Báo cáo khoa học: Mechanical Translation and Computational Linguistics

This paper examines the theory of translation in Quines Word and Object and attempts to show that it involves tacit appeal to a premise concerning a regularity in the behavior of bilinguals. The regularity is one whose existence is neither explained nor rendered probable by the theory.
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Báo cáo khoa học: "Mechanical Translation and Computational Linguistics" [Mechanical Translation and Computational Linguistics, vol.10, nos.1 and 2, March and June 1967] A Note on Quines Theory of Radical Translation by John M. Dolan, University of Chicago This paper examines the theory of translation in Quines Word and Object and attempts to show that it involves tacit appeal to a premise concerning a regularity in the behavior of bilinguals. The regularity is one whose existence is neither explained nor rendered probable by the theory. The suggestion that the regularity could result from congenital dispositions to organize and pattern linguistic data in certain characteristic ways is considered and rejected as implausible. This leaves the conclusion that if the regularity does obtain, the most plausible explanation would be that people, when acquiring a language, pay attention to and are guided by information and evidence ignored by Quines criteria of translation. Thus the novelty of the present discussion is this: if its principle contention is correct, then—even if one embraces the analysis in Word and Object, accepting all of its most controversial theoretical features, for example, its identification of a language with a set of behavioral dispositions and its requirement that analyticity and synonymy be operationally defined— one is still bound to recognize that its survey of relevant evidence is essen- tially incomplete, and one is logically committed to this recognition by a premise embodied in the very analysis one has embraced. That is, the soundness of the analysis entails its incompleteness, and, thus, the analysis is at best incomplete, at best an account of a fragment of the relevant evidence. Now the fact that theory in a given domain is undetermined by a fragment of the relevant evidence leaves wholly undecided the question whether theory in that domain is undetermined by all the relevant evi- dence. Thus, assuming the correctness of the contentions in this paper, the doctrine of translational indeterminacy does not follow from the analysis intended to support it, and one of the most elaborate expositions offered in support of Quines misgivings over the analytic-synthetic distinction fails to make those misgivings plausible. No difference between man and beast is more Object [1]. Our purpose is, first, to get before us clear, important than syntax. explicit statements of the translational criteria embodied in the theory (and this will prove, in the case of the fifth Apprendre une langue, criterion, a moderately difficult task) and, second, to cest vivre de nouveau. attempt to determine whether the theory does indeedA striking feature of the deepest and most nagging support the general thesis Quine advances concerningproblems we face in mechanical translation is their translation, his doctrine of translational indeterminacy.unclarity. We create a misleadingly optimistic picture if The conclusion we shall reach is that the criteria arewe say merely that we have not yet solved them. It is incomplete, that is, do not begin to exhaust the evidencemore honest and accurate to say that we have not yet an ...