Does Davidson Argue for Compositionality?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15173/jhap.v16i3.6884Abstract
Donald Davidson is generally supposed to have offered an argument for the principle of compositionality in “Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages”. Peter Pagin, however, has argued that Davidson offers no such argument. Indeed, Pagin claims that Davidson explicitly rejects any demand that compositionality should be justified and, moreover, claims that the argument in question is unsound. I argue here that the first claim is mistaken and that the latter, though it offers a helpful corrective to the usual interpretation, does not apply to the argument Davidson actually gives. But there is a deep tension in Davidson’s work here, to which Pagin may well be responding, and it is a tension that Davidson himself cannot resolve.
Downloads
References
Antony, Louise. 1997. “Meaning and Semantic Knowledge.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society sup. vol. 71: 177–208.
Beck, Isabel L., and Margaret G. McKeown. 1996. “Conditions of Vocabulary Acquisition.” In Handbook of Reading Research, edited by R. Barr, M. L. Kamil, P. B. Mosenthal, and P. D. Pearson, II. London: Routledge.
Boolos, George. 1998. “Quotational Ambiguity.” In Logic, Logic, and Logic, edited by Richard Jeffrey, 392–405. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1959. “A Review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior.” Language 35: 26–58.
———. 1966. Cartesian Linguistics: A Chapter in the History of Rationalist Thought. New York: Harper & Row.
———. 1986. Knowledge of Language: Its Origin, Nature, and Use. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Davidson, Donald. 1967. “Truth and Meaning.” Synthese 17: 304–23. Reprinted in Davidson (1984a).
———. 1973. “Radical Interpretation.” Dialectica 27: 313–28. Reprinted in Davidson (1984a).
———. 1979. “Quotation.” Theory and Decision 11: 27–40. Reprinted in Davidson (1984a).
———. 1984a. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
———. 1984b. “Reply to Foster.” In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 171–79.
———. 1984c. “Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages.” In Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 1–15.
———. 1999. “Reply to Pagin.” In Donald Davidson. Truth, Meaning and Knowledge, 68–70.
Davies, Martin. 1987. “Tacit Knowledge and Semantic Theory: Can a Five Per Cent Difference Matter?” Mind 96: 441–62.
Evans, Gareth. 1981. “Semantic Theory and Tacit Knowledge.” In Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, 118–37. Reprinted in Evans (1985).
———. 1985. Collected Papers. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Foster, John. 1976. “Meaning and Truth-Theory.” In Truth and Meaning: Essays in Semantics, edited by Gareth Evans and John McDowell, 1–32. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Frege, Gottlob. 1984. “Compound Thoughts.” In Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy, edited by Brian McGuinness, 390–406. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Heck, Richard Kimberly. 2007. “Meaning and Truth-Conditions.” In Truth and Speech Acts: Studies in the Philosophy of Language, edited by Dirk Greimann and Geo Siegwart, 349–76. New York: Routledge. Originally published under the name “Richard G. Heck, Jr”.
———. 2025. “What Is Compositionality?” Unpublished manuscript.
Higginbotham, James. 1992. “Truth and Understanding.” Philosophical Studies 65: 3–16.
Holtzman, S., and C. Leich, eds. 1981. Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Kuhn, Melanie R., and Steven A. Stahl. 1998. “Teaching Children to Learn Word Meanings from Context: A Synthesis and Some Questions.” Journal of Literacy Research 30: 119–38.
Larson, Richard, and Gabriel Segal. 1995. Knowledge of Meaning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Lepore, Ernie, and Kirk Ludwig. 2005. Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pagin, Peter. 1999. “Radical Interpretation and Compositional Structure.” In Donald Davidson. Truth, Meaning and Knowledge, 55–68.
———. 2019. “Compositionality in Davidson’s Early Work.” Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 7: 77–89.
Quine, W. V. O. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Richard, Mark. 1986. “Quotation, Grammar, and Opacity.” Linguistics and Philosophy 9: 383–403.
Soames, Scott. 1988. “Semantics and Semantic Competence.” In Cognition and Representation, edited by S. Schiffer and S. Steele, 185–207. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
———. 1992. “Truth, Meaning, and Understanding.” Philosophical Studies 65: 17–35.
Tarski, Alfred. 1956. “The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages.” In Logic, Semantics, and Metamathematics, edited by John Corcoran, 152–278. Indianapolis: Hackett.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1961. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Wright, Crispin. 1981. “Rule-Following, Objectivity, and the Theory of Meaning.” In Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, 99–117. Reprinted in Wright (2001).
———. 1989. “Wittgenstein’s Rule-Following Considerations and the Central Project of Theoretical Linguistics.” In Reflections on Chomsky, edited by A. George, 233–64. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Reprinted in Wright (2001).
———. 1993. “Theories of Meaning and Speakers’ Knowledge.” In Realism, Meaning, and Truth, 2nd ed., 204–38. Cambridge: Blackwell.
———. 2001. Rails to Infinity: Essays on Themes from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Zadrozny, Wlodek. 1994. “From Compositional to Systematic Semantics.” Linguistics and Philosophy 17: 329–42.
Żegleń, Urszula, ed. 1999. Donald Davidson. Truth, Meaning and Knowledge. Routledge.
Published
Issue
Section
License
The Public Knowledge Project recommends the use of the Creative Commons license. The Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy requires authors to agree to a Creative Commons Attribution /Non-commercial license. Authors who publish with the Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC license.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
