Show/Hide Menu
Hide/Show Apps
Logout
Türkçe
Türkçe
Search
Search
Login
Login
OpenMETU
OpenMETU
About
About
Open Science Policy
Open Science Policy
Open Access Guideline
Open Access Guideline
Postgraduate Thesis Guideline
Postgraduate Thesis Guideline
Communities & Collections
Communities & Collections
Help
Help
Frequently Asked Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
Guides
Guides
Thesis submission
Thesis submission
MS without thesis term project submission
MS without thesis term project submission
Publication submission with DOI
Publication submission with DOI
Publication submission
Publication submission
Supporting Information
Supporting Information
General Information
General Information
Copyright, Embargo and License
Copyright, Embargo and License
Contact us
Contact us
Donald Davidson: between compositionality and holism
Download
Index.pdf
Date
2023-7
Author
Ağoğlu, Eser
Metadata
Show full item record
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
.
Item Usage Stats
187
views
199
downloads
Cite This
Donald Davidson adopts both the principle of compositionality and holism in his earlier papers and keeps them intact through revisions he did in his philosophy through the years. This dissertation aims to clarify his position by showing that these principles are interdepended in his construal. The obstacle that could undermine this conclusion is the so-called learnability argument attributed to Davidson and said to justify the compositionality of natural languages. It will be shown that Davidson never attributes a justificatory role to it in the historical and argumentation contexts. The learnability argument will be reformulated as presupposing an informal account of compositionality to establish the finiteness of natural languages and to constrain the form of any semantic theory. Davidson proposes that Tarski style truth theory modified for a natural language satisfies the finiteness and gives an account of the compositionality. However, when the translation assumption is dropped and the theory goes empirical, the axioms of the theory are abstracted from the pattern of truth in language holistically. The principle of charity will be presented as a constitutive feature of language and communication that guides such a process and sheds light on Davidson’s informal account of compositionality.
Subject Keywords
Principle of compositionality
,
Holism
,
Learnability
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/104669
Collections
Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis
Citation Formats
IEEE
ACM
APA
CHICAGO
MLA
BibTeX
E. Ağoğlu, “Donald Davidson: between compositionality and holism,” Ph.D. - Doctoral Program, Middle East Technical University, 2023.