Quine versus Davidson : Truth, Reference, and Meaning /

Gary Kemp presents a penetrating investigation of key issues in the philosophy of language, by means of a comparative study of two great figures of late twentieth-century philosophy. So far as language and meaning are concerned, Willard Van Orman Quine and Donald Davidson are usually regarded as bir...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Kemp, Gary, 1960 October 15-
Format: eBook
Language:English
Published: Oxford : OUP Oxford, 2012.
Subjects:
Online Access:Connect to the full text of this electronic book
Table of Contents:
  • Cover; Contents; Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Introduction; I. Quine, Davidson, and the status of meaning; II. An outline of the main disputes; III. The positive side of naturalism and its consequences; 1. Facets of Naturalism; I. The roots of naturalism: Quine's response to Carnap; II. Naturalized epistemology; III. Aspects of the naturalized study of human language; IV. Indeterminacy and inscrutability; V. Naturalized ontology and ontological relativity; VI. Miscellaneous points; A. Compositionality and Chomsky; B. Naturalism and truth.
  • C. Consequences of naturalism: semantical holism, instrumentalism, realism, and objectivityD. Anomalous monism and the propositional attitudes; 2. Davidson's Semantics; I. Davidson's idea; II. Conditions on T-sentences; III. A simple illustration; IV. Radical interpretation and holism; V. The interdependence of meaning and belief, and the principle of charity; VI. Lepore and Ludwig; 3. Truth, Deflationism, and the T-schema; I. Deflationism; II. Truth-schema deflationism, other languages, and indexicality; III. The deductive and expressive inadequacy of the T-schema.
  • IV. Substantiality and deflationismV. Tarski-based deflationism; VI. Quine versus Davidson over truth; VII. Inconsistency; Appendix; 4. Quine versus Davidson on Reference; I. Davidson's response to the inscrutability of reference; II. The proximate and the distal; III. The scientiflc superiority of the proximate over the distal; IV. Semanticalism; V. Anomalous monism again; VI. GE-sentence variation; 5. Living with Naturalism; I. Is it self-refuting?; II. Quine, Davidson, science, and the swampman; III. Analyticity; IV. Normativity; V. Life with naturalism: vagueness, intuition, and language.