This is not a book in the commercial sense; it is my PhD dissertation, available online via my PhilPapers page. It marks the beginning of my mature research program.
In this work, I address a central problem: how translation can be accurate at all despite linguistic and cultural differences. Many influential views are skeptical about the very possibility of translation. I argue that this skepticism rests on a deeply flawed model of thought—one that mistakenly identifies what is translated with linguistic or cultural meaning, both of which are historically contingent and language-specific.
Drawing on work in Translation Studies, I argue instead that translators translate texts, not languages, and that the kind of meaning preserved in translation is genre-specific. On this account, translation is less like decoding a message and more like reconstructing a sculpture in a different medium. The genre of the original text determines what is organizationally salient, and these features constrain how a non-equivalent medium can be used to produce a text that is semantically isomorphic with the original.
Although this work is framed as a theory of translation, it is ultimately about inquiry itself—and about the possibility of understanding knowledge as something that can be separated from subjectivity, individual psychology, history, and culture.
