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Abstract

In this paper, first, I briefly discuss various types of obstacles and difficulties for cross-cultural study and in particular failure of translational equivalence of linguistic stimuli and questions by referring to the literature in cultural psychology. Second, I summarize the extant cross-cultural studies of semantic judgments about reference and truth-value with regard to proper names, with a focus on Sytsma et al.’s (2015) study that examined the differences between English and Japanese. Lastly, I introduce and discuss the two recent studies of semantic judgments in Japanese that my colleagues and I conducted. These two studies suggest that the translation Sytsma et al. used failed to consider the linguistic features characteristic of Japanese and other East Asian languages, and thereby failed to ensure translational equivalence.

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Fig. 1
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Notes

  1. Of course, there are multiple ways to individuate culture. Throughout the paper, I individuate culture ethnically and/or linguistically. Hence, the focus of the paper is on cross-cultural studies that examine differences between ethnically and/or linguistically different groups.

  2. Lam (2010) reported a replication failure of the cultural difference in semantic judgments in Cantonese Chinese for its native speakers, but his experimental design was criticized in Machery et al. (2010) and Beebe and Undercoffer (2016).

  3. Machery and Olivola (unpublished data) collected data in the USA, and Machery and Stich (2012) reported it.

  4. The studies mentioned here include those that use English for the target participants whose native language is not English. A list of cross-cultural studies in experimental philosophy with translation will be provided in “Cross-Cultural Studies on Semantic Judgments” section. Besides, Huebner et al. (2010) examined the cultural difference concerning judgments about consciousness by using English for Hong Kongese people. Sarkissian et al. (2010), too, examined the cultural difference concerning judgments about free will by using English for Hong Kongese people and Indians. Sarkissian et al. (2011) is a cross-cultural study of judgments regarding moral relativism and tested Americans and Singaporeans by using English only.

  5. The status quos of experimental studies of knowledge judgments, semantic judgments, and the side-effect effect are lucidly summarized in the following literature: Turri (2016) for knowledge judgments about the Gettier-style cases, Dacey and Mallon (2016) and Hansen (2015) for semantic judgments, and Beebe (2016) and Cova (2016) for the side-effect effect.

  6. For types of cross-cultural research, see, e.g., Matsumoto and Juang (2013): pp. 36–40.

  7. Jandt (2016: ch. 5.2) discusses Sechrest et al.’s taxonomy with examples. Many, e.g., Hambleton and Zenisky (2011), propose strategies and guidelines for increasing translational equivalence.

  8. Machery et al. (2009) do not explicitly claim that they used a translated vignette and questions, but Edouard Machery confirmed this in private conversation.

  9. In addition, Machery et al. (2017), appearing in the same issue of this journal, report on experiments on knowledge judgements regarding Gettier-style cases in 17 different languages. Rose et al. (2017a, b) report on experiments on belief judgements in 17 languages and experiments on knowledge judgements regarding cases of varying stakes in 14 languages, respectively. This is not intended to be a comprehensive list of experiments in languages other than English, not least because there are more studies that are not published in English.

  10. Although Knobe and Burra (2006) did not use forward and back translation, they made two Hindi translations, with ‘jaan’ and ‘jaan-bujhkar’, respectively, of the same English vignette. After running a comparative experiment, they concluded that ‘jaan-bujhkar’ closely mirrored the English word ‘intentionally’.

  11. The first ambiguity was raised against Machery et al.’s (2004) original study by Deutsch (2009), Ichikawa et al. (2012), Ludwig (2007).

  12. Unlike the original ‘talking about’ question, these versions end with an assertion. Machery et al. (2015a) hold that this difference is inconsequential.

  13. See, e.g., Blench and Spriggs (1998) for more details of the histories of languages.

  14. (α) and (β), individually and jointly, yield multiple interpretations of noun phrases in East Asian languages. See, e.g., Watanabe (2006) for Japanese, Cheng and Sybesma (1999) for Chinese, and Lee (1995) for Korean.

  15. Huang (2000) contains a helpful survey and discussion of the literature on topic in different languages, and Nariyama (2003) does the same for topic in Japanese.

  16. According to the classic typography of Li and Thompson (1976), on the one hand, Japanese and Korean are subject-prominent and topic-prominent languages, and Chinese is a topic-prominent language; on the other hand, English is a subject-prominent language.

  17. The translation of the vignette we used in Study 1 was mostly the same as used in Sytsma et al. (2015). Only minor changes were added to make the translation more colloquial and less stilted. The translation used in Study 2 was further changed on minor points for the same reason.

  18. No statistical difference was found between (2) alone and the combination of all (1) to (3).

  19. I thank Gillman Payette for this example of sentences with different topics.

  20. The referential interpretation is disjunctive, making room for the ambiguity between semantic reference and speaker’s reference.

  21. Uehara (1996) compared an English text and its Japanese translation and found that 56.5% of the English anaphoric pronouns were ellipted, 29% replaced by overt noun phrases, and only 14.5% preserved, in the Japanese translation. The frequency of anaphoric pronouns in ordinary Japanese might be lower than 14.5%, since any Japanese translation of an English text tends to contain more pronouns than ordinary Japanese does.

  22. The expectation for the speaker to deliver knowledge is an efficient heuristic for determining the topic of her utterance. More on this, see, e.g., Reinhart (1981).

  23. Then, the original ‘talking about’ question in Japanese includes at least four different ambiguities: between semantic reference and speaker’s reference, between speaker’s and narrator’s perspective, between definite and indefinite descriptions, and between topic and reference. It is of great interest how these ambiguities overlap and interact in the process of comprehending and answering the question.

  24. See Alexander and Weinberg (2007) and Stich and Tobia (2016) for this debate between the negative camp and traditional philosophers.

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Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to Yu Izumi and Edouard Machery for helpful comments on an early draft of this paper and to Gillman Payette for helpful discussion. I also thank Travis Dumsday, Matthew Murphy, and Masahiro Yamada for comments. The research for this paper was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Numbers 26770006 and 16H03347.

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Kasaki, M. Problems of Translation for Cross-Cultural Experimental Philosophy. J. Indian Counc. Philos. Res. 34, 481–500 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-017-0119-5

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