Philosophy Lexicon of Arguments
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Indeterminacy, philosophy: An object is indeterminate if its linguistic description indicates fewer characteristics than a member of a (linguistic) community usually needs to distinguish the object from other objects. See also uncertainty of translation, vagueness, under-determinateness, inscrutability, determinateness. _____________ Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments.
Author	Item	Excerpt	Meta data
Quine, Willard Van Orman   Books on Amazon	Indeterminacy	Rorty I 227 McDowellVsQuine: If truth is underdetermined by the entirety of the observable, then it must be independent of it. This is absurd for verificationists, therefore one must not understand it realistically. This strategy would imply, however, that one includes biology, but excludes translation. ChomskyVsQuine: there is only one indeterminacy: the familiar underdeterminacy of each theory through all observations. ((s) You never know whether all the observations are taken into account, or are already done. --- Quine I 257 Indeterminate singular terms do not designate objects. - An indefinite singular term must therefore stand in purely significant position: E.g. "The tax inspector is looking for someone" (position significant - "someone" is not significant). --- I 283 Indefinite singular term: disappears in quantification "something is an x such that", "everything is an x .." --- I 285 Beliefs and quotes can be understood as infinite different things (Indeterminacy). --- II 33 Inscrutability of reference: no difference: "x is a dog" or "x is the spatiotemporal strand, which is filled by a dog" - only one statement about the used terminology and its translation, not about physical objects (representative function). - Inscrutability: occurs in translation or permutation. --- VI 69 Indeterminacy of translation/syntax/Quine: the ambiguity does not extend to the syntax - but on the referential apparatus: plural endings, equal signs, quantifiers - but these are not part of syntax. --- XII 60 Indeterminacy of translation/Quine: E.g. numbers of Neumann, Frege, Zermelo: each definition is correct, but they are all incompatible with one another. - Solution: we invent set-theoretic models which must comply with the laws that fulfill the numbers in non-explicit meaning - Problem: you do not know if you talk about the terms or about the Goedel numbers - (> shifted ostension). --- XII 62 Indeterminacy of translation/Native language/Quine: the indeterminacy of translation is also valid in a language: E.g. we may translate the "hopefully" of a particular speaker better differently - principle of indulgence: justifies deviations from the homophonic translation, reproduction by the same phoneme order - compensation: can be made by corrections to the predicates - problem: we cannot ask: "are you really referring to Goedel numbers?" - Because the answer: "to numbers" lost its right to homophonic translation - ((s) because of the principle of indulgence). --- XII 97 Indeterminacy/translation/Gavagai/linguistics/Quine: the linguist always comes to an accurate translation, but only because he unconsciously makes arbitrary decisions - decisive: the holism: statements cannot be isolated. - ((S) any differences can be compensated in other partial-translations.) _____________ Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution.	Q I W.V.O. Quine Wort und Gegenstand Stuttgart 1980 Q II W.V.O. Quine Theorien und Dinge Frankfurt 1985 Q III W.V.O. Quine Grundzüge der Logik Frankfurt 1978 Q IX W.V.O. Quine Mengenlehre und ihre Logik Wiesbaden 1967 Q V W.V.O. Quine Die Wurzeln der Referenz Frankfurt 1989 Q VI W.V.O. Quine Unterwegs zur Wahrheit Paderborn 1995 Q VII W.V.O. Quine From a logical point of view Cambridge, Mass. 1953 Q VIII W.V.O. Quine Bezeichnung und Referenz In Zur Philosophie der idealen Sprache, J. Sinnreich (Hg), München 1982 Q X W.V.O. Quine Philosophie der Logik Bamberg 2005 Q XII W.V.O. Quine Ontologische Relativität Frankfurt 2003 Ro I R. Rorty Der Spiegel der Natur Frankfurt 1997 Ro II R. Rorty Philosophie & die Zukunft Frankfurt 2000 Ro III R. Rorty Kontingenz, Ironie und Solidarität Frankfurt 1992 Ro IV R. Rorty Eine Kultur ohne Zentrum Stuttgart 1993 Ro V R. Rorty Solidarität oder Objektivität? Stuttgart 1998 Ro VI R. Rorty Wahrheit und Fortschritt Frankfurt 2000 Q XII W.V.O. Quine Ontologische Relativität Frankfurt 2003

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Ed. Martin Schulz, access date 2017-07-21