The Structure of Truth

by Donald Davidson, Cameron Kirk-Giannini (Editor), Ernie Lepore (Editor)

Donald Davidson was one of the most famous and influential philosophers of the twentieth century. The Structure of Truth presents his 1970 Locke Lectures in print for the first time. They comprise an invaluable historical document which illuminates how Davidson was thinking about the theory of meaning, the role of a truth theory therein, the ontological commitments of a truth theory, the notion of logical form, and so on, at a pivotal moment in thedevelopment of his thought. Unlike Davidson's previously published work, the lectures are written so as to be presented to an audience as a fully organized and coherent exposition of his program in the philosophy of language. Had they been widely available in the years following 1970, the reception of Davidson's workmight have been very different. Given the systematic nature of their presentation of Davidson's semantic program, these lectures will be of interest to anyone working in the philosophy of language.

Genres: Philosophy

126 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 13, 2020

About the author

Donald Davidson was one of the most important philosophers of the latter half of the twentieth century. His ideas, presented in a series of essays from the 1960's onwards, have been influential across a range of areas from semantic theory through to epistemology and ethics. Davidson's work exhibits a breadth of approach, as well as a unitary and systematic character, which is unusual within twentieth century analytic philosophy. Thus, although he acknowledged an important debt to W. V. O. Quine, Davidson's thought amalgamates influences (though these are not always explicit) from a variety of sources, including Quine, C. I. Lewis, Frank Ramsey, Immanuel Kant and the later Wittgenstein. And while often developed separately, Davidson's ideas nevertheless combine in such a way as to provide a single integrated approach to the problems of knowledge, action, language and mind. The breadth and unity of his thought, in combination with the sometimes-terse character of his prose, means that Davidson is not an easy writer to approach. Yet however demanding his work might sometimes appear, this in no way detracts from either the significance of that work or the influence it has exercised and will undoubtedly continue to exercise. Indeed, in the hands of Richard Rorty and others, and through the widespread translation of his writings, Davidson's ideas have reached an audience that extends far beyond the confines of English-speaking analytic philosophy. Of late twentieth century American philosophers, perhaps only Quine has had a similar reception and influence.

Donald Herbert Davidson was born on March 6th, 1917, in Springfield, Massachusetts, USA. He died suddenly, as a consequence of cardiac arrest following knee surgery, on Aug. 30, 2003, in Berkeley, California. Remaining both physically and philosophically active up until his death, Davidson left behind behind a number of important and unfinished projects including a major book on the nature of predication. The latter volume was published posthumously (see Davidson, 2005b), together with two additional volumes of collected essays (Davidson 2004, 2005a), under the guidance of Marcia Cavell.

Davidson completed his undergraduate study at Harvard, graduating in 1939. His early interests were in literature and classics and, as an undergraduate, Davidson was strongly influenced by A. N. Whitehead. After starting graduate work in classical philosophy (completing a Master's degree in 1941), Davidson's studies were interrupted by service with the US Navy in the Mediterranean from 1942-45. He continued work in classical philosophy after the war, graduating from Harvard in 1949 with a dissertation on Plato's ‘Philebus’ (1990b). By this time, however, the direction of Davidson's thinking had already, under Quine's influence, changed quite dramatically (the two having first met at Harvard in 1939-40) and he had begun to move away from the largely literary and historical concerns that had preoccupied him as an undergraduate towards a more strongly analytical approach.

While his first position was at Queen's College in New York, Davidson spent much of the early part of his career (1951-1967) at Stanford University. He subsequently held positions at Princeton (1967-1970), Rockefeller (1970-1976), and the University of Chicago (1976-1981). From 1981 until his death he worked at the University of California, Berkeley. Davidson was the recipient of a number of award and fellowships and was a visitor at many universities around the world. Davidson was twice married, with his second marriage, in 1984, being to Marcia Cavell.

-http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dav...

Reviews

[path · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a collection of Davidson’s 1970 John Locke Lectures, in which he attempts to show that a theory of truth is a necessary and sufficient basis for a theory of meaning (21). That theory: “what [one] knows, together with the way the world is, determines whether the truth was spoken.” To illustrate: “someone who knows English knows that: an utterance of the sentence ‘snow is white’ is an occasion when the truth is spoken if and only if snow is white. And this fact, together with the way the world is, determines whether someone who utters the sentence ‘Snow is white’ speaks the truth” (21). This notion of truth is one Davidson takes from Alfred Tarski, called Convention T.

Davidson’s goal is connect a theory of truth to a theory of meaning or rather to say that a theory of meaning must entail a theory of truth (28) that references a world that supplies the ontological conditions that “satisfy” the proposition asserted (49). The import of this work is that Davidson is offering a way to think about the meaning of sentences spoken by people who are situated in time and space and to find a way that the sense of their statements about the world are meaningful beyond the words themselves — they are meaningful in that they correspond to theory of truth that serves as foundation. This correspondence to truth (i.e., to the logical conditions that satisfy its truth) also means that the number of sentences that could potentially have corresponding meaning will be constrained by the truth conditions, limiting the variety of forms those sentences can take. That is, we will reach a limit in constructing intensional sentences (i.e., those with situated and perspectival meaning) in an object language that can still adequately correspond to the truth of the things referenced (i.e., the extension). So “Green snow is white iff snow is white” lacks that correspondence. This observation is important in that it shows how intensional statements that are related to one another are also related to a common extension that sets the conditions for truth and meaning (34, 38). In other words, the extension is not just a discrete thing in the world that is referenced but instead represents the totality of all true statements that are derived from particular expression of X is Y iff X is Y. “The snow in my yard is white” and “The snow in 2022 is white” and “The snow on Denali is white” are all meaningful in the same way because of their correspondence to “Snow is white iff snow is white” — but what makes them all true is that they derive from the same extension of a reality in which snow is white.

Some of the ideas in these lectures are a bit sketchy, so it is likely I am misinterpreting things, but I think the ideas are sketchy because they are referencing ideas that were published elsewhere or that Davidson would later develop into other publications. Lectures III, IV, and V are places where Davidson deals with complications or challenges to this notion of truth in meaning. The cases of reported speech, attitudinal modifiers, use of determiners, and adverbial modification are ways that context is inserted into statements or that the logical structure of propositions are complicated, compounded, and multiplied so that they need to be broken out to establish truth. He demonstrates through a decompositional look at these cases of natural language that they too can be broken down into simpler logical constructs that also adhere to Convention T.

There is also a fascinating lecture on translation in which Davidson admits of the possibility that there is no direct correspondence between one person’s language and another person’s. I think that this lecture is about the translation of propositions from an object language into the meta language used to assess truth, but he illustrates this problem using the case of translating between object languages. Propositions in one language (e.g., English) and another (e.g., German) may not refer to the same world in the same way; however, they are subject to the same conditions of satisfaction if the goal is to establish shared meaning. “The simple ability translate another man’s language into our does not go to the root of our ability to understand his language: only a theory of truth does that” (104). We utilize the ontology that supplies the conditions of satisfaction for establishing the truth of a statement in our language and apply that same truth conditionality the other language. Where truth holds, so does understanding of meaning and the soundness of the translation (110). If not through these means, then we are left with trial and error or observation of that person’s speech community for clues about the truth of an utterance (107). Ultimately, though, “[t]he failure to interpret another language in terms of the structure that fits ours is simply a failure to interpret the other language; it cannot be construed as evidence that the other language has a different structure” (105).

A fascinating but confusing and elliptical set of lectures that I’m sure I’m not fully understanding yet.