. Hence the principle of charity: ‘We take the fact that speakers of a language hold a sentence to be true (under observed circumstances) as prima facie evidence that the sentence is true under those circumstances’ (Davidson 1984, p. 152). Interpretation is possible because ‘We can dismiss a priori the chance of massive error’ (Davidson 1984, p. 169). Charity extends further than that: Davidson held that to treat someone as a person is to make a normative assessment—to hold that we can expect their beliefs to be (for the most part) true, their desires to be for things we can see the value of, their inferences to be sound (by our standards), and so on. Interpretation involves expecting people (ceteris paribus) to conform to familiar, normative standards of belief and reasoning, allowing for error and foolishness only in unusual cases. It makes no sense to think of someone as a person whose beliefs are overwhelmingly false, and whose actions seem pointless (see Hookway 1988, Chap. 10, Heal 1997).

However, things are more complex: that hunter- gatherers possess truths about fundamental particles would be just as silly as that they should fail to acknowledge things that are plainly open to view. There are many cases where error is more likely than truth: we expect people to be deceived by perceptual illusions; and psychological research teaches that we often go wrong in thinking about probabilities, and so on. So even if the principle of charity embodies an important truth, the formulations we have employed are too simple to capture it.

This can be accommodated in two diﬀerent ways. First, Richard Grandy urged that we replace the principle of charity by a principle of humanity (Grandy 1973): a good translation or interpretation should enable us to view our subjects as believing what we would believe, were we to be in their shoes, to share their experience and background beliefs. This explains why we should not expect hunter-gatherers to hold beliefs about nuclear physics, and why we expect others to share many of the tendencies to error that come naturally to us.

Second, an adequate account of interpretation and translation must incorporate an epistemology. Quine’s theory did that explicitly: the role played by stimuli and observation sentences revealed his commitment to empiricism. Davidson rejected empiricism and, in his earlier writings, provided no alternative epistemological position. The principle of charity can recognize that our beliefs result from our causal interactions with our surroundings. Beliefs tend to be true when they are caused by the states of aﬀairs that make them true, or when they are caused by reliable signs of those states of aﬀairs. This provides guidance concerning when we should expect our subjects to possess truths, and when we should be surprised that they do so. A properly qualiﬁed principle of charity can make allowance for this, exploiting information about when we should expect agents to possess truths, and when we should expect them to be in error.

Grandy’s principle is a partial acknowledgement of this, one that can operate when we are ignorant of the causal processes involved in forming our knowledge. The result that it is a priori that we are reliable in forming beliefs, other things being equal, can also be secured. If utterances containing ‘London’ typically are caused by exposure to London, then this is evidence that ‘London’ refers to that city. In that case, our practice of interpretation will ensure that we ﬁnd the causal interactions between thought and the world that are required to ensure that our beliefs are generally true. But we should also expect that over time we would build up a philosophical anthropology, an account of people’s capacities and tendencies, which will further constrain our judgments about what is being said and about what agents believe.

Exploring these various possibilities reveals that we rely on many sources of information about the anchorage of our beliefs and utterances in formulating and assessing translations and interpretations. In his writings from the 1970s, Davidson continued to claim that interpretation was indeterminate, that there would be many distinct interpretations between which no objectively grounded choice could be made. However, as Quine has insisted recently, the more we see the range of considerations that constrain translation and interpretation grow, the less obvious is this claim: it may be an empirical question about how much indeterminacy there is, if any.

3. Conclusion

Thinkers other than Quine and Davidson have also developed the idea that it is in some way constitutive of interpretation that we rationalize people’s behavior, interpreting people as logical and generally truthful. It is fundamental to the ‘Intentional Systems Theory’ of Daniel Dennett (1979), an account of the relations between a functionalist account of mind and our ordinary vocabulary of psychological interpretation and explanation. In a series of papers, Martin Hollis (Wilson 1974, Chaps. 10–11) has applied a similar idea to problems about explanation in anthropology, challenging a variety of relativist views about rationality, and about the interpretation of ritual and magical practices.

As more and more information is taken to be relevant to reducing the range of possible interpretations and translations, the distinction between radical and nonradical interpretation may be less important than was once supposed. That a translation enables us to cooperate with those we wish to understand, to participate in their practices, should clearly be a point in its favor. However, this does not undermine the underlying insight that interpretations which follow Davidson’s strategy are not thereby false. Our grasp of the mental is, indeed, shaped by a sense of the norms that govern belief, desire, and action, and interpretation is an attempt to understand behavior as reasonable in context in the light of those norms.

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