Donald Davidson and White Snow: A Bare Bones Theory of Meaning

On The Very Idea - A Philosophy Podcast

In this first episode of a two part series on Donald Davidson, I examine the work of this often puzzling yet seminal American philosopher. Davidson offers a seemingly baffingly simple theory of meaning - that 'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white. In other words, that above sentence about snow is true if and only if snow is actually white and that fact about the whiteness of snow is the only thing that we need to know about snow if we are too understand the meaning of the sentence 'snow is white'. Isn't that a little too simple of a theory you might ask? Fair question and in this episode, I'll attempt to explain why this theory may be all we need to understand the entirety of what a concept of meaning provides for a language. It's adequate. Maybe ...