Reflecting Davidson: Donald Davidson Responding to an International Forum of Philosophers (Foundations of Communication)

I thank Professor Davidson for his instructive critical comments following the presentation of the original version of this paper, at the Colloquium "Toward a Unified Theory of Meaning and Action" at the Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung, Universität Bielefeld. Furthermore, I am grateful to Andreas Edmüller with whom I could discuss the whole paper in great detail and whose comments were very helpful, and to John O'Donoghue for correcting and improving my English. 1 Quine 1990, p. viii. Is Radical Interpretation Possible? 1 JERRY FODOR / ERNEST LEPORE case; in this reply I cleave to this convention. But as fat as I can find, I have never argued, specified, or assumed, as Fodor and Lepore insist, that the data on which the special enterprise is based exhaust the data available to actual interpreters. Preface Truth, Meaning and Logical Form Donald Davidson (Berkeley): Reply to Wolfgang Künne Davidson on Truth Donald Davidson: Reply to Richard Schantz Quine and Davidson on Reference and Evidence Donald Davidson: Reply to Felix Mühlhölzer Is Radical Interpretation Possible? Donald Davidson: Reply to Jerry Fodor and Ernest Lepore The Philosophical Significance of a Shared Language Donald Davidson: Reply to Andreas Kemmerling Norms and Meaning Donald Davidson: Reply to Akeel Bilgrami Uses of Mistakes Donald Davidson: Reply to Joachim Schulte “What Metaphors Mean” and how Metaphors Refer Donald Davidson: Reply to Oliver Scholz How Relational Are Davidson’s Beliefs? Donald Davidson: Reply to Johannes Brandl First-Person Authority and Radical Interpretation Donald Davidson: Reply to Eva Picardi The Explanation of First Person Authority Donald Davidson: Reply to Bernhard Thöle The Architecture and Evidential Base of the Unified Theory Donald Davidson: Reply to Lorenz Lorenz-Meyer Reasons, Actions, and their Relationship Donald Davidson: Reply to Ralf Stoecker The Explanatory Force of Action Explanations Donald Davidson: Reply to Peter Lanz Mental Concepts: Causal because Anomalous Donald Davidson: Reply to Peter Bieri Evaluative Judgements Donald Davidson: Reply to Thomas Spitzley Problems of Induction: Davidson and Goodman on Emeralds, Emeroses and Emerires Donald Davidson: Reply to Rosemarie Rheinwald Selected bibliography Index

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The governing idea of Professor Davidson's inquiries into truth and interpretation I take to be this: We would know "what it is for words to mean what they do" if we knew how to construct a theory of "radical interpretation" for a natural language.