Page 171 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Davidson starts from an empiricist constraint, that all facts about meaning must be manifest somehow in the use of language, and he puts this constraint to work in the importance which he assigns to the fiction of radical interpretation—his variant of Quine's fiction of radical translation. The shift from 'translation' to 'interpretation' represents Davidson's rejection of Quine's behaviorist conception of meaning in favor of an approach based upon an account of the truth- conditions of sentences.
It seems at first that the concept of truth-conditions is too weak to capture that of meaning, since it is entirely extensional (so that all true sentences have the same truth-conditions). But Davidson's insight was to propose that an account of the meaning of a sentence is provided by that account of its truth-conditions which is generated by a theory which (a) assigns cor- rect truth-conditions to the sentences of the speaker's language on the basis of assignments of contributory roles to the phrases of the language and to their man- ners of combination (the holistic condition) and (b) yields an interpretation of the language which can be integrated into a satisfactory understanding of the linguistic and other acts of the speakers (the empirical condition). So, Davidson does not simply identify meaning with truth-conditions; rather, for him, the meaning of a sentence is that account of its truth- conditions which explains its role within the language and its use by speakers.
Davidson's approach implies that a radical interpreter is able to assign truth-conditions to native sentences without a prior understanding of them. He maintains that the interpreter can legitimately achieve this by observing the distinctive conditions under which the natives hold various sentences to be true, and then assuming that these conditions are, for the most part, truth-conditions for these sentences. This assumption of truth for the most part (the principle of charity) is justified by Davidson by means of an externalist theory of psychological content, that, by and large, beliefs are about their external causes. But Davidson stresses that this assumption of truth brings with it an assumption of widespread agreement; for, of course, all interpreters take their own beliefs to be true. Thus, for Davidson, the radical interpreter initially projects onto the natives the interpreter's own beliefs and preferences in assigning truth-conditions to native utterances and uses these as the defeasible basis for a rational understanding of action, including speech acts. This presumption of agreement is a key component of Davidson's nonreductive approach; one can interpret others on the basis of their observed behavior only because one brings to that interpret- ation one's own understanding of the world and oneself.
Critics have urged that this presumption is both parochial and insecure. It is parochial because it implies that one's own beliefs and preferences set the
limits of intelligibility. It is insecure since Davidson's own theory threatens self-understanding. The threat arises from the possibility of replicating Quine's inde- terminacy thesis within Davidson's conception of rad- ical interpretation: as Davidson has sometimes seemed ready to acknowledge, his conception does not incor- porate any guarantee that a unique interpretation will emerge. But if more than one interpretation is held to be possible, and one then recognizes that it applies to oneself, it threatens one's own self-understanding and equally the significance of the procedures of radical interpretation.
5. Psychology and Meaning
These difficulties in Davidson's position make it all the more important to consider the alternative which reduces semantics to psychology. This has two parts: an account of meaning in terms of psychological and social facts (beliefs, intentions, and conventions), and an account of these facts which shows that they are not dependent upon semantic facts. The first part draws on the work of H. P. Grice and David Lewis; the second part looks to cognitive science. Grice pro- posed the following account of speaker-meaning (Grice 1957):aspeakerSmeansthat/?byadeclarative utterance of x to an audience A if and only if (a) S intends that A should come to believe that p; (b) S intends that A should recognize that S uttered x with intention (a); and (c) S intends that this recognition (b) should be among A's reasons for coming to believe that p. Subsequent discussion showed that a further condition is required: (d) S does not have any further intentions in uttering x of which A is unaware. Although further refinements have been proposed, there is a broad consensus that conditions (a-d) are at least sufficient for speaker-meaning. But two issues now arise: what is required in supposing that con- ditions (a-d) are satisfied; and how one is to move on from an account of speaker-meaning to an account of the meaning of sentences. One can try to solve the first problem for a few cases by thinking of S making appropriate iconic gestures and noises; but this is clearly very limited and offers no route to a solution of the second problem. Of course, if one could already rely on a solution to the second problem, then that would bring a solution to the first one; but that would subvert the strategy of basing an account of sentence- meaning upon that of speaker-meaning.
Lewis's account of conventions offers a way for- ward here (Lewis 1969). Lewis argued on general grounds that conventions, such as driving on the left, are regularities which coordinate the behavior of agents with interests which will be satisfied if and only if almost everyone abides by the same regularity; the need for a convention arises where it is not obvious in advance which regularity others will adhere to. Hence, Lewis claimed, a convention exists where there is a regularity for which it is common knowledge that
Meaning: Philosophical Theories
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