Journal for the History of Analytical Philosophy 16 (2026), no. 3, pp. 1-24.
Get it here: https://jhaponline.org/article/view/6884
ABSTRACT
Donald Davidson is generally supposed to have offered an argument for the principle of compositionality in “Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages”. Peter Pagin, however, has argued that Davidson offers no such argument. Indeed, Pagin claims that Davidson explicitly rejects any demand that compositionality should be justified and, moreover, claims that the argument in question is unsound. I argue here that the first claim is mistaken and that the latter, though it offers a helpful corrective to the usual interpretation, does not apply to the argument Davidson actually gives. But there is a deep tension in Davidson’s work here, to which Pagin may well be responding, and it is a tension that Davidson himself cannot resolve.
I now wish I had said something in the abstract about what happens toward the end of the paper: I make some suggestions about the intellectual climate in which Davidson was writing; more precisely, who his opponents were. Quine, it turns out, had made some suggestions of his own about how our 'infinite aptitude' for language arises. Davidson must have known of these, although he does not mention Quine by name.
