Looks like a backward step - explaining games by more games, rules by more rules. — Banno

As I said I'm not seeking to explain "rules by more rules" or even "games by more games". Where, if at all, does explanation terminate? What's your alternative?

What I am proposing is that learning language cannot be merely a matter of following rules; it also involves imitation and ostension of course. And it involves simply "getting it" in either case.

So, for example, in the case of ostension, when someone is pointing at something and making a sound I am not familiar with, unless we share a language where it can be explained that she intends to be informing me of the name of the thing she is pointing at, then I must simply "get" that that is what she is doing.

But we do learn that that is what is happening in these kinds of situations, and at least a part of that learning involves imitation, association and repetition.

repetition — Janus

Good point. Repeatability is crucial.

In general, though, I'd say the mountains of science about how children learn their native language should be the starting point, and all of this is armchair stuff.

In general, though, I'd say the mountains of science about how children learn their native language should be the starting point, and all of this is armchair stuff. — Srap Tasmaner

:up:

Where, if at all, does explanation terminate? — Janus

In action.

Ah, inaction!

Where, if at all, does explanation terminate?
— Janus

In action. — Banno

Out of context, that sounds weirdly fascist.

Eh. Probably just me.

...truth is a concept that only exists within language... — RussellA

And yet non linguistic creatures have true belief.

I'm not sure we ever squarely faced Davidson's central claim. — Srap Tasmaner

Did you miss my post on the bottom of page nine? It answers all this.

Take Lepore and Stone's example:

That's a nice soup latrine.

I think everyone would agree

1. You said "latrine" when you meant to say "tureen".

I do not agree. When mistaken, one unintentionally says the wrong word. Not all cases are mistakes or linguistic error. A joker, for example, intentionally means to say "latrine".

Lepore and Stone describe the situation as

2. You mispronounced "tureen" as "latrine". — Srap Tasmaner

Perhaps in some cases. Not with the joker.

What's still not perfectly clear is whether

3. By "latrine" you meant "tureen"'.

Sometimes if one knows how to use both but misspeaks nonetheless for whatever reason. Not with the joker, or yet other cases where the speaker does not know the meaning of either, and did not quite learn how to correctly use the phrase(learned something sounding close, but unconventional nevertheless).

That is, whether you were, consciously or not, assigning the meaning of the word "tureen" to the word "latrine".

That is to misattribute meaning to "latrine".

That is what the listener must knowingly do in order to correctly interpret the speaker, regardless of whether or not the speaker was mistaken or joking.

And then, finally, there's the question of whether the interpreter must say

4. In this sentence the word "latrine" means "tureen".

They do not have to say that, but they do have to knowingly misattribute meaning to "latrine" by virtue of drawing a correlation between it and the referent of "tureen".

they do have to knowingly misattribute meaning to "latrine" by virtue of drawing a correlation between it and the referent of "tureen". — creativesoul

If you were compiling a dictionary or a Tarski-style model of the English language, what would you do with the "latrine" sentence? If it's a one-off, the only attestation for "latrine" used as a synonym for "tureen", you could drop it from your sample.

But as Davidson would have it, the interpreter must assign a meaning to this sentence as it stands, and that means saying that in this sentence "latrine" is a synonym for "tureen".

Lepore and Stone say no: we'll take you not to have said "latrine" at all, but to have mispronounced "tureen". We could say, I think plausibly, that what makes the mispronunciation a malapropism is that the sound you make happens already to be a word. If you said "stureen" (perhaps because of the association between "soup" and "stirring") we're not really in dramatically different territory: it's still just an understandable mispronunciation.

But then must the listener treat "stureen" as a nonce synonym for "tureen"? I think Davidson says yes.

The real question, then, is what do we interpret? Do we assign meaning to the specific tokens you produce? Or is there a little preprocessing first, a little data-scrubbing?

This actually looks like a problem for Davidson, because we know, for a fact, that often mistakes go unnoticed, you read right over typos, and so on. That suggests the sentence interpretation stage comes after some initial classifying of the word tokens -- so by the time meaning gets assigned to the sentence, word-meaning has already, perhaps tentatively, been assigned to the word tokens, and sentence meaning is built out of those, not from the raw tokens.

(We know that the actual noises you make are classified as phonemes somewhat like this, and also somewhat early in the interpretation process.)

That word token processing stage seems to include some error correction, just as it does with phonemes. The dilemma of whether, in this sentence as it stands, we take "latrine" as a synonym for "tureen", may not arise.

But a whole lot of this post should be replaced by actual science...

To continue speculating...

If you know that your dinner guest is looking at your dining table, and seems to be commenting on it, "latrine" is not one of the words you expect them to utter, because you know there is no latrine on the table; you do know there is a tureen on the table, so that word is on the list of words you expect to be uttered.

Whatever lexical lookup occurs, it seems not to range over all possible words, nor over all possible English words (respecting English morphology), nor even over all words we might think the speaker knows, but only over the words we think the speaker knows and expect under the circumstances. As @Isaac would say, we're predicting all the time.

Thus in normal conversation, it's possible to mis-speak and have the mistake corrected unnoticed.

It could be that malapropisms are noticed, when they are, because the substitution suggests an interpretation that could be relevant, as puns do. Thus "latrine" could be an innocent mistake, or a suggestion, conscious or not, that your soup is excremental.

true belief — creativesoul

Truth within language
A bear hunts for salmon in the coastal waters of Alaska. The bear believes that there are fish in the water and as there are fish in the water the bear has, what we call, a "true belief".

Truth is the accordance between fact A, the bear's belief that there are fish in the water and fact B, there are fish in the water.

As truth is an accordance between two facts, and as neither fact A has any knowledge of being in accordance with fact B nor fact B has any knowledge of being in accordance with fact A, any truth must be external to facts A and B.

IE, truth is not an internal quality of a set of facts. Truth can only be a quality external to a set of facts, such as within language.

Truth outside language
As regards the bear, after successfully catching the fish

C - the bear believed there were fish in the water
D - the bear knows there are fish in the water

For the bear to know a truth, the bear has to know an accordance between C and D

IE, the bear has to know not only i) that it believed there were fish in the water but also
ii) that it knows there are fish in the water.

IE, for the bear to know a truth, the bear has to have thoughts about its thoughts, which becomes a problem of infinite regression.

The real question, then, is what do we interpret? Do we assign meaning to the specific tokens you produce? Or is there a little preprocessing first, a little data-scrubbing? — Srap Tasmaner

That which is interpreted is already meaningful. We interpret meaningful things... correctly or not(and that has some nuance). There is an actual difference between interpretation and attribution. The latter gives rise to the former. Thus, I think the better question is how do we interpret? How do we correctly attribute(successfully interpret) and/or misattribute(misinterpret) meaning? We'll find that we do both, assign meaning to words, and engage in a bit of pre-processing... a kind of situational awareness. We do all this by virtue of drawing correlations between the language use and other things.

...a whole lot of this post should be replaced by actual science... — Srap Tasmaner

Science of the attribution of meaning? Linguistics?

I'm not following. You earlier mentioned the initial language acquisition of one's native tongue as a starting point, or something similar.

...thoughts about its thoughts, which becomes a problem of infinite regression. — RussellA

I disagree, but it's irrelevant here. Infinite regress is the result of inadequate accounting practices.

The bear believes that there are fish in the water and as there are fish in the water the bear has, what we call, a "true belief"... — RussellA

Therefore, either true belief does not require truth, or truth is prior to language. Truth is presupposed within belief and statements thereof. Again, too far off topic here though.

That's a nice soup latrine.

I took the speaker to be disparaging the quality of the soup.

I took the speaker to be disparaging the quality of the soup. — Banno

In which case, the speaker intended to say "latrine", and the conventional meaning of the term aligns perfectly with the speaker's intent.

Yep.

The last couple of pages haven't added anything to the commentary. Indeed, they detract from it.

There is an actual difference between interpretation and attribution. The latter gives rise to the former. — creativesoul

WeekWell that's a question, isn't it. What sort of thing is a Davidsonian method of interpretation?

Davidson is very clear that the literal meaning of each word is in play when an interpreter interprets a speaker; the interpreter is not just working out how the meaningful bits have been assembled and what the speaker means to say by having so assembled them.

Linguistics? — creativesoul

Yes, I just haven't bothered to look in a while, but I suspect what I described is the sort of thing linguists argue about -- how compositionality should be understood. But singesome of this, like there being stages, could be tested.

In which case, the speaker intended to say "latrine", and the conventional meaning of the term aligns perfectly with the speaker's intent. — creativesoul

Not sure it's that simple. When I was a boy scout, "latrine" meant a ditch or a hole in the ground; you won't see such a thing on anyone's dining room table. So it's still not just literal; an element of the meaning of "latrine" (container for excrement) is being borrowed on the pretense of the similar sound of the words "tureen" and "latrine". So, a sort of pun.

That would be the last time that guy got invited to my dinner party.

:wink:

The last couple of pages haven't added anything to the commentary. Indeed, they detract from it. — Banno

Are you not entertained?

What sort of thing is a Davidsonian method of interpretation? — Srap Tasmaner

It's an accounting practice of that which existed in it's entirety prior to his account. As is linguistics.

Not for the last page or two.

" That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF P

What are we to put in the place of "P"?

If we assume mispronunciation, put "That's a nice soup tureen". But if not we need interpret a bit more broadly. Taking on board the Principle of Charity, we assume that the speaker has, overwhelmingly, the same beliefs as we do. We might well assume they know the difference between a latrine and a soup tureen. We might assume they know what the usual contents of a latrine are. So we might tentatively construct the following T-sentence...

"That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF that soup looks like shit

All within a Semantic theory of language using radical interpretation.

That is, there is more to Davidson than has been supposed.

, by way of a start on explaining T-sentences.

Well done. Gotta love the simplicity of the T sentence.

"That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF that soup looks like shit — Banno

I'm really not sure what you think you're demonstrating here.

Maybe it was a genuine malapropism; maybe it was, as I said above, a sort of pun, and some of the conventional meaning of "latrine" is brought along. There's not much to say for one interpretation or another without a little more context.

This is all beside the point though. If it's a malapropism, your T-sentence is

(T1) "That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF that's a nice soup tureen.

And that's pretty clearly a problem. Davidson's whole point is that you could not possibly have learned such a rule in advance. I don't think any of us are contesting that -- of course you couldn't have. The question is whether you come up with this rule, a contextual definition of "latrine", on the fly and use it just the once, rather than dealing with the unexpected utterance of "latrine" in some other way.

I'm really not sure what you think you're demonstrating here. — Srap Tasmaner

Well, for you, pointing out that T-sentences are not just "P" is true IFF P; those case in which the sentence on the right is the very same as the sentence on the left are unusual.

The sentence on the left is in the language being interpreted. The sentence on the right is the interpretation. The structure serves to remove the notion of meaning entirely, replacing it with truth. Moreover it is truth as set out by Tarski, in extensional terms.

The interpretation is not word-for-word; it is holistic.

I understand the theory. But we're talking about malapropisms and Davidson's claim that the intended meaning takes over from the literal meaning.

Is my T-sentence not what Davidson tells us would be part of the interpreter's passing theory? Did I misunderstand him?

The core of Davidson's semantics is the search for a way to set out the meaning of often obscure or intensional sentences clearly; a theory of meaning for a language will have been a success if, for each sentence in that language, the theory sets out one sentence that gives the meaning. If 'S' is some sentence in a language, then any decent theory of meaning would generate a statement P such that

'S' means P

Note that S is quoted.

P is some statement that sets out what is said in 'S'. Now we already have a transparent, extensional way of dealing with what is said, in the notion of satisfaction - a satisfies the formula F. So we might set ourselves the task of expressing P in terms of satisfaction; that is, P sets out the conditions under which 'S' is true.

And we have ready to hand a truth-conditional operator that will allow us to link 'S' with P, in equivalence. Hence a truth-conditional theory will have the form:

'S' is true IFF p

Where 'S' is the sentence we want the meaning of, and P the conditions under which the terms in S are satisfied - the truth conditions.

That P sets out the truth conditions for S is an empirical question. For any sentence we would have to construct an interpretation, based on whatever evidence we might collect by observing the language community in question.

So when faced with the utterance

That's a nice soup latrine

we invoke evidence collected about the situation and the community to render P in the T-sentence:
"That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF P
There are at least two candidates. One is that the speaker mispronounced tureen as latrine. That would render:
"That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF that's a nice soup tureen
The other is to understand that the speaker was talking about the soup. that might render something like
"That's a nice soup latrine" is true IFF that soup looks like shit


Two very different interpretations, both of which see a word being used wrongly in the sentence 'S' - both of which see a malapropism and dissipate it using the T-sentence structure.

All of this by was of showing that the Semantic Theory is not what is at stake here. I don't see that Davidson is contradicting his earlier work. So no, the T-sentence is not restricted to being part of the passing theory.

For what it is worth, the fault, so far as there is one, seems to me to be way back at the beginning, in the assumption that

...any decent theory of meaning would generate a statement P such that
'S' means P — Banno

That is, the fault is the assumption that there is a thing that can be called the meaning of the sentence. Labouring the point, we are better off considering what is being done with the sentence - admiring a tureen or disparaging a soup.

And we have ready to hand a truth-conditional operator that will allow us to link 'S' with P, in equivalence. Hence a truth-conditional theory will have the form:
'S' is true IFF p
Where 'S' is the sentence we want the meaning of, and P the conditions under which the terms in S are satisfied - the truth conditions. — Banno

More formal sounding than my earlier understanding of the T sentence, but it seems that your view has evolved a bit. I've never seen you argue for the right side being the truth conditions of the left.

That is, the fault is the assumption that there is a thing that can be called the meaning of the sentence. — Banno

That is exactly right. The meaning of a sentence consists of more than one thing. The same is true regarding the meaning of a word or anything else that is meaningful.

Davidson's whole point is that you could not possibly have learned such a rule in advance. I don't think any of us are contesting that -- of course you couldn't have. — Srap Tasmaner

Or perhaps the ability to correctly translate malapropisms are not a matter of following a rule at all...

Perhaps it's more that our knowing the rules, in advance, allows us to also know when they've been broken. Hence, the interpreter must misattribute meaning to "latrine" is cases of malapropism. That is to say that we gather the meaning of the term by the context, where the context includes situational awareness, and then we employ our inherent innate ability to attribute meaning(a shared method of translation), which is something certainly outside of learning the rules... for it's what allows us to do so.

The meaning of a sentence consists of more than one thing. — creativesoul

No! IT's not a thing at all, unless you want to call acts "things"!

:joke: