Indeterminacy of Translation and Innate Concepts: A Critical Review

Abstract

IntroductionThroughout their careers, both Chomsky and Quine have dealt with Underdetermination (henceforth UD) in different ways. Whenever Chomsky encounters UD he seeks to overcome it by postulating innate constraints; in contrast, Quine treats UD as a fact of life which simply has to be lived with. In this paper I will discuss the Indeterminacy of Translation (henceforth IDT). Chomsky argues that the IDT amounts to nothing more than UD. He argues that the UD in physics is overcome by our innate science-forming faculty, and that UD in language raises no more difficulties than UD in physics. In the case of language, the IDT is overcome by innate constraints imposed by the rules of our language faculty.Chomsky's interpretation of the IDT has been accepted by the vast majority of contemporary cognitive scientists and they have proceeded to flesh out his proposal that the IDT can be overcome by innate constraints. However, when cognitive scientists are concerned with the IDT, they are typically interested in only one area of it, the inscrutability of reference. They typically argue that the inscrutability of reference is a form of UD in concept acquisition and that this UD can be overcome by postulating innate concepts which we use to learn our first words. In this paper I will consider the attempt by contemporary cognitive scientists to overcome the inscrutability of reference by postulating innate concepts. Furthermore, I will analyze what effect the supposed overcoming of the inscrutability of reference by postulating innate concepts has on the indeterminacy of translation argument.I will review three key experiments which purport to overcome the problems raised by Quine and will show that while these important experiments are not a proof that Quine is wrong about the process of a child learning their first language they are very suggestive that Quine is on the wrong track. However as I will show in the paper even if Quine is wrong about manner in which a child learns his first words and concepts, this fact is of little significance. Quine's indeterminacy of translation is concerned with adults with a fully functioning conceptual scheme, so a child having innate constraints on the interpretations they give to experience is little evidence that adult users whose concepts develop over a life time in a culture will be subject to the same constraints; unless of course it can be shown that human concepts do not develop over time. Given that there is no evidence that human concepts do not change over time, and no evidence that the way such concepts change is determined a priori, then we have no reason to assume that innate constraints will overcome the indeterminacy of translation.Over the last fifty years it has become more and more common for people in the cognitive sciences to discuss the IDT as though it were a problem which has been overcome by discoveries in psychology. However this research typically ignores the fact that even if innate constraints do overcome the UD facing the child as they learn their first language such constraints will have little effect on the IDT as Quine conceived it. It is important that Quine's arguments for the IDT are explored in their full complexity instead being merely a tool used for cognitive scientists to argue for innate concepts. Cognitive scientists have long ignored the actual complexity of the IDT and this paper redresses this balance by showing where Quine's views have been undermined by empirical research and the areas where Quine's argument remain as strong as ever.1.Indeterminacy of Translation and UnderdeterminationMost contemporary cognitive scientists follow Chomsky in arguing that the IDT amounts to nothing more than UD and that this UD can be solved by postulating innate concepts. In particular they are interested in problems of inscrutability of reference and argue that the fact that children do not fall foul of the inscrutability of reference can be explained by the fact that children are born with innate concepts. …