This is the transcript for the original broadcast of this program (8 March 2008).

Alan Saunders: Hello, and welcome to The Philosopher's Zone. I'm Alan Saunders.

And come with me now to a distant land.

Reading: We weighed anchor and furled the sails; my men rowed me ashore. The dense forest stretched almost down to the sands, and from it, there suddenly emerged a man, naked but for a loincloth. He carried a spear, but seemed friendly, and we stood together, as a rabbit emerged from the foliage and looked at us both.

What, I wondered, was his word for 'rabbit'? So I pointed to the animal and looked inquiringly at him. He answered with a single word, 'Gavagai'.

Alan Saunders: More later about that mysterious word, 'gavagai', and what it has to tell us about the philosophy of language and of translation.

But let's turn first to more conventional problems of translation. Last week, we looked at translating philosophy from Greek and from Chinese. To many of us, Chinese is a thoroughly foreign language, though even Greek has a different alphabet and a different grammar to English.

But there are problems in translation even when you're translating from languages as similar to ours as German and French. Here's Dr Jean-Phillipe Deranty, senior lecturer in philosophy at Macquarie University.

Jean-Phillipe Deranty: Some English translations of some French texts are appalling, and others are amazing in being able to convey the difficulty of the French or German concepts. It's probably more a case of specific authors who are especially difficult to translate.

Alan Saunders: Well let's look at a specific author. In her recent book on the 20th century French philosopher, Michel Foucault, Claire O'Farrell points out that some critics have claimed that there's a masculine bias in Foucault's work, revealed in his tendency to apply masculine pronouns to words like 'individual', 'children', and 'subject', but that's just what you have to do in French because unlike English, it ascribes genders to everything and it just happens that it's le sujet which is masculine, and not la sujet, which would be feminine. So there do seem to be some sort of fairly simple errors in translation going on.

Jean-Phillipe Deranty: What I've seen myself is that a lot of people, perhaps including me, I think that just because you can read another language, you can translate. Actually of course any translator knows that it's a skill, it's a job, it's a trade, that you need to learn.

The question of gender neutrality is a question of the discrepancy between expectations in academia, in academic language between English-speaking countries and France. And here we're touching on the very complex question of cultural difference. Obviously the difficulty of translation is rooted in the problem of cultural difference, of different expectations. Foucault's prose can be best characterised as being classical, he's a beautiful writer who takes as a model two types of writers. First of all the great avant-garde writers that he, like all his generation in France admire so much, people like Artaud or Blancheur, but also the classics. When you trained in philosophy in France in the 1950s like Foucault was, there is still an expectation that you will write like Descartes and Pascal, and use this classical prose which was the model for all young intellectuals at the time. In that language, generate terms like 'the human', l'homme, 'the child', l'enfant, le sujet, as you said, are masculine. Now from an English-speaking perspective, indeed from a feminist perspective, from the perspective that came out much later in the '80s and '90s, this is sexist language, and it's quite possible that there is a deep sexist trend in classical French culture, and it's quite possible that even someone like Foucault, who did so much to challenge all forms of discrimination, even he, by using this classical language just simply reinforces these problems. You could say exactly the same of people like Deleuze and Derrida. So the ironies that the very French authors who are such important references for English-speaking feminism, can themselves be accused of sexism.

Alan Saunders: Is there moreover, something about English that just makes it inhospitable to Continental ways of thought? I mean philosophy in English, and by that I mean a lot of English, Irish, Scottish, American and Australian philosophy, seems to have perhaps an innate tendency towards empiricism, which is to say a tendency towards thinking that what matters if how you can make sense of the world from what you hear, see, touch, whatever. Does that make English ill-equipped for expressing philosophical concepts from German and French?

Jean-Phillipe Deranty: Yes, it's a fascinating question. The first thing to say is a lot of French and German philosophy is extremely analytical, even those authors who pass for being obscure and indulging too much in rhetorical flourishes like Foucault, Deleuze or Leotard. If you absolutely read them carefully, they're extremely analytical. They analyse concepts and meanings and make subtle distinctions of different meanings. So if that's what the difference is, there must be something else to analytical when we try to characterise the, I think, undeniable feel that there is something different about writing philosophy in English, or something different about the way English-speaking people and English people perhaps, write philosophy as opposed to Germans and as opposed to French. And again here of course we are back with the problem of cultural difference and this complex interaction between language and culture.

Are there structures of thought and structures of being in the world, let's say that are specific to French culture, or the German culture that would be different in English culture which would be reflected in language or in fact not just reflected, because of course language frames experience, and so it's a reciprocal interaction between experience and language.

To answer that question you need to be a very good linguist. I think anybody who has read philosophy has a sense that there is something like that going on. I think you could possibly analyse very precisely the exact differences between, say, the German syntax and the way the sentence and the clauses in German are constructed, and how then this leads to a certain type of philosophy, as opposed to the syntax of English. The fact that English can be so economical in expressing thought, at the same time economical can be a good thing, but it can be a bad thing. There is always, from the European perspective, this idea that the English language has a tendency to be overly empirical, pragmatic, utilitarian in its outlook etc.

Alan Saunders: I was looking the other day at, I think it was the first book by the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy called in English Barbarism with a Human Face. Now I don't know whether you'd call that philosophy or intellectual journalism, but if it's philosophy, the opening is just way over the top for an English-language philosopher. It's rhetorical, it's a lot about him and about where he comes from; you don't do that in English if you're a philosopher.

Jean-Phillipe Deranty: Yes, but I think what you're talking about here just simply reflects the style and personality of Monsieur Henri Levy, I don't think this is a good representative of the best that French or German philosophy have to offer. Some of the most famous books of the '70s in French, that's called French Theory for example on American campuses, sound completely crazy. You have to say the books that Deleuze and Guattari wrote in the '70s were that type of language, that type of over-the-top rhetoric, that's not to be denied. But what you have to say I think is that this is a very specific period in Continental intellectual life, cultural life, let's say, the '70s, the early '70s. If you read Deleuze's earlier texts, his book on Kant for example, his introductory book on Kant, or his books on Spinoza, this is pure analytical style, this is very dry prose, there are hardly any flourishes, there's very little playing with language, there's no play on words etc. So I think there are a lot of misconceptions here because of the fame and the importance of the later books by Deleuze. And you could say the same about Foucault I think, he's extremely analytical, and the author that is a bit of an exception here is of course Derrida, and I think here Derrida is different from the great French theorists, because as everybody knows, in Derrida, one of the core ideas in Derrida is this idea that you cannot distinguish between the meaning and the materiality of language, between signify and signified, and very logically therefore, he constantly plays with words, and therefore has constant puns and plays on words etc. This would be like Mallarme like the great poets, someone that is really, really hard, perhaps impossible, to translate.

Alan Saunders: Are there phrases and terms that seem acceptable in French but that simply look pretentious or absurd in English? I remarked last week that the great German philosopher, Martin Heidegger famously said Das Nicht nichtet, which translates into English as 'The nothing noths', and that's just damn silly in English. Does it make more sense in German?

Jean-Phillipe Deranty: I don't think it sounds silly for English Heideggerians. So I think that's the answer. It probably sounds very silly to most German people. Again, Heidegger is a special case. He has a whole philosophy, as you know, about the philosophical import of language you know, language plays a central role. I think you would have to talk about Heidegger separately from other philosophers, from other German philosophers. The two great German philosophers who have a very special relationship with language are Heidegger but of course, Hegel. But many other German philosophers just simply would sound like an English philosopher. But that said of course, the sentence could be longer, perhaps, the syntax would sound more complicated. So just at a practical level when I've done some translating of German into English, you always have to break up the German sentence, German sentences often are too long.

There is this famous story about Kant, Immanuel Kant, sending his first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason to one of his aristocratic friends who was a patron, and the friend replies and says, 'I couldn't finish your book because every time you started a new clause in a sentence, I counted on one finger, and by the time the sentence was finished, I didn't have enough fingers.' And that's a good summary of some German writers' sentences, Habermas typically has a very heavy style, and I guess the English translator has to break that up.

Alan Saunders: But if you translate it with regard to the length of the original sentences say, and you get something very heavy, does it just look heavy in English, or was it, (and I'm pretty certain it must have been in the case of Kant) pretty heavy in German, and should you not, as a translator, just reflect the heaviness of the original, rather than interpose yourself to lighten things up a bit?

Jean-Phillipe Deranty: That's a very, very good point. You have to choose between faithfulness and readability, and I must say an experience that you make as an alien, if you like, because of my education and where I come from, in the English-speaking world of philosophy and writing, is that often there is pressure put on you to be more readable, more accessible, more clear, even sometimes at the price of being faithful to the original.

Alan Saunders: Jean-Phillipe Deranty, thank you very much indeed for joining us.

Jean-Phillipe Deranty: Thank you.

Alan Saunders: On ABC Radio National, you're with The Philosopher's Zone, and we're looking at translation. In fact now, we're going to look at what's called radical translation and that word 'gavagai'. The word and the idea of radical translation were introduced by the American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, who was born a hundred years ago this year. To find out about him and his interest in the matter, I spoke to David Braddon-Mitchell, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney.

David Braddon-Mitchell: Well Quine was one of those early 20th century philosophers who was in the grip in some ways of escaping from positivism, yet at the same time embracing a kind of behaviourism. So he wants to put everything onto a scientific footing, and he particularly wanted to put the study of meaning onto a scientific footing. Now for him, given that this was a time when brain science was in its infancy, putting it onto a scientific footing meant making everything observable. So if you wanted to explain meaning, and you wanted to explain how meanings could be understood and language acquired, you needed somehow or other to make it depend on what you could see, how what you could observe.

Alan Saunders: Just a bit of a bit of a sidebar here. You say he was trying to escape from positivism, but what was it he was trying to escape from, because that sounds to me quite a positivistic enterprise.

David Braddon-Mitchell: Yes, positivism is a strange word in philosophy, and it's probably worth saying something about the many things that it means. So there's a very general sense of the word 'positivist' which means thinking science is continuous with philosophy. And then there is a specific sense of 'positivist' which is tied to the early 20th century logical positivist movement, and which depends in part on things like the principle of verification, so those guys believe that every word had a particular individual meaning, and that that meaning was given by the conditions under which you would verify that claims about it were true. And Quine was dead against that, and that sense, he was against positivism.

Alan Saunders: Yes, and they of course believed that if there were no conditions under which you could verify the meaning of this word, then it was literally meaningless.

David Braddon-Mitchell: That's right. They got to abolish vast amounts of stuff, they got to abolish religion on the grounds that there were no conditions under which you could verify claims about God. They got to abolish all kinds of poetical language, literally meaningless, because there are no conditions under which you could determine that it was true by observation.

Alan Saunders: Well let's look then at the word 'gavagai'. Where does that come from and what does it mean?

David Braddon-Mitchell: Gavagai is this example that Quine made extraordinarily famous. He supposed that you were trying to interpret the language of some tribe that you met, and they pointed at a rabbit, and said, 'gavagai'. Actually I would love to know, I tried to find out before this, whether there was such a word in any language. But unsuccessful, Google has failed me and so have all my philosophy text-books. Anyway, imagining this person pointing at a rabbit and saying 'gavagai', and here you are, you know none of their language, so you've got to try to figure out what a gavagai means. And so you imagine drawing little lines on their finger, and the line hits the back of the rabbit, and you go, Ah, ha, I know, they're pointing to a rabbit, it must mean 'rabbit'. And Quine's point is that that alone doesn't determine it at all, because if you're drawing the line from the finger, it might hit the rabbit's tail. So did they mean undetached rabbit part, i.e. just the tail as attached to a rabbit? Do they mean the whole rabbit? Do they mean the rabbit at this instant, but not the rabbit as it was in the past, or the rabbit as it will be in the future? So the idea was that translation in this way is indeterminate, because there's no evidence in front of you, which guarantees which of a bewildering number of possible interpretations is right.

Alan Saunders: Yes, of course this is curiously reminiscent of the story about how the kangaroo got its name.

David Braddon-Mitchell: I thought you might mention kang-gou-ru, yes.

Alan Saunders: That Captain Cook says 'What's that?' and the Aborigine he's talking to says 'kangaroo', and he thinks that's the name of the animal, that's what the animal's called, but in fact it means 'I don't know what you're saying' or 'I can't understand'. This in fact an urban myth.

David Braddon-Mitchell: Yes it turns out that he did mean kangaroo. But interesting that gangura came to mean 'horse' in lots of Aboriginal languages, because they talked to people in the Sydney areas and said, 'What are those big things over there that the white people are riding?' and the local people of the area said 'Oh they're big ganguru'. And since 'ganguru' didn't mean— anyway, sidetracked.

Alan Saunders: Now Quine seems to be talking, he really sets this ball rolling in his book Word and Object, which I think was published in 1960 wasn't it? He seems to be talking about ordinary translation, the sort of thing that an early explorer or anthropologist might get up to. But he's not really doing that, is he?

David Braddon-Mitchell: No, no. It's very idealised because of course practically every early explorer would inevitably travel with someone who spoke a language that was slightly related to the people and you would acquire people as you travelled, sort of you know two language group the way from the one you were going to. No, the concern is the light that it sheds on meaning in general and in particular on how we learn our own language.

Alan Saunders: The possibility, if we get back to the case of this indigenous person saying 'gavagai' to me, the possibility is that we could, perhaps with a few other words, we could set up translation manuals to enable us to translate from his language into our own, and there could be several translation manuals which were mutually inconsistent, they didn't agree with each other, but they all fitted the observable circumstances, and that's the problem.

David Braddon-Mitchell: That's the idea, yes.

Alan Saunders: Now I said that Quine's doctrines are trying to lead us to think that there are no meanings, or that the idea of meaning is helpful. Perhaps we should ask what exactly we mean by 'meaning'?

David Braddon-Mitchell: That is a great question, and I think it's one of the ones that needs to be sorted out in philosophy. The last time I counted, it meant 15 different things, and that lots of the confusions about meaning were caused by mixing up the different things it might be. So sometimes you mean by 'meaning', simply the things that you words are about. So the meaning of 'chair' is this thing (I'm patting a chair, since we're on radio and you can't see it). Sometimes 'meaning' means something like the thing that you would need to grasp in order to be able to tell that something was the sort of thing you were talking about. Very often in English, meaning has got to do not with something as dull as the reference about words, what they're literally about but the subtle and interesting psychological shifts that get caused when you come to understand something. So some people might say the meaning of 'chair' was not just what you need to grasp in order to know that things were chairs, you might think that the meaning of 'chair' had something to do with the form of life that you entered when you really understood what a chair was. And these are all I think different sorts of things, I mean you'd separate them all out.

Alan Saunders: Why do we care? Who wants meaning? Who needs meaning?

David Braddon-Mitchell: I think the people who really care are often the people who are against meaning. One reason I think is that people are worried that if there were meanings, then there might be something disturbingly autocratic about people telling you what the real meaning of something is. I've never understood why you'd worry about that, since what the real meaning of something is, is simply a fact about how it's used, and what's most likely to be communicated by it.

Alan Saunders: To get back to Quine, we're being encouraged, are we, to be more pragmatic, and remembering that Quine was an American philosopher and that pragmatism is a great American philosophical tradition, we're encouraged to be more pragmatic and more behaviourist.

David Braddon-Mitchell: More pragmatic and certainly more behaviourist, yes. Meaning is given in behaviour and behaviour is all the evidence that you'll ever have for what things mean. It was also tied to another kind of objection about meaning in Quine's thought, which was his rejection of the so-called analytic synthetic distinction, so he thought that nothing was true in virtue of meaning alone.

Alan Saunders: Right, so you would want to say that literally in terms of meaning alone, you know that a bachelor is an unmarried male person. You don't go around the world looking at bachelors and checking out that they're all unmarried males.

David Braddon-Mitchell: That's right, yes. So the idea of the so-called analytic claim is that when you know what it means, you know certain things, and you don't need to know any stuff about the way the world is, other than the meaning to know it. So if I know what bachelor means, I know that bachelors are unmarried. Whereas for all I know all bachelors might be over 5-foot-one. Maybe they're anyone below 5-foot-one's married, but there's nothing that doesn't follow at all from the meaning of the word 'bachelor'. Now Quine denies this doctrine. He says there's nothing that you know just by knowing the meaning of the word alone, not even that bachelors are unmarried.

Alan Saunders: Why does he say that? Why does he say that we— I mean I suppose you could point to married female Bachelors of Arts, but why does he deny what seems to be a very obvious doctrine?

David Braddon-Mitchell: It's once again because of the way he thinks that everything that we know about meaning, and the meaning of our language and the truth of our sentences, is something which, as he puts it, it comes to the tribunal of the senses collectively, that's not the phrase, but that's what it means. So what he notices is that of course you might find people denying that bachelors were unmarried, you might find someone saying 'Oh, So-and-so, such a bachelor, his wife complains about it all the time.' Now you and I might say, 'Obviously that's a metaphor, they aren't a bachelor he has a wife, he isn't a bachelor he has a wife so he can't be a bachelor.' But Quine would say Well look, wait, the person who's come to say this, they've come to say this on the basis of various pieces of evidence. Who are we to say this is not just a very well-entrenched view about bachelors, namely that they're unmarried, rather than some stipulative piece of meaning?

Alan Saunders: Well I suppose what I would say to Quine would be, Well his wife refers to him as a bachelor but that's a metaphor which is dependent upon the fact that we know that he's not a bachelor, and we know what bachelors are.

David Braddon-Mitchell: Quite so, quite so. And one of the interesting sort of disputes between those who are pro meaning and those who aren't, is the dispute between those who think that there's a real metaphor, literal distinction, and those who don't. So I myself am pretty attracted to the metaphor literal distinction. I think that the richness of metaphor and simile depends in some way or other on literal meaning, but this other tradition would have it that metaphor and simile and all sorts of things like that are completely continuous with literal meaning, there's no barrier between the literal and the metaphorical.

Alan Saunders: Well David Braddon-Mitchell, I've now decided that what 'gavagai' really means is 'thank you'. So gavagai to you.

David Braddon-Mitchell: Gavagai to you too, Alan.

Alan Saunders: The Philosopher's Zone is produced by Kyla Slaven with technical production this week by Leila Schunner, and I'm Alan Saunders.

Now you may have heard of the sudden death, apparently from a snake or spider bite, of Val Plumwood. She was an important figure, a pioneer of environmental philosophy, and a fighter for many causes. And so we're devoting all of next week's show to a tribute to her and her life's work.