Quine : Translation as an Epistemological Tool

Translation has always been a central concern of the philosophy of language. However, it has received more attention over the last decades, as witnessed by the significant development of translation studies and the interest shown in that topic by a range of first-rank philosophers such as Quine, Davidson, Kuhn, Michel Serres, etc.
Quine’s work suggests that, although usually understood as a linguistic process, translation is also a process of an epistemological nature. This paper will focus on some epistemological issues of Quine’s thesis of the indeterminacy of translation.
First I will stress that Quine’s use of radical translation is aimed at putting into question the theory of meaning on which empiricism up to him used to hinge. As I will show, resorting to translation provides Quine with a strong criticism of a notion underlying the epistemology of traditional empiricism, that is the notion of ‘‘meaning’’ as an objective entity.
Secondly, I will point out that this criticism leads to an empiricism of the sort that is not committed to the traditional theory of meaning. I will show how Quine can hold on to an empiricist point of view while doing without the notion of ‘‘meaning’’ by giving a key role to the notions of ‘‘observation sentence’’ and ‘‘stimulus-meaning’’.
Finally, I will emphasize the link between Quine’s translation thesis and two other indeterminacy theses (the underdeterminacy of theories by experience and ontological relativity). All these theses, I will argue, share a common structure which is based on Quine’s translation model. In the conclusion, I will show how the translating process can be applied to theories (as well as to their ontologies) with the help of what Quine calls a proxy function.