Davidson: Truth and Meaning

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41

I don’t in the least mind it being an empirical theory.
Logic seems quite happy to take for granted that sentences have truth-conditions. I suspect that they not regard the question how they are set up as being within their remit.
When I made that point, I felt that it called into question whether truth-conditions were ever settled in the objective sense that they are assuming, thus calling into question the verification process that Davidson needs. But on reflection, it seems to me to be true that the truth conditions of a language are, exactly, whatever users of the language, by consensus and practice, consider them to be.

I think there’s another way of looking at it. I think Davidson could accept what I’ve said, but reply that establishing the truth-conditions of a given sentence will simply be establishing what the consensus is; a good starting-point for this would be the intuitions (or the practice) of anyone who speaks the language sufficiently well.

42

I suppose the example is all right. We might just say this is a case of ambiguity, that S has more than one meaning, that is, more than one correct interpretation. (Puzzle picture) Count we count the two versions of “S” as not the same sentence?
Redundancy works as well.

I wouldn’t be opposed to that. But is it compatible with the pragmatic approach he was recommending earlier?

Depending on how you understand what the meaning of a sentence is, I would suggest that it must be - along the lines of the objections to Logical Positivism - though admittedly, with the Bardot example, he clearly cases his net wider than they did.
I guess much depends on what his readers consider to be interesting results. That’s not a criticism. But I would like to see what you think an interesting result would be, if that’s possible.

Yes, that would work.

But I think you miss my point. A “I am tired” and B “He is tired” are uttered by two different speakers in the same context. If they are two distinct sentences because they are uttered by different speakers, their meanings should be different. But they have exactly the same truth-conditions.

Well, that explains it. Thank you.

H’m. Let me offer instead “A knows that B knows that … p” Does that meet the conditions for recursion?

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43

But what about his statement, quoted by McDowell, that we verify in terms of other beliefs, not some empirical observation of the Given? Do you think McDowell is right that Davidson’s scheme doesn’t let us “get outside our beliefs”?

Yes. But to know that language L has truth-conditions doesn’t tell us that language L will issue true statements, unless we can also assert that the truth-conditions do more than capture what “truth” means in language L.

Again, yes. What McDowell and I are questioning is whether this is sufficient to claim empirical knowledge – or even contact with the empirical. And if it is not, what is the argument that shows us we have to be satisfied with this more or less coherentist theory of meaning and truth?

44

Very quickly:

On the “I am tired” vs. “He is tired” example, note that the theory is not given by the T-sentences. The T-sentences are the constraint on the theory, in that the theory must be able to derive them from the appropriate axioms. In this case, we could have a theory such as:

A1: When uttered by S at t, “I” refers to S at t.
A2: When uttered by S at t, “He” refers to a demonstrated male.
A3: When uttered by S at t, x^“is tired” is true iff the reference of x as uttered by S at t is tired.

Using these axioms (more or less), we could derive:

  1. “I am tired” uttered by Nagase at t is true iff the reference of “I” as uttered by Nagase at t is tired (by A3);
  2. The reference of “I” as uttered by Nagase at t is tired iff Nagase is tired (at t) (by A1).

On the other hand, “He is tired” (said by, say, Olívia demonstrating Nagase) has the following derivation:

  1. “He is tired” uttered by Olívia at t is true iff the reference of “He” as uttered by Olívia at t is tired (by A3);
  2. The reference of “He” as uttered by Olívia at t is tired iff Nagase is tired at (by A2 and the assumption).

So the two sentences have the same truth-conditions, and thus he same “meaning” in the sense of information conveyed, but not the same compositional meaning, as they use different axioms in the derivation of their respective truth-conditions. This is very similar, incidentally, to Carnap’s distinction between L-equivalence and synonymy, according to which the latter requires that the sentences are synonymous at the level of construction (they must be built out of synonymous components), and Kaplan’s distinction between character and content. Davidson’s approach, of course, is extensional.

As for issues of interpretation, note that:

(a) Davidson does not think there is a fact of the matter about how to get interpretations right, at least not in the sense of a physicalist fact of the matter. I could have a particle-by-particle replica of myself in Twin Earth, yet our beliefs differ, because what what makes sense to interpret one as believing is not what makes sense to interpret the other as believing (say, I believe that there is water in front of me, whereas my counterpart should be interpreted as believing that there is counter-water in front of him). In a sense, the only real standard for the correctness of interpretation is the person being interpreted, which makes it a matter of responsibility, more than accuracy.

(b) On the dispute between Davidson and McDowell, the empirical content of my beliefs is, for Davidson, captured by “perceptual beliefs”, that is, beliefs caused by perception. I think Davidson is right that there isn’t much difference between him and the McDowell of Mind and World on this point, except that McDowell there introduces a different kind of propositional attitude, “perceives that”, which is dubiously neutral with respect to the content being entertained (i.e. it neither accepts nor rejects it). Note that McDowell himself accepts that in “Avoiding the Myth of the Given”, and thus refines his position accordingly.

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45

Oh, and I forgot to add: although by the very early 70s Davidson did think that the axioms of the theory captured social conventions, after 1974 (“Radical Interpretation”) he changed his mind and decided that they at best captured individual dispositions, so that socially shared languages dropped out of the picture. The reason, roughly, is that he came to realize that speaking the truth is an intentional action, and therefore the interpretation assigned to an utterance in a context depends essentially on what the person is trying to achieve in that context. So the teleology of the speech act is primary with respect to its content than any conventional norm.

(The argument is more complex than that, of course. See “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs” for the full argument.)

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46

To my mind, he is neutral on this question. But he does assume that there is an objective answer.

Well, if we are going to assert it, we will have to do so in some language or other. I can’t make sense of truth independent of language.

I’m happy to rely on the criteria in the language that I speak. Not that I have any alternative.

Do you mean that the two sentences have different speakers? Davidson proposes a three-way relationship between sentence, speaker and time of speaking. In that example, the speaker and, most likely, the time of speaking are different. Which should make them different sentences. He does, I think allow for the possibility of ambiguity and suggests that his proposal would allow for ambiguity to be preserved. He doesn’t mention, I think, synonymy, but I don’t see why he has to deny it - and preserve it. But it does seem odd that there could be two different triads with the same truth-conditions.

I don’t buy this. Without public standards of what means what, I don’t see how communication can take place.

This is from memory of the article.
I think we choose between hypotheses; I certainly wouldn’t be dogmatic about what has priority. We can either suppose that “a nice derangement of epitaphs” is just a piece of nonsense or possibly a bit of fun after Edward Lear or re-arrange the signal into “a nice arrangement of epithets”. Which we choose will depend on the circumstances, and a dollop of charity.

47

Do you mean that the two sentences have different speakers? Davidson proposes a three-way relationship between sentence, speaker and time of speaking. In that example, the speaker and, most likely, the time of speaking are different. Which should make them different sentences. He does, I think allow for the possibility of ambiguity and suggests that his proposal would allow for ambiguity to be preserved. He doesn’t mention, I think, synonymy, but I don’t see why he has to deny it - and preserve it. But it does seem odd that there could be two different triads with the same truth-conditions.

Yes, I’m aware of the way Davidson characterizes utterances. That’s why the axioms were relativized to speakers (S) at a time (t), and that’s why the derivations were also so relativized. There’s nothing “odd” about two different utterances with the same truth conditions—that’s how we convey information to each other—, and the two derivations I proposed show how this is can be so.

I don’t buy this. Without public standards of what means what, I don’t see how communication can take place.

First, speaking entirely from the exegetical point of view, whether you buy it or not, that’s Davidson’s considered position. Read the article. Second, the lack of a shared language means that there are no shared standards, not that there are no public standards. Thirdly, for communication to take place (on a certain picture of communication), speaker and hearer must coordinate on the truth-conditions of an utterance, but this coordination need not be given before the utterance was made: it can be the result of the interpretation process (what Davidson calls a passing theory).

In a bit more detail, here is what happens. I come with a linguistic encounter with my own particular linguistic dispositions. As you speak, I project onto you the same dispositions (this is essentially the role of the principle of charity). If I notice that you deviate from those, I then correct course by taking into consideration the overall context, including what I take to be the most rational behavior on your part given the context, including linguistic behavior (charity again). That’s why he considers shared languages to be otiose: whatever job they were supposed to do is taken over by charity in his account.

This is from memory of the article.
I think we choose between hypotheses; I certainly wouldn’t be dogmatic about what has priority. We can either suppose that “a nice derangement of epitaphs” is just a piece of nonsense or possibly a bit of fun after Edward Lear or re-arrange the signal into “a nice arrangement of epithets”. Which we choose will depend on the circumstances, and a dollop of charity.

Yes, exactly. Since this choice is informed by what is most rational given the circumstances, it means that the teleological structure of the linguistic action overrides any putative conventional norm. So the latter can’t be binding, and thus they are not really explanatory.

48

No they don’t. One has on the right some interpretation of “Ludwig is tired” , the other, “Banno is tired”. They share a structural element, “Is tired”, but have differing referents.

“Knows that” implies the truth of what is known. Consider also “A doubts that B doubts that…” or “A hopes that B hopes that…”

Added: I see @Nagase gave a more detailed response.

49

I have difficulty understanding how this is significantly different from thinking in terms of propositions. Isn’t a proposition the sort of thing one discerns from observing a speaker in a particular situation? If you aren’t sure what they meant, you can just ask for clarification.

Could you explain why Davidson’s view is different?

50

Well, propositions are typically thought of as abstract objects that encode not only the actual truth conditions of a given sentence, but also it’s truth conditions across worlds. Davidson’s approach does not require either the postulation of such abstract objects or intensional constructions.

Of course, if you just want to call a proposition what we assign to a speaker upon interpreting him, this can be innocuous enough. But Davidson would be weary of the further step of thinking that therefore there is something, an abstract object, that explains why the speaker uttered what he uttered.

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51

Thanks, Nagase. A clean answer.

@Jay, the difference between McDowell and Davidson is slight, but detailed. We could look at A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge at a later time, if there is sufficient interest. The core ideas, stated too bluntly, are that beliefs are caused by physical states, and so it is a mistake to ask for the reason someone holds a belief. From what I understand, McDowell doesn’t quite “get outside beliefs”, either, but emphasises that perception is already conceptual. Both reject the “myth of the given”, but differ as to whether this commits one to a form of coherentism.

I have my own view here, the quasi-Wittgensteinian notion that we could not make sense of a difference in worlds between you and I. That view is close to Davidson in On the very idea…

Triangulation and radical interpretation both enter here, too, but again there is much in the detail. I advocate small steps. Davidson built his ideas over a long period, and modified aspects as he went along. Much of what he had to say might now be in question; that is indicative of the depth and breadth of his approach.

52

Does this mean Davidson’s scheme can’t accommodate modal issues?

Does this mean his view can’t allow unspoken truths?

53

Does this mean Davidson’s scheme can’t accommodate modal issues?

They do present issues, since his theory is explicitly designed to be extensional. He shared Quine’s suspicion on intensional constructions, so he would consider that a plus, not a con.

I suppose you could try to give an extensional, contextual treatment to the modal operators, but I personally don’t see how to accommodate them systematically and uniformly in a Davidsonian semantics.

Does this mean his view can’t allow unspoken truths?

It does allow, in the form of unspoken sentences.

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54

@Frank, his general response to opaque (non-extensional) contexts is given in On saying that. Briefly, he treats an opaque sentence such as “Galileo said that the earth moves” as two sentences: “Galileo said that”; “The earth moves,” with “that” a demonstrative pointing at an utterance, connected via a primitive relation of “samesaying.”

So far as I am aware, that device was never applied to modality. It’s not obvious how such a device would work.

The absence of an account of modality is a gap, not a refutation. A theory of meaning that gave the truth conditions for any non-modal sentence would still be useful.

Hence the emphasis I’ve placed here on a partial theory of meaning, and the methodological question of how large a fragment of English can be parsed in an extensional first order language.

55

I see, thank you!

. . . . . .

56

I guess that means that the derivation of the truth-conditions is part of the meaning??
Anyway, this is at least close to what I was saying.

I don’t object to the point that what a speaker intends to say (in respect of content) is important in understanding them and interpreting them when problems arise. But surely, we could not do without linguistic norms.
I would agree, though, that, although it is conventional to speak of the rules of language as conventions, it is misleading. I don’t have a better way of claiming that the consensus of speakers determines what the rules are. But we ought to emphasize more often that the consensus exists before we join the community (and will exist after we leave it).

Yes, I understood that.

I don’t understand this distinction.

But we can’t start from scratch, either. Or, perhaps, we don’t normally need an actual process of interpretation; it’s something we call on when problems arise.

Well, many conventions are not binding. They make life easier and it suits people to save themselves trouble. I think it is not non-explanatory to explain that under certain circumstances, we shake hands when we meet some as a matter of convention, or yield the floor when the chair asks us to.

[quote=“Banno, post:48, topic:2113”]
“Knows that” implies the truth of what is known.
[/quote
I was just wondering whether that means that “knows that” is, as you call it, semantically, as well as syntactically recursive.

57

OK, so let’s assert it in (by stipulation) L: “The truth-conditions specified for language L do more than merely capture what ‘truth’ means in language L.”

Do you think there’s anything defective in such an assertion? It may be false, but that’s different.

I think you do. Formalization is an attempt to change the criteria of the language you speak so as to arrive at a better concept of what can truthfully be said. The language you speak may be neutral on whether its criteria for knowledge-claims put us in contact with empirical truths. But nothing prevents you from questioning whether those criteria are adequate. There’s plenty of room for such a question in your language. You may not be able to answer it in your usual language . . . but heck, that’s what the Philosophy Room is for!

Well, he thinks he does (for him, the way that perceptions are “already conceptual” is different from how we normally talk about “having beliefs”), but I agree that he doesn’t. Nonetheless, his critique of Davidson’s choices here remains important.

For McDowell, a belief caused by a perception would be an “exculpation,” an explanation for why we have it as a mental event (“Nagase thinks X at time T1”). He contrasts this with a “justification,” which would be an explanation in terms of the content of the belief itself. As you say, he attributes the causal view to Davidson: “Davidson thinks experience can be nothing but an extra-conceptual impact on sensibility.” (14). But his own view is very different. Mind and World is substantially an attempt to make the case against this causal view of how sensibility connects with experience.

Of course both philosophers argue against the Myth of the Given, but McDowell points out that “the idea of the Given is a response to a way of thinking that underlies the familiar philosophical anxiety about empirical knowledge, and that way of thinking is precisely what Davidson endorses.” (15)

58

For McDowell, a belief caused by a perception would be an “exculpation,” an explanation for why we have it as a mental event (“Nagase thinks X at time T1”). He contrasts this with a “justification,” which would be an explanation in terms of the content of the belief itself. As you say, he attributes the causal view to Davidson: “Davidson thinks experience can be nothing but an extra-conceptual impact on sensibility.” (14). But his own view is very different. Mind and World is substantially an attempt to make the case against this causal view of how sensibility connects with experience. For McDowell, a belief caused by a perception would be an “exculpation,” an explanation for why we have it as a mental event (“Nagase thinks X at time T1”). He contrasts this with a “justification,” which would be an explanation in terms of the content of the belief itself. As you say, he attributes the causal view to Davidson: “Davidson thinks experience can be nothing but an extra-conceptual impact on sensibility.” (14). But his own view is very different. Mind and World is substantially an attempt to make the case against this causal view of how sensibility connects with experience.

I’m aware that McDowell claims this in Mind and World. What I’m saying is that nothing in his position there differentiates him from Davidson, as he himself later admitted:

Trying to spell out this possibility [viz. of the rational character of experience], which I found missing from Davidson’s picture, I made one of the assumptions I have here renounced: that if experiences are actualizations of conceptual capacities, they must have propositional content. That have Davidson an opening for a telling response. Davidson argued that if by “experience” we mean something with propositional content, it can only be a case of taking things to be so, distinctive in being caused by the impact of the environment on our sensory apparatus. But of course his picture includes such things. So I was wrong, he claimed, to suppose there is anything missing from his picture. (Having the World in View, p. 269)

And in case you think McDowell disagrees with this response, here is what he says two paragraphs later:

And if we want to avoid the Myth [of the Given] by conceiving experiences as actualizations of conceptual capacities, while retaining the assumption that that requires crediting experiences with propositional content, Davidson’s point seems well taken. If experiences have propositional content, it is hard to deny that experiencing is taking things to be so, rather than what I want: a different kind of thing that entitles us to take things to be so. (ibid.)

So McDowell is clear that the position he took in Mind and World differed little from Davidson’s; it was only once he distinguished propositional from intuitional content that things fell into place. This is not surprising, as he makes clear in the last sentence of the above quotation. Think about it: if experiences have propositional content, then they are a kind of propositional attitude. The question then becomes: which attitude? Davidson says “belief”, McDowell (of Mind and World) says “something neutral”. But this seems almost a labeling issue.

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59

I guess that means that the derivation of the truth-conditions is part of the meaning??
Anyway, this is at least close to what I was saying.

The meaning of the component words is part of the meaning.

I don’t object to the point that what a speaker intends to say (in respect of content) is important in understanding them and interpreting them when problems arise. But surely, we could not do without linguistic norms.
I would agree, though, that, although it is conventional to speak of the rules of language as conventions, it is misleading. I don’t have a better way of claiming that the consensus of speakers determines what the rules are. But we ought to emphasize more often that the consensus exists before we join the community (and will exist after we leave it).

What would you say about homesign?

Yes, I understood that.

Cool.

I don’t understand this distinction.

For Davidson, what you mean by your utterance is public: I can reconstruct it entirely from the public evidence. Nothing is hidden. It is not thereby shared: that I can reconstruct what you mean by your utterances does not mean that I adopt this meaning as my own. In the case of Ms. Malaprop, precisely not.

But we can’t start from scratch, either. Or, perhaps, we don’t normally need an actual process of interpretation; it’s something we call on when problems arise.

Well, we can. Theoretically, that’s the radical interpreter’s position. Less theoretically, that’s the case of homesign.

Well, many conventions are not binding. They make life easier and it suits people to save themselves trouble. I think it is not non-explanatory to explain that under certain circumstances, we shake hands when we meet some as a matter of convention, or yield the floor when the chair asks us to.

Sure, but if they’re not binding, in what sense are they driving the communication process? How do I know that they are in force in this particular interaction? Davidson’s answer is: because I interpret you to be following a convention. So the latter falls out of the interpretation process, whence it is interpretation which is explanatory prior.

60

Thanks, this is interesting. I’ve only read Mind and World. That McD thought he was differentiating himself from Davidson is clear, we both agree. Given his later emendations, I too would call the question of “which propositional attitude?” a labeling issue; do you know whether McDowell also ended up saying something of that sort?