Donald Davidson Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality [Hardcover]

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

Lepore and Ludwig have provided a magnificently impressive critical detailed account of Donald Davidson's contributions to the philosophy of logic, language, and mind. -- Gilbert Harman, Princeton University