Although the assignment above refers to the whole of section II, we will probably discuss only about the first ½ of the section (roughly through p. 205).

• The first key idea here lies in the implications of the claim that “radical translation begins at home” (pp. 198-200) and the associated ideas of “homophonic translation” and the “principle of charity.” Quine does not say much about the latter idea here. It played a central role in his book Word and Object (1960); but, there too, his description of it was limited. Someone who has said more is Donald Davidson, a philosopher strongly influenced by Quine. According to him, “What justifies the procedure is the fact that disagreement and agreement alike are intelligible only against a background of massive agreement.” And he goes on to say,

The methodological advice to interpret in a way that optimizes agreement should not be conceived as resting on a charitable assumption about human intelligence that might turn out to be false. If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our own standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything. (“Radical Interpretation” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 137.)

In short, for Davidson, the principle of charity expresses a condition of the possibility of translation and interpretation. To understand the meaning of what people say under given circumstances, we need assumptions about what they believe in those same circumstances; and we have little access to those beliefs independent of what they say. So Davidson says that the use of the principle of charity “is intended to solve the problem of the interdependence of belief and meaning by holding belief constant as far as possible while solving for meaning” (ibid.). And to hold belief constant in any way but as true would be arbitrary.

• The second key idea is that speaking of reference in a language makes sense only relative to a background language (pp. 200-202). Perhaps the best statement of the point is this: “What makes sense is to say not what the objects of a theory are, absolutely speaking, but how one theory of objects is interpretable or reinterpretable in another” (p. 201).

• Much of the paper from the break on p. 202 on seems motivated by Quine’s claim that “when questions regarding the ontology of a theory … become meaningful relative to a background theory, this is not in general because the background theory has a wider universe” (p. 203) and, perhaps more generally, by desire to distinguish the point he has been making in this paper from more familiar ones. The most useful part of this material for us is his effort to distinguish his point from Carnap’s distinction between internal and external questions (which appears mainly on p. 203).

• I suggest you continue reading at least through the first paragraph of p. 205 because p. 204 provides a kind of recap of Quine’s points phrased in terms of the interpretation of logical forms. (This will be less helpful to you if you have not had a logic course, but you should try to get a sense of the function of a “model” even if the details of how it fulfills that function are obscure.) The chief moral of this discussion is stated in the next-to-last paragraph of p. 204.

• The remainder of the paper is concerned in one way or another with issues regarding the idea of ontological reduction—i.e., the idea of showing how the ontological commitments of one theory can be fulfilled by some apparently different theory, showing how things of kind X can be understood as really made up of or constructed from things of kind Y—or the idea of substitutional quantification (which Quine explains on p. 209). His last page is a summary, but most of it is devoted to this range of issues, so you can get some idea from it of the range of things he discusses in the last quarter of the paper. (If the Löwenheim-Skolem Theorem that Quine speaks on p. 206 of seems incredible, it may help to know that it depends on the fact that a language in an ordinary sense contains only denumerably many sentences—i.e., no more than there are positive integers—and thus only denumerably many claims of existence, which can be shown to be satisfiable using only denumerably many members of any wider collection that a theory is thought to concern. The reference to the Pythagoreans concerns the idea that integers are fundamental to everything.)