Donald Davidson Quotes on Truth
Donald Davidson’s “Truth and Meaning” (1967), “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1973), and the long sequence of papers collected in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984) gave late twentieth-century analytic philosophy of language one of its most influential research programmes around the Tarskian semantics of truth. The central project is the development of a Tarski-style truth-theoretic semantics for natural languages whose theorems for individual sentences supply the meanings those sentences have for competent speakers — under the constraint of the principle of charity that radical interpretation must maximize agreement and intelligibility — with the corresponding rejection of the scheme-content distinction that the standard relativist accounts of conceptual variation had presupposed. The framework, drawing on Tarski, Quine, and the broader analytic tradition, shaped subsequent debates over realism, objectivity, and the philosophy of language through Davidson’s many students.
Quotes
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Attributed to Donald Davidson:
“Reasons are causes.”
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“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed.”
Davidson, Donald. " A nice derangement of epitaphs ." Philosophical grounds of rationality: Intentions, categories, ends 4 (1986): 157. -
Attributed to Donald Davidson:
“Belief is by nature veridical.”
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Attributed to Donald Davidson:
“Charity is forced upon us; whether we like it or not, if we want to understand others, we must count them right in most matters.”
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“The methodological advice to interpret in a way that optimizes agreement should not be conceived as resting on a charitable assumption about human intelligence that might turn out to be false. If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything”
Donald Davidson. "Radical interpretation." Dialectica 27.3‐4 (1973): p. 324; as cited in; Herman Parret, Jacques Bouveresse (1981) Meaning and Understanding, p. 186 -
“I thought... that the fact that in characterizing truth for a language it is necessary to put words into relations with objects was enough to give some grip for the idea of correspondence; but this now seems to me a mistake. The mistake is in a way only a misnomer, but terminological infelicities have a way of breeding conceptual confusion, and so it is here. Correspondence theories have always been conceived as providing an explanation or analysis of truth, and this, a Tarski-style theory of truth, certainly does not do.”
Donald Davidson (1990, p. 135), as cited in: Simon Evnine (1991) Donald Davidson. p. 137