Is Radical Interpretation Possible

Is Radical Interpretation Possible? Jerry Fodor; Ernie Lepore Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 8, Logic and Language. (1994), pp. 101-119. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=1520-8583%281994%298%3C101%3AIRIP%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P Philosophical Perspectives is currently published by Blackwell Publishing.

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Philosophical Perspectives, 8, Logic and Language, 1994

IS RADICAL INTERPRETATION POSSIBLE?l

Jerry Fodor

Rutgers University and CUNY Graduate Center

Ernie Lepore

Rutgers University

Introduction The specter of a certain transcendental argument has haunted the philosophy of language ever since Wittgenstein wrote the Philosophical Investigations. We take the form of the argument to be something like this: Argument form T 1 . No language would be interpretable at all unless it were radically interpretab1e;z that is, unless it were interpretable from the epistemic position of a radical interpreter. 2. No language would be radically interpretable unless it were F.3 3. (natural) languages are actually interpreted (for example, by children who learn them and field linguists who translate them); hence, natural languages are radically interpretable. 4. Therefore, natural languages are F.4

We say that this is the specter of an argument because there is less than universal consensus as to what goes in for F.5 Or on what the epistemic situation of a radical interpreter is. But never mind; an argument schema is sufficient for our purposes: We are going to claim that no case has been made for the soundness of any familiar instantiation of argument form T. In fact, as the radical interpreter's epistemic situation is usually understood, it may turn out that perfectly kosher languages (like, for example, English) aren't radically interpretable. This is not, of course, to say that English can't be learnedltranslated; on the contrary, we take it as a given that natural languages are interpretable. We propose, however, to challenge the inference from their actual interpretability to their radical interpretability; and we deny that any other plausible reason for supposing them to be radically interpretable has thus far

102 /Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore

been given. Notice that some positive argument for the claim that languages must be radically interpretable really is required if arguments of form T are to be approved. A radical interpreter is, by definition, someone who is in an epistemic situation from which it must be possible to interpret a language on pain of there being no fact of the matter about what the interpretation of the language is. To require that a language be radically interpretable is thus to require a priori that a correct theory of the language be epistemically accessible. But one might well wonder how any requirement of this sort could be enforced; surely it is not a kind of constraint that is widely supposed to be enforceable in other areas of empirical inquiry. It's implausible, for example, that the physical facts are constrained, a priori, by the requirement that they be accessible from the physicist's epistemic position; how could the physical constitution of the world possibly depend on the evidential situation of physicists? To view one's physical theories Realistically is to view the physicist's inferences from data to theory as inherently fallible. Short of omniscience, whatever epistemic situation one is in, it always could turn out that the data available in that situation are misleading. Parallel considerations would suggest that the notion of radical interpretation has no important role to play in theorizing about language or mind: if the ontological possibilities aren't epistemologically constrained in physics, why should the ontological possibilities be epistemologically constrained in linguistics or psychology?6 We propose, in the course of this discussion, not to beg the case against Intentional Realism. That is, we take it for granted that a language isn't radically interpretable unless someone in the specified epistemic position would be able to choose the (or a) correct interpretation for the language; a fortiori, that there is such a thing as the (or a) correct interpretation for a language. If it turns out that languages are not radically interpretable consonant with these Realist assumptions, then the choice will be between espousing semantic eliminativism and abandoning radical interpretability as a constraint on interpretability.7 One further introductory comment: what follows is devoted largely to arguing that there is no account of the epistemic situation of the radical interpreter that makes it plausible both that radical interpretation from that position is possible and that radical interpretability from that position is a presupposition for a language to be interpretable. It bears emphasis that both these constraints must be substantively satisfied on pain of trivializing the notion of radical interpretation. Thus, for example, it is surely possible to select the right semantic theory of a language from the epistemic position of an omniscient interpreter. But this doesn't constrain the possible languages since, trivially, the right theory of anything is accessible from the epistemic position of omniscience. If the radical interpreter is omniscient, then premise 1 in argument form T is vacuously true however F is chosen. And if premise 1 is vacuously true, then the conclusion that they must be F does not impose a

Is Radical Interpretation Possible? / 103 substantive constraint on languages.

What is a radical interpreter? As we've been seeing, the tactical problem in constructing an argument along the lines of T is to provide a notion of radical interpretation such that, on the one hand, there is good reason to believe that the radical interpretation of natural languages really is possible, and such that, on the other hand, if their radical interpretation is possible, that fact substantively constrains the properties that natural languages can have. It is pretty clear how some friends of radical interpretation propose to secure the first of these desiderata. The idea is to so construe radical interpretation that it is plausible that the stipulated epistemic condition of the radical interpreter is the actual epistemic condition of children learning a first language or of linguists and translators in the field. Since children really do learn natural languages, and field linguists really do translate them, it follows, on this construal, that the radical interpretation of natural languages must be possible. Thus, for example, Quine takes the paradigm of radical translation to be:

...the recovery of a man's current language from his currently observed responses to his environment by a linguist who, unaided by an interpreter, is out to penetrate and translate a language hitherto unknown [1960:28]. Correspondingly, what Davidson calls "radical interpretation" is the construction of a theory of the informant's language based on "evidence plausibly available...to someone who does not already know how to interpret utterances the theory is designed to cover" [1973:128]. Thus, the data for radical interpretation must be

...evidence we can imagine the virgin investigator having without his already being in possession of the theory it is supposed to be evidence for [1974: 1431. The epistemic situation of the radical interpreter is thus the epistemic situation in which languages are actually interpreted. Quine tells us that radical translation "begins at home" ("Ontological Relativity," p.46). Davidson tells us that "all understanding of the speech of another involves radical interpretation" [1973:125]. This provides a substantive account of radical translation only relative to an understanding of the epistemic situation in which languages are actually interpreted. So, then, what is this epistemic situation? What is it that, according to Quine, the child (and, according to Quine and Davidson, the field linguist) shares with the radical interpreter? Or, to put the same question another way: in what respects are children and field linguists supposed to be radical interpreters? We commence with the linguists. According to Quine, a radical translator is just someone in the situation of a field linguist who doesn't know the language he is trying to describe and who

104 /Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lep01-e has no access to bilingual informants and the like. (For details, see Word and Object, Chapter 2.) The substance of Quine's theory of radical interpretation is thus carried by his account of how a field linguist so situated must proceed. Quine thinks the that the field linguist must begin the task of translation by collecting a sample of the informant's utterances (in effect, a sample of syntactic types belonging to the informant's language) and must somehow contrive to turn these uninterpreted forms of utterance into queries. Thus having once noticed that the informant spontaneously utters "Gavagai" on certain occasions, the linguist is positioned to ask "Gavagai?" and note his subject's positive and negative responses under various environing conditions. For reasons that needn't concern us, Quine takes these environing conditions to be specified by reference to proximal stimulations operating simultaneously on the linguist and the informant. The primary data for radical translation are thus formulable as what we'll call singular assent (and dissent) sentences (SASS for short). A typical SAS might be: A: Kurt assents to "Gava ai" on Saturday at noon when his nerve endings are stimulate in way e.

d

The singular assent sentences available to the linguist amount to a catalogue of observed correlations between the informant's assents to sentences and sensory stimulations caused by the things going on around him: a correlation, to use Quine's terminology, of occasion sentences with their stimulus meanings. Translation begins when, and if, the linguist finds sentences in his own language with the same (or very nearly the same) stimulus meanings as (occasion) sentences in the informant's language. (For a change in Quine's views that does not affect our line of argument, see Pursuit of Truth, pp. 40-44). Details aside, according to Quine, this method of query and assent can be used to compile a "translation manual" which enables the linguist to understand the subject's language; that is, to understand the informant's "complex of present dispositions to verbal behavior" in the presence of proximal stimuli [1960:27]. This translation manual will be expressible as a function that takes the subject's sentences as arguments and yields as values sentences in the linguist's language. Davidson disagrees with Quine largely on the details. For example, instead of the quasi-behaviorist notion of stimulus meaning, Davidson uses the quasimentalist notion of holding a sentence true to generate the primary data for a scheme of interpretation. Just as Quine assumes that the linguist can generally tell when his informant assents to a query even though the linguist doesn't know what the sentence assented to means, so Davidson takes it for granted that the linguist can generally tell when an informant holds a sentence to be true even though he doesn't know the interpretation of the sentence.

...the evidence available is just that speakers of the language to be interpreted hold various sentences to be true at certain times and under specified

Is Radical Interpretation Possible? / 105 circumstances [1973:135].

According to Davidson, then, the primary data for radical interpretation are formulable as what we'll call singular hold true sentences (SHTs for short).g A typical SHT might be: E: Kurt holds true "Es regnet" on Saturday at noon and it is raining near Kurt on Saturday at noon. The epistemological properties of SHTs don't differ importantly from those of SASs. Both offer presumptive evidence that the informant takes some form of words to express a truth. Neither offers more than that except in those cases where a given form of words is held true (assented to) only some of the time; for example, "Gavagai," "Es regnet" or "That's a tree." In those cases, true SHTs offer correlations between linguistic behavior and situations of utterance. On Davidson's account, what the radical linguist gleans from his primary data will be not a presumptive correlation between the subject's sentences and sentences of his own (as per Quine), but rather a set of presumptive truth sentences for the informant's utterances. These truth sentences are formulas of the form "S is true in N's language at time t if and only if ...," where the ellipsis is replaced by a specification of salient (distal) features of the situation in which the utterances are produced, for example: "'Es regnet' is true in the speaker's language at time t iff it raining in his vicinity at t." So much, then, for Quine's and Davidson's accounts of the evidential constraints upon successful translation manuals/ interpretation theories. Presently we need to ask whether they are plausible accounts of the evidence available to the field linguist; if they are, then the field linguist's successes are constructive proofs that natural languages are radically interpretable. First, however, we want to emphasize that SASs (for Quine) and SHTs (for Davidson) exhaust the empirica3/information that the radical translator is supposed to have about the informant. That is, a radical translator is, by stipulation, somebody who knows only the following: i . His informants assents (/hold trues); ii. General principles of theory construction that apply as well outside the intentionaVsemantic sciences. (These are accessible to the radical translation qua empirical investigator.) iii. Whatever transcendental principles are presupposed by the possibility of radical translation per se (in effect, the various warranted substitutions for F in argument form T).9 The present argument for the possibility of radical translation is thus the claim that i-iii are, in fact, all that thefield linguist need know to pull off successful translations. And an argument for that claim is the assumption that i-iii are all that the field linguist does know when he translates fully alien languages

106/Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore

successfully. This last assumption is, however, highly substantive. It implies, for example, that the radical translator (and hence the field linguist insofar as he shares the radical translator's epistemic situation) can't proceed by any sort of "bootstrapping" of his task. To see what this means, let C be some set of techniques or principles that might be proposed for choosing among competing translation manuals or interpretation theories. Can C itself be justified "empirically," by appeal to the fact that the theories it chooses for given languages are generally correct for those languages? No, for that would presuppose some independent way of assessing the correctness of the theories and, by stipulation, radical translators have no access to such a criterion of correctness; all they have to work with are SASSand SATs. So, it's not just that the radical translator is denied access to informed intuitions about the meanings of sentences in the target language; he is also denied access to information about the reliability Cfor example, the previous successes and failures) of hisfield procedures. The question thus arises whether this account of radical translation provides a reasonable reconstruction of what field linguists know, in virtue of which their attempts at translation are frequently successful. If it's not (if field linguists aren't really in the epistemic position that radical interpreters occupy), then the fact that field linguists often succeed in interpreting their informants is no reason to suppose that radical translation is possible, and transcendental arguments that assume the possibility of radical translation are to that extent undermined. Field linguists as radical interpreters As we remarked above, Davidson stipulates that [The evidence available to a radical interpreter] must be evidence we can imagine the virgin investigator having without his already being in possession of the theory it is supposed to be evidence for [1974:143].

Compatible with this stipulation, Davidson takes it that the evidence consists of SHTs; observations of sentences held true. Question: is this in fact the epistemic situation field linguists are in when they approach an alien informant? The answer is, surely, that it's not. For one thing, real linguists generally exploit the semantic intuitions of their informants (or they learn the language under study and become their own informants). It is quite unwarranted to assume without argument that this procedure is merely heuristic; that a rational investigator could, in principle, always interpret an informant's language in some other way. If only for this reasori, it can't just be taken for granted that field linguists are in the epistemological situation that define the radical interpreter.10 But we want to stress a different consideration: beyond dispute, real field

Is Radical Interpretation Possible? / 107 linguists-the ones who do end up with confirmed theories of the languages that they are studying -invariably approach the analysis of the alien tongue with a background of very powerful theoretical assumptions about what the languages they encounter in the field can be like. (That is, what they can be like given that the informant is a conspecific, which, of course, the field linguist takes for granted.) These background assumptions are, in general, bootstrapped in the sense suggested above: the linguist's evidence for accepting them is their previous successes in interpretation (plus their face empirical plausibility, plus their coherence with the linguist's assumptions about the cognitive psychology of his conspecifics, and about how language learning works, and about the laws of linguistic change, and about what linguistic universals there may be and so forth.) In short, the linguist's background theory includes whatever empirical factors he believes may constrain the variability of natural languages. Learning about this sort of thing is part of the linguist's professional apprenticeship; unlike Davidson's radical interpreter, real linguists lose their virginity in graduate school. It's simply not plausible that these bootstrapped background assumptions play no essential role in the linguist's selection of translations or interpretations. On the contrary, they function in the "context of discovery" by providing the linguist with hunches about which theory to try to fit to the data (though that is surely true). And, more important, they also function in the "context of justification" as part of the corpus of empirical data to which the preferred translation/interpretation is required to conform. So what is demonstrated by the linguist's empirical success is at most that the available observations of "hold true" behaviors plus these contingent background assumptions allows the field linguist reliably to choose a best theory for the alien tongue. From this it does not follow that radical interpretation is possible; viz. that the choice of a best translation or interpretation is warranted solely on the basis of the "hold true" evidence together with whatever general constraints may inform empirical theory construction as such. It might be supposed, however, that the working linguist's appeal to his background theory must be dispensable in principle. After all, what about the first linguist? Surely he had no independently certified background of theory to rely on; surely he had to proceed with just inductive methodology together with his observations of the informant's behavior. We do not propose, at this point, to raise large questions in epistemology. Suffice it to remark that to reject foundationalism in the philosophy of science is precisely to reject the notion of a "first scientist" in favor of the idea that science begins in media res. Neurath's ship didn't "start" anywhere; it always was at sea. This steady-state picture of the physical sciences is, ironically, one we owe to Quine more than to anyone else. Why doesn't it also apply in linguistics? We pause to be explicit about what the argument thus far is supposed to show. Quine has two related uses for his famous thought experiments about

108 / Jeny Fodor and Ernie Lepore

translation. One is to show that interpretation is possible only if principles of charity are invoked; the other is to show that the empirical evidence necessarily underdetermines the choice of a translation manual. We have no objection to either of these conclusions. (Not, at least, for present purposes). For all we know, it may be true both that interpretation (/translation) is empirically underdetermined (a fortiori, that it is underdetermined from the epistemic position of a radical interpreter) and that there is no interpretation (/translation) without charity (a fortiori that there is no radical interpretation/translation without charity.) What we're objecting to is a certain sort of transcendental argument, one which seeks to infer that there is no translation without charity from the following assumptions: first, no radical translation without charity; second, no successful translation of an alien language without radical translation; and third, field linguists succeed in the translation of alien languages. Our point is that this sort of argument depends on an unargued identification of the epistemic position of real translators with the epistemic position of radical interpreters. By contrast, we claim that it is prima facie implausible that real translators are ipso facto radical interpreters. So, prima facie, the transcendental argument for charity fails. Children as radical interpreters

Quine is explicit in holding that the field linguist's epistemic situation is not interestingly different from that of a child learning its first language: they both operate under "behavioristic" constraints that also delimit the radical interpreter's data. A child learns his first words and sentences by hearing and using them in the presence of appropriate stimuli ... . What I have said of infant learning applies equally to the linguist's learning a new language in the field. If the linguist does not lean on related languages for which there are previously accepted translation practices, then obviously he has no data but the concomitances of native utterance and observable stimulus situation [our emphasis, 1969:81].

Consider also the following passage from Quine's recent book The Pursuit of Truth: Critics have said that the thesis [of indeterminacy of translation] is a consequence of my behaviorism. Some have said that it is a reductio ad absurdum of my behaviorism. I disagree with this second point, but I agree with the first. I hold further that the behaviorist approach is mandatory. In psychology one may or may not be a behaviorist, but in linguistics one has no choice. Each of us learns his language by observing other people's verbal behavior and having his own faltering verbal behavior observed and reinforced or corrected by others. We depend strictly on overt behavior in observable situations ... . There is nothing in linguistic meaning beyond what is to be gleaned from overt behavior in observable circumstances [37-381.

Our objection to this analysis of the field linguist's epistemic situation was that

Is Radical Interpretation Possible? / 109 it ignores the background theories he brings to his task. The analogous point holds for the child. It seems perfectly possible that he too approaches the language learning situation with a background of, perhaps innate, contingent assumptions about what the character of a conspecific's dialect can be, and that these assumptions substantively constrain his choice of a translation manual. (Innateness isn't the only possibility. Lots of psychologists think that learning a first language requires the previous acquisition of all sorts of conceptual and social capacities; see, for example, Piaget [1926], Bruner [1983].) The child differs from the field linguist, though, in that his background assumptions aren't justified by bootstrapping. To quote the linguist David Lightfoot: It is clear that the P[rirnary] L[inguistic] D[ata] which trigger the growth of a child's grammar do not include much of what linguists use to choose between hypotheses. To this extent the child is not a 'little linguist' constructing her grammar in the way that linguists construct their hypotheses. For example, the PLD do not include well organized paradigms nor comparable data from other languages. Nor do the PLD include rich information about what does not occur, that is, negative data [1989:323].

So, arguably, the child and the linguist aren't in the epistemic situation of the radical interpreter; or in one another's epistemic situation either. All the radical interpreters data are, by stipulation, SASS (if you believe Quine) or SHTs (if you believe Davidson). The field linguist's data consists of his behavioral observations plus such background assumptions as bootstrapping may serve to justify. The child has whatever background assumptions he does, but they aren't justified by bootstrapping; in fact, they aren't justified at all; they're (as it might be) determined by his genetic endowment. A fortiori, the child's choice of an interpretation on the basis of his observational evidence together with his background assumptions needn't yield justified true belief about a language; it thus needn't yield knowledge of the language. But then, there is no reason to suppose that children (or anybody else except, maybe, a few linguists) do have knowledge of their language in that sense. What is truistic is only that children come to know their language in the sense that they come to be able to speak and understand it: hence, that they come to have whatever true beliefs speaking and understanding the language may require. Hume says, in the Enquiry, that it's enough that children take the principle of causation seriously; they don't need to have justified true beliefs about it. (1.n fact, Hume's view appears to be that unjustified false beliefs about causation are what serve the child best.) For this reason, Hume says, children don't have to solve the problem of induction in order to learn to avoid open flames.11 We say, in similar spirit, that children don't have to solve the problem of radical translation in order to learn English. To repeat: linguists and children may choose the right translation and interpretation on the basis of inter alia the observational evidence available to

110 /Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore

them; and this observational evidence may more or less be exhausted by what SASs and SHTs report. It does not follow, pace Quine, that SASs and SHTs report all the contingent information that the child uses to chose a translation manual. So it does not follow that the child learns his language from the epistemic position of a radical interpreter. So it does not follow that radical interpretation is possible. We want to forestall an accusation of lack of charity. Like all Empiricists, Quine is himself a sort of nativist; he doesn't really think that the child's epistemic situation is fully characterized when one specifies the available SASs. After all, a child must somehow generalize his data if he is to learn from them; and the principles of generalization must ultimately be given rather than learned if regress is to be avoided. Under pressure of this sort of argument, Quine is prepared to endow the child with an innate "similarity space"; responses trained to old stimuli generalize to new ones in proportion to their propinquity in this space. (Similarly, Skinnerian accounts of learning commence by postulating the "intact organism" with its innate dispositions to generalize in some directions rather than others; Humean accounts of learning commence by postulating associative principles which are "intrinsic to human nature" and so on.) The first thing to be said about this proposal is that, quite independent of the issues about radical interpretation, it's unclear just what it is intended to concede. That's because it's unclear to what extent-if at all-the requirement that an innate endowment be expressible as a similarity space (or, mutatis mutandis, as a generalization gradient, or a principle of association) actually constrains the innate information that a child may be supposed to have. Presumably that would depend on what sorts of properties the dimensions of the innate space are allowed to express. If, for example, the dimensions of a similarity space can express parameters of grammatical derivations, then, as Paul Churchland has remarked, there is no obvious reason why we can't imagine "...a way of representing 'anglophone linguistic hyperspace' so that all grammatical sentence turn out to reside on a proprietary hypersurface within that hyperspace..." [1991:84]. That is, barring resmctions on the dimensions of the space, the hypothesis that language learning is mediated solely by an innate similarity space is very likely compatible with the hypothesis that the grammar of English is innate. An empirically motivated proposal for restricting the dimensions of innate "similarity spaces" would be a major breakthrough in the psychology of learning. However, almost certainly, what Quine has in mind is to placate Empiricist scruples by only allowing the dimensions of the innate similarity space to express psychophysical properties of proximal stimulations. If this is the right exegesis, then Quine needs an Argument that the interpretation of, say, English is possible from the epistemic position of an investigator whose data are restricted to SASs and who generalizes these data along psychophysical parameters. For reasons that have been familiar since Chomsky's "Review of

Is Radical Interpretation Possible? / 111 B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior," it seems unlikely that such an argument will be forthcoming, though that is, of course, entirely an empirical issue. How much does all this affect the status of Quine's story about radical interpretation? Not much, we think. There are two possibilities. Suppose that information corresponding to the child's innate similarity space is not assumed to be at the disposal of the radical interpreter. In that case, Quine can no longer argue from the fact that languages are learned by children to the possibility of their radical interpretation; for all one knows, the child's innate endowment may play an essential role in mediating his learning of his language. So, suppose that information corresponding to the child's innate endowment is assumed to be at the disposal of the radical interpreter. Then the force of the epistemic requirement that a language be radically interpretable depends entirely on what the innate information is supposed to be. In the limiting case, the interpretation theory for the language is itself innate-hence available to the radical interpreter -and the requirement that the language be radically interpretable is empty since the radical interpreter can "learn" the language from no data at all. In this respect, the point about the child really is just like the point about the linguist; to take seriously the possibility that they bring a rich background of empirical assumptions to their appointed tasks is to jeopardize either the argument that radical interpretation is possible, or the force of the requirement that languages be radically interpretable, or both.

Nothing is hidden12

To repeat our old theme: argument form T requires that radical interpretation be so defined that the condition that natural languages must be F substantively constrains the interpretation theories that can be true of them; and also that it is independently plausible that natural languages are in fact radically interpretable. Thus far, we have considered attempts to derive accounts of radical interpretation from a reconstruction of the epistemic situation of field linguists and children; as we remarked, defining radical interpretation that way has the desirable property of entailing that natural languages are radically interpretable since children and linguists do, in fact, learn them. We turn now to a different basis on which a substantive notion of radical interpretation might be constructed. Correspondingly, the discussion shifts from being mostly about Quine to being mostly about Davidson. In "Coherence theory of truth and knowledge," Davidson writes:

...as a matter of principle, ...meaning, and by its connection with meaning, belief also, are open to public determination... . What a fully informed interpreter could learn about what a speaker means is all there is to learn; the same goes for what the speaker believes [1986:315]. Davidson's point depends on the metaphysical principle that "nothing is hidden":

112 /Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore

If there is any fact of the matter at all about what the interpretation of a language is, then the evidence which selects a meaning theory for that language must in principle be publicly accessible data. Some such line of thought has been central in analytic philosophy at least since Wittgenstein's discussion of private languages in the Philosophical Investigations. And, under one interpretation, it is acceptable to anybody who thinks that the intentional supervenes on the physical, since physical facts are publicly accessible facts par excellence. Notice that, prima facie, defining the radical interpreter as someone whose epistemic situation is compatible with the "nothing is hidden" thesis we&ns the notion as compared with defining him as someone whose data are exhausted by SASs or SHTs. "Assents" and "holding trues" are to count as unhidden if only by Quine's and Davidson's respective stipulations. But the converse doesn't obviously hold since there are lots of unhidden facts that are neither assents nor hold trues, and who knows which of these might serve to usefully constrain the choice of an interpretation theory? Just what differences there are between the "hold true" account of radical interpretation and the "nothing is hidden" account (in effect, what substitutions for "F'might be licensed on one account of radical interpretation but not on the other) is an interesting issue, but not one we propose to pursue here. Rather, we're going to doubt that a substantive version of the "nothing is hidden" constraint can actually be enforced. The problem is that, though it may be that the evidence that determines the choice of a correct translation manual (or interpretation theory) can't be "hidden" in principle, that doesn't begin to show that it can't be hidden from the child/linguist/interpreter. Let's see why. Suppose God knows everything about the world that can be said without using intentional (with-a-"t") or semantical concepts; so He knows all the facts about the world that are untendentiously public. Then it follows from the principle that nothing is hidden that God knows everything He could need to know to warrant His choice of a correct interpretation theory for, say, English. But, of course, this assumption has God knowing a lot of things that radical interpreters can't be assumed to know if the possibility of radical interpretation is plausibly to be prerequisite for the possibility of interpretation. Not only does God know things that go on in people's heads (under, of course, neurological or other nonintentional descriptions), but He also knows what laws there are and what counterfactuals they support. Nothing rules out the possibility that some of this neurological, or counterfactual information may be relevant to His choice of the correct translation manual; to be more precise, the "nothing is hidden" thesis doesn't rule this out. Nor can it simply be assumed that, if a law or a counterfactual is relevant to a justified choice of an interpretation for a language, then the application of general principles of warranted theoretical inference to the observational evidence available to an arbitrary linguist/child/interpreter(the SASs or SHTs, as it might be) would lead to knowledge of that law or counterfactual. Remember, in

Is Radical Interpretation Possible? / 113 particular, that no such conclusion follows from the fact that children and linguists do succeed in learning languages; that is, from the fact that languages are interpretable. Children may not make warranted interpretations; and field linguists who arrive at warranted interpretations may have not just their observational evidence to go on, but also an independently confirmed empirical background theory. But now there's a dilemma. If the nothing is hidden thesis is read as "nothing [relevant to the warranted choice of an interpretation theory] is hidden from someone in God's epistemic position," then it is no doubt true, but it's methodologically uninteresting. In particular, since nobody is ever in God's epistemic position, the nothing is hidden thesis, so construed, provides no reason to believe that the radical interpretation of natural languages is actually possible. And if, on the other hand, "nothing is hidden" is read as "nothing is hidden from the epistemic positions that real interpreters occupy (for example, from the epistemic positions of the child or the linguist)," then no doubt radical interpretation is possible if the nothing is hidden thesis is true, but we have no good reason to suppose that the nothing is hidden thesis is true. Another way to put this point is that you can read the principle that "nothing is hidden" either metaphysically (as, in effect, the claim that the intentional and semantic supervene on the nonintentional), or epistemologically (as the claim that interpretation is always possible from the radical interpreter's epistemic position). If you read it the first way it's probably true, but it doesn't follow that radical interpretation is possible. Maybe the intentional supervenes on something unhidden, but this leaves it open that, de facto, the "unhidden" information required for the warranted choice of an interpretation is available only to God. If, however, you read "nothing is hidden" kpistemologicallynothing relevant to the choice of an interpretation could be hiddenfrom a radical interpreter-then to assume the thesis is to beg the question whether anybody is a radical interpreter (whether, for example, children or field linguists are). There is a quite characteristic line of reply that Davidson is disposed to take when he is pressed on these sorts of issues. "The structure and content of truth," p. 314: We should demand ...that the evidence for the [interpretation] theory be in principle publicly accessible... . The requirement that the evidence be publicly accessible is not due to an atavistic yearning for behavioristic or verificationist foundations, but to the fact that what is to be explained is a social phenomenon. Mental phenomena in general may or may not be private, but the correct interpretation of one person's speech by another must in principle be possible. A speaker's intention that her words be understood in a certain way may of course remain opaque to the most skilled and knowledgeable listener, but what has to do with correct interpretation, meaning and truth conditions is necdssarily based on available evidence. As Wittgenstein, not to mention Dewey, Mead, Quine and many other have insisted, language is intrinsically social. This does not entail that truth and meaning can be defined in terms of observable behavior, or that it is "nothing but" observable behavior; but it does imply that meaning is

114 /Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore entirely determined by observable behavior, even readily observable behavior. That meanings are decipherable is not a matter of luck; public availability is a constitutive aspect of language. (See also "The inscrutability of reference,' p. 235.)

Notice, however, that the truism that natural language is a social phenomenon leaves open the crucial question: What sorts of creatures (creatures in what epistemic, genetic and psychological situations) can constitute the societies to which natural languages are ipso facto publicly available? What, in particular, is the argument that natural languages are ipso facto available, publicly or otherwise, to a society of radical interpreters?l3 We remind the reader once again: What's at issue in this whole discussion is precisely whether there is a definition of "radical interpreter" such that, on the one hand, the data required to select a warranted interpretation theory are, ipso facto, not hidden from him; and, on the other hand, such that the epistemic situation of the radical interpreter is one that real interpreters are in at least from time to time, hence one for which languages are known to be radically interpretable. You can define "radical interpreter" such that it is true by stipulation that he satisfies one or other of these desiderata. But it is a substantive question whether anything ever satisfies both. Thus far, in our view, all attempts to construct arguments on the model of T have begged this question.14 Summary and conclusion We haven't claimed that the observations reported by SASSand SHTs are in fact inadequate for the warranted choice of a correct translation manual or interpretation theory. We are only claiming that it is not obvious that they are adequate; certainly that it is not true a priori that they have to be adequate; hence that no transcendental argument should be allowed to take it as a premise that if the sentences of a language have content, then the language is ipso facto susceptible of radical interpretation. So, where does this leave us? Well, a case needs to be made that appeals to the epistemological conditions that define Davidson's radical interpreter or Quine's radical translator have any interesting role to play in the philosophy of language. Neither Quine nor Davidson say much about what they think justifies the evidential constraints on translation and interpretation that their accounts of radical interpretation are supposed to institute. As must be clear to you by now, we are doubtful that any such justification will be forthcoming. Confronted with our complaints, a friend of argument form T might reasonably decide to loosen the epistemic constraints in terms of which the radical interpreter is defined. Why not let in something more than knowledge of assents and hold trues? As we've been seeing, deciding to do so needn't prejudice the "nothing is hidden" thesis. And, as we've also been seeing, nothing we know about the ways that children and linguists go about their work suggests that they

Is Radical Interpretation Possible? / 115 do, as a matter of fact, have access only to the exiguous data that Quine and Davidson permit them. Suppose, then, that some new account of the epistemic situation of the radical interpreter is proposed: "A radical interpreter knowh not only about the informant's hold trues and assents, but also about X" where X is some body of (contingent) information that is still to be specified. The argument now proceeds as in T above: no interpretation without radical interpretation; no radical interpretation unless languages are F; but interpretation actually happens; so languages are F. We have simply no objection at all to the philosopher who proposes to pursue this strategy. But we have some friendly advice. Unless he wants to be pestered with another paper just like this one, he had best attend to all of the following: i. He needs to say what X is; ii. He needs to show that radical interpretation really is possible for someone who knows about the assents, and the hold trues, and about X. (For example, by showing that children and/or field linguists are plausibly radical interpreters in this revised sense). iii. He needs to show that the revised transcendental argument is sound for some interesting value of F; that is, that the possible languages are substantively constrained by the requirement that they be radically interpretable according to the revised definition of the notion. We've seen, for example, that one consequence of the old transcendental argument was supposed to be that the choice of a translation manual from the radial interpreter's epistemic position requires the exercise of charity: that is, that radical interpretation, according to the old characterization,is impossible unless many of the sentences held true are true (see n. 2). Suppose this is so. It remains open whether charity (or anything else that's philosophically interesting) is required for radical interpretation according to the new characterization; that is, according to the definition of the radical interpreter as someone who has access to SASSand SHTs and X. We'll only know that when we know what X is. The bottom line is that there might be a transcendental argument for something philosophically interesting that runs along the lines of Argument form T. But we know of no particular reason to suppose that there actually is one; and certainly there aren't any so far. Barring some candidates, benign skepticism would seem to be the rational attitude.15 Notes 1. Some of the material in this paper is adapted from Fodor and Lepore, Holism, A Shopper's Guide, Basil Blackwell, 1992. 2. A language L is interpretable iff there is a true semantic theory of L. We assume, for purposes of the present argument, that a semantic theory of L is a function

116 /Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore that enumerates the sentences of L together with their truth conditions (but nothing essential to our discussion turns on this). We also assume that no language could be learned, translated, and so forth, unless it is interpretable. Hereafter we'll use "interpreting L" and its cognates as cover terms for the process of constructing a semantic theory of L. Radical interpretation is the process of constructing a semantic theory of L from a certain specified epistemic position (typically, on the basis of a certain specified kind of data). Unless explicit notice is given, "interpretation" without qualification always means interpretation-tout-court. When we mean radical interpretation, we'll say so. 3. Among the variants of premise 2 is: no language is radically interpretable unless many of the sentences held true by speakers of the language are true (a fortiori, consistent). See Davidson 1973, 1974; Lewis 1973, Dennett 1970, 1987, Grandy 1973 and many others. Other variants of premise 2 include: no language is radically interpretable unless there are behavioral criteria for all its psychological terms [Ryle 1949; Wittgenstein 19681; no language is radically interpretable unless there are observable criteria for the application of all its theoretical terms [Ayer 1936, 19461; no language is radically interpretable if it contains terms whose meanings are available only to one speaker [Wittgenstein 19681; no language is radically interpretable unless there are public criteria for ascriptions of knowledge of the language [Dummett 19781; no language is radically interpretable unless it contains singular terms [Strawson 19561, etc. We are not denying that natural languages actually exhibit these and related properties; or even that there are transcendental arguments that show that they have to do so. We deny only that there are any good reasons to believe that such arguments proceed from assumptions about the conditions for radical interpretation. 4. This form of argument has variants for philosophers whose primary interest is not in languages but in minds. For example: Argument form T' 1'. Nothing would be a thinker but that hisfherfits thoughts were interpretable (but that in principle hisfherlits concepts are acquirable) from the epistemic position of a radical interpreter. 2'. No thoughts would be interpretable (no concepts would be acquirable) from the epistemic position of a radical interpreter unless they were F'. 3'. But thoughts are actually interpreted (concepts are actually acquired). 4'. Therefore, thoughts (/concepts) are F'. For our purposes in this paper, the differences between argument forms T and T' are largely irrelevant. We therefore propose mostly to ignore them. 5. The philosophical literature is more single-minded about the possibility of grounding a transcendental argument on the conditions for radical interpretation than it is on what the bottom line of such an argument would be. Wittgenstein holds, apparently, that these conditions preclude the possibility of a "private" language (however the import of this doctrine is unclear since nobody seems to be quite sure what a private language is). Quine's analysis of the conditions for radical translation is the first step towards showing that the notion of linguistic meaning is not scientifically useful and that there is a great deal of "sco pe... for empirically unconditioned variation in one's conceptual scheme" [1960: 261. It's not entirely clear what Davidson thinks about the scientific utility of linguistic meaning, but he certainly thinks that consideration of radical interpretation provides a basis for denying that different individuals (or cultures) could operate with very different conceptual schemes. Both Quine and Davidson think that the warranted Fs include charity principles; a priori guarantees that the informant cannot be mistaken in certain of his beliefs. But, whereas Quine thinks that the these principles guarantee only that the informant subscribes to logical truths, Davidson thinks they apply quite broadly; hence, that the possibility of radical interpretation offers the basis for a refutation of

Is Kadical Interpretation Possible? / 117 skepticism about the external world. In face of this disarray, we defer for consideration in another paper the question what a transcendental argument from the possibility of radical interpretation would show if such an argument were sound. Our present purpose is to argue that there is no account of the radical interpreter's epistemic situation (no account of what being a radical interpreter consists in) that makes 1 both substantive and true. Notice that the conclusion of argument form T really is supposed to be ontological and not just epistemological. T is supposed to show not merely that the semantic properties of languages would be epistemically inaccessible if languages weren't F. It's also supposed to show that languages wouldn't have semantic properties but that they are F; that nothing that wasn't F could be a language. It is, for example, not very interesting that if there were a private language, then it wouldn't be learnable, or that it would be epistemically accessible only to its speaker. What's striking is the thought that there couldn't be a private language. The former is the strategy of Dennett [1970, 19871 and Churchland [1981]; they areue. in effect. that since the conditions for radical internretation aren't actuallv s&sfied, there are no intentional or semantic facts. he latter is ~ e a r l e ' s strategy [1987]; he argues, in effect, that since the evidence available to the radical interpreter is insufficient to warrant the assignments of the beliefs and meanings that first-person intuitions prefer, the requirement of radical interpretability must be abandoned. At least since "Belief and the basis of meaning," and more obviously in his most recent papers, Davidson takes the basic evidence for interpretation to be not "holding true under such and such circumstances," but rather, "information about what episodes and situations in the world cause an agent to prefer that one rather than another sentence be true" [1990, p. 314, our emphasis]. As far as we can tell, this change doesn't affect the line of argument we will be pursuing. If radical interpretation can't succeed unless languages are F, then the successful interpreter must proceed on the (explicit or implicit) assumption that his target language is F. Taxonomic linguistics, at the metatheoretic level, was largely devoted to developing a "non question-begging" account of successful field procedures (See, for example, Harris 1951.) An account that says "first learn the language" is ipso facto question-begging since there is, notoriously, no field procedure for doing that. With the exception, perhaps, of a few lonely connectionists, nobody in linguistics now takes this project seriously. Hume is worth quoting on this: When a child has felt the sensation of pain from touching the flame of a candle, he will be careful not to put his hand near any candle; but will expect a similar effect from a cause which is similar in its sensible qualities and appearance. If you assert, therefore, that the understanding of the child is led into this conclusion by any process of argument or ratiocination, I may justly require you to produce that argument; nor have you any pretext to refuse so equitable a demand. You cannot say, that the argument is abstruse, and may possibly escape your search and enquiry; since you confess, that it is obvious to the capacity of a mere infant An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Essay IV, "Skeptical doubts concerning the operations of the understanding, part 2"). This is Wittgenstein's phrase, but we're not using it for Wittgenstein's purposes. (See circa para 93 of the Philosophical Investigations, where the issue seems primarily to be essentialism with regard to language.) Notice too Davidson's tacit assumption that the constraints on natural languages hold for semantic interpretability at large (that is, that they are conditions for there being "correct interpretation, meaning and truth conditions" as such).

1 18 /Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore 14. Dummett provides a variant of the argument that makes clear how closely the childflinguist construal of radical interpretation is related to the "nothing is hidden" construal. According to Dummett, language is constrained by the principle that "...there must be an observable difference between the behavior or capacities of someone who is said to have [knowledge of the language and someone who] is said to lack it" [1978:217]. We take this to be a version of the "nothing is hidden" thesis. But the argument that leads Dummett to this depends on the consideration that "...our proficiency in making use of the statements and expressions of the language is all that others have from which to judge whether or not we have acquired a grasp of their meanings" [1978:217]. We take this to be a claim that languages aren't learnable unless they are teachable; and that they aren't teachable unless nothing relevant is hidden from the teacher. (Strictly speaking, Dummett makes this claim for the language of mathematical theories; but it is clear that he thinks the point is general.) This line of argument, if it were successful, would show more than that nothing is hidden from someone in God's epistemic position; it would also show that nothing is hidden from someone in the teacher's epistemic position. However, that natural languages can be learned does not entail that they can be taught (as Chomsky has often pointed out). Moreover, what follows from the assumption that they can be taught depends on what the epistemic situation of the learner is supposed to be (nothing follows from the assumption that English can be taught to someone who knows English). So, we're back where we started. 15. Versions of this paper have been presented at Washington University, the University of Missouri, the University of Florida, the University of Bielefeld, and the Pacific American Philosophical Association meeting, Portland, 1992. We would like to thank Donald Davidson, Roger Gibson, Michael Root, Gabriel Segal, and the participants in the 1992 NEH Summer Seminar on Meaning Holism for comments on earlier drafts.

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