Good response. You've been reading his paper Intending? That's the topic there.

There is no guarantee that our surmised intent is the correct one, no law-like structure that locks intent in with action and belief. Intentions are future-directed and shaped by beliefs and desires but not reducible to them.

Radical interpretation is a process for assigning truth values to utterances, not a process for determining intent. But this does not rule out that intent might enter into the interpretation. "Pedro intended to climb Everest" is true IFF that was Pedro's intent.

We might surmise intent, charitably, by presuming holistic coherence and rationality. Of course people do not always act holistically nor coherently. The process is not algorithmic, not law-like, and not infallible. It's human.

How's that?

I'll take it. It occurred to me that I just assumed Davidson meant that projecting intention on the speaker was part of radical interpretation. The words intend, mean, and understand are mixed together in my mind.

Well done. Yes, one of the take aways from all this is the separation of intent from meaning. Seeing how this works takes some effort. The idea that the meaning of an utterance is found in the intent of the speaker is somewhat ingrained. We say "That's not what I meant", after all; And we also say "But it's what you said!"

We can backtrack this to the discussion of Lewis, and conventions. It's hard to see how conventions might work without invoking intention - we intend to act in accord with the convention. But what we've seen here is how interpretation precedes convention. I think we can maintain a sort of continuity between Davidson, Searle and Lewis, but there is plenty here to work on.

But we can see that conventions do not determine the meaning of an utterance.

But we can see that conventions do not determine the meaning of an utterance. — Banno

:up: