• Although, towards the end of “Two Dogmas,” Quine likened the distinction between conceptual scheme and fact to the analytic/synthetic distinction, Davidson treats it as a “third dogma” and much of the paper is organized around arguments against it. The beginning of his introductory discussion (pp. 5-7) suggests the way he will address the issue: as one of translatability between languages. The latter issue is one that Quine himself began to discuss about 10 years after “Two Dogmas,” and it was receiving much attention from philosophers at the time Davidson wrote this paper. His overall point will be that we cannot make sense of the idea of even a partial failure of translatability, and the heart of the paper is divided into arguments against a series of attempts to make sense of the idea.

However, he addresses these attempts only after a significant stretch of preliminary discussion (pp. 7-13) in which he sharpens the issue to be addressed. At the end of this, Davidson assembles things Quine says in “Two Dogmas” and elsewhere that might be taken to express the “third dogma”—though whether Quine intended them in that way is another matter. (Davidson’s reference to Quine on p. 10 concerns a different issue: Quine had pointed to problems with our language for attibuting propositional attitudes that are related to the issues he discussed in “Notes on Existence and Necessity.”)

• Davidson’s actual consideration of each of the attempts to make sense of failures of translatability is relatively brief. Your first assignment includes only the first of these (pp. 14-15). The second is handled almost as quickly (pp. 15-17), but it begins to introduce ideas characteristic of Davidson, in particular the view that there is a close tie between theories of truth and our understanding of language. Davidson’s final argument against a way of understanding partial failure of translatability (pp. 17-20) develops these ideas further in a way that turns on a sort of “charity” (described on p. 19) that Quine had also discussed.