Davidson on indeterminacy and ‘passing theories’: need translators worry?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Donald Davidson, building in part on the work of W. V. O. Quine, who was a major influence on him, makes a pair of claims that, if true, would seem to undermine the work of practising translators. The first is that there is ‘no such thing as a language’, at least as concerns the traditional notion of what a language comprises. So translation as traditionally conceived may need rethinking. The second claim is that translation is inevitably indeterminate, and not only in the sense that it is underdetermined by the data we could possess about what other people mean by their utterances. Rather, more radically, Davidson claims that there is simply no fact of the matter about correct translation. I begin by attempting to mitigate the first claim, before turning to do the same to the second.