Translation as a Test for the Explicit-Implicit Distinction

Abstract

The paper will first present Kripke’s “translation test” to identify any semantic ambiguity and his claim, against Donnellan, that we should not expect to disambiguate the referential vs. attributive uses of definite descriptions via translation into another language. Second, the paper will discuss a strengthened version of Kripke’s “translation test” proposed by Voltolini to distinguish between any semantic vs. pragmatic phenomena. Finally, the paper will show that translation cannot work as a test for the semantic/pragmatic distinction, but can rather work as a test for the explicit/implicit distinction.