Radical interpretation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Radical interpretation in philosophy is the notion of considering the meaning of a concept relative to a belief system rather than as something that is unchanging across all belief systems.
The term was introduced by American philosopher Donald Davidson (1973) and is meant to suggest important similarity to W. V. O. Quine's radical translation, which is translation of a speaker's language, without prior knowledge, by observing the speaker's use of the language in context. [1].
Even more so than radical translation did for Quine, radical interpretation plays an important role in Davidson's work, but the exact nature of this role is up for debate. Some see Davidson as using radical interpretation directly in his arguments against conceptual relativism and the possibility of massive error—-of most of our beliefs being false[2]. But Davidson seems to explicitly reject this reading in "Radical Interpretation Interpreted"[3].
There is also a more narrow and technical version of radical interpretation used by Davidson[3]: given the speaker's attitudes of holding particular sentences true in particular circumstances--the speaker's hold-true attitudes--, the radical interpreter is to infer a theory of meaning--a truth theory meeting a modified version of Alfred Tarski's Convention T--for the speaker's idiolect. Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig characterize this as inference from sentences of the form:
- Ceteris paribus, S holds true s at t if and only if p.
to corresponding T-sentences of the form
- s is true (S, t) if and only if q
where s is a sentence is the idiolect of the speaker S, t is a time, and p and q are filled in with sentences in the metalanguage[2].
[edit] References
- ^ Davidson, Donald. Radical Interpretation. Originally published in Dialectica, 27 (1973), 314-28. Reprinted in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (2n. ed. 125-39). New York: Clarendon Press.
- ^ a b Lepore, Ernest and Kirk Ludwig. Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality. Oxford. 2005.
- ^ a b Davidson, Donald. Radical Interpretation Interpreted. Philosophical Perspectives, 8 (1994), 121-128.
