Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation: Philosophical Essays Volume 2

by Donald Davidson

Overview

Donald Davidson presents a new edition of the 1984 volume which set out his enormously influential philosophy of language. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation has been a central point of reference and a focus of controversy in the subject ever since, and its influence has extended into linguistic theory, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. This new edition features an additional essay, previously uncollected. The central question which these essays address is what it is for words to mean what they do. Davidson argues that a philosophically instructive theory of meaning should acknowledge the holistic nature of linguistic understanding, in that it should provide an interpretation of all utterances, actual and potential, of a speaker or group of speakers; and that it should not rely upon the concepts it attempts to explain, in that it should be verifiable independently of knowledge of the detailed propositional attitudes of the speaker. Among the topics covered in the essays are the relation between theories of truth and theories of meaning, translation, quotation, belief, radical interpretation, reference, metaphor, and communication.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191529832
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	09/27/2001
Series:	The Philosophical Essays of Donald Davidson (5 Volumes)
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Lexile:	1360L (what's this?)
File size:	436 KB

About the Author

Donald Davidson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Donald Davidson is Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, and educated at Harvard, completing his Ph.D. in classical philosophy after serving in the US Navy from 1942 to 1945. Before coming to Berkeley in 1981, he was Professor at Stanford, Princeton, Rockefeller, and the University of Chicago. He is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

Table of Contents

• Preface to the Second Edition
• Provenance of the Essays and Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Truth and Meaning
• 2: Truth and Meaning (1967)
• 3: True to the Facts (1969)
• 4: Semantics for Natural Languages (1970)
• 5: In Defence of Convention T (1973)
• Applications
• 7: On Saying That (1968)
• 8: Moods and Performances (1979)
• Radical Interpretation
• 10: Belief and the Basis of Meaning
• Appendix to Essay 10: Reply to Quine and Lewis (1974)
• 11: Thought and Talk (1975)
• 12: Reply to Foster (1976)
• Language and Reality
• 14: The Method of Truth in Metaphysics
• 15: Reality Without Reference (1977)
• 16: The Inscrutibility of Reference (1979)
• Limits of the Literal
• 18: Communication and Convention (1982)
• Bibliographical References, Index

Editorial Reviews

"A classic in its field."—P. F. Strawson

From the Publisher