Skeletons in the Closet of Natural Language Semantics: Hidden Transcendental Assumptions of Donald Davidson’s and David Lewis’s Project

Abstract

This article provides a critique of Davidson’s and Lewis’s dependence on truth conditions in natural language semantics, connecting their shortcomings to broader epistemological challenges. Despite their formalist aspirations and claims of epistemic neutrality—centered on a semantic mapping purportedly indifferent to pure categories or specific judgment standards—we argue that both frameworks ultimately rely on what Gross (2012) terms the “Principle of Exhaustion,” which limits the scope of meaning to publicly available semantic facts, collapsing semantic agreement into a surface-level compatibility devoid of deeper epistemic divergence and normative content. We argue that both Davidson’s extensionalist theory and Lewis’s intensionalist theory rely on underlying assumptions about what counts as rational, judgeable, or meaningful within a given framework of truth standards, ultimately failing to avoid inclusion in a transcendental problematic. Both programs fail to remain transcendentally neutral or indifferent regarding the epistemic standards that structure the limits of judgment (or any method for determining truth), a failure that manifests either in (1) their reduction to a merely formal paradigm incapable of sustaining the transition from a theory of contentless agreement to a theory of meaning, or (2) their slipping into an unreflective demarcation of meaning, shaped dogmatically and blindly by the prevailing paradigms of method and judgment of a given historical period.