Inquiries into truth and interpretation

Davidson's exceptional Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984), which set out his enormously influential philosophy of language, remains a central point of reference, and a focus of controversy, with its impact extending into linguistic theory, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. The eighteen essays in this collection address the question of what it is for words to mean what they do. Davidson covers such topics as the relation between theories of truth and theories of meaning, translation, quotation, belief, radical interpretation, reference, metaphor, and communication. This work will appeal to a wide audience of philosophers, linguists, and psychologists. – 1. Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages; – 2. Truth and Meaning; – 3. True to the Facts; – 4. Semantics for Natural Languages; – 5. In Defence of Convention T. Applications; – 6. Quotation; – 7. On Saying That; – 8. Moods and Performances. Radical Interpretation; – 9. Radical Interpretation; – 10. Belief and the Basis of Meaning; – 11. Thought and Talk; – 12. Reply to Foster. Language and Reality; – 13. On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme; – 14. The Method of Truth in Metaphysics; – 15. Reality Without Reference; – 16. The Inscrutability of Reference. Limits of the Literal; – 17. What Metaphors Mean; – 18. Communication and Convention. – Appendix to Essay 10: Belief and the Basis of Meaning (1974). M.-M. V.