Donald Davidson

 

Provided language is seen as non-metaphorical (i.e. there is an essential skeleton of meaning regardless of how expressed), and the logical formulation is not expected to be entirely comprehensive and watertight, then Davidson's theory refutes the wilder speculations of Postmodernism. There are certainly shortcomings (exceptions, qualifications, alternative formulations are the bread and butter of philosophy) but there are no grounds for asserting that language is an endless web of self-referencing signifiers.

Davidson's theory of meaning begins with Alfred Tarski's approach to logical paradoxes like All Cretans are liars. Tarski's solution was to consider the primary sentence as written in an object language, and to propose another, higher level, metalanguage that could handle object languages without being tangled up in paradoxes of self reference. Superficially, the two may seem the same — both are formal and not natural languages — but only the metalanguage could incorporate and refer to the object language.

The American philosopher Donald Davidson made an enterprising attempt to take this further. His goal is meaning, a clear, unambiguous concept of meaning, and this he defined (audaciously) as the truth conditions of a sentence. Meaning becomes what needs to be true of its constituent parts if the sentence as a whole is to be true. Quite apart from such a novel redefinition Davidson has two difficulties to overcome. One is that Tarski's approach applies only to formalized languages, not to imprecise, ambiguous and elliptical natural languages. The second is that Tarski assumed identical meaning in making the translation from object to metalanguage, i.e. assumed the very thing that Davidson wishes to establish.

Davidson adopts Tarski's method, but relies on two supports: the top down approach and use of the radical interpreter.

By top down, Davidson is arguing for an approach that starts with the language as a whole and moves progressively into smaller components. "We can give the meaning of any sentence (or word) only by giving the meaning of every sentence (and word) in that language," says Davidson: a holistic view of language. A sentence has meaning only because of what its constituent words mean, and words only have a meaning by virtue of the contributions they make to the sentences in which they occur. According to Davidson we cannot give the meaning of one word without giving the meaning of all.

In the radical interpreter Davidson is looking for the means of translation between mutually incomprehensible languages. Quine's view was that, ultimately, we couldn't be sure of success in translation. Simply pointing and uttering the word was not sufficient: we needed other words to be sure that "sheep" indicated an animal and not wool-provider or grass-trimmer or mutton or part of a sheep. These other words would not be available prior to translation. Davidson finds something of a way round this, but has to accept a less demanding (charitable) view of the radical interpreter: that the native speaker is rational, not aiming to deceive us, and has a set of beliefs largely consistent with our own.

Given these two assumptions, however — top-down approach and radical interpreter — Davidson's approach is this: Suppose we have two languages, one natural and one formalized. We say in our natural language, to a logician speaking the foreign formalized language: snow is white. That is true in our language. He replies in his language: sun glare causes snow-blindness. That is true in his language. Since both sentences are true they could be assembled in a T sentence:

Snow is white-in-natural language is true iff sun glare causes blindness-in-formalized language.

Our interpreter is charitable. Both logician and natural language speaker are standing in a snow-draped mountain landscape, so that the two assertions presumably have something to do with each other. Without further conversation, we might suppose that sun-glare is the translation of snow, just as the predicate causes blindness is a translation of is white. That is what Tarski's partial definition listed above would suggest. S is true-in-L iff... But further conversation would soon disabuse us. Using snow in some other context would not return sun-glare but something very different. Eventually, a long time later, given sufficient exchanges involving words relevant to the context, and a well-intentioned interpreter, we should arrive at: Snow is white-in-natural language iff Snow is white-in-formalized language. No other result would avoid ludicrous mismatches somewhere along the line. And having made the translations of snow and white, we should go on with other words relevant to the situation — fresh falls, clean air, clear sunlight, etc. Our activities would gradually widen until we had made all the links between the two languages. At very long last our translation would be complete, and would indeed be able to express a natural language in a transparent, logical formalized language.

Is this achievable? Davidson has made great strides but the enterprise has hit snags with indexicals (pronouns and related expressions of time and place) and other complications. The programme has spread, ramified, and regrouped as new objectives, but none of these have been fully achieved. Davidson and his followers remain hopeful, but onlookers are less convinced.

But even if success were to come, is this concept of meaning — the truth conditions in a formalized language — how we generally use the term? And what of the difficulties noted before with Tarski's definition? Davidson's approach counters the Poststructuralist view that language is an endless self-referencing web of signifiers, but does not correspond to how language is always used, either in literature or the everyday world.

Donaldson's work is more wide-ranging and difficult than suggested by this introduction, or the extended article on TextEtc. You'll probably need to read papers and books with a trained mind to appreciate what Davidson is really getting at — and, most particularly, those of his critics.

 

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Donald Davidson

 

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