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Full Idea
The notion of fitting the totality of experience ...adds nothing intelligible to the simple concept of being true. ....Nothing, ...no thing, makes sentences and theories true: not experience, not surface irritations, not the world.
Gist of Idea
Saying truths fit experience adds nothing to truth; nothing makes sentences true
Source
Donald Davidson (The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme [1974], p.11), quoted by Willard Quine - On the Very Idea of a Third Dogma p.39
Book Ref
Quine,Willard: 'Theories and Things' [Harvard 1981], p.39
A Reaction
If you don't have a concept of what normally makes a sentence true, I don't see how you go about distinguishing what is true from what is false. You can't just examine the sentence to see if it has the 'primitive' property of truth. Holism is involved....
| 19044 | Saying truths fit experience adds nothing to truth; nothing makes sentences true [Davidson] |
| 6398 | Different points of view make sense, but they must be plotted on a common background [Davidson] |
| 6399 | Criteria of translation give us the identity of conceptual schemes [Davidson] |
| 6400 | Without the dualism of scheme and content, not much is left of empiricism [Davidson] |