Monday, July 25, 2016

In what way is a theory of truth, a theory of meaning? From Donald Davidson's Truth and Predication

"A theory of truth for a speaker is a theory of meaning in this sense, that explicit knowledge of the theory would suffice for understanding the utterances of the speaker. It accomplishes this by describing the critical core of the speaker's potential and actual linguistic behavior-in effect, how the speaker intends his utterances to be interpreted. The sort of understanding involved is restricted what we may call the literal meaning of words, by which I mean, roughly the meaning the speaker intends the interpreter to grasp, whatever force or significance the speaker may want the interpreter to fathom" (2000, 53).