Heidegger, Tugendhat, Davidson - University of New Mexico

produce and the interpreter can understand, and which thus manifest in their actual speaking and
understanding of the language.
Even if Tarski’s definitions provide an extensionally adequate characterization of truth in a particular
language, in this sense, though, this is not to say, as Davidson admits, that they capture “all there is” to
the concept of truth itself. First, there is the obvious point that Tarski’s definitions (whether applied to
formal languages given a satisfaction relation, as Tarski does, or applied to the structure of a natural
language only under an interpretation) define truth only for specific languages L; the general concept of
truth (in an arbitrary language) is not explained or defined by them, and it is not clear from the Tarskian
structure alone where or even whether we should look for such a definition. (In particular, in radical
interpretation we must use a general concept of truth in characterizing utterances in an alien language
as those held true, so we must presuppose it in interpretation). Second, as a number of commentators
have objected, neither the specific Tarskian definitions of truth-predicates nor their general pattern
suffice by themselves to define the general sense of truth in a way that goes beyond their extensional
adequacy in each case. For example, as Dummett has objected, Tarski’s definitions provide no guidance
in extending the concept of truth to the case of a new language, and as Field has objected, they provide
no guidance, even in the case of a single language, in extending the concept of truth to apply to
sentences involving concepts or terms introduced de novo and thus not provided for in the original
truth-definition. Both objections are related, moreover, to Dummett’s suggestion that in an important
sense, Tarski’s definitions fail to capture the “point” of the introduction of a truth-predicate into a
language to begin with.
Admitting the trenchancy of these objections, Davidson agrees that in an important sense, Tarski has
not provided a definition of the concept of truth, even as applied to particular languages. In particular,
there is a clear sense in which the Tarskian definitions, though they provide the extension of the concept
of truth in each case, do not provide its meaning. Their failure in this respect can, according to
Davidson, is a result of the fact that they can provide the extension and reference of basic predicates
and terms only by listing (finitely many) cases; in particular, the specification of the satisfactionconditions
for basic terms and predicates, on which each Tarskian truth-definition structurally depends,
does not and cannot provide any guidance for how to go on in applying either satisfaction or truth to
new cases, or any useful characterization of the point or purpose of doing so. This is what leads
Davidson to suggest that, while Tarski’s theory does provide an essential formal guide to the contours of
any truth predicate, it is nevertheless reasonable to suppose that the truth predicates have further
essential properties, not captured or reflected in the Tarskian language-specific definitions or in
Convention T itself. In particular, for Davidson, these further properties can come into view when we
consider (as we necessarily do in the course of radical interpretation) whether a particular T-theory
actually applies to a given natural language, and in this way consider how the type of pattern embodied
in a particular T-theory is identifiable in the actual use of a language by its speakers.
For Davidson, though, the insight of Tarski’s structural approach to truth is not limited to its essential
use in the practice of radical interpretation or to the way it supports the project of giving a theory of
meaning for a natural language; in it is to be found, as well, the essential ingredients for an actual
solution to the ancient problem of predication. As Davidson presents it, this is the problem of how the
8