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A page in one of my son’s exercise books has images similar to the ones shown below. The point of this particular exercise is for him to practice writing the letter ‘u’. The 20th century philosopher, Willard Van Orman Quine, would’ve had issue with these particular exercises. We’ll see why after the examples.

🐞 b _ g

☕ c _ p
🍺 m _ g
🏃 r _ n

(Before discussing the examples, a quick note. I’ve used Unicode emojis above and am thus limited to available emojis. ¹ My son’s book doesn’t actually feature a cup with coffee; just an empty cup. Neither does it have a mug of beer; just an opaque mug. The rest of this post will assume that’s the case with the above emojis: the cup is a cup and the mug is a mug.)

Here’s the problem, though. While cup is clearly a cup and the mug is clearly a mug one must be a little charitable describing the insect as a bug. It could equally be (in this case) a lady beetle² or the insect’s redness, or its black spots, or a host of other features.

Things really breakdown with the fourth example. While the first three may be defended as being nouns with this one the expected answer is a verb. The child is supposed to take into account the action the man is performing (to run, as it were) when it could really be anything. Going by the prior patterns³ we can hardly be blamed for expecting that this puzzle too expects a noun (man, as it were). Clearly, authors of these activity books lack sufficient grounding in analytical philosophy.

In his 1960 book, Word and Object, analytical philosopher, Willard Van Orman Quine, discussed this very topic. In it, he posits the problems a linguist might encounter when attempting (what Quine calls) a “radical translation, i.e., translation of the language of a hitherto untouched people” (emphasis in original). For instance, continues Quine, if, when the linguist is with a native of these hitherto untouched people, “[a] rabbit scurries by, [and] the native says ‘Gavagai’”, then “the linguist notes down the sentence ‘Rabbit’ or ‘Lo, a rabbit’) as tentative translation, subject to testing in further cases.”

While the linguist has formed a hypothesis (that “Gavagai” means “Rabbit”), s/he needs to test this hypothesis. “[T]he linguist”, says Quine, “has to supply native sentences for his informant’s approval, despite the risk of slanting the data by suggestion.” Now s/he has a new problem. Even if s/he formulates some sentence asking if “Gavagai” is “really translatable respectively as ‘Animal’, ‘White’, and ‘Rabbit’” and elicits a response from the native, Quine continues, “how is he [the linguist] to recognize native assent and dissent when he [the linguist] sees or hears them? Gestures are not to be taken at face value; the Turk’s are nearly the reverse of our own.”

Later, Quine elaborates in more detail the problems a linguist faces. Some excerpts below:

[S]ynonymy of the occasion sentences ‘Gavagai’ and ‘Rabbit’ does not even guarantee that ‘gavagai’ and ‘rabbit’ are coextensive terms, [i.e.] terms true of the same things.

For, consider ‘gavagai’. Who knows but what the objects to which this term applies are not rabbits after all, but mere stages, or brief temporal segments, of rabbits? … [P]erhaps the objects to which ‘gavagai’ applies are all and sundry undetached parts of rabbits; again the stimulus [i.e. pointing at the rabbit] meaning would register no difference. When from the sameness of stimulus meanings of ‘Gavagai’ and ‘Rabbit’ the linguist leaps to the conclusion that a gavagai is a whole enduring rabbit, he is just taking for granted that the native is enough like us to have a brief general term for rabbits and no brief general term for rabbit stages or parts. (pg 46)
…
A further alternative likewise compatible with the same old stimulus meaning is to take ‘gavagai’ as a singular term naming the fusion… of all rabbits: that single though discontinuous portion of the spatiotemporal world that consists of rabbits…. And a still further alternative in the case of ‘gavagai’ is to take it as a singular term naming a recurring universal, rabbithood. The distinction between concrete and abstract object, as well as that between general and singular term. (pg 47)
…
Does it seem that the imagined indecision between rabbits, stages of rabbits, integral parts of rabbits, the rabbit fusion, and rabbithood must be due merely to some special fault in our formulation of stimulus meaning, and that it should be resoluble by a little supplementary pointing and questioning? Consider, then, how. Point to a rabbit and you have pointed to a stage of a rabbit, to an integral part of a rabbit, to the rabbit fusion, and to where rabbithood is manifested. Point to an integral part of a rabbit and you have pointed again to the remaining four sorts of things; and so on around. (pg 47)

The following three conclusions naturally follow from the above passages:

  1. Quine, quite fairly, concludes that the linguist has no grounds along which to interpret the meaning of the word “gavagai”.
  2. It’s a wonder analytical philosophers (like Quine) aren’t household names and, least controversially,
  3. Kindergarten and primary-level schoolteachers must be thankful their students aren’t analytical philosophers.

The linguist’s rejoinder

Linguist Charles Yang in his 2006 book, The Infinite Gift, cites Quine’s gavagai and points out that children face this very scenario. Children, for all intents and purposes, should be confused when their parents point at, say, a cow and voice the word “cow”. However, children don’t get confused and always understand what their parents mean. How do they do it? Read the book to find Yang’s theory. For the record, I agree with him.

Footnotes

¹ The full list of Unicode emoji is available at https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html. I use Unicode because they have no licensing concerns.

² From above reference, https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html#1f41e.

³ Of course, prior patterns are themselves problematic as we know from David Hume. I covered this in an earlier post. See “David Hume and homework excuses”, published Dec 14, 2017, available at https://medium.com/galileo-onwards/david-hume-and-homework-excuses-9cd684a3c057.

About the image: It is a cropped version of “Urban Bunny” by John Benson, accessed on Fri, Jun 15, 2018 at https://www.flickr.com/photos/j_benson/5802672918 licensed under CC BY 2.0.