[Guille]

The third main concern in the philosophy of Quine was that of meaning. For Quine, a person can never be right completelly in a translation because there are amany possible different translation for each word, and each group of works. For him, the translation wasn't really of the words, but of the meaning. And this meant a problem. Although it can be defended that the most appropiate translation is that which a native of that language woudl use of meaning, it still can't be determined weather that meaning is the same as it is for a non-native. For example, the word ground would have a different meaning to a native english speaker than to a non-native neglish speaker, for the meaning is correlated and actually dependent on the words and the language as a whole. And when, for example, an Indian learns english, he will be basing his learning in previous hypothesis of the english language, that is previous ideation, but if this previous ideation is wrong, the whole interpretation of the language will be wrong a (ussually is only wrong a bit). This is because the Indian is bassing his language and meaning to learn the other language and meaning, so there will neve rbe a correct understanding of another language. Unless of course if you are native of both.

So meanings are not entities. And yet, they are meaningfull (significant). Do you agree?

In my opinion, it is vice versa. the words are not entities, neither are the languages. The entities are the meanings, the concepts to what they relate.

[Mohan.C]

Yes, I do agree with that because may be just four or five days back a message was sent to my sister's cellphone in Hindi and a challenge to translate it to English. The sentence was composed of just five words. And neither could I say the meaning in English nor like word to word translation. But I could say it in my own language(Kannada).

And I knew what the sentence meant!