Kirk Ludwig

This chapter argues that Davidson's truth-theoretic semantics was not intended to replace the traditional pursuit of providing a compositional meaning theory but rather to achieve the same aim indirectly by placing conditions on a truth theory that would enable someone who understood it to understand its object language. The chapter argues that by placing constraints on the axioms of a Tarski-style truth theory, namely, that they interpret the terms for which they give satisfaction conditions, and specifying a suitable canonical proof procedure that issues in T-sentence that remove all the metalanguage semantic terms from the right hand side and draw intuitively only on the content of the axioms, we can use the theory to interpret object language sentences. It further argues that if we ask what body of knowledge one must be in possession of to interpret the language, it turns out to be a set of propositions about the truth theory but not the axioms of the truth theory itself. This shows how to avoid the problem of the semantic paradoxes and the problem of vagueness.

The book is divided into twenty chapters, divided in turn into six parts. Parts I-III contain the main positive account of metarepresentations. The main semantic thesis of parts I-III is that metarepresentational sentences are not relational, but involve a metarepresentational operator applied to a sentence which functions in its usual way, but which is evaluated relative to a “shifted circumstance” in use. This is supposed to represent a novel account of the semantics of attitude sentences that preserves “semantic innocence” and the principle of iconicity, that a metarepresentation “contains” its object representation. Parts IV-VI are concerned with a perceived threat to this picture from examples that are to suggest that metarepresentational operators shift context as well as circumstances. In the end, the response to the examples is that they involve pragmatic phenomena. This discussion could have been significantly compressed.

In this chapter, we defend the view that Davidson aimed not to replace the theory of meaning with the theory of truth, or to capture only certain features of the ordinary notion of meaning for certain theoretical purposes, but rather to pursue the traditional project of explaining in the broadest terms “what it is for words to mean what they do” through a clever bit of indirection, namely, by exploiting the recursive structure of a Tarskian‐style truth theory, which meets certain constraints in an illuminating way, to generate theorems that give truth conditions for object language sentences that at the same time provide interpretations of them.

Appeal to triangulation occurs in two different contexts in Davidson’s work. In the first, triangulation—in the trigonometric sense—is used as an analogy to help explain the central idea of a transcendental argument designed to show that we can have the concept of objective truth only in the context of communication with another speaker. In the second, the triangulation of two speakers responding to each other and to a common cause of similar responses is invoked as a solution to the problem of underdetermination of thought and meaning by the patterns of causal relations we stand in to the environment. I examine both of these uses of the idea of triangulation. In section 2, I take up the use of triangulation as an analogy in connection with Davidson transcendental argument to establish that communication is essential for the concept of objectivity. I argue that it is unsuccessful because the case has not been made that scope for deploying the idea of contrasting perspectives, which is needed for the concept of objectivity, is available only in the context of communication. In section 3, I take up the idea that triangulation on a common cause of common responses of two creatures interacting with each other provides the additional constraint needed to assign objective content to our thoughts and words. I show that appeal to this sort of triangulation provides minimal help in responding to the problem it is intended to solve. Section 4 provides a brief summary and conclusion.

Among the entities that can be mentally or linguistically represented are mental and linguistic representations themselves. That is, we can think and talk about speech and thought. This phenomenon is known as metarepresentation. An example is "Authors believe that people read books." -/- In this book François Recanati discusses the structure of metarepresentation from a variety of perspectives. According to him, metarepresentations have a dual structure: their content includes the content of the object-representation (people reading books) as well as the "meta" part (the authors' belief). Rejecting the view that the object representation is mentioned rather than used, Recanati claims that since metarepresentations carry the content of the object representation, they must be about whatever the object representation is about. Metarepresentations are fundamentally transparent because they work by simulating the representation they are about. -/- Topics covered in this wide-ranging work include the analysis of belief reports and talk about fiction, world shifting, opacity and substitutivity, quotation, the relation between direct and indirect discourse, context shifting, semantic pretense, and deference in language and thought.

causal relevance, a three-place relation between event types, and circumstances, and argue for a logical independence condition on properties standing in the causal relevance relation relative to circumstances. In section 3, I apply these results to show that functionally defined states are not causally relevant to the output or state transitions in terms of which they are defined. In section 4, I extend this result to what that output in turn causes and to intervening mechanisms. In section 5, I examine the implications of this result for functional theories of mental states. In section 6, I distinguish between functional descriptions of properties and functional definitions of properties, and argue the former present no obstacle to mental states being causally relevant to behavior, but that this is so because they do not treat mental states as functional states. In section 7, I examine the nature of explanations that appeal to functional states or properties. section 8 identifies some difficulties that arise in thinking about specifically conscious mental states as functional states. section 9 is a brief conclusion.

The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intentionality is the first of its kind, synthesizing research from several disciplines for all students and professionals interested in better understanding the nature and structure of social reality. The contents of the volume are divided into eight sections, each of which begins with a short introduction: Collective Action and Intention Shared and Joint Attitudes Epistemology and Rationality in the Social Context Social Ontology Collectives and Responsibility Collective Intentionality and Social Institutions The Extent, Origins, and Development of Collective Intentionality Semantics of Collectivity The eight sections contain a total of 40 accessible chapters, all written exclusively for this volume by a team of internationally recognized experts. Each chapter ends with a References and a Further Reading section as well as cross-references to other germane chapters in the volume. A longer General Introduction provides an initial overview of the history as well as the current issues and problems in collective intentionality, the range of topics and their interconnections, and the organization of the _Handbook_. Systematic in its approach and thorough and detailed in its coverage_, The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intentionality_ provides readers with a valuable reference to this rapidly growing, cross-disciplinary research area and a trailhead to its most promising future directions.

Written by a distinguished roster of philosophers, this volume includes chapters on truth and meaning; the philosophy of action; radical interpretation; philosophical psychology; knowledge of the external world; other minds and our own minds; and the implications of Davidson's work for literary theory. Donald Davidson has been one of the most influential figures in modern analytic philosophy and has made significant contributions to a wide range of subjects. Embodied in a series of landmark essays stretching over nearly 40 years, his principal work exhibits a unity rare among philosophers contributing on so many diverse fronts. Kirk Ludwig, the recipient of two grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, has taught at the University of Florida's Department of Philosophy since 1995. His areas of research specialization include philosophy of language, epistemology, and philosophy of mind. He has contributed chapters to a number of volumes on these topics as well as published articles in Philosophical Quarterly, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Mind and Language, and elsewhere.

We owe to Donald Davidson the suggestion that a truth theory used as an interpretation theory for a speaker can do duty as a meaning theory for his language. This is a brilliant suggestion, but there are some oddities in the development of this idea in Davidson’s work which need to be brought to light, and the project, in the form it takes in Davidson’s hands, in the end is too ambitious to succeed. I begin by distinguishing three questions: 1.What is it for a word or expression to be meaningful? 2. What is it for a word or expression to mean what it does? 3. How do the meanings of complex expressions in a language depend upon those of their parts? A full answer to 1 would include answers to 2 and 3; but it is clear one could pursue question 3 independently of 1 and 2, and 2 independently of 1. My discussion of the development of Davidson’s program in semantics is organized around the distinction between these three questions. First, I discuss Davidson’s development of the project of employing a truth theory in a central role in a recursive meaning theory for a natural language. Davidson’s project, as first stated in “Truth and Meaning”, undergoes an important but easily overlooked transformation from having the relatively modest goal of answering question 3 to that of answering simultaneously questions 1-3. Plausibly, a truth theory that meets certain constraints can be pressed into service to answer question 3. But the unremarked shift to the more ambitious goal imposes the requirement that the constraints not appeal to semantic facts. This obscures a relatively straightforward answer to the question what constraints such a theory needs to meet to serve a central role in a meaning theory, if we put aside questions 1 and 2. When Davidson turns from his first proposal about what constraints are needed to his later proposal in “Radical Interpretation,” that the theory be confirmed by a radical interpreter, the effect of not having laid out the straightforward constraints is to leave unclear what the radical interpreter has to confirm to succeed. Separating more cleanly the projects of answering question 3, and answering 1-2, helps us to evaluate the prospects of each, and, in particular, the prospects for success in radical interpretation. Next I consider the prospects for answering questions 1 and 2 by describing the procedures a radical interpreter, who takes a recursive truth theory to give the basic structure of a meaning theory for another’s language. I distinguish a modest and ambitious program in Davidson’s work, and argue that Davidson is best understood as engaged in the ambitious one. The ambitious program assumes an a priori guarantee of success at radical interpretation. The modest program eschews this. Failure of the ambitious program would undermine a number of important results Davidson grounds in reflection on radical interpretation. I argue the prospects for the ambitious program are dim, and that this becomes clear once we see what success in radical interpretation requires. Next, I consider two a priori arguments for the ambitious program suggested by some of Davidson’s recent work, and argue neither succeeds

Kirk Ludwig develops a novel reductive account of plural discourse about collective action and shared intention. Part I develops the event analysis of action sentences, provides an account of the content of individual intentions, and on that basis an analysis of individual intentional action. Part II shows how to extend the account to collective action, intentional and unintentional, and shared intention, expressed in sentences with plural subjects. On the account developed, collective action is a matter of there being multiple agents of an event and it requires no group agents per se. Shared intention is a matter of agents in a group each intending that they bring about some end in accordance with a shared plan. Thus their participatory intentions differ from individual intentions not in their mode but in their content. Joint intentional action then is a matter of a group of individuals successfully executing a shared intention.

Kirk Ludwig presents a philosophical account of institutional action, such as action by corporations and nation states, arguing that it can be understood exhaustively in terms of the agency of individuals and concepts constructed out of materials that are already at play in our understanding of individual action. He thus argues for a strong form of methodological individualism. The book provides a new account of the logical form of grammatically singular group action sentences (e.g. 'Company laid off 10,000 workers'), and features new analyses of the concepts of a constitutive rule, status function, status role, collective acceptance, and proxy agency. He also provides an analysis of the structure of corporate action, including the status of corporations as legal persons, and of the nature of state action in relation to its citizens. This is the companion volume to From Individual to Plural Agency (OUP 2016), extending the multiple-agents account of collective action set out in the earlier volume.

This book is an examination of the foundations and applications of the program of truth-theoretic semantics for natural languages introduced in 1967 by Donald Davidson in his classic paper “Truth and Meaning.” This is the second of two books on Donald Davidson’s central philosophical project. The first, Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), dealt with the basic framework of Davidson’s truth-theoretic approach to providing a meaning theory for a natural language, and then with his development of his general project in the philosophy of language and theory of meaning by way of the analysis of the empirical confirmation of a meaning theory for a speaker, from the stance of the radial interpreter, that is, the interpreter who starts out without any detailed knowledge of the speakers’ meanings or attitudes. This book turns to the development of details of Davidson’s semantic program, specifically, the pursuit of the project of providing a compositional semantic theory for natural languages by making strategic use of an appropriately adapted Tarski-style axiomatic truth theory. Such a theory aims to provide a specification of the truth conditions of any felicitous utterance of a natural language sentence which serves to interpret it, and exhibits in the proof of the theorem that gives the truth conditions the compositional structure of the sentence and how its truth depends on its context of utterance. The book develops the basic framework, applies it to quantifiers, proper names, indexicals, simple and complex demonstratives, quotation, adjectives and adverbs, simple tenses of state and event verbs, temporal adverbs and quantifiers, tense in sentential complements and perfect tenses, opaque contexts, especially indirect discourse and attitude sentences, non-declarative sentences, semantic structure and logical form, and discusses the relation of the framework the metaphysics of truth.

This dissertation addresses the question whether externalist theories of thought content provide a satisfactory response to the traditional problem of skepticism about the external world. I address two questions. If externalist theories of thought content are true, do they provide a satisfactory response to skepticism about the external world? Are externalist theories of thought content true? My answer to the first question is yes, and to the second no. The argument of the dissertation is divided into three parts. In the first part, I argue that skepticism about the external world rests on two fundamental assumptions about the mind-world relation. The contents of the mind are logically independent of the nature of the world around us. The contents of the mind are all the evidence we have for the nature of the world around us. Externalism attacks the first of these assumptions. In the second part, I criticize crucial and representative arguments for externalism by Hilary Putnam, Tyler Burge, and Donald Davidson. In the third part, I argue directly that the thesis of externalism is incorrect. The arguments in this part divide into three groups. The first shows that we cannot retrieve from our causal relations with our environment a determinate picture of the contents of our thoughts, without assuming that what determines those thoughts is not logically dependent on the environment. The second shows that if externalism were true, thought content would not be causally relevant to what we do. The third argues that attention to the first person point of view shows that thought content cannot plausibly be thought to be determined by external relations

This paper distinguishes two projects in Davidson's theory of meaning, an initial project of providing a compositional meaning theory for a natural language for which a Tarski-style truth theory is pressed into service and an extended project that aims to illuminate the basis of meaning in its relation to the neutrally described behavioral evidence in terms of which an interpretive truth theory for a language can ultimately be confirmed, and then argues that having distinguished the two projects we can see that the goal that the radical interpreter sets himself cannot be achieved given the limits on his data.