KARL-OTTO APEL

C O M M E N T S ON D A V I D S O N

Being not in possession of Professor Davidson's text, I prepared my comments on his present paper with the aid of his previous papers, especially his recent elaboration on 'A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs', which he was kind enough to send me 1. As far as I can see, this reading helped me indeed to understand the point of his present paper; or, at least, I hope so.

Now, regarding this paper, let me immediately and, so to speak, spontaneously express my impressions with respect to the second thesis, which I consider to make up the main point of the paper. This point, it seems to me, confronts us with a new Davidsonian position, which more or less overthrows the well-known older position of papers like 'Truth and Meaning' or ,'Radical Interpretation' and still of 'Thought and Talk'. 2 And I should confess at the beginning that the new position looks rather puzzling to me, such that I feel stimulated to defend the earlier Davidson against the new one.

Using Professor Davidson's new terminology, I could say that my own "prior theory" with regard to his position was something like this: Starting out from, and developing further, approaches of Carnap, Tarski and Quine, Professor Davidson elaborated in a series of papers what I would call a semanticist theory of "radical interpretation", i.e., of understanding utterances of sentences of a natural language on the basis of evidence available before interpretation has begun. I am using the term semanticist in characterizing his approach because it seemed to me to make up a counter-position to extremely pragmaticist ap- proaches to almost the same problem, as, e.g., the intentionalist approach of Paul Grice 3. The difference between the two approaches to the problem of radical interpretation could perhaps be explicated by the following distinctions:

Whereas Grice tried to reduce what he called "timeless meaning" of "utterance types" to "utterer's occasion meaning" and thereby finally to pre-linguistic intentions of agents of purposive-rational actions, Davidson, on the other side, seemed to repudiate this type of approach by arguments like the following:

Synthese 59 (1984) 19-26. 0039-7857/84/0591-0019 $00.80 © 1984 by D. Reidel Publishing Company

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(1) It is completely unclear (unintelligible) how we could conceive of the fine differentiations of human intentions and beliefs - in contra- distinction, say, to the problematic mental states of a dog - without presupposing the possibility of understanding their actual or at least potential expression (and hence articulation) by sentences whose meanings are pre-structured by the whole recursive structure of a language as a "word-sentence system", so to speak.

(2) In as far as utterances of sentences are actually used, in order to realize intentions of the speakers that lie beyond, or deviate from, the linguistically pre-structured conventional meanings of sentences, as, e.g., in so-called perlocutionary actions of warning, insulting, persuad- ing, etc., thus far the utterances are in fact purposive-rational actions that must be subject to teleological explanations that could draw on decision-theory. But even if such explanations have only to do with extralinguistic actions, the testing of the teleological explanations must rely on the use of language, and hence a semantical theory of verbal interpretation must be added to the action-theory to be tested 4. Thus far, I understood, even the radical understanding of the non- linguistic intentions of human agents is dependent on the public meaning of linguistic signs which we as human beings can share with our communication-partners.

(3) The semantic theory of verbal interpretation may have the logical form of a recursive account of the truth-conditions of all possible sentences, or rather utterances of sentences, of a natural language. The sought for truth-conditions may be empirically testified to by the observable correlation between sentences held true by their utterers and concomitant states of affairs.

I may confess that I found myself in great sympathy with at least part of Davidson's tenets for the following reasons: It seemed (to be) plausible to me - especially as an achievement of this century's overcoming of psychologism - that the public medium, so to speak, of meaning, as it is constituted by the syntactic and semantic rules of a language-system, should make up the tendentially intersubjective con- dition of the possibility of communicative experience, i. e., of that special type of cognition that is possible and necessary for us with respect to the communicative intentions of our co-subjects of cog- nition.

I found this latter point reconfirmed by Professor Davidson's insight that, in order to be able to understand other people's utterances, or, for

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that matter, beliefs, we must presuppose a common background of agreement about what is true (I would even add: and about what is right!). In this context, I was especially impressed by Davidson's paper 'The Method of Truth in Metaphysics', 5 where he states that "in sharing a language, in whatever sense this is required for communication, we share a picture of the world that must, in its large features, be true (my emphasis). "6 From this insight, which corresponds to the hermeneutic "principle of charity", Professor Davidson, I understood, derived his double programme of studying the structure of reality in the light of radically understanding natural language and at the same time studying the meaning of linguistic utterances in the light of shared truth, i.e., of an attempted identification of the truth-conditions of sentences held true by their utterers with those states of affairs we ourselves hold to be facts.

Besides these agreements, though, I also had some troubles with what I felt was one-sided in Davidson's semanticist approach. It took into account only (merely) the truth-conditions of propositional sentences, or rather, of the propositional part of the performative-propositional double-structure of explicit sentences in the sense analysed by the later Austin and expecially by J. R. Searle. I would have preferred to see Davidson's semantic theory of interpretation supplemented not only by a theory of explaining purposive-rational actions, but, moreover, by a semantic and pragmatic theory of the meaning of linguistic modes, performative sentences, and of "illocutionary force", including Grice's "conversational implicatures". 7 All these phenomena appeared to me to lie in between the subject area of Davidsonian semantics and a theory Of teleological explanation of actions. They would, in my opinion, require a supplementation of the truth-functional semantics by a wider semantic theory of linguistic competence as well as by a universal-pragmatic theory of communicative competence 8 for those cases where human beings can and must compensate, so to speak, for the non-realization of Searle's "principle of expressibility ''9 by means like irony, metaphors, "conversational implicatures", etc. (I shall come back to this point later.)

Now, in his present paper Professor Davidson takes precisely these phenomena of "utterer's occasion-meaning" (to speak along with Grice) as an occasion and motive for, at least partly, revising his previous theory of radical interpretation. In this context, he interes- tingly brings under one head phenomena that, at least on the speaker's

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side, do not only bear witness for the triumphs, so to speak, of the compensative function of the communicative competence, but rather merely for a deficiency of the linguistic competence. For the special motive of this revision is delivered, I understand, by the phenomenon of malapropism by ignorance or inadvertence. (I shall come back to this point too.)

Now, in what respect, or to what extent, has Professor Davidson in fact revised his former position?

His new thesis concerning the necessary preconditions of radical interpretation denies, I understand, the presupposition that any two communication-partners must share a common language or, for that matter, a common theory about a language-system. The notion of such a thing as a socially shared rule-system of a common language to be learned and finally mastered dissolves itself: "No two speakers need speak the same language"; 1° "We must give up the'idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language users master and then apply to c a s e s . ' ' 1 1

What is needed instead is only "a shared way of interpreting a speaker, ''12 or as it is stated in a principle of "correspondence": "The speaker must know how his speech will be interpreted, while the interpreter must know how the speaker intends his speech to be interpreted. Each knows what the other knows about how to interpret the speaker. ''13 Precisely this reciprocal knowledge of speakers and interpreters seems to be the content of what Professor Davidson now calls the "passing theory" on which the communication-partners must "converge from time to time," 14 i.e., "from utterance to utterance". 15

Listening to these statements, one might think that there is no longer any essential difference between Professor Davidson's semanticist ap- proach and the intentionalist approach of P. Grice, which culminated in the circle of reflective reciprocity of intentions and expectations between the speaker and the interpreter.

Now, this presumption seems to be precipitate, I understand; for Professor Davidson still insists on the presupposition of the interpreter's having a linguistic background, as he made clear in his first thesis. Thus he should still oppose the assumption that human intentions or beliefs -- like those one possibly might attribute to a dog - could be somehow understood without presupposing some kind of semantic theory. Hence he would still be unable to agree with Grice's programme of a reduction of our understanding of the "meanings of utterance types" to a

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pre-linguistic understanding of intentions, I suppose. But I am not sure about his possible answer with regard to this

question. Let us therefore try to put it to a test by an example. P. Grice suggests that a shop merchant in Port Said who sees a British

tourist could mean that the tourist should come in by saying to him with an alluring smile the Arabic for "You pig of an Englishman." 16 Could Professor Davidson agree with this judgment? I ask this question because I am inclined to consider Grice's example to be a confusion between genuine verbal communication and what I would call an act of feigned speech that stands in the service of a strategic action, in this case of the strategy of touting customers. Of course, if the tourist could take the unknown Arabic words as an invitation to come in, the merchant would have succeeded in performing an extra-verbal act of communication. But could he have meant by his cynical verbal utterance that the tourist should come in?

Grice does and must think so on his premisses. I would deny the question for the reason that the merchant did not fulfill the condition of genuinely sharing the meaning of his verbal utterance with his com- munication-partner. 17 I could think that Professor Davids0n would even now agree with me on the ground that the merchant did not really share his way of interpreting, or, more precisely, his passing semantic theory, with the tourist. What he in fact shared with his communication- partner was at best, one could say, the extra-verbal meaning of his invitation-gesture. And this is obviously not enough for the tourist to interpret the fine cynical intention of the shop merchant.

But I am not sure whether my attempted assessment of the im- plications of Davidson's new theory is correct. Couldn't one say that the "utterer's occasion meaning" of the sentence "You pig of an English- man!" was just "Please, come in!" On this account, the English tourist had just to adjust his "prior" theory of Arabic, in order to converge with the "passing theory" of the merchant. The fact that his "prior theory" was not a theory at all would be no obstacle for developing a correct "passing theory" by just correlating the utterance of the Arabic sentence with the obvious fact that the merchant wished to invite him to come in. For the "prior theory", on Professor Davidson's new account, is no longer to be equated to that of a shared language (i.e., a "learnable common core o f . . . shared grammar or rules" 18) but merely to "the ideolect of the speaker that the interpreter is in a position to take into account before the utterance begins". 19 Hence also the tourist's zero-

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theory of Arabic may be considered as a limit-case of a "prior theory", and this is precisely what the Port Said merchant does by suggesting to the tourist that "You pig of an Englishman!" means "Come in!" So this would just be the beginning of the tourist's developing a semantic theory of Arabic in the sense of "radical interpretation".

I think indeed that this last interpretation would be an unavoidable consequence of Professor Davidson's giving up the idea that a semantic theory of verbal interpretation must be an account of a system of syntactic and semantic rules that more or less definitely exclude, and thereby imply, the possibility of false applications in favour of a theory that changes "from utterance to utterance". But why should we need such a strange semantic theory?

Professor Davidson's answer, I understand, is: because we need a theory of radical interpretation that is adequate for interpreting the occasion-meaning of particular sentences as uttered by particular speakers. In order to make his semantic theory suited for this purpose, he is prepared to sacrifice the idea of a basic framework of categories or rules as constituting the core of a semantic theory. 2°

Now this price seems to me (to be) too high, and moreover, it seems to me unnecessary to pay it. For why should a theory concerning rules be made suited to cover even people's failures to follow the rules? Such an ambition seems to me even to be based on a misunderstanding of the very concept of a rule that must imply its being not followed in exceptional cases. The general problem to be solved - the problem of our understanding the occasion-meaning of utterances even in those cases where its verbal expression deviates from the so-called normal or conventional expression by language - may be better solved by a division of labor, so to speak, between a semantic theory of linguistic competence (i.e., of the language-system as a system of conventional rules that may eventually even be partly grounded on a universal theory of all possible human grammars) and, on the other hand, a universal- pragmatic theory of communicative competence. 21

Such a division of labor would fit in with the general fact that human institutions - and thus the institution of a language - by conventional rules fulfill the function of unburdening us from intentional decisions in normal cases 2z and precisely,thereby fail to satisfy our special intentions in particular cases. Thus most cases of a speaker's deviating from the normal (linguistic) usage and all cases of the interpreter's understanding those utterances could be accounted for by the compensative function

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of the communicative competence. Only those cases where a creative speaker by his very special deviatings from common usage should influence the common usage would seriously raise problems for the semantic theory; whereas (whilst) cases of malapropism by ignorance or inadvertence would clearly raise only problems for, or concerning, the compensative function of the interpreter's communicative com- petence. They would cease to do so only in those cases where they would amount to a general tendency towards changing the usage in the speech-community, as, e.g., in the case mentioned by Professor Davidson where "malaprop" is getting to be used in the place of "malapropism". (Similarly in German the slang-word "Studiker" could possibly come to be used in the place of "Student".)

Finally, one remark on Professor Davidson's most radical revision: on the suggestion, that we must abandon "not only the ordinary notion of language", but must erase "the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally". 23 This suggestion, it seems to me, amounts in its last consequence to dissolving one of the key notions of this century's convergence in philosophy, the notion that sharing public meanings by communication with co- subjects of cognition is a transcendental condition of the possibility of cognition in the sense of intersubjectively valid knowledge; and thus it seems to amount to restoring the methodical solipsism of a Cartesian or Lockean epistemology. 24

If the idea that our knowledge about the world already presupposes our sharing a common language had to be dissolved as a myth of this century, as one could think, then it might indeed be easier to come to terms with the intricate problem of learning one's first language, since this achievement of knowing had no longer to be conceived as a special type of knowledge that in a sense must precede all knowing concerning the world. Yet, on the other hand, I should ask what sense would then remain of that great insight inherent in Professor David- son's "principle of charity" that sharing linguistic meaning means "sharing a picture of the world that must, in its large features, be true"? For it is only with respect to communication-partners, i.e., co-subjects of speech, that we can learn to share the truth about the world.

N O T E S

l Donald Davidson, 'A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs'. My quotations are from the type script.

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2 Donald Davidson, 'Truth and Meaning', Synthese 17 (1967), 304-323 'Radical Interpretation' Dialectica 27 (1973), 313-327; 'Thought and Talk', Dialectica 31 (1977), 7-23. 3 Cf. H. P. Grice, 'Meaning', Philosophical Review 66 (1957) 377-388; 'Utterer's Meaning and Intentions', Philosophical Review 78 147-177. 4 Cf. Davidson, 'Thought and Talk', p. 15. 5 Donald Davidson, 'The Method of Truth in Metaphysics', Midwest Studies in Philoso- phy II (1977) 224-254. 6 Ibid., p. 244. 7 Cf. H. P. Grice 'Logic and Conversation',in P. Cole and J. L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and Semantics, Vol. III, New York, 1975, pp. 41-58. 8 Cf. J. Habermas, 'Towards a Theory of Communicative Competence', Inquiry 13 (1970), 360-375; 'Was heiBt Universalpragmatik?' in K.-O. Apel (ed.), Spraehpragmatik und Philosophie, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M., 1976 pp. 174-272; K.-O. Apel, 'Two Paradigms in the Philosophy of Language', in D. Ihde, D. Pellaurer and D. Tracy (eds.), Meaning and Interpretation: Essays in Honor of Paul Ricoeur (forthcoming). 9 See J. R. Searle, Speech Acts; and my critical discussion in K.-O. Apel, 'Sprechakt- theorie and Begriindtmg ethischer Normen', in K. Lorenz (ed.), Konstruktionen versus Positionen: PaulLorenzen zum 60. Geburtstag, W. de Gruyter, Bedinl 1979, Vol. 2, pp. 37-107. 1o Donald Davidson, 'A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs', p. 7. 11 Ibid., p. 11. 12 Ibid., p. 7. 13 Ibid., p. 4. 14 Ibid., p. 21. 15 Ibid., p. 20. 16 H. P. Grice, 'Otterer's Meaning and Intentions' p. 162. 17 For a thorough discussion of Grice's position cf. my paper 'Intentions, Conventions, and Reference to Things: Comments on some Disparities in Analytic Philosophy of Meaning' in H. Parret and J. Bonveresse (eds.), Meaning and Understanding, W. de Gruyter, Berlin, 1981, pp. 79-111. is Davidson, 'A Nice Derangement', p. 21. 19 Ibid., p. 17. 2o Ibid., p. 18. 21 Cf. notes 8 and 9. 22 Cf. A. Gehlen, Der Mensch, l l t h ed., Athen~ium, Bonn 1976 and Urmensch and Sptitkultur, Atheniium, Bonn, 1956. 23 Davidson, 'A Nice Derangement' p. 22. 24 Cf. my argument against methodical solipsism in K.-O. Apel, Towards a Trans- formalion of Philosophy, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1979.

Fachbereich Philosophie (7) D-6000 Frankfurt am Main Dantestr. 4-6 F.R.G.