Darla Migan 6/18/2015 Lecture Notes and Summary of W.V.O Quine’s “Meaning” 1 Our course packet includes the article “Translation and Meaning” 2 from Quine’s seminal 1960 text Word and Object 3 . However, I will be focusing on Quine‘s “Meaning” which is taken from the book, Pursuit of Truth 4 published 30 years after Word and Object in 1990. In this later text, “Meaning”, Quine addresses objections raised to the earlier version of his indeterminacy theory of translation. Quine begins his quest for a clear and substantial notion of meaning by asking if sentences or words are the “primary vehicles of meaning”. Although it may seem at first that individual words are the most basic units of meaning, Quine hypothesizes that words could be said to owe their meaning from the role that they play in sentences (Pursuit of Truth, 37). In order to test his hypothesis Quine sets up a thought experiment wherein the target language is English and the source language is Jungle. “Jungle” is supposedly unrelated to any other language previously known to English speakers and so the only data available to Quine’s English-speaking linguist are the native’s utterances. The working hypothesis is that “[T]he meaning of a sentence of one language is what it shares with its translations in another language, or so goes the thought behind the experiment of “radical translation” [originally published in 1960’s Word and Object] (Pursuit of Truth 37). Thus, Quine thinks that he can show that the way we learn new words is through their role in sentences that correlate with the target language (English in this case), then his hypothesis that sentences are the primary vehicle for meaning will be confirmed So, I will not leave any surprises here, the results of the1960 experiment led to a negative conclusion, Quine’s “thesis of indeterminacy of translation.” (PT 37) It turns out Quine learns that our public utterances bear little predictable relevance to outwardly observable phenomenon. Our language depends on situations that are previously in play, so called “unshared past experiences” (PT 38) or experiences that are in motion prior to the utterance. One exception to this rule seems to be the “observation sentence”-- the first kinds of declarative sentences that the English linguist hopes he will hear and be able to correlate to a concurrent situation. To check on the correct correlation between what is observed and what is uttered, the linguist attempts to repeat the native’s utterance and hopes for clear sign of assent or dissent. Back in the early 1960s Quine assumes that what is universal between languages is that speakers will assent to “an utterance in any circumstance in which he would [also] volunteer it.” (PT39) But by the early 1980s he adjusted this assumption to focus on the repeated assent or dissent of single speaker under conditions that were similar, rather than making the onus of his project depend on a definition of identical situations or stimulations between the native and the English speaker. With this stipulation, hopefully the work could be done as a study in translation, bypassing the onus of intersubjective relationality between the linguist and the native. But again by 1986 Lars Bergström observed that speakers may or may not assent to an utterance in similar situations. And I surmise that this is for the same reason as mentioned earlier: Our language 1 W.V. Quine, Pursuit of Truth, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1990), 37-57. 2 W.V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), 26-79. 3 W.V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960). 4 W.V. Quine, Pursuit of Truth, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1990).