ABSTRACT
Davidson’s views on semantics and metaphysics strike many philosophers as paradoxical. Views in semantics and metaphysics that are typically paired are not paired for Davidson. Davidson’s account of reference is externalist, but he denies that there are “joints” in nature. The objective world supplies the application-conditions for predicates, but the world itself has no intrinsic articulation and reality is not a given domain of Beings and kinds of Beings. Whether A is the same object as B is relative to a description. Such a combination of views seems implausible and unsatisfactory on fi rst encounter.
