Grazer Philosophische Studien 89 (2014), 135–152. ARE THERE EMPIRICAL CASES OF INDETERMINACY OF TRANSLATION? Rogério Passos SEVERO, Universidade Federal de Santa Maria Summary Quine's writings on indeterminacy of translation are mostly abstract and theoretical; his reasons for the thesis are not based on historical cases of translation but on general considerations about how language works. So it is no surprise that a common objection to the thesis asserts that it is not backed up by any positive empirical evidence. Ian Hacking (1981 and 2002) claims that whatever credibility the thesis does enjoy comes rather from alleged (fi ctitious) cases of radical mistranslation. Th is paper responds to objections of that kind by exhibiting actual cases of indeterminacy of translation. Introduction "Gavagai" is a made up word, as are the various translations Quine says it admits-all equally compatible with the behaviors of the made up native speakers, but incompatible with each other. Apparently some of the most impressive cases of indeterminacy of translation are fi ctitious. My favorite is Jorge Luis Borges's (1964) description of a few pages of the "Eleventh Volume of A First Encyclopedia of Tlön." We are told that the languages spoken on planet Tlön diff er radically from the ones we speak on Earth. Commenting on one of those languages, Borges produces a vivid image of what indeterminacy of translation might look like. He mentions a native sentence and two possible translations. One of them is a literal translation; the other has a more natural expression in most human languages: Th e nations of this planet are congenially idealist. [...] Th e world for them is not a concourse of objects in space, but a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is successive and temporal, not spatial. Th ere are no nouns in Tlön's conjectural Ursprache, from which the "present" languages and dialects are derived [...]. For example: there is no word corresponding to the 136 word "moon," but there is a verb which in English would be "to moon" or "to moonate." "Th e moon rose above the river" is hlor u fang axaxaxas mlo, or literally: "upward behind the onstreaming it mooned." (Borges 1964, 8) Th is gives us an illustration of indeterminacy of translation because the native sentence hlor u fang axaxaxas mlo apparently can be equally well translated as "Th e moon rose above the river" and as "Upward behind the onstreaming it mooned." Th e latter is a more literal translation, but harder for us to understand. Th e former is easier for us to understand, but might render other portions of the native discourse less readily intelligible: portions of their philosophical and scientifi c discourse might sound nonsensical to us when translated out of their native idiom. Th us, alternative manuals of translation-one more literal, the other less so-might be thought up which aff ord roughly equal fl uency in dialogues and negotiations with the natives of Tlön, but which diverge in the translation of individual sentences. I take this to be a good illustration of Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of translation.1 Th e question addressed in this paper is whether there is any actual empirical evidence for the thesis. A recurrent objection says that there is none, and that the thesis asserts a mere logical possibility.2 Quine himself did not do much to prevent this kind of objection from coming up. His reasoning contains very little in terms of direct positive evidence.3 It relies instead on considerations about how language and translation works in general, not on actual case studies. Quine does not think that the lack of direct evidence counts against the thesis. Rather, he argues that this is to be expected, given how hard it usually is to fi nd a single manual of translation.4 Once a manual of translation is found that aff ords fl uency in 1. Th is is how Quine formulates the thesis in Word and Object: "manuals for translating one language into another can be set up in divergent ways, all compatible with speech dispositions, yet incompatible with one another" (1960, 27). Th e notion of 'incompatibility' that fi gures in this passage is explained in Pursuit of Truth in terms of non-interchangeability: the "two translation relations might not be usable in alternation, from sentence to sentence, without issuing in incoherent sequences. Or, to put it in another way, the English sentences prescribed as a translation of a given [...] sentence by two rival manuals might not be interchangeable in English contexts" (Quine 1992a, 48). 2. Collin and Guldman (2005, 255), for example, say that "... it remains a striking feature of his account that Quine only argues for the abstract logical possibility of the indeterminacy of translation. He never off ers serious examples taken from actual anthropological or linguistic research." See also Bar-On (1993), who argues that indeterminacy of translation is inconsistent with our actual translation practices, and Hacking (1981 and 2002), discussed below. 3. See Quine (1960, chapter 2), (1970), and (1987). 4. "Radical translation is a rare achievement, and it is not going to be undertaken success137 dialogues and negotiations, why keep on seeking for another? Although Quine's reasoning does not require direct empirical evidence, I shall argue his thesis is confi rmed by some case studies in radical translation. Th e cases presented below are off ered here also as a response to the claim that indeterminacy of translation is a mere logical possibility that has little to do with our actual translation practices. Th is suggestion has appeared several times in the literature, but perhaps its most striking appearance has been in Hacking's (1981). Hacking argues that because Quine's reasons for indeterminacy are so abstract and theoretical, whatever empirical credibility the thesis has must come instead from a few notorious cases of radical mistranslation. He then shows that these cases are all fi ctitious, and concludes it is unlikely that there has ever been a case of radical mistranslation. Hacking seems to suggest that cases of mistranslation off er evidence for indeterminacy of translation. But surely this is not how Quine viewed the matter: indeterminacy of translation says that if a translation manual can be devised, so can others that are equally compatible with the behaviors of the natives but incompatible with each other. So it is a thesis about multiple translatability, not about untranslatability or mistranslatability. Hacking's point, however, is that given the lack of direct empirical support for indeterminacy of translation, it might gain some plausibility from cases of mistranslation; but-and this is his main argument in (1981 and 2002)-the allegedly historical cases of mistranslation are all fi ctitious. Th is does not entail that indeterminacy is impossible, but it is meant to drain most of its plausibility. Hacking concludes that given the lack of empirical support, indeterminacy of translation is a logical possibility (something we cannot prove impossible) that is most likely false of the world we live in.5 Given Hacking's argumentative strategy, the bulk of his reasoning turns on an analysis of three notorious cases of alleged radical mistranslations. One of these cases is that of an alleged mistranslation of the word 'kangaroo': On their voyage of discovery to Australia a group of Captain Cook's sailors captured a young kangaroo and brought the strange creature back on board fully twice for the same language" (Quine 1992a, 50f.). 5. In his Historical Ontology (2002, 152) Hacking added a few extra sentences at the very beginning of his (1981) paper, which is reprinted in the book: "Some readers will protest that this shows nothing about Quine's logical point. I am not so sure. If something is claimed as a logical possibility about translation, which is never known to be approximated for more than a few moments in real life, may we not begin to suspect that the conception of translation that is taken for granted may be erroneous?" 138 their ship. No one knew what it was, so some men were sent ashore to ask the natives. When the sailors returned they told their mates, 'It's a kangaroo.' Many years later it was discovered that when the aborigines said 'kangaroo' they were not in fact naming the animal, but replying to their questioners, 'What did you say?'6 As Hacking points out, this report is false. In the Guugu Yamidhirr dialect, spoken by Aborigines who lived in the area where Cook landed, the word for kangaroo is "ganurru", where "n" is a phoneme that sounds a bit like "ng." According to Hacking (1981, 172), this was "apparently pointed out in a letter to an Australian newspaper in 1898," but only became common knowledge with the work of anthropologist John Havilland in 1972. Travelers in Australia subsequent to Cook apparently either failed to contact speakers of the Guugu Yamidhirr dialect or made contact but failed to pronounce the word properly; hence the myth of the radical mistranslation of "kangaroo." Th ere was no mistranslation, just poor phonetic transcription. Two other cases of alleged mistranslation are likewise analyzed away by Hacking-that of the French word "vasisdas" and that of the English word "indri". Based on his analysis of these cases, Hacking suggests that there is no evidence of there ever having occurred a single case of radical mistranslation. Th is paper does not examine the examples brought by Hacking-which are indeed fi ctitious-but discusses instead cases of radical translations of Amerindian words and phrases that apparently satisfy Hacking's defi nition of a mistranslation (section 1). Amerindian cosmologies-found especially in native cultures of the Amazon region, but also throughout North, Central and South America-are so much at odds with the cosmologies prevalent in Europe (and throughout the world nowadays) that radical mistranslations in Hacking's sense are bound to occur. I then argue (section 2) that there is something wrong with Hacking's criteria of mistranslation, and that the cases exhibited here are in fact evidence both of indeterminacy of translation and of what one might want to call 'cosmological relativity'. Th e paper concludes that indeterminacy can be argued for using both top-down (from abstract reasons, as Quine did) and bottom-up (from actual cases of translation, as we do here) strategies, and at the very end answers a couple of objections. 6. Quoted from Hacking (1981, 175), originally in Th e Observer (London, 1973). See also Banks's entry 14, July 1770, in his (1962). 139 1. Radical "mistranslations" of Amerindian phrases We begin with Hacking's criteria for a radical mistranslation: (1) Speakers of two very diff erent languages are trying to communicate. (2) A speaker of one language says s. Speakers of the other language take him to be saying p. (3) Th is translation is completely wrong. Yet (4) neither party realizes it, although they continue to converse. Moreover (5) the mistranslation persists until it is too late to correct. (1981, 171) Hacking has in mind cases of mistranslation of names, hence cases of malostension, or the misidentifi cation of the object or objects referred to by a name. Th ese occur "when (6) an expression of the fi rst language is taken by speakers of the second language to name a natural kind. (7) It does nothing of the sort, but (8) the second language incorporates this expression as the name of the natural kind in question" (171). Conditions (3) and (7) are meant to rule out "mere diff erences in nuance, moderate misunderstandings and misclassifi cations [...], or the taking of the name of an individual as the name of a class" (171). As we shall see next, conditions (1)–(8) are apparently satisfi ed by some translations of Amerindian words. Anthropological studies have been pointing out for some time now that most Amerindian peoples do not conceive themselves as the only creatures that see themselves as humans.7 Like many other cultures, they describe themselves as persons and as human beings, and they also conceive persons as centers of intentionality and agency. But, unlike many cultures, they view the belonging of an individual to a natural kind as something quite diff erent from what we take it to be. For many cultures, this is a matter of having certain natural traits (biological, physical, etc.) which are true of the individuals of that kind regardless of how they are perceived by others. For the Amerindians, on the other hand, belonging to a natural kind is a matter of perspective. Th e same individual that from a human perspective is a jaguar, is said to be a human being from the perspective of the jaguars (see Lima 2005, 215), and is said to belong to yet another kind from the perspective of other creatures (say, a fi sh, an armadillo, a monkey, a spirit, or whatever). In other words, for the Amerindians the natural sorting of an individual turns on the species that sees that individual. Th e kind to which an individual belongs is relative to how it is seen by others. So Amer7. See, e.g., Århem (1993), Descola (1996), Lima (1996, 2005), Viveiros de Castro (1996, 1998, 2002), and Vilaça (2005). 140 indians, like other cultures-European cultures, for example-claim that human beings are persons. But they diverge from others in saying that not only we, humans, see ourselves as humans. Th ey say that seeing oneself as human is a common trait of all creatures, whereas others-Europeans, for example-would tend to say that humanity is what sets us apart from other creatures. Th ey say that humanity is shared, and that what sets creatures apart is instead the kind of body that each has. On their view, the same individual that is a human from one perspective can also be non-human in another. Vilaça (2005, 450) describes the case of the Amazonian Wari' people and provides further references: Although they see jaguars as animals, the Wari' know from their shamans that jaguars see themselves as humans: that is, as people pursuing a full social life and endowed with a human appearance. A similar instance among the Carib of British Guiana, taken from Ahlbrinck's work of 1924, is cited by Levy-Bruhl as an example of this extended notion of humanity: "[A]nimals (just as plants and inanimate objects) live and act like humans. In the morning, the animals go 'to work,' as the Indians do. Th e tiger, the snake and all the other animals leave to go hunting; like the Indians, they must 'look after their family' ..." (Ahlbrinck 1924, 221, in Levy-Bruhl 1996 [1927], 30). Commenting on studies such as these, Viveiros de Castro (1998) off ers a more generalized account of Amerindian cosmology: Typically, in normal conditions, humans see humans as humans, animals as animals, and spirits (if they see them) as spirits; however, animals (predators) and spirits see humans as animals (as prey) to the same extent that animals (as prey) see humans as spirits or as animals (predators). By the same token, animals and spirits see themselves as humans: they perceive themselves as (or become) anthropomorphic beings when they are in their own houses or villages and they experience their own habits and characteristics in the form of culture-they see their food as human food (jaguars see blood as manioc beer, vultures see the maggots in rotting meat as grilled fi sh, etc.), they see their bodily attributes (fur, feathers, claws, beaks, etc.) as body decorations or cultural instruments, they see their social system as organized in the same way as human institutions are (with chiefs, shamans, ceremonies, exogamous moieties, etc.). Th is 'to see as' refers literally to percepts and not analogically to concepts ... (470) Viveiros de Castro and others thus say that Amerindian cosmology has a "perspectival quality." Diff erences among kinds of creatures are not 141 accounted for in physical or biological terms as many cultures understand them, but in terms of the perspective aff orded by the body of the individual that perceives the individuals at hand. From the perspective of one's own body, one sees oneself as human, and sees other creatures as having different kinds of bodies, some of them non-human. But this is also true of the way all other creatures see themselves and the creatures around them. One signifi cant consequence of this is that in Amerindian tongues the words used to designate what we call "persons" or "humans", and which have been translated accordingly-e.g., dene (McDonnell 1984), masa (Århem 1993), matsigenka (Rosengren 2006), wari' (Vilaça 2005)-do not designate persons or humans as we understand them. Instead, those words function as pronouns or indexicals of self-designation-much like "we" or "us"-which vary in content according to who uses them and in which context. It is of course understandable that the Amerindian words just mentioned have been translated for "human beings" or "persons," and it is for us natural to continue to do so, given the fl uency in dialogues and negotiations allowed by that choice. Th e same is true not only of words of self-designation but also of words that we usually translate as names of natural kinds such as jaguar, tapir, arapaima, etc. Th e Tupinambás (of eastern Brazil), for example, use the word jauára-also transcribed as ya'guara-to designate creatures of a natural kind (the jaguar), as we do, i.e. creatures that have a certain type of body. But for them, having that body is not something that belongs to a creature's independent nature or essence; rather it is something that a creature has or does not have relative to the perspective from which its body is perceived. Th e same individual creature may have the body of a jaguar when seen from the perspective of a human body, a body of a human being when seen from the perspective of a jaguar, and yet a diff erent type of body from the perspective of a third creature. In fact, jauára works much like the Amerindian words for "person" and "human being": it registers a certain perspective, and functions much like an indexical, such as "you" or "they". Reporting on his voyages to Brazil in the 16th Century, Hans Staden recalls being made captive by the native Tupinambás. He describes a ritual in which a Tupinambá declared himself to be a jaguar while eating human fl esh: jauára iche ["I am a jaguar"] (see Staden 2008, 91). Being a jauára is in this case the perspective of a creature that eats human fl esh, among other things, i.e. the perspective of a predator-but note that from that perspective it is not human fl esh that is being eaten. Th e perspective one has is fi xed by one's body, but bodies are in this framework essentially 142 unstable and can change radically in special circumstances. Vilaça (2005) reports the case of a Wari' child who was invited by her mother to take a trip into the forest: Many days go by as they walk around and pick fruit. Th e child is treated normally by her mother until one day, realizing just how long they have spent away from home, the child starts to grow suspicious. Looking carefully, she sees a tail discreetly hidden between her mother's legs. Struck by fear, she cries for help, summoning her true kin and causing the jaguar to fl ee. (451) Reports such as these are quite common in the Amazon region and off er evidence of how radically diff erent from ours the notion of a body is for the Amerindians: it is not a substance or a physical substrate, but primarily a set of "aff ections or ways of being" (Viveiros de Castro 1996, 128), "a way of being actualized in a bodily form" (Vilaça 2005, 450). What the Tupinambás and other Amerindians ordinarily see when they look at a jaguar is a jaguar, but this is not how jaguars see themselves, and neither is it what the Tupinambás and other Amerindians see in some special circumstances. Th e case is likewise for other creatures and even spirits and celestial bodies such as the moon (see Fernandes 1970, 171). Th is is so because the individuals that we may conceive as jaguars are conceived by the Amerindians as seeing themselves as humans; hence, they too have a language and designate themselves with words that correspond to wari', dene, masa, matsigenka, etc. From their perspective, they also see beings that diff er from themselves in bodily appearance, and are accordingly classifi ed as predator or prey-just like we do with other creatures. Snakes and jaguars see themselves as humans, and in turn see humans as tapirs or white lipped peccaries, for example, as prey (see Baer 1994, 224, quoted by Viveiros de Castro 1998, 477). Hence, in Amerindian tongues the words we ordinarily translate as names of natural kinds, such as jaguar, tapir, armadillo, etc. vary in content (extension) according to who uses them and in which context, while not varying in what Kaplan (1989, 505ff .) calls "character." Like the Amerindian words for "human" or "person", they function as indexicals or pointers. Th ey may of course be translated into many other languages as jaguar, tapir, armadillo, etc., and this is as good a translation as we will ever get without radical changes in our use of our words. Strikingly, however, these translations satisfy Hacking's conditions for a radical mistranslation: a number of cultures have been in dialogue with Amerindian peoples over the last fi ve centuries, translating words such 143 as jauára for "jaguar". Yet what an English (or Portuguese, etc.) speaker means by "jaguar" diff ers radically from what the Tupinambás mean by jauára; and the diff erence here is not just a matter of nuance, moderate misunderstanding or misclassifi cation, nor is it mistaking the name of an individual for the name of a class. In translation, "jaguar" ends up meaning a creature that belongs to a set picked out by their physical and biological traits independent of who sees it, whereas by jauára the Tupinambás mean a perspective which many individuals of diff erent species can take on, including human beings. Th is diff erence, however, did not prevent the word "jaguar" and others like it from being incorporated from the Tupi language into Portuguese, Spanish, English, and other European tongues to designate a natural kind.8 So we do have here historical cases of radical mistranslation in Hacking's sense.9 At the same time, it is unclear which alternative translations would be better suited for these cases. 2. Indeterminacy of translation and cosmological relativity Th e anthropologists mentioned above have pointed out that the cosmologies of the Amerindian peoples diff er radically from ours, and they have off ered indications on how Amerindians think (the inferences they make) and are inclined to talk on given occasions. For the most part they have not provided better translations, nor are they saying that the translations we do have are wrong. Instead, the suggestion is that in translation we are bound to use the categories with which we are familiar and project them onto native cultures. But this is precisely the point of Quine's indeterminacy of translation: "What the indeterminacy thesis is meant to bring 8. Th is happened with many other Tupi words as well. Th e Portuguese word for armadillo, for example, is "tatu", from the Tupi word ta'tu; "jaguatirica" (ocelot) comes from the Tupi îaguara tyryk; "guapuruvu" (schizolobium parahyba) comes from ïwakuru'mbu. 9. Two interesting additional examples are those of the Wari' expressions kwereand jam-, that are usually translated as body and soul (see Vilaça 2005, 452ff .). What we mean by our words "body" and "soul" has no counterpart in the Wari' cosmology. Having a jam- (soul) is for the Wari' having the capacity to transform, especially in extraordinary action. Jamis not what gives a person's body feelings, thoughts, consciousness, etc., but what gives it its instability. A body-which is conceived by them not as a substance or substrate, but as a set of aff ections or ways of beings-will change due to its jam-. Vilaça reports (453) that "the Wari' insist that healthy and active people do not have a soul (jam-)", precisely because they are much less prone to change their aff ections or ways of being. 144 out is that the radical translator is bound to impose about as much as he discovers" (Quine 1992a, 49). Hacking has argued previously for the determinacy of translation (see his 1975, 150ff .): he says that two translated sentences p and q cannot be both correct translations of a native sentence s, and at the same time be "contraries".10 Th is is true, but it is a misreading of Quine's thesis, which does not say that the translated sentences p and q are contraries, but merely that the manuals that yield each sentence are incompatible in the sense that using them in alternation will bring about an incoherent English text or discourse: the translated sentences p and q are "not interchangeable in English contexts" (Quine 1992a, 48). Th e fact that they are not interchangeable does not entail that they cannot both be true. In fact, there is no reason to think that they are not intertranslatable: p is a translation of s which is a translation of q-thus p is a second-hand translation of q; moreover, they must both fi t equally well the speech-behaviors of the natives while uttering s. So in many cases-though not necessarily in all-they are likely to have the same truth-value, and (by defi nition) are not contraries. Th e point is that even when two English sentences are perfectly good translations of s-in the sense of allowing for fl uency in dialogues and negotiations-if we think of them as conveying meanings (conceived as something distinct from their actual behavior during those dialogues and negotiations), then the meanings of the two English sentences off ered as translations of s must diff er. If they did not diff er, then they could for the most part be used in alternation without producing incoherence in the overall English text or discourse. So the fact that a translation relation is transitive-i.e. that if p is a translation of s, and s is a translation of q, then q is a translation of p-does not entail the transitivity of meaning. Th e sentences p and q might not be usable in alternation in English contexts, and thus there is hardly any sense in which they can be said to mean the same. In other words, a good translation is not evidence of sameness of meaning. Let's not dwell on Hacking's misreading of Quine's thesis here but merely press that the cases presented above are evidence of the indeterminacy of translation. Th ere are at least two ways of fi nding out what a native speaker of a foreign tongue means by what she says: we can translate her words into 10. It is not clear what Hacking means by saying that two sentences cannot be "contraries". Perhaps he means that they cannot be logically incompatible, i.e., that they cannot be negations of each other nor contraries in the strict sense (in which one says 'all S is P' and the other says 'no S is P')-in either sense the sentences cannot both be true. 145 a language we already know, or we learn to speak like her. In the latter case, little or no translation is needed. But in the former, fi nding out what a person means is the outcome of a translation; hence the meanings assigned to her words cannot be used as a standard for the correction of the translation itself. What we can do is to come up with a better translation-one that allows for more fl uency in dialogues and negotiations-and with which the original translation can then be compared and corrected. In any case, if we are to say in our language what she says in hers, some translation will be needed. To be sure, fl uency in dialogues across cultures is bound to be broken here and there: some phrases will be untranslatable or only partially translatable. Th is surely happens with many Amerindian phrases in translation; and it is a common experience for anyone who speaks more than one tongue: one can know how to say things in a foreign language without ever quite fi nding a way of conveying it in one's mother tongue. Th e thesis of indeterminacy of translation has nothing to say about these cases. It is not a thesis about untranslatability, nor is it a thesis about mistranslations.11 What it does say is that whenever we have a manual of translation that allows for dialogue and negotiations, however broken, then other manuals are possible that allow for roughly equal fl uency in dialogues and negotiations, yet are incompatible with the original manual (in the sense mentioned above, that they cannot be used in alternation-that switching from one manual to another in the course of a translation will yield inconsistency in the translated text). For the word jauára mentioned above, the standard translation is just "jaguar." Th is is of course the easiest and most natural way for us to understand what a Tupinambá says while pointing to a jaguar and uttering the word. But an alternative manual could try to be more faithful to what we now know about Amerindian cosmology by attempting to avoid projecting 11. Hacking (2002, 169) says that indeterminacy of translation "pulls in one direction and the idea of incommensurability"-which is usually defi ned in terms of untranslatability-"in the other". But here again Hacking's reading of the thesis of indeterminacy is mistaken: it assumes that the thesis entails that there are always "too many translations between schemes" (170). Yet indeterminacy is compatible with untranslatability, i.e. with there being no translation at all for a given set of sentences. And it is also compatible with there being only a few. Indeterminacy is one thing, translatability is another: "Th is thesis of indeterminacy of translation is by no means a theory of untranslatability. Th ere are good translations and bad, and the two confl icting manuals imagined are good. However, there are also plenty of cases of untranslatable sentences, and they are commonplace even within our own language. A sentence about neutrinos admits of no translation into the English of 1900" (Quine 1992b, 1). 146 onto them our own theories about what a jaguar is. It could, for example, translate words such as jauára for phrases containing "jaguar-perspective" or "jaguar-from-our-perspective" or something of the kind. Th is would increase the intelligibility for the Amerindians of what we say, but at the cost of making what they say less readily intelligible to us. Th e standard translation (where jauára is just "jaguar"), on the other hand, projects our view of what a jaguar is onto the natives, and thus makes it harder for them to understand what we say, but easier for us to speak to them. So in choosing one manual over another, there is a trade off . To be sure, some translations are just wrong, in that the manuals that issue them systematically yield sentences that are incompatible with the speech behaviors of the natives. But the possibility of more than one manual issuing sentences that allow for dialogues and negotiations that are roughly equal in fl uency seems to be implied by the diff erences of our own cosmology and that of the Amerindians. Th e question of whether by jauára the natives really mean "jaguar" or "jaguar-from-our-perspective" is in fact a question about which manual of translation is to be favored. If the manuals that issue them do in fact allow for roughly equal fl uency in conversations, and if no other manual is available that allows for increased fl uency, then there is hardly any sense in saying that only one of them captures what the natives really say. If translation according to one manual is correct, then so is the alternative. Th is is not to say that the natives do not know what they mean: certainly they know what they mean just as much as we do. By "jauára" they mean jauára, just as we mean jaguar by "jaguar". Surely there are occasions in which people do not know what they mean, and we might even want to say that meaning in these cases is indeterminate. But this is not the thesis of indeterminacy of translation. Lima (1996, 30) describes the initial strangeness to her ears of certain Tupi phrases (spoken by the Jurunas, of the Amazonian lowlands) like amãna ube wï, literally: "it rained for me". She reports that most of the statements made by the Jurunas have the qualifi cation "for me": it is beautiful for me, it turned into a jaguar for me, it is true for me, etc. For the Jurunas, however, it would make little sense to speak as we do, as if from nowhere. For the purposes of translation, of course, we could just say that amãna ube wï, said by a Juruna, is what we mean by "it rained," or "it rained where I was". But in doing so we eventually have to add in some explanation about why they seem to believe in claims that to us are obviously false or senseless, such as "this is blood for me but manioc beer for a jaguar", "while hunting he appeared as a pig to his friends, who then 147 killed him", etc. Alternatively, we might try a translation that already has that "perspectival quality" built into it, thus allowing for a more literal rendering of sentences such as amãna ube wï: it rained for me. In this case it is the translated sentence itself that is harder for us to understand. So, again, in choosing one manual over another, there is a trade-off ; and the fact that there is a trade-off is evidence of indeterminacy. Although we have been speaking here of the thesis of indeterminacy of translation, it is in fact a set of theses containing at least two. Th is was not clear in Quine's earlier writings on the matter but gradually became more transparent. Quine came to speak of the indeterminacy of translation of sentences (or holophrastic indeterminacy), as distinguished from the indeterminacy of translation of subsentential parts, especially the indeterminacy of translation of terms (or indeterminacy of reference). Th e latter thesis admits of a proof, with the use of proxy functions: A proxy function is any explicit one-to-one transformation, f, defi ned over the objects in our purported universe. By 'explicit' I mean that for any object x, specifi ed in an acceptable notation, we can specify fx. Suppose now we shift our ontology by reinterpreting each of our predicates as true rather of the correlates fx of the objects x that it had been true of. Th us, where 'Px ' originally meant that x was a P, we reinterpret 'Px' as meaning that x is a f of P. Correspondingly for two-place predicates and higher. Singular terms can be passed over in view of §10.12 We leave all the sentences as they were, letter for letter, merely reinterpreting. Th e observation sentences remain associated with the same sensory stimulations as before, and the logical interconnections remain intact. Yet the objects of the theory have been supplanted as drastically as you like. (Quine 1992a, 31f.) Th is reasoning for the indeterminacy of reference came to be favored by Quine over the "gavagai" argument used in Word and Object, because it can be fl eshed out into a full logical proof. Th is is in stark contrast with the stronger thesis of the indeterminacy of translation of sentences, for which there is no proof (see Quine 1992a, §§ 13 and 20). In his later writings Quine comes to describe it as a conjecture.13 However that may be, both theses have implications for metaphysics. Indeterminacy of reference has 12. In §10 Quine describes a method for eliminating singular terms in favor of defi nite descriptions. Th is is essentially Russell's technique, but now extended to all singular terms. Th is is not to be understood as an interpretation of singular terms-i.e., it does not say or clarify what they mean-nor is it meant to replace singular terms in ordinary or scientifi c discourse. (Quine 1992a, 25–28) 13. See Quine (1998, 728); for further comments and discussion, see Hylton (2007, chapter 8). 148 well-known implications for the status of ontology, explicitly drawn by Quine himself in "Ontological R elativity" (1969). Holophrastic indeterminacy has an implication that has been less explicitly explored, which we might want to call "cosmological relativity". Whereas ontological relativity states that all existence claims are relative to a manual of translation, cosmological relativity says that all claims about the relations among entities are relative to a manual of translation. Th e fact that Amerindian cosmologies have the "perspectival quality" described above, whereas other cosmologies do not, suggests cosmological relativity. In our cosmologies the attributes assigned to an individual do not turn on who is describing that individual. Hence, being objective usually means to describe or explain something without letting the particular perspective from which the description is made intrude. In Amerindian cosmologies, by contrast, the attributes assigned to an individual vary according to the bodily perspective from which it is perceived. Hence, the ideal of an objective view from nowhere is out of question. Objectivity is granted, rather, by seeing things from the perspective of the individual that is being described. To know a jaguar objectively is to become acquainted with its perspective, to see the world as it sees it, and so on.14 Th ese diff erences are so radical and run so deep that translations from Amerindian into European languages are bound to be quite loose at some points. Th e radical translator may opt for projecting more or less of his own cosmology into what is said. And this, we conclude, is evidence suggestive of cosmological relativity. Even in cases where the individuals of which Europeans and Amerindians speak can be matched up onto one another, they are conceived in radically diff erent ways. Hence cosmological relativity can obtain even if ontological relativity does not. In translation, both might be suggested, but the Amerindian cases mentioned above are evidence primarily of the former. 3. Two objections (1) Given the anthropological evidence presented above, one might want to say that we do in fact have good reasons for translating Amerindian 14. Th is in part explains why Amerindians were apparently so easily converted into Western religions, and also why they would so easily fall back into their own rituals. "Professing" the new faith was their way of fi nding out what it was about; the Europeans, however, mistook this as evidence of faint-heartedness (see Viveiros de Castro 2002, chapter 3). 149 sentences more literally: we have good anthropological evidence of how they think and what they believe in, and we should translate them accordingly. "Amãna ube wï" would then really mean "It rained for me" and not "It rained where I was."-Th is is an interesting objection, because it is indeed true that we have good anthropological evidence of a perspectival cosmology among Amerindians. Th is in turn provides clues as to which translations are empirically adequate. But it does not rule out alternative translations which have roughly equal adequacy. Th ere is an issue here as to what exactly is to count as part of a translation: is it just the sentences translated, or those sentences and whatever else a translator might add so as to facilitate its understanding-say, footnotes, introductory remarks, explanations, gestures, etc.? "It rained for me" can only work as a good translation of "Amãna ube wï" when off ered in a context of an explanation of how the Amerindians behave and think (why they are inclined to speak the way they do). So several other sentences have to be added to the translation so as to make it intelligible to us and usable in conversations with the natives. Th ese other sentences include remarks to the eff ect that the Jurunas say "Amãna ube wï" in contexts where we would most likely just say "It rained where I was." Th ese other remarks link the literal translation of the original sentence with sentences that are idiomatic in our own tongue. In eff ect we have here layers of translation. Th e translation "It rained for me" is at an intermediate level, between "Amãna ube wï" and "It rained where I was." Th e choice is then not between "It rained for me" and "It rained where I was", but between "It rained for me" plus an explanation of how we can understand this in our terms and "It rained where I was" plus an explanation of why this is not what the Jurunas literally say. Th e translated sentence itself is not the same in each case, but both alternatives will aff ord roughly equal fl uency in dialogues in negotiations, given the explanatory remarks that accompany each translation. Th ere is a trade-off between how much of the natives' views to build into the translated sentence and how much to convey by way of explanations and side remarks. So a translation which builds more of the natives' cosmological views into the translated sentences themselves and adds further remarks as to how to understand those sentences can do an equally good job of aff ording fl uency in dialogues and negotiations as a translation that conveys less of the natives' cosmological views into the translated sentences but explains more of it in introductory and side remarks. Regarding which of these alternatives better captures what the natives really mean, there is indeterminacy: it is not something settled by our anthropological knowl150 edge of the Amerindian cosmology; in fact, it is empirically irrelevant for anthropology. Both translation manuals seem equally compatible with our current anthropology. (2) A related objection (see Hacking 2002, chapters 11 and 12) says the translation is not the issue in cases such as these. Rather, the diffi culty lies in understanding the style of reasoning of the native speakers. Th e inferences they make are unlike the ones we make, as well as their ontology and cosmology.-Th is is in fact true, but why should this not render indeterminacy of translation even more plausible? If the style of reasoning of the natives diff ers radically from ours, then more introductory remarks, explanations and footnotes will be crucial to the understanding of the translated sentences. It is less likely that a straightforward single solution will clearly present itself as the translation of any given sentence. At least in some cases, it is likely that several translations will be roughly equally adequate, each accompanied by a diff erent set of explanations, introductory remarks, footnotes, etc. Conclusion Th is paper has argued that Quine's original writings on the thesis of indeterminacy of translation can be supported by empirical evidence from actual cases of translation. Although Quine's views on the matter do not require direct evidence of the thesis-indirect, holistic considerations suffi ce-the fact that we can marshal some empirical support for this thesis fi ts nicely with Quine's empiricism and naturalism. Furthermore, it responds more straightforwardly to authors such as Hacking who take the lack of direct empirical support as evidence of the implausibility of the thesis. Th e paper has also indicated-without developing the point, however-that the thesis of ontological relativity, which is a direct consequence of the indeterminacy of reference, can be complemented with a thesis of cosmological relativity, which is a direct consequence of holophrastic indeterminacy. Th is is an issue that deserves further attention and has not been adequately handled here.15 15. Section 1 of this paper benefi ted substantially from an exchange with César Schirmer dos Santos, to whom I am most grateful. 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