Truth & Predication [Paperback]

Donald Davidson (Author), Kevin Sharpe (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 31, 2005

This brief book takes readers to the very heart of what it is that philosophy can do well. Completed shortly before Donald Davidson's death at 85, Truth and Predication brings full circle a journey moving from the insights of Plato and Aristotle to the problems of contemporary philosophy. In particular, Davidson, countering many of his contemporaries, argues that the concept of truth is not ambiguous, and that we need an effective theory of truth in order to live well.

Davidson begins by harking back to an early interest in the classics, and an even earlier engagement with the workings of grammar; in the pleasures of diagramming sentences in grade school, he locates his first glimpse into the mechanics of how we conduct the most important activities in our life--such as declaring love, asking directions, issuing orders, and telling stories. Davidson connects these essential questions with the most basic and yet hard to understand mysteries of language use--how we connect noun to verb. This is a problem that Plato and Aristotle wrestled with, and Davidson draws on their thinking to show how an understanding of linguistic behavior is critical to the formulating of a workable concept of truth.

Anchored in classical philosophy, Truth and Predication nonetheless makes telling use of the work of a great number of modern philosophers from Tarski and Dewey to Quine and Rorty. Representing the very best of Western thought, it reopens the most difficult and pressing of ancient philosophical problems, and reveals them to be very much of our day.

(20050930)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Donald Davidson's book is a fitting conclusion to his oeuvre. It achieves what is perhaps its main objective in demonstrating the centrality of the concept of truth in the field of the philosophy of language. More, it develops and unifies many of the author's favourite themes and does so with energy and grace. It is not uncontentious; and it would be less interesting if it were. It makes us the more aware of the loss of one of the most powerful and influential figures of our time. (P. F. Strawson Times Literary Supplement )

Overall, Donald Davidson's book is a fitting conclusion to his oeuvre. It achieves what is perhaps its main objective in demonstrating the centrality of the concept of truth in the field of the philosophy of language. More, it develops and unifies many of the author's favourite themes and does so with energy and grace...It makes us the more aware of the loss of one of the most powerful and influential figures of our time. (P.F. Strawson Philosophy )

When Donald Davidson died unexpectedly on August 30, 2003, the English-speaking world lost one of its most influential philosophers, one who had dominated debates about meaning, mind, and language for 40 years...[Truth and Predication] contains important new ideas, confirming that Davidson's thought was still as fertile, subtle and provocative as ever. (E. J. Lowe Times Higher Education Supplement )

Review

Davidson was a distinguished philosopher, and the first three chapters of this book constitute his principal statement about the concept of truth. I consider it one of the most important philosophical writings about truth of its time. The remaining chapters give Davidson's view about a very ancient philosophical problem about predication, often called the "unity of the proposition". It may be that no one can say anything really definitive about the issue, but Davidson is far more sensitive to the issues involved than most of those who have written on the subject at all recently. They should serve to raise the consciousness of contemporary philosophers of language. (Charles Parsons, Professor of Philosophy, Harvard University 20060407)

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Belknap Press (May 31, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674015258
• ISBN-13: 978-0674015258
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 1.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,043,532 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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18 of 81 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Disappointed, September 28, 2005

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This review is from: Truth & Predication (Paperback)

Davidson is trying to solve the age-old problem of the "unity of the proposition". The proposition SOCRATES HITS PLATO is different from the heap SOCRATES, THE RELATION OF HITTING, PLATO. This corresponds to the semantic fact that "Socrates hits Plato" is a sentence, whereas "Socrates, the relation of hitting, Plato" is not. Frege ineffectively tried to solve this by saying that the verb (in "Socrates hits Plato") denotes something which is "unsaturated", i.e. has holes in it, thereby enabling that thing to link up, in a proposition-forming way, with the items flanking it. Frege's theory is radically confused, as Davidson has noted many times. (For one thing, it has the absurd result that the thing corresponding to the verb "hits" has a hole in it, whereas the thing corresonding to the noun "the relation of hitting" does not. But how can this be, given that both expressions presumably pick out the same relation? Frege gave the absurd answer that we cannot speak of properties the way we can speak of individuals -- this is embodied in Frege's dictum "the property HORSE is not a property".) Rightly rejecting Frege's view, Davidson produces one of his own, which -- like much of his previous work -- involves a dubious reliance in Tarski's work relating to the definability of truth-predicates in formal languages. Throughout his career, Davidson often tried to turn Tarski's technical points in logic to deep semantic and metaphysical account. Davidson also seems to have found support in Tarski's work for some extremely strange and, I believe, false doctrines. Tarski's disquotationalism -- "snow is white" is true iff snow is white -- apparently inspired Davidson to think that (a) there are no propositions (sentences are enough), (b) there are no facts, (c) the predicate "is true" and the corresponding property are innocuous and somehow vacant (this is supposedly evidenced by the apparent equivalence of "snow is white" and "it is true that snow is white") (d) there is no difference between meanings and truth-conditions (Tarski talks about truth-conditions, not about meanings). None of these doctrines has any real support in Tarski's work; and Davidson's attempt to give them support - in particular, his use of the spurious "Slingshot" argument to prove that there are no facts and that, consequently,
sentences are not made true by anything -- involved rather glaring fallacies. Davidson's views on truth are based on a complete failure to see past the phonetic surface structure of indicative sentences. From a purely orthographic point of view, "snow is white" is less complex than the corresponding nominal: "that snow is white". But semantically the story is very different. Both encode the proposition THAT SNOW IS WHITE. But "snow is white" does something additional: it manages to ascribe truth to that proposition. (How this is done is a delicate matter.) Once the semantic anatomy of "snow is white" is laid bare, it becomes impossible to sustain the idea that the truth-predicate is innocuous or the concomitant idea that nothing MAKES a sentence be true. Davidson's views on these matters are projections of folk-syntax, and are a source of annoyance to anyone who (unlike Davidson) gives any credence to the work of Chomsky and other depth-grammarians. In Identity and Predication, the unique blend of obscurity, indirectness, and flabby logic that vitiated much of Davidson's earlier work is in full bloom. Further, he doesn't really add anything that wasn't already found in his earlier papers. As a philosopher, Davidson had some fine moments. His work on scepticism is original (though unsuccessful). Some aspects of his work on semantics -- especially his excavation of the logical form of action sentences and his scathing criticisms (in "Theories of Learnable languages") of Frege's bizarre views on indirect discourse -- are philosophical classics. But in this work, Davidson is not at his best, and this exposes a certain lack of focus that pervaded his career. On a scale of 1 to 10, I give it a 2.