Expresiones de las gestantes en el alumbramiento

The general issue at stake can be traced back to the Cartesian mind-body dualism of res cogitans (the mental substance) and res extensa (the corporeal substance), according to which the human mind is fundamentally separated from the external world (Simon

5_{2011:11). If we accept this schism between the mind and the world, it can lead to quite}

strikingly opposing ontological and epistemological conclusions. This opposition is most basically reflected in the dichotomy constituted by the two poles of objectivism and subjectivism and their respective accounts of metaphysics, human cognition and language.

3.1.1 Objectivism

Broadly speaking, objectivist metaphysics posits the dominance of the res extensa and claims that the world is uniquely, correctly, and completely prestructured in terms of entities, properties (essential and accidental ones) and relations between entities, with this structure existing independently of any human conceptualization (Lakoff 1987:159). According to this account, the human mind can function as a mirror of nature and the symbols used in thought and language correspond to entities and categories in the objectively prestructured world (ibid.:162). Knowledge, in the objectivist paradigm, consists in the correct conceptualization and categorization of objects in the world and the relations holding between those objects and categories (ibid.:163). Human concepts are treated as mental representations of these objects and categories in the world (ibid.:165). Accordingly, the accuracy of a human conceptual system is measured in terms of its capacity – borrowing Plato’s metaphor – to “carve nature at the joints” (ibid.:309), i.e. its capacity to uncover and reflect the distinctions already given in the objective structure of the world. However, within the objectivist paradigm, human conceptual systems cannot create any new joints since they are already predetermined by the world. According to objectivist metaphysics, then, “[t]he world is the way it is“ (ibid.:164), and humans can either succeed or fail to conceptualize and categorize it correctly. Objectivist metaphysics posits a “God’s Eye view” of reality (ibid.:260, referring to Putnam 1981:49) from which we can correctly and completely describe “the way the world is”.

Based on the tenets of objectivist metaphysics, objectivist cognition claims that humans reason in terms of abstract symbols, which are made meaningful by corresponding to entities and categories in the world. Following a nativist account of objectivist cognition, human conceptual systems are innate and have the capacity to correspond correctly to the world, while on an empiricist account, these conceptual systems are acquired through accurate perception of the prestructured world (Lakoff 1987:164). In both nativist and empiricist accounts of objectivist cognition, the external world places tight or even determining constraints on the categories of mind formed by humans (ibid.:165).

Similarly, objectivist semantics claims that linguistic meaning arises either from the correspondence between linguistic expressions and the world (noncognitivist objectivist semantics) or from the correspondence between linguistic expressions and concepts in the form of symbols of thought, which in turn get their meaning from their capacity to correspond to entities and categories in the world (cognitivist objectivist semantics) (Lakoff 1987:168). A prime example of an objectivist account of language and meaning is the paradigm of formal semantics and, especially here, the approach of truth-conditional semantics. Truth-conditional semantics is based on the correspondence theory of truth according to which a truth bearer (which could, for example, be a sentence expressed in a natural language) is said to be true if it corresponds to some ‘state of affairs in the world’ (see Evans/Green 2006:446). According to truth-conditional semantics, the meaning of a sentence can be equated with its truth conditions as regards the correspondence of the sentence (or, more precisely, the proposition expressed by the sentence) with some state of affairs in the world (ibid.). At the level of word meaning, there is another parallel to objectivist metaphysics, i.e. the formal-semantic distinction between Aristotelian

essentialia and accidentialia. The essentialia correspond to the essential/definitional properties of an objectively given entity in the real world and constitute the dictionary meaning of the word. The accidentialia, on the other hand, represent the contingent properties of such an entity and are treated as encyclopaedic or pragmatic information (Marmaridou 2000:45).1

1 _{The same distinction can be found in General Terminology Theory (see Arntz et al.} 6_{2009:57).According to}

Faber Benítez (2009:111), this terminological framework conceives concepts “as abstract cognitive entities that refer to objects in the real world”, which would be in line with the objectivist paradigm.

In translation studies, the influence of objectivist metaphysics and language is present, for example, in equivalence-based approaches which posit a language-external tertium comparationis2

3.1.2 Subjectivism

as a common reference point for source text and target text (see Siever 2010:65 ff.). An example of such an account would be Catford (1965), who posits a

situation as a shared extralinguistic reality to which both source text and target text must be relatable (see Aschenberg 1999:23; Kenny 22009:97). If this tertium comparationis is equated with an objectively (hence language and mind-independently) prestructured world and languages are treated as codes which merely differ in their surface-representation of this pregiven structure, then it seems reasonably straightforward to posit the objective meaning of the source text as an invariant that is to be recreated in the target text. At a more general theoretical level, an objectivist influence is discernible in those theories which try to uncover the essentialia of translation, i.e. theories which ask what translation is and how it can be delimited from non-translation (see Halverson 1997:220). Such theories usually work with the classical Aristotelian model of categorization based on necessary and sufficient conditions to make, for example, a distinction between translation and adaptation. Proponents of such theories are, among others, Catford and especially Wilss (1982), who is concerned with the science of translation (Halverson 1997:220).

The opposite of objectivism with its prestructured world serving as a fixed reference point for human cognition and language is posited by the subjectivist paradigm, which is quite pervasive in contemporary thought in the form of the postmodernist enterprise and which places special emphasis on the res cogitans of the Cartesian dichotomy. Parallel to the objectivist paradigm, subjectivism claims that human concepts are fundamentally separated from the world (Lakoff/Johnson 1999:95). However, from the subjectivist perspective, this separation entails that human conceptual systems are neither structured by any inputs from external reality (as opposed to empiricist objectivist cognition), nor do they have the capacity to correspond correctly to the world (as opposed to nativist objectivist cognition). Since, in the subjectivist paradigm, the world and its possible structure cease to provide anchor points for human cognition, human theories and beliefs become free-floating,

2 _{Since the present thesis involves a comparative analysis between source texts and target texts, it will also}

work with a tertium comparationis (see 7.2.1). However, this tertium comparationis will have a different ontological and epistemological status than its predecessors in early equivalence-based approaches.

radically relative constructs which, due to the absence of any Archimedean point of reference, cannot be compared in terms of their more or less successful description, explanation or prediction of phenomena in the world. While in the objectivist paradigm, the prestructured external world exercises a determining influence on cognition, subjectivism reverses the roles and claims that it is human cognition which is (solely) responsible for the emergence of any structure, thus constructing reality in the first place.3

Language, from this perspective, loses its capacity to represent reality in any way and becomes a social construct that merely pretends to represent reality; it serves as an instrument for people in society to construct a social reality (Budin 2007:61). As a result, linguistic meaning is, to a large extent, claimed to be arbitrary, relative and historically contingent (Lakoff/Johnson 1999:5). Also, any interpretation of meaning is exclusively subject to idiosyncratic factors since “there is nothing about the world or people that fixes these interpretations” (ibid.:466). In addition to relativism and constructivism, another pillar of the postmodernist paradigm is the notion of indeterminacy (see, for example, Budin 2007:66). According to Pym (2010:94), who traces the indeterminacy concept back to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, we can never assume to have reached a stable Since the external world does not constrain the process of reality construction in any significant way and since this construction process is performed by individual human beings, each having different paracultural, diacultural and idiocultural backgrounds, there are bound to exist (possibly radically) different versions of reality, reflected in often incommensurable conceptual systems. Going back to Plato’s metaphor of conceptual systems “carving nature at its joints”, we could say that according to a subjectivist account of metaphysics and cognition, humans can never know the “real” joints of nature at which to carve and that it is the act of carving itself (done by human beings establishing conceptual systems) that creates the only meaningful joints to which we can have access. Since carving up the world is essentially an individual process, there will be different versions of the world with different arrangements of joints, and we cannot be sure which of these arrangements works best.

3 _{This is not to say that the subjectivist paradigm rejects the existence of an external world independently of}

human beings and their conceptual systems. This existence is not seriously doubted even in strong subjectivist approaches (except perhaps in metaphysical solipsism). What is at stake is more the question of whether humans can have any meaningful or privileged epistemological access to this Kantian “thing in itself”, which is generally denied in the subjectivist paradigm.

understanding of a given state of affairs. Instead, we always have to account for ambiguity, vagueness and the possibility of alternative interpretations.

The foundations of the subjectivist paradigm laid out above should sound quite familiar to anyone acquainted with the current tenets in translation studies. As opposed to objectivism, which has declined in translation studies in parallel with the equivalence paradigm since the 1980s, subjectivism/postmodernism has, in the wake of the cultural and social turns, gained considerable momentum in TS (Arrojo 1998:42; Prunč 2007:305-306). Some of the research stimulated by this paradigm has had such a huge influence in TS that the results of this research were in fact fed back to the source disciplines, causing for example a “translational turn” in cultural studies (Bachmann-Medick 3_{2009:26). With Derrida’s (e.g.}

1994) theory of Deconstruction, a more radical postmodernist approach has also left its mark in TS. In line with the general subjectivist tenets, Deconstruction denies any stable association between signifier and signified and thus fundamentally calls into question the stability of textual meaning, focusing instead on revealing contradictions beneath the

textual surface and developing these contradictions towards complete aporia (Prunč

2007:254). Again, one of the major consequences of this line of thought is the radical subjectivity or individuality of any interpretation of meaning since, according to the Deconstructionist account, meaning resides in “systems of binary oppositions between free-floating signifiers” (Lakoff/Johnson 1999:465), not fixed by anything in the outside world. Pym’s (2010) work on indeterminacy in translation can also be seen as standing in the wider subjectivist/postmodernist tradition. His claim that “[w]hatever we say will be only one of many possible variations on what we think we mean, and what others make of our words will be only one of many possible interpretations” (ibid.:95) can be seen as axiomatic for the whole postmodernist paradigm.

In the light of this discussion, the tension between subjectivist/postmodernist approaches to translation and the idea of conceptual stability and stability/invariance of meaning

postulated in the context of STT should indeed be hardly surprising.4

4 _{Also, investigations of explicitation and implicitation will have a hard time within the postmodernist}

paradigm since, according to Pym’s claim above, we will hardly reach any intersubjective consensus on which information is actually implicit in a given source text and can be made explicit in the target text in a process of explicitation.

At present, it seems that the subjectivist/postmodernist paradigm has gained the philosophical upper hand in translation studies, the more so since, as Halverson (2013:62) rightly points out, “a clear

alternative to a relativist epistemology has not been fully worked out or adequately articulated [in translation studies]”.