This is the next essay in an expanding series of expositions of the philosophy of Donald Davidson. The article is available at Jstor, or Common Ground. It follows closely on from the exposition on Truth and Meaning, in which Davidson sets out a methodical approach to interpreting the meaning of sentences in some natural language using an extensional, formal first-order language to make explicit the conditions under which a sentence of the natural language would be true. He proposes doing this by generating a T-sentence for a given utterance in the natural language. The foremost difficulty with such an approach is ensuring that the sentence of the formal language captures the meaning of the sentences in the natural language. That is the subject of this next essay:
…given a theory that would make interpretation possible, what evidence possibly available to a potential interpreter would support the theory a reasonable degree?
By way of example, given that Kurt utters “Es regnet”, and the theory that Kurt said that it is raining, what evidence is available to us that supports this theory?
Davidson notes that the issues here are not only between languages, but also within them. We might well ask how, if Kurt had instead uttered the sounds “It is raining”, what evidence might support the theory that Kurt said that it is raining. Roughly, the question is that, given those noises and some idea about what was being said, what evidence have we of what was meant?
Notice that we cannot simply use Kurt’s beliefs, intentions, or the meanings of Es regnet as evidence, because those are precisely what the radical interpreter is trying to discover. Whatever evidence we use to justify our interpretation must be publicly observable.
Which takes us to the top of the second page of the essay.
On the one hand it won’t do to explain interpreting “es regnet” by saying it means the same as “it’s raining” - that’s just repeating the problem. On the other hand it won’t do to say “es regnet” is just noise. It is indeed noise, but not just noise. There’s something in the middle. Davidson considers and rejects a few options: “But such theories fail to reach the evidence, for it seems clear that the semantic features of words cannot be explained directly on the basis of non-linguistic phenomena”. We need to consider utterances in their context, and find our evidence there, in both the “interests and activities” in which they occur.
Similarly a fine and discriminating analysis of the many intentions with which a sentence might be used might only be helpful if it includes the agent’s intentions and beliefs.
All this by way of pointing out that what we do with words is deeply embedded alongside the other things we do, and so in what we take to be the case: in our beliefs and intentions.
Seeing what is happening in the paragraph that crosses pages 315-16 needs some background. I think the argument might be filled out somewhat as follows.
The interoperation here is for the whole of some language, nothing left out. That is, the interpreter must be able to interpret any sentence constructed in that language. In order to be knowable, what we might know in order to do this must be finite. That’s fine, since for any given language there is at most a finite vocabulary and other resources. So far so good. But if we were instead to look for a way to interpret any possible language, our resources would become innumerable, and hence unknowable. The base on which our interpretation might be built would become unfixed, and unusable. Hence, it would make no sense to ask for any sort of interpretation here.
This is much the same point as that made early in Truth and Meaning, that we must keep to a finite, if quite large, set of linguistic resources.
The next point is one of triviality; interpreting utterances in one’s own language doesn’t require a theory as such, since such would consist of tautological sentences such as “‘It is raining’ is true IFF it is raining.” But in radically interpreting “‘Es regnet’ is true IFF it is raining,” one cannot make use of that sort of recognition. The evidence cannot consist in terms of meaning, translation, synonymy, and so on, since these already presume some level of interpretation. A different sort of evidence is required.
Next, Davidson is moving away from Quine’s notion of Radical Translation. What will not do is a theory that gives something like a one-to-one equation between the terms used in two languages. The difference here is that between the truth sentence “‘Es regnet’ is true IFF it is raining” and the equivalence “‘Es regnet’ = ‘It is raining’.” The T-sentence is reliant on the semantics of both languages in a way that a mere equivalence is not.
Thanks for this. I found it much easier to understand than the actual article.
This is really just a comment. You won’t be surprised that this chimes well with my approach. But I don’t find much trace of it in his more detailed discussion. One could be forgiven for thinking that he is treating language as a distinct domain.
FWIW, I think Sellars nailed this, adding some meat to “meaning is use.” “It’s raining” plays the same-enough role in one community that “es regnet” plays in another.
I like that you emphasize that is “noise.” It is “arbitrary noise.” We need some noise or other, but many noises will do.
What matters is the way that “noise” functions like a “machine part” in the community understood as an organism. This community of primates needs food, water, shelter. The signs only have meaning in the context of helping us deal with non-sign objects that we primarily care about.
To me it looks hopeless to discuss “meaning” as if something that is in the sign system ripped out of its visceral context.
This last point, that more is needed than a mere translation, is teased our over the next page or so. Davidson is very much placing the utterance in a context, as what others might call a part of the “form of life”, not as a “distinct domain” and within it’s “role” in a language game. Radical interpretation is anthropological, not linguistic.