Abstract
Recent developments in the theory of truth by Tarski1 have brought new material for inquiries in the theory of meaning – this is what indeed thinkers such as Davidson believe; but are they right believing this ? More exactly, in what sense can we legitimately discuss the idea that a theory of truth can ‘serve as' a theory of meaning? As we understand it, this question commits us to elucidate two things: (i) what is required by (and for) a ‘good' theory of meaning; and (ii) to what extent a theory of truth can satisfy those requirements.
As Davidson puts it (and as most authors second), the main and crucial requirement for a good theory of meaning is that it fulfills the task of explaining how we come to master natural languages – that is, how it is that we have the a prior ability to understand and utter an infinite number of different sentences.
Besides, what one could logically expect from a good theory of meaning, is that it eventually produces unequivocal theorems of the form‘s means that p' – to put it another way : that it produces theorems that unequivocally link every possible sentence with some translation of its, in such a way that all of them are made directly intelligible. Given this, Davidson's core intuition is that Tarski's theory of truth could provide a convenient basis, for it contains the wanted ‘finite-to-infinite' connection, and an unequivocal form for its theorems – the famous ‘convention T'.
