Inscrutability

Abstract

Pick what seems a correct scheme of reference for a language, German say. Perhaps you have picked one which tells us such things as that‘Katz’ refers in German to cats (and nought else)‘Hund’ refers in German to dogs (and nought else).Your scheme, given that it also accounts for German devices of sentence compounding such as ‘und,’ ‘nicht,’ and ‘alle,’ assigns truth conditions to German sentences.Quine reminds us that it is possible to permute your reference scheme in such a way that the result assigns the same truth values to all German sentences, even though the permutation changes the reference of all of German's terms. For example, we can take ‘Katz’ to refer to undetached cat parts, ‘Hund’ to undetached dog parts, ‘lauft’ to be true of undetached parts of things that run, ‘ist identische mit’ to name the relation undetached object parts stand in when they are parts of the same object, and so on. Quine observes that it seems possible to do this without effecting the ‘observational consequences’ of German theories: a theory in German will be seen, under one interpretation, to be confirmed by some evidence iff it is so confirmed under the other.