DAVIDSON AND THE CORRESPONDENCE THEORY OF TRUTH

Abstract

Donald Davidson, in his works on theories of meaning, looks for a compositionalism in which single words do not correspond to single meanings: parts of sentences do not have proper meanings, they only give a systematic contribution to the sentences in which they occur. This is a holistic conception of meaning, where the meaning of the sentences depends on their structure, and the meaning of each element of the structure is only an abstraction from the totality of sentences in which it occurs. It is possible to indicate the meaning of a sentence, or of a word, only indicating the meaning of all sentences of the language. In True to the Facts (1969), Davidson studies the correspondentist conceptions of truth. The correspondence theories are founded on a simple and ineluctable idea, they are true but banal and useless. The American philosopher claims he is defending a kind of theory of correspondence: the truth can be explained through reference to a relationship between language and the world; however it is clear that the correspondence that Davidson accepts is not the classical form of correspondence theory. Indeed, using the slingshot argument he refuses the classical strategy of facts and the semantic atomism.