Abstract

Richard Rorty has argued that there can be neither a justification of our standards of truth and justification nor a wholesale supplanting of those standards by a radically different set of such standards. The dissertation examines whether and to what extent Donald Davidson's views on truth and translation support Rorty's position. Davidson argues that it is possible to develop a theory of truth and translation that does not depend on a realistic theory of reference and which demonstrates that the possibility of alternative conceptual schemes need not be taken seriously. Thus Davidson weakens possible attacks on Rorty's position that might claim that a viable realistic theory of reference would imply the falsity of Rorty's crucial claims or that might argue that Rorty, with neither a correspondence theory of truth nor a realistic theory of reference, is unable to avoid an extreme relativism of possible varying conceptual schemes. In addition, Davidson develops a theory of truth that does justice to certain intuitions about truth that Rorty's extreme pragmatism cannot indulge. Using Tarski's Convention T as the heart of a theory of truth and translation, Davidson shows how the notion of satisfaction can be used to explain the functioning of the truth-predicate in a natural language. Finally, the dissertation discusses the plausibility of Rorty's position in the event that Davidson's arguments fail to be convincing