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Re: Positivism



On Mon, 25 Apr 1994, George Aichele wrote:

> Sorry for my cryptic post. Unlike many of you I access the net
> through a commercial provider & must pay per bit sent.

Perhaps you should look into Delphi, which provides full Internet access 
without per bit charge.

> "Descendent" was too strong a term. Recent modernist semantic
> theories (eg Quine) reject positivism but maintain the desire for
> univocity. They replace univocal reference (verifiability) with
> (univocal) usage--trading 1 set of unsolvable problems for
> another. Q admits this, but I'm less sure about Louw & Nida, who
> seem to think that accurate translation is possible.

It has been a long time since I have studied these matters, but I am 
virtually certain that Nida (at least) holds to a determinacy theory of 
translation, unlike Quine's indeterminacy thesis.  In fact, I don't know 
how influenced Nida and the dynamic equivalence theorists are influenced 
by Quine, Davidson, etc., at all.  I think they are much more powerfully 
influenced by the neo-Cartesianism of Chomsky, which is in radical 
departure from the hyper-empiricist, "thoroughgoing pragmatism" of the 
post-postivists.  Perhaps some of the linguists on the list can comment 
more accurately on the historical influences of the dynamic equivalence 
theory of translation.

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Prof. James F. Sennett
Asst. Professor of Philosophy         sennett@goliath.pbac.edu
Palm Beach Atlantic College                    andretg@aol.com
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