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Full Idea
Davidson's response to the problem of how you would state truth conditions for "I am sick now" ...is to relativize its truth to a particular speaker and a time.
Gist of Idea
You can state truth-conditions for "I am sick now" by relativising it to a speaker at a time
Source
report of Donald Davidson (Truth and Meaning [1967]) by William Lycan - Philosophy of Language Ch.9
Book Ref
Lycan,William G.: 'Philosophy of Language' [Routledge 2000], p.142
A Reaction
Lycan is not happy with this, but it seems a reasonable way to treat the truth of any statement containing indexicals. Never mind the 'truth conditions theory of meaning' - just ask whether "I am sick now" is true.
7772 | Compositionality explains how long sentences work, and truth conditions are the main compositional feature [Davidson, by Lycan] |
7327 | Davidson thinks Frege lacks an account of how words create sentence-meaning [Davidson, by Miller,A] |
7769 | You can state truth-conditions for "I am sick now" by relativising it to a speaker at a time [Davidson, by Lycan] |
6179 | Should we assume translation to define truth, or the other way around? [Blackburn on Davidson] |
7332 | There is a huge range of sentences of which we do not know the logical form [Davidson] |