Analyze The Concept Of Meaning In The Transformation From The Radical Translation To The Radical Interpretation

Since the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, the field of world philosophy has occurred the linguistic turn, The Philosophers have changed their attention from the world to the language, Researching how to use words to describe the state of affairs、the meaning of the language and truth-conditional statement, Hence, the concept of meaning has becoming the core issue of philosophy. The analysis of philosophers advocate using the method of modern logic to analyze the meaning of language statement、Thus making philosophy be more scientific.On the basis of inheriting and criticizing the Frege, Russell and Carnap’s views, Quine proposed the radical translation of thought experiments, and draw his "behaviorism theory of meaning", At this point, we shouldn’t regard the meaning as a physical connotation,firmly disagreed of materialized meaning, but do not deny things that are meaningful, We can through the observation to the understanding of the objective reality by the linguistic statement, its nature is our common speech act tendency. Davidson, As Quine’s student, not only inherited and developed the Quine’s theory of meaning, on the basis of Tarski’s theory of truth, Putting forward a radical interpretation of the thought experiment, and draw its "truth-conditional theory of meaning", He sees the interpretation of behavior of the speech as the starting point of theory of meaning, Thinking the meaning of the statement is equal to the truth-conditional of statement, indicating that there have existed strong logical connection between the concept of meaning respectively in Quine’s radical translation and Davidson’s radical interpretation.By comparative analysis, we could found that Davidson inherited Quine’s standpoint of holism and Analysis methods of modern logic in the aspect of understanding the concept of meaning, Thus, making theory of meaning have a huge transformation from the experience type proposition concerning "How radical translation occurred?" to the priori type proposition concerning "How radical interpretation be possibly?" manifesting change of their attitudes on the concept of meaning vary "negative" to "positive"; On the one hand, Davidson emphasizes using "interpretation" instead of "translation" on comprehending the concept of meaning, advocating on the basis of distal stimulus during the interpretation to replace the proximal stimulus used in the Quine’s radical translation.on the other hand, Davidson has extended the Quine’s principle of charity from only used in purely translate sentences to the scope of quantifier, in order to ensure the correctness of the faith while making interpretation be possible.