Interpretation, Meaning, and Disagreement

This chapter unveils the deeper moral of the findings in Chap. 6 . Utilizing Davidson’s later writings on the topic of “triangulation,” and recent defenses of his metasemantics, it suggests that the epistemological peculiarities revealed in Chap. 6 are a result of the social nature of meaning and thought. Here, the epistemology and the metaphysics of disagreement intersect. Stated in a very general way, meaning arises when different agents converge on what they take to be true and seek to explicate divergences from this. Due to this, disagreements are as much a disturbance of communication and intersubjective intelligibility as they are disruptive for any agent striving to entertain true beliefs.