Our understanding of Davidson's enterprise is now good enough to
discuss the use McDowell and Evans make of Davidson's theory.
What makes this theory so attractive for someone who
sympathizes with Frege? Evans speaks of the striking similarity
between a Davidsonian conception of a theory of meaning as a theory of
truth and a Fregean semantic conception.
In which features does this similarity consist?
Let us first take a look at Davidson's semantic conception. Davidson's objective is to give a theory of meaning for a natural language. But the theory he sketches does not contain theorems of the form:
if and only if p
But, as John Foster stresses:
claim does not, of course, mean that, given the relevant knowledge, [the truth-theory]The theorems neither state the meaning of the sentences of the language nor do they describe or name meanings. But someone who has the right extra-knowledge can use these theorems to interpret utterances of the language.becomes a theory of meaning for L, that
comes to state facts which suffice for a mastery of L. For obviously, however useful this extra knowledge, it cannot make any difference to what
states.''
This thought that a theory of truth can serve indirectly as theory of meaning is analogous to an account of the interrelation between the Fregean concepts of sense and reference which Michael Dummett sketches in the following quotation:
has become a standard complaint that Frege talks a great deal about the senses of expressions, but nowhere gives an account of what constitutes such a sense. This complaint is partly unfair: for Frege the sense of an expression is the manner in which we determine its reference, and he tells us a great deal about the kind of reference possessed by expressions of different types, thereby specifying the form that the senses of such expressions must take. It is true enough, however, that he says practically nothing directly about what the senses of expressions of different types consist in; and this is legitimate ground of complaint. Indeed, even when Frege is purporting to give the sense of a word or symbol, what he actually states is what its reference is: and, for anyone who has not clearly grasped the relation between sense and reference, this fact makes his hold on the notion of sense precarious. The sense of an expression is a mode of presentation of the referent: in saying what the referent is, we have a particular way of saying this, a particular means of determining something as the referent. In a case in which we are concerned to convey, or stipulate, the sense of an expression, we shall choose that means of stating what the referent is which displays the sense: we might borrow a famous pair of terms from the Tractatus, and say that, for Frege, we say what the referent of a word is, and thereby show what its sense is.''We can think for the purposes of this paper of the theory of reference as that part of a theory of truth which determines the reference of the singular terms of the language. Looking back at Davidson's account of the interrelation between truth-conditions and meaning we can say: Dummett's idea is that a particular theory of reference can serve as a theory of sense. There will be many different theories which assign the correct references to the singular terms of the language. But although these theories may be extensionally equivalent, only some of them will satisfy further constraints and qualify thereby as theories that can serve as a theories of sense. The idea that Davidson employs at the level of sentential expressions of the language is employed by Dummett at the subsentential level.
And it is this idea which strikes Evans. He writes for instance in his article ``Understanding Demonstratives'':
a theory of meaning for a language must give the senses of expressions, we are not to think of the theory of meaning as a separate tier, additional to and independent of the theory of reference. If sense is a way of thinking of reference, we should not expect to be given the sense of an expression save in the course of being given the reference of that exression. Rather than look for a theory quite independent of the theory of reference, we must take one formulation of the theory of reference---the formulation of the theory which identifies the references of expressions in the way in which one must identify them in order to understand the language---and make it serve as a theory of sense.''While Dummett leaves it open which theory of reference can serve as a theory of sense, Evans at least hints at an answer to this question in the quotation: A theory of reference that is part of a theory that can serve as a theory of linguistic competence (a theory of understanding) can serve as a theory of sense. And a speaker who knows that can use a theory of reference as a theory of sense.
What are the advantages of looking in this way at the interrelation between the concepts of sense and reference?
Evans lists two advantages:
A) This conception makes the form of a theory of sense
unmysterious. In a strict sense there is no
theory of sense. The semanticist only needs a truth-theory and certain
justified beliefs about it in order to use a truth-theory as a theory
of sense. So we don't have to assume that there are two theories, one
of sense, one of truth. Strictly speaking it is false to speak of a
theory of sense. There is only the function of serving as such a
theory.
B) Perry and Kaplan have criticized Frege on the assumption that the
Fregean sense of a singular term must be the sense of a definite
description. They argue that this assumption is incompatible with
our intuitions about i) the modal properties of singular statements (Kaplan)
and our epistemic intuitions about indexical utterances (Perry).
The conception under consideration does not force us to equate the
sense of a singular term with the sense of a definite description.
According to this theory a sentence like:
[Evans] shows more plainly than anyone has done before why it is so grave a mistake to equate, like Kripke does, the ascription to a term of a Fregean sense with a characterization of it as descriptive.''
But the conception Evans favours has also a serious disadvantage. Singular terms without reference seem to have no sense according to this theory. Most critics of Evans have focussed on this point. In contrast to them, I will investigate whether Evans' conception of sense can really do the work it is supposed to do, namely specify what a speaker has to know in order to understand an (indexical or referential) utterance. As one will already expect certain points in this discussion have been already anticipated in section 3.2.
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