The Logic and Metaphysics Workshop will meet on May 12th from 2:00-4:00 in-person at the Graduate Center (Room 7395) for a talk by Mircea Dumitru (Bucharest).

Title: Does a Tarskian theory of truth offer a theory of meaning? A Sellarsian-type evaluation and critique of Donald Davidson’s truth-conditional semantics

Abstract: The paper examines how problems with Davidson’s truth-conditional semantics can be fixed through Sellars’ brand of inferentialism. I begin by presenting Davidson’s truth-conditional semantics for a natural language, viz. the program according to which the meaning of a language is to be given by a Tarskian truth-theory for that language. Against this background, I build a scenario in which a competent logician can give a truth-theory for sentences of a language that he/she cannot speak/read/understand without thereby giving/knowing/understanding the meaning of the sentences that he/she cannot comprehend. The logician knows that the sentences in the unknown (for him/her) language are true but, nevertheless, he/she does not know what they mean. In order to fix this drawback of the Davidsonian truth-conditional based theory of meaning, I present the main elements of Sellars’ subtle views on meaning and truth, pointing at how the latter can circumvent the problems with the extensional Tarskian truth-conditional approach put forward by Davidson.