Indeterminacy of Translation (and the Cryptographer's Maxim)

Across

1. Dirty stuff

2. A great human need

3. To make smooth

4. Movie actor

Down

1. Vehicle dependent on H 2 O

2. We usually want this

3. Just above

4. U.S. state (abbrev.)

Did you solve it? If so, which solution did you discover? The puzzle has two solutions, about equally good (they are hidden later in the book, to give you a chance to find both before they are revealed). It took me hours to devise it, small as it is, because the multiple constraints that must be satisfied interact to limit the possibilities drastically. If you are skeptical, try to compose a larger, better one! (And please, send it to me if you succeed. I will use it in place of my own.)

Anybody who asks, “What word is 1 Down really?” stands convicted of a certain sort of misplaced realism. There is no fact of the matter. I deliberately set it up so there wouldn’t be a fact of the matter. For instance, I didn’t compose the puzzle with one set of answers (the historically first or original answers and “hence” the real answers) and then cast about for another set. I worked out the two solutions together, drawing from a list of pairs of four-letter words with similar meanings that I had collected.

It is possible to construct such a puzzle because there are norms for definitions that admit some flexibility. Both solutions include words that just barely fit their definitions, but the conspiracy of the surrounding fit (the holism, in the jargon of philosophers) pulls the words into two quite stable configurations. What odds would you take that there isn’t going to be a third solution that competes evenly with either of these two? In general, the cryptographer’s maxim holds: if you can find one solution to a puzzle, you’ve found the only solution to the puzzle. Only special circumstances permit as many as two solutions, but such cases show us that the existence of only one single solution to a question like this is not a metaphysical necessity, but just the immensely probable result of very powerful constraints.

People are much more complicated than either crossword puzzles or computers. They have convoluted brains full of neuromodulators, and these brains are attached to bodies that are deeply entwined with the world, and they have both an evolutionary and a personal history that has embedded them in the world with much more interpenetration than the embedding of a crossword puzzle in a linguistic community. So Ruth Millikan (for instance) is right that given the nature of design constraints, it is unlikely in the extreme that there could be different ways of skinning the cat that left two radically different, globally indeterminate, tied-for-first-place interpretations. Indeterminacy of radical translation is truly negligible in practice. Still, the principle survives. The reason we don’t have indeterminacy of radical translation is not because, as a matter of metaphysical fact, there are “real meanings” in there, in the head (what Quine called the “museum myth” of meaning, his chief target). The reason we don’t have indeterminacy in the actual world is that with so many independent constraints to satisfy, the cryptographer’s maxim assures us that it is a vanishingly small worry. When indeterminacy threatens in the real world, it is always just more “behavioral” or “dispositional” facts—more of the same—that save the day for a determinate reading, not some mysterious “causal power” or “intrinsic semanticity.” Intentional interpretation almost always arrives in the limit at a single interpretation, but in the imaginable catastrophic case in which dual interpretations survived all tests, there would be no deeper facts to settle which was “right.” Facts do settle interpretations, but it is always “shallow” facts that do the job.