Philosophy of Language, Translation Theory
My interest in language as an area of research began when I noticed that my professors wanted us to stick close to the original text of any philosopher we were reading. We were almost always reading a philosopher in translation. The language we were supposed to quote wasn’t actually the language that the philosopher used. I always wondered how it was possible that we could know that we got this right. This conclusion was, in itself, an artifact of just not knowing how to translate philosophy.
But I realized that my views on translation were also pretty naive. This became clear to me when I was thinking about how we could translate ethical discourse from one language to another. My assumptions were that there were no huge cultural differences that could make this challenging. That was bizarre because my interest in translating ethics across languages was informed by my knowledge that cultures differ and the way people talk about things differs according to their background.
So to get to the bottom of all this I made translation the topic of my PhD in philosophy.
Language and Thought
The research for my PhD dissertation, called Translating Evaluative Discourse, consisted of reviewing major contributions in analytic and continental philosophy of language, especially as they relate to translation, as well as linguistic anthropology and, most importantly, translation studies, which is an interdisciplinary field of scholarship on translation. What I quickly learned was two things:
- The way that philosophers think about translation is completely out of touch. Philosophers tend to think about translation as a matter of swapping words with the same meaning across languages. The reality is that languages differ in every linguistic way, according to syntax, word order, grammar, pragmatics, the social impact, and semantics (the meaning of words). If you change syntax with respect to what grammar demands, then the meanings of words will have to change in order to accommodate those syntactic changes. It’s a completely implausible way to think about translation, to think about it as this linguistic exchange. Translators in translation studies have many ideas on how to circumvent this challenge that philosophers never pay attention to.
- In the Western tradition, everybody assumes without any defense, argument, or appreciation that there could be alternate ways of thinking about this. Language is basically where thought resides, or rather thought is, in the ultimate analysis, the same as linguistic meaning.
This is the idea that a thought, or proposition, like the thought ‘it is raining outside,’ is the same as the linguistic meaning of this claim. I call this the Linguistic Account of Thought, or LAT.
It turns out this is controversial in China, where it is affirmed by Confucius in the Analects but rejected by Taoists. In ancient India, no one bought it. However, it goes back to the very begining of the West in its ideas of logos: one word for ‘word’ and ‘reason.’
The problem for LAT is that if its correct translation is impossible. But, it turns out there are no good reasons to buy LAT. In fact since there are simply no good reasons to buy it, traditions that assume it never defend it.
Thought and Translation in Reality
what I’ve come to defend is an indigenous model of thought. According to this view, thought isn’t language or what you can say, but the disciplinary use that you can make of any meaningful expression.
According to what I call linguistic externalism, a thought is a collection of meaningful expressions that share a purpose in a certain kind of dialogue and inquiry. This means that we can translate across languages without having to expect sentences to mean the same. They simply have to have the same type of function relative to a discourse, discipline, or genre we’re interested in.
Importantly we can acknowledge how creatures beyond humans (whether not human, animals, the earth, or ecosystems) are thinking agents insofar as they perform meaningful expressions that share a purpose in a certain kind of inquiry.
A serious problem with LAT is that is undermines reasoning.
Thought with language, Lat, conflates the beliefs and other attitudes encoded in a language with the thinkable. This leads people who operate according to Lat to be irrationally conservative, assuming cultural expectations as though it’s the content of thoughts.
Linguistic externalism, in contrast, allows us to separate the perspective encoded in a meaningful expression from the thought. The thought is the common use across meaningful expressions, which means we never have to actually buy into or believe the meaning of what we are saying in order to express critical thinking.
The Politics of Language
in many of my published works I bring attention to the political aspects of language if we confuse it with thought. If thought is the same as what we mean when we speak, then we cannot draw a clear distinction between our own culture and the thinkable.
In Moral Philosophy and De-Colonialism I show that not only does this result in irrationality but also in the oppression of colonialism. Colonizing traditions assume LAT and then impose their cultural perspective on everyone as though they must conform in order to be understood. In contrast if we operate with linguistic externalism, as Indigenous people do, we allow ourselves to both reason and operate in a world of a diversity of agents.