Доналд Дейвидсън: истина и индексичност
Donald Davidson: Truth and Demonstratives

Summary/Abstract: The paper reconstructs the early attempts of Donald Davidson to design a formal theory of truth – and, hence, a formal semantics for the ordinary languages. Following his failures to realize this task step by step the paper deconstructs the very task. If truth is to be understood as a formal “relation between sentences, speakers, and dates” as Davidson initially suggests then the demonstratives (all the language devices pointing out contextual circumstances and times) should be treated as “logical constants”. But such a formal treatment – in the course of the attempts to be found - appears to be mission impossible. Moreover, nearly in the same time Davidson finds that the “saying that” and the “quotation” have explicitly demonstrative character. But “saying that” and “quotation” are integral parts of truth-saying: the quotation and dis-quotation are even at the core of the Tarski’s formalized T-equivalence. Taking into account this discovery as well as Davidson’s misfortunate attempts to formalize the demonstratives we can infer: not a formal one but some explicitly demonstrative theory of truth should be developed from here. This is the direction sketched out not by Davidson but by the author in the end of the paper.

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