Davidson ’ s Explication of Meaning Gary Ebbs

1. The s-means-that-p requirement In Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality (Lepore and Ludwig 2005) Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig present a systematic alternative to a view that often goes without saying, but is widely shared by previous interpreters of Davidson—the view that Davidson's attitude toward traditional and commonsense ideas of meaning is similar to W. V. Quine's. Quine regards traditional and commonsense ideas of meaning as obscure and without explanatory force. He proposes that we replace them for scientific purposes by a notion of empirical meaning characterized holistically in terms of a speaker's dispositions to assent to or dissent from sentences under various prompting stimulations. Similarly, according to the view in question, Davidson regards traditional or commonsense ideas of meaning as obscure and proposes that we replace them by a notion of meaning characterized holistically in terms of an empirically testable truth theory for a given speaker's language. For reasons that will become clear below, I shall call this the explicational reading of Davidson's approach to constructing empirically adequate theories of meaning, or the explicational reading of Davidson, for short. Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig reject the explicational reading of Davidson. They argue that Davidson does not regard ordinary concepts of meaning as obscure or otherwise in need of replacement. In their view, Davidson's goal is " to illuminate the