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  • Inquiries into truth and interpretation by Donald Davidson
  • Liang Chen
Inquiries into truth and interpretation. 2nd edn. By Donald Davidson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xxiii, 296. ISBN 0199246297. $21.95.

Since its first appearance in 1984, Davidson’s exceptional Inquiries into truth and interpretation has been the focus of controversy. This second edition features a new essay in addition to the original eighteen essays. It addresses the central question of what it is for words to mean what they do. It presents D’s most important writings on philosophy of language and covers such topics as the relation between theories of truth and theories of meaning, translation, quotation, belief, radical interpretation, reference, metaphor, and communication.

The essays as individual chapters are organized into five parts. The first part, ‘Truth and meaning’, addresses foundational issues about what a theory of semantics would have to look like in order to provide semantic interpretations for all possible linguistic expressions. A semantic theory, like the language it sets out to model, should have finite means to treat the semantic features of the potential infinity of sentences. D considers ‘truth to be the central primitive concept’ and hopes to get at meaning ‘by detailing truth’s structure’ (xvi). To this end, D recommends and defends a theory of truth in Alfred Tarski’s style. The second part, ‘Applications’, examines how a theory of truth can be applied to three related problems: quotation, indirect discourse, and mood operators. Whereas the first part is concerned with the exhaustiveness condition for a theory of semantics, the third part, ‘Radical interpretation’, deals with the verifiability condition, that is, the theory ought to be verifiable without assuming too much about what it sets out to describe. Since D denies material facts as entities for true sentences to correspond to, it is no surprise that in the fourth part, ‘Language and reality’, he argues that reference plays no role in explaining the relation between language and reality, and that what we take there to be is pretty much what there is. Part 5, ‘Limits of the literal’, talks about the limitations of semantic theories. Two provocative theses are proposed: that a metaphor has no special meaning beyond its literal meaning and that linguistic communication does not require, though it often makes use of, convention. Although there are close connections among the essays in this volume, they may be read independently.

Almost two decades after the first edition, we do not seem to be any closer to a solution to the basic questions addressed in this collection of highly stimulating papers: What is meaning? What is truth? How do we generate meaning of a sentence from that of its constituents? and so on. The intricacy of the argumentation throughout the book makes it less accessible to a general audience. A naive reader will most likely get lost here and there, unable to figure out which is D’s argument and which is his counter-argument. This, of course, will not prevent the book’s continued impact on linguistic theory, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. It will be of value to a wide audience of philosophers, linguists (in particular semantists and acquisitionists), and psychologists.

Liang Chen
University of Louisiana, Lafayette
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