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A nice derangement of epitaphs: some comments on Davidson and Hacking

In Ernest LePore (ed.), Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Cambridge: Blackwell (1986)

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  1. Semantic normativity.Åsa Maria Wikforss - 2001 - Philosophical Studies 102 (2):203-26.
    My paper examines the popular idea, defended by Kripke, that meaning is an essentially normative notion. I consider four common versions of this idea and suggest that none of them can be supported, either because the alleged normativity has nothing to do with normativity or because it cannot plausibly be said that meaning is normative in the sense suggested. I argue that contrary to received opinion, we don’t need normativity to secure the possibility of meaning. I conclude by considering the (...)
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  • Overhearing uninterpreted sound: challenges in Davidsonian interpretation.Vladimir Lazurca - 2023 - In Ana Maria Haddad Baptista, Ciprian Vălcan & Márcia Fusaro (eds.), Education and Research Topics. Tesseractum. pp. 312-326.
    This paper develops a counterexample to Davidson’s elaborate model of conventionless communication, first articulated in his (1986) and defended in his (1994a). The first part contains an analysis of the model and its assumptions. Then, in a second part, I present a case focused around the concept of overhearing. It subtracts active interaction from the model and reveals that, under these novel conditions, communication makes further demands on it, namely conformity of the prior interpretive theory of all but one of (...)
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  • Nonsense Made Intelligible.Hans-Johann Glock - 2015 - Erkenntnis 80 (1):111-136.
    My topic is the relation between nonsense and intelligibility, and the contrast between nonsense and falsehood which played a pivotal role in the rise of analytic philosophy . I shall pursue three lines of inquiry. First I shall briefly consider the positive case, namely linguistic understanding . Secondly, I shall consider the negative case—different breakdowns of understanding and connected forms of failure to make sense . Third, I shall criticize three important misconceptions of nonsense and unintelligibility: the austere conception of (...)
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  • That's not what you said! Semantic constraints on literal speech.Sarah A. Fisher - forthcoming - Mind and Language.
    According to some philosophers, a sentence's semantics can fail to constitute a complete propositional content, imposing mere constraints on such a content. Recently, Daniel Harris has begun developing a formal constraint semantics. He claims that the semantic values of sentences constrain what speakers can literally say with them—and what hearers can know about what was said. However, that claim is undermined by his conception of semantics as the study of a psychological module. I argue instead that semantic constraints should be (...)
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  • Linguistic Mistakes.Indrek Reiland - 2023 - Erkenntnis 88 (5):2191-2206.
    Ever since the publication of Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, there’s been a raging debate in philosophy of language over whether meaning and thought are, in some sense, normative. Most participants in the normativity wars seem to agree that some uses of meaningful expressions are semantically correct while disagreeing over whether this entails anything normative. But what is it to say that a use of an expression is semantically correct? On the so-called orthodox construal, it is to say (...)
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  • The limit of charity and agreement.Chuang Ye - 2008 - Frontiers of Philosophy in China 3 (1):99-122.
    Radical interpretation is used by Davison in his linguistic theory not only as an interesting thought experiment but also a general pattern that is believed to be able to give an essential and general account of linguistic interpretation. If the principle of charity is absolutely necessary to radical interpretation, it becomes, in this sense, a general methodological principle. However, radical interpretation is a local pattern that is proper only for exploring certain interpretation in a specific case, and consequently the principle (...)
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  • Knowledge, the concept know, and the word know: considerations from polysemy and pragmatics.Rachel Dudley & Christopher Vogel - 2023 - Synthese 203 (1):1-46.
    A recent focus on philosophical methodology has reinvigorated ordinary language philosophy with the contention that philosophical inquiry is better served by attending to the ordinary use of language. Taking cues from findings in the social sciences that deploy methods utilizing language, various ordinary language philosophers embrace a guiding mandate: that ordinary language usage is more reflective of our linguistic and conceptual competencies than standard philosophical methods. We analyze two hypotheses that are implicit in the research from which ordinary language approaches (...)
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  • A Deranged Argument Against Public Languages.Robert J. Stainton - 2016 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (1):6-32.
    Are there really such things as public languages? Are things like English and Urdu mere myths? I urge that, despite an intriguing line of thought which may be extracted from Davidson’s ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’, philosophers are right to countenance such things in their final ontology. The argument rebutted, which I concede may not have been one which Davidson himself ultimately embraced, is that knowledge of a public language is neither necessary nor sufficient for successful conversational interaction, so that (...)
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  • The Unavoidable Guidance in Language.Steven G. Smith - 2020 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 28 (1):18-35.
    Considering the profoundly collaborative nature of human communication, the notion of guidance needs more careful consideration and foregrounding in the philosophy of language. The practically cruc...
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  • Language and Know-How.David Simpson - 2010 - Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9 (4):629–643.
    I address the assumption that communicative interaction is made possible by knowledge of a language. I argue that this assumption as it is usually expressed depends on an unjustified reification of language, and on an unsatisfactory understanding of ‘knowledge’. I propose instead that communicative interaction is made possible by (Rylean) know-how and by the development of (Davidsonian) passing theories. We then come to see that our focus ought to be, not on propositional knowledge of a language which we internally represent, (...)
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  • Interpretation and Skill.David Simpson - 1998 - ProtoSociology 11:93-109.
    In this paper I argue that Donald Davidson's rejection of the notion of language, as commonly understood in philosophy and linguistics, is justified. However, I argue that his position needs to be supplemented by an account of the development and nurture of pre-linguistic communicative skills. Davidson argues (in ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs' and elsewhere) that knowledge of a language (conceived of as a set of rules or conventions) is neither sufficient nor necessary for 'linguistic' communication. The strongest argument against (...)
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  • Conventions and Failure of Communication.Eisuke Sakakibara - 2010 - Kagaku Tetsugaku 43 (1):1-14.
    D. Davidson argued that shared conventions learned in advance are not essential for the success of communication. In this paper, holding the validity of his contention in suspense, I argue that linguistic conventions play essential roles when communication fails. In everyday communication, when discrepancies are detected between what the speaker intended to inform the hearer and what the hearer actually understood, it becomes necessary to determine whether the speaker or the hearer caused the communication failure. For in everyday communication, the (...)
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  • Conventional Wisdom.Patrick Rysiew - 2000 - Analysis 60 (1):74-83.
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  • Metaphors and Malapropisms: Davidson on the Limits of the Literal.Ehud Rahat - 1992 - Philosophia 21 (3-4):311-327.
  • Reply to Humphreys, Quinlan, Higginbotham, Schiffer and Soames's comments on Peacocke's Explanation in Computational Psychology.Christopher Peacocke - 1986 - Mind and Language 1 (4):388-402.
  • Your word against mine: the power of uptake.Lucy McDonald - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):3505-3526.
    Uptake is typically understood as the hearer’s recognition of the speaker’s communicative intention. According to one theory of uptake, the hearer’s role is merely as a ratifier. The speaker, by expressing a particular communicative intention, predetermines what kind of illocutionary act she might perform. Her hearer can then render this act a success or a failure. Thus the hearer has no power over which act could be performed, but she does have some power over whether it is performed. Call this (...)
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  • Utterance Interpretation and Actual Intentions.Palle Leth - 2019 - Axiomathes 31 (3):1-20.
    In this paper I argue, from the consideration of what I hope is the complete variety of a hearer’s approaches to a speaker’s utterance, that the speaker’s intention does not settle the meaning of her utterance and the hearer does not take a genuine interest in the speaker’s actual intention. The reason why the speaker’s intention does not settle utterance meaning is simply that no utterance meaning determination, as presupposed by intentionalists and anti-intentionalists alike, takes place. Moreover, in the regular (...)
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  • Utterance Interpretation and Actual Intentions.Palle Leth - 2021 - Axiomathes 31 (3):279-298.
    In this paper I argue, from the consideration of what I hope is the complete variety of a hearer’s approaches to a speaker’s utterance, that the speaker’s intention does not settle the meaning of her utterance and the hearer does not take a genuine interest in the speaker’s actual intention. The reason why the speaker’s intention does not settle utterance meaning is simply that no utterance meaning determination, as presupposed by intentionalists and anti-intentionalists alike, takes place. Moreover, in the regular (...)
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  • Semantic externalism, language variation, and sociolinguistic accommodation.Daniel Lassiter - 2008 - Mind and Language 23 (5):607-633.
    Abstract: Chomsky (1986) has claimed that the prima facie incompatibility between descriptive linguistics and semantic externalism proves that an externalist semantics is impossible. Although it is true that a strong form of externalism does not cohere with descriptive linguistics, sociolinguistic theory can unify the two approaches. The resulting two-level theory reconciles descriptivism, mentalism, and externalism by construing community languages as a function of social identification. This approach allows a fresh look at names and definite descriptions while also responding to Chomsky's (...)
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  • Language Learning in Wittgenstein and Davidson.Ben Kotzee - 2013 - Studies in Philosophy and Education 33 (4):413-431.
    In this paper, I discuss language learning in Wittgenstein and Davidson. Starting from a remark by Bakhurst, I hold that both Wittgenstein and Davidson’s philosophies of language contain responses to the problem of language learning, albeit of a different form. Following Williams, I hold that the concept of language learning can explain Wittgenstein’s approach to the normativity of meaning in the Philosophical Investigations. Turning to Davidson, I hold that language learning can, equally, explain Davidson’s theory of triangulation. I sketch an (...)
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  • Davidson’s Wittgenstein.Ali Hossein Khani - 2020 - Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 8 (5):1-26.
    Although the later Wittgenstein appears as one of the most influential figures in Davidson’s later works on meaning, it is not, for the most part, clear how Davidson interprets and employs Wittgenstein’s ideas. In this paper, I will argue that Davidson’s later works on meaning can be seen as mainly a manifestation of his attempt to accommodate the later Wittgenstein’s basic ideas about meaning and understanding, especially the requirement of drawing the seems right/is right distinction and the way this requirement (...)
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  • Conceptual engineering and the implementation problem.Sigurd Jorem - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (1-2):186-211.
    Conceptual engineers seek to revise or replace the devices we use to speak and think. If this amounts to an effort to change what natural language expressions mean, conceptual engineers will have a hard time. It is largely unfeasible to change the meaning of e.g. ‘cause’ in English. Conceptual engineers may therefore seem unable to make the changes they aim to make. This is what I call ‘the implementation problem’. In this paper, I argue that the implementation problem dissolves if (...)
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  • Islam and Science: The Philosophical Grounds for a Genuine Debate.Ali Hossein Khani - 2020 - Zygon 55 (4):1011-1040.
    What does it take for Islam and science to engage in a genuine conversation with each other? This essay is an attempt to answer this question by clarifying the conditions which make having such a conversation possible and plausible. I will first distinguish between three notions of conversation: the trivial conversation (which requires sharing a common language and the meaning of its ordinary expressions), superficial conversation (in which although the language is shared, the communicators fail to share the meaning of (...)
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  • Elucidations of meaning.James Higginbotham - 1989 - Linguistics and Philosophy 12 (4):465 - 517.
  • Is a science of language possible? The Derrida‐Searle debate.Alan G. Gross - 1994 - Social Epistemology 8 (4):345 – 359.
  • Davidson's Derangement: Of the Conceptual Priority of Language.Karen Green - 2001 - Dialectica 55 (3):239-258.
    Davidson has argued that the phenomenon of malapropism shows that languages thought of as social entities cannot be prior in the account of communication. This may be taken to imply that Dummett's belief, that language is prior in the account of thought, cannot be retained. This paper criticises the argument that takes Davidson from malapropism to the denial of the priority of language in the account of communication. It argues, against Davidson, that the distinction between word meaning and what speakers (...)
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  • Quine on Shared Language and Linguistic Communities.Matej Drobňák - 2018 - Philosophia 46 (1):83-99.
    In this paper, I discuss Quine’s views on language sharing and linguistic communities. It is sometimes explicitly and often implicitly taken for granted that Quine believes that speakers can form communities in which they share a language. The aim of the paper is to show that this is a misinterpretation and, on the contrary, Quine is closer to linguistic individualism – the view according to which there is no guarantee that speakers within a community share a language and the notion (...)
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  • Is Davidson a Gricean?John Cook - 2009 - Dialogue 48 (3):557-575.
    RÉSUMÉ : Dans son récent recueil d’articles Language, Truth and History, Donald Davidson semble pencher en faveur d’une philosophie du langage mettant l’accent sur la notion de l’intention communicative du sujet parlant; en quoi il se rapproche du point de vue de Paul Grice. Si cela est juste, la pensée de Davidson se serait dégagée de l’approche sémantique formelle qu’il soutenait dans ses Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Dans cet article, je soutiens que, bien qu’il y ait beaucoup de similitudes (...)
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  • The limit of charity and agreement.Y. E. Chuang - 2008 - Frontiers of Philosophy in China 3 (1):99-122.
    Radical interpretation is used by Davison in his linguistic theory not only as an interesting thought experiment but also a general pattern that is believed to be able to give an essential and general account of linguistic interpretation. If the principle of charity is absolutely necessary to radical interpretation, it becomes, in this sense, a general methodological principle. However, radical interpretation is a local pattern that is proper only for exploring certain interpretation in a specific case, and consequently the principle (...)
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  • Replies to Commentators.Christopher Peacocke - 1986 - Mind and Language 1 (4):388-402.
  • Idiolects and Language.Daniele Chiffi - 2012 - Axiomathes 22 (4):417-432.
    The present paper is intended to analyse from a theoretical point of view the relationships between natural language and idiolects in the context of communication by means of the Davidson–Dummett controversy on the nature of language. I will explore from a pragmatic point of view the reliability of an alternative position inspired by the recent literalism/contextualism debate in philosophy of language in order to overcome some limitations of Dummett’s and Davidson’s perspectives on language, idiolects and communication.
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  • Conventions and Their Role in Language.M. J. Cain - 2013 - Philosophia 41 (1):137-158.
    Two of the most fundamental questions about language are these: what are languages?; and, what is it to know a given language? Many philosophers who have reflected on these questions have presented answers that attribute a central role to conventions. In one of its boldest forms such a view runs as follows. Languages are either social entities constituted by networks of social conventions or abstract objects where when a particular community speaks a given language they do so in virtue of (...)
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  • On Davidson Against Language as Conventional.Mayank Bora - 2023 - Journal of the Indian Council of Philosophical Research 40 (3):287-304.
    Davidson (in: LePore (ed), pp 433–46, 1986) uses the existence of malapropisms to motivate a model of linguistic communication where communication succeeds between conversational partners without their having to rely on conventional meanings. Davidson uses this model to then claim that there is no such thing as a conventional language shared by a linguistic community which must be known in advance for linguistic communication to succeed. However, for many cases, Davidson relies on there being standard lines of interpretation for communication (...)
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  • Is there room for reference borrowing in Donnellan’s historical explanation theory?Andrea Bianchi & Alessandro Bonanini - 2014 - Linguistics and Philosophy 37 (3):175-203.
    Famously, both Saul Kripke and Keith Donnellan opposed description theories and insisted on the role of history in determining the reference of a proper name token. No wonder, then, that their views on proper names have often been assimilated. By focusing on reference borrowing—an alleged phenomenon that Kripke takes to be fundamental—we argue that they should not be. In particular, we claim that according to Donnellan a proper name token never borrows its reference from preceding tokens which it is historically (...)
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  • Deranging the Mental Lexicon.Endre Begby - 2016 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (1):33-55.
    This paper offers a defense of Davidson’s conclusion in ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’, focusing on the psychology and epistemology of language. Drawing on empirical studies in language acquisition and sociolinguistics, I problematize the traditional idealizing assumption that a person’s mental lexicon consists of two distinct parts—a dictionary, comprising her knowledge of word meanings proper, and an encyclopedia, comprising her wider knowledge of worldly affairs. I argue that the breakdown of the dictionary–encyclopedia distinction can be given a cognitive and functional (...)
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  • Anti-realism and speaker knowledge.Dorit Bar-On - 1996 - Synthese 106 (2):139 - 166.
    Dummettian anti-realism repudiates the realist's notion of verification-transcendent truth. Perhaps the most crucial element in the Dummettian attack on realist truth is the critique of so-called realist semantics, which assigns verification-transcendent truth-conditions as the meanings of (some) sentences. The Dummettian critique charges that realist semantics cannot serve as an adequate theory of meaning for a natural language, and that, consequently, the realist conception of truth must be rejected as well. In arguing for this, Dummett and his followers have appealed to (...)
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  • Coordination, Triangulation, and Language Use.Josh Armstrong - 2016 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 59 (1):80-112.
    In this paper, I explore two contrasting conceptions of the social character of language. The first takes language to be grounded in social convention. The second, famously developed by Donald Davidson, takes language to be grounded in a social relation called triangulation. I aim both to clarify and to evaluate these two conceptions of language. First, I propose that Davidson’s triangulation-based story can be understood as the result of relaxing core features of conventionalism pertaining to both common-interest and diachronic stability—specifically, (...)
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  • The normativity of meaning and content.Kathrin Glüer, Asa Wikforss & Marianna Bergamaschi Ganapini - 2022 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    Normativism in the theory of meaning and content is the view that linguistic meaning and/or intentional content are essentially normative. As both normativity and its essentiality to meaning/content can be interpreted in a number of different ways, there is now a whole family of views laying claim to the slogan “meaning/content is normative”. In this essay, we discuss a number of central normativist theses, and we begin by identifying different versions of meaning normativism, presenting the arguments that have been put (...)
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  • Idiolects.Alex Barber - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    An idiolect, if there is such a thing, is a language that can be characterised exhaustively in terms of intrinsic properties of some single person at a time, a person whose idiolect it is at that time. The force of ‘intrinsic’ is that the characterisation ought not to turn on features of the person's wider linguistic community. Some think that this notion of an idiolect is unstable, and instead use ‘idiolect’ to describe a person's incomplete or erroneous grasp of their (...)
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  • Interpreting Mrs Malaprop: Davidson and communication without conventions.Imogen Smith - unknown
    Inspired by my reading of the conclusions of Plato’s Cratylus, in which I suggest that Socrates endorses the claim that speaker’s intentions determine meaning of their utterances, this thesis investigates a modern parallel. Drawing on observations that people who produce an utterances that do not accord with the conventions of their linguistic community can often nevertheless communicate successfully, Donald Davidson concludes that it is the legitimate intentions of speakers to be interpreted in a particular way that determine the meanings of (...)
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  • Understanding the Social Constitution of the Human Individual.Jo-Jo Koo - 2011 - Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh
  • Idiolect and context.Carlo Penco - 2007 - In L. E. Hahn (ed.), Library of Living Philosphers: the Philosophy of Michael Dummett. Open Court.
    In this paper I will compare some of Dummett and Davidson’s claims on the problem of communication and idiolects: how can we understand each other if we use different idiolects? First I define the problem, giving the alternative theses of (I) the priority of language over idiolects and (II) the priority of idiolects over language. I then present Dummett's claims supporting (I) and Davidson's claims supporting (II).
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  • The reality of language.Ernest Lepore - manuscript
    I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered or born with. (Davidson, 1986, p. 446).
     
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  • El giro pragmático de Habermas. Tres momentos de su aleación de las concepciones del lenguaje de la hermenéutica y la analítica.Francisco Javier Gil Martin - 2003 - Azafea: Revista de Filosofia 5 (1).
    Al menos en tres ocasiones Habermas ha perfilado su concepción comunicativa del lenguaje mediante una contraposición con concepciones del lenguaje asociadas con las tradiciones analítica y hermenéutica. Esas exposiciones coinciden en el tiempo con sendas aclaraciones del instrumental conceptual de la pragmática formal y contienen variaciones que indican a las claras algunos de los más importantes reajustes de dicha teoría. El artículo recupera y contextualiza los enclaves textuales de tales perfiladuras conceptuales y los marcos teóricos de la pragmática formal alzaprimados (...)
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