Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig present the definitive critical exposition of the philosophical system of Donald Davidson (1917-2003). Davidson's ideas had a deep and broad influence in the central areas of philosophy; he presented them in brilliant essays over four decades, but never set out explicitly the overarching scheme in which they all have their place. Lepore's and Ludwig's book will therefore be the key work, besides Davidson's own, for understanding one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century.

• 1: Introduction


• Part I: Historical Introduction to Truth-Theoretic Semantics


• 2: Learnable Languages and the Compositionality Requirement


• 3: The Form of a Meaning Theory and Difficulties for Traditional Approaches


• 4: The Introduction of a Truth Theory as the Vehicle of a Meaning Theory


• 5: Truth and Context Sensitivity


• 6: Davidson's Extensionalist Proposal


• 7: The Extensionality and Determination Problems


• 8: Foster's Objection


• 9: Relation to an Explicit Meaning Theory and to Semantic Competence


• 10: The Problem of Semantic Defects in Natural Languages


• Part II: Radical Interpretation


• 11: Clarifying the Project


• 12: The Procedure of the Radical Interpreter


• 13: The Justification of the Principle of Charity


• 14: The Theory of Agency and Additional Constraints


• 15: Indeterminacy


• 16: Development of a Unified Theory of Meaning and Action


• 17: The Reality of Language


• Part III: Metaphysics and Epistemology


• 18: The Impossibility of Alternative Conceptual Schemes


• 19: Externalism and the Impossibility of Massive Error


• 20: First Person Authority


• 21: Inscrutability of Reference


• 22: Language, Thought, and World


• Bibliography