The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory

Davidson’s remark is fairly conventional stuff in contemporary philosophy, but the argument that informs it is elusive. Is this a kind of unformulated transcendental argument, which amounts to the claim that the ‘sharing’ of ‘language,’ in some unspecified sense of these terms, is a condition of the possibility of ‘communication’ in some unspecified sense of this term? Or is it a kind of inference to the best explanation in which there are no real alternativesan inference, so to speak, to the only explanation (which is perhaps not a bad definition of transcendental argument)? There are good reasons to be suspicious of arguments of this form. Yet this general picture, of some sort of shared (and presumably…