Davidson's objection to Horwich's minimalism about truth

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 101, Issue 8, 2004, Pages 429-437

  Ludwig, Kirk ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA   (United States)

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EID: 60950029948     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil2004101827     Document Type: Article

References (10)

1. "Davidson on Deflationism," in Urszula Zeglen, ed., Donald Davidson: Truth, Meaning and Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 20-24;
2. and Truth, 2nd edition (New York: Oxford, 1998).
3. Truth, p. 133.
4. In this case, we can replace 'is true in L iff' with 'means in L that', thus preserving truth - see Davidson, "Semantics for Natural Languages," in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (New York: Oxford, 2001), pp. 55-64, here p. 60.
5. There is no attempt here to articulate a conception of "truth condition" that guarantees the satisfaction of Convention T. For further discussion and defense, see Kirk Ludwig, "What Is the Role of a Truth Theory in a Meaning Theory?" in David Shier, Joseph Keim Campbell, and Michael O'Rourke, eds., Meaning and Truth: Investigations in Philosophical Semantics (New York: Seven Bridges, 2002), pp. 142-63. Although I will not follow out the point here, reflection on this also shows that truth-theoretic semantics does not, as Horwich believes, carry any commitment to the concept of truth being more basic than, or at least as basic as, the concept of meaning. This is something that Davidson holds. But it is not a consequence of his conception of truth-theoretic semantics. It is an independent commitment.
6. "Davidson on Deflationism," p. 24.
7. That Davidson's own view looks to provide a response to the objection has been noted by Julian Dodd, "On a Davidsonian Objection to Minimalism," Analysis, LVII, 4 (October 1997): 267-72. Dodd amends Davidson's paratactic account of indirect discourse to involve demonstrative reference to propositions, and adapts it to 'the proposition that p'; the present discussion extends the response by showing how to detach it from Davidson's controversial paratactic analysis.
8. For example, one of the well-known difficulties with this is that there is no guarantee that an utterance of (2) is true in the same circumstances as an utterance of (1) because nothing constrains the speaker in (2) to refer to the following utterance, or to be speaking English when he utters it. For a review of difficulties, see Ludwig and Greg Ray, "Semantics for Opaque Contexts," Philosophical Perspectives, XII (1998): 141-66.
9. Ludwig, "What Is the Role of a Truth Theory in a Meaning Theory?"
10. Once we take into account context sensitivity in natural languages, other complications begin to emerge. In the case of a sentence containing a demonstrative, 'that is brown', for example, it is possible for a token utterance of (T) to be false, since the speaker could use 'that' to refer to different things on the left and right-hand sides of the biconditional. Similar difficulties arise with tense. Consider: the proposition that I am standing is true if and only if I am standing. Arguably, the time indexed in the first utterance of 'I am standing' and in the second utterance of it are different. I can say, without contradiction: I am standing now, but I am not standing now. (As Jaakko Hintikka has pointed out, even the context insensitive disquotational schema is problematic for instances such as 'The proposition that any man is mortal is true if and only if any man is mortal' since the second occurrence of 'any', because of how it is embedded, receives an existential reading. See his "A Counterexample to Tarski-type Truth-definitions as Applied to Natural Languages," Philosophia, V (July 1975): 207-12.) It may be possible to handle these difficulties compatibly with the leading idea of minimalism, but I will not pursue either the problem or possible solutions here. My present interest is in the adequacy of Davidson's objection to minimalism. That objection focuses on the problem of giving a compositional account of 'the proposition that p' that is consistent with the use to which Horwich wants to put the schema (T) in explaining minimalism.