Donald Davidson

Marc Joseph

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317489948
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Donald Davidson's work has been of seminal importance in the development of analytic philosophy and his views on the nature of language, mind and action remain the starting point for many of the central debates in the analytic tradition. His ideas, however, are complex, often technical, and interconnected in ways that can make them difficult to understand. This introduction to Davidson's philosophy examines the full range of his writings to provide a clear succinct overview of his ideas. The book begins with an account of the assumptions and structure of Davidson's philosophy of language, introducing his compositionalism, extensionalism and commitment to a Tarski-style theory of truth as the model for theories of meaning. It goes on to show how that philosophical framework is to be applied and how it challenges the traditional picture. Marc Joseph examines Davidson's influential work on action theory and events and discusses the commonly made charge that his theory of action and mind leaves the mental as a mere 'epiphenomenon' of the physical. The final section explores Davidson's philosophy of mind, some of its consequences for traditional views of subjectivity and objectivity and, more generally, the relation between minded beings and the physical and mental world they occupy.

Chapter 1
Introduction: Davidson's philosophical project

Donald Davidson ranks as one of the most influential philosophers of the second half of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century. Davidson was trained in the analytic tradition in philosophy, which traces its origins back to Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell and continues through the logical empiricists and W. V. Quine, who was Davidson’s teacher when he was a graduate student. A central focus of this tradition is the nature of language, and some of Davidson’s most significant and widely cited work is his contribution to methodological and substantive debates about fundamental matters in the philosophy of language. Davidson argues that the most fruitful way to answer the basic question “What is it for our words to mean what they do?” is to investigate theories of meaning that model the knowledge an interpreter possesses when she understands a speaker’s utterances.¹ His work on theories of meaning connects with problems in the metaphysics of mental concepts, and his arguments for the position he calls anomalous monism present one of the live options in contemporary philosophy of psychology; at the same time, Davidson’s ideas about language and mind have a bearing on the nature of action, and since his earliest published work Davidson has been one of the seminal figures in contemporary action theory. From the complex ties that link these disparate writings there emerges, especially in Davidson’s later work, a critique of traditional ideas about truth, scepticism and relativism, and the relation of subjectivity to objectivity. This critique is highly controversial, for Davidson counsels nothing less than “relinquishing what remains of [the] empiricism” that characterized Anglo-American philosophy for much of the twentieth century (Davidson 1990d: 68). In this respect, Davidson’s work in philosophy departs from the tradition in novel and exciting ways.

1.1 From Plato to the philosophy of language

Given this brief overview of his work and interests, it is at first somewhat surprising to learn that Davidson began his career working on Greek philosophy – as he ironically puts it, the “bold purpose” of his Harvard PhD thesis is “to try to explain the philosophic meaning and intention of Plato’s Philebus”² – after having majored in classics and literature in college. However, a closer examination of his writings reveals an underlying programme and pattern (evident, no doubt, only in retrospect) and, indeed, one of the attractions of Davidson’s work is the breadth and unity of his interests. Alfred North Whitehead, one of Davidson’s undergraduate professors at Harvard, famously described European philosophy as a series of footnotes to Plato, and one might characterize the arc of Davidson’s career as a more or less systematic working through of a number of the problems Plato left us: the nature of meaning and its connection to truth; the relation of belief to knowledge; the nature of human action; and the place of the human mind in the world order.

Davidson has explained that he began to direct his energies to the topics we associate with him only after participating in research on the theory of rational choice in the mid 1950s.³ The theory of rational choice, or decision theory, is a modern, formal investigation of the ancient concept of deliberation, the locus classicus for which is Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. According to Aristotle, human behaviour rises to the level of ethical concern when we can say that an agent deliberately chooses to engage in that behaviour. This seems right, for it excludes acts we perform under compulsion or due to ignorance; in the former the choice to act is made for us by whoever or whatever compels us, while in the latter we lack understanding of what we seem to have chosen to do. In both scenarios, not having chosen the action our behaviour is not subject to moral evaluation, and we should not be blamed or praised for it.

In his discussion of deliberate choice (proairesis), Aristotle identifies as deliberation (bouleusis) the stage that precedes our making a choice. An agent deliberates over which of several courses of action open to her is likely to eventuate in an outcome she values, and on the basis of that deliberation she chooses to pursue a course of action. In thus constructing a theory of deliberation or rational choice, we model the process of an individual’s decision-making: how she chooses to realize her goals through actions in which she is able to engage. A moment’s reflection reveals the very wide import of such a theory, as Davidson writes, for its goal “is to throw light on how people make decisions in the circumstances of everyday life” (Davidson 1957: 7).

Davidson has made some contributions to the theory of rational choice, but the most important consequence of his work is the way it led him to ask questions about the nature of action, belief and meaning. To see how reflection on problems in decision theory led Davidson in this direction, consider the case of a researcher, Jane, who offers an experimental subject, Jack, the opportunity either to receive $5 (option A), or to choose to gamble and receive $11 if a tossed coin comes up heads and nothing if it comes up tails (option B). The pattern of Jack’s choices, given his beliefs about his chances of tossing a head in option B (e.g. he might believe that the coin is weighted one way or another), is of considerable interest to decision theorists. For example, suppose further that Jack has expressed his preference for option B over option A, and he has also expressed a preference for some third option (option C) over option B; will Jack also prefer option C to option A? That is, is the pattern of his preferences transitive?

An agent’s choice behaviour is a function of two independent factors: the strength of his beliefs and the strength of his preferences. In our example, whether Jack chooses option A or option B depends on how likely he believes it is that he will win the money in option B, and it also depends on the value he places on receiving different sums of money. Davidson notes that there is a third factor that plays a role in Jack’s deliberation; namely, his interpretation of the words Jane speaks in setting up the situation. If Jane is to succeed in teasing out the relative contributions of Jack’s beliefs and desires then, as part of her analysis of Jack’s pattern of choices, she has to assume that Jack understands her instructions in setting up the choice scenario, and this supposition is non-trivial.

Davidson’s observation runs deeper. Jane is interested in the pattern of her subject’s beliefs and values, but her only access to Jack’s attitudes are his words and other actions; she only knows what Jack prefers because he says or otherwise communicates that he prefers one option over another. Thus Jane, too, must be an interpreter; she cannot begin to construct or test a theory that describes the pattern of Jack’s choices unless she already knows enough about his language to interpret his words. If we model this knowledge as a theory of meaning or interpretation,⁴ knowledge of which would suffice for her interpreting Jack’s utterances, then we can express the point by saying that the project of constructing a theory of meaning is prior to constructing a theory of rational choice. In other words, first she figures out what he means by his words, then she analyses the pattern his choices make. This priority is merely apparent, however, for the evidence on which any interpreter bases her theory of meaning for a speaker includes a description of the speaker’s attitudes, especially his network of beliefs and desires, and this is given (in part) by rational choice theory. Hence we ought to see Jane as engaged simultaneously in two closely related interpretative projects. In light of this, Davidson sets as his goal “a theory where just by noticing what choices a person makes among sounds you could figure out what those sounds meant to them, and at the same time then figure out what they valued and what they believed” (Davidson 1994c: 210).

1.2 What is and ought to be a theory of meaning?

This goal points to a difference separating Davidson from one of the main traditions in twentieth-century philosophy of language, represented by J. L. Austin, Paul Grice, and P. F. Strawson and, more recently, John Searle, Stephen Shiffer and Brian Loar.⁵ These philosophers adopt an intention-based approach to semantics, in the sense that they take as fundamental the idea that when a speaker utters a sentence, she intends to produce certain beliefs in her audience by means of that utterance, and what she intends determines what she means.

Grice, for example, identifies speakers’ intentions as the vital component in an account of linguistic meaning, and that which distinguishes linguistic meaning from what he calls “natural meaning”.⁶ By natural meaning, Grice has in mind the relation we express when we say, for example, that certain spots mean that a person has measles or that smoke means fire; and natural meaning differs from linguistic meaning in that as we cannot argue from “‘Those spots meant measles’ to any conclusion to the effect that somebody or other meant by those spots” that he had measles (Grice 1957: 39, emphasis added).⁷ This is important, because the concept of linguistic meaning finds its home in an account of interpersonal communication. Thus, in contrast, we can argue from an utterance’s meaning that someone had no wish to make a long speech to the conclusion that someone (namely, Pericles, in his funeral oration to the Athenians) meant that he had no wish to make a long speech; and this, in fact, is what is important about the utterance. Grice has revised his original proposal under the weight of many counterexamples, but setting aside most of these details we can roughly define Pericles’ meaning (in the sense of linguistic meaning) that he had no wish to make a long speech as his intending to cause his audience to believe that he had no wish to make a long speech, and his intending to produce that belief by uttering the ancient Greek translation of my English sentence, “I have no wish to make a long speech.”

Davidson has remarked on the influence that Grice has had upon his work, especially the view that words mean what their speakers intend them to mean (Davidson 1990d: 311). It should be evident, however, that Davidson cannot directly exploit Grice’s insight to construct a theory of meaning since, according to Davidson, “an analysis of linguistic meaning that assumes prior identification of nonlinguistic purposes or intentions will be radically incomplete” (Davidson 1990d: 315–16). Recall that in our hypothetical situation Jane wants a theory of meaning to help her interpret Jack’s words. If she follows the path that Grice’s analysis suggests, then Jane will interpret Jack’s words by appealing to his intentions and beliefs, such as his intention to cause Jane to believe that he prefers option B over option A and his belief that he can accomplish this goal by saying, “I prefer option B to option A”. In effect, this strategy depends on Jane’s knowing details of Jack’s psychology prior to her knowing the meanings of his words: first she knows Jack’s intentions and other attitudes, and then she interprets his utterance by fitting his words into an account of his beliefs and desires. Davidson urges, however, that an interpreter’s only access to a speaker’s attitudes are through his actions and that, more generally, “interpreting an agent’s intentions, his beliefs and his words are parts of a single project, no part of which can be assumed to be complete before the rest is” (Davidson 1984: 127). In our example, Jane only knows that Jack prefers option B to option A by his saying that he prefers option B to option A, or perhaps by his doing something else that indicates the relative strengths of his desires (such as pointing to a card on which the words, “option B”, are written), where this indicating, too, stands in need of interpretation.

What Davidson seeks, therefore, is akin to David Hume’s “science of Man”: a unified theory that encompasses the study of thought, language and action (Hume 1978: xv). Is such a “theory of everything” possible? Whatever is actual is possible, hence Davidson would argue that a unified theory is possible; after all, we do manage, in fact, to interpret the words our fellows speak, and at the same time we fit those words into our overall picture of their lives. We accomplish these feats, moreover, based on only those resources that Davidson identifies as being available to our hypothetical researcher and experimental subject, including a catalogue of people’s utterances and other actions, and the attitudes we can observe in these actions. What Davidson is after, then, is nothing more than making explicit or rationally reconstructing what we all, in effect, already possess in some form.

1.3 Quine and Davidson

The greatest influence on the development of Davidson’s philosophy is the work of Quine, his friend and teacher. Quine, in turn, is most deeply influenced by the revolution in modern logic, beginning with Frege, Russell and Kurt Gödel, and by the empiricist tradition running from Locke and Hume through the logical positivists. These two traditions intersect in the person of Rudolf Carnap, who was never Quine’s formal teacher, but was his mentor and friend, and the frequent target of his criticism.

By the early 1920s, Carnap came to see the “new logics” that Frege, Wittgenstein and Russell and Whitehead had developed as supplying a key to removing vitiating defects in tradi-tional empiricism. By adopting a symbolic or formal method, these new theories provided that key by indicating the true character of logic and mathematics; in this way, they opened the door to solving “the greatest difficulty” that empiricism had faced – the problem of our knowledge of necessary truths. That true character is that “all the sentences of logic are tautological and devoid of content”, and thus the difficulty is removed in recognizing that logical and “mathematical sentences are neither empirical nor synthetic a priori [as Immanuel Kant had thought] but analytic” (Carnap 1930–31: 143). In other words, Carnap (with thanks especially to Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein) solved the problem that dogged Hume and J. S. Mill by arguing that our knowledge of the truths of logic and mathematics is no knowledge at all, except in the trivial sense that we know the rules of the languages we speak.⁸

Ironically, though, Carnap’s project shared with Kantianism the anti-empirical idea that the empirical scientific enterprise is preceded by an a priori investigation of the framework of science. This affinity is easily overlooked, for while Kant identifies that framework with the structure of the human mind, Carnap instead focuses on the framework implicit in a language system.⁹ For Carnap this includes logic and pure mathematics, very general statements about the structure of the physical world (e.g. the statement that space-time does, or does not, obey the laws of Euclidean geometry) and the ontology of the theory. The present point, however, is that Carnap and the other logical empiricists retain a very powerful a priori apparatus, even if it is not the a priori apparatus envisaged by Kant.

Quine turns away from Carnap’s latent a priorism and returns to a model of philosophizing more associated with Locke and Hume than Kant. Like Locke and Hume, Quine takes the methods and subject matter of philosophy to be continuous with those of natural science. In a different respect, though, Quine is Carnap’s faithful student, for he also takes as his project the constructing of an improved empiricism, unflaw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Davidson's philosophical project
• 2 Meaning and truth I
• 3 Meaning and truth II
• 4 Radical interpretation
• 5 Interpretation and meaning
• 6 Events and causes
• 7 Action theory and explanation in the social sciences
• 8 The matter of mind
• 9 Conclusion: scepticism and subjectivity
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index