Competing Radical Translations: Examples, Limitations and Implications

Abstract

In Chapter II of Word and Object, Quine presents and analyzes some of the philosophical difficulties found in the following situation: a linguist comes upon some jungle natives whose language is entirely unknown to him; the linguist then sets out to provide a translation of the jungle language into English. What the linguist would then be said to produce is a ‘radical translation’. Quine’s thesis about radical translation is this: while, in a sense, translations can be produced, there are philosophical reasons why there can be no uniquely correct equivalence class of radical translations.1