I've remarked several times on how safe (and a little boring) some of the recent philosophical literature seems to me to have been, how we should encourage more philosophical risk-taking, and on how we should be wary of assuming that a paper is great just because it appeared in Mind or Phil Review (or not great because it didn't).
All that being said, there still are awesome pieces of work being done, and I think I came across one today: Greg Ray's "Meaning and Truth" (forthcoming in Mind). It's a brilliantly clear, original, and well-written piece, and was a joy and enlightening experience to read.
Here's the abstract:
This paper concerns a key point of decision in Donald Davidson's early work in philosophy of language — a fateful decision that set him and the discourse in the area on the path of truth-theoretic semantics. The decision of moment is the one Davidson makes when, in the face of a certain barrier, he gives up on the idea of constructing an explicit meaning theory that would parallel Tarski's recursive way with truth theory. For Davidson there was little choice: he tells us he does not see how to deal with the difficulty except in the radical way he proposes. But there is a way to give such a meaning theory — a meaning theory proper which, using classical logic only, meets a meaning-theoretic analogue of Convention T, satisfies Davidson’s three key desiderata for a theory of meaning, reflects linguistic competence, and avoids quantifying over meanings. The meaning theory sketched here uses Tarskian strategies, as Davidson proposed, but differs from Davidson's approach in not going by way of a truth theory for the target language.
Enjoy!
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