5. RADICAL INTERPRETATION
The project of radical interpretation is mentioned in “Truth and Meaning,” where Davidson takes a truth theory for a language to be an empirical theory, to be confirmed for particular speakers or groups of speakers on the basis of their behavior. It first takes center stage, however, in “Radical Interpretation” (Davidson 1984b [1973]). The project is that of interpret- ing another speaker without the usual assumptions of commonality of lan- guage. The description of the project of radical interpretation aims at il- luminating what it is to speak a language by describing how a theory for interpreting a speaker could be confirmed by evidence that did not al- ready presuppose any knowledge of what the speaker means by his words. The guiding idea is expressed in this passage from “Belief and the Basis of Behavior”:
Everyday linguistic and semantic concepts are part of an intuitive theory for organizing more primitive data, so only confusion can result from treating these concepts and their supposed objects as if they had a life of their own. (Davidson 1984a [1974], p. 143)
Specifically, in light of the commitment to using a truth theory as the vehicle of a meaning theory, the data to which Davidson restricts the radical interpreter is knowledge of the speaker’s hold-true attitudes, that is, his beliefs about what sentences of his language are true, and how he interacts with his environment and with others like him. Though Davidson takes the interpreter to have access to a speaker’s hold-true attitudes, these may be presumed to be identifiable ultimately on the basis of more primitive evidence.
In a nutshell, the radical interpreter’s procedure involves identifying correlations between hold-true attitudes directed toward sentences, on the one hand, and events and circumstances in the speaker’s environment, on the other. The speaker’s hold-true attitudes are assumed to be the result of his knowledge of what his sentences mean and what he believes. If he knows that s means that p and believes that p, then he holds true s. Then, if we know that, for example, ceteris paribus, the speaker holds true s at a time iff there is a white rabbit in his vicinity, and we can assume the speaker is mostly right about his environment, we can with some justification infer that at any time t, s means that there is at t a white rabbit about. The assumption that the speaker is mostly right, both about his environment and in his beliefs generally, as well as by and large rational, Davidson calls the Principle of
Introduction 17
assumption, but constitutive of what it is to be a speaker at all, and so not an option in interpretation.
The Principle of Charity can be separated into two strands, which Davidson has more recently called the Principle of Correspondence and the Principle of Coherence (Davidson 2001b [1991]). The first of these strands is the assumption that a speaker’s beliefs, particularly about his en- vironment, are by and large true. This plays a crucial role in bridging the gap between noticing correlations between a speaker’s hold-true attitudes and his environment and assigning interpretations to his sentences. The Principle of Correspondence is a solution to the problem of separating out meaning from belief in hold-true attitudes. Which sentences a speaker holds true depends on what he thinks they mean and what he believes. If we knew either, we could solve for the other. Assuming that what the speaker believes is true, in the light of the conditions under which he has his beliefs, enables the interpreter to solve for meaning, and then to assign correspond- ing belief contents. The Principle of Charity is justified by the assumption that the position of the radical interpreter is the most fundamental position from which to investigate meaning and related matters, and it is needed to make sense of how the interpreter can see, on the basis of his evidence, another as a speaker. This assumption plays a central role in Davidson’s epistemology and his arguments for the relational individuation of thought content. This is the view that, generally, what the contents of our thoughts are is a matter at least in part of our relations to things and events in our environments, so that we would not have had, as a matter of the logic of our concepts, the thoughts we do if our environments had been very different. The Principle of Coherence has to do with the principles governing attributions of attitudes to an agent and descriptions of the agent’s behavior so as to make the agent out to be by and large rational. It subsumes such principles as that, by and large, an agent’s beliefs are consistent and his preferences transitive, and that attitudes are attributed in patterns that both (1) sustain the attribution of particular concepts to the agent by seeing them as fitting into a coherent pattern of beliefs deploying the concepts, and (2) enable us to see the agent’s behavior as rationalizable in the light of his beliefs and pro attitudes. The Principle of Coherence is grounded in the analysis of the nature of agency, that is, in a priori principles governing our conception of what it is for anything to be an agent.
This represents an important point of connection between Davidson’s work in the philosophy of action and his work in the theory of meaning. It is obvious also that any account of communication must involve the theory of action, since we understand speech, which is a form of action, only against a