This post doesn't belong on an audio forum, so I should just resist the temptation of weighing in. But I can't.
First, Quine's point (in "Ontological Relativity," from which comes the "Gavagai" coinage), as well as in several other places, is just that our best scientific theories should govern our ontology. This is a fancy way of saying that if an accepted and useful scientific theory demands that we regard a given theoretical construct as "real," then we should do so. As David Lewis put it, although "sets" were "unknown to Homo javanensis," they are nevertheless indispensable in modern mathematics and therefore should be regarded as "real." This question dates at least to Plato, for whom numbers were more "real" than the things of perception they enumerated, being pure intelligible entities not subject to perspective, change over time, and so forth. Which is to say that, although they proclaim themselves to be "empiricists," Quine, et al., are really committed to idealism—to the "reality" of non-empirical theoretical entities.
This insight dovetails with what I think mahgister was trying to say in citing Goethe. But Goethe's view just follows Kant: the "real" is always already a construct of consciousness—of perception, which is sense information processed and interpreted by the mind. The real "in itself" is simply unknowable. Thus, Goethe says that perception is already "theoretical": "Alles vergängliche / Ist nur ein Gleichnis." This insight makes it exceedingly difficult to know where to draw the lines between the "real" and the "imaginary"; in effect, the real IS what "imagination" constructs for experience. But that is NOT to say there is no independent reality "in itself"; rather, we just don't know anything about it except insofar as we experience it (that is, insofar as it becomes mental).
Coincidentally, I also speak (or read) 4 languages. Serbo-Croatian isn't one of them, but Croatian is. My wife's mother was a Serb, her father a Croat (we met in Germany). There is no such language as "Serbo-Croatian." Serbian and Croatian are, of course, very similar as Slavic languages; Slovenian is also similar, and Slovenia was part of the former Yugoslavia along with Serbia and Croatia. But, just for instance, Serbian and Croatian aren't even written in the same alphabet! Books published in Belgrade (Beograd) are printed in Cyrillic. My wife tells me that there are indeed words for "niece" and "nephew" in Serbian as well as in Croatian. I'd give examples, but this post is already egregiously gratuitous.
