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| 15160 | Davidson rejected ordinary meaning, and just used truth and reference instead |
| Full Idea: Davidson held that knowledge of truth and reference could give us a notion of meaning. He embraced Quine's rejection of analyticity, synonymy and ordinary meaning, and substituted truth and reference, when there was something genuine to capture. | |||
| From: report of Donald Davidson (Semantics for Natural Languages [1970]) by Scott Soames - Philosophy of Language 2.3 | |||
| A reaction: I always get a warm glow when anyone suggests that the concept of meaning involves the concept of truth. I largely reject Quine. Davidson made a helpful suggestion! |
| 14612 | Davidson aimed to show that language is structured by first-order logic |
| Full Idea: Davidson's program was to show the underlying structure of natural languages as that of first-order logic. | |||
| From: report of Donald Davidson (Semantics for Natural Languages [1970], 2) by J.J.C. Smart - The Tenseless Theory of Time 2 | |||
| A reaction: First order logic just reasons about a domain of objects with predicates attached to them. Language appears to refer to properties and relations as well as objects. |