Page 535 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

tence of the language yields a theorem which specifies its meaning.
The proposal prompted a spate of work, by Dav- idson and others, which essayed theories of this form covering specific fragments of English. The first guid- ing constraint in this enterprise urged by Davidson is that each sentence's meaning be derivable in a finite axiomatic theory from axioms assigning semantic properties to component expressions discerned as semantic constituents. A second is that the structure imputed to a sentence must be such as to exhibit as valid the inferential relations between it and other sentences. Davidson's own contribution includes an account of the 'logical form' or semantic structure of action sentences, which he argues must be construed as involving an implicit quantification over events. He also proposed an ingenious new account of sentences giving reports of speech, such as 'Galileo said that the earth moved.' The 'that' is construed as being indeed a demonstrative, one which, on any occasion of utter- ance of the whole sentence, refers to the speaker's own utterance of the content clause 'the earth moved.' The whole utterance is thus paraphraseable as The earth moved. Some utterance of Galileo's and this last utter- ance of mine make us samesayers.' Davidson has also written about the relation between mood and force, which he argues cannot fully be explained in terms of convention. In a subtle article he argues that meta- phor is a feature solely of the use of language, and is not to be ascribed to a sentence's meaning, which is confined to literal meaning. As to how one can tell when a given theory of meaning is the correct theory
of a given community of language users, Davidson approaches this issue in terms of the scenario of 'rad- ical interpretation'.
2. ContributiontoOtherAreasofPhilosophy
Davidson has made seminal contributions advancing the subject in philosophy of mind and action, meta- physics, and epistemology. He has argued, contra one tradition, that reasons for action are causes of the actions they rationalize. He was one of the first to suggest that the relation between mind and brain may be one of'token identity' of mental with neural events, there being however no 'type identities,' between the two categories, due to the different nature and allegiances of mental and physical vocabularies. He has put forward an account of the nature of cause, and causal statements of English. Most recently he has turned explicitly to epistemology and metaphysics, developing a distinctive view of the nature of truth, which has implications for the coherence of global skepticism.
See also: Convention; Meaning: Philosophical The- ories; Radical Interpretation.
Bibliography
Davidson D 1980 Essays on Actions and Events. Clarendon Press, Oxford
Davidson D 1984 Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Clarendon Press, Oxford
Davidson D 1990 The structure and content of truth. The Journal of Philosophy 87(6): 279-328
LePore E (ed.) 1986 Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Blackwell, Oxford
Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett (b. 1925), for- merly Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford Uni- versity, is a renowned authority on the work of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege. He has made significant contributions to the philosophy of language. Of particular interest to linguistic theorists is the emphasis he has given to the theory of meaning, and his account of linguistic understanding.
1. Theoretical Context
Dummett's work is best understood in relation to a particular theoretical perspective. This position,
known as 'truth-conditional semantics,' involves the fundamental assumption that the meaning of a sen- tence in a language is given by stating the conditions under which it is true. The semantic properties of other expressions, e.g., nouns, verbs, etc., are then characterized in terms of the contribution they make to the truth-conditions of the sentences in which they appear. More complex expressions can be accounted for by recursion, i.e., they can be shown to be gen- erated from simpler ones according to basic rules. It is crucial to this approach that truth is taken to be a more perspicuous and theoretically tractable notion than that of meaning. The provision of a theory of
Dummett, Michael D. E. B. Pollard
Dummett, Michael
513