Linguistic Luck and the Publicness of Language

Abstract

Abstract Donald Davidson wrote, famously: “That meanings are decipherable is not a matter of luck; public availability is a constitutive aspect of language” (1990, 314). Yet Davidson is also famous (or infamous) for maintaining that language possession does not require a speaker to mean by her words what others mean by them. The primary goal of this chapter is to show that these prima facie incompatible claims are in fact complementary; what explains the primacy of idiolects also explains the dispensability of luck. It is argued that the reason meanings are decipherable is not a matter of luck is that meanings can be present only if at least some of them have been deciphered; and meanings do not have to be shared by interlocutors in order to be deciphered. The key to seeing this is to understand properly the conditions Davidson lays down, especially in his writings on triangulation, for the possibility of language possession. Davidson’s account of meaning, it is argued, explains why we do not have to rely on luck in order to understand novel uses of language, such as malapropisms and neologisms. Furthermore, the claim that communication does not rely on luck, given what makes language possession possible, can be used to address the sceptical problem about meaning and rule-following Saul Kripke found in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s later writings.