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A Defense of Derangement

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Paul M. Pietroski
Paul M. Pietroski*
Affiliation:
McGill University, Montréal, QCH3A 2T7, Canada
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Extract

In a recent paper, Bar-On and Risjord (henceforth, ‘B&R’) contend that Davidson provides no good argument for his (in)famous claim that ‘there is no such thing as a language.’ And according to B&R, if Davidson had established his ‘no language’ thesis, he would thereby have provided a decisive reason for abandoning the project he has long advocated — viz., that of trying to provide theories of meaning for natural languages by providing recursive theories of truth for such languages. For he would have shown that there are no languages to provide truth (or meaning) theories of. Davidson thus seems to be in the odd position of arguing badly for a claim that would undermine his own work.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 24 , Issue 1 , March 1994 , pp. 95 - 118
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1994

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References

1 Bar-On, Dorit and Risjord, Mark ‘Is There Such a Thing as a Language,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 22 (1992) 163-90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The quotation is from Davidson, Donald ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,’ in Lepore, Ernest ed., Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1986) 433-46Google Scholar, at 446. I shall refer to the latter article as ‘Derangement.’

2 Bar-On and Risjord, 164. They discuss Ramberg, Bjorn Donald Davidson's Philosophy of Language: An Introduction (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1989)Google Scholar.

3 Bar-On and Risjord, 165-6

4 Davidson, Donald Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1984), 154Google Scholar (my emphasis)

5 Davidson, Donald ‘What is Present to the Mind,’ in Brandl, J. and Gombacz, W. eds., The Mind of Donald Davidson (Amsterdam: Rodolpi 1989), 6Google Scholar

6 Ibid. Of course, we can (in principle) reduce claims about heat to claims about molecular motion; and like Davidson, I think the semantic is irreducible to, but supervenes on the nonsemantic. But I see no reason to be concerned about notational variation even if reduction seems unlikely; though indeterminacy arguments may serve to keep us from making indefensibly fine-grained semantic distinctions. (See also note 7 below.)

7 Davidson, Inquiries, 228 and 239. Cf. Bar-On and Risjord, 166 n. 5. Of course, we can fix one way of stating the ‘physical’ facts and still correctly describe A's linguistic competence in several ways. But this is also true of molecular motion and temperatures; so ‘second order’ notational variation is no cause for ontological concern. Quine holds that indeterminacy is second order underdetermination of theory by data. (See, e.g., ‘On the Reasons for Indeterminacy of Translation’ Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970) 178-83.) But unless non-reductive supervenience is untenable, one can reject reductionism, verificationism, and the claim that semantic properties somehow ‘float free’ of the physical as Quine suggests.

8 ‘A speaks L’ can be true, without L being a thing that A speaks. But while Davidson does not reify meanings or languages, there is a more important sense in which he rejects the notion of language. B&R think that defense of (2) must rest on dubious versions of the principle of charity. But while Davidson thinks that charity and (in)determinacy are connected, I do not think his acceptance of (2) hangs on this.

9 MacKay, Alfred ‘Mr. Donnellan and Humpty Dumpty on Referring,’ The Philosophical Review 77 (1968) 197–202CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Nonstandard first meanings should not be confused with ‘standard second meanings’ — e.g., the intended (and recognized) intention of a speaker making an utterance in an ironic tone of voice.

10 Donnellan, Keith ‘Putting Humpty Dumpty Together Again,’ The Philosophical Review 77 (1968), 213CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Bar-On and Risjord, 177-8

12 Fodor, Jerry The Modularity of Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1983)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Michael Dummett, ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs: Some Comments on Davidson and Hacking,’ in Lepore, 459-76

14 Bar-On and Risjord, 187 (their emphasis and ellipsis). The quotation is from Davidson, Donald ‘The Structure and Content of Truth,’ Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990), 301CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15 The significance of this point depends on the language in question. Suppose it is fully characterized by the following theory 8: tokens of [N Tom] refer to Tom; tokens of [v runs] are satisfied by all and only things that run; verbs of the form [v[v1 … ] and [v2 … ]] are satisfied by all and only things that satisfy [vi … ] and [v2 … ]; and utterances of the form [[N … ] [v … ]] are true iff the referent of [N … ] satisfies [v … ]. Then e interprets utterances of the form [[N Tom] [v runs]], [[N Tom] [v [v runs] and [ v runs]]], etc.; and there are no other utterance forms to interpret. If we construe 8 as a fragment of a more complex language CL that has more lexical items and/ or syntactic devices, e interprets infinitely many-though not all- utterances of CL. But nothing yet follows about the correctness of such interpretations. And it is unlikely that e will be equivalent to any passing theory that an actual speaker would use, although the application of even such a simple theory requires enough ‘prior theory’ to classify acoustic strings utterances of [[N Tom] [v flies]].

16 See especially ‘Radical Interpretation’ in Inquiries, 125-39.

17 Cf. Block, Ned ‘Advertisement for a Semantics for Psychology,’ in French, et al., eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy 10 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. But I allow that passing theories can agree in their interpretations of many, but not all, of the potential utterances of (a time-slice of) a speaker. In this sense, understanding need not be an all-or-nothing matter; and we should not expect perfect overlap between the speaker and hearer's passing theories.

18 Sellars, Wilfrid ‘Meaning as Functional Classification,’ Synthese 27 (1974) 417-37Google Scholar, at 428. It is worth bearing in mind that the ‘functional role’ of a lexical item can determine, for example, its causal relationships to the environment. And Sellars explicitly allowed for ‘language entry rules.’

19 Fodor, Jerry and Lepore, Ernest Holism: A Shopper's Guide (Oxford: Blackwell 1992)Google Scholar

20 I discuss some of the general issues raised here in ‘Prima Facie Obligations, Ceteris Paribus Laws in Moral Theory,’ Ethics 103 (1993) 489-515.

21 What other propositions could they use? For discussion, see especially Davidson, ‘What is Present to the Mind.’ But see also Davidson, ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,’ in Inquiries, 183-98.

22 My thanks to Susan Dwyer and two anonymous referees for helpful comments and suggestions.