The most general lesson of the discussion of Davidson is that the overall collision is between
the intrinsically holistic demands of reason-relations, understood in interpretivist terms by Davidson, and (also) in social-practical terms by Rorty,
Interpretism: to say someone is a believer is to invoke the possibility of interpreting their beliefs and actions together (in a way that maps onto our own beliefs)
While having a conversation with someone is how you learn what they mean by X, the fact you can have a conversation is what it means for them to mean something by X.
To say that someone believes something is to claim we can have a conversation with them.
and the claims representational relations determined independently of social practices of giving and assessing reasons, for instance (and paradigmatically) by objective, causal relations describable in alethic modal terms
Davidson is happy to impute extensions (referents) as an intermediate stage of interpretation. But he insists that the process be top-down, starting from reason-relations to assignments of referents.
Davidson’s big contribution:
flipping Tarski’s theory of truth:
Tarski: if you take meanings fixed, I can give you a recursive theory of which statements are truth.
Flipped: You can take ‘meanings’ to be the truth conditions (of all of the language). The starting point is the reason relations, and from those we derive the meanings.
We can argue about which order of explanation is better. Bottom up vs top down.
Bad theories
E.g. witches, phlogiston
We often find ourselves saying “Hard to say whether they’re talking about real things but are wrong about most of them or not talking about real things”
To what degree do ‘witch’ and ‘phlogiston’ refer?
It’s a matter of degree and a pragmatic decision.
So any theory that has as a consequence that there is a precise line between reference or non-reference is wrong.