Just thought that you might like this, as it is somehow related to your “different conclusions when presented with the same information”:
For Quine, the criterion of successful communication, whether or not translation is involved, is fluent interaction, verbal and nonverbal: “Success in communication is judged by smoothness of conversation, by frequent predictability of verbal and nonverbal reactions, and by coherence and plausibility of native testimony” (1990, 43). From this point of view, talk of synonymy and of ideas in the mind is simply a theoretical gloss which is (at best) in need of justification. Quine doubts that the gloss is justifiable; his scepticism about the theorizing, however, is not scepticism about the data. Smooth communication certainly occurs, sometimes in cases where different languages are involved. That successful translation occurs is not cast in doubt by anything he says; his claim, indeed, is that it may be possible in more than one way.
At this point we need to distinguish the two kinds of indeterminacy. Quine introduces the general idea of indeterminacy, in Chapter Two of (1960), without explicitly making the distinction but subsequently comes to treat them quite differently. The first is indeterminacy of reference: that there is more than one way of translating sentences where the various versions differ in the reference that they attribute to parts of the sentence but not in the overall net import that they attribute to the sentence as a whole. (This doctrine is also known as “ontological relativity” and “inscrutability of reference”.) To use an example which has become famous, a given sentence might be translated as “There’s a rabbit” or as “Rabbithood is manifesting itself there” or as “There are undetached rabbit parts”, or in other ways, limited only by one’s ingenuity. Something like this, Quine suggests, can be done systematically for terms referring to physical objects: each such term is translated as referring to all of space-time other than the portion occupied by that object; each predicate is translated by one which is true of the space-time complement of an object just in case the original predicate is true of the object. It will not help to ask the person we are translating whether she means to refer to the family dog or to its space-time complement: her answer is subject to the same indeterminacy.
Indeterminacy of reference is akin to a view of theoretical entities put forward by Ramsey: that there is no more to such an object than the role that it plays in the structure of the relevant theory (see Ramsey, 1931). For Quine, however, the point holds for all objects, since he “see[s] all objects as theoretical… . Even our most primordial objects, bodies, are already theoretical” (1981, 20). Quine holds, moreover, that considerations akin to those of the previous paragraph amount to a “trivial proof” of indeterminacy of reference (1986c, 728).
The second kind of indeterminacy, which Quine sometimes refers to as holophrastic indeterminacy, is another matter. Here the claim is that there is more than one correct method of translating sentences where the two translations differ not merely in the meanings attributed to the sub-sentential parts of speech but also in the net import of the whole sentence. This claim involves the whole language, so there are going to be no examples, perhaps except of an exceedingly artificial kind. There is also nothing resembling a proof; in some late work, indeed, Quine refers to it as a “conjecture” (loc. cit.). At some earlier points, he seems to think that sufficiently clear-headed reflection on what goes into translation will suffice to make the idea at least plausible. All that can be required of a method of translation is that it enables us to get along with the speakers of the other language, why should there not be more than one way to do it?
My emphasis.
PS: Notice the guy’s name, wink wink.