Abstract
According to neo-Russellianism, in a sentence such as John believes that Mont Blanc is 4000 m high, any other proper name co-referring with Mont Blanc can be substituted for it without any change in the proposition expressed. Prima facie, our practice of translation shows that this cannot be correct. We will then show that neo-Russellians have a way out of this problem, which consists in holding that actual translations are not (merely) a matter of semantics, but also make an attempt at preserving some pragmatic features of the sentences to be translated. We then turn to translations that only preserve the semantic characteristics of the sentences and we argue that, although these translations are unable to show that neo-Russellianism is incorrect, they still show that it relies on some theses that seem to have no justification, apart from saving neo-Russellianism itself.
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Notes
We will come back to this in §4.
Millianism is the thesis that proper names referring to the same thing are everywhere interchangeable not only salva veritate but even salva significatione. The main rational for Millianism is that proper names have no descriptive content that is semantically relevant—i.e., that contributes to determining the truth-values of the sentences in which they occur. A distinct thesis, which is not equivalent to Millianism, is that a proper name has no semantic function other than to refer to an individual. See Santambrogio (2015) for these points.
One might here protest that “Abendstern”, “Morgenstern”, “The Morning Star” and “The Evening Star” are not proper names but definite descriptions. However, the very fact that they refer to Venus, even though it is no star, shows that they are not definite descriptions. Moreover, had Frege used “Hesperus” and “Phosphorus” instead, which undoubtedly are proper names, we could make exactly the same point. Some philosophers have claimed that names belong to no language in particular. If this were so, then one might doubt that names are to be translated at all. However, as Kripke remarks, even if names did not belong to any languages, it would not really make any difference to our point: “Some philosophers stress that names are not words of a language, or that names are not translated from one language to another … It seems hard to deny, however, that “Deutschland,” “Allemagne,” and “Germany,” are the German, French, and English names of a single country, and that one translates a French sentence using “Londres” by an English sentence using “London.” … As far as I can see, it makes little or no semantic difference whether a particular name is thought of as part of a language or not … one need not say that a name such as ‘Londres’ is ‘translated’ (if such a terminology suggested that names have ‘senses,’ I too would find it objectionable), as long as one acknowledges that sentences containing it are properly translated into English using ‘London’” (1979, 135 f. 18).
An argument similar to the one we present in this section can be constructed concerning not couples of co-referential proper names, but of allegedly synonymous terms. Take two synonymous common nouns in English, for instance, doctor and physician (if you are not convinced that they are synonymous, please change the example accordingly). Clearly, in translating
The thought in the sentence “Doctors are reliable” differs from that in the sentence “Physicians are reliable”. Anybody who did not know that doctors are physicians might hold the one thought to be true, the other false,
we would have to pick two different nouns to translate ‘doctors’ and ‘physicians’.
Does this show that there are in the end no synonymous terms whatsoever, or does it instead show that our argument to the conclusion that co-referential proper names are not synonymous, contrary to neo-Russellianism, is a bad argument? Mates (1950) famously opted for the first option. But many found it counterintuitive that there are no synonyms whatsoever. In case you find the conclusion that there are no synonyms unacceptable, the strategy we put forward for neo-Russellians in the next section, i.e. to hold that the terms are only pragmatically non-substitutable, can be exploited also to reject the thesis that there are no synonyms whatsoever. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this point.
For similar points, see Church (1950, 1954, 73, f. 24), where he distinguishes between usual and literal translations. Translation arguably does not even merely concern the semantic and pragmatic characteristics of a sentence. If Frege is right that his third component does not belong to the thought and, as it seems, this third component cannot be taken to belong to pragmatics, then, at least when it comes to translating poetry, we would need to try to preserve also this third component beyond the semantic and pragmatic characteristics of the original verses.
For some neo-Russellian remarks on the semantic/pragmatic divide, see Salmon (1983, 58–59; 84–85).
In a footnote, Kripke adds: “For example, in translating a historical report into another language, such as, “Patrick Henry said, ‘Give me liberty or give me death!’” the translator may well translate the quoted material attributed to Henry. He translates a presumed truth into a falsehood, since Henry spoke English; but probably his reader is aware of this and is more interested in the content of Henry’s utterance than in its exact words. Especially in translating fiction, where truth is irrelevant, this procedure is appropriate.” (1979, 139, f. 25) This squares perfectly with what Salmon says about the translation of quoted material and shows that it is pragmatic translation that violates Kripke’s principle: the semantic translation, which is the one in which the quoted material does not undergo change, is in fact the true one.
Again, a similar argument can be constructed concerning not couples of co-referential proper names, but of allegedly synonymous terms, such as doctor and physician. Take
However inappropriate it may be in most contexts to say so, Lois Lane is fully aware that a doctor is a physician
However inappropriate it may be in most contexts to say so, Lois Lane is fully aware that a doctor is a doctor
It seems that these two sentences can differ in truth-value. If, in disagreement with Mates (1950), you think that it is counterintuitive that there are no synonyms whatsoever, you might think that the metalinguistic strategy is not in the end arbitrary, because only in this way can we account for the difference in truth-value of the two sentences above, while allowing for synonyms. But, as we saw already in footnote 6, it is not obvious that there are synonyms (see Burge 1978b for discussion). Thus appealing to the thesis that there are synonyms does not seem the easiest way to go in order to defend the thesis that the metalingustic reading of (17) is the correct one.
A few qualifications are in order. Kripke in fact adds: “The sentence replacing ‘p’ is to lack indexical or pronominal devices or ambiguities, that would ruin the intuitive sense of the principle (e.g., if he assents to “You are wonderful,” he need not believe that you—the reader—are wonderful). When we suppose that we are dealing with a normal speaker of English, we mean that he uses all words in the sentence in a standard way, combines them according to the appropriate syntax, etc.: in short, he uses the sentence to mean what a normal speaker should mean by it. The ‘words’ of the sentence may include proper names, where these are part of the common discourse of the community, so that we can speak of using them in a standard way. For example, if the sentence is “London is pretty,” then the speaker should satisfy normal criteria for using ‘London’ as a name of London, and for using ‘is pretty’ to attribute an appropriate degree of pulchritude. The qualification “on reflection” guards against the possibility that a speaker may, through careless inattention to the meaning of his words or other momentary conceptual or linguistic confusion, assert something he does not really mean, or assent to a sentence in linguistic error. “Sincerely” is meant to exclude mendacity, acting, irony, and the like” (1979, 137–138).
One might try to hold that the weak disquotational principles, i.e. if a normal English speaker, on reflection, sincerely assents to ‘p’, then he believes that p, are true, while the principles of credence, i.e. if a normal English speaker, on reflection, sincerely assents to ‘I believe that p’, then she believes that p, are not. She might try to maintain that principles of this second group are false because in order for a subject to assert that she believes that p it is sufficient that she believes that she believes that p, without it being necessary that she also believes that p. But if this were the case, then also the principles in the first group would be false. Usually, from the subject’s point of view, believing that one believes that p cannot be distinguished from believing that p. In order for a subject to assert that p it is then sufficient that she believes that she believes (or knows) that p, and we cannot conclude that she believes that p. But this is exactly what the weak disquotational principles tell us to conclude. Thus one should either accept all the principles, or reject all of them.
Concerning a different, but similar for our purposes, case, Church holds: “Of course we must ask whether the absence of a one-word translation of “fortnight” is a deficiency of the German language in the sense that there are therefore some things which can be expressed in English but cannot be expressed in German. But it would seem that it can hardly be so regarded—else we should be obliged to call it a deficiency of German also that there is no word to mean a period of fifty-four days and six hours, or that the Latin word “ero” can be translated only by the three-word phrase “ich werde sein.” Indeed it should rather be said that the word “fortnight” in English is not a necessity but a dispensable linguistic luxury.” (1954, 70–71) Similarly, Salmon himself holds that the thesis that having more synonyms increases the expressive capacity of a language is “seriously implausible” (2012, 438). The idea that more synonyms cannot change the expressive capacity of a language is strictly tied to the theses that propositions are language- and mind-independent entities and that propositions are what semantic translations should preserve: two sentences that differ only for one synonym substituted for another express the same proposition. Although the other language has only one word or phrase instead of two synonymous ones, still that proposition can be expressed in the other language, and thus the second language is as expressively powerful as the first, lush one.
This seems to square perfectly with what Kripke holds concerning Church translation argument, whose aim is to establish whether “that”-clauses denote sentences or propositions: “I myself am a believer in the argument, but I also think, as Church does … that the translation argument only brings out the arbitrariness of the connection of a given phonetic or written sequence and what it stands for or means” (2008, 259, f. 17).
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Andrea Bianchi, Daniel Whiting and Sandro Zucchi for their useful and interesting comments on an early version of this paper. Thanks moreover to the anonymous referees of this journal for their suggestions.
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Felappi, G., Santambrogio, M. Lost in Translation?. Topoi 38, 265–276 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9433-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-016-9433-9