Differences and similarities between Kuhn and Quine about the indeterminacy of translation

Question

About Thomas Kuhn's semantic incommensurability:

Early on Kuhn drew a parallel with Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of translation (1970a, 202; 1970c, 268). According to the latter, if we are translating one language into another, there are inevitably a multitude of ways of providing a translation that is adequate to the behaviour of the speakers. None of the translations is the uniquely correct one, and in Quine's view there is no such thing as the meaning of the words to be translated. It was nonetheless clear that Quine's thesis was rather far from Kuhn's thesis, indeed that they are incompatible. First, Kuhn thought that incommensurability was a matter of there being no fully adequate translation whereas Quine's thesis involved the availability of multiple translations. Secondly, Kuhn does believe that the translated expressions do have a meaning, whereas Quine denies this. Thirdly, Kuhn later went on to say that unlike Quine he does not think that reference is inscrutable—it is just very difficult to recover (1976, 191).

[source: "Thomas Kuhn" in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, A.Bird, 2011]

In which sense "Quine denies that the translated expressions do have a sense"? Is it related to a different notion of sense in Kuhn and in Quine? If yes, is it correct to argue that Kuhn accepted the G.Frege's notion of sense, whereas Quine refused it? Given the differences above, which are the similarities between Kuhn and Quine about the indeterminacy of the translation?

Answer 1

Long comment

For Quine, see Indeterminacy of Translation :

The general claim of the indeterminacy of translation is that there might be different ways of translating a language which are equally correct but which are not mere stylistic variants. Quine introduces the general idea of indeterminacy, in Chapter Two of Word and Object (1960), without explicitly distinguishing [two kinds of indeterminacy], but subsequently comes to treat them quite differently.

The first is indeterminacy of reference: some sentences can be translated in more than one way, and the various versions differ in the reference that they attribute to parts of the sentence, but not in the overall net import that they attribute to the sentence as a whole. (This doctrine is also known as “ontological relativity” and “inscrutability of reference”.)

Indeterminacy of reference is akin to a view of theoretical entities put forward by Ramsey: that there is no more to such an entity than the role that it plays in the structure of the relevant theory. For Quine, however, the point holds for all objects, since he “see[s] all objects as theoretical ... Even our most primordial objects, bodies, are already theoretical”.

The second kind of indeterminacy, which Quine sometimes refers to as holophrastic indeterminacy, is another matter. Here the claim is that there is more than one correct method of translating sentences where the two translations of a given sentence differ not merely in the meanings attributed to the sub-sentential parts of speech but also in the net import of the whole sentence. This claim involves the whole language, so there are no examples, except perhaps of an exceedingly artificial kind.

We have already discussed the issue about the link between Quine's view about translation and Kuhn's incommensurability thesisi; see the posts : Where dows Kuhn talk about intension of concepts ? and Kuhn: in what sense is the changed part of an old taxonomy redefined in terms of an “unchanged part” ?

Kuhn's view about The Incommensurability of Scientific Theories is greatly influenced by Quine's philosophy, but Kuhn still holds at the possibility of "interpreting" old scientific concepts (the phlogiston) in the context of new theories where these concepts have no reference.