Philosophical Background of Donald Davidson’s Natural Language Semantics
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Keywords

action
belief
event
externalism
interpretation
meaning
natural language
semantics
theory of truth
truth

Abstract

DOI: http://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxviii.10

The aim of the paper is to present Donald Davidson’s semantics on the background of his philosophical system. The system consists not only of the philosophy of language, which constitutes the central part of his system, but also of externalist epistemology, the philosophy of psychology, metaphysics of events, the theory of action, the theory of rationality and the philosophy of truth. The theory of interpretation based on Tarski’s theory of truth, which is the main part of Davidson’s semantics, has been gradually extended from an extensional part of natural language to performative sentences, propositional attitudes, quotations, and adverbs of actions constituting a consistent system with his philosophical views from other areas of philosophy. I argue that it is impossible to understand one area of Davidson’s philosophy without knowing the others. In the paper Davidson’s choice of Tarski’s theory of truths as theory of meaning are also justified and their connections with other areas of Davidson’s philosophy are indicated.

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