Continuing the discussion from Davidson: Actions, Reasons, and Causes, I’d like to move on to Davidson’s ideas concerning meaning.
The paper being considered is Truth and Meaning. The pretence is that of building a theory of meaning from as few presumptions as possible. Davidson begins by noting that while we have a finite vocabulary, we are able to construct novel and innumerable sentences. Hence, the meaning of a sentence must somehow depend on the meaning of constituent words. The question considered in this paper is what a theory needs in order for this to be so.
His first approach is to consider the consequences should we assign some entity to each word, called its “meaning”. The meaning of a sentence would then be somehow derived from the concatenation of those words. We want to analyse a basic sentence like “Theaetetus flies”, so we assign meaning to the words - Theaetetus to “Theaetetus”; and flies to “flies”… and concatenation (writing the two words side by side) is the only syntactic resource we’ve used to build the sentence; so the concatenation somehow gives a meaning to the sentence “Theaetetus flies”; the concatenation has some semantic place in the construction.
The idea here is no so far from a naive notion often proposed, that the meaning of a sentence is given by what it refers to.
So now we need to go to the next step, and explain the place of the concatenation. If meaning is assigning entities to words, then what entity do we assign to “concatenation”? But before you answer that, notice that whatever answer you give, you will then need to explain its role in giving a meaning, and so on.
There’s the regress to which Davidson points. Although unnamed, it’s an instance of Bradley’s regress. The general form is that if we seek to explain how say A stands to B, by claiming they are related by C, then we are faced with explaining how both A and B stand to C; and if our answer is that they are related by D, then… well, you get the idea.
The problem isn’t dissipated by Frege’s treatment. What does “The father of…” mean in “The father of Annette” is not settled by what it refers to, since “The father of…” must do the same trick twice in “The father of the father of Annette”. It can’t explain the progress from Annette to her father to her grandfather. The conclusion is that assigning some entity to every word is insufficient to our task; we also need some account of the way these entities are combined.
So it seems that just assigning an entity to each word won’t get us quite to what we want.
But we now have in outline the sort of theory we are working with. We want to give the meaning of any sentence, and in terms of the structural elements of that sentence. The theory at hand is that we set out each of the structural elements of the sentence, and that to which they refer: t refers to x. So “The father of Annette” has a referent, despite “The father of…” not having a referent; it instead has a structural place within the sentence that serves to fix the referent. The sentence does the referring, not the structural elements. “The father of” doesn’t refer, but “the father of Annette”, the complete term, does.
So we have in outline a theory of meaning in terms of reference. Now comes a more infamous difficulty, the slingshot.