Oxford: Oxford University Press. Edited by Kirk Ludwig (
2007)
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Abstract
This book is an examination of the foundations and applications of the program of truth-theoretic
semantics for natural languages introduced in 1967 by Donald Davidson in his classic paper
“Truth and Meaning.” This is the second of two books on Donald Davidson’s central philosophical project. The first, Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005), dealt with the basic framework of Davidson’s truth-theoretic approach to providing a
meaning theory for a natural language, and then with his development of his general project in
the philosophy of language and theory of meaning by way of the analysis of the empirical
confirmation of a meaning theory for a speaker, from the stance of the radial interpreter, that is,
the interpreter who starts out without any detailed knowledge of the speakers’ meanings or
attitudes. This book turns to the development of details of Davidson’s semantic
program, specifically, the pursuit of the project of providing a compositional semantic theory for
natural languages by making strategic use of an appropriately adapted Tarski-style axiomatic
truth theory. Such a theory aims to provide a specification of the truth conditions of any
felicitous utterance of a natural language sentence which serves to interpret it, and exhibits in the
proof of the theorem that gives the truth conditions the compositional structure of the sentence
and how its truth depends on its context of utterance. The book develops the basic framework, applies it to quantifiers, proper names, indexicals, simple and complex demonstratives, quotation, adjectives and adverbs, simple tenses of state and event verbs, temporal adverbs and quantifiers, tense in sentential complements and perfect tenses, opaque contexts, especially indirect discourse and attitude sentences, non-declarative sentences, semantic structure and logical form, and discusses the relation of the framework the metaphysics of truth.