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How Can the Theory of Meaning be a Philosophical Project?
Author(s) -
WRIGHT CRISPIN
Publication year - 1986
Publication title -
mind and language
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.905
H-Index - 68
eISSN - 1468-0017
pISSN - 0268-1064
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-0017.1986.tb00095.x
Subject(s) - wright , metaphysics , meaning (existential) , epistemology , philosophy , citation , sociology , library science , computer science , art history , history
This paper’ is concerned with the interpretation of a theory of meaning of the kind which, prescinding from their points of disagreement, is associated with the writings of Davidson and Dummett.2 Such a theory, for a specific natural language, will consist of a syntactic and a semantic part. The syntactic part will divide the atomic expressions of the language into finitely many basic syntactic kinds, and determine on the basis of that division which combinations of such expressions are grammatically well-formed. The semantic part will contain finitely many axioms characterising the meanings of the atomic expressions in such a way as to render the meaning of any well-formed sentence of the language effectively decidable on the basis of its syntactic composition. As is familiar, Davidson proposed that the sort of recursive characterisation of truth which Tarski showed how to construct for certain formal languages (‘Truth and Meaning’, Davidson 1984) might serve as the core of such a theory of meaning for a natural language. The Tarskian prototype has, indeed, dominated philosophers’ work on the project. But it is of no consequence for the questions with which I am here concerned whether or not that is fortunate. The project is one which, it was and is widely supposed, promises to shed light on a number of philosophically fundamental concepts, and on the notion of meaning in particular (Cf. McDowell 1976 p.72). Still greater claims have been made for it (cf. Dummett 1975, p.97). But it has been generally assumed that, at the very least, its (complete or partial) execution would cast light on such closely interrelated questions as: