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Individual minds vary from each other — with respect to their particular psychological history and configuration — within what we might describe as a continuous spectrum of possibilities. Individual minds determine the way in which speakers invest their utterances with meaning. Words belonging to public languages may be thought of as discrete units that introduce some form of stability and punctuation to that initial fluid space of possible meanings. Linguistic interpretation, I believe, must take these two dimensions into account.
The first dimension is emphasized by Donald Davidson's distinctive proposal in foundational semantics. Because speakers' meanings reflect their thoughts — given their essential interdependency — linguistic interpretation cannot fail to engage in an investigation of the speakers minds. Accordingly, Davidson proposes a form of general and integrated investigation that aims to uncover both the thoughts and the meanings of the interpreter's interlocutor. The second dimension is emphasized by standard forms of social semantic externalism, such as those developed by Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge in the seventies. They claim that, to some extent, words of a public language retain their community meaning even without a strong support from the speaker's mind.
In my presentation, I address the apparent tensions between the two approaches, and argue for their compatibility by exploring a number of tentative solutions to various obstacles and challenges.
