Page 534 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Key Figures
eralizations at the expense of handling at the outset any number of detailed facts. These broad gen- eralizations bolster his theory of mind, since they tend to be so abstract that they could not have been learned inductively. As a final step in the chain, the broad generalizations, in mutual interaction, do in fact account for a considerable portion of the empirical data.
In sum, Chomsky has moved to a position in which the study of the language faculty, the repository of what he has come to call 'I-language' (i.e., internalized language), has reached a depth of abstractness unpre- cedented in the development of the theory of gen- erative grammar. But Chomskyconsiders himselffirst and foremost an empirical scientist, not (merely) a speculative philosopher. As he would be the first to acknowledge, the philosophical system upon which his approach to linguistic analysis is based will stand or fall depending on the depth of insight attained on the nature of the grammatical processes at work in the 5,000-odd languages of the world.
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Theory. Plenum, New York
Donald Davidson (b. 1917) is a major figure in con- temporary philosophy of the Anglo-American ana- lytic school. From 1963 onwards he has published a series of seminal articles which have done much to shape the direction and development of philosophy within this tradition. In some cases what were orig- inally bold new proposals by him have become a widely received view, although many of his doctrines remain provocative and controversial. Though he has written no single work of book length, his many art- icles are closely interconnected, and together form a
distinctive and coherent philosophical system cover- ing language, the mind, and metaphysics.
1. Philosophy of Language
In the late 1960s Davidson gave 'semantics* of natural languages a new form and direction by proposing that a 'theory of truth' for a natural language, similar to those devised by Tarski for formal languages, could constitute a 'theory of meaning' for that language, that is, a formal axiomatic theory which for any sen-
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Davidson, Donald E. M. Flicker