Davidson's Semantic Program

Abstract

Donald Davidson did it. He did it slowly, deliberately, in more than a half dozen widely noted essays. What he did was to elaborate a program for the study of empirical semantics. Nor did he stop there. He went on to apply his program to some of the problems that have long bedeviled semantics: action sentences, indirect discourse and propositional attitudes.My goal in this paper is to assess Davidson's achievement. The first step is to assemble the program from the sketches and hints scattered among Davidson's papers. This is the project of my first section where my aim is sympathetic exposition. Since Davidson sometimes seems to be playing a game of hide and seek with his reader, my reconstruction of his program and arguments is of necessity occasionally speculative. In the second section my stance turns critical. There are anomalies in the program; the sort of theory Davidson advocates is not the sort delivered. When the problems are pushed, I think the program loses whatever initial plausibility it may have had. It is my contention that Davidson has provided no serious framework for the empirical study of natural language.