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Truth & Predication

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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.