Probe in Davidson's Argument for Compositionality of Natural Languages and the Slingshot Argument

Davidson, at first, for presenting his theory of meaning, provides grounds for doing so. Among these grounds, the compositionality of natural languages is one, based on which he becomes able to apply Tarski’s theory of truth to natural languages for granting a truth conditional theory of meaning. According to Davidson, it is just after admitting natural languages as compositional ones that they can be learnt. Another important basis for posing the theory is Davidson’s Slingshot argument which prevents traditional approach to meaning to be extended to sentences. In the traditional approach, all expressions refer to objects as their meanings, and meanings are treated as abstract entities. By the argument, this approach is stopped to be continued for sentences. In this essay, after describing these two arguments, I am going to discuss about.