Radical interpretation

Radical interpretation is a concept developed by Donald Davidson in numerous articles. It formulates a methodical approach to the problem of understanding the utterances of another person, especially in extreme cases when two completely different languages are spoken and no aids such as interpreters, dictionaries, etc. Are available. The catchphrase “radical interpretation” refers to necessary preconditions without which an attempt at understanding would appear nonsensical; for example, a large number of shared and true core beliefs must be assumed. Davidson reacts to the concept of a "radical translation" formulated by Quine . Davidson has traditionally been credited with requiring radical interpretation in order to argue against conceptual pluralism and rule out the case of largely false beliefs.

approach

Davidson assumes that the interpreter must assume that the speaker is committed to the truth of numerous beliefs in his utterances, most of which are shared by the interpreter. The interpreter must develop a theory of meaning whose components formally correspond to the truth convention formulated by Tarski . Tarski had argued that the truth predicate could be understood in such a way that for every given sentence the following is fulfilled: “S is a” is true if and only if S is a.

According to Davidson, the interpreter forms a theory which, for example, assigns the English sentence "Snow is white" to the truth-makers singled out in German with "Schnee ist weiß": "Snow is white" is true precisely when snow is white.

In the extreme case of radical interpretation, the interpreter does not know the meanings of any words in the speaker's language, nor his beliefs, intentions or desires from independent sources. All that remains for him is the linguistic and non-linguistic behavior of the speaker and his relationship to events in his environment. Nevertheless, the interpreter without knowledge of the foreign language can justifiably form hypotheses about whether the speaker considers certain sentences to be true at certain times. For example, suppose that every morning a man in a group of several men utters the phrase “Faki si kunori” and everyone else nods in agreement. He might now suspect that the sentence is true. By observing the events to which the sentence is uttered and to what extent other speakers of the language react, he can record these observations in sentences in the following form: The speaker considers the sentence “Faki si konori” to be true at time t and he has it at t Roe deer made a rutting call. Generalizing this, the interpreter can conclude that "Faki si konori" is always uttered when the rutting calls of a deer can be heard and thus means a reference to facts of this type.

Quine had used a similar example: “Gavagai” is always uttered when a rabbit walks by. Quine had discussed a radical vagueness of the translation and a relativity of ontological ascriptions to the underlying concepts; Davidson et al. a. with his criticism of the concept of a “conceptual scheme”.

Problems

Discussed problems of this view include the following:

The fact that the sentence “Faki si kunori” is about the rutting calls of a deer can only legitimately be assumed if the speaker is not mistaken. It could well be that he actually suspects that it is a fallow rutting call.

Davidson counters this problem with the "principle of benevolent interpretation," which firstly states that the interpreter must assume that the speaker is largely rational and, secondly, that he has largely true beliefs about the world. If this were not the case, understanding others would be fundamentally impossible. Here it becomes clear that Davidson believes in holistic semantics .

The following problem is connected with the reference to Tarski's concept of truth. The theory of interpretation would be true if and only if it had found a sentence for every sentence in the foreign language that has the same truth value, for example:

“Roses are red” is true exactly when snow is white.

Here, too, the solution is Davidson's holistic understanding of language. Understanding a sentence means inserting it into the entire network of sentences of the language and not just contrasting it with another sentence in a biconditional as in the above sentence.

literature

Donald Davidson: Radical Interpretation. In: Truth and Interpretation. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-518-06040-6 , pp. 183-203.
Donald Davidson: Truth and Meaning. In: Truth and Interpretation. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1986, ISBN 3-518-06040-6 , pp. 40-67.
Ernest LePore, Kirk Ludwig: Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality. Clarendon Press, Oxford 2005, ISBN 0-19-925134-7 .
Robert Sinclair: What is Radical Interpretation? Davidson, Fodor, and the Naturalization of Philosophy. In: Inquiry 45/2 (2002), pp. 161-184, doi: 10.1080 / 002017402760093252 .

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ Davidson later contradicted this: Radical Interpretation Interpreted , in: Philosophical Perspectives 8 (1994), 121–128.
↑ “This procedure requires that we adapt our own propositions (or our own sentences) to the words and attitudes of other people in such a way that their utterances and other behavior can be understood. From this it follows with necessity that we see others in terms of overall coherence and correctness as persons who are largely the same as us: We have to see them as more or less rational beings who live spiritually in a world that is very similar to ours. " Donald Davidson, The Expression of Valuations. In: ders. Problems of Rationality, Frankfurt am Main, 2006. P. 76 f.

[1] Davidson later contradicted this: Radical Interpretation Interpreted , in: Philosophical Perspectives 8 (1994), 121–128.

[2] “This procedure requires that we adapt our own propositions (or our own sentences) to the words and attitudes of other people in such a way that their utterances and other behavior can be understood. From this it follows with necessity that we see others in terms of overall coherence and correctness as persons who are largely the same as us: We have to see them as more or less rational beings who live spiritually in a world that is very similar to ours. " Donald Davidson, The Expression of Valuations. In: ders. Problems of Rationality, Frankfurt am Main, 2006. P. 76 f.