Lexicon of Arguments

 

IV 86
Holism/radical interpretation/RI/Davidson/Fodor/Lepore: Davidson's argument for holism is based on his assumption that individual sentences, e.g. "Kurt belongs to the German-speaking Community and Kurt holds true": "It is raining on Saturday afternoon and it is indeed raining in Kurt’s area on Saturday afternoon" are lawlike (laws).
>Radical interpretation, >Holism, >Laws.
Fodor/LeporeVsDavidson: the generalizations thereof e.g. (x)(t)(if x belongs to the German-speaking community, then x holds "it s raining" to be true at t if and only if it is raining in the vicinity of x at t) do not support counterfactual conditionals and therefore, according to Davidson's definition of the law, are not lawlike. There is no support of counterfactual conditionals. E.g. the meaning of "it is raining" could be: "the cat is on the mat", then it does not follow that the cat is not on the mat when it is not raining.
IV 87
Solution: "... for a relation R and each speaker S..." then the statement is nomological, but not yet a radical interpretation. Lawlikeness: we only had to assume lawlikeness because of the conventionality of language. Problem: the radical interpretation cannot find out conventionality by definition.
IV 89
Radical Interpretation/RI/Fodor/Lepore: our image of the radical interpretation is much richer than that of Davidson.
IV 90
Problem: the nomological approach is not holistic.