Davidson's Theory Of Meaning.pdf

Donald Davidson's "Truth and Meaning" argues that a satisfactory theory of meaning must explain how the meanings of sentences depend on the meanings of words. He critiques Frege's approach of assigning entities as meanings to words, as it leads to an infinite regress and fails to explain how the meaning of complex expressions depends on their parts. Davidson suggests that a successful theory of meaning should entail every sentence of the form 't refers to x', where 't' is replaced by a structural description of a singular term, and 'x' is that term itself. He also proposes that a theory should clearly suggest an effective procedure for determining what a singular term refers to. Davidson then discusses Frege's proposal to count predicates as a special case of functional expressions and sentences as a special case of complex singular terms. However, he points out that identifying the meaning of a singular term with its reference leads to the problem that all sentences with the same truth value would be synonymous, which is intolerable. Therefore, Davidson concludes that the distinction between meaning and reference is necessary, and a theory of meaning must start with the meaning of the parts rather than their reference.