Although Quine will return at the end of “Speaking of Objects” to ideas from the first section (ideas that are central to the “Ontological Relativity”), in much of §§IV-V he is concerned with a range of topics that combine his concerns in “Two Dogmas” with Russell’s in ch. 12 of Problems of Philosophy (to say nothing of Wittgenstein’s concerns about the idea of a “shadow”).
• In most of §IV, Quine is concerned with issues regarding attributes. However, in an interlude or digression on pp. 16f, he discusses the referentiality (or, as he elsewhere calls it, the referential transparency) of terms in ascriptions of belief. Although this discussion functions here mainly as an example of a general point that applies also to his main topic in the section, the issue was important to Quine and is closely tied to issues we will discuss in the last week of the course.
• After a discussion of whether to posit objects of belief at the beginning of §V, Quine speculates about the possibility of fundamental changes in our ontology. His comments at the end about the significance of the idea of such a change anticipate things he says in “Ontological Relativity.”
“Ontological Relativity” combines two lectures that Quine delivered a few years after he published Word and Object and that developed some of its ideas further. In the first two of the selections I've assigned, this development is mainly expository, but the third makes explicit ideas Quine had barely hinted at earlier.
• The first selection (pp. 185-187) restates Quine’s doubts about meaning and, by comparing his views to those of John Dewey, echos the affinity with Pragmatism that he claimed at the end of “Two Dogmas.”
• The second selection (pp. 188-191) recounts his example of radical translation from “Speaking of Objects.” Notice at the end of the selection the way he compares and contrasts the sorts of indeterminacy or inscrutability he finds in meaning and in reference.
• The third selection (the beginning of the second lecture, pp. 198-202) explores the idea of “relativity” alluded to in Quine’s title. There are two key components to this.
• The first 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 and do. 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). After reading this discussion, you might look back at the last two paragraphs of §I of “Speaking of Objects” as well as the final paragraph of that lecture.