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Radical Interpretation, the Primacy of Communication, and the Bounds of Language

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Radical Interpretation, the Primacy of Communication, and the Bounds of Language Empedocles European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication Volume 1 Number 1 © 2009 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ejpc.1.1.123/1 Radical Interpretation, the primacy of communication, and the bounds of language Eli Dresner Tel Aviv University Abstract Keywords In the first section of this paper I review the notion of ‘Radical Interpretation’, Davidson introduced by Donald Davidson in order to account for linguistic meaning philosophy of and propositional thought. It is then argued that this concept, as embedded in communication Davidson’s whole philosophical system, gives rise to a view of communication interpretation as a key explanatory concept in the social sciences. In the second section of the paper it is shown how this view bears upon the question as to what the bounds of linguistic behaviour are. As opposed to major psychological and sociological perspectives on language, Davidson’s communication-centred position gives rise to an inclusive, context-dependent answer to this question. Donald Davidson was one of the main figures in twentieth century ana- lytic philosophy. In a long series of articles, collected in several volumes (Davidson 1980, 1984, 2001, 2004), Davidson develops a far-reaching yet unified philosophical system, with implications for numerous phil- osophical domains. Thus Davidson made significant contributions to such diverse philosophical areas as the philosophy of rationality and action, the metaphysics of events, and the analysis of metaphor. However, at the heart of Davidson’s philosophy stands his view of lan- guage – in particular, his anchoring both linguistic meaning and propo- sitional thought in communicative interaction (Dresner 2006). The concept that best expresses this aspect of Davidson’s views is ‘Radical Interpretation’, introduced in (Davidson 1984a) and discussed in many places since its formulation. The notion is a descendent of Quine’s ‘Radical Translation’ (Quine 1960) – a term coined to designate a hypothetical situation in which a linguist approaches a completely isolated linguistic community. In such a situation, all the linguist has to go on in breaking into the foreigners’ language is their behaviour, and thus the translation manual that the linguist ends up constructing cap- tures only such behavioural data. A key tenet of Quine’s is that this scenario exhausts the essentials not only of this arcane situation, but rather of linguistic interaction in general. His view is that when under- standing each other’s speech we correlate linguistic behaviour with our experience of the world around us, and that there is nothing to linguis- tic meaning beyond such correlation. Thus Quine is both an empiricist EJPC 1 (1) pp. 123–134 © Intellect Ltd 2009 123 EJPC_1.1_art_Dresner_123-134.indd 123 11/19/09 4:40:54 PM and a behaviourist, and there is no significant philosophical role in his philosophy for such traditionally (and intuitively) central notions as thought and truth. Davidson breaks away from this behaviourist, empiricist position in several important ways, but retains (at least) one key aspect of it: he endorses an intersubjectivist view of linguistic meaning. That is, Davidson holds that whatever the internal processes that give rise to our utterances may be, these processes are not accessible to our inter- locutors, and therefore cannot be part of the meaning of what we say, which must be available in principle to those we converse with. Thus Davidson subscribes to a constructivist view of communication (Buttny 1986; Deetz 1994): according to his position communication is not the context where meaning is manifested or transmitted, but rather the locus where it is created (more on this below). Davidson develops this key idea along several far-reaching trajec- tories (which are distinct from (and often inconsistent with) Quine’s views, as noted above). Here, in a nutshell, are three of them. (More detailed expositions can be found in many places (Evnine 1991, LePore and Ludwig 2007), including an overview from the perspective of com- munication theory in Dresner 2006.) First, Davidson maintains that we assign meaning to another’s utterances not by translating them into our own language, but rather by associating them with things in the world surrounding us. This is what is behind Davidson’s talk of radi- cal interpretation (rather than translation) as the hypothetical process that brings to the fore what is essential to linguistic communication. The way utterances are associated with the world in this process, according to Davidson, is through the notion of truth. That is, a sys- tematic assignment of truth-conditions to the sentences in someone’s language consists in understanding the literal meaning of these sen- tences. Such an assignment will require, among other things, a logical analysis of these sentences, and an association of the referring expres- sions that appear in them with objects in the world. (An elaboration of – and criticisms against – the role allocated to truth in this account can be found in the aforementioned references.) Second, Davidson does not ignore propositional thought in his account of language (as behaviourists like Quine do). As a proponent of the constructivist conception of communication, though, he does not view meaning as flowing from thought to language; rather, the same process through which meaning is assigned to our utterances (i.e., interpretation) is viewed by Davidson as giving rise to the attach- ment of content to our internal mental states as well. In the process of interpretation we are not only assigning meaning to each other’s utter- ances, but rather also propositional content to each other’s beliefs and desires (as well as other propositional attitudes). Thus communicative interaction is viewed as constituting both linguistic meaning and prop- ositional thought, in an interdependent fashion. Third (and finally), Davidson views interpretation as a local, inter- subjective process that does not depend in any essential way on a social context or setting. Thus Davidson leaves no room for convention in his account of the most basic underpinnings of language. Of course, it 124 Eli Dresner EJPC_1.1_art_Dresner_123-134.indd 124 11/19/09 4:40:54 PM cannot be denied that there are elaborate conventions that govern the linguistic behaviour of the members of a given community, and that these conventions help make linguistic interaction easy and efficient. However, Davidson argues that the role of convention in language is regulative rather than constitutive: linguistic communication does not depend on a set of conventions for its practice (as, e.g., many games do) – it is similar in this respect to various other basic functions of ours (such as eating) that are subject to numerous conventions in most socie- ties but do not derive their identity and feasibility from such conven- tions. Interpretation, Davidson tells us, requires only two creatures facing each other and associating meaning with each other’s utterances in the way outlined above. They need not be aware of any convention, nor do they even have to manifest the same regularities in their speech: it is only necessary that each of them be interpretable to the other. Let us turn now to consider how these ideas bear upon the status of communication as an explanatory concept and as a field of research. The primacy and unity of communication as such are often chal- lenged. The field’s two main neighbouring disciplines – psychology and sociology – typically conceive of the questions that communica- tion scholars try to answer as auxiliary to the more basic problems that are found in their own respective domains. Psychology, on the one hand, construes content as primarily an attribute of cognition, and only secondarily of communication. Thoughts, that are internal to each agent, come first in the explanatory order, and the plethora of questions regarding the way they are transmitted from one agent to another come second. The transmission model of communication, which plays a central role within communication studies, echoes this perspective. Sociology, on the other hand, aims at explaining a variety of phenomena in the interpersonal and public domains through a set of concepts of normative character. Viewed from this perspective com- munication processes in general, and language in particular, are ana- lysed on a par with other aspects of social life. What are the conventions that govern human communication processes of various kinds? How are they related to such notions as group identity and boundaries, stratification and status? In this context, too, communi- cation does not play any special role: it is not the focus of attention in an account of systems of (social and cultural) meaning. Furthermore, if communication analysis is indeed subsumed under the sociological perspective, then various types of non-conventional communication (both in the human and the animal domains) are divorced from com- munication processes that are thought of in conventional terms (such as language): the latter (conventional) kinds of communication are of interest from the said perspective, while the former (non-conventional kinds) are not. We see that an adoption of either of these two perspectives, or a combination of the two, raises a formidable challenge to the coherence of a discipline that takes the notion of communication as the centre of inquiry. Those who do indeed adopt this critical view of the disci- pline may acknowledge the great practical importance of analysing Radical Interpretation, the primacy of communication, and the bounds… 125 EJPC_1.1_art_Dresner_123-134.indd 125 11/19/09 4:40:54 PM communication processes, especially in view of the rapid develop- ment of new communication technologies and the influence that these developments have on various aspects of our lives. However, such an acknowledgement does not entail the allocation of a special role to communication-related concepts in our understanding of human beings. The philosophy of Donald Davidson offers the scholar of commu- nication a way out of this predicament.
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