Michael Dummett - The Seas of Language

end p.ii

that, according to his conception of a theory of meaning, such a theory was not intended to convey the concepts expressible in the object-language, but to convey an understanding of that language to one who already had those concepts. This struck me as a luminous way of expressing his idea of what he was after in his discussions of a theory of meaning, and also as focusing very precisely on the difference between the ways he and I conceived of such a theory. The two of us each contributed to a series of Wolfson Lectures held in Oxford in 1974 (and published as Mind and Language, edited by Samuel Guttenplan, Oxford, 1975); by an odd coincidence, out of the six lecturers, all but the two Americans were Catholics, although you could not have inferred that from their lectures. When I came to compose my lecture, I decided to treat of the conception of a theory of meaning I remembered Davidson to have expressed with such clarity, and borrowed that formulation for my characterization of what I called a 'modest' theory of meaning: but I was embarrassed whether or not to acknowledge the source of the formulation. On the one hand, I surely owed it to Davidson to do so; on the other, it is unfair to saddle people in public, and particularly in print, with things they said in discussion, which may well not have expressed their considered view. In the event, I decided, with some uneasiness, not to make any acknowledgement. I was later relieved, but at the same time greatly surprised, when Davidson, in informal conversation, declared that he had never intended a theory of meaning, as he conceived it, to be modest in my sense, and had never asserted it to be. My memory is extremely unreliable; in particular, I have often discovered that people never said what I thought I remembered them as saying. One possibility, therefore, is that Davidson had not said what I remembered as having afforded me so much illumination, and that I misunderstood him at the time or misremembered him later. Another, of course, is that