Does a Tarskian Theory of Truth Offer a Theory of Meaning? A Sellarsian-Type Evaluation and Critique of Donald Davidson’s Truth-Conditional Semantics

Mircea Dumitru (University of Bucharest)

The paper examines and assesses how Davidson could be fixed through Sellars. I begin by presenting Donald Davidson's truth-conditional semantics for a natural language, viz. the program according to which the meaning of a language is to be given by a Tarskian truth-theory for that language. Against this background, I build a scenario in which a competent logician can give a truth-theory for sentences of a language that he/she cannot speak/read/understand without thereby giving/knowing the meaning of the sentences that he/she cannot comprehend. The logician knows that the sentences in the unknown (for him/her) language are true but, nevertheless, he/she does not know what they mean. In order to fix this drawback of the Davidsonian truth-conditional based theory of meaning, I present the main elements of Sellars' subtle views on meaning and truth, pointing at how the latter can circumvent the problems with the extensional Tarskian truth-conditional approach put forward by Davidson.

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