Notes: MEANING & TRANSLATION

(These are the study notes prepared by me for the essay for the course: Translation Studies)

Notes: MEANING & TRANSLATION
W.V.O. Quine

1. Stimulus Meaning
1.1 Empirical meaning:
a) Is that which remains when we peel away the verbiage of a given discourse together with all its stimulatory conditions
b) Is that what sentence of the totally alien SL have in common sentences of TL and.
This ISOLATED Empirical meaning will give a language of logic.
To give meaning is: to say something in the home language that has it.
1.2 Radical Translation: is translating a hitherto unknown language into a known language.
In case of related languages (like languages of the same family or that have some kind of convergence or have same religious or cultural background etc) the translation is aided with resemblance of cognate words etc.
But for the real nature of the empirical meaning we must look into the translation of the unrelated languages one of which should be a hitherto unknown language. Translation involving such a language is called the radical translation. So for nature of meaning we should think of radical translation. It is here where the real empirical meaning detaches itself from the words that possess it.
1.3 Methodology for the translator (or linguist’s power of intuition)
He (the linguist) must be able to:
Guess what stimulation his subject is heading to-not nerve by nerve-but the rough & ready references to the environment,
Guess whether that stimulation actually prompts the native’s assent to or dissent from the accompanying question,
To rule out the chance that the native assents to or dissents from the questioned sentence irrelevantly as a truth or falsehood on its own merits without regard to the scurrying rabbit which happens to be the conspicuous circumstance of the moment.
1.4 Occasion Sentence Vs Standing Sentence:
The contrast is based on the notion of prompted assent and dissent which we are supposing available.
A sentence is an occasion sentence for a man if he can sometimes be got to assent to or dissent from it, but can never be got to unless the asking is accompanied by a prompting stimulation. (So here the asking is accompanied by a prompting stimulation is necessary.)
In other words an occasion sentence commands assent or dissent only when prompted all over again by current stimulation.(Ex. So as to know what Gavagai means we need to point out the rabbit and ask if it is. Here asking is: ‘if it is a rabbit’ (or rather Gavagai) and the rabbit’s really being there is the prompting stimulation).
No such prompted sent and dissent for the standing sentences is required. Here the subject may repeat his old assent or dissent unprompted by current stimulation when we ask him on later occasions. ( So repeatability and unprompted-ness distinguish standing sentences from the occasion sentences. Ex. There are brick houses on the elm street etc.)
1.5 Affirmative Stimulus meaning of an Occasion sentence ‘S’ is the set of all the stimulations that would prompt him to assent to ‘S’.
So also the Negative stimulus meaning of an occasion sentence ‘S’ is the set of al the stimulations that would prompt him to dissent to ‘S’.
On the conditional would prompt:
The strong conditional defines is a disposition in this case a disposition to assent to or dissent from S when variously prompted. The disposition may be presumed to be some structural condition, like solubility or more particularly, like an allergy, in not being understood.

2. The inscrutability of terms:
2.1 Meaning: Is not there in the words separately but it emerges when a whole sentence is uttered, as the words, when not learned as sentences, are learned only derivatively by abstraction from their roles in learned sentences. So also there are one word sentences as ‘White’ or ‘Rabbit’ do exist. But sentences too are highly interlinked, so is the meaning within the sentences.
So can we reasonably talk about the meaning irrespective of sentences?
Therefore stimulus meaning is devised
2.2 Notion of stimulus meaning:
It isolates sort of a net empirical import of the various single sentences without regard to the containing theory, without losing whatever it owes to the theory.
It is a device contrived while broaching an alien culture, and relevant also to an analysis of our own knowledge of the world.
2.3 Term and Sentence:
Terms have extensions to objects.
Stimulus meaning is in theory a question of direct surface irritation.
Synonymy of sentences not terms:
It is only the sentences that can be synonymous not the terms.
Sentences are not the real mediators of all the implications what a term in an untouched language has-but sentences only render some idea within the pattern of the target language. In radical translations (a) terms can never be synonymous (b) there can only be synonymy of sentences not of terms.
2.4 Inscrutability proved:
Occasion sentences and stimulus meanings are general coin, whereas terms, conceived as variously applying to objects in some sense, are a provincial appurtenance of our object-positing kind of culture. There cannot be any basic alternative to our object-positing pattern. There cannot be any in translation either, as it imposes our pattern.

3. Observation Sentences:
(Same as the summary given by Dr. Bhat Padikkal)

4. Intrasubjective synonymy of occasion sentences:
Apart from the stimulus meaning-which is unique for each individual sentences-some sentences can be synonymous.
So Bachelor & Soltero may be synonymous for a bilingual.
Intra-subjective synonymy is in principle just as objective as discoverable by the outside linguist as is translation. He may find synonymous sentences without their translations.
Even here the terms (say Bachelor and Unmarried man) need not be co-extensive general.
Talking of occasion sentences as and not as terms, however, we see that we can do more for synonymy within a language than for radical translation. It appears that sameness of stimulus meaning will serve as a standard of intra-subjective synonymy of occasion sentences without their having to be observation sentences.
There is no limit to the length of sentences and their synonymy.

5. Truth Functions:
The fact that logic of a language and the language of logic may be different (only the former i.e. logic of a language may differ from the later as we can fix the language of logic) is at the heart of this subsection. The main question is how logical concept is different form logic of a language. Logic creeps in because: is it so that all languages share same logic?
For a language that has the object positing kind of schema and that which is without such a pattern – for both the speakers of two different languages the stimulus meaning can just be the same. So the truth-functional part is the only part the recognition of which, in a foreign language, we seem to be able to pin down to behavioral criteria (i.e. speech).

6. Analytical Hypotheses:
Here we imagine a project undertaken by linguist of infinite semantic correlation of sentences. Only conjectural equating of parts may be called analytical hypotheses.
The main idea here is that there cannot be any complete hypotheses as such a guide or a handbook of translation, say from jungle-to-English. The linguist is bound to fail in the project and will come up with disdainful of English parallels to the jungle language.
He can of course do it as a bilingual. But a bilingual too does it as a split personality.

7. A handful of meaning:
It is by his analytical hypotheses the linguist implicitly starts the grand synthetic hypotheses which is his overall semantic co-relation of sentences.
No sense is made of sameness of meaning of the words that are equated in the typical Analytical hypotheses. There is no objective matter to check the nicety of the hypotheses.
A sense is after all given to sameness of meaning of the expression.
This indefinability of synonymy by reference to the methodology of analytical hypotheses is formally the same as the indefinability of the truth by reference to the scientific method. Also consequences are parallel.
The methods of AH is a way of catapulting oneself into the native language by momentum of the home language.
The analogy provided by the AH is no way unique as the relation between two analogous
Sentences is not just unique and singular, there can be many analogous sentences ( still failing to carry the import of the jungle language sentence) that analogy, therefore, cant be seen as the meaning.
Quine is not simply saying that we cannot know the meaning of a foreign sentence except as we are prepared to offer a translation in our own language, but more that:
It is not only relative to an in large part arbitrary manual of English sentences and then only in a parochial sense of meaning, i.e. use in English.
So is the indeterminacy of translation at the heart of the Quine’s essay.