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In the second chapter of ''Word and Object'', Quine investigates the concept of meaning. He shows to what extent his own, empirical, notion of meaning can give an account for our intuitive concept of meaning: 'what a sentence shares with its translation'.<ref name="Quine, Willard Van Orman 2015, p. 29">Quine, Willard Van Orman, ''Word and Object'' [1960]. New edition, with a foreword by Patricia Churchland, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2015, p. 29.</ref> Quine also introduces his famous principle of ''indeterminacy of translation'', with the help of the [[thought experiment]] of [[radical translation]], i.e. translation of a hitherto unknown language (called Jungle by Quine) into English. The point of this thought experiment is to show that a [[Behaviorism|behavioristic]] account of meaning does not allow for the determination of the right manual for translating one language into another, as there is no such single right translation manual.<ref name="QuineComp">{{cite book |author=Harman, G.|editor=Harman, G. |editor2=Lepore, E. |title=A Companion to W.V.O. Quine|publisher=Wiley |___location=Hoboken, NJ |year=2013 |pages=236–237 |isbn=9781118607992 |oclc= |doi= |accessdate=}}</ref>
A linguist desiring to translate Jungle has to set up his translation manual based only on the events happening around him/her, the stimulations, combined with the verbal and non-verbal [[behaviour]] of Jungle natives.<ref name="Hookway740">{{cite book |author=Hookway, C. J. |editor=Honderich, Ted |title=The Oxford Companion to Philosophy |publisher=Oxford University Press |___location=Oxford |year=1995 |page=740 |isbn=0-19-866132-0 |oclc= |doi= |accessdate= |url-access=registration |url=https://archive.org/details/oxfordcompaniont00hond }}</ref> The linguist can thus only use empirical information, therefore, radical translation will tell us which part of our language can be accounted for by stimulus conditions. In the experiment, Quine assumes that functional Jungle equivalents of 'Yes' and 'No' are relatively easy to be found. This allows the linguist to actively query the utterances of the natives, by repeating words (s)he has heard the native utter, and to subsequently record the native's reaction of assent or dissent.
In determining the translation of the Jungle sentence 'Gavagai' (whose English equivalent would be 'Look, a rabbit'), the linguist first has to determine which [[stimulation]] prompt the native to assent, and which prompt him to dissent to the linguist uttering 'Gavagai'. For example, if the linguist sees a rabbit, and the native says ‘Gavagai’, the linguist may think that ‘Gavagai’ means ‘Rabbit’. (S)he will then try the sentence ‘Gavagai’ in different situations caused by the stimulation of a rabbit, to see whether the native assents or dissents to the utterance. The native's reaction is elicited by the linguist's question and the prompting stimulation together. It is the stimulation that prompts the assent or dissent, not the object in the world, because an object in the world can be replaced by a replica, but then the stimulation stays the same.
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