3 - Radical Interpretation

Summary

You find yourself stranded on a desert island with one fellow castaway. You rapidly discover that you cannot communicate with her; indeed, it is perhaps not clear initially that she has a language. You must build your interpretation of her, as agent and speaker, from scratch. How is such radical interpretation possible? Insight into the answer to this question is apt to tell us something quite general about what it is to speak a language, and to be interpretable as a speaker – about what it is, in short, to be a linguistic being. Davidson is famous for pursuing this question by exploring the constraints on interpreting the raw data of overt behavior – constraints that we must respect if we are to count as interpreting our fellows as speakers and thinkers. He argues that in order for any interaction to be mutual interpretation, the parties must make assumptions about each other that could not turn out to be false lest their enterprise fail to be interpretation at all. In a sense, then, no interpretation is built entirely from scratch, and it is this that makes radical interpretation possible.

Davidson's exercise is “conceptual” (Davidson 1990d, p. 325). What emerges is not a manual for the field linguist, but a distinctive – and in many respects compelling – picture of language and the mind. Importantly, Davidson sees as impossible the conceptual reduction of our intentional concepts (those that we use to describe the meanings and minds of others) to the nonintentional.