Kirk Ludwig

Reviews a number of interconnected arguments concerned with the question whether the third person stance of the radical interpreter is conceptually basic in understanding language. These include Davidson’s argument for the necessity of possessing the concepts of belief, truth, and error for possessing propositional attitudes, the argument from the necessity of language for possessing the concept of error, and the argument from triangulation for the necessity of communication with others to fix what thoughts are about. Argues that the crucial arguments for the necessity of communication for the concept of error and the argument from triangulation fail, and that this undercuts the last hope for an a priori grounding for the assumption that radical interpretation is possible.

Takes up the question whether an account of meaning and the propositional attitudes that takes the third person standpoint of the radical interpreter as methodologically and conceptually basic can accommodate our special epistemic position with respect to our own thoughts. Examines Davidson’s most extended argument for this in ’First Person Authority’ and concludes that the argument falls short of explaining the relevant asymmetry in the knowledge one has of one’s own thoughts and the knowledge that other people do.

Begins part III of the book, which examines theses that Davidson has aimed to found on reflection on radical interpretation, and also arguments that aim to establish _a priori_ the possibility of radical interpretation. Explains and criticizes Davidson’s argument against the possibility of radically different conceptual schemes. Examines two metaphors of conceptual relativity, the idea that different schemes organize reality differently, or that they fit it differently. The former is ruled out because it requires a common subject matter. The latter Davidson rejects because he claims that it conflicts with our best intuition about truth as embodied in Traski’s Convention T, which Davidson claims requires us to think that other languages which contain true theories are translatable into our own. We argue that this does not follow from Tarski’s insight, and offer a different though limited defence of the claim that there cannot be radically different conceptual schemes.

Discusses Davidson’s arguments against the impossibility of massive error and for externalism about thought content. Two main arguments are distinguished, the omniscient interpreter argument and the argument from the Principle of Charity. The omniscient interpreter argument is criticized, but it is argued that the argument from the Principle of Charity is the more fundamental of the two arguments. This argument is shown to rely on a strong assumption about the publicity of language, which we argue is not supported by reflection on the social function of language.

Considers Davidson’s claim in ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’ that there is ‘no such thing as a language’ in the sense in which many philosophers and linguists have wanted to maintain. Argues that once the precise content of the claim is made clear, the claim is plausibly true in the light of Davidson’s view that the radical interpreter’s stance is basic for understanding meaning, but also that it has none of the alarming consequences which critics have supposed to flow from it, including its being incompatible with Davidson’s use of the notion of a language at other places in his work.

Discusses the procedure of the radical interpreter, and in particular, the role of a truth theory for the subject’s language, how it motivates the introduction of a the Principle of Charity, roughly that a speaker is to be taken to have largely true general beliefs and largely true particular beliefs about his environment, and three interpretations of the principle. Argues for one of the interpretations but also that it is not sufficient for the work Davidson needs it to do and that a slightly different and stronger principle is needed which we call ‘Grace’. Ends with an account of the major stages of the procedure.

Begins part II of the book, which examines Davidson’s project of radical interpretation Discusses how to characterize the project, and certain difficulties that arise in Davidson’s initial statement of the goal of the radical interpreter. Restates the goal of the project in a way that avoids the difficulties, and distinguishes an ambitious and more modest philosophical program founded on radical interpretation, arguing that Davidson’s most interesting theses are to be seen as founded on the ambitious program.

Responds to objections to providing a truth theory for a natural language, namely, that natural languages are ambiguous, that they do not have a well-defined syntax, that they give rise to semantical paradoxes which will infect any truth theory that adheres to Contention T, and that the presence of vague terms in natural languages will result in a truth theory with truth value gaps. Argues that ambiguity and the lack of a well-defined syntax are not serious obstacles to providing an illuminating compositional meaning theory by the vehicle of a truth theory for much of natural language, and that the explicit statement of the meaning theory provided in Ch. 9 shows that neither the semantic paradoxes nor vagueness are a threat to the meaning theory, as opposed to the truth theory.

Discusses the extensionality and determination problems for truth-theoretic semantics. The extensionality problem is how to impose a constraint on a truth theory that guarantees that it meets Tarski’s Convention T. The determination problem is the problem of specifying for a theory that meets Tarski’s Convention T which theorems can be used to interpret the sentences of the object language. Argues that nothing the theory states can solve the extensionality problem, but that one can state a condition on the theory that will solve the problem, and that the determination problem can be solved by specifying a canonical proof procedure for the theory.

Discusses the modifications that have to be made to a truth theory for a context insensitive language to adapt it to a context sensitive language, that is, a language that contains terms like ‘I’, ‘here’, ‘now’, and so on, and tense inflection, whose contributions to what sentences mean in a context of use depend upon features of the context. Shows how to relativize the axioms of the theory to contextual parameters, and how to modify Tarski’s Convention T for a truth predicate which is relativized to contextual parameters.

Discusses the general form of a theory of meaning, and difficulties for traditional approaches to the theory of meaning that introduce meanings as entities in the theory of meaning. Discusses and criticizes Davidson’s argument to show that if sentences refer to their meanings, then all sentences alike in truth value refer to the same thing. But it also concludes with Davidson that introducing meanings construed as entities is neither necessary nor sufficient for carrying out the project of providing a compositional meaning theory for natural languages.

In later work, Davidson distinguished two strands in the Principle of Charity which he called the Principle of Coherence and the Principle of Correspondence (“Three Varieties of Knowledge” 1991). The Principle of Coherence tells us to find another to be rational and intelligible. The Principle of Correspondence deals with the connection between another’s hold true attitudes and her environment. I focus on the Principle of Correspondence. I consider three interpretations suggested in Davidson’s work. The first is the Principle of Sentential Truth, which requires the interpreter to find the speaker’s hold true attitudes to be true. The second is the Principle of Agreement in Belief, which requires the interpreter to find the speaker to be largely in agreement with the interpreter about her environment. The third is the Principle of True Belief, which requires the speaker to be largely right about her environment. I argue none of these is adequate to the task Davidson sets himself. I consider a fourth principle, the Principle of Salience, which requires the interpreter to find the speaker to be speaking truly about things that the interpreter would find salient in the speaker’s position. The last of these is connected with the intuitive idea of triangulation in Davidson’s later work. I argue that the interpreter needs to employ the Principle of Salience, but this requires the interpreter to justify an a posteriori assumption about targets of interpretation. I assess the implications of this for Davidson’s anti-Cartesian epistemology and philosophy of mind.