Donald Davidson : how to understand his philosophy of language in terms of the semantics-pragmatics distinction

Abstract

How could one separate the study of what words and sentences in natural languages mean from the study of the way agents use languages? What serves as a background for my interest in this thesis is the difference in opinion between two ways of approaching the study of meaning in language and the agents involved in creating this meaning. As there is no clear picture of how language helps us in sharing thoughts, there is no clear picture of what the nature of language is. My main interest seen against this background lies with one American philosopher particularly influential in the discipline of the philosophy of language in the latter half of the 20th century: Donald Davidson (1917-2003). While his legacy in truth-conditional semantics is considerable, he is also much discussed for his views on the nature of language and communication. While these two areas of the discipline are sometimes thought of separately, I will show that there are difficulties in separating so-called theories of meaning from theories of communication. Davidson argues that there is a pattern in natural languages which can be captured by a formal theory of truth. Such a formal approach to language is often thought of as standing in contrast with a study of the agents that use language for communication. While Davidson, besides his semantic concerns, particularly present in his early work, starts to worry more and more about how the agents influence what is expressed through their utterances, we are given good reasons to interpret Davidson on the background of the distinction between semantics and pragmatics. Moreover, Davidson is, at least implicitly, concerned with the difference between what words semantically mean when used in a context, and what they can be used to communicate. This is clear in several essays published in the 1980’s and 1990’s, particularly in “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs.” I will spend much time on discussing this essay as it is here that Davidson offers us the best angle from where to understand his views on the nature of communication and language. This is seen through his distinction between first meaning and dictionary meaning, and the construction of two theories to illuminate the nature of language. It is also here that he challenges his earlier views on what a theory of meaning might look like. We will also find the clearest breaking point between semantics and pragmatics in these discussions, as Davidson here minimalizes the explanatory force of a theory of meaning in favor of pragmatic approaches, though the favorability is not given in an optimistic tone. It will be particularly important to show how speaker intentions fit into this picture, especially in order to show in what ways Davidson is a Gricean. I will conclude the thesis with a promising suggestion as to how one could integrate Davidson within the relevance theoretic account of the recognition of intentions.