A theory of truth is not enough to interpret a language.
After all, if truth-conditions are all that matters, then how can anomalous sentences such as ‘“Schnee ist weiss” is true if and only if snow is white and grass is green’ be verified as false? Davidson argues that because the language is compositional, it is also holistic: sentences are based on the meanings of words, but the meaning of a word depends on the totality of sentences in which it appears. This holistic constraint, along with the requirement that the theory of truth is law-like, suffices to minimize indeterminacy just enough for successful communication to occur.
After all, if truth-conditions are all that matters, then how can anomalous sentences such as ‘“Schnee ist weiss” is true if and only if snow is white and grass is green’ be verified as false? Davidson argues that because the language is compositional, it is also holistic: sentences are based on the meanings of words, but the meaning of a word depends on the totality of sentences in which it appears. This holistic constraint, along with the requirement that the theory of truth is law-like, suffices to minimize indeterminacy just enough for successful communication to occur.
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See that post with different algorithms in metabole
See the journal French Metablog with today different posts
