Chomsky, Davidson, & learning ...

This may be a caricature.

Once I learn to ride a bicycle, I can ride it through many landscapes. Once I can sing in tune, I can sing many tunes. There may be rules about following maps or reading music, but not about riding bicycles or singing in tune.

We can analyse map-reading metalinguistically. We can generate isomorphs of the map, or of a musical score. These things require us to be able to talk about them, agree about them, in certain ways. We can't do the same for the 'methods' of singing in tune or bicycle riding, both of which are needed for music and bicycle navigation.

While there are some rules of grammar and syntax, and some rules of meaning there are also just some things that we find that we agree about in practice - that just don't give us enough trouble for us to reflect on them. When we try to reflect on them ('how does reference work?') we find ourselves in a Wittgensteinian predicament. Some aspects of these things seem too obvious to remark on and yet too obscure to explain.

A language may well need generative meaning rules, but this is not all it needs. There must also be things we do not yet know that we will agree about - things we might call 'discoveries' when we encounter them. Discovering that we agree about something may look like new knowledge about the world or about ourselves. In many cases, it may be a matter of taste which - it may come down to metaphysical prejudice.

We can do something like following rules that we can not write down - we know this from the open question arguments. We also know that we learn to speak, and that we can learn to do things without being able to articulate the rules which govern them.

Where does this leave Davidson's argument for a constructive account of meaning? At least we know that if we tried to pursue his programme, the meanings of things we said about meaning would change ...