As Davidson will say, his views are basically similar to Quine’s; however, they are developed in a rather different way from what you’ve seen in “Two Dogmas.” While that isn’t solely a matter of the passage of time, part of it is that. Around 10 years after “Two Dogmas,” Quine began to frame his discussions of meaning in terms of issues concerning translation (which, after all, is concerned with capturing meaning). His skepticism about the idea of meaning appeared then as a thesis of the “indeterminacy of translation,” and Davidson’s paper takes such issues as its starting point.
In the part we will discuss Mon., a bit over half the paper, offers Davidson’s characterization of what he calls “the problem of interpretation.”
• Davidson provides an introduction to the problem on pp. 309-313.
• He next turns to an analogy with “decision theory,” a modern counterpart to Aristotle’s “practical reasoning” in which rational decisions are connected with beliefs and desires (pp. 313-316). Davidson is interested in uses of this connection to reason backwards from decisions to the beliefs and desires on which they are based.
• At the end of this assignment (from the end on p. 316 to the middle of p. 317), he sets out the problem of interpretation as he sees it.
The rest of the paper, our topic for Wed., concerns Davidson’s approach to solving this problem.
• In the first part of this discussion (pp. 317-320), Davidson gives an occasionally technical description of “theories of truth.” Much of the detail here is not important for our purposes. You should focus on the paragraph beginning at the bottom of p. 317 and focus, in particular, on the idea of “T-sentences.”
• The most important material in this assignment runs from the middle of p. 320 to the end of the paper. You should watch for three key ideas. (i) In the first couple of paragraphs, Davidson outlines something that he later calls the “principle of charity.” Next (ii) he notes the indeterminacy that affects interpretation. And (iii) in the last sentence, he describes the theories he has been describing as “holistic.”