ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses criticisms of the concept of untranslatability which D. Davidson and H. Putnam have raised against the incommensurability thesis. It considers a related argument which derives from Davidson's discussion of interpretative charity. Putnam and Davidson employ the objection because they assume incommensurability falls within the ambit of the argument. As Davidson and Putnam interpret incommensurability, the language of argument and the language into which translation fails are one and the same. With both Putnam and Davidson, the suggestion appears to be that knowledge of semantic content or propositional attitude is required to justify language attribution. The connections Davidson draws between interpretation, translation and charity seem to license the following inferences. Davidson assumes that charitable interpretation of an agent assigns truth conditions in a home language to sentences of an alien language. Davidson's crucial assumption is that it is necessary to translate to determine that a language divides the world differently.
