RESULTADOS DEL APRENDIZAJE Competencias específicas:

figure out what he intended. This is an expression again of Davidson’s view that matters of meaning must be publicly accessible.

Davidson’s study of metaphor illustrates his general thesis. (See Chapter 7,§3, for additional discussion.) He argues that metaphors achieve

their effects through their first meanings, and that we need not assign to them any additional metaphorical or nonliteral meanings to see how their effects are achieved. An author intends a metaphor, through the literal meaning of its words, to draw our attention to a comparison of things to one another. This need not be something that can be cashed out in terms of some specific claim. A rich metaphor is open-ended, and the intended ef- fects of metaphors need not be limited to conveying propositional content. “Metaphor is the dreamwork of language,” Davidson writes, “and, like all dreamwork, its interpretation reflects as much on the interpreter as on the originator.” We understand this, a marvelous illustration and expression of Davidson’s thesis, because we understand what the words in their ordinary employment mean; the full meaning (in another sense) of the metaphor is to be sought in what it encourages us to compare the metaphor to, and, like the best metaphors, the comparisons and extensions are open-ended. It also reminds us that success in metaphor is as much a matter of taste as it is of design.

12. ORGANIZATION OF THE VOLUME

This volume begins with chapters on truth and meaning and on the phi- losophy of action. The first discusses the relation between a theory of truth and the project of giving a compositional meaning theory for a natural language. The second discusses Davidson’s contributions to the philoso- phy of action. These form a background for the discussion of the nexus of Davidson’s philosophy, the project of radical interpretation, in Chapter 3. Chapter 4 takes up Davidson’s most celebrated thesis in the philosophy of mind, the thesis of anomalous monism, and his difficult argument for it. Chapter 5 discusses Davidson’s work on the semantics of action sentences, which argues for there being a commitment to an ontology of events in many of the things that we assert about ourselves and others, and Davidson’s views about the nature and individuation of events. Chapter 6 takes up Davidson’s account of the grounding of and relations between our knowledge of our own and others’ minds, and of the external world, in which reflections on radical interpretation play a central role. Chapter 7 discusses applications of Davidson’s work in the theory of action and meaning to understanding the

Introduction 33

language and intent of literature, which is part of the more general project of understanding the nonliteral use of language in light of its literal uses. Each chapter may be read independently, but earlier chapters will help to il- luminate later chapters; in particular, Chapters 1 and 2 provide background for Chapter 3, and Chapters 1–3 for all subsequent chapters.

Notes

I wish to thank Donald Davidson for reading a draft of this Introduction and cor- recting a number of mistakes. I am of course responsible for any that remain. 1. In an interview in 1993, Davidson reported that before he took these courses from

Quine he “had thought of philosophy as a form of literature, which indeed it is, but as no more open to basic questions of ‘Is this right or wrong?’ than poetry” (Bergstrom 1994, p. 223). Davidson also emphasizes the decisive influence of Quine in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Davidson 1984b), which collects many of Davidson’s papers in the philosophy of language up through 1982; it is dedicated to Quine, “without whom not.” In the Introduction, he writes:

W. V. Quine was my teacher at a crucial stage in my life. He not only started me thinking about language, but he was the first to give me the idea that there is such a thing as being right, or at least wrong, in philosophy, and that it matters which. (p. xx)

2. This is reflected, for example, in Davidson’s explanation of his methodology for illuminating concepts in “Radical Interpretation”:

I have proposed a looser relation between concepts to be illuminated and the relatively more basic. At the centre stands a formal theory, a theory of truth, which imposes a complexstructure on sentences containing the primitive notions of truth and satisfaction. The notions are given applica- tion by the form of the theory and the nature of the evidence. The result is a partially interpreted theory. (Davidson 1984b [1973], p. 137)

3. Radical interpretation differs from radical translation in several important re- spects. First, the radical interpreter aims not to formulate a translation manual, but to confirm a theory of truth for a speaker’s language under conditions that ensure that it can be used to interpret the speaker’s sentences. Second, the rad- ical interpreter focuses not, as Quine’s radical translator does, on stimulus at a speaker’s sensory surfaces as grounding the meanings of his words, but on those distal stimuli that prompt his thoughts and speech. Both of these differences reflect a difference in aim. In Word and Object, Quine’s aim is, in part, to give a scientifically respectable reconstruction of the notion of meaning; in contrast, Davidson’s aim is to understand the ordinary notion.

4. Facts about A logically supervene on facts about B iff for any B fact, there is an

A fact, such that it is logically necessary that if a fact of the latter type obtains, a

fact of the former type obtains.

5. There is, prima facie, a tension between the claim that facts about attitudes and meanings supervene on facts about behavior and the view that facts about

34 KIRK LUDWIG