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Jason asked:
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Quine's "gavagai": the explanations I've found have all been very simple, with a huge ending, that he
was attempting to disprove the viability of metaphysics, what the hell is an explanation?
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===========
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W.V.O. Quine's gavagai argument forms one of his two arguments for the thesis known as the
'indeterminacy of translation'.
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The gavagai argument is the argument 'from below' as it concerns concrete cases, whereas his
second argument is much more theoretical — the argument 'from above' — concerning the
indeterminacy of any physical theory. Quine's basic thought is that if we suppose we were linguistic
translators working to translate a tribe's language, we would be unable to come up with a single
'correct' translation from their language into ours. Suppose that the tribesmen say 'gavagai' whenever
a rabbit runs past. It seems natural to suppose that the tribesmen mean what we mean by 'rabbit'
when they say 'gavagai'. Quine's argument is that 'gavagai' is consistent with not only 'rabbit' but
'undetached rabbit part' 'temporal slice of rabbit' and many other alternatives. Furthermore, the
translator could never know whether he was right to translate 'gavagai' with any single english phrase
or word, because there would always be plausible alternatives that equally fitted the data. Moreover,
all of the alternatives are equally viable as each other. Hence, for Quine, translation is always
indeterminate.
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Similarly, the argument from above, in brief, concerns the idea that for any phenonema two
competing physical theories could explain the phenomena equally well and we can have no way of
choosing between the two. Hence, physical theory is always underdetermined by the data because
the same data is consistent with many different empircal theories. Now, as for this showing
metaphysics to be impossible the basic idea is that if translation is indeterminate then so is meaning.
Moreover, the indeterminacy must spread to pyschological states (beliefs desires, etc.) which are in
part, identified by their linguistic content. If meaning is indeterminate, then anything that has
semantics as an integral part will be indeterminate itself. Hence, most of what we consider
metaphysics will be indeterminate which of course would show that metaphysics is impossible.
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See Quine Word and Object1960 and Wright 'Indeterminacy of Translation' in Blackwells Companion
to Philosophy of Languageeds. Hale and Wright. 1997
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Richard Woodward
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