|
 Building
a home philosophy library
Lyn
May and Steve Deery
The
twenty-third in a series of articles advising on how to build your
own home philosophy library.
No.
23 Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation
Donald
Davidson's Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation is a collection
of essays addressing just one question: 'What is it for words to
mean what they do?' Any answer that is to be philosophically instructive
must, argues Davidson, satisfy two conditions. The first must acknowledge
the 'holistic nature of linguistic understanding', the second, that
any answer to the question posed does not presuppose what it sets
out to answer.
The
first five essays address the first condition and here Davidson
argues that individual words can be viewed as meaningful only to
the extent they play a role in whole sentences. Therefore, it is
sentences not words that are the primary focus for his theory of
meaning.
In
'Truth and meaning' he argues that providing an account of meaning
for a language is a matter of developing a theory that will enable
us to generate for every actual and potential sentence of the language
in question a theorem that specifies what each sentence means. It
is here that Davidson turns to the concept of truth. This is a crucial
move because he believes that by detailing truth structures we get
at meaning.
Truth,
he argues, is "less opaque than meaning". So, to specify
the conditions under which a sentence is true is also a way of specifying
its meaning. Here Davidson connects his account of a theory of meaning
with an already existing approach to the theory of truth developed
by Tarski.
Davidson,
aside from being one of the most influential philosophers of the
last century, shares with many of his generation a capacity to write
intelligibly. Once described as 'terse' we can only suppose this
to mean concise rather than curt - Davidson is anything but rudely
brief.
Inquiries
into Truth and Interpretation by Donald Davidson (Clarendon) £14.99/$21.95
A
new book will be featured early December 2002.
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