On Translation (Part 2)
Fram-Cohen's Critique
As Fram-Cohen's presentation stands, it isn't clear what the ultimate source of scepticism about the possibility of translation is. Although she suggests its roots lie in Kant's idealism, it's clear that a great deal has to be done to take us from Kant to Cassirer. On Kant's view, the common (distorting) nature of human consciousness would not prevent translation from occurring, because the conceptual schemes of all humans fail to connect to reality in the same way.
If we were all color-blind, this wouldn't present translators with a problem -- only if there was a language of the color-blind that didn't include any color terms would there be any difficulty.
So the possibility of translation does not depend on objective reality. If humans are all by nature limited in the same way, as Kant claimed, and given certain hard-wired predilections as Chomsky at various times has claimed, then translation would still be possible based on the common limitations of our subjective reality. I'm not defending this notion, but pointing out that an external objective reality is a sufficient condition for the possibility of translation, not an necessary one. So Fram-Cohen's claim, "If there was no objective reality, there could be no similar concepts expressed in different verbal symbols. There could be no similarity between the content of different languages, and so, no translation" requires further justification.
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