A HYPOTHESIS ABOUT THE UNIQUENESS OF NATURAL LANGUAGE *

principles are tested against the facts in comparative linguistics. (Ref. 9, Sections 5 , 6, & 7.) Above, we described the controversy between rationalism and empiricism over the uniqueness of human beings and human natural language. We described the limitations of a syntactic account of uniqueness and proposed a hypothesis that concerns semantic as well as syntactic structure. The effability hypothesis sharply focuses the rationalistempiricist controversy on the concrete questions of the relation of language t o thought and the character of language acquisition. Quine and other linguistic relativists, such as Whorf and Sapir, make the empiricist assumption that the objects manipulated in thought are or correspond directly to the particular sentences learned in acquiring a language. Quine is particularly clear: Thus who would undertake to translate ‘Neutrinos lack mass’ into the jungle language? If anyone does, we may expect him to coin words or distort the usage of old ones. We may expect him to plead in extenuation that the natives lack the requisite concepts; also that they know too little physics. And he is right except for the hint of there being some freefloating, linguistically neutral meaning which we capture, in ‘Neutrinos lack mass’, and the native cannot.’) To make it perfectly clear, Quine adds that it is an illusion to think that less theoretical, so more readily translatable sentences . . . are diverse verbal embodiments of some intercultural of some intercultural proposition or meaning, when they are better seen as the merest variants of one and the same intercultural verbalism. The discontinuity of radical translation tries our meanings: really sets them over against their verbal embodiments, or, more typically, finds nothing there.” This is the very opposite of a rationalist view. For rationalists, cases of failure to translate theoretical sentences represent only a temporary inability of speakers, based on their lack of knowledge of the relevant sciences,to make the proper combination of primitive semantic concepts to form the appropriate proposition. That is, the failure represents a temporary vocabulary gap (rather than a deficiency of the language) which makes it necessary to resort to paraphrase, creation of technical Katz: Uniqueness of Natura l Language 41 vocabulary, metaphorical extension, and so on, in order to make translations possible in practice, as well as in principle. The empiricist assumption that our concepts come from experience is responsible for the empiricist’s view that natural languages are not intertranslatable; similarly, the rationalist assumption that our concepts come from our genes is responsible for the rationalist’s view that natural languages are intertranslatable. The well-known doctrine of linguistic relativity, which states that cultural differences produce incommensurate conceptual frameworks, derives neither from the discovery of exceptional facts about exotic languages by linguists like Whorf nor from important breakthroughs in the study of methodology by philosophers like Quine. Rather, the doctrine derives from the empiricism common to these linguists and philosophers.(