Davidson, Interpretation and First‐Person Constraints on Meaning¹

1 A version of this paper was first presented in 2003 to the Philosophy of Language Seminar of the Philosophy Programme in the University of London in honour of Donald Davidson. I am grateful to the audience on that occasion. I am also very grateful to Ophelia Deroy for incisive written comments and suggestions.The ideas developed here were discussed with Donald Davidson and Marcia Cavell on visits to Berkeley, These discussions were always a great source of pleasure and encouragement and I benefited greatly from them; though I never budged Davidson an inch in the direction I was recommending. I shall miss that fierce but admonishing stare Davidson would deliver when I had clearly gone too far in departing from his views. His strength of mind and the fundamental way he had of thinking about issues and seeing connections between them will be widely missed, but they will ensure his lasting impact on the subject.

Abstract

Donald Davidson’s account of meaning and mind is thought to be overly third‐personal. Its interpreter‐relative treatment of thought and language neglects the contribution that first‐personal and sub‐personal aspects of a speaker’s competence make to the significance of speech. However, Davidson’s own work contains materials that point towards a more speaker‐centred account of meaning. I shall argue that by adding experience to Davidson’s scenario of triangulation we can bridge the publicly interpretable content of a speaker’s utterances and the immediate first‐person accessibility they have to the speaker.

Keywords:

• interpretation
• meaning
• publicity first‐person knowledge
• rule‐following
• triangulation

Notes

1 A version of this paper was first presented in 2003 to the Philosophy of Language Seminar of the Philosophy Programme in the University of London in honour of Donald Davidson. I am grateful to the audience on that occasion. I am also very grateful to Ophelia Deroy for incisive written comments and suggestions.The ideas developed here were discussed with Donald Davidson and Marcia Cavell on visits to Berkeley, These discussions were always a great source of pleasure and encouragement and I benefited greatly from them; though I never budged Davidson an inch in the direction I was recommending. I shall miss that fierce but admonishing stare Davidson would deliver when I had clearly gone too far in departing from his views. His strength of mind and the fundamental way he had of thinking about issues and seeing connections between them will be widely missed, but they will ensure his lasting impact on the subject.

2 The notions of word, word meaning, singular term, predicate, etc. are just theoretical concepts used in the construction of a theory for interpreting a person’s speech (see Davidson, 1990: p. 300).

3 Despite important differences, McDowell and Dummett are at one on this point and also close to Quine and Davidson.

4 For a clear and incisive discussion of this point see Pagin, 2000.

5 However, their views about the nature of meaning lead to differences between them in where they locate the facts about meaning. For Davidson, the meanings of people’s utterances are a matter of the gloss an interpreter can put on a speaker’s linguistic behaviour. For Quine, on the other hand, meaning must be reconstructed from these behavioural materials. Quine is a behaviourist about meaning, Davidson is not (or not quite). For Davidson linguistic meaning, or rather interpretation, supervenes on behaviour.

6 We should add the qualification ‘by individuals suitably equipped to judge with whom she communicates’.

7 In the end, all Quine can reconstruct from the meagre materials of behaviour, physically described, is the notion of stimulus meaning.

8 The generalizations that explain linguistic data can only be characterized at levels of linguistic structure remote from surface form.

9 Dummett, of course, comes close in a number of places to saying that the behaviour is which meaning is manifested amounts to what it is to know the meaning of expressions. However, he also claims that speech is a conscious rational activity and that only those regularities consciously selected count as part of the language. The thought here that abilities may be cognitive abilities with ‘insides’ as well as ‘outsides’ is perhaps what Dummett is after when he talks of linguistic abilities as being more than merely practical abilities and as having an ineliminable theoretical component that guides as speaker as to which uses to make of his expressions (see Dummett, ‘Language and Truth’, in Dummett, 1993: pp. 117–46).

10 ‘If one speaker is to understand a second [this does] not suggest that the two would need to speak the same language … it does not involve shared rules or conventions’ (Davidson, 1992: p. 260).

11 See Davidson, 1982, 1992, 2001, and Glüer, 2006.

12 For convincing empirical evidence that it is only under these conditions that the infant securely attaches a meaning or a word, see the work of Dare Baldwin (1995).

13 The ideas here concerning our entitlement to knowledge of another’s meaning adapts the epistemological framework provided by Crispin Wright in his discussion of Wittgtenstein’s On Certainty, in particular the role of hinge propositions (see Wright, 1985 and 2004).