Abstract

Using Donald Davidson's seminal work in semantics as my point of reference, I argue that a theory of meaning is an empirical theory of truth, which determines the meaning of a sentence by assigning it a location in the semantic structure of a language as a totality. But linguistic understanding is not captured by any one theory--it is dynamic, because it arises only through an ongoing process of theory construction and reconstruction. ;This continuous construction and modification of truth-theories is radical interpretation. To determine the meaning of an utterance, then, is to subject it to radical interpretation by incorporating it in an empirically based theory of truth which places the utterance in an evolving semantic pattern. ;Developing a semantics of interpretation--in contrast to a semantics of languages--makes it possible to frame a theory of incommensurability on which it is a diachronic phenomenon, a symptom of structural change in a language, tradition or "paradigm," rather than a synchronic relationship among such isolable structures. Radical interpretation, I argue, provides not only a model of linguistic meaning, but a model for coping with incommensurability, and as such is an essential element in the hermeneutic progression of critical, reflexive understanding