Burge, Tyler - Predication and Truth (Review of Donald Davidson book)

03/28/2008

Journal of Philosophy, November 2007

Author gives a long review of Donald Davidson's book Truth And Predication. The review is at least three parts: a discussion of Davidson's conception of truth and then a discussion of his view of predication, then a critique of Davidson's views on predication.

Davidson takes Tarski's T-sentences as the basis for his truth theory. Author agrees with Davidson that deflationist positions of truth don't capture quantification and truth is more than extensional. Author proceeds to discuss Davidson's rejection of correspondence theories as misunderstanding such theories and too narrow a view (pg581-3).

In chapter 3 Davidson gives a 'rational reconstruction' of how to arrive at a theory of meaning and belief that adds to the missing parts of Tarski's theory. Author takes this as a re-formulation of Davidson's major contributions to philosophy, yet discusses how confusing Davidson's talk can be. On one hand, it appears people have to be following a semantic rule in order to build a theory of meaning, which is countered by how people actually learn language. It is also countered by evidence of 'perceptual reference' and 'propositional inference' in non-human animals and young children. (pg285-6) On the other, he thinks people just need to behave 'as if' they are conforming to those rules, yet author thinks that such talk isn't what Davidson is committed to. (pg584-5)

The next part of the paper is dealing with Davidson's 'problem of predication', which is the regress argument if predicates are names for properties. (pg586-590) Davidson wants a theory of predication to satisfy 4 criteria: (pg586-7)
1. predication should be connected to truth
2. predication is not explained by trying to associate objects with universals, properties, etc.
3. predication is kept separate from the question of the existence of properties, universals, etc.
4. the solution must allow for predication
Davidson appears to waffle between claiming that having predication refer to properties is unnecessary for it to work, and claiming that understanding predication as reference doesn't complete the understanding of predication. When discussing the regress problem, Davidson is loose with his talk, at least according to the author, who shows ways of avoiding the regress while still referring to properties. "The regress gets started if the syntactic and semantic relations of a predicate are assimilated to those of a singular term." (pg 590)

Author defends types of regress. Regression of explanation is bad, regression (infinity) of objects isn't a theory-killer-- there is no real philosophical problem with having infinite entities. There is a philosophical problem with having an infinite explanationatory scheme (pg592).

Author argues that predication has two parts: first it indicates or refers to properties and second it attributes that it is true of the singular term used in the argument (or place) if the predicate. (pg593-594) Author spends some time defending Frege against Davidson. Author asserts that Frege was wrong to believe that predicates can't be predicated without turning them into singular terms. (pg598-601) It is because predicates play a different semantic role than singular terms do that you don't turn a predicate into a singular term when you apply another predicate to it.

Author criticizes Davidson's concept of reference and 'being-true-of'. For Davidson, these concepts are loose and should be whatever works to get true sentences to be come out as true. Here the only 'primitive' concept is truth. (pg605-6) Author argues that though reference and predication are dependent on truth, truth is 'partially explicated in terms of notions of reference and predication'. (pg607) They help explain how truth is related to truth makers.