Reply to Davidson

Abstract

The issue between Donald Davidson and myself is, as he states in his first sentence, whether the idiolect or the common language is primary in the order of philosophical explanation. The issue remains entangled, however, with another which I now think to be irrelevant: whether Davidson was right to deny that there are such things as languages, if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed I admit, of course, that, in some of the remarks I made at Rutgers, I was teasing; not, however, with complete frivolity, since I suspected that there was no place in Davidson’s intellectual landscape for any normal concept of a language. At any rate, I felt certain that the concept of a language had no philosophical importance for him, and with this I strongly disagreed. Let us look at how Davidson delineates that concept of a language that he opposes. “It was this”, he says in his present paper:

In learning a language, a person acquires the ability to operate in accord with a precise and specifiable set of syntactic and semantic rules; verbal communication depends on speaker and hearer sharing such an ability, and it requires no more than this. I argued that sharing such a previously mastered ability was neither necessary nor sufficient for successful linguistic communication.