semantics and truth conditions

i have to admit sometimes i don't know why davidson thinks he can carry out a program similar to tarki's. tarski explicitly said his T-schema only applies to FORMAL languages with unambiguous predicates, no self-reference, and only a defined, pre-determined set of propositions and objects. davidson pretty much ignores this and goes ahead and tries to apply the T-schema to natural languages only to get meaning out of sentences. So we have something like:

(1) 'snow is white' is true iff snow is white.

which seems true, but doesn't really who much about meaning. but of course, because of the definition of an "if and only if" statement, it also makes sentences like

(2) 'snow is white' is true iff grass is green

true as well. of course this is absurd. yes, the biconditional is true, but it tells us nothing about the meaning because the name 'snow is white' doesn't designate whether grass is green. davidson kinda says that the precise theory of meaning wouldn't allow for cases like (2), or at least for not many of those cases, because each word in any statement will have a set of axioms that interpret the referent of words. for example, there will be axioms such as:

A1: 'dogs' refers to dogs
A2: 'snow' refers to snow
A3: 'is white' refers to the property of being white
...
An

such that cases similar to (1) will not occur (or at least not very often). but in effect all this does is equate meaning with (potentially mistaken) translations.

in effect, what i'm trying to say about davidson's adoption of tarki's t-schema adapted to get meaning is that it's both too strong and too weak. by this i mean that there are cases where the whole biconditional is met and we still don't want to say that we have meaning (such as in the case of (2)).

AND there are cases where the biconditional is not met yet we still want to say there is some meaning. this type of thing happens often in natural languages: self-reference, sentences without truth values, vague predicates, metaphors, similes, malapropisms, and other stuff.

this position i take against davidson is probably due to the fact that my idea of meaning is (not surprisingly) akin to peirce's, where the meaning of something is its effects... but that's for a post at another time...