Truth and meaning: In perspective

Midwest Studies in Philosophy

Volumn 32, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 1-19

  Soames, Scott ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61049089291     PISSN: 03636550     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1475-4975.2008.00162.x     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. Scott Soames, "Truth, Meaning, and Understanding," Philosophical Studies 65 (1992): 17-35
2. and Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, vol. 2 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), chap. 12
3. Donald Davidson, "Truth and Meaning," Synthese 17 (1967): 304-23
4. reprinted in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). Citations will be to the latter
5. Donald Davidson, "Radical Interpretation," Dialectica 27 (1973): 313-28
6. reprinted in Inquiries into Truth and Meaning. Citations will be to the latter
7. Donald Davidson, "Reply to Foster," in Truth and Meaning, ed. Gareth Evans and John McDowell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 33-41
8. See chapters Parts 2-4 of Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, vol. 2
9. Noam Chomsky, Aspects of a Theory of Syntax (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1965)
10. Gilbert Harman, "Deep Structure as Logical Form," Synthese 21 (1970): 275-97
11. Alfred Tarski, "The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages," in Logic, Semantics, and Metamathematics, 2nd ed., ed. John Corcoran (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 152-78
12. and "On the Concept of Logical Consequence," in Logic, Semantics, and Metamathematics, 2nd ed., ed. John Corcoran (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 409-20
13. Davidson, "Truth and Meaning," 24, my emphasis
14. W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1960)
15. "Ontological Relativity," in Ontological Relativity and Other Essays (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 26-68
16. For discussion, see chap. 11 of Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, plus the final section of my article, "The Indeterminacy of Translation and the Inscrutability of Reference," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 29 ( 1999): 321-70
17. See Scott Soames, "What Is a Theory of Truth?" Journal of Philosophy 81 (1984): 411-29
18. and Understanding Truth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 102-07 and 238-44
19. See Donald Davidson, "Reality without Reference," Dialectica 31 (1977): 247-53
20. See Soames, "What Is a Theory of Truth?" 422-24
21. and Understanding Truth, 102-07
22. Also, Donald Davidson, "The Structure and Content of Truth" (The Dewey Lectures 1989), Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990): 279-328
23. See Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, chaps. 16 and 17 of vol. 1, chaps. 10 and 11 of vol. 2
24. J. A. Foster, "Meaning and Truth Theory," in Truth and Meaning, ed. Gareth Evans and John McDowell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 1-32
25. Here, and throughout, I put aside complications caused by indexicals
26. Davidson, "Reply to Foster," 36-37
27. See Soames, "Truth, Meaning, and Understanding."
28. This point should not be obscured by the fact that Davidson did not, in his reply to Foster, explicitly involve the notion of a translational truth theory. Instead, he invoked the idea of a truth theory that is known to satisfy a set of controversial constraints about what meaning and interpretation are, and what it is to verify theories of such. Unless satisfaction of these constraints guarantees translationality (which it would seem it does not), knowing that they are satisfied will not be sufficient to interpret sentences, and Davidson will not have an answer to Foster
29. Richard Larson and Gabriel Segal, Knowledge of Meaning (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995)
30. James Higginbotham, "Truth and Understanding," Philosophical Studies 65 (1992): 3-16
31. reprinted in Mark Richard, ed., Meaning (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Citations are to the reprinted version
32. T; (ii) it is required, and hence necessary, that one who understands the sentences and other expressions of L (with the meanings they actually have) knows (i)
33. Thanks to William Dunaway for discussion of points in the previous paragraph
34. See Mark Richard, "Deflating Truth," Philosophical Issues 8 (1997): 57-78 for a defense of the philosophical coherence (if not correctness) of such nonfactualists. My response is found on pp. 88-93 of that volume
35. For further discussion, see Scott Soames, "Understanding Deflationism," Philosophical Perspectives 17 (2003): 369-83
36. Donald Davidson, "On Saying That," Synthese 19 (1968-69): 130-46
37. Richard Larson and Peter Ludlow, "Interpreted Logical Forms," Synthese 95 (1993): 305-56
38. Elsewhere, I have made suggestions about how to extract empirically testable claims from such theorems, and hence come to a judgment about their truth or falsity. See Scott Soames, Beyond Rigidity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 147-59
39. and "Truth and Meaning: The Role of Truth in the Semantics of Propositional Attitude Ascriptions," in Proceedings of the 7th International Colloquium on Cognitive Science, ed. Kepa Korta and Jesus M. Larrazabal (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003), 21-44
40. Larson and Ludlow appear to adopt a version of the psycholinguistic justification discussed earlier
41. The best recent attempt to do this that I know of is the illuminating discussion in Jeffrey C. King's The Nature and Structure of Content (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)
42. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922)
43. For a brief discussion of Wittgenstein's theory of propositions (interpreted sentences), see pp. 215-16 of vol. 1 of my Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century