Oiling the wheels

I love Davidson. I hardly read him, but the enthusiasm that people I meet have for him is contagious!

Dale offers these great quotes from Davidson's criticism to Fregean and empty markerese account of things for something like

Pegasus flies.

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"Ask, for example, for the meaning of 'Theaetetus flies'."


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It would be good hear to revamp Grice, 1948.

what U means by uttering "Pegasus flies"
what "Pegasus flies" means
what "flies" means.
and so on.

Note that Grice would like to have something like

"To fly" is to be able to move in the air by means of wings. It can be used metaphorically to mean, 'he is in the clouds', not paying attention, or other. Vide 'slang'.

The meaning of 'fly' is a complex one.

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Davidson:

"A Fregean answer might go something like this: given the meaning of 'Theaetetus' as argument, the meaning of 'flies' yields the meaning of 'Theaetetus flies' as value."

I think this is a bit of a strawman. It's like a meta-semantic explanation.

I do believe that, in markerese, we may be able to provide a sufficient and necessary acccount of

"x flies".

Let me check with the first online dictionary:

fly (v.1)

"to soar through air,"

Pegasus flies, i.e. soars through air.

-- O.E. fleogan "to fly" (class II strong verb; past tense fleag, pp. flogen), from W.Gmc. *fleuganan (cf. O.S., O.H.G. fliogan, O.N. flügja, O.Fris. fliaga, M.Du. vlieghen, Du. vliegen, Ger. fliegen), from PIE *pleu- "flowing, floating" (see pluvial).

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Notion of "flapping as a wing does" led to noun sense of "tent flap" (1810), which yielded (1844) "covering for buttons that close up a garment."

The noun sense of "a flight, flying" is from mid-15c.

Baseball fly ball attested by 1866.

Slang phrase fly off the handle "lose one's cool" dates from 1825.

To do something on the fly is 1856, apparently from baseball.


fly (v.2)

"run away," O.E. fleon (see flee). Fleogan and fleon were often confused in O.E., too. Mod.Eng. distinguishes in preterite: flew/fled.

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So 'soar through air'.

Of course it would be circular, but not necessarily otiose, to explain what 'soar' means by reference to 'fly'.

Davidson goes on:

"The vacuity of this answer is obvious. We wanted to know what the meaning of 'Theaetetus flies' is;"

which is different from

'the meaning of 'fly'', admittedly.

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"it is no progress to be told that it is the meaning of 'Theaetetus flies'."

A bit of a Davidsonian rhetoric trick. We were explained that it's about values, arguments, and functions.

"This much we knew before any theory was in sight."

----- It was in terms of extension (or intension) -- rather than platonic idea, or concept, though.

Davidson:

"In the bogus account just given, talk of the structure of the sentence and of the meanings of words was idle, for it played no role in producing the given description of the meaning of the sentence. [Davidson (1967), pp. 30.)."

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I think a fuller answer is clear in the case of

"Homo habet canem"

--- We tend to think we understand, transparently, that -ies in 'flies' already involves a third-person singular present tense, and that Pegasus is nominative.

With

"homo habet canem"

it would be more like 'reading between the lines' in a Latin lesson:

"homo" nominative singular -- man. Predicate "MAN" MANx

'habet' -- present tense 'habere' third person. As applied to "homo". Homo subject, 'habet' predicate.

'canem' -- accusative singular. The dog is HAD by the man.

and so on.

Here the issue may be raised about the meaning of 'possess'.

What is the meaning of 'had' in (title of song, used by Woody Allen as signature tune to his latest, "You'll meet a dark tall stranger"): "If I had you".

Here Grice would be contented with

"To have" is... 'to possess'.

We don't need to provide meaning for abstract markers like 'past tense' and so on.

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Davidson goes on:

"Paradoxically, the one thing meanings do not seem to do is oil the wheels of a theory of meaning"

He seems to be punning on the mass-noun use of 'meaning' and the countable (if otiose, often, philosophically) 'meanings'.

Note that Grice's "Meaning" is best understood as a 'verb'. If Grice were writing old English, that would end in -nd, not '-ing' (cfr. German -ung). He is not into the meaning of the noun 'meaning', but into the meaning of the verb, "to mean". Only that, if many would have objected to his essay being a mere futilitarian essay in linguistic botanising, having his essay entitled, "To mean" would have had it rejected by "The Philosophical Review", even!

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Davidson ends this quote by Dale:

"- at least as long as we require of such a theory that it non-trivially give the meaning of every sentence in the language. [Davidson (1967), p. 307.]"

---- and we see why Dale indeed started to find inspiration in Schiffer, rather than Fodor and Katz. We are looking for non-trivial, apt, philosophial answers to things!