Donald Davidson Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality

by Lepore, Ernest; Ludwig, Kirk

• ISBN13: 9780199204328
• ISBN10: 0199204322
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-03-29
• Publisher: Clarendon Press

Summary

Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig present the definitive critical exposition of the philosophical system of Donald Davidson (1917-2003). Davidson's ideas had a deep and broad influence in the central areas of philosophy; he presented them in brilliant essays over four decades, but never set out explicitly the overarching scheme in which they all have their place. Lepore's and Ludwig's book will therefore be the key work, besides Davidson's own, for understanding one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century.

Table of Contents

Detailed Table of Contents	p. xiii
Note on In-Text Citations	p. xviii
Introduction	p. 1
Historical Introduction to Truth-Theoretic Semantics	p. 19
Learnable Languages and the Compositionality Requirement	p. 25
The Form of a Meaning Theory and Difficulties for Traditional Approaches	p. 38
The Introduction of a Truth Theory as the Vehicle of a Meaning Theory	p. 63
A Closed Form Recursive Definition of 'true[subscript 0]'	p. 76
Truth and Context Sensitivity	p. 78
Formulating a Truth Theory for Natural Languages which Predicates Truth of Utterances of Sentences	p. 88
Davidson's Extensionalist Proposal	p. 92
The Extensionality and Determination Problems	p. 101
Foster's Objection	p. 113
Relation to an Explicit Meaning Theory and to Semantic Competence	p. 119
The Problem of Semantic Defects in Natural Languages	p. 125
	p. 143
Radical Interpretation	p. 147
Clarifying the Project	p. 151
The Procedure of the Radical Interpreter	p. 174
The Justification of the Principle of Charity	p. 198
The Theory of Agency and Additional Constraints	p. 209
Indeterminacy	p. 221
Development of a Unified Theory of Meaning and Action	p. 248
The Reality of Language	p. 263
	p. 298
Metaphysics and Epistemology	p. 301
The Impossibility of Alternative Conceptual Schemes	p. 305
Externalism and the Impossibility of Massive Error	p. 322
First Person Authority	p. 343
Inscrutability of Reference	p. 373
Language, Thought, and World	p. 387
	p. 420
Bibliography	p. 425
Index	p. 435
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.