The Principle Of Charity And Davidson’s Construction Of His Theory Of Meaning

Being the central topic of linguistics,a theory of meaning for natural languages has received much attention.Among all the efforts of constructing a meaning theory,Donald Davidson has provided a unique theory of meaning.However,Davidson has no enough time to complete his construction in a book and all of his theoretical proposals are scattered in his theses.The principle of charity is one of the main themes that have combined Davidson’s lifelong researches on meaning together.Therefore,this research focuses on a careful look at the relation between the principle of charity and his theory of meaning.Davidson proposes two requirements for a suitable theory of meaning: formally compositional and empirically testable.He believes that Tarski’s definition of truth reveals the relation between truth and meaning,that is,to give the meaning of a sentence is to identify the conditions under which the sentence can be taken as true.Hence,Davidson adopts Convention-T as the form of his meaning theory.On the other hand,he believes that a theory of meaning should be a testable interpretation theory.To test this theory,the interpreter must take the speaker’s beliefs into account but without knowing the meaning of the speaker’s utterances,the interpreter cannot determine the beliefs.This is the entanglement problem of meaning and belief,which will be well solved by the principle of charity.Once meaning and belief are separated,Davidson’s theory of meaning is testable empirically.Therefore,the principle of charity plays an essential role in Davidson’s theory.The principle of charity has three meanings in Davidson’s theory.Firstly,the principle of charity is an attitude of holding true.Secondly,the principle of charity is to maximize or optimize the agreement during the interpretation,that is,to ascribe the right sort of logical consistence to the speaker.Thirdly,the principle of charity has two sub-principles: principle of coherence and principle of correspondence.The principle of charity works in two ways.On the one hand,the principle is an unavoidable condition for understanding.The aim of interpretation is understanding,which can only be secured by making the right sort of agreement.Without this principle,it will not be possible for one to understand others.On the other hand,the principle of charity is a necessity for a workable theory of meaning.The principle is necessary for the theory of interpretation to start,for without it,the entanglement problem of meaning and belief cannot be solved.The reason why Davidson adopts the principle lies in the rationality of human beings.Being rational means to have propositional attitudes.Having propositional attitudes means to have the idea of thought.Human beings’ ability to communicate their thoughts with others indicates that they are rational in nature.Therefore,in the process of interpretation,the rationality implies that the principle of charity is forced on the theory of interpretation since language users are rational and understanding others demands massive agreement.Denying the principle of charity is to deny that human beings themselves are by nature rational.This research has made two contributions.Firstly,this research has clarified the definition and the operation of the principle of charity as well as the reason for this principle in charity in Davidson’s theory of meaning.Secondly,the research has put forward and demonstrated a tentative theoretical framework for Davidson’s theory of meaning.