Quine (on translation)

Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy

According to the sceptic Saul Kripke envisages in his celebrated book on Wittgenstein on rules and private language, there are no facts about an individual that determine what she means by any given expression. If there are no such facts, the question then is, what justifies the claim that she does use expressions meaningfully? Kripke’s answer, in a nutshell, is that she by and large uses her expressions in conformity with the linguistic standards of the community she belongs to. While Kripke’s sceptical problem has gripped philosophers for over three decades, few, if any, have been satisfied by his proposed solution, and many have struggled to come up with one of their own. The purpose of this paper is to show that a more satisfactory answer to Kripke’s challenge can be developed on the basis of Donald Davidson’s writings on triangulation, the idea of two individuals interacting simultaneously with each other and the world they share. It follows from the triangulation argument that...

Can we arrive at a reasonable conception of world-bound thought without succumbing to an account of meaning and knowledge which starts with a private mental realm, and only then tries to work its way to external reality? Such is the question concerning a broadly empiricist philosophy which Donald Davidson has repeatedly invited us to contemplate. It is one thing to say that without perception, there would be no knowledge of the world and no communication. It is quite another to commit oneself to the view according to which our meanings or theories are determined or justified by something that literally happens in us. The former is, for Davidson, a " pallid " construal of empiricism (1990, 68)—indeed, so pallid is the construal that Davidson would rather drop the label " empiricism " altogether, for the platitude is something that all are expected to endorse; it cannot mark a distinctive philosophical position. The latter is the hallmark of empiricism as traditionally conceived. This view of things permeates the debate Davidson led with Quine. The debate, spanning in fact a couple of decades, leaves impressions of deep mutual misunderstanding—ever more surprising given that both protagonists knew the works of each other well. In the following reconstruction, I will present the debate from what is essentially a Davidsonian perspective—it was, after all, Davidson who sensed incongruity in Quine's system and was keen on

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2017

Acta analytica, 2022

Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy

The papers collected in this issue were solicited to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Donald Davidson’s birth. Four of them discuss the implications of Davidson’s views—in particular, his later views on triangulation—for questions that are still very much at the centre of current debates. These are, first, the question whether Saul Kripke’s doubts about meaning and rule-following can be answered without making concessions to the sceptic or to the quietist; second, the question whether a way can be found to answer Davidson’s own doubts about the continuity of non-propositional thought and language; third, the question whether normative properties can be at once causal and prescriptive; fourth, the question whether folk psychological explanations can be at once illuminating and autonomous. The fifth paper reexamines Davidson’s take on the principle of compositionality, which always was at the centre of his theorizing about language.

Philosophical Books, 1987