Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig present the definitive critical exposition of the philosophical system of Donald Davidson (1917-2003). Davidson's ideas had a deep and broad influence in the central areas of philosophy; he presented them in brilliant essays over four decades, but never set out explicitly the overarching scheme in which they all have their place. Lepore's and Ludwig's book will therefore be the key work, besides Davidson's own, for understanding one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century.
1. Introduction Part I: Historical Introduction to Truth-Theoretic Semantics 2. Learnable Languages and the Compositionality Requirement 3. The Form of a Meaning Theory and Difficulties for Traditional Approaches 4. The Introduction of a Truth Theory as the Vehicle of a Meaning Theory 5. Truth and Context Sensitivity 6. Davidson's Extensionalist Proposal 7. The Extensionality and Determination Problems 8. Foster's Objection 9. Relation to an Explicit Meaning Theory and to Semantic Competence 10. The Problem of Semantic Defects in Natural Languages Part II: Radical Interpretation 11. Clarifying the Project 12. The Procedure of the Radical Interpreter 13. The Justification of the Principle of Charity 14. The Theory of Agency and Additional Constraints 15. Indeterminacy 16. Development of a Unified Theory of Meaning and Action 17. The Reality of Language Part III: Metaphysics and Epistemology 18. The Impossibility of Alternative Conceptual Schemes 19. Externalism and the Impossibility of Massive Error 20. First Person Authority 21. Inscrutability of Reference 22. Language, Thought, and World Bibliography
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