Donald Davidson

Regular price €45.99
Title
A01=Bjorn Ramberg
attack
attempt
Author_Bjorn Ramberg
best
book
Category=CFA
davidson
davidsons
development
donald
emerges
eq_bestseller
eq_dictionaries-language-reference
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
interpretation
introduction
intuition
language
light
natural
notion
past
philosophy
purge
reifications
semantics
theoretical
understood
work

Product details

  • ISBN 9780631164586
  • Weight: 369g
  • Dimensions: 163 x 240mm
  • Publication Date: 31 Jul 1989
  • Publisher: John Wiley and Sons Ltd
  • Publication City/Country: GB
  • Product Form: Hardback
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This book is an introduction to and interpretation of the philosophy of language devised by Donald Davidson over the past 25 years. The guiding intuition is that Davidson's work is best understood as an ongoing attempt to purge semantics of theoretical reifications. Seen in this light the recent attack on the notion of language itself emerges as a natural development of his Quinian scepticism towards "meanings" and his rejections of reference-based semantic theories.

Linguistic understanding is, for Davidson, essentially dynamic, arising only through a continuous process of theory construction and reconstruction. The result is a conception of semantics in which the notion of interpretation and not the notion of knowing a language is fundamental.

In the course of his book Bjorn Ramberg provides a critical discussion of reference-based semantic theories, challenging the standard accounts of the principle of charity and elucidating the notion of radical interpretation. The final chapter on incommensurability ties in with the discussions of Kuhn's work in the philosophy of science and suggests certain links between Davidson's analytic semantics and hermeneutic theory.

Bjorn Ramberg is the author of Donald Davidson: Philosophy of Language, published by Wiley.