Donald Davidson's philosophy of language - Bjrn T Ramberg

This book is an introduction to and interpretation of thephilosophy of language devised by Donald Davidson over the past 25years. The guiding intuition is that Davidson's work is bestunderstood as an ongoing attempt to purge semantics of theoreticalreifications. Seen in this light the recent attack on the notion oflanguage itself emerges as a natural development of his Quinianscepticism towards "meanings" and his rejections of reference-basedsemantic theories.

Linguistic understanding is, for Davidson, essentially dynamic,arising only through a continuous process of theory constructionand reconstruction. The result is a conception of semantics inwhich the notion of interpretation and not the notion of knowing alanguage is fundamental.

In the course of his book Bjorn Ramberg provides a criticaldiscussion of reference-based semantic theories, challenging thestandard accounts of the principle of charity and elucidating thenotion of radical interpretation. The final chapter onincommensurability ties in with the discussions of Kuhn's work inthe philosophy of science and suggests certain links betweenDavidson's analytic semantics and hermeneutic theory.