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to when they utter sounds. Sorensen rejects Quine's construal of paradoxes by
pointing out that, “ 'What is the translation of 'Gavagai'?' has infinitely many
rival answers. According to Quine, the problem is that infinitely many of these
are equally good answers. Quine's paradox of radical translation is a counterex-
ample to his own definition of paradox. In addition to showing that absurdity is
inessential to paradox, the paradox of radical translation shows that the paradox
can be free of arguments and conclusions. 'What is the translation of 'Gavagai'?'
has answers obtained by translation, not conclusions derived by arguments.”[13,
p. 560].
Even though we agree with Sorensen that actual, in contrast to merely ap-
parent, absurdity is not necessary for understanding the nature of paradoxes, we
disagree with his claim that it is not helpful to construe paradoxes in terms of
an argument consisting of premises and a conclusion. What Sorensen misses in
his criticism of Quine is that while a paradox need not present itself in canonical
forms, their canonical forms are useful tools in understanding them, just as the
canonical form of an argument (with numbered premises and designated conclu-
sion) is a useful tool for discussing arguments that, in real life, do not always
present themselves in that way. To force the paradox into the canonical form,
suppressed premises must be revealed and hidden assumptions made explicit. If
the radical translation claims are paradoxical, they can be fitted into the canon-
ical forms, though there may be different ways to do that. Here's one version in
our favored canonical form:
(1) A correct translation of one natural language into another is one that is
entirely compatible with all the facts about usage.
(2) If two translations translate a given term in one language into incompatible
terms in another language, one of the translations is not correct.
(3) There are two correct translations of the native language word“gavagai”
into English; one translates it as “rabbit” and the other translates it as
“undetached rabbit part.”
(4) “Rabbit” and “undetached rabbit part” are incompatible terms in English
(in the sense that they do not have the same referent).
(5) The native language and English are natural languages.
Contrary to Sorensen, we find that it is possible to exhibit the paradox of radi-
cal translation in terms of an argument with premises and a conclusion, revealing
the assumption on which it rests. At the same time, we agree with Sorensen in
a different way when he holds that a paradox need not have a genuinely absurd
conclusion. We tend to think that “sounding absurd” lends a psychological air
to the issue of a paradox. In light of these two considerations, we propose a
general definition of a paradox. A paradox is an (apparently) inconsistent set
of sentences each of which seems to be true.
10
The word “apparently” in this
account, as in Quine's, is to allow for cases that depend on fallacious arguments,
as in the well-known “proofs” for 1=2. Another advantage of this account is that
one might make several arguments from a set of inconsistent sentences, but one
10
We owe this definition to John G. Bennett. Lycan [7] has also provided a similar
definition.
