While discussing the theory of meaning in relation to truth, it is noticed that Davidson is influenced by Quine's work on 'radical translation'. He has borrowed this idea from Quine and developed his own theory 'radical interpretation' for establishing the theory meaning holism. It was Quine who first gave the three seminal ideas, i.e., holism, indeterminacy, and charity which became central to Davidson's theory of interpretation.
It is further noticed that Quine had not worked out explicitly the interconnection between these three concepts. But Davidson has brought out the full implications of these three concepts while developed his theory of interpretation. In his theory of interpretation, he reorganized these three ideas and developed a holistic conception of interpretation in the light of the other two ideas namely; indeterminacy, and charity.
However, distinguishing himself from Quine, Davidson expresses that we do not need an epistemological bridge between language and the world because language is not a filter or a screen through which knowledge of the world must pass.3 So, according to him, theory of meaning is decided by theory of truth that envisages whether a particular proposition is meaningful or not. Therefore, each and every sentence would be judged as either true or false. While discussing the theory of meaning he incorporates the following issues. These are: theory of interpretation, theory of truth, principle of charity, and the network of belief system.
This presentation has given a detailed presentation of the exposition of the Davidsonian theory of meaning with a view to find out the semantic nature of a language, i.e., how meaning works holistically. To start with the theory that meaning functions holistically Davidson took the help from Tarski's view of T-schema where Tarski emphatically expresses that "a (finite) theory T is a truth theory for language L iff, for each sentence E of L, T entails a T-sentence of the form":
This theory is taken to be considered as extensionally adequate iff all the T-sentences it entails are true. On this account, Fodor and Lepore evoke the holistic approach to meaning advocates that for "any expression to have even reasonably deterministic content, there must be other contentful expressions that belong to the same linguistic system as it does" (Fordor and Lepore, 1992, 69).
Tarski in his truth theory says that a formal definition of the truth predicate as it applies within a language L can be given with reference to meta-language M by providing for every sentence S of L, a matching sentence in M which is translationally synonymous with S. This requirement is known as 'Convention T'. Further, to understand this notion we have to know the material adequacy condition of truth definition.
| 3 | This view is derived from the Davidsonean analysis on 'Interpretative theory', Please see Ramberg, B.T. (1984). Donald Davidson's Philosophy of Language. New York: Basil Blackwell. |
| 4 | The analysis is found in Fordor, J. and Lepore, E. (Eds.). (1992). Holism: A Shopper's Guide. Oxford: Blackwell, p.60. |