Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

Davidson’s work can best be seen as carrying through Quine’s dissolution of the distinction between questions of meaning and questions of fact—his attack on the linguistic reinterpretation of Kant’s distinction between the receptivity of sense and the a priori concepts given by spontaneity. Davidson is saying that if we are serious in renouncing an a priori knowledge of meaning, then the theory of meaning is going to be an empirical theory. Thus there can be no special province for such a theory save, roughly, the traditional province of the grammarian—the attempt to find ways of describing sentences which help to explain how those sentences are used. From this perspective, Quine’s “canonical notation” should not be conceived of as an attempt “to limn the true and ultimate structure of reality,”8 but rather as an attempt to find the most perspicuous ways of describing a fairly small portion of reality—the use of language. The point of constructing a “truth theory of English” is not to enable philosophical problems to be put in a formal mode of speech, nor to explain the relationship between words and the world, but simply to lay out perspicuously the relation between parts of a social practice (the use of certain sentences) and other parts (the use of other sentences).

December 1, 2020. Page 262.