The Concern for What is True

Abstract The concept of truth always had a special significance within Donald Davidson’s view of language and thought. For instance, Davidson always maintained that a basic requirement for understanding another individual is finding a great deal of truth in what she says and thinks. This captures his commitment to the principle of charity. What is the relationship between this principle and the constitutive claims about language and the triangulation argument advanced in later work? I argue that the triangulation argument assigns to the concept of truth, which is at the core of the Davidsonian conception of charity, a new role within the Davidsonian system. While Davidson’s earlier claims about language and thought entail that it is in the nature of the thinking mind not only to seek the truth but also to succeed, at least to some extent, in this aspiration, the triangulation argument entails that a concern for what is true is a requirement for being on the path to thought. Only individuals who embody such a concern can count as full-blown speakers and thinkers, for only such individuals can be motivated to engage in the activity of triangulation. A secondary aim of the paper is to show that this expanded Davidsonian conception provides an attractive alternative to a family of views according to which the anchoring of thought and language to the world is to be explained primarily in terms of the distinctive features of one’s natural capacities.