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Meaning in Donald Davidson's Meaning in Donald Davidson’s truth-conditional semantics Martin Andreas Lind Rebstein (SG) und Wien (Österreich) Inauguraldissertation der Philosophisch-historischen Fakultät der Universität Bern zur Erlangung der Doktorwürde, vorgelegt von: Martin Andreas Lind Rebstein (SG), Wien (Österreich) Selbstverlag, Bern 2012 Von der Philosophisch-historischen Fakultät auf Antrag von Prof. Dr. Klaus Petrus und Prof. Dr. Guido Löhrer angenommen. Bern, den 28. März 2012, der Dekan Prof. Dr. Hp. Znoj Table of contents 1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 4 Part I: Defending Davidson’s philosophy of language 2 Davidson’s philosophy of language – a short introduction ......................................................... 8 2.1 Davidson’s truth-conditional approach to semantics ................................................................. 8 2.2 The theory of Radical Interpretation .......................................................................................... 18 3 The communication-intentionalists’ challenge ............................................................................. 27 3.1 Proving the inferiority of Davidson’s approach – not as easy as it seems ................................. 27 3.1.1 Explaining linguistic meaning in terms of communicative intentions .................................. 28 3.1.2 Strawson’s argument against Davidson’s truth-conditional approach ................................ 30 3.1.3 Refuting Strawson’s argument .............................................................................................. 31 3.2 Are the communication-intentionalists as strong as they suggest? ............................................ 35 3.2.1 Problem I: How to make the communication-intentionalists’ theories compatible with linguistic structures? .................................................................................................... 35 3.2.2 Problem II: How to define the foundational concept of non-linguistic communicative intention? .............................................................................................................................. 37 3.3 Concluding remarks ................................................................................................................... 40 4 Davidson’s understanding of the concept of truth ....................................................................... 42 4.1 Is there any use to the concept of truth? .................................................................................... 42 4.2 Is truth absolute, is it relative, or is it neither of both? .............................................................. 45 4.3 Davidson’s understanding of the concept of truth ..................................................................... 48 4.3.1 The role of the concept of truth in subject/object interactions ............................................. 48 4.3.2 The characteristics of the concept of truth according to Davidson ...................................... 51 4.4 Is Davidson’s understanding of the concept of truth plausible? ................................................ 53 Part II: Davidson’s foundational notion of meaning – its characteristics and explanatory power 5 Literal meaning vs. conventional meaning ................................................................................... 56 5.1 Rule-/convention-following in language: the analogy of language-understading and the playing/winning of games ......................................................................................................... 57 2 5.2 The Dummett/Davidson controversy about conventions relating illocutionary forces to the grammatical moods .................................................................................................................... 61 5.2.1 Dummett’s argument in favour of the indispensability of force/mood conventions ............. 62 5.2.2 Davidson’s objection: the existens of force/mood conventions is impossible ...................... 64 5.2.3 Is Davidson’s objection the result of a misunderstanding? ................................................. 66 5.3 Interlude: The paratactic analysis of sentences in the non-indicative moods ............................ 69 5.4 More about conventions and rules ............................................................................................. 74 5.4.1 Conventions relating communicative intentions to the meanings of sentences .................... 74 5.4.2 Conventions relating communicative intentions to the meanings of sub-sentential items ... 75 5.5 The characteristics of the notion of literal meaning .................................................................. 77 6 Literal meaning, first meaning, and the interpretation of non-conventional language uses and linguistic idiosyncrasies ........................................................................................................... 79 6.1 A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs: modifying the theory of Radical Interpretation .................. 80 6.1.1 The NDE-modification: a first outline .................................................................................. 80 6.1.2 The NDE-modification and its impact on the theory of Radical Interpretaton and on truth-conditional semantics .................................................................................................. 82 6.1.3 The NDE-modification and its impact on the understanding of what it means “to inter- pret a speaker” and “to know a language” ......................................................................... 85 6.2 The Dummett/Hacking/Davidson controversy on A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs ............... 88 6.2.1 Eliminating misunderstandings ............................................................................................ 89 6.2.2 What remains of the controversy .......................................................................................... 93 6.3 Further objections and replies .................................................................................................... 97 6.3.1 Bar-On/Risjord’s attempt to save Davidsonian semantics by means of rejecting the No-Language Postulate ........................................................................................................ 97 6.3.2 Karen Green’s strategy of rejecting the No-Language Postulate by proposing an alternative approach to the interpretation of malapropisms .............................................. 99 6.3.3 Catherine Talmage’s doubts about the replacement of the notion of literal meaning by the notion of first meaning ...................................................................................................103 6.4 The characteristics of the notion of first meaning .................................................................... 106 7 Concluding remarks ...................................................................................................................... 108 8 Bibliography ................................................................................................................................... 113 3 1 Introduction Human beings use their linguistic skills in an impressive variety of ways: they state and assert what they believe, they ask questions, and they issue commands; they communicate their wishes, hopes, and fears, and they use their languages in order to lie and to deceive. They refer linguistically to the concrete and to the tangible as well as to the abstract and to what is too small, too slow, too fast or too far away for sensory perception. Human beings use language to be funny, sarcastic, and ironic; they play with language and they use language to express themselves artistically. This list of different kinds of language use is obviously incomplete. It suffices, however, to remind us of the fact that our linguistic abilities are exceptional, perhaps unique. This considered, it is no surprise that languages and our ways of using them have always enjoyed the philosopher’s attention. The business of philosophers is, of course, the general and fundamental. Accordingly, they are not interested in specific empirical questions about the acquisition or the use of a particular language; their interest is rather with the question why it is possible, in principle, to acquire and to use a language. Since the use of a language typically involves the production of certain sounds or written marks, there must be something, the philosophers say, that distinguishes linguistic sounds (marks) from non-linguistic ones (such as, for instance, the squeaking of a train’s wheels in sharp bends, or the colourful patterns of inclusions in white blocks of marble). The relevant distinctive characteristic is, they hold, that linguistic sounds (marks) possess specific linguistic meanings, while other sounds (marks) do not. Accordingly, philosophers typically try to answer questions such as the following: - What exactly is linguistic meaning? - How could we describe a sentence’s (a phrase’s, a word’s) particular linguistic meaning? - How do we have to define the concept of linguistic meaning in order to describe the possibility of language-understanding and/or the possibility of language-acquisition? A particularly interesting approach to these questions has been proposed by the American philosopher Donald Davidson (1917–2003). Davidson claims that it is possible to deliver an adequate
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