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, that the argument in question is invalid. I argue here that the first claim is mistaken and that the latter, though it offers a helpful corrective, does not undermine the interest of the argument Davidson gives. But there is a deep tension in Davidson's work here, to which Pagin may well be responding, and that tension is not resolvable.
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