Radical interpretation is interpretation of a speaker, including attributing beliefs and desires to them and meanings to their words, from scratch—that is, without relying on translators, dictionaries, or specific prior knowledge of their mental states. The term was introduced by American philosopher
Donald Davidson (1973) and is meant to suggest important similarity to
W. V. O. Quine's term
radical translation
Radical translation is a thought experiment in ''Word and Object'', a major philosophical work from American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine. It is used as an introduction to his theory of the indeterminacy of translation, and specifically to p ...
, which occurs in his work on the
indeterminacy of translation The indeterminacy of translation is a thesis propounded by 20th-century American analytic philosophy, analytic philosopher W. V. Quine. The classic statement of this thesis can be found in his 1960 book ''Word and Object'', which gathered together a ...
. Radical translation
is translation of a speaker's language, without prior knowledge, by observing the speaker's use of the language in context.
[Davidson, Donald. Radical Interpretation. Originally published in Dialectica, 27 (1973), 314-28. Reprinted in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (2n. ed. 125-39). New York: Clarendon Press.]
Even more so than radical translation did for Quine, radical interpretation plays an important role in Davidson's work, but the exact nature of this role is up for debate. Some see Davidson as using radical interpretation directly in his arguments against conceptual relativism and the possibility of massive error--of most of our beliefs being false.
[Lepore, Ernest and Kirk Ludwig. ''Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality''. Oxford. 2005.] But Davidson seems to explicitly reject this reading in "Radical Interpretation Interpreted".
[Davidson, Donald. Radical Interpretation Interpreted. Philosophical Perspectives, 8 (1994), 121-128.]
There is also a more narrow and technical version of radical interpretation used by Davidson:
given the speaker's attitudes of holding particular sentences true in particular circumstances, the speaker's hold-true attitudes, the radical interpreter is to infer a theory of meaning, a truth theory meeting a modified version of
Alfred Tarski's
Convention T, for the speaker's
idiolect.
Ernest Lepore and
Kirk Ludwig characterize this as inference from sentences of the form:
:Ceteris paribus, S holds true s at t if and only if p.
to corresponding
T-sentences of the form
:s is true (S, t) if and only if q
where s is a sentence in the idiolect of the speaker S, t is a time, and p and q are filled in with sentences in the
metalanguage
In logic and linguistics, a metalanguage is a language used to describe another language, often called the ''object language''. Expressions in a metalanguage are often distinguished from those in the object language by the use of italics, quot ...
.
See also
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Indeterminacy of translation The indeterminacy of translation is a thesis propounded by 20th-century American analytic philosophy, analytic philosopher W. V. Quine. The classic statement of this thesis can be found in his 1960 book ''Word and Object'', which gathered together a ...
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Meaning (linguistics)
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and compu ...
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Philosophy of language
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Radical translation
Radical translation is a thought experiment in ''Word and Object'', a major philosophical work from American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine. It is used as an introduction to his theory of the indeterminacy of translation, and specifically to p ...
References
External links
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Philosophy of language
Interpretation (philosophy)
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