ABSTRACT
Donald Davidson’s program, as I encountered it in the late 1960s, was inspiring and exciting. It appeared that an account of logical forms, coupled with a semantics that eschewed metaphysics, would soon solve or dissolve many philosophical problems. Davidson’s thesis was that the fi rst step to dealing with a philosophical problem was getting the semantics straight. For instance, the fi rst step in answering the question “What things are good?” is fi nding out the logical form of sentences using “good.” The hope was that this kind of ground-clearing would enable real progress on the problems that did not, like the “problem of predication” or whether to believe in sparse or abundant properties, disappear with a proper understanding of semantics.
