I wanted to follow up on the question what Davidson's attitude would have been to Convention A, both with respect to whether it might be thought to be in conflict with the context principle and about whether it might be in conflict what he says later about indeterminacy.
Convention A places a constraint on the axioms of a truth theory that parallels the constraint that Convention T places on its theorems. The idea is to require the axioms to give reference, satisfaction, and truth conditions for object language expressing using, in an appropriate way, a metalanguage expressions which translates the object language expression. The point of this is to ensure that we actually start with axioms that express or show what the object language expressions mean, so that in giving proofs of interpretive theorems we exhibit how the primitives contribute systematically to fixing the interpretive truth conditions at each step in virtue of their meanings.
Is this in conflict with the context principle, i.e., the principle that only in the context of a sentence does a word have a meaning? I take the point of this to be that the function of a word in a language is to contribute to what we say or mean in using sentences. The point of language is to be found in the context of communication and it is the utterance of sentences that serves that point, not of words or other subsentential expressions (except insofar as these are hints as to what sentence or range of sentences might properly to the job in the circumstances--we would not want to deny that people get away with using fragments of sentences for the purposes for which sentences are designed, but this works because we know the functions of the expressions that be constructed from them). Thus, words have their point in a language in virtue of what they contribute to the sentences in which they can appear.
This is (all of these observations about the import of the context principle), I think, entirely compatible with also recognizing that we do learn words in learning a language -- together with of course a range of sentences, for learning words is to learn their systematic contributions to sentences -- and then use what we have learned to understand novel sentences, sentences we have never heard before. The point is about what it is that we learn when we learn words--their systematic contributions to sentences--and it is the fact that that is what we learn that puts us in a position in fact to understand novel sentences.
Now the idea of Convention A is to constrain the axioms of a theory so that proofs of T-sentences show how the meanings of complexes depend on the meanings of the parts. But this also exhibits how the meanings are to be understood in terms of their contributions to the meanings of the sentences they appear in. So Convention A does not conflict with the context principle. This also shows that it does not presuppose that the building block theory of language is correct, the theory according to which we first learn words independently of sentences in which they appear and then come to learn the complex expressions as we go along.
Could Davidson have accepted the constraint imposed by Convention A? I think so. In one of the quotations I displayed, he says that requiring metalanguage predicates translate object language predicates would suffice to have a theory that met Convention T (well, in the general case we need to treat every category of word). So I think that so far as the initial project goes, he would have no objection.
What about the later claim that there is indeterminacy of interpretation? Is this in conflict thinking of the aim of interpretation as being to confirm a theory that meets Convention A as opposed to Convention T? I think so. If it is compatible with thinking the theory meets Convention T, why not Convention A, which suffices for a theory to meet Convention T. How is requiring a theory meet Convention T compatible with indeterminacy? I think, in the end, it isn't, but let me describe how the story is supposed to go. Many interpretation in the end are going to be compatible with all the data (and I mean all of the relevant facts). They all capture the facts of the matter equally well. They all suffice for interpretation. They all meet Convention T. How to understand this? The various theories are like different measurement scales for, for example, temperature. 0 Centigrade and 32 Farenheit capture the same facts about the temperature, though they look different. Well, we'll see whether this really makes sense tomorrow or the next day. But that's the idea. If it works for making sense of the requirement compatibly with indeterminacy, then it should work for meeting Convention A compatibly with indeterminacy.
What about a case in which the same T-theorems are proved from different axioms? I think Davidson would be forced to say that if the theories really did meet all the constraints equally well, they would be equally interpretive, and so both sets of axioms would meet Convention A.
In "Inscrutability of Reference," Davidson seems to require only that a truth theory have true theorems to be just as good any other. I think this does not comport well with the rest of his work, and I'll say why when we get to that. But if that were the standard, I do not think we could plausibly maintain that all the theories that met it satisfied Convention A--but then the same thing, I would say, goes for Convention T in that case.
Comments