Theory Of Meaning: Davidson Programme Interpretation

In the sixties of last century, Davidson, under a complicated theoretical background, proposed and elucidated step by step a kind of meaning theory which known as"truth condition theory". His meaning theory was usually called"Davidson's program". And many of the issues was involved, i.e. meaning and reference, meaning and truth, language exchange and interpretation, formal language and natural language and so on.Davidson learned much from the early philosophers of language theory. He drew lessons from Frege's language philosophy and explored the meaning of language on the statement level; based on Tarski's truth semantics, Davidson quested for the relationship between the meaning of natural language and the truth. With the thought of Quine's holism and extensionalism Davidson made the research on meaning theory in association with the objective reality, putting forward his distinctive meaning theory. In this thesis, the author will analyze and expound Davidson's program from Davidson's unique perspective and his methodology.