In the last NYRB, Kwame Anthony Appiah reviewed two recent books about translation. One is by Damion Searls, whose Tractatus I criticized in this space, provoked in part by his complaint about philosophers as translators of philosophy.
Skepticism about Searls's re-purposing (appropriation?) of Gibsonian affordances seems warranted. In what sense is a text analogous to the features of an environment that make possible a range of actions from which a person can choose? We might be able to extend the construct of affordances to the social environment in which humans live, but can we really say that language itself is a source of affordances (in the context of, say, conversation or translation)? It's an intriguing idea, but someone would need to explore it with rigor and it's not clear to me if Searls has done so in The Philosophy of Translation.
Skepticism about Searls's re-purposing (appropriation?) of Gibsonian affordances seems warranted. In what sense is a text analogous to the features of an environment that make possible a range of actions from which a person can choose? We might be able to extend the construct of affordances to the social environment in which humans live, but can we really say that language itself is a source of affordances (in the context of, say, conversation or translation)? It's an intriguing idea, but someone would need to explore it with rigor and it's not clear to me if Searls has done so in The Philosophy of Translation.