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\title{A Companion to Donald Davidson}
\date{2013}
\author{Ernest Lepore \& Kirk Ludwig}
\subtitle{Blackwell companions to philosophy \#53}






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\chapter[{Table of Contents}]{~}


Blackwell Companions to Philosophy


Title page


Copyright page


Notes on Contributors


Introduction: Life and Work


Life, Early Career, and the First Phrase of Davidson's Work through 1969


Second Phrase of Davidson's Work, 1970–1981


Third Phase of Davidson's Work from the 1980s On


Organization and Contents of the Volume


Part I: Action Theory


1: Action Explanation


1. Introduction


2. Actions and Their Rationalization


3. Davidson's Challenge and the Problem of Wayward Causal Chains


4. The Logical Connection Argument


5. Reasons as Causes?


6. The Role of Laws in Action Explanations and the Causal Relevance of Mental Properties


7. Singular Causal Statements and Causal Explanations


8. Strict Laws, Generalizations, and Causal Concepts


9. Causal Powers


10. Propositional Attitudes as Causal Powers


11. The Explanatory Value of Action Explanations


Acknowledgements


2: Practical Reason


1. Three Degrees of Complexity


2. The Partitioned Model


3. Davidson's View


4. Final Thoughts: Why Not Partition?


3: Action Individuation


1. Modifiers and Multiple Things Done


2. Primitive Actions


3. The Competition: Actions as Fine Grained


4. Preliminary Objections


5. “By,” Cause, and Time


6. Deeper Problems


7. Actions as Extended Processes


8. Conclusion


4: Freedom to Act


1. Introduction


2. Davidson's Interest in His Work on Freedom


3. Davidson's Project and Its Relationship to Moore and Austin


4. Methodological Problems for Conditional Analyses


5. The Analysis of Freedom to Act and Abilities to Do x


6. Subjective Conditions and the Thinness of Davidson's Analysis


7. Concluding Discussion: The Challenge for a Causal Theory of Action


5: Intention


1. The Initial Account


2. Agency


3. Weakness of Will


4. Intending


Part II: Metaphysics


6: Event Variables and Their Values


1. Quantifying over Events


2. Events to Quantify Over


3. Logical Form and Grammatical Form


7: Causation


1. Actions, Reasons, and Causes


2. Mental Causes


3. Difficulties With This Account


4. Another Look at Davidson


5. Causation and Mental Causation


6. Concluding Remarks


8: Davidson's “Method of Truth” in Metaphysics


9: The Concept of Truth


1. Tarski, Truth, and Meaning


2. Satisfaction and Correspondence


3. Radical Interpretation and Coherence


4. Defining Truth and Deflationism


5. Objectivity and Truth


Part III: Philosophy of Language


10: Truth in the Theory of Meaning


1. Introduction


2. Compositionality


3. Criticism of Traditional Approaches


4. The Positive Proposal


5. Problematic Passages?


6. Later Work


7. Conclusion


11: Parataxis


1. Indirect Discourse


2. Mood and Mood-Setting


3. Quotation


4. A Parting Shot


12: Logical Form


1. The Idea of Logical Form and Its Philosophical Significance


2. Constraints on Accounts of Logical Form


3. Davidson's Account of Logical Form


4. Criticisms


Acknowledgment


13: Radical Interpretation and the Principle of Charity


1. What Is Radical Interpretation?


2. The Role of Radical Interpretation for Meaning Theory


3. The Principle of Charity


4. The Power of Charity


5. The Justification of Charity


14: Davidson's Measurement-Theoretic Analogy


1. Introduction


2. Radical Interpretation and Indeterminacy


3. The Inscrutability of Reference


4. The General Case


5. Instrumentalism or Realism?


15: Reference


1. Reference in T-Theories


2. The Inscrutability of Reference


3. Explanations and Reference


16: Language and Thought


1. Davidson's View and Two Others


2. Davidson and the View that Thought Precedes Language


3. Conclusion


Acknowledgments


17: Conceptual Schemes


18: Interpretation and Value


Interpretation and Value


1. The Interpretation Argument


2. The Application to Desires and Normative Beliefs


3. The Application to Values and Normative Truths


4. The Triangulation Argument


19: Predication


20: Convention and Meaning


1. Introduction


2. The Public Nature of Meaning


3. Semantics and Ulterior Purposes


4. Word Meaning and Speaker Meaning


5. Is There Such a Thing as a Language?


6. Radically Interpreting Mrs. Malaprop


21: Metaphor and Varieties of Meaning


Davidson on Metaphor


1. “What Metaphors Mean”


2. “A Nice Derangement of Metaphors”


3. Evaluating a Hybrid Davidsonian View of Metaphor


Acknowledgment


22: Davidson and Literary Theory


Davidson and Literary Theory


1. Locating Literary Language


2. Convention


3. Davidson's Influence on Literary Theory


4. Texts


5. Sketch of a Davidsonian Account of Texts


Part IV: Philosophy of Mind


23: The Larger Philosophical Significance of Holism


The Larger Philosophical Significance of Holism


1. Holism and Charity Defended


2. How to Formulate Relativism


3. The Davidsonian Strategy Against Relativism


4. Two Further Issues


24: Anomalous Monism


1. Three Principles


2. Event Individuation


3. An Argument for Monism


4. Strict Laws


5. Anomalism


6. Irreducibility


7. Supervenience


8. Mental Causation


25: Triangular Externalism


1. Outlines of Triangular Externalism


2. Externalism, Interpretation, and Holism


3. Davidson on Other Forms of Externalism


4. Triangulation and the Determination of Thought Content


5. Triangulation and the Objectivity of Thought


26: Triangulation


1. Introduction


2. The Triangulation Argument


3. Objections to the Triangulation Argument


4. Conclusion


27: Rationality as a Constitutive Ideal


1. Kant, Carnap, and Quine


2. Davidsonian Interpretation Theory


3. Charity as a Constraint on Interpretation


4. Realism, Instrumentalism, and Eliminativism


5. Cognitive Science and Radical Interpretation


6. Representation and Rationality in Nonlinguistic Creatures


7. Davidson's Contributions to the Study of Rationality


28: Irrationality


29: The Rationality of the Emotions


1. Introduction


2. Emotions and Cognition


3. Emotions and their Causes


4. Objections


5. Privileged Access to Emotions


6. Emotions and Irrationality


7. Animal Affects


Acknowledgments


Part V: Epistemology


30: Davidson and Radical Skepticism


1. Introduction


2. Davidson on Radical Interpretation and the Principle of Charity


3. Davidson's Route to Antiskepticism I: The Omniscient Interpreter


4. Davidson's Route to Antiskepticism II: Triangulation and Content Externalism


5. Contra Davidson's Transcendental Antiskepticism


Acknowledgments


31: First-Person Authority


1. The Phenomenon of First-Person Authority


2. Davidson's Explanation of First-Person Authority


3. First-Person Authority and Semantic Externalism


32: Knowledge of Other Minds in Davidson's Philosophy


1. The Measure of All Things


2. Understanding Others


Part VI: Influences and Influence


33: Quine and Davidson


1. Logical Pragmatism


2. Naturalism


3. Language, Meaning, and Use


4. Truth


5. Meaning and Radical Interpretation


6. Assent, Distal versus Proximal Meaning, and the “Third Dogma”


7. Farewell to Empiricism?


34: Davidson and Contemporary Philosophy


1. Introduction


2. Meaning and Truth Conditions


3. Mind and Action


4. Truth, Knowledge, and Reality


5. Normativity and Rationality


6. Conclusion


Name Index


General Index

\chapter[{Table of Contents}]{~}


Blackwell Companions to Philosophy


Title page


Copyright page


Notes on Contributors


Introduction: Life and Work


Life, Early Career, and the First Phrase of Davidson's Work through 1969


Second Phrase of Davidson's Work, 1970–1981


Third Phase of Davidson's Work from the 1980s On


Organization and Contents of the Volume


Part I: Action Theory


1: Action Explanation


1. Introduction


2. Actions and Their Rationalization


3. Davidson's Challenge and the Problem of Wayward Causal Chains


4. The Logical Connection Argument


5. Reasons as Causes?


6. The Role of Laws in Action Explanations and the Causal Relevance of Mental Properties


7. Singular Causal Statements and Causal Explanations


8. Strict Laws, Generalizations, and Causal Concepts


9. Causal Powers


10. Propositional Attitudes as Causal Powers


11. The Explanatory Value of Action Explanations


Acknowledgements


2: Practical Reason


1. Three Degrees of Complexity


2. The Partitioned Model


3. Davidson's View


4. Final Thoughts: Why Not Partition?


3: Action Individuation


1. Modifiers and Multiple Things Done


2. Primitive Actions


3. The Competition: Actions as Fine Grained


4. Preliminary Objections


5. “By,” Cause, and Time


6. Deeper Problems


7. Actions as Extended Processes


8. Conclusion


4: Freedom to Act


1. Introduction


2. Davidson's Interest in His Work on Freedom


3. Davidson's Project and Its Relationship to Moore and Austin


4. Methodological Problems for Conditional Analyses


5. The Analysis of Freedom to Act and Abilities to Do x


6. Subjective Conditions and the Thinness of Davidson's Analysis


7. Concluding Discussion: The Challenge for a Causal Theory of Action


5: Intention


1. The Initial Account


2. Agency


3. Weakness of Will


4. Intending


Part II: Metaphysics


6: Event Variables and Their Values


1. Quantifying over Events


2. Events to Quantify Over


3. Logical Form and Grammatical Form


7: Causation


1. Actions, Reasons, and Causes


2. Mental Causes


3. Difficulties With This Account


4. Another Look at Davidson


5. Causation and Mental Causation


6. Concluding Remarks


8: Davidson's “Method of Truth” in Metaphysics


9: The Concept of Truth


1. Tarski, Truth, and Meaning


2. Satisfaction and Correspondence


3. Radical Interpretation and Coherence


4. Defining Truth and Deflationism


5. Objectivity and Truth


Part III: Philosophy of Language


10: Truth in the Theory of Meaning


1. Introduction


2. Compositionality


3. Criticism of Traditional Approaches


4. The Positive Proposal


5. Problematic Passages?


6. Later Work


7. Conclusion


11: Parataxis


1. Indirect Discourse


2. Mood and Mood-Setting


3. Quotation


4. A Parting Shot


12: Logical Form


1. The Idea of Logical Form and Its Philosophical Significance


2. Constraints on Accounts of Logical Form


3. Davidson's Account of Logical Form


4. Criticisms


Acknowledgment


13: Radical Interpretation and the Principle of Charity


1. What Is Radical Interpretation?


2. The Role of Radical Interpretation for Meaning Theory


3. The Principle of Charity


4. The Power of Charity


5. The Justification of Charity


14: Davidson's Measurement-Theoretic Analogy


1. Introduction


2. Radical Interpretation and Indeterminacy


3. The Inscrutability of Reference


4. The General Case


5. Instrumentalism or Realism?


15: Reference


1. Reference in T-Theories


2. The Inscrutability of Reference


3. Explanations and Reference


16: Language and Thought


1. Davidson's View and Two Others


2. Davidson and the View that Thought Precedes Language


3. Conclusion


Acknowledgments


17: Conceptual Schemes


18: Interpretation and Value


Interpretation and Value


1. The Interpretation Argument


2. The Application to Desires and Normative Beliefs


3. The Application to Values and Normative Truths


4. The Triangulation Argument


19: Predication


20: Convention and Meaning


1. Introduction


2. The Public Nature of Meaning


3. Semantics and Ulterior Purposes


4. Word Meaning and Speaker Meaning


5. Is There Such a Thing as a Language?


6. Radically Interpreting Mrs. Malaprop


21: Metaphor and Varieties of Meaning


Davidson on Metaphor


1. “What Metaphors Mean”


2. “A Nice Derangement of Metaphors”


3. Evaluating a Hybrid Davidsonian View of Metaphor


Acknowledgment


22: Davidson and Literary Theory


Davidson and Literary Theory


1. Locating Literary Language


2. Convention


3. Davidson's Influence on Literary Theory


4. Texts


5. Sketch of a Davidsonian Account of Texts


Part IV: Philosophy of Mind


23: The Larger Philosophical Significance of Holism


The Larger Philosophical Significance of Holism


1. Holism and Charity Defended


2. How to Formulate Relativism


3. The Davidsonian Strategy Against Relativism


4. Two Further Issues


24: Anomalous Monism


1. Three Principles


2. Event Individuation


3. An Argument for Monism


4. Strict Laws


5. Anomalism


6. Irreducibility


7. Supervenience


8. Mental Causation


25: Triangular Externalism


1. Outlines of Triangular Externalism


2. Externalism, Interpretation, and Holism


3. Davidson on Other Forms of Externalism


4. Triangulation and the Determination of Thought Content


5. Triangulation and the Objectivity of Thought


26: Triangulation


1. Introduction


2. The Triangulation Argument


3. Objections to the Triangulation Argument


4. Conclusion


27: Rationality as a Constitutive Ideal


1. Kant, Carnap, and Quine


2. Davidsonian Interpretation Theory


3. Charity as a Constraint on Interpretation


4. Realism, Instrumentalism, and Eliminativism


5. Cognitive Science and Radical Interpretation


6. Representation and Rationality in Nonlinguistic Creatures


7. Davidson's Contributions to the Study of Rationality


28: Irrationality


29: The Rationality of the Emotions


1. Introduction


2. Emotions and Cognition


3. Emotions and their Causes


4. Objections


5. Privileged Access to Emotions


6. Emotions and Irrationality


7. Animal Affects


Acknowledgments


Part V: Epistemology


30: Davidson and Radical Skepticism


1. Introduction


2. Davidson on Radical Interpretation and the Principle of Charity


3. Davidson's Route to Antiskepticism I: The Omniscient Interpreter


4. Davidson's Route to Antiskepticism II: Triangulation and Content Externalism


5. \emph{Contra} Davidson's Transcendental Antiskepticism


Acknowledgments


31: First-Person Authority


1. The Phenomenon of First-Person Authority


2. Davidson's Explanation of First-Person Authority


3. First-Person Authority and Semantic Externalism


32: Knowledge of Other Minds in Davidson's Philosophy


1. The Measure of All Things


2. Understanding Others


Part VI: Influences and Influence


33: Quine and Davidson


1. Logical Pragmatism


2. Naturalism


3. Language, Meaning, and Use


4. Truth


5. Meaning and Radical Interpretation


6. Assent, Distal versus Proximal Meaning, and the “Third Dogma”


7. Farewell to Empiricism?


34: Davidson and Contemporary Philosophy


1. Introduction


2. Meaning and Truth Conditions


3. Mind and Action


4. Truth, Knowledge, and Reality


5. Normativity and Rationality


6. Conclusion


Name Index


General Index

\chapter{Blackwell Companions to Philosophy}


This outstanding student reference series offers a comprehensive and authoritative survey of philosophy as a whole. Written by today's leading philosophers, each volume provides lucid and engaging coverage of the key figures, terms, topics, and problems of the field. Taken together, the volumes provide the ideal basis for course use, representing an unparalleled work of reference for students and specialists alike.


Already published in the series:


\textbf{1.} The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, Second Edition\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Nicholas Bunnin and Eric Tsui-James}


\textbf{2.} A Companion to Ethics\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Peter Singer}


\emph{\textbf{3.} A Companion to Aesthetics, Second Edition\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Stephen Davies, Kathleen Marie Higgins, Robert Hopkins, Robert Stecker, and David E. Cooper


\emph{\textbf{4.} A Companion to Epistemology, Second Edition\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Jonathan Dancy, Ernest Sosa and Matthias Steup


\textbf{5.} A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy (two-volume set), Second Edition\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit}


\textbf{6.} A Companion to Philosophy of Mind\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Samuel Guttenplan}


\emph{\textbf{7.} A Companion to Metaphysics, Second Edition\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Jaegwon Kim, Ernest Sosa and Gary S. Rosenkrantz


\textbf{8.} A Companion to Philosophy of Law and Legal Theory, Second Edition\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Dennis Patterson}


\emph{\textbf{9.} A Companion to Philosophy of Religion, Second Edition\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Charles Taliaferro, Paul Draper, and Philip L. Quinn


\textbf{10.} A Companion to the Philosophy of Language\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Bob Hale and Crispin Wright}


\emph{\textbf{11.} A Companion to World Philosophies\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Eliot Deutsch and Ron Bontekoe


\emph{\textbf{12.} A Companion to Continental Philosophy\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Simon Critchley and William Schroeder


\emph{\textbf{13.} A Companion to Feminist Philosophy\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Alison M. Jaggar and Iris Marion Young


\emph{\textbf{14.} A Companion to Cognitive Science\forcelinebreak  }Edited by William Bechtel and George Graham


\textbf{15.} A Companion to Bioethics, Second Edition\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer}


\textbf{16.} A Companion to the Philosophers\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Robert L. Arrington}


\textbf{17.} A Companion to Business Ethics\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Robert E. Frederick}


\textbf{18.} A Companion to the Philosophy of Science\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by W. H. Newton-Smith}


\textbf{19.} A Companion to Environmental Philosophy\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Dale Jamieson}


\emph{\textbf{20.} A Companion to Analytic Philosophy\forcelinebreak  }Edited by A. P. Martinich and David Sosa


\emph{\textbf{21.} A Companion to Genethics\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Justine Burley and John Harris


\textbf{22.} A Companion to Philosophical Logic\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Dale Jacquette}


\textbf{23.} A Companion to Early Modern Philosophy\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Steven Nadler}


\emph{\textbf{24.} A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Jorge J. E. Gracia and Timothy B. Noone


\textbf{25.} A Companion to African-American Philosophy\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Tommy L. Lott and John P. Pittman}


\emph{\textbf{26.} A Companion to Applied Ethics\forcelinebreak  }Edited by R. G. Frey and Christopher Heath Wellman


\textbf{27.} A Companion to the Philosophy of Education\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Randall Curren}


\textbf{28.} A Companion to African Philosophy\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Kwasi Wiredu}


\emph{\textbf{29.} A Companion to Heidegger\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall


\textbf{30.} A Companion to Rationalism\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Alan Nelson}


\emph{\textbf{31.} A Companion to Pragmatism\forcelinebreak  }Edited by John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis


\emph{\textbf{32.} A Companion to Ancient Philosophy\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Mary Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin


\emph{\textbf{33.} A Companion to Nietzsche\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Keith Ansell Pearson


\emph{\textbf{34.} A Companion to Socrates\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Sara Ahbel-Rappe and Rachana Kamtekar


\textbf{35.} A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Mark A. Wrathall}


\emph{\textbf{36.} A Companion to Kant\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Graham Bird


\emph{\textbf{37.} A Companion to Plato\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Hugh H. Benson


\emph{\textbf{38.} A Companion to Descartes\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Janet Broughton and John Carriero


\emph{\textbf{39.} A Companion to the Philosophy of Biology\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Sahotra Sarkar and Anya Plutynski


\emph{\textbf{40.} A Companion to Hume\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Elizabeth S. Radcliffe


\textbf{41.} A Companion to the Philosophy of History and Historiography\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Aviezer Tucker}


\emph{\textbf{42.} A Companion to Aristotle\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Georgios Anagnostopoulos


\emph{\textbf{43.} A Companion to the Philosophy of Technology\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Jan-Kyrre Berg Olsen, Stig Andur Pedersen, and Vincent F. Hendricks


\emph{\textbf{44.} A Companion to Latin American Philosophy\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Susana Nuccetelli, Ofelia Schutte, and Otávio Bueno


\textbf{45.} A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Garry L. Hagberg and Walter Jost}


\emph{\textbf{46.} A Companion to the Philosophy of Action\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Timothy O'Connor and Constantine Sandis


\textbf{47.} A Companion to Relativism\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Steven D. Hales}


\emph{\textbf{48.} A Companion to Hegel\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur


\textbf{49.} A Companion to Schopenhauer\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Bart Vandenabeele}


\textbf{50.} A Companion to Buddhist Philosophy\forcelinebreak  \emph{Edited by Steven M. Emmanuel}


\emph{\textbf{51.} A Companion to Foucault\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Christopher Falzon, Timothy O'Leary, and Jana Sawicki


\emph{\textbf{52.} A Companion to the Philosophy of Time\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Heather Dyke and Adrian Bardon


\emph{\textbf{53.} A Companion to Donald Davidson\forcelinebreak  }Edited by Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig


Forthcoming:


A Companion to Rawls, Edited by Jon Mandle and David Reidy


A Companion to Derrida, Edited by Leonard Lawlor and Zeynep Direk


A Companion to Locke, Edited by Matthew Stuart


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-2.jpg}
\end{figure}


This edition first published 2013


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\chapter{Notes on Contributors}


\textbf{Anita Avramides} is Southover Manor Trust Fellow in Philosophy at St. Hilda's College and Reader in the Philosophy of Mind at the University of Oxford.


\textbf{Sven Bernecker} is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine and the University of Vienna. His main areas of research are epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind. He is the author of \emph{Reading Epistemology} (2006), \emph{The Metaphysics of Memory} (2008), and \emph{Memory: A Philosophical Study} (2010); and editor, with Fred Dretske, of \emph{Knowledge: Readings in Contemporary Epistemology} (2000) and, with Duncan Pritchard, of \emph{The Routledge Companion to Epistemology} (2011).


\textbf{Agnes Callard} is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in Philosophy. Her primary areas of specialization are Ancient Philosophy and Ethics. She is currently writing a book, \emph{Remoralizing Weakness of Will}.


\textbf{Elisabeth Camp} is an Associate Professor at Rutgers University. She works on topics in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, including figurative speech, slurs, fiction, cartographic and diagrammatic representations, and nonhuman animal cognition.


\textbf{William Child} is a Fellow in Philosophy at University College, Oxford. He is the author of \emph{Causality, Interpretation, and the Mind} (Oxford University Press, 1994) and \emph{Wittgenstein} (Routledge, 2011), and co-edited \emph{Wittgensteinian Themes: Essays in Honour of David Pears} (Oxford University Press, 2001). He has written on various aspects of Davidson's work, and has published widely in the philosophy of mind and on the philosophy of Wittgenstein.


\textbf{Pascal Engel} is Professor of Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Geneva and senior research director at \emph{Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales} in Paris. He has published articles and books in philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, philosophy of mind and epistemology, among which are \emph{The Norm of Truth} (Prentice Hall, 1991), \emph{Ramsey, Truth and Success} (with J. Dokic, Routledge, 2002), \emph{Truth} (Acumen, 2002), and \emph{Philosophy of Psychology} (Palgrave, 2013). He is the author of \emph{Davidson et la Philosophie du Langage} (PUF, 1994) and of a number of essays on Davidson.


\textbf{Luca Ferrero} is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. He earned his PhD at Harvard University. He has been a Humanities Fellow and Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University, and NEH Summer Fellow at Princeton University. He works on the nature of diachronic agency, intentions, constitutivism, practical reasoning, and personal identity. His work has been published in \emph{Noûs}, \emph{Philosophical Studies}, \emph{Philosophers' Imprint}, \emph{Philosophical Issues}, \emph{Oxford Studies in Metaethics}, and \emph{Oxford Studies in Agency and Responsibility}.


\textbf{Olav Gjelsvik} is Professor of Philosophy and Director of The Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo. Educated in Oslo and at Balliol College Oxford, he works in epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of action, and has also written several papers about addiction. He is a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and also of the Academia Europaea.


\textbf{Michael Glanzberg} is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University. He works in the areas of philosophy of language, logic, and metaphysics.


\textbf{Hans-Johann Glock} is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Zurich (Switzerland), and Visiting Professor at the University of Reading (UK). He is the author of \emph{A Wittgenstein Dictionary} (Blackwell 1996), \emph{Quine and Davidson on Language, Thought and Reality} (Cambridge University Press, 2003), \emph{La Mente de los Animals} (KRK, 2009) and \emph{What is Analytic Philosophy?} (Cambridge University Press, 2008). He has published numerous articles on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, the history of analytic philosophy and Wittgenstein. At present, he is working on a book on animal minds and coediting \emph{The Blackwell Companion to Wittgenstein}.


\textbf{Kathrin Glüer} is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at Stockholm University. She works mainly in the philosophy of mind and language. Recent work includes \emph{Donald Davidson. A Short Introduction} (Oxford University Press, 2011), “General Terms and Relational Modality,” with Peter Pagin, in \emph{Noûs} 46(2012): 159–199, “In Defence of a Doxastic Account of Experience,” in \emph{Mind \& Language} 24(2009):297–373, and “Against Content Normativity,” with Åsa Wikforss, in \emph{Mind} 118(2009):31–70.


\textbf{Mitchell Green} teaches Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. His primary research areas are Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, and Aesthetics, with special interests in pragmatics, attitude ascription, reference, empathy, and the epistemic significance of music and literature. He has published \emph{Self-Expression}, \emph{Engaging Philosophy: A Brief Introduction}, and \emph{Moore's Paradox: New Essays on Belief, Rationality and the First Person} (coedited with John Williams), as well as numerous journal articles.


\textbf{John Heil} is Professor of Philosophy at Washington University in St Louis and honorary research associate at Monash University. His most recent book is \emph{The Universe as We Find It} (Oxford, 2012).


\textbf{David Henderson} is the Robert R. Chambers Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. He works in the philosophy of social science and epistemology. He is the author, with Terry Horgan, of \emph{The Epistemic Spectrum}. In the philosophy of social science, he has written on the explanatory relevance of norms, the significance of simulation, and the explanatory limits of rationalizing explanation. A central concern in his work has been the relation between various forms of explanation and the adequacy of one's interpretation.


\textbf{Miguel Hoeltje} is Assistant Professor at the Universität Duisburg-Essen (Germany). He graduated from Hamburg University with a thesis on truth conditional semantics for which he received the 2012 Wolfgang Stegmüller award of the German Society for Analytic Philosophy. Miguel works primarily in the philosophy of logic and language and metaphysics, and he has recently taken an interest in social ontology.


\textbf{Ernie Lepore} is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University and Acting Director of the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. He is the author of numerous articles and books in the philosophy of language and mind, including, with Kirk Ludwig, \emph{Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality} (2005) and \emph{Donald Davidson's Truth-theoretic Semantics} (2007), with Herman Cappelen, \emph{Language Turned on Itself}, and most recently, with Barry Loewer, \emph{Meaning, Mind and Matter: Philosophical Essays} (2011).


\textbf{Kirk Ludwig} is Professor of Philosophy at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has written extensively in the philosophy of language, mind and action, and epistemology. He is coauthor with Ernie Lepore of \emph{Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality} (2005), and \emph{Donald Davidson's Truth-theoretic Semantics} (2007).


***William G. Lycan** is William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is author of* Logical Form in Natural Language\emph{,} Consciousness\emph{,} Judgement and Justification\emph{,} Modality and Meaning\emph{,} Consciousness and Experience\emph{, and} Real Conditionals\emph{.}


\textbf{A.P. Martinich} is Roy Allison Vaughan Centennial Professor in Philosophy and Professor of History and Government at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the coeditor with David Sosa of \emph{The Philosophy of Language}, 6th edition (Oxford University Press, 2013) and \emph{Analytic Philosophy: An Anthology} (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).


\textbf{Hugh J. McCann} in Professor of Philosophy at Texas A\&M University, and specializes in action theory and the philosophy of religion. He is the author of \emph{The Works of Agency}, and of numerous articles on the subject of human action.


\textbf{Brian P. McLaughlin} is a Professor II of Philosophy at Rutgers University. He is the author of numerous papers in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of psychology, metaphysics, and philosophical logic.


\textbf{Robert H. Myers} is Associate Professor of Philosophy at York University, Toronto. He works mainly on theoretical ethics – both metaethics and normative ethics – and has published extensively on the implications of Davidson's philosophy for these topics.


\textbf{Peter Pagin} is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at Stockholm University. He has published papers on Quine and Davidson, on compositionality, vagueness, assertion, reference and modality, bivalence, and on other topics in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of logic


\textbf{Paul M. Pietroski} is Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Linguistics at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is the author of \emph{Causing Actions} and \emph{Events and Semantic Architecture.}


\textbf{Duncan Pritchard} is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He works mainly in epistemology, and has published widely in this area, including the books \emph{Epistemic Luck} (Oxford University Press, 2005), \emph{The Nature and Value of Knowledge} (with A. Millar \& A. Haddock, Oxford University Press, 2010), and \emph{Epistemological Disjunctivism} (Oxford University Press, 2012).


\textbf{Piers Rawling} is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Florida State University. He has wide-ranging interests. In addition to work on the philosophy of Donald Davidson, his dissertation director, he has also published papers in various other areas, including decision theory, ethics (with David McNaughton), and quantum computing (with Stephen Selesnick). He is coeditor (with Alfred Mele) of \emph{The Oxford Handbook of Rationality} (2004).


\textbf{Michael Rescorla} is an Associate Professor in the philosophy department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research concerns the philosophies of mind, language, and logic.


\textbf{Carol Rovane} is a Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, and is the author of numerous articles on mind, agency, metaphysics and ethics. Her two books are \emph{The Bounds of Agency: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics} and the forthcoming \emph{Multimundialism: The Metaphysics and Ethics of Relativism.}


\textbf{Adam Sennet} is Associate Professor at UC Davis. He works on issues in the philosophy of language. Recent work includes “Embedding If and Only If” (with Jonathan Weisberg) in \emph{Journal of Philosophical Logic} 41 (2): 449–460, “Semantic Plasticity and Epistemicism”in \emph{Philosophical Studies} 161 (2): 273–285, and “Unarticulated Constituents and Propositional Structure,” in \emph{Mind and Language} 26 (4):412–435.


\textbf{Jeff Speaks} is the Rev. John A O'Brien Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. He works mainly in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind.


\textbf{Ralf Stoecker} is Professor for Practical Philosophy at the University of Bielefeld (Germany). He has worked on different topics in applied ethics, the foundations of ethics and in particular in action theory. Among his most recent publications are “Why Animals Can't Act,” \emph{Inquiry} 52 (2009), “Acting for Reasons,” in C. Sandis (ed.), “New Essays on the Explanation of Action” (2009), and the entry “Donald Davidson” in the \emph{Blackwell Companion to Action Theory} (2010). He is the editor of \emph{Reflecting Davidson} (1993).


\textbf{Sarah Stroud} is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Associate Vice-Principal, Research and International Relations, at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. She works mainly in moral philosophy and is particularly interested in issues at the intersection of moral psychology and the philosophy of action. She coedited \emph{Weakness of Will and Practical Irrationality} (Oxford University Press, 2003) with Christine Tappolet and is Associate Editor of \emph{The International Encyclopedia of Ethics}, forthcoming from Wiley-Blackwell (in 9 print volumes + electronic publication). Her recent papers include essays on moral demandingness, on procrastination, and on plural agency and partiality.


\textbf{Claudine Verheggen} is Associate Professor of Philosophy at York University, Toronto. She has a special interest in issues at the intersection of the philosophies of language and mind, such as the nature of meaning and content, the normativity and the objectivity of meaning and content, and the prospects of semantic reductionism. She has published numerous papers on these topics, as well as on Davidson and the later Wittgenstein.


\textbf{J. Robert G.Williams} is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Leeds, where he arrived in 2005 after graduate work at the Arche Centre at the University of St Andrews. He works in the philosophy of logic and language, metaphysics, and formal epistemology.


\textbf{Samuel C. Wheeler III}, PhD Princeton 1970, is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He has published on philosophy of language, metaphysics, political philosophy, ethics, literary theory, the links between analytic and continental philosophy, and the history of philosophy.

\chapter{Introduction}


Life and Work


Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig


Donald Davidson was one of a handful of philosophers in the latter half of the twentieth century who reshaped the terrain of analytic philosophy.


Davidson's philosophical project was centered on two interconnected inquiries, one into the nature of human action, and the other into nature of linguistic meaning. Both of these projects had their origins early in his career at Stanford, and became more closely integrated as time went on. Davidson sought to understand the nexus of mind and world through an understanding of what makes possible our capacity to communicate with one another. At the center of this was, on the one hand, the project of constructing a theory of truth for a natural language and, on the other, an investigation into the conditions on confirming such a theory for a speaker from the standpoint of an interpreter (the radical interpreter) who did not already know a correct theory, on the basis of evidence distant enough from what is to be confirmed to yield illumination of the concepts deployed in the theory. His central thesis was that any theory confirmed in the manner he described could be used to interpret the other's speech. The conditions a speaker had to meet to be interpretable in turn he regarded as constitutive of the interpreter's subject matter. The role of the theory of action in this overall project is to provide a theoretical framework for identifying patterns in behavior that can be interpreted as expressions of intentional behavior, including speech behavior.


Davidson sought to ground far-reaching conclusions in reflection on radical interpretation. For example, he has argued that we cannot make sense of conceptual schemes radically different from our own, and that language is required for thought, and actual communication for language. He has argued that interpretation is indeterminate, and that the reference of terms and extensions of predicates is inscrutable in the sense that given any workable reference scheme for a language, there are an indefinitely large number of schemes that assign referents and extensions differently but capture everything there is to capture about how words are used by the speakers of the language. He has argued on the basis of reflection on what is required for success in interpretation, together with the assumption that speakers by their nature are interpretable, that we could not be massively wrong about the external world and that we of necessity have knowledge of our own and of other minds. Concomitantly, he has argued that the contents of our thoughts are individuated (in part) by our relations to our environment. And he has sought to ground the objectivity of (in principle agreement on) values in reflections on radical interpretation parallel in certain respects to the argument for the impossibility of massive error in our empirical beliefs.


These three aspects of Davidson program can be represented in Figure I.1. At the center stands the project of radical interpretation. The theory of action, which is developed to an extent independently, provides part of the theoretical framework for radical interpretation. The project of radical interpretation, focused centrally though not exclusively on the development of a theory of truth for a speaker's language, is to yield a theory of meaning for the speaker's language in the form of an interpretive truth theory for it – one meeting an analog of Tarski's Convention T for natural languages that requires the sentence giving truth conditions to provide an interpretation of it. From reflection on this project, we are to arrive at a deeper understanding of what it is for words to mean what they do in general, not just for sentences, but for their significant parts as well. At the same time, assumptions that have to be in place for the project to succeed, as Davidson thought it must, are seen as constitutive of the interpreter's subject matter, and thus reflection on radical interpretation leads to a variety of metaphysical and epistemological theses. We do not here mean to suggest that absolutely everything Davidson argued for is bound up in one way or another with this central project. For example, work on the individuation of events, on metaphor, on the rationality of the emotions, on the nature of causation and causal laws, and the argument for anomalous monism, though these may inform his work on interpretation, are not based on it (Davidson does invoke the indeterminacy of interpretation in his argument for anomalous monism in “Mental Events” (1970), but it is not in the end clear that it plays an essential role). But reflection on the nature and structure of radical interpretation is nonetheless the central organizing project of Davidson's philosophical work as a whole.


Figure I.1


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As this indicates, Davidson's work was both far ranging and systematic. It is therefore surprising that the bulk of his work appeared in essay form, spread out over a period of more than 40 years. These are now almost all collected in five volumes of essays from Oxford University Press (OUP): \emph{Essays on Actions and Events} (2001, 2nd edition, originally published in 1980), \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation} (2001, 2nd edition, originally published in 1984), \emph{Subjective, Objective, Intersubjective} (2001), \emph{Problems of Rationality} (2004), and \emph{Truth, Language, and History} (2005). \emph{Truth and Predication} (Harvard, 2005), whose first three chapters are Davidson's Dewey lectures at Columbia University from 1990 on the structure and content of truth, and whose last three chapters were his Hermes lectures delivered at the University of Perugia in 2001, was published posthumously, and collects the only major work not included in the OUP volumes. No one paper, of course, describes the shape of the whole, and the essays and lectures, though elegant and written in an accessible style, are densely argued, and difficult even by the standards of analytic philosophy. They presuppose considerable background knowledge, and later essays often presuppose familiarity with earlier work. Though they range widely over action theory, metaphysics, language, mind, epistemology, and value, they are still informed by a central project under which they can be organized. For these reasons, his work stands in need of systematic and detailed interpretation. And though Davidson's work has received an enormous amount of commentary, no single volume has attempted to cover its full range. The current volume aims to remedy this in 34 chapters that provide a detailed picture of Davidson's thought across the range of topics to which he contributed.


In light of the detailed discussion of nearly every facet of Davidson's thought in the following, this introduction will be limited to a brief overview of Davidson's life and the development of his central project, and then a brief description of the organization and contents of the volume.

\section{Life, Early Career, and the First Phrase of Davidson's Work through 1969}


Donald Davidson was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on March 6, 1917. After early travels that included a stint in the Philippines, his family settled on Staten Island in 1924. He began studies at Harvard University in 1935 on a scholarship from the Harvard Club of New York, studying English literature initially, and then classics and comparative literature. When he graduated in 1939, he was offered a fellowship at Harvard in Classical Philosophy, and he took his first course with W.V.O. Quine, who was to become a major influence on him later (see Chapter 37). When the United States entered the Second World War, Davidson interrupted his graduate studies to join the navy, in which he served as an airplane spotter in the Italian campaign, and then as an instructor. Discharged in 1945, he returned to Harvard in 1946, and in 1947, took up a teaching job at Queens College in New York. He finished his dissertation on Plato's \emph{Philebus} on a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1947–1948 academic year and received his PhD from Harvard in 1949. In 1951, he left Queens to join Stanford University in Palo Alto, where he taught for 16 years until he left for Princeton in 1967.


This was a formative period for Davidson. Working with Patrick Suppes and J.J.C. McKinsey at Stanford, Davidson became interested in formal decision theory, which had an important influence on his later work in action theory and on radical interpretation (see Chapter 15). He was invited by McKinsey to join him in writing a paper on Carnap's method of intension and extension for the \emph{Library of Living Philosophers} volume on Carnap, and when McKinsey died, the task fell to him, and sparked his interest, first, in the problem of the semantics of attitude sentences and indirect discourse, and, second, in the theory of meaning (see Chapter 11 for the tack Davidson eventually took on indirect discourse and belief sentences). This led to Davidson's skepticism about the utility of assigning meanings to sentences in the theory of meaning (see Chapter 10). In a bit of serendipity, Davidson gave a talk on Carnap at Berkeley, and Alfred Tarski was in the audience. Tarski gave Davidson a reprint of his “The Semantic Concept of Truth and Foundations of Semantics,” which led Davidson to Tarski's more technical “The Concept of Truth in Formal Languages.” Davidson saw in this a model for how to give a serious theory of language, and, then, in turn, a powerful criterion for the adequacy of an account of the logical form of a sentence (namely: incorporate it into a truth theory that yields the right results for the whole of the language – see Chapter 12), and the framework for a compositional meaning theory for natural language that dispensed with meanings (see Chapter 10).


In the 1958–1959 academic year, Quine was a fellow at the Center for Advance Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, where he revised the manuscript of \emph{Word \& Object} (1960). At the center of this is Quine's description of the project of radical translation, that is, the project of constructing a translation manual for another solely on the basis of behavioral evidence. Davidson, on an ACLS fellowship that year, read the manuscript, and adopted the central idea that there is no more to meaning than can be recovered from a speaker's behavior. Davidson put together the idea he had developed from Tarski's work with this principle he took from Quine to forge his own distinctive approach to the theory of meaning, at the core of which is reflection on the project of confirming on nonquestion begging evidence a truth theory for another speaker's language. In the late 1950s at Stanford, Davidson also became interested in general issues in the philosophy of action when his student Dan Bennett spent a year in Oxford and brought back the ideas of the neo-Wittgenstenians who held that giving an agent's reasons for doing something was a matter of redescribing an action in a way that fit it into a larger social, linguistic, or evaluative pattern, but decidedly not a species of causal explanation (causation was, according to A.I. Melden (1961: 184), “wholly irrelevant to understanding” human action). Davidson's reaction against this orthodoxy began his program in the philosophy of action, which then became connected with the program in the theory of meaning as part of the conceptual framework of interpretation.


The results of Davidson's thinking during this period began to appear in the early 1960s and immediately established him as a major figure in analytic philosophy. (See Table I.1 for a summary of Davidson's principal work from 1963 to the posthumous publication of \emph{Truth and Predication in 2005}). “Actions, Reasons and Causes,” originally delivered at the American Philosophical Association, was published in 1963. It argued so influentially that action explanation was causal explanation, contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy, that it became the new orthodoxy almost overnight. Six major interconnected papers appeared in the three-year span from 1966 to 1969: “Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages” (1966), which urged the importance of formulating a compositional meaning theory for natural languages, “Truth and Meaning” (1967), the seminal paper in his semantic program, introducing the proposal that a truth theory can be exploited in pursuit of a compositional meaning theory (see Chapter 10), “The Logical Form of Action Sentences” (1967), which introduces his concept of logical form and argues for the event analysis of action sentences on the grounds that it best explains the formal patterns of entailments in which action sentences figure, “Causal Relations” (1967), which extends an event analysis to singular causal statements, “On Saying That” (1968), which introduces the paratactic analysis of indirect discourse, “True to the Facts” (1969), which argues against the traditional correspondence theory of truth in favor of the importance of Tarski's approach, and “The Individuation of Events” (1969), which argues that events are datable particulars individuated by their place in the network of causes and effects.


\textbf{Table I.1} Summary of Davidson's principle work from 1963 to 2005


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\section{Second Phrase of Davidson's Work, 1970–1981}


Davidson left Stanford for Princeton where he taught from 1967 to 1969, then left Princeton for Rockefeller University in 1970. He moved to the University of Chicago in 1976 when the philosophy department was disbanded at Rockefeller and then to the University of California at Berkeley in 1981 where he taught, even after retirement, until his unexpected death in 2003 at the age of 86.


A second phase of his work began in the 1970s, and represented further development of the themes introduced in the 1960s, responses to objections, and modifications of his positions.


In the philosophy of action and events, “How is Weakness of the Will Possible?” (1970) introduced a new model for the logical form of practical reasoning, which treated it as analogous to probabilistic reasoning, and in the light of which Davidson argued that a puzzle about how akratic action is possible could be resolved. This is also the first paper in a series that stretches into the 1990s on the nature of irrationality. “Action and Reaction” (1970), “Agency” (1971), and “Freedom to Act” (1973) deal respectively with objections to the causal theory of action, further work on the possibility of analyzing agency in purely causal terms (Davidson rejects this view), and work on the nature of free action, which at the same time introduces the problem of deviant (or wayward) causal chains. “Hempel on Explaining Action” (1976) takes up the extent to which action explanation can be modeled on explanation in the natural sciences, and argues they are fundamentally different because of the way in which attributions of attitudes that explain action are dependent on the events that they are cited to explain. “Intending” (1978) takes back a claim made in “Actions, Reasons and Causes,” namely, the claim that talk of intentions was syncategorematic and that “intention” has no genuine use as a count noun. Davidson's acknowledges that pure (or prior) intending is a counterexample, and suggests that intending be identified with a pro-attitude expressed by what he called an all-out judgment in favor of an action in “How is Weakness of the Will Possible?” During this period, Davidson also wrote a paper on “Hume's Cognitive Theory of Pride” (1976), which interprets Hume's theory in the light of Davidson's causal theory of action explanation. The work on the nature of events and the logical form of action sentences was followed up in “Events as Particulars” (1970) and “Eternal versus Ephemeral Events” (1971).


In philosophical psychology, the publication of “Mental Events” in 1970 introduced the thesis of anomalous monism and nonreductive materialism. Davidson argued that there were no strict psychophysical laws, though mental and physical events were causally related, so that on the assumption that events causally related were subsumed by strict laws, and that only physical laws were strict, all mental events were also physical events. This was followed by a number of other papers elaborating on this theme: “Psychology as Philosophy” (1974), “The Material Mind” (1973), and (mentioned earlier) “Hempel on Explaining Action” (1976).


In natural language semantics, Davidson elaborated and defended his proposal for using a truth theory in pursuit of a compositional meaning theory. The main papers connected with this are, “Semantics for Natural Languages” (1970) and “In Defense of Convention T” (1973), which contain useful clarifications of his position. In this period, he also extended the device of parataxis introduced in “On Saying That” to quotation and sentential mood in “Quotation” (1979) and “Moods and Performances” (1979).


In “Truth and Meaning” (1967), Davidson clearly had in mind that a truth theory for another's language was to be treated as an empirical theory. This theme comes to the prominence in “Radical Interpretation” (1973), in which Davidson offered a new account of what conditions a truth theory could meet that would enable it to be used for interpretation, namely, that it be confirmed from the standpoint of a radical interpreter of another speaker. This was intended both to illuminate the concepts of the theory by showing how evidence that did not presuppose their application could be marshaled in its support and to remedy a defect in the earlier proposal, which was that a true truth theory for a language would ipso facto be interpretive (see Chapter 10). The account was elaborated in “Belief and the Basis of Meaning” (1974) and in “Thought and Talk” (1975), in which Davidson also argued for the thesis, which turns out to be central to later themes, that language is necessary for thought. “Reply to Foster” (1976), which was written in response to a paper presented by John Foster (1976) at a conference in 1973, provides an especially useful perspective on how Davidson understands his own project and its development from its initial presentation to 1973. In two papers from the later 1970s, “Reality without Reference” (1977) and “Inscrutability of Reference” (1979), Davidson draws out some of the consequences of his theoretical perspective for the content and determinacy of the concept of reference, assigning it basically an instrumental role in the theory of interpretation.


Other work in the 1970s included “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974), “The Method of Truth in Metaphysics” (1977), and “What Metaphors Mean” (1978). The first of these originated in the last of Davidson's six John Lock Lectures in 1970 and was delivered as his presidential address to the Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in 1973. It influentially argued that relativity of truth to a conceptual scheme is incoherent and that there can be no radically different conceptual schemes from our own in the sense that there can be no languages which are not largely translatable into our own. “The Method of Truth in Metaphysics” concerns the relation of semantic theory of reality. It is the first place Davidson draws out a connection between the principle of charity, which he introduces as a principle constitutive of interpretation, and the impossibility of massive error in our beliefs, especially in our empirical beliefs about the world around us. The paper also argues that, against this background guarantee, an investigation into the large-scale ontological commitments of language through an investigation of the logical form of the sentences that we endorse at the same time reveals the ontological structure of the world. “What Metaphors Mean” pursues the question of meaning into figurative language. Davidson offers an important and novel account of metaphor that rejects the view that words have metaphorical meanings and even the view that metaphors must necessarily involve the conveyance even indirectly of a propositional content. Thus, metaphor, whose existence depends essentially upon literal meaning, functions not to do the same thing indirectly that language used literally does directly, but to get us to see things in a different light. Its intent, to borrow from speech act theory, is primarily perlocutionary, and not illocutionary.

\section{Third Phase of Davidson's Work from the 1980s On}


A third phase of Davidson work began in the 1980s and developed through the 1990s. While the work in this period followed up on, and developed out of, his earlier work, there are several new or newly prominent themes. We will here remark only on the major themes and not trace them out in detail through the papers. First, and most notable (see Table I.1), Davidson shifted attention to the implications of his basic standpoint for epistemology and the individuation of thought. He argued in a series of papers that reflection on the standpoint of the interpreter of another as conceptually fundamental reveals that we cannot be massive wrong about the external world, about our own thoughts, or about the minds of others, and that this resolves a number of traditional philosophical puzzles about knowledge (beginning with “Empirical Content” and “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge”; as mentioned earlier, the theme is first introduced in “The Method of Truth in Metaphysics”). He argued at the same time that this shows that our thought contents are relationally individuated, and that in very different environments, fixing our nonrelational states, we would have had very different beliefs, which would have been largely true of those environs. In the 1990s, a new theme connected with the relational individuation of thought emerges, namely, the idea that crucial to the possibility and objectivity of thought is what he called the triangulation of a speaker, auditor, and object to which each responds similarly while responding to each other. A second main theme in the philosophy of mind takes up a thread in “How Weakness of the Will is Possible?”, namely, what is required for rationality, on the one hand, and what scope there is for irrationality, on the other (these begin in 1982 with “Rational Animals” and “Paradoxes of Rationality”). A third, less prominent theme, falling under the heading of philosophy of mind, is a defense of the argument for anomalous monism. Davidson defends the view against the charge that it leads to epiphenomenalism in “Thinking Causes” (1993) and supplies an argument for one of the premises in the original argument, the nomological character of causality, in “Laws and Cause” (1995). There were three new directions of work in the philosophy of language. The first was on the role of convention in linguistic communication, which Davidson argued was not essential to it, most notoriously, if a bit misleadingly, in “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs” (1986; page citation to the reprint in 2005), in which he declared: “there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered or born with.” The second was a further development of his views on truth, represented in his early work primarily by “Truth to the Facts” in 1969. Davidson argued that truth is a fundamental, indefinable concept (see especially “The Folly of Trying to Define Truth”), discussed his differences with Quine about truth, and argued in the latter three chapters of \emph{Truth and Predication} that the problem of predication has a solution or dissolution at any rate in reflection on Tarskian truth theories (see Chapter 9). The third was further reflections on the import of his views on meaning on understanding literature and literary language (see Chapter 22). The final major new development is represented by four papers on value that aimed to extend something like the principle of charity from beliefs to evaluative judgments, beginning with “Expressing Evaluations,” the Lindley Lectures at the University of Kansas in 1985 (see Chapter 18).

\section{Organization and Contents of the Volume}


We now turn to a brief description of the organization and contents of this volume, which is divided into six parts, of varying length, on action theory, metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and on Davidson's influence and influences on Davidson.


In the first division, the chapters take up Davidson's seminal account of action explanation as causal explanation (Chapter 1), his account of the structure and content of practical reason (Chapter 2), his account of action individuation (Chapter 3), of free action (Chapter 4), and of intention (Chapter 5), on which he changed his mind. The second division on metaphysics takes up Davidson's conception of events and his analysis of the logical form of event sentences as involving an implicit quantifier over events (Chapter 6), which lies behind his account of action, then his account of mental causation (Chapter 7), his defense of the method of truth in metaphysics, essentially, the method of reading large-scale features of reality off of the -cale commitments of ordinary language (Chapter 8), and then his treatment of the concept of truth (Chapter 9), which is central to his semantic program.


The third division on philosophy of language takes up a range of issues dealing with meaning and language to which Davidson has contributed influentially. The first three chapters concern the proposal to use a truth theory in pursuit of giving a compositional meaning theory for natural languages. The first defends the view that Davidson's project was not to replace the theory of meaning with the theory of truth, but instead to pursue traditional aims by a bit of indirection (Chapter 10). The second reviews his use of the device of parataxis – in Davidson's hands, treating what appears to be syntactically a single sentence as semantically equivalent to two sentences, one of which in use makes a reference to the other in order to say something connected with it – in the analysis of indirect discourse, quotation, and sentential mood, all in defense of the claim that an extensional truth theory is adequate for natural languages (Chapter 11). The third takes up his use of a truth theory in an account of the concept of logical form (Chapter 12). The next three chapters are concerned with the role of the project of radical interpretation in Davidson's overall enterprise. The first focuses on the content and role of the principle of charity in radical interpretation (Chapter 13). The second focuses on Davidson defense of indeterminacy as innocuous by appeal to the analogy with measurement, likening the different schemes of interpretation that his method sanctions with different scales of measurement (Chapter 14). The third focuses on the implications that Davidson draws for the concept reference and the determinateness of reference schemes used in truth theories (Chapter 15). The next three chapters concern the relation of thought to language (Chapter 16) and the extent of variation between languages or conceptual schemes (Chapter 17), and whether the interpreter's standpoint affords ground for an argument for the objectivity of values. Of the final four chapters in this section, the first two concern central concepts of language, the first the problem of predication (Chapter 19), and the second the role of convention in communication (Chapter 20), and the last two concern departures from the literal, metaphor (Chapter 21), and the relevance more generally of Davidson work to understanding literature (Chapter 22).


The fourth division concerns issues in the philosophy of mind. The nature and extent of Davidson's holism is the focus of the first (Chapter 23) and Davidson's argument for anomalous monism is the topic of the second (Chapter 24). The next two chapters concern Davidson's account of the individuation of thought content, his externalism about thought content (Chapter 25), and the role of triangulation in particular (Chapter 26). The last three chapters in this section concern Davidson's views on rationality and irrationality, first the nature of rationality (Chapter 27), then of irrationality (Chapter 28), and then rationality in connection with the emotions (Chapter 29).


The fifth division concerns the three domains that Davidson argues we must have knowledge in if we are to be speakers of a language and so creatures with any thoughts at all. The first concerns his response to radical skepticism about the external world (Chapter 30), the second his defense of first-person authority from a third-person point of view (Chapter 31), and the third his account of our knowledge of other minds.


The final division takes up, on the one hand, Davidson's relation to the most important philosophical influence on him, namely, W.V.O. Quine (Chapter 33), and, on the other, Davidson's influence on contemporary philosophy (Chapter 34).


* * *


We hope this volume will serve as an introduction to Davidson's philosophy to those who have not yet studied it, a resource for those who wish to get some orientation on particular topics in Davidson, a source of stimulation to those with interests in Davidson's work, and a portrait from many vantage points of the varied but unified work of one of the most influential analytic philosophers of his time.

\section{Bibliography}


Davidson's primary works


(2001). \emph{Essays on Actions and Events}, 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon. Original edition, 1980.


(2001). \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}, 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Original edition, 1984.


\emph{(2001).} Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective\emph{. Oxford: Clarendon Press.}


(2004). \emph{Problems of Rationality}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


(2005). \emph{Truth, Language and History}. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


(2005). \emph{Truth and Predication}. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


Selected commentary


Glüer, K. (2011). \emph{Donald Davidson: A Short Introduction}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Hahn, L.E. (1999). \emph{The Philosophy of Donald Davidson}. Chicago: Open Court.


Kotatko, P., Pagin, P. and Segal, G. (eds) (2001). \emph{Interpreting Davidson}. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications.


\emph{Lepore, E. (ed.) (1986).} Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson\emph{. Cambridge: Blackwell.}


Lepore, E. and Ludwig, K. (2005). \emph{Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Lepore, E. and McLaughlin, B.P. (eds.) (1985). \emph{Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson}. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.


Ludwig, K. (ed.) (2003). \emph{Donald Davidson}. New York: Cambridge University Press.


Melden, A.I. (1961). \emph{Free Action}. London: Routledge \& Paul.


Preyer, G. (ed.) (2012). \emph{Donald Davidson on Truth, Meaning, and the Mental}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Stoecker, R. (ed.) (1993). \emph{Reflecting Davidson}. Hawthorne, NY: de Gruyter.

\part{Part I: Action Theory}

\chapter{1. Action Explanation}


Ralf Stoecker

\section{1. Introduction}


Understanding action explanation is not only an interesting philosophical task per se, it is of utmost importance for action theory in general, since according to most philosophers, it belongs to the very essence of actions to be explainable in specific ways. Action explanation is also at the core of Davidson's theory of action. “Actions, Reasons, and Causes” (ARC), his first and most prominent contribution to action theory, was explicitly devoted to the question: “What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent's reason for doing what he did?” (\emph{Essays on Actions and Events} (EAE) 3). And he further developed his view on action explanation in many of his later articles. Moreover, for Davidson, the whole enterprise of interpretation, that is, ascribing intentional attitudes as well as linguistic meaning to our fellow people, aims at the explanation of actions (as part of a “unified theory of meaning and action,” \emph{Problems of Rationality} (POR) Ch. 10). In this sense, action explanation forms the root of Davidson's philosophical work in general.


Davidson's account of action explanation has also been one of the most influential parts of his philosophical work. Under the heading of the “causal theory of action,” it evolved into a standard conception of agency that is not only taken for granted by many action theorists, but also by philosophers of mind and ethicists. And when the standard theory comes under attack, critics still refer to Davidson.


Despite its prominence, however, there has been comparatively little scholarly effort invested into a precise interpretation of Davidson's general account of action explanation. Apparently, the overwhelming success of ARC and the publication of a selection of his earlier articles under the title \emph{Essays on Actions and Events} (EAE) in 1980 misled philosophers working in action theory into believing that they could confine themselves to the critical study of these papers. However, in order to understand Davidson's theory of action, and in particular his theory of action explanation, it is important to take into consideration Davidson's writings on radical interpretation and intentional attitudes as well (many of which are to be found in the second collection of his earlier articles: \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation} (ITI)), and also to realize that Davidson developed and considerably refined his views in later articles (which nowadays are easily accessible in the three additional volumes of Davidson's Collected Essays: \emph{Problems of Rationality} (POR), \emph{Subjective, Intersubejctive, Objective} (SIO), and \emph{Truth, Language, and History} (TLH)), as well as in numerous replies to criticisms. As it turns out, the overall picture, resulting from a comprehensive study of Davidson's oeuvre, is in many respects quite different from the standard causal theory of action.

\section{2. Actions and Their Rationalization}


Actions, according to Davidson and most other philosophers of action, are events. Events in turn are spatiotemporally individuated entities, standing in part-whole relationships, as well as in causal relations to other events (cf. EAE Essays 8–10 and Appendix B). For Davidson, however, only events of a special kind can be actions, namely bodily movements (EAE 59, POR 101–106). This claim emerges from his account of a prominent feature in the ascription of agency: the employment of the “by”-locution. When a person acts, she typically does various things \emph{by} doing others, for example, she illuminates a room \emph{by} turning on the light, which in turn she does \emph{by} flicking the switch (EAE 53). The observation that ascriptions of agency often involve “by”-sentences gave rise to the question of the relationship between the actions that are ascribed on both sides of the “by,” which in turn fuelled a lively debate in the early days of modern action theory. Davidson's answer to this question is radically “coarse grained.” In saying that the agent illuminates the room by turning on the light, which she does by flicking the switch, one is picking out one and the same bodily behavior: a finger movement touching the switch. The agent's actions of illuminating the room, turning on the light, and flicking the switch are identical. Yet if the actions involved on both sides of the “by”-locution are identical, then, given that ultimately people always act by moving their bodies, it follows that all actions are bodily movements. (See the entry on the individuation of action.)


Not all bodily movements are actions, however. For Davidson to call a bodily movement an action is to say that it can be explained in a specific way that he calls “rationalization.” In this sense, the possibility of giving action explanations is essential for agency.


\emph{There are many different kinds of rationalizing explanations of actions. One can explain an action, for example, by citing an intention (}A man nails boards together with the intention of building a squirrel house\emph{, EAE 83), an expected outcome (}I pour you a shot because it will sooth your nerves\emph{, EAE 8), or the object of a want (}I went into the store because I want that gold watch in the window\emph{, EAE 6), by giving new descriptions of the same action (}“Why are you bobbing around that way?” – “I'm knitting, weaving, exercising, sculling, cuddling, training fleas.” \emph{EAE 8), by using a “by”-sentence (}By setting fire to the bedding, Smith burned down his house\emph{, EAE 47), or by pointing out the aim of the action (}Smith burned down the house in order to collect the insurance\emph{, EAE 47).}


It is therefore not quite correct to object that Davidson only considers a special kind of sophisticated action explanation (Thompson 2008: 86); he is well aware of the whole variety of everyday explanations. Yet for Davidson, all these explanations share a common core: they explain an action by leading us “to see something the agent saw, or thought he saw, in his action” (EAE 3). As a minimum, they describe the agent as having a favorable attitude (a “pro attitude”) to actions of a certain kind (e.g., building a squirrel house), plus the belief that the action to be explained (e.g., the action of nailing the boards together) is of the respective kind (EAE 3–4). In ARC, Davidson calls such a pair of attitudes a “primary reason.” Explanations that merely point out the primary reason usually are not very interesting. According to Davidson, however, the more interesting explanations, which explain the action without explicitly mentioning the primary reason, still indicate a primary reason and thereby show what the agent saw in the action. (“ ‘I want that gold watch in the window’ is not a primary reason and explains why I went into the store only because it suggests a primary reason – for example, that I wanted to buy the watch” (EAE 6).)\footnote{It is evidence for the extraordinary influence of ARC that its terminology is still frequently used in the literature although subsequently to ARC Davidson himself immediately gave up the notion of “primary reason” and also made use of his second coinage “pro attitude” only in two other papers (“Intending” and “Problems in the Explanation of Action”).}


Michael Smith has called Davidson's claim that there has to be a primary reason for every action the “Humean dogma” (Smith 1994: 92). It is not clear, however, whether recent debates on Humean (or internalist) versus Kantian (externalist) theories of motivation really are of concern for Davidson's account, because his understanding of pro attitudes is presumably much broader than a typical “Humean” understanding of desires. What seems to be clear, though, is that Davidson's view is challenged by authors who deny that there have to be primary reasons at all for actions, like Rosalind Hursthouse in her conception of arational actions (Hursthouse 1991), or philosophers who doubt that reasons are mental attitudes (e.g., Alvarez 2010; Bittner 2001; Dancy 2000; Hacker 2007; Stoutland 2001).


In any case, rationalizing explanations do more than merely point out that an agent has a certain favorable attitude toward one of her actions. They express that the agent acts \emph{on} her attitude. Action explanations hence have two elements: in addition to expressing what the agent sees in the action, they claim that what she sees is a reason \emph{for which} she acts. This additional element of action explanations is not redundant since, first, there are situations where an action is attractive to the agent in a number of different respects, yet only one of them is responsible for her doing what she does, and, second, there are situations where a certain behavior fits the agent's demands perfectly, and still the behavior is merely a reflex or induced from the outside and hence no action at all. In both kinds of situation, pointing out why it seems favorable for the agent to do what she does is not sufficient for explaining it.


The interesting question is how to understand this additional element in action explanations. Following Aristotle, one might be tempted to think that the action has to be somehow set in motion by the agent, for example, by an act of will or volition of hers. When Davidson wrote ARC, however, there was almost unanimity in action theory that rationalizations should not be construed as causal explanations, and in fact even that they \emph{could} not be construed in this way. Proponents of this view, very much influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, were, for example, G.E.M. Anscombe (Anscombe 1957) and A.I. Melden (Melden 1961). It was Davidson's express intention in writing ARC to combat these views and to show that a causal understanding of the additional element in action explanations is not only feasible but highly plausible, and he devoted a considerable part of this philosophical work to elaborating and refining this causal position. Overall, Davidson's argument combines three lines of attack: (i) a move that is occasionally called “Davidson's challenge” (cf. Mele 2000: 279); (ii) a refutation of attempts that were supposed to show that rationalizing explanations cannot be causal; and (iii) a positive account of the causal character of rationalizing explanations.

\section{3. Davidson's Challenge and the Problem of Wayward Causal Chains}


Davidson repeatedly made clear that in fact, he was much in agreement with most of what his Wittgensteinian colleagues said about the way rationalizing explanations fit actions into a pattern of the agent's behavior (e.g., ITI 159). What is missing in the Wittgensteinian proposals, however, is an account of \emph{how} one could explain the occurrence of an action by merely showing that it fits into a certain pattern (EAE 10). According to Davidson, this is why the explanations should be regarded as causal. We know that causal explanations provide a possible way of explaining occurrences; it is therefore a good first guess to assume that action explanations are causal, too. The challenge he puts to the anti-causalist is to put forward an alternative account of the explanatory force of action explanations that does not make use of causality.


Action theorists have repeatedly taken up Davidson's challenge and in particular have tried to strengthen teleological readings of rationalizing explanations instead (e.g., George Wilson, and more recently G.F. Schueler, Scott Sehon, and Timothy O'Connor; cf. Sehon 2010). This is not the place to assess these proposals, which have gained much popularity during the last couple of years, yet it is necessary to mention that they are frequently motivated by skeptical doubts about whether Davidson himself could meet his challenge, that is, whether Davidson and the causalists are in fact better off with respect to Davidson's challenge than their opponents. This skepticism is based on the assumption that Davidson can only claim to have given an adequate account of the extra element in action explanations if his characterization of these explanations sufficed to distinguish actions from nonactions. If actions are by essence explainable in a specific way, and if it is characteristic of this specific way that the explanation expresses, first, what the agent saw in the action and, second, that the action's taking place was caused by the agent's reasons for it, as Davidson apparently maintains, then there should be no instances of bodily behavior that satisfy these two conditions and yet are not actions. But in fact, there are such cases, that is, cases of so-called \emph{wayward causal chains}, where a person's behavior is favorable from her own perspective and is, moreover, caused by her pro attitude, but the behavior still is not an action.


Davidson was one of the first action theorists to formulate this problem and he contributed several creative examples to the debate, for example, the following: “Thus a man might want to break a pot, and believe that by stamping on the floor he will cause the pot to break. The belief and desire cause him to stamp, but the stamping has no direct effect on the pot. However, the noise makes a bystander utter an oath which so offends the agent that he swings around, accidentally knocking over and breaking the pot. The agent had a motive for breaking the pot, and the motive caused him to break the pot. But he had no motive in breaking the pot: it was an accident” (EAE 264). Although the destruction of the pot was caused by the appropriate pair of belief and pro attitude, it was not an action; hence a causal relationship between primary reason and behavior is not sufficient for agency.


Unfortunately, though, Davidson also did much to obscure his own position when he wrote in his seminal article “Freedom to Act,” “What I despair of spelling out is the way in which attitudes must cause actions if they are to rationalize the action” (EAE 79, cf. also EAE 264, POR 106), without making it sufficiently clear that for him this was not a weakness of his approach but evidence for something important about action explanations. At least, defenders of a noncausal, teleological view of action explanations have taken Davidson's confession as a strong confirmation of their view that causal accounts of action explanations cannot handle the phenomenon of wayward causal chains and, hence, do not meet Davidson's challenge themselves.

\section{4. The Logical Connection Argument}


Given the initial plausibility of causalism and the strength of Davidson's challenge, it is worthwhile to turn to the second line of Davidson's vindication of causalism, the question whether there are some principled obstacles that speak against the very possibility of a causal account of rationalizing explanations.


In the early 1960s, probably the most prominent objection against a causal understanding of action explanations was the so-called \emph{logical connection argument}. The argument is based on the assumption that causal explanations derive their explanatory power from a causal relation between the event to be explained and another event by which it is caused. The occurrence of such a sequence of two distinct events is an empirical fact. Hence, it is assumed any causal explanation of an event with reference to another causally efficacious event must be expressed in a contingent sentence. Rationalizations, however, were said to be based on a kind of logical connection between the agent's attitudes and her action, since her attitudes are only explanatory if their content somehow fits the action. Rationalizations therefore could not be causal explanations.


Despite its prominence in the early days of action theory, the logical connection argument has at least two weak points, both of which Davidson tackles in ARC. First, the presumed logical connection between reasons and actions is extremely shaky. One simply cannot infer from the information that a person has a pro attitude toward illuminating the room and that he knows that flicking the switch would illuminate the room to the conclusion that the person will illuminate the room (perhaps he is too lazy to get up or too much occupied with building a squirrel house). Second, the whole idea of a mismatch between causal relations and logical relations rests on a category mistake. Whether a sentence expresses a causal relationship depends on \emph{what its expressions refer to}, while whether it is logically true or contingently true depends on \emph{which expressions are used}. The sentence “The event of United Airlines Flight 175 crashing into the southern tower of the WTC caused the collapse of the building” is true, and it is a contingent truth; while the sentence “The event that caused the collapse of the southern tower of the WTC caused the building's collapse,” although true as well, is almost a logical truth (cf. EAE 13–15). Given the number of impressive philosophers who have once defended the logical connection argument in one form or another, one may wonder whether the argument really was based merely on a sort of logical blunder (cf. Kenny 1975: 117–120), but in any case, it almost disappeared from action theory after Davidson's devastating criticism.


Much stronger than the logical connection argument are objections that point to apparent tensions between Davidson's causal understanding of rationalizations and other parts of his philosophical work. Particularly conspicuous are two seeming conflicts with Davidson's understanding of causation. First, action explanations seem to provide the wrong kind of explanantia for causal explanations, and, second, there seems to be a contradiction between Davidson's view that causal relations entail strict laws covering the succession of cause and effect and his insistence that there are no (and could be no) laws that cover ascriptions of mental attitudes and ascriptions of actions.

\section{5. Reasons as Causes?}


In the literature, Davidson's causalism has been frequently summed up with the catchphrase: \emph{reasons are causes}, and Davidson himself has occasionally used similar phrases (e.g., EAE 4, 233). These bold slogans, however, apparently contradict Davidson's claim in his articles on causation that the relata of causal relations are events (EAE ch. 7). For Davidson beliefs, desires and other attitudes are not events and consequently are not even of the right kind to be causes of actions. So, how could he still maintain that reason explanations are causal explanations?!


Davidson had already anticipated this objection in ARC (12–13). But since many critics take it that his response is basically to be found in the following sentence, “States and dispositions are not events, but the onslaught of the state or disposition is” (EAE 12), they were understandably not convinced. The explanatory value, for example, of a desire to travel to Australia someday is obviously not captured by the fact that it was once acquired, years ago. Hence, Davidson's response apparently fails to dispel the objection.


There is another objection that points into a similar direction but was, to my knowledge, never addressed by Davidson. Harry Frankfurt argues that action explanations cannot be causal explanations because reasons only explain actions if they are simultaneous with the action, while causes and effects occur in temporal succession (Frankfurt 1988). That a man wants to illuminate the room explains his flipping the switch only if, at the moment of his moving the finger, he still wants to illuminate the room, while a causally efficacious desire might well have ceased when the effect takes place. Consequently, according to Frankfurt, reasons are not causes.

\section{6. The Role of Laws in Action Explanations and the Causal Relevance of Mental Properties}


The second objection that points to a tension between Davidson's conception of causation and his causal understanding of action explanations concerns the role of laws. The objection can be rather different in kind. The most radical one is at the same time the one which is easiest to refute. It starts from two premises: first, every causal relationship is covered by a strict law, and second, it is impossible to formulate strict psychophysical laws. It then draws the conclusion that there could be no causal relations between mental events and physical events (e.g., actions).


The argument is not conclusive, though. As Davidson has shown in his famous argument for anomalous monism, there is another, alternative conclusion that can be drawn, namely that all (causally connected) mental events are physical events. For Davidson, every mental event is at the same time a physical event, that is, an event to which one can refer in purely physical language. Consequently, it is perfectly possible that mental events (described physically) fall under strict covering laws, although there are no psychophysical laws, and hence it is possible that mental events are causes of physical events. Davidson's presumptions that every causal relationship is covered by a strict law and that there are no strict psychophysical laws do not per se contradict his causal understanding of action explanations. (See the entries on causation and anomalous monism.)


Although this response is formally impeccable, to many philosophers in action theory and the philosophy of mind, it seemed insufficient and beside the point and therefore led to an extended debate on agency and mental causation in the late 1980s and early 1990s (cf. the articles in a special issue of \emph{Philosophical Perspectives} 3 (1989) and in Heil and Mele (1993)). What these authors complained about was that in order to defend the causal understanding of action explanations, it is not enough to show that mental events could be causes of physical events. What one has to prove is that they can cause something \emph{qua} being mental, or to put it slightly different: one has to prove that mental properties could be \emph{causally relevant}, that they are not merely epiphenomenal. Fred Dretske has illustrated the objection by a telling analogy: “Meaningful sounds, if they occur at the right pitch and amplitude, can shatter glass, but the fact that these sounds have a meaning is surely irrelevant to their having this effect” (Dretske 1989: 1). Hence, what defenders of causalism have to show is that the property of being mental is not as causally inert in action explanations as the libretto of the soprano is who shatters glass with her voice.


The objection can take different lines. Jaegwon Kim has proposed it in an ontologically rich sense as an argument about the causal role of properties. For Kim it is part of our physicalistic understanding of the world that every event can be fully explained with recourse to preceding events and their physical properties. Accordingly there is no causal role for mental properties, unless they are in fact physical properties, which leads to his criticism of so-called token identity theories (like Davidson's) and to his defense of type identity theories. From Davidson's perspective, however, this objection is misguided right from the beginning. Since properties are strictly speaking not part of his ontology at all, he need not worry about their causal relevance or inertness. Moreover, as he frequently emphasizes, he rejects the whole idea of an event causing another \emph{qua} having a certain property or \emph{qua} being an exemplification of a property (TLH 188).


The objection is much stronger yet, if it is not understood ontologically but as an argument about the \emph{explanatory power of reason explanations}. According to this reading, Dretske's example shows that we learn very little about \emph{why} the glass broke when we are merely told that it fell into pieces because a woman declared her passionate love (unless we are also informed that she is a soprano singer and that her oath of love was at an extremely high pitch). The way the cause is described, it seems, is not useful in explaining why the glass broke. Another, quasi opposite, example for explanatory feebleness has already been mentioned in the discussion of the logical connection argument. It is true that the event that caused the collapse of the southern tower of the WTC caused the building's collapse, but as being almost trivially true it has no explanatory value at all. What these examples show is that one has to say much more about the explanatory role of rationalizing explanations than merely that they are causal explanations. One still has to explain \emph{how} they could be causally explanatory. Insofar as the causal theory has failed to do so, again, Davidson's challenge has not been met (cf. Follesdal 1985: 315).


This is where finally the objection seems to get grip that there is a tension between Davidson's causal understanding of action explanation and his conception of the relationship between causation and laws. For it is tempting to go back to the laws that cover causal relations in order to account for the explanatory value of causal explanations. Given that they are strict in the sense of being universally true without exception, these laws seem to provide ideal causal explanations because they allow an inference from the occurrence of the cause to the occurrence of the effect; they provide, in the words of C.G. Hempel, a kind of deductive-nomological explanation (Hempel 1965: 347 ff.; cf. EAE ch. 14). For Davidson, however, who denies the very possibility of strict psychophysical laws, rationalizations could not be supported by covering laws, and therefore could not be explanatory in the sense mentioned. There seems to be an inevitable dilemma that one must either give up the idea that action explanations are causal explanations or agree that the mental explanantia fit into strict laws.


In should be noted, however, that there is further difficulty for the covering law account of the explanatory force of action explanations, which is independent of the anomalousness of the mental. Typical action explanations which, for example, refer to a desire of the agent usually do not look like instances of regularities, since: “Far more often than not people fail to perform any action at all to achieve a desired end, even though they believe or know the means are at hand; and no one ever performs all the actions he believes will lead to the end. [\dots{}] If we were to guess at the frequency with which people perform actions for which they have reasons (not necessarily adequate or good reasons, but reasons in the simple sense under consideration), I think it would be vanishingly small” (EAE 263–264). Hence, according to Davidson, if action explanations were based on regularities between what a person wants and what she does, most of our everyday explanation would be almost worthless. Neither would it help to try to improve these regularities by making them more specific and case sensitive (cf. Lanz 1993). Hence, whether there are any psychophysical laws or not, the explanatory force of action explanations apparently is not due to being an instance of a deductive-nomological explanation. But then, how can it be accounted for instead?


This is the point to switch from the second line of Davidson's defense of causalism, that is, his attempts to refute objections that try to show that causalism is untenable for him, to the third line, namely his positive account of causal explanations in general and reason explanations in particular. (See the entry on causation.)

\section{7. Singular Causal Statements and Causal Explanations}


There is one conspicuous feature that many of the objections against Davidson's causalism share. They seem to go much too far because they apparently prove that the bulk of common sense explanations (and perhaps also many explanations in science) are not causal, either. Davidson had already made this point in ARC and restated it again in later articles. First, with respect to the objection that reasons could not be causes because they are not events, Davidson points out that the same is true of many ordinary causal explanations: “the bridge collapsed because of a structural defect; the plane crashed on takeoff because the air temperature was abnormally high; the plate broke because it had a crack” (EAE 12). Neither structural defects nor temperature or cracks in the dishes are events, yet they allow for causal explanations of events like the collapse of a bridge, the crash of a plane or the breaking of a plate. Second, with respect to the objection that action explanations do not allow for covering laws, he writes: “I am certain the window broke because it was struck by a rock – I saw it all happen; but I am not (is anyone?) in command of laws on the basis of which I can predict what blows will break which windows” (EAE 16). Since none of our everyday concepts presumably will turn up in the strict laws that cover causal relations, in this respect, action explanations fare no worse than other everyday causal explanations.


This is where Davidson's positive account of causal explanations sets in, which is based on two crucial distinctions. First he distinguishes two different understandings of the expression “cause” (EAE 161–162; cf. Davidson 1993: 288, 1999: 638). Either the expression is used as a two-place predicate to be filled in by names of events (“United Airlines Flight 175's crashing into the southern tower of the World Trade Center,” “the collapse of the building”) or it is used as a connective between sentences, for example, between “the plate broke” and “the plate had a crack.” In the first, “strict,” sense, “cause” occurs in singular causal statements, while in the second, “broad,” sense, it is used for causal explanations. Obviously, Davidson's claim that reasons are causes has to be understood in the latter sense.


However, even if one has to distinguish single causal statements from causal explanations, they have to be connected. Causal explanations must be somehow dependent on causal relations. And if action explanations are causal explanations, they must be based on causal relations, too. The question is, how?

\section{8. Strict Laws, Generalizations, and Causal Concepts}


At this point, Davidson's second crucial distinction comes into play. One has to distinguish between strict laws of nature that are entailed by causal relations and the generalizations on which familiar causal explanations are based (PoR 113). While the existence of laws of the former kind may very well be unknown to anybody, generalizations of the latter kind clearly play an important role in causal explanations. In \emph{Laws and Cause} (TLH, ch. 14). Davidson sketches an almost Kantian picture of events as being individuated according to the demands of our explanatory interest in assigning regularities to the world: “It is not surprising, then, that singular causal statements imply the existence of covering laws: events are changes that explain and require such explanations. This is not an empirical fact: nature doesn't care what we call a change, so we decide what to count as a change on the basis on what we want to explain, and what we think available as an explanation” (TLH 212). The principle of the nomological character of causality, according to which every causal relation entails a strict covering law, is an \emph{a priori} truth. It is an essential part of our metaphysics of events (cf. also Davidson 1985: 227).


But as Davidson already made clear in his famous argument for anomalous monism, “it is possible (and typical) to know of the singular causal relation without knowing the law or the relevant descriptions” (EAE 224). This is what our nonstrict everyday generalizations are good for: “Knowledge requires reasons, but these are available in the form of rough heteronomic generalizations, which are lawlike in that instances make it reasonable to expect other instances to follow suit without being lawlike in the sense of being indefinitely refinable” (EAE 224). It is characteristic for our everyday causal wisdom and also for most scientific knowledge that we base it on generalizations that we believe can, in principle and by reference to the basic laws of nature, be shown to be trustworthy under the specific circumstances where we employ them – although in fact we are not and perhaps nobody ever will be able to do it. And we express our conviction that we are faced with a case where they are trustworthy by using the language of causality. In this sense, claiming a causal relationship always is an unfulfilled promise, “a cloak for ignorance” (EAE 80), that deep down in the causal fabric of the world, the succession of events under question can be shown to be an instance of a strict law of nature. And our familiar rules and regularities provide the evidential base for such claims. We feel confident to say that the short-circuit caused the fire (EAE 151) because we have pretty good general knowledge of household electricity and its dangers, which we believe would not evaporate if some super physicists inquire more deeply into the relationship between the particular short-circuit and the particular fire under question. In this sense, we make the occurrence of an event (the fire) intelligible with reference to another, earlier event (the short-circuit), since we make the justified (although certainly not infallible) claim that the one had to follow the other due to the laws of nature.


Therefore, the fact that there are no strict laws that cover action explanations is no reason at all to deny that they are causal explanations; on the contrary, it is something that is shared by (almost) all causal explanations: “It is often thought that scientific explanations are causal, while explanations of actions and mental affairs are not. I think almost exactly the reverse is the case: ordinary explanations of action, perception, memory, and reasoning, as well as the attribution of thoughts, intentions, and desires, is riddled with causal concepts; whereas it is a sign of progress in a science that it rids itself of causal concepts” (PoR 96).


There remains the other problem, however, that there are not even rough and ready generalizations that support typical action explanations; in this respect, they are unlike, for example, the explanation of the fire by the short-circuit. But as Davidson repeatedly points out, many everyday causal explanations work differently, anyhow. They are based on \emph{causal concepts}. The notion of “causal concept” plays a dominant, though frequently neglected, role in Davidson's work on agency and the mind, despite the fact that already in the introduction to his \emph{Essays on Actions and Events}, he writes, “The theme [of the book] is the role of causal concepts in the description and explanation of human action” (EAE xi). In another article, he says: “In fact the causal character of the concepts used in talking about action is an essential part of what must be grasped in coming to a clear view of the nature of action explanation” (PoR 105). What Davidson means by “causal concepts,” however, are not terms like “cause,” “produce,” and so on, but predicates that either imply a certain causal role (e.g., “having a sunburn,” which entails that the bearer's burned skin was caused by being exposed to the sun (PoR 121)) or which imply certain causal powers or dispositions (e.g., “being biodegradable,” which entails that under certain circumstances it will decompose by natural biological processes (PoR 95)).


Both kinds of causal concepts are important for understanding the explanatory force of action explanations: “it is part of the concept of an intentional action that it is caused and explained by beliefs and desires; it is part of the concept of a belief or a desire that it tends to cause, and so explain, actions of certain sorts” (SIO 217). As already mentioned at the beginning, according to Davidson, it is essential for an event being an action that it can be causally explained by reference to a primary reason, that is, a pair of a belief and a desire. “Action” is in this respect similar to “sunburn.” And (which is a less familiar claim) it is essential for being a belief or a desire, or any propositional attitude whatsoever, that they are dispositions or causal powers of the agent. “As I already pointed out, beliefs and desires have causal powers, and that is why they explain actions” (PoR 112, cf. (Mayr 2011)). In order to understand Davidson's account of action explanation, one has to elucidate his view of causal powers.

\section{9. Causal Powers}


According to Davidson, a causal power is “a property of an object such that a change of a certain sort in the object causes an event of another sort” (EAE 64), where this second event could either be occurring within the same object (as in the causal power of being soluble) or somewhere else (as in being a solvent). For Davidson, causal powers play an important role in everyday causal explanations. They “encapsulate the relation between causality and laws” (TLH 214). Saying, for example, that certain wrappings are biodegradable is expressing our wisdom that under the right condition (e.g., a compost heap), it is probable that certain natural processes (having to do, e.g., with earthworms and bacteria) cause the decomposition of the wrappings. Consequently, we can give a causal explanation of the disappearance of a particular package in the heap after a few months by simply saying that it was biodegradable. It had the disposition to be caused to dissolve.


Such an explanation by reference to a disposition is far from being pointless. After all, the package could also have vanished because it was removed or burned. Although all causal concepts share the “cloak of ignorance” with respect to the specific underlying natural processes, they express a practical causal wisdom that justifies an explanatory claim. Much of what we know about the world is preserved either in generalizations, like the one that short-circuits tend to cause fire, or in our ascription of causal powers to things, for example, to paper wrappings, that they are biodegradable. They allow us to give causal explanations, although these explanations entail that there has been some natural process about which we have at best a very dim idea. The remaining uncertainty (the “cloak for ignorance”) is expressed in the explicit reference to causality. Whenever we give a causal explanation, we express our confidence that a certain relationship obtains which we are unable to make explicit due to our lack of knowledge.


Given Davidson's account of causal concepts and particularly of causal powers, many of the objections against his causal understanding of agency dissolve. It is not a problem any longer that propositional attitudes are not events and hence cannot be causes, since causal explanations need not necessarily refer to any causally efficacious event. Sometimes they do (e.g., to a short-circuit), but occasionally they do not, for example, when they explain the vanishing of the paper wrapping with reference to its biodegradability. Therefore, beliefs and desires as causal powers can causally explain an action without being events. Of course, in order for the explanation to be true there have to be some causally efficacious events that cause the action, for example, the onslaught of a desire or a glimpse of the desired object, and so on. But frequently, we have no idea what the particular event was and still can easily explain the action by rationalizing it.


The account also furthers a better understanding of the phenomenon of “wayward causal chains,” since it can be shown that the phenomenon is an instance of a general feature of explanations by dispositions and causal powers. Imagine that the paper wrapping has vanished from the compost heap not because it dissolved but because the owner picked it out as an illustrative sample for her children to teach them about biodegradability. In this case, its vanishing is still due to its being biodegradable, yet it is at least severely misleading to say: it has vanished because it is biodegradable, since the vanishing was not an \emph{instantiation} or an actualization of the disposition of being biodegradable. In the same way, it can be argued that cases of wayward agency are not actualizations of the causal powers of the agents' intentions, although they are in some way due to them (Stoecker 2003). The fact that typical causal explanations display the same phenomenon of “wayward causal chains,” far from falsifying Davidson's causal account, speaks very much in its favor.


We are left, however, with the question of what kind of causal power propositional attitudes are. As already mentioned, usually there is almost no regularity between having a certain desire and performing a particular action. In this respect propositional attitudes are very unlike disposition like biodegradability, fragility, solubility, and so on. What is still missing is an account of propositional attitudes as causal powers, which in the end leads to Davidson's theory of radical interpretation.

\section{10. Propositional Attitudes as Causal Powers}


One big difference between ascriptions of propositional attitudes on the one hand and of dispositions like being biodegradable on the other is that the former are relational. To say that an agents wants to build a squirrel house is to relate him to a “propositional content,” namely that he builds a squirrel house. According to Davidson, the best way to construe this connection is as a special kind of linguistic maneuver. The speaker who attributes this desire to the agent says something like: “That's what he wants: He builds a squirrel house.” The speaker attributes a desire to the agent pointing to something he, the speaker, utters, as a sort of specimen. Since the specimen sentence is not logically connected with the attribution sentence but only attached, Davidson calls his proposal a “paratactic account” of propositional attitude attributions (SIO 76–77, cf. ITI 106). In order to understand how propositional attitudes could be causal powers, though, one has to clarify the punch line of this linguistic practice. Why are we interested at all in relating an utterance of our own to another person?


The first step in Davidson's theory is to notice a surprising parallel to other dispositions ascribed relationally: for example, having a certain weight, length, temperature, and so on (EAE 220, SIO 59–60). That the water starts boiling in the kettle obviously is not due to its having some temperature (everything has), but rather due to its temperature being 100° C. In this way, one can explain the boiling of the water by relating the water to a number. Moreover, depending on the scale we use, assigning numbers can allow for complex dispositions (e.g., in a very simple example, we might explain the crash of an elevator with recourse to the culminated weight of the passengers, none of whom had the causal power to endanger the lift alone).


In the same way, according to Davidson, one can explain actions by relating agents to sentences or utterances (SIO 74–75). To say that the agent picks up the hammer because he wants to build a squirrel house is to explain his action of fetching the hammer as an actualization of a causal power that we keep track of (“measure”) by relating the agent to the utterance “He builds a squirrel house.” And as we can add up weights into more complex causal powers, we can also combine different propositional attitudes into more complex dispositions, for example, the desire to build a squirrel house and the belief that squirrel houses have to be fixed with screws instead of nails. Given both attitudes, it is no longer possible to explain the agent's act of fetching the hammer as by reference to the agent's disposition which we keep track of with by the sentence “He builds a squirrel house,” while an act of getting a screw driver would still be perfectly explainable, and so on. The way these causal powers combine is provided by the basic principles of rationality.


It is still not clear, however, how this works as a causal explanation. At this point, Davidson's account of action explanations leads back to his theory of interpretation in the philosophy of language (cf. ITI Part 3). Understanding what people say, as a semantic enterprise, relates the speakers' utterances to the world. According to Davidson, our basic tool for relating speaker's utterances to the world is a \emph{theory of truth} for the language of the speaker, which is even possible for alien speakers, that is, in a situation of what Davidson calls “radical interpretation.” A theory of truth assigns truth conditions to the sentences uttered. It might say, for example, that the sentence “Schnee ist weiß,” uttered by a speaker at a time, is true if and only if snow is white. As the logician Alfred Tarski has shown, it is possible to provide a finitely axiomatized truth theory for a language that contains quantifiers. Davidson and others have shown how to extend the sort of truth theory Tarski developed to natural languages that contain context sensitive expressions and types of sentences that do not occur in the formal languages that Tarski discussed. (For instance, Davidson's paratactic account was originally a suggestion to incorporate indirect speech into a truth theory.) Although it is difficult to formulate such a theory explicitly, Davidson assumes that: “All understanding of the speech of another involves radical interpretation” (ITI 125).


In radical interpretation, a theory of truth is treated as part of an empirical theory that, inter alia, ascribes to the speaker something like a representation of the world (ITI 133 ff., THL 35–36). The theory has to fulfill formal and empirical constraints (ITI 150 ff.). Empirical evidence for an adequate construction of the theory is found primarily in the vicinity of the speaker, where the interpreter can (provisionally) regard the speaker's utterances as being prompted by what is the case in her immediate surroundings (as in Quine's famous example of an alien speaker who utters “Gavagai” while a rabbit runs past). At least at these “edges” of the language, that is, indexical observation sentences, it must be granted that speech is causally embedded in the world (SIO 189).


Given that these empirical constraints are met, we can use our own sentences to “measure” (or keep track of) actual and even possible utterances of the speaker. This is where the concept of meaning is located in Davidson's philosophy of language (ITI, Essay 2), for example, when we say: the alien speaker's sentence “Gavagai” \emph{means} that: a rabbit is running by. We use our sentence “A rabbit is running by” as a way of keeping track of the meaning of “Gavagai” in her language, based on an empirical theory of truth for that language. In this sense, the theory of truth provides a tool to measure the meaning of the sentences of a speaker's language.


Interpretation is more demanding, though. Its point is not merely to describe a language but to describe a speaker, by uncovering a propensity of hers to utter sentences under certain circumstances that would allow for inferences about unobserved and counterfactual situations (e.g., that she is or would be prompted by a passing rabbit to utter “Gavagai”) (ITI 174). Davidson calls this propensity the “holding true” of sentences. That is what connects his theory of truth with his theory of action. “The interlocking of the theory of action with interpretation will emerge [\dots{}] if we ask how a method of interpretation is tested. In the end, the answer must be that it helps bring order into our understanding of behavior. But at an intermediate stage, we can see that the attitude of holding true or accepting as true, as directed towards sentences, must play a central role in giving form to a theory” (ITI 161). It is part of the ability of a competent speaker of a language that many of her real or even potential and counterfactual utterances can be explained by recourse to her holding true sentences of her language. And these attitudes of holding sentences true are in turn based on the agent having been confronted with the world in situations like the running by of a rabbit. In this sense, Davidson can claim: “We justifiably assume [e.g.] that a person who is now disposed to hold that ‘is a dog’ is true of dogs came by that disposition through experiences of dogs” (POR 85).


Now, since we can keep track of what the sentences of the speaker's language mean by recourse to sentences of ours that express the truth conditions of these sentences (in whatever sense this gives their “meaning”), we can likewise use them to keep track of hold true attitudes, for example, the attitude of holding true the sentence “Gavagai.” The result is an attitude of the speaker we can “measure” by the following: a rabbit is running by. According to Davidson, such an attitude is called a belief. The alien speaker who utters “Gavagai” and holds true “Gavagai” believes that a rabbit is running by. Instead of describing a speaker by recourse to sentences being held true, we can now describe her with recourse to states of affairs that express the conditions under which these sentences are true. On the one hand, this is not an arbitrary scale, since it is based on the assumption that the speaker's holding these sentences true is at least partially due to being confronted with the conditions under which they are true (e.g., that a rabbit is running by). On the other hand, it allows for the important fact that speakers occasionally hold sentences true which are in fact not true. To say that the speaker believes, for example, that a rabbit is running by is to describe him as someone who is disposed to behave as if a rabbit is running by whether this really occurs or not. “The concept of belief thus stands ready to take up the slack between objective truth and the held true, and we come to understand it just in this connection” (ITI 170).


The construction of a theory of truth for a speaker enables the interpreter not only to ascribe to him a web of beliefs, however, but a whole system of attitudes that are identified with recourse to the interpreter's characterization of the truth conditions of sentences in the speaker's language. This is due to the fact that human agents are not merely representing the world but take an evaluative stand towards it. We do not confine ourselves to holding some sentences true, but we also \emph{prefer} some sentences to be true and others to be false. Hence, the way we “measure” agents by ascribing truth conditions to her can take different dimensions or perspectives. This is what we express in ascribing different kinds of attitudes that stand for different dispositions, although they concur in their propositional content (e.g., believing, doubting, hoping, or being afraid that a rabbit runs by). (“Our sentences provide the only measure of the mental” (SIO 77).)


Ascriptions of such attitudes, in turn, are subject to further constraints in addition to the empirical evidence and formal demands of a truth theory. They have to conform to certain principles of rationality that relate them to the behavior, in particular to the nonlinguistic behavior, of the speaker. Perhaps the most basic of these principles is the claim from ARC that in order to explain the behavior of a person with recourse to the system of her attitudes, there has to be a primary reason for the behavior (rendering it an action). Then there is the more demanding principle that the action must coincide with what the agent regards as being best on the basis of all relevant reasons (“principle of continence”) (EAE 41). And finally, there are even more demanding principles that come into play when the system of attitudes is further enhanced with a second layer of numeric measurement: subjective probabilities and the relative weights of preferences. This additional feature of the attribution of propositional attitudes is already part of our everyday practice of action explanations (“He built a squirrel house instead of repairing the doghouse because he liked squirrels more than dogs.”), but according to Davidson, it also opens the way for constructing a psychologically more respectable unified theory of meaning and action (cf. POR 10) that unifies the tasks of creating a theory of truth and a theory of subjective probability in decision theory.

\section{11. The Explanatory Value of Action Explanations}


Davidson's account of intentional attitudes has radical ontological consequences that are not always sufficiently noticed in the literature. “In thinking and talking of the weights of physical objects we do not need to suppose there are such things as weights for objects to have. Similarly, in thinking and talking about the beliefs of people we need not suppose there are such entities as beliefs. Nor do we have to invent objects to serve as the “objects of belief” or what is before the mind, or in the brain. Such invention is unnecessary because the entities we mention to help specify a state of mind do not have to play any psychological or epistemological role for the person in that state, just as numbers play no physical role” (SIO 60). According to Davidson neither intentional attitudes nor their contents should be taken seriously from an ontological point of view. To ascribe an intentional attitude to an agent is like ascribing a weight to her, and the sentence we use to keep track of the attitude (its “content”) is analogues to the number expressing how much she weights.


Actions consequently are not the causal effect of propositional attitudes. Still, action explanations are causal explanations because they are based on a highly sophisticated disposition of human language users that is characterized by an intertwined web of attitudes, each of which is measured at the truth conditions of the agent's language, which in turn is grounded in the agent's reactions to her immediate vicinity, that is, in a causal relationship that has shaped the agent. Actions are actualizations of this disposition of the agent. When actions are explained in this way, what we learn from the explanation is not what caused the action. Instead, we learn something about the agent, namely the special idiosyncratic shape of her disposition to behave rationally in the light of her propositional attitudes (EAE 274). Learning for example that she wants to illuminate the room adds a certain strain to her disposition that is not already entailed in her being rational and that other people do not necessarily share or expect. And saying that she is acting \emph{because} she wants to illuminate the room is to say that her behavior is an actualization of this disposition.

\section{Acknowledgements}


I would like to thank Jens Kulenkampff, Kirk Ludwig and Thomas Spitzley for numerous helpful suggestions and criticisms of earlier versions of the text.

% Note
\section{References}



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\end{amusebiblio}

\chapter{2. Practical Reason}


Agnes Callard


If Abe wants just one thing and sees that the only way to get it is by φ-ing, it is reasonable to suppose that he will, unless prevented, φ. This supposition is reasonable because people are reasonable – we do not act in just any which way, but rather, we act in order to achieve what we want. Indeed, one might draw a distinction between what can properly be called \emph{action}, and the innumerable other ways in which human bodies move or are moved. Movements such as spasms, seizures, sleepwalking, or ones resulting from physical coercion fail to count as actions precisely in virtue of not being, in the relevant respect, reasonable.


But in another sense it might have been completely \emph{unreasonable} of Abe to φ. It might have been unreasonable of him to want what he wanted, or to believe that φ-ing was the way to get it. We might grant that what Abe did was reasonable or rational \emph{in the light of} his desire and belief while leaving open the question of how rational the desire and belief themselves were. We should, therefore, distinguish two senses of the word “reasonable” or “rational”: the conditional or internal sense I described in my first paragraph, and the unconditional or external sense in which the beliefs and desires themselves are evaluated as rational. My topic is \emph{internal} rationality. The “theorist of practical reason,” for the purposes of this chapter, adopts Abe's point of view and tries to see what rationally follows from it, setting aside questions of the (unconditional) reasonableness of having that point of view in the first place. Consequently, I will also set aside both the question of what external or unconditional rationality consists in, and the question of the connection between the two senses of rationality. This last question is taken up, in different ways, in Williams (1980), Quinn (1995), Korsgaard (1997), and Kolodny (2005).

\section{1. Three Degrees of Complexity}


If all our points of view were as simple as Abe's, the theory of practical reason would not be much to trouble oneself over. The theory would look like this:


Figure 1:


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\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-6.jpg}
\end{figure}


This theory says that wherever you have a desire and a belief about what action will satisfy it, these will produce an action, and wherever you have an action, you will find it has been produced by two things in the agent, namely, a desire and a belief to the effect that this action satisfies the desire. The problem with the theory l am representing with Figure 1 is that it presupposes you only have \emph{one} belief and \emph{one} desire – or at any rate, only one belief and desire that fit together so as to potentially give rise to an action. If I have more than one belief–desire pair, this picture could have me performing conflicting actions at the same time, and that is something I cannot do.


What complicates the theory of practical reason is that we all want and believe many things. The agent must sort through or resolve this complexity to come out with a single action. The problem of complexity comes in three degrees of difficulty. The first is mere multiplicity of desire and belief, what I'll call overmotivation. The second is when that overmotivation occasions conflict between belief–desire pairs, so that at a given time, we are pulled in the direction of incompatible actions. And the third is when that conflict is resolved in favor of one action but the agent nonetheless performs the other action (weakness of will,\footnote{Assuming we allow that it is possible. \emph{Denial} of the phenomenon is one philosophical option that Davidson does not consider; it has a pedigree dating back to Plato's \emph{Protagoras}, but also seems a position of desperation. There certainly \emph{seems} to be weakness of will. For discussion of this point, see Watson (1977).} akrasia, acting against your better judgment). Each of these three stages is a species of the one prior to it; more precisely, each stage picks out the most problematic arena of its genus.


Unconflicted overmotivation is so unproblematic as to be able to be handled by the simple theory I sketched earlier. Overmotivation can be “unconflicted” for any number of reasons. I will single out a few to serve as a sketch of the territory. (1) Of two (or more) desires, only to one does there correspond a belief as to how it might be satisfied by immediate action: so, I desire X and believe that I can get it by φ-ing, and I desire Y, and do not have a belief as to how to get it. (2) Of two or more beliefs, only to one does there corresponds a desire. (3) There is one desire to which corresponds two beliefs, but one of the beliefs clearly “trumps” the other. For instance, if I desire X and believe that I will get it by φ–ing and I also believe that I will get it more easily, cheaply, nobly, and so on by ψ-ing, we can say that I \emph{effectively} have only one belief desire pair. (4) There are two desires, to each of which there corresponds a belief, but the one desire “trumps” the other. If I desire \$100 and I also desire \$200, the prospect of satisfying the latter desire will blot out the import of the former. The idea of “trumping” here should be understood more broadly than commensurability: it might be that the one desire is conditional on the other, or is so trivial as to be negligible in the presence of the other. (5) There are two desire–belief pairs that fortuitously converge on the same action. (6) Two belief–desire pairs converge on two actions that can, fortuitously, be performed at the same time.


In a case of unconflicted overmotivation, the agent cannot be described as “torn” between different actions. In (5) and (6), the agent has more than one belief–desire pair, but her action(s) can be fully explained by Figure 1, so long as we are prepared to deploy it (and in the case of (5), the action) twice over. In (1)–(4), multiple beliefs or multiple desires (if they are present) respectively fight it out among themselves for claim to the relevant slot, and the agent effectively has only one belief–desire pair. Though there is \emph{some} kind of “conflict” present in (3) and (4), it is not one which the kind of rationality that is our topic can adjudicate. If we ask, “Which of two beliefs or desires \emph{should rationally} ‘trump’ the other?”, this is a question of what I have called the external or unconditional rationality of our beliefs or desires themselves. One thing that is worth noting about (3) and (4) is that they reveal the conceptual independence of belief from desire. Cases in which one belief trumps another (or one desire outweighs another) show us what is wrong with a picture even simpler than Figure 1, in which an action is produced directly by a belief-infused desire to do that very thing.


But if \emph{more than one} belief–desire combination emerges as relevant to my situation, and if I am thereby pulled two different directions, we have a kind of conflict that cannot be handled by the view from Figure 1. What we seem to need is a psychic power or act that will adjudicate between the recommended actions to pick between them. On the Figure 1 view, the very combination of desire and belief produces an action, which rules out the possibility of bringing together the relevant beliefs and desires \emph{without} acting on them, as part of the process of figuring out which to act on. Hence, as part of introducing multiple belief–desire pairs into our story, we also introduce an element of judgment between the two steps of our simple picture:


Figure 2:


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-7.jpg}
\end{figure}


The judgment combines belief and desire into a thought that is \emph{not yet an action}.


But of course the point of this picture is not to depict the simple case where there is only one belief and desire – for that, the simple model worked just fine. We want to allow for \emph{multiple} belief–desire pairs, and so each will need its own judgment, and then those two judgments will be resolved into a single, \emph{better} judgment that then gives rise to one of the two actions.


Figure 3:


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-8.jpg}
\end{figure}


I have subscripted the action to indicate which desire it corresponds to. But I have left the question of the relation between the better judgment and judgment\textsubscript{1} and judgment\textsubscript{2} unanswered. Is the better judgment that produces action\textsubscript{1} identical to judgment\textsubscript{1}? That is to say, by “better judgment,” do we mean the better of the two judgments, judgment\textsubscript{1} and judgment\textsubscript{2}? Or is the better judgment yet a third judgment, which is better than judgment\textsubscript{1} (and, of course, also better than judgment\textsubscript{2})? I will take up this question in Section 2, but we can set it aside for now.


The important advance here is that beliefs and desires produce not actions but judgment. This is an advance because, while only rarely are two actions coperformable (as in the case of the fifth kind of overmotivation), almost all judgments are cojudgeable. If I judge p, and I judge q, I can judge “p and q.” Our new account of action says that beliefs and desires produce judgments, and judgment cause action – either in virtue of the fact that there is no other judgment (Fig. 2), or in virtue of combining to produce a single better judgment (Fig. 3). The cause of action is the singular practical judgment, and practical judgments are either singular because of lack of conflict (Fig. 2), or because conflict has been resolved (Fig. 3).


The addition of judgment to the story might have sufficed to explain psychic complexity, were it not for the fact of weakness of will. In weakness of will, we have something like this:


Figure 4:


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-9.jpg}
\end{figure}


This is psychical complexity at its most deeply entrenched. We have two desires (1 and 2) that are fully active and motivational (in the sense of having beliefs to combine with) and are fully present all the way through the action. We might say that what is characteristic of the nonakratic conflict depicted in Figure 3 is that one of the two desires does not “last” – that once we get to the point of the better judgment in favor of action 1, desire 2 becomes as practically irrelevant as a desire that does not have a belief to combine with. (As in my first kind of overmotivation; see earlier this section) But in weakness of will (incontinence), these supposedly “dead” desires come to life, and move us to act. And yet the other desire is still active as well, in producing our judgment about what to do. Weakness of will forces upon us the most difficult form of the problem: How is it possible to want to do more than one thing?


The difficulty facing the theorist of practical reason is to explain how \emph{anything} we do can be reasonable in the light of our point of view when that point of view is itself plural. The problem of accounting for weakness of will is at the heart of the theory of practical reason, since it offers up for our examination the deepest kind of disunity in a point of view – it is the most “lasting” form of conflictedness.

\section{2. The Partitioned Model}


You may have been thinking for a while that it is simplistic to lump together all “desires” into one single family. There are obvious difference between \emph{kinds} of desire that are important to the understanding of what it is like to be conflicted. Most philosophers have thought likewise – the standard way to understand conflictedness is to invoke some system for speciation of desire. And desires do seem to fall into types. There are appetitive desires, desires of the body, which can in turn be classified into desires for food, drink, sex, and so on. There are desires that are inherently social, dependent on caring about what others think: desires to avoid shame, to do what is moral or honorable, to have power or fame or renown, to maintain one's pride or self-respect, and desire for privacy. Then there are outliers, desires that seem to fall into their own category or are hard classify: desires to be moral or act morally, desire for wealth or prudence, and the desire for knowledge.


Perhaps desires that cause conflict always differ in species: the one desire pulls me in one direction, the other in another. The conflict be motivationally “lasting” because it itself represents a basic way in which we are divided up. The speciation of desire is the contemporary name for the partitioning of the soul. I will call any model of practical reason that tries to understand akratic conflict by speaking of kinds of desire a “partitioning model” and the person who advance such a view a “partition theorist.”


The theory of practical reason Donald Davidson (1970) offers in his paper, “How is Weakness of the Will Possible,” is distinctive in that it attempts to account for conflict \emph{without} partitioning. It is, for this reason, instructive to begin by looking at the partitioned theory to which his theory must be contrasted: how does a divided-soul picture of practical reason seek to accommodate conflict and weakness of will?


There are two general ways to partition the soul: morally or psychologically. The moralistic partitionist is committed to there being exactly two partitions, namely one for moral and one for nonmoral desire. The psychologistic partitionist can partition in any number of ways, and into any number of partitions, depending on the psychological theory to which he ascribes. He might, for instance, group together hunger and sex as “bodily desires” or he might think that sexual desire deserves its own category and needs to be grouped together with artistic desire and ambition. I will try whenever possible to discuss partitionism in abstraction from this difference, since it is unimportant to the contrast with Davidson. I will take as my example a conflict between hunger and reluctance to take the food of another, because such an example could be a case for either view.\footnote{As a bibliographical note, Davidson's (1970) paper itself focuses on the moral partitionism of Aristotle, Aquinas, Mill, and so on specifically (see esp. pp. 29–37), whereas psychological partitionism, as a theory of practical reason, came into existence as a response to Davidson's paper. The most extensive development of psychological partitionism is to be found in Mele (1987).}


The shared starting point between Davidson and the partition theorist is the abandonment of Figure 1. All parties agree that desire conflict forces us to bring judgment into our picture of practical reason.


So let us return to Figure 2:


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-7.jpg}
\end{figure}


A question we failed to ask is, how do the belief and desire produce a judgment? Recall that our interest here is in how your point of view can \emph{reasonably} lead to action. The reasonable production of a judgment is just the drawing of a conclusion – which means that in order to understand Figure 2, we need to show how belief and the desire could be premises from which a judgment might be drawn as a conclusion.


We can represent the desire as the major premise of the syllogism (Ma) and the belief as its minor premise (Mi) and the judgment as the conclusion (C). Take a case of hunger for our first such syllogism:


Syllogism 1:


Ma 1 If something is food, I ought to eat it.


Mi 1 This is food.


C1 I ought to eat this.


Syllogism 1 is a natural way of understanding what it means for hunger and the perception of some food to come together to produce a judgment that might, in turn produce an action. But as soon as we move to the conflict case, the problem with syllogism 1 becomes apparent. Suppose that the agent knows that “this food” belongs to another, and that he has moral scruples. He is conflicted, and so we will need to add another syllogism.


Syllogism 2:


Ma 2 If something belongs to another, I ought not eat it.


Mi 2 This food belongs to another.


C2 I ought not eat this.


But no one can simultaneously conclude C1 and C2, because they form a contradiction!


We can now revisit the problem hidden in our Figure 3:


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-10.jpg}
\end{figure}


As we noted earlier, the reason for abandoning Figure 1 and introducing judgment is the possibility of \emph{combining} in thought what cannot be combined in deed. But it looks as though judgment\textsubscript{1} and judgment\textsubscript{2} constitute precisely the one kind of judgment pair that cannot be combined even in thought.


The divide between appetite and morality seems to provide a way of rewriting our syllogisms to produce judgments that are noncontradictory. We might suppose that the difference between appetite and moral desire infects the ought judgment it produces: if something is sweet, I \emph{appetitively ought} to eat it; if something is yours, I \emph{morally ought} to not eat it. If we substitute “appetitively ought” for “ought” in syllogism 1, and “morally ought” for “ought” in syllogism 2, we eliminate the contradiction. There is no problem with believing both that I appetitively ought to eat this, and that I morally ought not eat it. It is at this point that we see how the speciation of desire has become integrated into the theory of practical reason, for it is the difference between kinds of desire that colors the ought-judgments and thereby insulates them from one another.


So judgment\textsubscript{1} and judgment\textsubscript{2}, instead of contradicting one another, are like ships passing in the night. This raises a new problem: how do we move forward from there? How can the judgment that I appetitively ought to do this, and that I morally ought not, come together to produce anything further?


Given that they pull me toward different actions, they only way for them to come together to produce an action is for the one to supersede or win out over the other. Both of them are sources of action (this is clear from Fig. 2 – in the absence of the other, either could cause action) – but one of the two is more of a source of action than the other. We need to find a way to make the two judgments comparable – we need, in some way, for one to be greater or stronger or better than the other.


But it seems that there are two ways in which a judgment could have “strength.” One is as a judgment and the other is as a motive. By strength as a judgment, I mean something like rational superiority, being the better of the two judgments. Spelling out what it means for a judgment to be better than another will be a task for the partition theorist – and at this point the difference between moral and psychological partitionism cannot be overlooked. The former simply identifies the agent's better judgment with the judgment produced by the moral desire – for the moralist, rational and moral superiority are one. The psychological partitionist will have to say that the superiority of a judgment is simply rational, stemming from its status as a higher order evaluation. Reason is an impartial observer, and does not preemptively take the side of one kind of desire over the other. Thus, for the moralistic partitionist, the better judgment will simply be identical to whichever of judgment\textsubscript{1} and judgment\textsubscript{2} corresponds to the moral judgment; for the psychologistic partitionist, it is not identical to either judgment, but is a third judgment occurring at a higher level of abstraction.


Both kinds of partitionist will agree on what motivational strength is: whichever judgment does in fact lead to the action is motivationally stronger. One might have been tempted to \emph{equate} motivational strength with strength as a judgment (what is usually called, “evaluative strength”) were it not for weakness of will. We can now see how partitionism offers a way of understanding our confusing Figure 4. Judgment\textsubscript{1} and judgment\textsubscript{2} can jointly produce a better judgment, and, independently, judgment\textsubscript{2} can motivationally produce an action. We might depict this by representing the evaluative element using dotted arrows and the motivational one using a dashed one:


Figure 4:


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-11.jpg}
\end{figure}


We should note that the moralist in fact offers us the possibility of a simplified version of this picture, so long as we specify ahead of time which of the two desires is the moral one:


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-12.jpg}
\end{figure}


This simplification is possible because the moral partitionist has to partition only once, into moral versus, nonmoral motivation, whereas the psychological paritionist must partition twice – once into species of desire (desire\textsubscript{1} vs. desire\textsubscript{2}), and then into evaluative versus motivational production.


Either way, partitionism takes the lesson of weakness of will to be that no theory of practical reason can do without the distinction between evaluative and motivational strength.

\section{3. Davidson's View}


Donald Davidson demurs. Where the moralistic partitioner makes one distinction (between moral and nonmoral desires) and the psychologistic partitioner makes two (between species of desire and between evaluative vs. motivational strength), Davidson makes none.


Davidson (1963: 3) holds that all desires can be assimilated as “pro-attitudes” of some kind or another. When we desire something, that thing is appealing to us, and it is the fact that that thing is appealing, rather than the fact that it appeals to us on moral or prudential or appetitive grounds, that is important in understanding the structure that makes action intelligible. He likewise eliminates the distinction between a judgment, such as C1 and C2, and an action.\footnote{This is, at any rate, the position of 1963 paper “Actions, Reasons and Causes,” in which “intention” is not an entity or state. The function of the word, he claims, is rather to “generate descriptions of actions in terms of their reasons” (Davidson (1963), p.8). In “Intending” (Davidson 1978), he changes his mind on this point in order to allow for the phenomenon of intending without acting, “pure intending.” The issue does not come up in Davidson (1970), and in any case (as is clear from Davidson (1978) and his return to the topic of weakness of will in Davidson (1982)) Davidson does not want to exploit the gap he opens up between intention and action to explain cases of conflictedness. For this reason I set the issue aside as tangential to our topic.} Intentionally φ-ing is not distinct from thinking, “I ought to φ.” Motivation just is evaluation. He does not think that we need to differentiate flavors of ought-judgment, or between lower and higher-order ought judgments, or between ought judgments that originate from moral sources and those that do not.


For Davidson, both desire and motivation must be understood to have a basic unity. Or rather, they must be understood that way for the purposes of a theory of practical reason.


Davidson does not deny that one can distinguish between moral and prudential and appetitive and perhaps many other kinds of desires; as well as between the various “flavors” of motivation – but he holds that such distinctions are the province of psychology and not important for the theory of practical reason.


We ought at this point be puzzled. If moral desires and prudential desires do not produce different “flavors” of ought-judgments, how is it that they do not produce \emph{contradictory} ought judgments? And worse yet, since the ought-judgments correspond to actions, how is it that the agent is not left doing two contradictory things?


Recall our syllogism 1:


Ma 1 If something is food, I ought to eat it.


Mi 1 This is food.


C1 I ought to eat this.


This bit of reasoning culminates in the judgment, “This ought to be eaten.” This is a feature of syllogizing quite generally – we draw conclusions by \emph{detaching} the last line from the premises as an independent thought. So the person who syllogizes in the way I have just described, cannot also at the same time syllogize in the manner of our syllogism 2:


Ma 2 If something belongs to another, I ought not eat it.


Mi 2 This food belongs to another.


C2 I ought not eat this.


The reason these two syllogisms are incompatible is that someone cannot believe, at one and the same time, that this ought to be eaten and this ought not to be eaten. C1 and C2 form a contradiction, and no one can hold a contradiction. The desire speciation view solved this problem by substituting “appetitively ought” for “ought” in Ma 1 and C1, and “morally ought” for “ought” in Ma 2 and C2. But Davidson rejects this move, and suggests a more radical solution.


Consider this hypothetical claim, a relative of our first syllogism:



\begin{quote}


Hypothetical 1 (H1): If this is food, I ought to eat this. (If Mi 1, then C1).



\end{quote}


Certainly someone could believe H1, and also at the same time believe that



\begin{quote}


Hypothetical 2 (H2): If this belongs to others, then I should not eat this (If Mi 2, then C2).



\end{quote}


Why is it that H1 and H2 are compatible but C1 and C2 are not? The answer is that, although C1 and C2 appear inside of H1 and H2, they do not appear detached from the larger context. If we \emph{paired} H1 with Mi 1, and H2 with Mi 2, then we once again have a contradiction, because the detachment of C1 from the former, and C2 from the latter, would be entailed. But from H1 and H2 themselves, no contradiction follows.


Suppose there were connectives like “If \dots{} then,” but which did not rationally entail detachment of the consequent \emph{even when the antecedent was satisfied}. Davidson follows Hempel in claiming that probabilistic “If \dots{} then's” are such connectives.


Consider:



\begin{quote}


Hypothetical 3 (H3): If it is snowing, it is probably winter.


Hypothetical 4 (H4): If it is August, it is probably not winter.



\end{quote}


And now suppose there is a time at which it is true that:



\begin{quote}


Mi 3: It is snowing.


Mi 4: It is August.



\end{quote}


We need not conclude either:



\begin{quote}


C3: It is probably winter.



\end{quote}


or



\begin{quote}


C4: It is probably not winter.



\end{quote}


Here, it looks as though we can hold all of H3, Mi 3, H4 and Mi 4 without a contradiction. We can say something like, given that it's snowing, it's probably winter, but given that it is August, it is probably not winter. Or: the snow makes it probable that it is winter, but the fact that it is August makes it probable that it is not. Which is it? Is it more probably winter, or more probably not winter? We do not know. We need not draw any conclusions shorn of “given that's” from probabilistic evidence. We might, for instance, be waiting to hear more about what part of the world we are in.


Davidson thought the same was true for practical judgments.


So, what follows from Ma 1 and Mi 1 is not C1 but rather:



\begin{quote}


CEJ 1 (Conditional Evaluative Judgment): Given that (if something is food, I ought to eat it and that this is food), I ought to eat this.



\end{quote}


We can paraphrase CEJ 1 as follows: The fact that food should be eaten and this is food rationalizes my eating of this.


CEJ 1 is compatible with the conditionally evaluative judgment that is the conclusion from Ma 2 and Mi 2, namely:



\begin{quote}


CEJ 2: Given that (I should not eat what is yours, and this is yours), I ought to eat this.



\end{quote}


CEJ 1 is not as committal as C1 – for CEJ 1 does not say that this food ought to be eaten, or that it is rational for me to eat it. CEJ 1 must, indeed, be compatible with its \emph{not} being rational for me to eat this food, with it being the case that I ought \emph{not} eat it. But CEJ 1 is more committal than H1 – for it takes into account the truth of Mi 1. CEJ 1 supposes, as given, a fact that H1 treats only as a hypothesis, namely, that this is food.


Let us grant Davidson that CEJ 1 is all that is entailed by Ma 1 and Mi 1. We have, then, solved the problem of how we can have conflicting desires. But the solution to the contradiction problem raises the same question here as it did in the case of the partition view (Section 2): how do we move forward from the position of having formed our two conditional evaluative judgments, CEJ 1 and CEJ 2? Davidson (1970) describes reasoning that stops at something like CEJ 1 as “practical only in its subject, not in its issue” (p. 39). This is because for Davidson, it is only unconditional evaluative judgment – a judgment such as C1 or C2 – that count as practical. For it is the unconditional judgment that indicates the presence of the corresponding action. But that deepens the puzzle: if beliefs and desires only get me to conditional evaluative judgment, and if actions involve unconditional judgments, how is action possible?


Here is a picture of our question:


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-13.jpg}
\end{figure}


Davidson's answer is that there is nothing there where I have the question marks. Our picture should look like this:


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-14.jpg}
\end{figure}


C1 does not \emph{follow} from CEJ 1, but that is not to say that CEJ 1 cannot produce C1. It is only prevented from doing so if C2 has already been drawn as a conclusion, in which case the agent would already be performing action\textsubscript{2}. All that is required for the performance of action\textsubscript{1} is the presence of CEJ 1. This is another way of saying: we cannot act without reasons. An agent who forms a conditional evaluative judgment that she ought to eat that, given that it is food, is in a position to act. She will do so by forming the unconditional judgment that she ought to eat that. Davidson's claim is that action is produced by way of the detachment of the consequent of a CEJ. We might call this, the “act-by-detaching” principle.


In standard (nonpractical, nonprobablistic) thinking, someone who reasons from the fact that if p then q and the fact that p \emph{ought} to conclude that q. He is rationally required to detach the consequent. Someone who forms a CEJ \emph{can} but \emph{need not} detach the consequent. Davidson's account of practical reasoning offers a new conception of what it is for reasoning to be practical by offering, at a more general level, a new conception of what it is for thinking to be reasoning. Reasoning is the legitimate movement of thought from a given starting point to an ending point. A species of reasoning is \emph{syllogizing}, which we might define as the \emph{forced} movement of thought from a starting point to an ending point. In calling reasoning “forced,” I allude to Aristotle's definition of the syllogism: “a deduction (syllogismos) is an argument (logos) in which, some things having been posited, something different from them results by necessity from their being so” (Aristotle 1964: \emph{Prior Analytics} 24b20). In practical as in probabilistic reasoning, the relevant endpoint (the action, the belief as to whether it is winter) is not \emph{necessitated} by the premises; hence they are nonsyllogistic forms of reasoning. Two people, engaging in probabilistic or practical reasoning from the same premises, can reason their way to different conclusions.


Is this not possible in standard theoretical reasoning? Consider these three propositions:


\textbf{(1)} If p, then either q or r


(2) \textbf{p}


(3) \textbf{r}


Could not someone reason (mistakenly) from (1) and (2) to (3)? We say that just insofar as he does so he is not engaging in reasoning but failing to; we might describe him as “jumping” to a conclusion – to contrast that act with \emph{reasoning} one's way to a conclusion. Whereas in the practical\Slash{}probabilistic case, both conclusions are, equally, reasoned to.


This is not to say that practical or probabalistic reasoners can conclude however they like. One is not allowed, in probabilistic reasoning, to draw conclusions on no evidence, nor, in practical reasoning, to do something for no reason (i.e., without the relevant CEJ). The unconditional conclusion depends on its conditional premises.


This account of practical reason does not have trouble allowing for cases of conflictedness, or any of the various actions that might arise from such conflict. In fact, so little is ruled out that \emph{that} might seem to be the problem with the account. Once again, the phenomenon of weakness of will points us to the trouble spot. It looks as though the agent who is conflicted can, consistently with the structure of practical reason, safely go the way of \emph{any} of her CEJ's. Why do we sometimes say that the way that she went was a mistake, or weak-willed, or irrational?


The answer is that not all CEJs are created equal. There is a particular CEJ in which any conflicted agent will take an interest, namely, the one taking into account \emph{all} her pro-attitudes and beliefs, taken together. So, first let us suppose that we have identified that total set of attitudes that comprises all the things that the agent has to take into account in deciding what to do. This set will include Ma 1, Ma 2, Mi 1, and Mi 2, and any other considerations she deems relevant – such as, perhaps, the fact that she thinks being moral is more important than pursuing pleasure.


The question she must then ask herself is: given all these considerations, what ought I do? Davidson labels the judgment that is the answer to this question the agent's “all-things-considered judgment.” It boasts superiority to the agent's other CEJs in the relative completeness of the set of things it takes into account, but it is nonetheless still conditional – every all things considered judgment is itself a CEJ. And so it might appear as though we have made no progress, since we have not arrived at anything like C1 or C2, and that is what action is a matter of. C2 no more follows from the judgment that all things considered, I ought not eat this, than it follows from CEJ 2. For all things considered judgment, is like CEJ 2, a conditional evaluative judgment with C2 as its (undetached) consequent.


It is at this point that Davidson invokes a principle that “the rational man will accept in applying practical reasoning,” namely, “perform the action judged best of all available relevant reasons.” This “principle of continence” tells the agent to detach the consequent from his all-things-considered judgment. It instructs him to reason from (given all things, C) to, simply, (C). The principle of continence specifies the \emph{best} road from conflictedness to action. But it does not specify \emph{the only possible road}. One could, despite judging that (given all things, C2), fail to conclude C2 and instead, on the basis of CEJ 1, incontinently conclude C1. Concluding C2 is what one \emph{ought} to do; it is what the maximally rational, that is, continent, person will do, but it is possible to be rational enough to act without being rational enough to be continent.


Davidson must hold that the principle of continence is a rational principle that is not itself definitional of practical reasoning. We might contrast it with the principle I mentioned earlier, the “act-by-detaching” principle. One simply \emph{cannot} act without a reason, that is to say, without having formed the relevant CEJ. One \emph{can} but \emph{shouldn't} act against one's all things considered judgment. Compare: it is \emph{definitional} of playing soccer that one plays a sport as a member of one of two teams, runs around on some kind of field with the goal of getting the ball into the other teams goal while preventing them from doing the same. Whoever is not following these definitional rules is not playing soccer. But there are other non-definitional rules for playing soccer such as: stay within the boundary lines drawn, do not touch the ball with your hands unless you are the goalkeeper, do not charge\Slash{}strike\Slash{}push an opposing player, etc. These are rules which the violation of which does not imply that the violator is not playing soccer. The indication of this is that they incur penalties, such as a penalty kick. The opposing teams allotment of a free kick is only a punishment to someone who is playing the game. If someone cuts across a field on her way home, interrupting a soccer game that happens to be in play she does not “violate” the rules of the game. There would be no way to “penalize” her within the game of soccer. Definitional rules are non-violable: one cannot break or violate them because it is only to the extent that one is following them that one is engaging in the activity in question. The principle of continence is violable; the act-by-detaching rule is definitional.


Here is how Davidsonian practical reason depicts weakness of will:


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-15.jpg}
\end{figure}


I use a bulb-ended arrow to mark the place where the akratic agent violates Davidson's principle of continence. Here, the Davidsonian picture of the nonweak willed (“continent”) action:


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-16.jpg}
\end{figure}


The weak-willed agent follows \emph{one} rule of rationality, namely, the rule that action must come from detachment of the consequent of a CEJ; the continent agent follows \emph{two} rules of rationality, namely the action-by-detachment rule and the rule not to act against his all things considered judgment.


It might seem as though the only way for a theory of practical reason to allow for desire conflict generally, or weakness of will, specifically, is to introduce species of desire, and thereby to differentiate the way in which different classes of desire act on us. Davidson avoids this route – instead, he introduces speciation into rationality itself. There are, for him, \emph{two kinds of rules} of practical reason, the kind that can be broken and the kind that cannot. The first rule marks out the space of possible actions, which is also the realm of desire conflict. The second rule picks out from that space the action, the nonperformance of which counts as weakness of will.


At the outset of our discussion, we set aside a sense of the word “reasonable” in which a belief or desire itself might be externally “reasonable” or “unreasonable.” As theorists of practical reason, our interest is the sense of “reasonable” in which an action is reasonable in the light of an agent's point of view, irrespective of whether it is reasonable for the agent to \emph{have} that point of view. But Davidson thinks we need to make \emph{another} distinction within the sense of “reasonable” that is our proper topic, what I have called internal reasonableness. He thinks that an action can be \emph{fully} internally reasonable by satisfying the principle of continence \emph{and} the action by detachment principle, or satisfy only the latter principle, and thus be only \emph{partly} internally reasonable.


Davidson's view raises the question of whether a violable rule can be \emph{exceptionless}: can there be cases in which one is called upon by the very standards of success at the activity in question to break its (violable) rules? This seems to be the way it goes with soccer. Nothing rules out in principle that there be an occasion in which the benefits to be gained by a rule-violation outweigh its associated penalties. Such occasions would have to be rare, since the distinction between definitional and nondefinitional rules collapses when we consider \emph{large scale} violation. If everyone were touching the ball with their hands and hitting one another, it would not be a game of soccer. But, given that the game of soccer survives the \emph{occasional} rule-violation, it looks to be possible that there could be a situation in which someone would be called upon to break a rule. Although perhaps not: perhaps excellence in soccer is not a matter simply of doing what it takes to win the game, but of winning by conforming to (all) the rules?


I leave open the general question of whether violable rules can admit exceptions, since detailed discussion of it would take us far afield, but I want to briefly look at what would follow if the principle of continence had exceptions. What would follow is that weakness of will would not always be irrational. And this, I suggest, might not be an unwelcome result. Jonathan Bennett (1974) put under the spotlight a form of weakness of will in which the weak action is the right one. Huck Finn, judging that he has a duty to return runaway slave Jim to his owner, cannot bring himself to do it. He acts against his better judgment, but he acts well. Indeed, one might, under the influence of philosophers who have developed Bennett's arguments in this direction (Arpaly 2000; Jones 2003; McIntyre 1990), even conclude that he acts \emph{rationally}. Because perhaps we want to allow that his gut instinct is more rational than that judgment that bears the imprint of a racist education. It is a special feature of Davidson's account of practical reason that it demotes the principle of continence to secondary rational status; this feature might be exploited by those who want to insist on the possibility of \emph{rational} cases of weakness of will.

\section{4. Final Thoughts: Why Not Partition?}


Davidson takes it for granted that if he can come up with a theory of practical reason that allows for “desire” and “motivation” to be used unambiguously, that is itself a strike against partitioning. But there is at least one obvious independent disadvantage of a partitioned view: it cannot allow for conflict \emph{within} any given species of desire.


In the case of the moralistic partitionist, I focus on intramoral conflict, since he might be thought to have a point in denying intra-appetitive conflict. (It is not clear that being, e.g., both hungry and cold \emph{is} really anything more than overmotivation of the fourth type.) As Davidson points out, moral conflict seems to be a fact of life: “The situation is common; life is crowded with examples: I ought to do it because it will save a life, I ought not because it will be a lie” (Davidson 1970: 34). The question of whether one moral principle can really conflict with one another is of course a topic in ethics. The utilitarian, for instance, will deny the possibility of a conflict between principles, since he thinks there is only one principle (do whatever maximizes happiness). But even the firmest defender of a univocal morality would have to allow that moral principles can \emph{seem} to conflict. The moral partitionist must, therefore, say that one of the two “feelings” only \emph{appears} to come from moral desire. And we have reason to resist both such a rewriting of our experience, and a theory of practical reason that generates substantive ethical commitments of this kind.


The psychological partitionist has a corresponding problem not with morality, but with conflict within whatever partitions he creates. But he also has a way out: he can create partitions in \emph{response} to his conflict. He can, for instance, divide moral desire into potentially conflicting regions of morality (desire not to lie, desire to save lives). The problem is that it looks as though \emph{no} partitioning will be safe from the discovery of a further conflict. The desire-to-save-lives itself gets “torn apart” when I need to decide \emph{whose} life to save. And the desire-to-save-Bill's-life needs to get further subdivided when I face the choice between saving his life painlessly but riskily, or painfully but safely. And so on. The only way to ensure that the desire is not subject to further conflict is to bottom out in particular instances of desiring. But then we lose the generality that says this very desire could have combined with some other belief (or no belief at all) to produce a different (or no) action. Indeed, we lose the distinction between belief and desire, and with it, the very category (desire) within which the partitioning in question was supposed to be taking place.


Davidson's diagnosis of the failure of moral and psychological partitioners is that they bring in some external fact – be it morality or psychology – to solve what is a problem within practical reason. He makes no such distinction between kinds of desire, and therefore is not pressured to place any restriction on which desires can conflict with one another. But his solution does involve distinguishing, at a later stage of the process of practical reason, between forms or kinds of rationality. One might think that in a certain sense Davidson is also partitioning the mind – and he in fact acknowledges this feature of his view in his later paper, “Paradoxes of Irrationality.” (Davidson 1982: esp. 180ff.)


In that paper, he divides the mind not into kinds of desire, but into sets of reasons. One partition corresponds to a set of beliefs and desires (reasons) that, taken together, satisfy the continence principle: “to constitute a structure of the relevant sort, a part of the mind must show a larger degree of consistency or rationality than is attributed to the whole” (Davidson 1982: 180). Globally, the mind must follow the basic principle of practical rationality, the act-by-detaching principle. But locally, each partition is also required to follow the principle of continence. So, in the case of someone who akratically φ-es, we would have one partition containing the unconditional judgment (the conclusion, C) and the CEJ from which it is detached, and another partition for the agent's all-things-considered judgment. Davidsonian partitioning is “flexible” in a number of respects: the partitions will vary from person to person, change over time, can overlap one another, and Davidson does not have anything to say about how many there are, or whether there need be any of them at all. Nonetheless, it is a form of partitioning, creating “spheres” of rationality that can operate with some independence from one another.


Davidson's contribution to the theory of practical reason should, therefore, not be understood as opposition to partitioning of the mind, but opposition to the invocation of psychological or moral distinctions into the theory of practical rationality. What is distinctive about his account of practical reason is that he understands it as autonomous, functioning according to rules it does not borrow from without.

% Notes
\section{References}



\begin{amusebiblio}


Aristotle. (1964). \emph{Analytica Priora et Posteriora}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Arpaly, N. (2000). On acting rationally against one's best judgment. \emph{Ethics} 110:488–513.


Bennett, J. (1974). The conscience of Huckleberry Finn. \emph{Philosophy (London, England)} 49:123–134.


Davidson, D. (1963). Actions, reasons and causes. In Davidson (1980), pp. 3–19.


———. (1970). How is weakness of the will possible? In Davidson (1980), pp. 21–42.


———. (1978). Intending. In \emph{Actions and Events}. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1980), pp. 83–102.


———. (1980). \emph{Actions and Events}. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


———. (1982). Paradoxes of irrationality. In \emph{Philosophical Essays on Freud}, R. Wollheim and J. Hopkins (eds). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.


Jones, K. (2003). Emotion, weakness of will and the normative conception of agency. In \emph{Philosophy and the Emotions}, A. Hatzimoysis (ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.


\emph{Kolodny, N. (2005). Why be rational?} Mind; A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy \emph{114:455.}


Korsgaard, C. (1997). The normativity of instrumental reason. In \emph{Ethics and Practical Reason}, G. Cullity and B. Gaut (eds). Oxford: Clarendon Press.


McIntyre, A. (1990). Is akratic action always irrational? In \emph{Identity, Character, and Morality}, O. Flanagan and A. Rorty (eds). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 379–400.


Mele, A. (1987). \emph{Irrationality}. New York: Oxford University Press.


Quinn, W. (1995). Putting rationality in its place. In \emph{Virtue and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory: Essays in Honor of Philippa Foot}, R. Hursthouse, G. Lawrence, and W. Quinn (eds). Oxford: Clarendon Press.


Watson, G. (1977). Skepticism about weakness of will. \emph{Philosophical Review} 86:316–339.


Williams, B. (1980). Internal and external reasons. In \emph{Moral Luck: Philosophical Papers 1973–1980}. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press (1981), pp. 101–113.



\end{amusebiblio}

\chapter{3. Action Individuation}


Hugh J. McCann


One of Davidson's seminal contributions to action theory is his account of how actions are individuated. Like all seminal accounts, it was much debated, rejected by some, and accepted by others only with modification. But it remains one of the places where treatments of act individuation must begin. In what follows, I shall first describe the origins of the theory, then outline the theory itself. After that comes a description of the most radical alternative to Davidson's view, and then a treatment of two general objections to event ontologies, and how they might be answered. Finally, a few further objections are considered, and a compromise position that is essentially Davidsonian in spirit is developed. I argue that the compromise account escapes the objections to Davidson's own view, and that objections that might in turn be raised against the compromise are unconvincing.

\section{1. Modifiers and Multiple Things Done}


Davidson's interest in the individuation of action seems to have been prompted by two major issues. The first has to do with the logic of predicate modification. Consider the following statement:


\textbf{(a)} Booth shot Lincoln stealthily with a derringer in Ford's Theater on April 14.\footnote{cf. Davidson's examples in “The Logical Form of Actions Sentences,” in Davidson (2001). Page references in the text are to this source.}


From this, we may infer that Booth shot Lincoln, that he shot Lincoln stealthily, that he shot Lincoln with a derringer, that he shot Lincoln in Ford's Theater with a derringer, that he shot Lincoln with a derringer on April 14, and so forth. That is, we may infer from our original statement a number of others, in which we may freely drop or rearrange the various predicate modifiers in the original. The problem, however, is that in the form in which (a) is stated, none of these inferences appears to be a matter of standard predicate logic. Davidson's solution is to postulate an underlying logical form for (a) that is rendered explicit by:


\textbf{(b)} (E\emph{x}) (Shot (Booth, Lincoln, \emph{x}) and Stealthily \emph{x and} With (a derringer, \emph{x}) and In (Ford's Theater, \emph{x}) and On (April 14, \emph{x})).


That is, the solution is to quantify over what Booth did, over Booth's action. The verb “shot” is then treated as a predicate of the action, as is each of the predicate modifiers. If, as I shall assume, an action counts as a kind of event,\footnote{Not everyone would accept this assumption; see, for example, Bach (1980).} (b) can be restated as:


\textbf{(c)} There is an event \emph{x} such that \emph{x} is a shooting by Booth of Lincoln, and \emph{x} was stealthy, and \emph{x} was done with a derringer, and \emph{x} occurred in Ford's Theater, and \emph{x} occurred on April 14,


where the verb is transformed into the gerund “shooting,” and the original modifiers are attached to it as predicates. If we adopt a similar regimentation for the various statements that may be inferred from (a), it can be seen that they now follow by rules of standard logic – in effect by the principle that any conjunction entails any combination of its conjuncts.


Crucial to Davidson's view of action individuation is a thesis he takes to be implicit in (a), and which is made more explicit in (b) and (c) – namely, that in the moment when he shot Lincoln, Booth performed what was at bottom a single action. The episode in Ford's Theater need not be taken this way, for the different conclusions that may be inferred from (a) about “what Booth did” speak of things that are different at least to this extent: that one can shoot a person in Ford's Theater without using a derringer; that one can shoot a person with a derringer but not on April 14, and so forth. There is, then, a multiplicity of descriptions available to us of things done by Booth that tragic evening, and this could be taken to imply that Booth performed a multiplicity of actions. Davidson is committed to the opposite view (109). And in fact, the commitment appears to extend beyond anything that, on the surface at least, counts obviously as a matter of logical form.


That this is so is evident in the second major concern that motivates Davidson's approach to individuation: what Joel Feinberg (1965: 146) had called the accordion effect. There is a lot more to be said about what Booth did in Ford's Theater. He moved his finger; by doing that, he pulled the trigger, and by doing that fired the derringer. By firing the derringer he shot Lincoln, and by doing that he killed Lincoln. And we could add that by doing all of this, he plunged the nation into mourning, and prompted a harsh reaction against the states that had formed the Confederacy. The differences among these descriptions are not a matter of adverbial modification. Unlike the many things that may be said about the shooting taken by itself, the main verbs in each of these descriptions are different, and none of the descriptions entails any of the others. Yet all are things that Booth did, and it seems fair to say that as in the case of adverbial modification, all were accomplished by Booth in just one episode of action, one exercise of agency. Accordingly, following a precedent that had been set by Anscombe (1957: 45–46), Davidson treats accordion effect cases too as instances, where but a single action is performed (4, 53). As he sees matters, we must say that Booth did just one thing, although that thing may be described in a multitude of different ways.\footnote{In later writing, Davidson suggests that action sentences could be treated as involving two sorts of quantifiers over events, one for the agent's primitive action, and the other for causal consequences of the action. In principle, this would allow for treatment of the \emph{by}-relation as a matter of logical form. See Ludwig (2010).}

\section{2. Primitive Actions}


It is not, however, a matter of complete indifference how we choose to describe what Booth did. The term “by” introduces an order among the descriptions of Booth's behavior, and in the example as given that order begins with Booth's moving his finger on the trigger of the derringer. Booth's act of moving his finger is for Davidson the basic, or as he would say “primitive,” action performed by Booth on this occasion. Roughly characterized, it is the action \emph{by} performing which Booth did all of the other things he did on April 14 (Stoutland 1968: 467). In treating overt actions like the finger movement as basic, Davidson was adhering to a view that was almost universal among analytic philosophers of the time, but was in fact a departure from what had gone before. Previous philosophers had held that overt movements originated in mental acts of willing or volition on the part of the agent, which were themselves intrinsically voluntary or actional, and from which all that the agent accomplished by means of these took the name of action. In the heyday of logical behaviorism, such claims were anathema. Any view that spoke of interior acts, even if it spoke only of actions of muscular movement or exertion, was to be eschewed. Sequences of overt action had to stop at the borders of the agent's body – that is, with movements such as moving a finger or raising an arm, that were held to be basic.\footnote{It is worth mentioning here that Davidson does allow for the existence of mental actions such as deciding and computing. He insists, however, that, “. . .in such ordinary actions as pointing one's finger and tying one's shoelaces the primitive action is a bodily movement” (49).}


One consequence of treating bodily movements as basic is that there can be no ontological distinction between the action of performing a movement and the observable motion of the body that is involved. In itself, an agent's action of raising an arm is nothing other than the upward motion of the arm (124); and there is no numerical difference between Booth's moving his finger on the trigger and the motion of the finger on the trigger. It is worth noting that this is out of keeping with ordinary discourse about action. Asked what Booth did with his body in the Presidential Box at Ford's Theater, we do not respond, “the motion of his finger” or, “He did the motion of his finger.” We say, “He moved his finger” or “He brought about the motion of his finger,” and similarly for the case of arm raising.\footnote{This difference is easy to gloss over (and thus to ignore) by speaking simply of “bodily movements” or “mere movements of the body” (59).} But if there can be no ontological distinction between bringing about the motion and the motion itself a problem occurs. It is possible for someone's finger to move not because he moves it but as a result of a muscle spasm; and it is possible for my arm to go up not because I raise it but because you do, by taking hold of it and lifting. What then is the difference between Booth's finger moving and his moving it, between any motion occurring and the agent bringing it about? Davidson's answer here was to adopt what is today called the causal theory of action. In one version, the causal theory would say that a bodily motion counts as an action when it is caused by the agent's reasons for the action (cf. 11–12). So the motion of Booth's finger counts as an action on his part of moving it when it is caused by his reason – that is, by his desire to bring about Lincoln's death, and his belief that he could do so by moving his finger as he did in the right circumstances, which obtained once he had crept into the Presidential Box. Alternatively, one might speak not of the agent's reasons, but of his state of intending, holding that a bodily motion counts as an action when it is caused by the agent's intention – that is, his state of being committed to performing an action of the type encapsulated in his reasons.\footnote{Davidson makes no distinction between reasons and intention in his early work, but later he recognizes a difference (89).}


We should take note, finally, of Davidson's inclination as regards a criterion for the identity of actions. Following Quine (1969: 23), it was common at the time to hold that one's ontology ought to admit only entities for which a criterion of identity – that is, a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of claims of the form “\emph{x} = \emph{y}” – could be provided. On this matter, Davidson was (wisely, as we shall see) hesitant, but he did at one point (179) offer a criterion that he would later rescind (309), a general criterion for the identity of events, of which actions are a subclass. Events are identical, he suggested, if and only if they fit into the causal milieu in precisely the same way – that is, provided they have exactly the same causes and same effects.

\section{3. The Competition: Actions as Fine Grained}


Davidson's treatment of the individuation of action has a lot going for it, most obviously that by speaking of just one action under many descriptions, it is able to treat both predicate modifiers and the accordion effect in a way that provides the simplest account of what we may call the unity of agency: the fact that in both sorts of case the agent accomplishes all that he does in a single exercise of agency, a single instance of doing. There are, as well, reasons independent of logical behaviorism for favoring Davidson's view of what actions are basic. One is that throughout our lives, we gain proficiency in acting through learning to perform the bodily movements by which to accomplish what we wish to do. Thus, even in adulthood, one learns how to hit a golf ball accurately by learning what movements to make in swinging the club.


Another is that in ascribing actions to people, we use the progressive tense only while the person is actively engaged in the relevant movements (Lombard 1986: 151–152; Richards 1976: 195–196). Of Booth, for example, someone might have said, “He is assassinating Lincoln!” while he was actually pulling the trigger, but no one would have said this during the interval between his pulling the trigger and the next morning, when Lincoln finally died.


Still, Davidson's is not the only way to treat the individuation of action. The opposite approach is to take each of the many things a person may be said to do on a given occasion of action as different, allowing actions to be individuated according to their description (Goldman 1970; Kim 1976). At its most radical, this sort of view, usually referred to as the \emph{property exemplification account}, treats as distinct even doings whose descriptions differ only in attaching different modifiers to the same core verb. So Booth's shooting Lincoln with a derringer and his shooting him in Ford's Theater would count as distinct actions; both would be distinct from Booth's shooting Lincoln with a derringer in Ford's Theater, and all three would be distinct from Booth's shooting Lincoln. A prodigal sounding view, especially in this strong form, but a view that is inevitable if one thinks of actions as instantiations of properties, and then simply allows the complete grammatical predicates of action sentences to stand with no alteration as signifiers of those properties. But there are advantages on this side of the debate as well, the chief among them being that the property exemplification account does full (most would say too much) justice to the fact that in acting as he did on April 14, Booth “did many things.” And it brings with it a reasonably clear criterion of identity: actions are identical on this account just in case they involve the same agent, the same property, and the same time (Goldman 1970: 10; Kim 1976: 160–161).


There are interesting differences between this account of action identity, which divides actions according to fine-grained principles, and Davidson's more coarse-grained picture. The first implies a conceptual starting point, where one begins with act types, that is, universals that signify action, and treats particular actions as tokens of those types. On such an approach, it is natural to think of the token as a rather thin entity, one that includes no more than is signified in the type, so that episodes of action turn out to be fine grained in their ontology. Davidson's approach is more down to earth. It begins in the arena where individual actions are described and explained, and is concerned to account for the descriptive richness that attends particular episodes of doing. Here, the first concern is with particulars, and it is natural in this context to think of actions as relatively dense so that very diverse descriptions may apply to them. Thus from this viewpoint action, ontology comes out coarse grained. An attendant contrast concerns the criteria for identity that attend each view. From the start, the fine-grained view is concerned with what look like essences of action: with universals which, when instantiated, will inevitably turn out to yield something an agent does. As a result, the theory is able to articulate a principle of individuation that is at least somewhat informative as to the nature of the deed. In Davidson's case, the situation is different. Entities that may receive a multitude of descriptions are as to their nature less easy to discern, since no particular description need necessarily get at that nature. Perhaps it is in part for this reason that Davidson's criterion for their individuation, tentative though it is, is a relational one. In the end, however, the concept of action is for Davidson inherently relational anyway. The motion of a finger is not made action by any intrinsic feature of it, but rather by virtue of its being caused by appropriate mental states of the agent. It will turn out that there is trouble lurking here.

\section{4. Preliminary Objections}


There are two objections that might be raised against any ontology of action, not just Davidson's. The first is simply that we ought to reject talk of such entities. Metaphysics, it might be argued, ought to be as austere in its metaphysical commitments as possible. This should preclude the inclusion of events and actions in our ontology – especially if these are to be conceived as having equal ontological standing with more familiar entities – unless we have good reason for including them. And, the argument would continue, we have no good reason. Davidson's treatment of inferences involving predicate modifiers may make it seem that we do, but since he wrote on the subject, other methods of dealing with such inferences have been developed, for example, Clark (1970) and Parsons (1970), that do not quantify over events. Furthermore, the apparent logical equivalence among statements (a) through (c) with which we began implies that purported references to events in discourse can always be exchanged for talk about ordinary objects and their properties. Similar claims can be made about the accordion effect. The world of our experience is preeminently one of substances, of physical objects that persist, remaining the same with respect to some of their characteristics and changing with respect to others. Thus, it may be argued, anything that needs to be said about the world can be said in these terms. We need not ask how Booth's action of firing the derringer was related to his action of killing Lincoln, for we need not speak of actions at all in describing the incident. We need only say that Booth fired the gun, and thereby shot and killed Honest Abe. Anything more is superfluous, and always reducible to predications having Booth as their subject, rather than the suspect denizens of an inflated ontology.


Things are not, however, as simple as this argument would make them appear. It must be admitted that a theory of the logic of predicate modifiers does not require quantification over events. Yet on the other hand, if (a) through (c) are indeed logically equivalent, then it is open to proponents of events to argue that a thoroughgoing commitment to events underlies virtually all ordinary discourse. Refusing to make the inference from (a) to (b) or (c) may mask that commitment, but it cannot remove it. Nor should it be supposed that, as the earlier argument suggests, a commitment to events would involve claiming that they exist “on their own,” as free-standing entities alongside substances or physical objects. On the contrary: the equivalence of (a) through (c) suggests that in fact, events are inseparable from their subjects. Killings do not just occur, nor do they have independent existence. They are brought to pass by killers, and their existence is grounded in that of their agents. So if the objection to events is only that they ought not to constitute an ontologically independent category of being, then there seems to be no real difficulty. Finally, as for the accordion effect, both with it and with predicate modifiers we may if we wish content ourselves with saying simply that Booth killed Lincoln, that he did so by shooting him, did so in Ford's Theater, and so forth. This, however, is not where the concerns of metaphysics end; it is where they begin. What we want to know is how all of these descriptions are related, what “by” signifies, and the like. We want, that is, to explain the richness of the descriptions that apply to the case, which requires understanding the ontological structure of what is going on. It seems all but hopeless to suppose this could be accomplished without admitting what is implicit in the descriptions themselves – namely, that when all of this took place, there were events occurring (164–165).


A second general objection to including events in one's ontology has to do with criteria for their individuation. The history of such criteria has not been happy. Davidson's causal criterion has been accused of circularity, inasmuch as the causes and effects of events are themselves events (Wilson 1974). In order to apply Davidson's principle, therefore, we must already have accepted some events as real, and what criterion shall we use for their individuation? There is a second difficulty as well. It seems possible to imagine cases – say, collisions of pairs of elementary particles in an otherwise empty space – where events such as the resultant acceleration of the two particles might have exactly the same causes yet have no effects at all (cf. Brand 1977). There seems to be no reason to rule a priori that no such situation can occur, yet that is what, in effect, the causal criterion does. The fine-grained criterion for event individuation also has its problems. To use it, one supposes, we must first be able to individuate properties, which is no easy task. And even then there are problem cases. It seems possible that the same subject may be involved in two events of the same description at the same time – as, for example, when I move both my arms at once. But the property exemplification theory's criterion for individuation forbids this. Now perhaps it is possible to fix some of these problems.\footnote{For an effort to deal with the problems of the fine-grained criterion, see Lombard (1986).} But if we are committed to the idea that an ontology of events is off-limits unless we have an effective criterion for their individuation, then such an ontology would seem to be forbidden at least for the time being.


The proper response here is to reject the restriction. Criteria for individuation always presuppose that something is already individuated. We decide whether \emph{a} and \emph{b} are the same in terms of their relation to something else \emph{c}. The additional entity may be of the same sort, as with Davidson's suggested criterion for events, or it may be different. Sometimes, more than one additional type is involved, as with the fine-grained criterion, which requires that we be secure in picking out individuals, properties, and times in order to pin down the identity of events.


Always, however, there is some such reliance; and if that is so, we cannot demand identity criteria for every sort of entity admitted into metaphysics. The result of such a demand could only be a series of criteria that was either infinite or circular. The fact is, moreover, that there are few or no sorts of entity for which we possess agreed-upon criteria of identity; even those for physical objects are disputed. Yet as Davidson points out, we are perfectly comfortable speaking not only about physical objects, but also about things like avalanches, eclipses and killings, which are certainly events (180). The demand for necessary and sufficient conditions for the identity of events ought, then, to be rejected.


It does not follow, however, that there can be no useful discussion of identity claims about events. There is a legitimate necessary condition for the truth of any identity claim, namely the indiscernibility of identicals. Entities can be one and the same only if they have all and only the same properties. It is, moreover, in terms of this principle that Davidson's views on act individuation have most strongly been criticized.

\section{5. “By,” Cause, and Time}


Three such criticisms are set forth by Goldman (1971). The first concerns the relation the term “by” signifies, which is asymmetric and irreflexive. Booth killed Lincoln by moving his finger, but he did not move his finger by killing Lincoln; nor did he kill Lincoln by killing Lincoln or move his finger by moving it. The identity relation is by contrast both symmetric and reflexive, since everything is identical with itself. And in any case, by the indiscernibility of identicals, things that are identical ought to have the same properties. Why is it, then, that Booth's moving his finger and his killing Lincoln display different \emph{by}-relations? A similar point concerns causality. The various actions that accrue to Booth via the accordion effect obviously do so in virtue of their causal relations. We say that Booth killed Lincoln because his shooting Lincoln caused Lincoln's death, and we would say he fired the derringer because his moving his finger caused the derringer to fire. But it seems simply false that Booth's killing Lincoln caused the derringer to fire, or that his firing the derringer caused Booth's finger to move. But if all these actions are the same, should they not all have the same consequences?\footnote{A similar point can be made about predicate modifiers. Booth's act of killing Lincoln was owing to his disgruntlement over the outcome of the Civil War. But his stealthiness was no doubt caused by his desire to avoid detection. So his merely killing Lincoln and his killing him stealthily do not receive the same causal account. How then can they be the same?} Finally, there is a problem about the timing of the things Booth did. All of the earlier actions in the accordion sequence can be said to have been performed in a very short time: within a few seconds of entering Lincoln's box, the assassin had moved his finger, fired the gun, and shot the President. Yet Lincoln did not die until the next morning, and it seems positively odd to say that Booth killed Lincoln several hours before his death. Only after Lincoln died was it fair to say that Booth had killed him, that he was guilty of murder. Apparently then, all of the earlier acts in the sequence lay in the past by the time the killing was finally over. Plainly, however, identical actions must occupy the same temporal interval, so that again, the verdict seems to be that Booth's actions were not identical (see Thomson 1971).


It may be argued with at least some plausibility that these criticisms are not decisive. The \emph{by}-relation in particular seems to be less reliable than the objection requires. In Booth's case, his moving his finger sets in motion a causal sequence of events ending in Lincoln's death, so that it is natural to move out the causal chain, as it were, in saying what is done by doing what. We say Booth moved his finger, thereby pulling the trigger, thereby firing the gun, and so on.


But sometimes it is the other way around. If you ask me to move my fingers in exactly the way I would if I am tying my shoelace, my surest chance of success would come if I actually tied the lace (see 51). The fair thing to say here is that I manage to move my fingers in the requisite way by tying my shoelace, which is the opposite order from the causal one. What this suggests is that “by” denotes not an objective ontological order but, as it were, a sort of recipe that is in the end subjective: a way of conceiving and approaching a task so as to facilitate a desired outcome. That is, it indicates an intentional context. And if that is the case then, in the agent's thinking, one \emph{by}-ordering may take precedence even though the actions are identical. Davidson's identity claims can be upheld, then, in spite of the peculiarities of the \emph{by}-relation.\footnote{For further discussion of the \emph{by}-relation, see Ludwig (2010).}


A similar point can be raised to resist the objection in terms of causal relations. Causal relations are real things in the world, and hence extensional realities. But causal \emph{claims} are often made to explain events, and explanation is an intentional matter that proceeds in terms of facts rather than events. For example, the fact that Columbus journeyed to America in 1492 helps to explain a lot about the history of the next few centuries; the fact that he made a voyage in 1492 does not explain very much at all. Yet the events in question were surely identical. Now on Davidson's account, the “actions” on Booth's part that are related by the accordion effect are one and the same: a bodily movement, but one that gets redescribed in terms of successive causal consequences as we traverse the series “pulling the trigger,” “firing the gun,” and so on. Accordingly, given that explanatory force is a matter of how events are described, we must expect that the various descriptions bestowed on Booth's action will have different explanatory implications, despite its being precisely the same primitive movement that receives the descriptions (155). Thus, the argument runs, even though Booth's primitive act was the very same event as his killing Honest Abe, and although that killing was indeed the cause of the trigger's motion, it sounds odd to say so. And that is because the fact that it was a killing of Lincoln does not explain the motion of the trigger, whereas the fact that it was a movement of Booth's finger does explain the trigger's motion. Hence the claim that these actions are identical can be maintained despite the oddness.


As for the objection concerning times, it may be replied that although it does indeed sound strange to say that Lincoln died hours after Booth killed him, this is a perfectly legitimate claim to make. After all, we would not have asserted during the interval between the shooting and Lincoln's death that Booth was still killing Lincoln. He had done all that he needed to do to bring about Lincoln's death, had long since fled the scene of the crime, and was at that point trying to make good his escape. Rather, we should say that Booth's nefarious action was in itself complete, but had not yet taken on the relational property of causing Lincoln's death, and would not do so until the next morning when Lincoln died. At that point, Booth's moving his finger \emph{became} a killing, which it had not been previously (Bennett 1988: 197–199). Implicit here is the claim that entities can take on relational properties after they cease to exist. But, the argument goes, once this claim is accepted, it becomes perfectly legitimate to say that Lincoln died hours after Booth killed him.

\section{6. Deeper Problems}


It may be debated how successful these replies are. For my part, the earlier account of \emph{by}-relations seems plausible, but the other replies considerably less so. It seems doubtful, for example, that opponents of Davidson's position will be much consoled by the thought that although Booth's act of killing Lincoln does not, as such, explain the depression of the derringer's trigger, nevertheless it did cause the trigger to depress, causation being after all an objective relation. Only philosophers say things like that. Similarly, on the point about times, it seems reasonable to think that one of those who kept the night-long vigil at Lincoln's bedside might have said, “A villain has shot the President; it remains to be seen whether he will have killed him.” But nobody would likely have said, “A villain has shot the President; it remains to be seen whether the movement of his finger will become a killing.” Replies such as those previously mention to the objections in terms of causation and timing seem, then, to be less than decisive.


Furthermore, there seems little reason to insist that, even on a coarse-grained approach to act individuation, everything that went into the process of Lincoln being assassinated – a process that can be said fairly to have culminated in Lincoln's death – must be telescoped down into one action, a brief movement on Booth's part, which itself consisted in no more than a brief motion on his finger's part. The real strength of Davidson's view of act individuation lies not in claims like these, but in the justice it does to the unity of agency that lies at the bottom of all that occurs in Booth's case. Fine-grained theories are not without value: they offer an ontology of the many facets belonging to complex processes like that of Lincoln's assassination – facets that, even in their diversity, must in the end be granted some kind of objective reality.\footnote{Efforts to reconcile the claims of fine- and coarse-grained theories of act individuation can be found in Castañeda (1975) and McCann (1998).} Fine-grained theories leave us, however, with a multiplicity of \emph{actions} yet only one \emph{acting}, and it is hard to pull these together in more than an artificial way (McCann 1998: 38–42). That task requires something more like Davidson's treatment. Even so, we should not conclude that accounting for the unity of agency requires reducing all that Booth did to a single primitive action. And quite apart from difficulties about causation and timing, there is a case for thinking an alternative is needed.


Part of the case has to do with a problem of potential waywardness or deviance in the causal chain that, on Davidson's view, connects reasons or intentions with the overt bodily events that are supposed to constitute action. There is, as we have already noticed, nothing intrinsically actional about the movement of one's body or any part of it. If you take hold of my arm and raise it, then you will have performed an action of raising my arm but I will not have. What is it then, when it is I who raise the arm, that makes its motion count not as mere motion but as action, as voluntary \emph{movement} on my part? If we hold that bodily movements are primitive or basic, we cannot invoke a still more basic action to make the difference. The alternative is to resort to some relation between the arm's motion and my mental states at the time, usually a causal relation between reasons or intention on the one hand, and the observable motion on the other. It is well known, however, that one's reasons or intention can cause bodily motion of the sort envisioned in them, but in such a way that no action at all occurs, much less one of the kind indicated. In Davidson's own example of this, a person scaling a mountain wishes to rid himself of the weight and danger of a fellow climber, and knows he can do so by releasing his grip on the rope that joins them. But he does not proceed to act. Instead, his desire and belief cause him to become nervous so that his grip loosens, as we would say, “involuntarily.” The unfortunate companion is let go, but no action of letting him go occurs (79). Indeed, the climber does nothing at all, even though the causal relation that is supposed to be constitutive of action is present. The literature now contains quite an array of such examples, but I know of no place where the problem they pose is solved without invoking not just internal states of the agent, but internal \emph{action}: something along the lines of what used to be called “volition” – which in legitimate cases of voluntary movement is held to cause the observed, but in itself still nonactional, external motion. Davidson, for his part, simply despairs of a solution.


One ought to despair if the hope is to retain the thesis that our basic actions, the ones by performing which we perform all others, are bodily movements. It is perfectly possible to try to perform a bodily movement and fail. One may try to raise an arm and fail to move it at all. Perhaps someone else is holding the arm down, or one's sleeve is caught on the arm of one's chair. If so, the attempt will consist in physical exertion aimed at producing the arm's upward motion, and which if successful would have served as the means by which the action was done. Nor should it be supposed that the exertion occurring in such cases counts as an extraordinary means, one not usually employed when the bodily movement is performed. After all, the agent need not have known that his arm was encumbered, and find out only by trying and failing to raise it in the normal way. In more extreme cases, the agent may be paralyzed, and find out that he is paralyzed only (how else?) through a failed attempt at movement – an attempt that if the paralysis is complete, must consist in some kind of mental doing, since complete paralysis rules out even muscular exertion. In short, the evidence of failed attempts refutes completely the claim that overt movements are primitive or basic. We perform bodily movements by doing other things, both physical and mental.\footnote{For much more on this topic, see McCann (1998). Davidson discusses briefly the possibility that more basic, exertional actions may underlie the act of moving a finger (Davidson 2001: 49–50), but the discussion mistakenly supposes that a more primitive action would cause me to move my finger rather than simply cause the finger to move, and Davidson offers no treatment of failed attempts at bodily movement.}


But these other doings are not overt; whether physical or strictly mental, they are concealed within the agent. Where, then, do we stand on the question of individuation? If we insist that all overt action has to be strictly identical with whatever is the most primitive act or activity by which such actions are performed, we are stuck in the position of claiming that really, there are no overt actions at all. Not just the springs of action but action itself is concealed within us – so that when Booth shot Lincoln, all that he really \emph{did} was to engage in whatever volitional activity was required to produce the muscular exertion that got his finger to move, everything else being just a series of causal consequences of his willing. This would no doubt be an unwelcome consequence for Davidson, but it should be unwelcome to action theory generally. A witness to Booth's behavior in Ford's Theater would claim to have observed Booth's act of shooting Lincoln, not just the consequences that gave the act this particular name. And in general, we tend to believe we observe people acting, that what they do is, while perhaps concealed in its origins, not completely hidden from us. If there is a compromise that would preserve this belief, it is worth considering.

\section{7. Actions as Extended Processes}


A compromise can be found if coarse-grained actions are viewed as consisting not in a single, basic action, but in a causal process that begins with a basic action and includes the causal consequences of the basic act up to whatever event lends its identity to the particular action in question (Ginet 1990; Thalberg 1977; Thomson 1977). Thus Booth's action of killing Lincoln – that is, his action of bringing about Lincoln's death – began with his willing the physical exertion that would get his finger to move, and consisted in the chain of events from the willing up to and including Lincoln's death. Earlier actions in the accordion sequence end with the event from which they take their name: Booth's shooting Lincoln ends with the bullet entering Lincoln's body, his firing the gun ends with the gun's discharge, and so forth. Later actions in the sequence end with later events: Booth's act of plunging the Nation into mourning terminates with the Nation beginning to mourn, and so on. As for the matter of predicate modifiers, nothing prevents any action in the sequence from taking multiple descriptions. So the same action can be Booth's shooting Lincoln, his shooting him surreptitiously, his shooting him on April 14 in Ford's Theater, and so on.\footnote{The same applies to cases of conventional action, where an act receives additional descriptions owing to legal or social conventions, as when a person at a meeting signals a question by raising their hand.} In short, the different descriptions we can give of “things done by Booth,” both in terms of modifiers and by virtue of the accordion effect, are easily accommodated if we simply allow some actions to count as temporal components of larger ones. In itself, there can be nothing offensive in this kind of move; actions often have actions as temporal segments, as when John ties his shoes by tying first one and then the other. The difference is simply that in accordion sequences, the later events are not actions, but causal consequences of actions. And regardless of whether we are willing to call such causal chains “actions,” no one denies that they exist. In terms of basic metaphysics, then, the compromise afforded by this account looks to be above reproach.


And the advantages of accepting it are considerable. Above all, this account is still essentially coarse grained. It allows multiple descriptions of just one action, and it ties all that is accomplished on a given occasion of action to a single, primitive exercise of will on the part of the agent, thereby accounting for the unity of agency. In addition, if it is correct that the primitive actions in an accordion series are exercises of will, then the way is open to a solution to the problem of wayward causal chains, since the intrinsically actional character of exercises of will guarantees that they will count as action no matter how they are brought about (McCann 1998). But the compromise position is not tied to a volitionist position, and even if the volitionist view is rejected, there are additional benefits to consider. In particular, problems about causation and the timing of an action's consequences are solved. There is no implication that Booth's action of killing Lincoln caused the derringer to fire, or caused Booth's finger to move, because both of those events now count as \emph{parts} of Booth's killing Lincoln, and so cannot be caused by it. But since both events occur earlier than Lincoln's death in the causal chain that constitutes Booth's killing him, both they and Booth's actions of bringing them about – that is, his moving his finger and his firing the gun – can cause Lincoln's death, which of course they did. And as for the timing of what occurred, we are no longer forced to claim that Lincoln died hours after he was killed. Rather, Booth's act of killing Lincoln culminates or terminates in Lincoln's death, so that there is no temporal gap between them.


Finally, this view allows us to retain the common sense belief that we observe people acting. Not that we observe the interior goings on that lie at the springs of action, but no one thinks that we observe those. What we observe are the consequences of the agent's inner activity, in particular the movements of the agent's body and their immediate effects, which are likely to occur while the agent is still engaged in the volitional activity of willing them, and in the physical exertion sustained by that activity. This is the appropriate place to consider the only really telling objection to the compromise view: that we would not describe actions in the present progressive tense once the agent is no longer actively engaged in their performance. The objection is correct. We would not say of Booth, “He is killing Lincoln” once he had left the theater, even though Lincoln was not yet dead. But the reason is not that Booth was no longer exhibiting bodily motions aimed at bringing about Lincoln's death. Suppose that Booth's derringer had a second barrel, and that after firing the fatal shot Booth stood over the fallen President for a moment or two, ready to fire again if seemed a second shot was needed. If so, it would still have been fair to say “He is killing Lincoln,” even though he was not then, and would never again be performing any voluntary movement toward that end. The present progressive tense is in order provided just that an agent is engaged in executing a plan of action, even when the engagement consists only in monitoring developments and standing ready to renew action as may be needed. When this sort of engagement is ended, as it was once Booth had fled the scene, the progressive tense is no longer correct. But even though Booth was not still acting, it is not unfair to say that his \emph{action} of killing Lincoln continued until the President's death, because the complete causal process that constituted the action extended to that point. So while the objection is correct in what it says about Booth's acting, it is mistaken in the conclusion it draws about his action.


Davidson himself poses another objection to the compromise position, based on a series of identity claims (58). Framed in terms of our example it goes as follows. In moving his finger as he did, Booth performed an action that caused Lincoln's death. Performing an action that causes someone's death is the same as causing the person's death. But causing a person's death is the same thing as killing him. Therefore, Booth's action of moving his finger is identical with his action of killing Lincoln. This objection founders, however, on an ambiguity that afflicts the expression “performing an action that causes someone's death.” Booth's moving his finger is identical with the event to which this expression refers only if the natural process of the finger's motion causing the death is extraneous to the claimed identity. That is, the event referred to as “performing an action,” and that referred to as “Booth's moving his finger” would in this context be identical regardless of whether Lincoln had died as a result. By contrast, for the alleged identity between doing something that causes someone's death and causing the person's death to hold, it is not irrelevant whether the death ensues. In order that Booth's “doing something that caused Lincoln's death” be identical with “his causing Lincoln's death,” what is referred to by the former expression must be the entire process that terminates in Lincoln's death, for that is what is referred to by the latter. One cannot, then, claim both identities at once without equivocation, so that the argument fails.\footnote{For a more complete treatment of the identities argument, see McCann (1998: 52–54).}

\section{8. Conclusion}


There is, then, little that stands in the way of accepting the compromise position, and much to be said in its favor. It is essentially coarse grained, provides an account of the unity of agency, and offers a satisfying solution to difficulties in Davidson's own position about time and causation.


It is, furthermore, essentially independent of any view about which actions are primitive, although difficulties besetting the thesis that overt movements have this status are part of what motivates the compromise. Even if we ignore the question of which actions are basic, however, the compromise view is eminently defensible, and a fitting descendant of Davidson's signal contributions to the metaphysics of events.

% Notes
\section{References}


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Brand, M. (1977). Identity conditions for events. \emph{American Philosophical Quarterly} 14:329–377.


Castañeda, H.-N. (1975). \emph{Thinking and Doing}. Boston: D. Reidel.


Clark, R. (1970). Concerning the logic of predicate modifiers. \emph{Nous} 4:311–336.


Davidson, D. (2001). \emph{Essays on Actions and Events}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Feinberg, J. (1965). Action and responsibility. In \emph{Philosophy in America}, M. Black (ed.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 134–160.


Ginet, C. (1990). \emph{On Action}. New York: Cambridge.


Goldman, A.I. (1970). \emph{A Theory of Human Action}. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.


———. (1971). The individuation of action. \emph{The Journal of Philosophy} 71:761–774.


Kim, J. (1976). Events as property exemplifications. In \emph{Action Theory}, M. Brand and D. Walton (eds). Boston: D. Reidel, pp. 159–177.


Lombard, L.B. (1986). \emph{Events: A Metaphysical Study}. London: Routledge \& Kegan Paul.


Ludwig, K. (2010). Adverbs of action and logical form. In \emph{A Companion to the Philosophy of Action}, T. O'Connor and C. Sandis (eds). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 40–49.


McCann, H.J. (1998). \emph{The Works of Agency}. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.


Parsons, T. (1970). Some problems concerning the logic of predicate modifiers. \emph{Synthese} 21:320–333.


Quine, W.V. (1969). Speaking of objects. In \emph{Ontological Relativity and Other Essays}. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 1–25.


Richards, N. (1976). \emph{E pluribus unum}: a defense of Davidson's individuation of action. \emph{Philosophical Studies} 29:195–196.


Stoutland, F. (1968). Basic actions and causality. \emph{The Journal of Philosophy} 65:467–475.


\emph{Thalberg, I. (1977).} Perception, Emotion, and Action: A Component Approach\emph{. Oxford: Blackwell.}


Thomson, J.J. (1971). The time of a killing. \emph{The Journal of Philosophy} 68:115–132.


———. (1977). \emph{Actions and Other Events}. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.


Wilson, N.L. (1974). Facts, events, and their identity conditions. \emph{Philosophical Studies} 25:303–321.

\chapter{4. Freedom to Act}


Olav Gjelsvik

\section{1. Introduction}


Davidson's greatness as a philosopher stands on two solid legs: the first is his contribution to the theory of meaning and communication; the second, his contribution to the theory of rational and intentional action. (Of course, he also made a penetrating attempt at bringing the two together in a unified theory of thought and action.)


Within the theory of action, Davidson's greatest contribution was his development and defense of a causal theory of action. Davidson's thoughts on freedom should be seen as an attempt to overcome challenges facing a causal theory of action on matters concerning freedom to act.


Davidson saw two types of threat to the causal theory of action from the freedom issues. The first is made up of attempts to identify a general tension or incompatibility between seeing actions as caused by events outside the agent's control and seeing them as free. Davidson had little patience with this type of argument and reasoning. The arguments in support of a general tension between causation and freedom are not even superficially plausible, he contended, and the tradition from Hume to Ayer and Stevenson had anyway already done everything to answer these challenges. The other threat he found more interesting, and it amounts to a challenge for a causal theory of action, not simply for seeing actions as caused. The causal theorist of action attempts to account for agency and what intentional actions are in terms of causal notions, and might therefore seem obliged to produce an account of freedom to act in terms of similar causal notions. No small matter.


This becomes interesting if there is a challenge a causal theory of action has yet to meet, has a hard time meeting, or, possibly, cannot meet, in accounting for freedom to act as a causal power. The basic structure of the view, the causal theory of action, is to see actions as bodily movements exhibiting a particular type of causal history. If these movements are caused in the right or required way, that is, properly caused in order to be actions, then they are actions. If they are not so caused, they remain mere movements. This promises an ontological reduction of actions to movements and the causes of these movements, but if the required type of causing cannot be specified independently of the concept of action (“the right kind of way for being action” does not explain what action is), it does not account for the concept of action. The causation that makes the movements in question into intentional action, should, it seems, also explain why the freedom issues arise the way they do. If we are told that what makes the freedom issues arise is that these movements are caused in the kind of way that makes the freedom issues arise, we are not much further.


This chapter will focus on Davidson's contribution to the debate about what freedom to act is, and the relationship between this contribution and Davidson's causal theory of action. In particular, it will raise certain problems in accounting for the content of “can x” (where “can” seems to stand for a capacity) by conditionals with “would do x” in the consequent. I shall only marginally touch on the issue Davidson thought overdiscussed – the problems about a possible general tension between seeing actions as caused and seeing actions as free. Those problems are very large, and Davidson did not go into them.

\section{2. Davidson's Interest in His Work on Freedom}


There are many freedoms, and the nature of this plurality is clearer now than 40 years ago. Harry Frankfurt's (1971) article on “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person” started a new development. In today's dialectical situation, freedom to act could be seen as consisting of freedom of movement and freedom of will, and freedom of will could again be split into an aspect that concerns the way higher-order volition (and in some versions judgment) governs how we are motivated when acting (so that we are motivated in accordance with what we judge we ought to do\Slash{}judge to be best\Slash{}with our second-order volition), and another aspect that concerns freedom of thought or freely reaching a judgment or second-order volition about what we ought to do. To clarify further: an addict could be taken as exemplifying a failure of motivation (in not acting in accordance with her own judgment of what she ought to do (or her second-order volition), and a brainwashed person exemplifies failure of the second sort (failing to have freedom in thought). Here we see three types of failure or impairment of freedom, (a) freedom to act (impaired freedom of movement); (b) freedom of will (impaired self-governance); and (c) freedom of thought (brainwashing). The three are distinct, and the respective impairments can combine in different sorts of way (see Watson 1987).


Davidson sees freedom to act as a fundamental notion, to be understood independently of any notion like will or free will. We can appreciate this if we look at Davidson's response to Chisholm (Chisholm 1964, 1966). Freedom, Chisholm stressed, touches upon the role of the self. Chisholm may have been drawing attention here to what is called freedom of will or freedom of thought, rather than freedom of action as understood by Davidson. Davidson finds some of Chisholm's remarks about Austin and Moore's view on freedom to act interesting. Davidson's own view is not that far from Moore's. I shall return to Moore's and Austin's views very soon. Before that, however, I want to identify Davidson's specific project by contrasting it with Chisholm's.


Chisholm's point is that while it might be true that if a man were to choose, or try, to perform the action, then he would perform some action, nevertheless he might be unable to choose or to try, in which case, he could not perform the action. So it might be true that a person would – if he tries, yet false that he could try.


I think that Chisholm's point is very important, and that he is right to say that to overlook it is to make a “first-water, ground-floor mistake” (Austin's words) (Davidson 1980: 68).


The point Chisholm makes relates to the issues raised by Frankfurt. Think of someone who is unable to choose to F, perhaps because he has been brainwashed into thinking F the most horrible thing a person can do. Such a person has a certain kind of “freedom reduction” or impairment. Still, having this impairment can be compatible with the truth that if he had chosen to F, he would. Stressing this latter point, Davidson says in a footnote added in1979:



\begin{quote}


In connection with the theory under consideration, therefore, Chisholm would say that the agent is not free to ----- even if he would ----- given that he had the appropriate desires and beliefs, provided that he could not have the desire or belief. \emph{In this essay I reject this view}. I hold that there is a basic sense in which we are free to ----- (can -----) provided all that is needed for the action (in addition to other present circumstances) is the right attitudes and beliefs.


(Davidson 1980: 73, fn. 9, my italics)



\end{quote}


Bear this in mind as we enter upon the discussion proper: Davidson is after a basic and independent sense of freedom to act, and this is what we shall be discussing here. But let me add, nevertheless, that when Davidson declared in 1979 that he is interested in freedom of action in a very basic sense of freedom, he did not retract what he had acknowledged in the original 1973 article as a wider set of freedom issues. Let us note that accounts of the wider types of freedom may be relevant when it comes to understanding freedom of action. Given that Davidson is defending a causal theory of (physical) action, and recognizes a challenge for this causal theory in providing a causal account of the power of freedom to act, these wider freedom issues that he sets aside might be important when it comes to appreciating the full implications of the challenge to the causal theory of action.

\section{3. Davidson's Project and Its Relationship to Moore and Austin}


It is fair to think of Davidson's contribution as a way of improving on G. E. Moore's causal-conditional analysis of freedom to act. Moore's approach is to analyze the phrase “can do F.” He claims to analyze the relevant sense (i.e., the relevant freedom sense) of “can do F” by providing a conditional that analyses the relevant meaning of the phrase, and where the causal condition in the antecedent is such that were it to obtain, A would F. Very briefly put, Davidson (in response to Austin's criticism of Moore) suggests replacing the analysis of “can do F” with an analysis of “can do F intentionally,” and also replacing Moore's antecedent in the conditional analysis.


Here is Moore's view:


A is free to F (at time t and location l) iff:


\textbf{(1)} A could have done F if he had chosen to


The meaning of this sentence in (1) is, according to Moore, for present purposes the same as (2), which analyses it:


\textbf{(2)} A would have done F if he had he chosen to


Moore also claims that:


\textbf{(3)} The condition in (1) and (2), (the antecedent “had he chosen to”), identifies in both (1) and (2) a causal condition upon which A would have done F.


Austin (1961, “Ifs and Cans”) had many things to say about this proposal. He finds all three clauses (1, 2, and 3) false. Davidson accepts Austin's claim that (3) is false: the condition is not a proper causal condition.


Austin maintained that it is wrong to think that in the sentence:


\textbf{(1)} A could have done F if he had chosen to


the antecedent, “he had chosen to,” expresses a causal condition that has to be satisfied in order for it to be true that “A can do F.” Austin claims that (1) as a whole simply implies that “A can do F.” The latter (in the relevant sense of “can”), is, we might say, true in all worlds in which (1) is true. If the consequent is in this way implied by the truth of the conditional (1), then (1) is not a proper causal conditional.


Austin had another and quite different claim as well, which was that:


\textbf{(2)} A would have done F if he had he chosen to


basically says something like this: \emph{It was up to him} (to A). This is an interesting claim, one indeed with a ring of plausibility to it. It spurs, among other things, questions about the role and significance of “\emph{up to him}.” The phrase Austin introduces might connect with Chisholm's view, and also with Frankfurt issues. I shall put both aside for now.


We have, Davidson holds, general grounds for letting the conditional analysis focus on \emph{doing something (x) intentionally}, not just on \emph{doing something (x)}. It is the power of doing something intentionally that is so intertwined with the power of freedom to act. Many of the things we do and can do are not relevant for issues to do with freedom, like digesting our meal. It seems obvious when it is pointed out. Let us replace Moore's analysandum with Davidson's.


Davidson's idea is stated as follows (Davidson 1980: 73):



\begin{quote}


A person can do x intentionally (under description d) means that if she has the appropriate beliefs and desires that rationalize x (under d), then she does x.



\end{quote}


The basic claim Davidson makes is therefore that the analysis of freedom to act is an analysis of “\emph{can do something intentionally},” and that it in turn is given by the conditional:



\begin{quote}


If the agent has the appropriate beliefs and desires that rationalize x (under d), then she does x.



\end{quote}


First, there is no regress about whether the agent \emph{can} do the action in the antecedent – because no action is mentioned in the antecedent at all. He takes Chisholm's point about the need to be free to choose to be a regress point: choosing is something we do. The next point concerns the difficulty pointed out by Austin, that any analysis invoking the statement that the person does x, implies that the person can do x (in the relevant sense). But this is different when “A can do x intentionally” is being analyzed, since “doing x intentionally” is not entailed by “A does x.”


There are other real problems for an approach to freedom like Moore's, Davidson maintains. We noted earlier his observation that Chisholm brought out something important when he noted that (1) and (2) both can be true without A being free to do F. Here is a concrete example.


A is unable to stop smoking – he is as hooked as you can be. Still it might be true that if he really had chosen to stop he would have stopped. But he is unable to make that choice. We are appealing to a sense of choosing that carries with it basic self-governance in relation to what we choose. (See Scanlon 1987.) That seems to leave both (1) and (2) true, that is, it is true that A could have stopped smoking if he had chosen to do so, and also true that he would have stopped smoking had he chosen to do so. Both these sentences can be true even if A is unable to choose to stop smoking. When this is so, we can see A's failing to have the ability to make the choice to stop smoking as a vital ingredient in his lack of freedom to stop smoking or not. In this case, Chisholm's point gives rise to a real problem. Remember, however, that Davidson thinks he is contributing towards identifying a sense in which A \emph{is free to stop smoking nevertheless}. This is the basic sense in which A is free to smoke or not whether he is thoroughly hooked on nicotine or not. That is how we should understand the 1979 footnote cited earlier.


It is in this light, we must understand Davidson's quite specific interpretation of Chisholm's argument, in (Davidson) finding the source of the problem in the possibility of us asking whether “the agent is free to do the things identified in the causal conditions in the antecedent of (1) and (2).” The sense of freedom in this statement is the one Davidson is interested in. Davidson goes on to say that “What the argument shows is that the antecedent of a causal conditional that attempts to analyze ‘can’ or ‘could’ or ‘is free to’, must not contain, as its dominant verb, a verb of action, or any verb which makes sense of the question ‘Can someone do \emph{it}?’ ” (Davidson 1980: 68). What this shows, Davidson concludes, is that a conditional analysis of freedom to act cannot have as its main verb a verb of action in the antecedent stating the causal condition. This explains why he sees the problem identified by Chisholm as one of regress: you can always ask (when exploring this basic sense of freedom) whether you are free to do the thing any action verb in the antecedent requires of you. The upshot is that we cannot use action verbs to state the antecedent in the analysis. Davidson's main idea in meeting this point is to avoid the use of an action verb in the antecedent in the conditional analysis. He introduces psychological states, that is, believing and desiring, in place of action verbs and what they stand for. Of course, we might join Chisholm in seeing the interesting question to be whether the person has entered or remained in those states freely. Davidson is clear, however, that the sense of freedom in this last question is not the sense of freedom he is analyzing. He is analyzing a much more basic sense of freedom.


I shall discuss three main problem areas in connection with Davidson's proposal for understanding freedom to act. The first is the notion's relationship to certain problematic features of conditional analysis, first noted by Keith Lehrer, the methodological implications of which are quite serious for someone with Davidson's aspirations. I shall then raise issues about the complexity of the connections between freedom to x and having the ability to x. Third, I shall discuss in some detail whether the extension of what we are free to do is the same as the extension of what we can do intentionally. Finally, I explore the significance of the outcome of this for Davidson's defense of a causal theory of action, and the larger philosophical issues that were very important for him.

\section{4. Methodological Problems for Conditional Analyses}


Keith Lehrer (1960) raised a problem for conditional analysis of causal powers that bothered Davidson and is worth thinking about. Lehrer's argument, simply put, is this.


Consider these sentences:


\textbf{(4)} If causal condition C obtains, A will Φ.


\textbf{(5)} Unless causal condition C obtains, A cannot Φ.


\textbf{(6)} C does not obtain.


(4) to (6) are consistent, Lehrer claims. And they do indeed seem consistent, and denying that consistency comes at a considerable cost. But (5) and (6) imply “\emph{A cannot Φ}.” Since that is so, (4) cannot analyze “\emph{A can Φ}” (negated in (5)), for then (4) would be false when (6) is true, and we agree (4)–(6) are consistent. The analysis Moore and possibly also Davidson attempt is in all likelihood a nonstarter. It takes “\emph{A can Φ}” to be analyzed by (4), but (4) cannot be true when (6) is true and (5) is true, if that is the proper analysis. Therefore, (4) does not and cannot analyze “\emph{A can Φ},” in the relevant sense, since (6) and (5) do not entail the negation of (4).


This problem concerns the relationship between having a certain power and exercising that power when certain conditions are met. Davidson says: “But for my purposes it will be enough to remark that even if Lehrer's argument showed that no disposition or power is correctly analyzed by a subjunctive conditional, the claim that being able to do something is to have a causal power would not be undermined” (Davidson 1980: 70). This may indeed be right, but Davidson's aim is to account for freedom to act as a causal power. He therefore needs an account, if not a full analysis. He needs to show how the specific view on freedom he develops inspired by Moore accounts somehow for this freedom. The Lehrer point raises methodological problems for Davidson's attempt at accounting for this power.


Now, the obvious move in connection with the consistent triad (4)–(6), is to question whether the “can” in (5) and (6) is the relevant “can.” It could be that the relevant “can,” the one being analyzed by (4), is not the “can” employed in (5) and (6) when the triad is consistent and they are all true.


Let the analysis of the relevant “A can do x intentionally” be given by:



\begin{quote}


If the agent has the appropriate beliefs and desires that rationalize x (under d), then he does x.



\end{quote}


That is, “A has the appropriate beliefs and desires that rationalize x (under d)” stands for “causal condition C obtains.”


That gives us:


\textbf{(7)} If causal condition C obtains, A does x.


\textbf{(8)} Unless causal condition C obtains, A cannot do x.


\textbf{(9)} C does not obtain.


Of course, (8) may be false. Consider restricting ourselves to (8) being true. (8) then says, roughly, we can only do x (in the relevant sense) when there is a reason (in Davidson's sense of x being rationalized by beliefs and desires we have). And that seems indeed to be the relevant sense of “can,” the one Davidson wants (7) to analyze.


Let us assume that C does not obtain. Now this might be so for different reasons, and here lies the methodological catch. Let the reason C does not obtain be that you have been brainwashed, and that the brainwashing is thorough and quite hardwired. Since (9) is true, it follows from (8) that you cannot do x. This seems right for our purposes, you cannot do x intentionally since C does not obtain. Also, you will not do x in the actual or any nearby world.


The methodological problem then is this. Davidson wants to capture a sense of “can do x intentionally” on which it is still true that you can do x. (Remove the brainwashing, let C obtain, and you will do x.) Does he succeed? The difficulty here is that the chance that C would obtain is very slim in the real world – the antecedent is not likely to be true in any nearby worlds. In a case like that, we do not understand well how the conditional can be giving an account. If the antecedent is true only in remote worlds at best, that is a problem – here called the remoteness problem.


The question is whether the present causal-conditional account of “can do x intentionally” will do. I think we can see the notion of freedom Davidson is after, and I am not denying its existence. I do doubt whether we yet have an account of it, or whether we are just appealing to it when evaluating the conditionals. If we had independent access to the notion of having freedom of thought impaired (as in being brainwashed), and we could have access to worlds where that condition does not hold, and we could look into the further question of whether you actually could do x intentionally if the impairment in question was removed, we would be closer to an account. Davidson's ambition, however, was to account for freedom to act by the conditional earlier, (7), and also to think of freedom to act as prior and independent of other freedoms. He is methodologically required not to invoke these other freedoms when evaluating the conditionals.


Imagine then that you have a phobia against entering open spaces. If you were to believe it best to enter a space and strongly desired to do so, you still could not do it. Here, C clearly obtains, but you still would not do x. On Davidson's approach, you then are not free to do x. It seems to me, however, that Davidson is after a basic sense of freedom in which you are free to do x nevertheless, since you can walk. (Perhaps you can sleepwalk into such spaces.) His present account does not capture that sense of freedom. It only captures a sense in which you cannot do x when you are phobic. We can think of this as the inaccuracy problem.


This inaccuracy problem can be put together with the remoteness problem. The brainwashed person might be suffering from phobia or not. Remove the brainwashing in the phobic case, and you still would not do x if C did obtain. Can Davidson's causal-conditional approach account for the sense in which it is still true that can x intentionally?


Davidson's account needs to address cases like this: there might be several ways of failing to be able to do x intentionally, and missing one of the other freedoms, like freedom of thought, might be one of them. To be able to light on the right possible worlds for illuminating the specific causal power Davidson is after, it seems we need to be able to disregard the situations where other freedoms are impaired and, as a result of that impairment, we cannot do x intentionally. We need to get a clear focus on the relevant worlds when evaluating the conditionals that are meant to give us the understanding of the notion of freedom of action Davidson is after.

\section{5. The Analysis of Freedom to Act and Abilities to Do x}


I want to explain further some of the virtues of Davidson's approach, and also ask whether all there is to freedom to act can be captured by an account of doing something intentionally.


We are again imagining that the condition C is “has the appropriate beliefs and desires that rationalize x (under d).”


Imagine a case of being free to walk. First, we consider a case where you do not want to walk, and where (9) therefore is true. (8) is still true, and since (9) is true, the consequent in (8) is true.


(7) would still be true. In nearby worlds you do want to walk, and in the nearby worlds where you do want to walk, you do walk. Your power to walk freely in Davidson's freedom-relevant sense is present.


The freedom to walk seems, however, lost if you are chained up. Imagine that (9) is true and that (8) is true in a world where you are chained up. A plausible reading of (7) would make (7) false in this world. This would be so as long as in nearby worlds where (9) is false, you still would not walk (even if the antecedent of (7) were true). The freedom-relevant “can walk” would therefore not be present in this world. This would get things right if and only if the power to walk intentionally is not present in this world. We might hold back a little; in one sense, you still have this power (but you cannot exercise it); in another sense, you do not have it. The sense Davidson is after is the one in which the power is lost when you are chained up.


Consider then a case where you do not have the ability to walk because you have broken both legs. Again, (7) seems false in Davidson's sense of free to walk: you are not free to walk intentionally. This seems to me to be somewhat more constrained than the earlier case (chained up). This has to do with which worlds we are supposed to look at. There is another sense of having the ability to walk in which you still have the power; you just have to wait for your legs to mend to be able to exercise it. Are the worlds in which you have recovered sufficiently close to be relevant for assessing the counterfactual? If they are, you are free to walk. Here is a possible parallel case: are you free to cycle in a world even if you have not acquired the ability to ride a bike, as long as you can acquire that ability quite easily by practicing and you are free to do so? Imagine then that you are quite drunk and have lost your balance and control of your legs (but your mind is clear). You could not walk even if you wanted to. In this case, it seems to me, you are clearly free to walk, even if you could not really walk if you tried. You might only be able to crawl in the actual world. If this is right, certain cases might present problems for Davidson's analysis, that is, the case of drunkenness, the case of cycling, and possibly the case of the broken legs. These are all cases where the ability to do x either is (a) present and cannot be exercised, or (b) can be acquired, possibly freely acquired, or (c) can be exercised again very soon.


The distinctions between the various ways in which we can lack abilities, like the ability to walk, from not having the ability, to not being able to exercise it, to failing to have abilities we can easily acquire, are very delicate. It partially concerns what the “x” stands for in “free to x,” whether it stands for a type of action or a token of that type, whether x is free to walk now or free to walk generally. The case of being chained up is a case where no tokens can be produced. But in the cycling case, we might be free to perform tokens of a type we could acquire quickly and easily. We need an independent account of abilities, and that could perhaps be had. We would need to account for the relevance to freedom of cases where you are prevented from exercising an ability you have, and therein, possibly, an explanation of why chains and brainwashing function differently. (Brainwashing might simply prevent exercises of rational abilities.)


It is problematic if the relevant notion of “being free to do X” is tied too closely to what you would actually do, and you are not considered free to x in the relevant sense if you can acquire the required ability easily and freely, or the ability would return if you simply waited until you were sober. This creates some distance between “can do \_\_intentionally” and “is free to \_\_.” There are therefore issues here for Davidson's approach. They are not necessarily unsolvable problems, but they connect with and can combine with the methodological problems discussed previously (remoteness and inaccuracy).

\section{6. Subjective Conditions and the Thinness of Davidson's Analysis}


I have quoted Davidson's specification of his aim. Davidson also says, “what an agent does do intentionally is what he is free to do and had adequate reasons for doing” (Davidson 1980: 74).


Davidson does not explain in any detail what “adequate” or “having reasons” amount to here. (Since he allows that weak willed action is intentional action, the adequate reasons could come to no more than having a minimal belief–desire pair that rationalizes the action.) I want to note that if it is true that what we do intentionally we are free to do and have adequate reasons for doing, and it is true that what we are free to do is what we can do intentionally, and that again is what we would do if we had beliefs and desires that rationalized doing it, then we are working with a very small explanatory circle. If the actual extension of what we are free to do is larger than what we can do in the relevant sense of “can do intentionally,” and given by what we would do if we had beliefs and desires that rationalized doing it, then that might help toward widening the circle. If we are free to do things we are not in a position to do intentionally, that might be good for the account of intentional action, even if the position would not be Davidson's position.


There is another side to this, of which Davidson is well aware, and that is that it may surely be true that we do have the relevant reasons (in his sense of this, i.e., have the beliefs and desires that rationalize doing x), and yet fail to do x. This is obviously so in all cases in which we fail to realize what we believe or desire, or in which we fail to realize what course of action our beliefs and desires justify. In such cases, we would not do x intentionally even if we were (in any clear sense) free to do so, and had the adequate reasons. Maybe Davidson is thinking about a conception of having reasons on which it is transparent to us what reasons we have, or where having reasons is a causal notion that is simply manifest in what we do. I shall put this aside, too.


Finally, there are cases in which we are (in a fairly clear sense) free to do x, we realize that doing x is justified by our reasons, and we do x, but we fail to do it \emph{intentionally} even when we do it. Davidson made much use of the most famous of these cases, that of the climber who realizes he must loosen his hold of the rope, a realization that makes him so nervous that he (unintentionally) loosens his grip of the rope.


The case introduces a problem about whether Davidson's account of doing something intentionally can specify sufficiently the conditions for doing something intentionally. Davidson held that the case of the climber shows that he has not provided a causal account of intentional agency and thereby not of freedom to act from the resources he starts out with. However, there is not much doubt that the climber was free to let go of the rope and that in the basic sense Davidson is after he could have let go of the rope intentionally. There is an issue about how big a problem deviant chains make up for the account of freedom to act. It is indeed a problem for Davidson's actual account of doing something intentionally, and a problem for the small explanatory circle earlier.


Let me turn to a something different: the case of falling asleep. The case is interesting because it seems to be something many (or all?) of us cannot do intentionally. Still, we do say that we intend to go to sleep before midnight, and we might be considered free to fall asleep in a sense that is very close to the sense of freedom Davidson explores, since we might also have beliefs and desires that justify and also cause falling asleep which again surely is something we do. Still, it may be a quirk of our psychological makeup that if we really try to fall asleep intentionally, we will fail. Falling asleep is for many of us an essential by-product of doing other things, relaxing, and so on. We may start doing these other things with an eye to falling asleep; count sheep or pigs, and as a result we fall asleep if things go as they should. The precondition for things going as they should is for many of us that we, after a while, do not think of these other things as things we do in order to sleep when we do them. If the thought that they are such means entered our minds, we fail. We are not nonobservationally aware of falling asleep when we do so. If our psychological makeup had been different, it is imaginable that we could have gone to sleep intentionally. In the case I consider, it seems to many that we do not do so intentionally, the nonobservational awareness is missing. (See Anscombe 1957 for this view of the connection between doing x intentionally and nonobservational awareness of doing it.) Perhaps it is true that in the case we considered we do not go to sleep freely, when we do not do it intentionally. Nevertheless, we seem free to do it, since beliefs and desires that rationalize doing it cause us to do it when things go as they should, something they do fairly regularly. We might be free to do things we cannot do freely.


Davidson did indeed make the strong claim that doing something intentionally was the proper target when analyzing the basic sense of being free to. A case like falling asleep, as outlined earlier, questions that view, and seems to indicate that the direct identification of what we are free to do (in a basic sense) with what we can do intentionally, is too precipitous, and we should look at a wider range of cases for freedom to do x. The class of things we can do intentionally might very well be narrower than the class of things we are free to do and do because our beliefs and desires rationalize us doing them. The class of things we do intentionally might indeed be less inclusive than the class of things of which we say it was intentional of us that we did them. The things we are free to do, in the relevant sense, might be identified by the latter class. This goes against Davidson's identification of these classes, but it might throw a certain light on the climber case, which is a case that demonstrates that we have to employ the notion of causing something the right way, where the right way is the way required for doing something intentionally, to spot that it is not an intentional action. It might be that in all such cases, we are typically free to do (in the required sense of free) what we actually do, but fail to do it intentionally. In that case, the process of getting the account of doing x intentionally right or completed, would not necessarily, or by itself, provide an analysis of being free to x.


The problems discussed in this section would seem to make up a possibly more serious problem for Davidson's specific approach to freedom to act. Earlier, I suggested that there are problems in method relating to issues about needs for disposing of other types of impairment on freedom in order to be able to avail oneself of the right counterfactuals. I have also suggested that the connection between freedom to x and having the ability to do x is rather more indirect than Davidson suggests. Finally, it does seem to me as if the basic kind of freedom to do x that Davidson is after extends beyond the things we do intentionally.

\section{7. Concluding Discussion: The Challenge for a Causal Theory of Action}


Davidson saw that a causal theory of action needs to account for freedom to act if the causal theory of action needs to use the notion of “free to act” in its causal account of action. He commits himself to that in the passage quoted earlier: “what an agent does do intentionally is what he is free to do and had adequate reasons for doing.” If on this approach we analyze “free to do” using “doing intentionally” and “adequate reasons,” we are dealing with a very tight circle indeed. Now the notion of freedom to do x can actually do work, I have suggested, somewhat independently of the other two notions, and that would in a way be good for the account, which needs something more to stand on. It might, however, be bad for a pure causal account of agency. It seems to me that we ought to start talking about capacities, and thinking of freedom to act as related to having the relevant capacities unimpaired. That might leave a pure causal and “standard” theory of intentional action behind.


The causal theory of action tries to account philosophically for what action and agency are by the set of causes of events. It belongs to a class of causal theories encompassing the causal theory of reference and causal theory of knowledge. It has many things in common with those theories, not least their attempt to account for the content of a philosophical central concept C by employing other central concepts. We would succeed at this task only if we at least managed to determine the extension of C using these other conceptual resources.


There is wide agreement that most such attempts fail, and that it is very hard to achieve an analysis of any philosophically central concept. Still, there is wide disagreement about the significance of such failures, both generally and in particular cases.


Davidson had two main aims in his work in action theory. The first was to refute the view that actions did not have causes, and that we could not see actions as caused. In this he was successful, but the opposition was perhaps less strong than he took it to be. The other aim was to arrive at a causal theory of action. That was, of course, a much more ambitious aim, and many people these days think he was not fully successful here. Since few such attempts at theories of basic philosophical concepts have been successful, that is perhaps not surprising. Perhaps Davidson was as close as he could get, or as close as anyone could reasonably get. It is also possible that he was on the wrong track when giving an account of intentional action, and maybe the deviant causal chain story illuminates that. The best defense of the view that Davidson was on the right track and that his approach, contrary to what Davidson thought himself, can be improved upon and made good, is given by John Bishop (1989, 2010). I shall not here go into my differences with Bishop.


The main rival in the 1960s to Davidson's theory of action was Anscombe's approach. Anscombe did not deny that actions had causes, though many thought erroneously that she did. One interesting difference between Davidson and Anscombe is that the existence of deviant causal chains is not a problem for Anscombe's approach to agency and intentional action. Davidson has stronger explanatory aims, but when the approach to action has to appeal to an unanalyzed “right kind of way” – and that phrase of course gets its content from “the way exhibited by intentional action” – the stronger explanatory aims are essentially given up anyway (Davidson 2004: 106).


It is the failure in accounting fully for the concept of acting intentionally that Davidson himself sees as the principal cause of his not being able to provide a fully successful causal account of freedom of action. The “right kind of way point” thus keeps getting in his way, and this also prevents him from claiming he has a full account of freedom to act. Davidson insisted that this did not mean that freedom to act was not a causal power. It is clearly true that this claim is right. The present discussion suggests that Davidson identified the notions of being “free to do x” and “can do x intentionally” and “would do x intentionally” too closely, as this chapter has shown in several ways. We might, however, want to extend the explanatory circle when accounting for agency. We might want to include capacities, for instance, but then there would be questions about whether we are still giving a causal account. If we need to think of the relevant capacities as causal in some sense or perhaps as having causal powers in being rational capacities, we might, however, still be providing a causal view of action.


Davidson did not think it worthwhile to enter the general discussion of the tension between cause and free action. This chapter will not enter that discussion, but as a final note, I want to say that a need to remove a possible tension here seems more clearly in place on Davidson's strong and deterministic conception of cause than on many other conceptions of cause.\footnote{I thank Dagfinn Føllesdal, Edmund Henden, Anders Nes, Sarah Paul, and an audience in Oslo for helpful comments. Special thanks go to Kirk Ludwig for his feedback.}

% Note
\section{References}


Anscombe, G.E.M. (1957). \emph{Intention}. Oxford: Blackwell.


Austin, J. (1961). \emph{Philosophical Papers}. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


Bishop, J. (1989). \emph{Natural Agency. An Essay on the Causal Theory of Action}. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.


———. (2010). Skepticism about natural agency and the causal theory of action. In \emph{Causing Human Actions – New Perspectives on the Causal Theory of Action}, J.H. Aguilar and A.A. Buckareff (eds). Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books, MIT Press, pp. 69–84.


Chisholm, R. (1964). J.L. Austin's philosophical papers. \emph{Mind; A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy} 73:1–26.


———. (1966). Freedom and action. In \emph{Freedom and Determinism}, K. Lehrer (ed.). New York: Random House, pp. 28–44.


Davidson, D. (1980). \emph{Essays on Actions and Events}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


———. (2004). \emph{Problems of Rationality}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Frankfurt, H. (1971). Freedom of the will and the concept of a person. In \emph{Free Will}, G. Watson (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 81–96. 1982.


Lehrer, K. (1960). Ifs, cans and causes. \emph{Analysis} 20:122–124.


Scanlon, T. (1987). The significance of choice. In \emph{Tanner Lectures on Human Values}, (Volume 8). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Available at: \href{http://tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/atoz.html}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}tannerlectures.utah.edu\Slash{}lectures\Slash{}atoz.html} (accessed February 26, 2013).


Watson, G. (1987). Free action and free will. \emph{Mind; A Quarterly Review of Psychology and Philosophy} 145–172.

\chapter{5. Intention}


Luca Ferrero

\section{1. The Initial Account}


Davidson's account of intentional action develops in three stages. In Davidson (1963) and Davidson (1971), he discusses intentional action in relation to the explanation and the ontology of action. His earlier view equates acting intentionally with being caused to act by a pair of appropriately related mental states (a pro-attitude and an instrumental belief) and denies the existence of intentions as distinct mental states. In Davidson (1969), he offers a more complex account of practical deliberation in terms of various kinds of evaluative judgments. In Davidson (1978), he discusses intentions for future action and reverses his earlier position about the nonexistence of intentions as distinct and irreducible mental states. In his later account, he argues that intentions are all-out evaluative judgments.


The starting point of Davidson's investigation of intentional agency is the notion of “intentional action.” On the basis of his view of intentional action, Davidson discusses various related notions, including the idea of acting “with the intention to” do something, “intention” as a distinct mental state, and “intending to perform a future action.”


Davidson (1971) is primarily concerned with the relation between the justification of action in terms of reasons and the explanation of action in terms of causes. Davidson argues that reasons both justify and cause intentional actions. Causation by reasons accounts for the intentional character of actions. More precisely, a particular action φ is intentional if and only if it is performed for a reason, in the sense that it is caused (in the right way) by the combination of (i) a pro-attitude for actions of kind \emph{K}, and (ii) a belief that that \emph{particular} action φ (under a description \emph{d}) is of kind \emph{K}. This combination is what Davidson calls a \emph{primary reason}. The primary reason both explains and rationalizes the action φ. For instance, it is getting dark and I have a desire to illuminate the room. My desire is for actions of kind \emph{K}: actions that result in the illumination of the room. I also have a belief that by flipping this particular switch, the room will be illuminated. The combination of this belief and desire provides the primary reason for my particular action φ of flipping this switch, an action that belongs to the desired kind \emph{K}, that of all the actions that result in the illuminating of the room.


To have a pro-attitude is to be favorably disposed toward actions of a certain kind. The particular action is only referred to in the cognitive component of the primary reason, in the instrumental belief that indicates that the particular action φ is an instance of the desired kind \emph{K}. Although Davidson often refers to pro-attitudes in general as “desires” or “wants” and to the way in which actions look favorable as their “desirability,” pro-attitudes encompass a variety of conative attitudes, in a spectrum that goes from an urge to a sense of obligation or duty (Davidson 1971: 4, 6).


In doing φ intentionally, the agent acts “under a description.” The agent cannot be said to be acting intentionally with respect to \emph{all} the features of the action. Consider this case: “I flip the switch, turn on the light, and illuminate the room. Unbeknownst to me I also alert a prowler to the fact that I am home” (Davidson 1971: 4). According to Davidson, in this scenario, the agent performs only one action, the finger movement required for flipping the switch. This action can be described in many different ways, including in terms of any of its causal effects. Among these effects, there are the turning on of the light, the illuminating of the room, and the alerting of the prowler. The action can be described in any of these terms but it is intentional only under some of them. The action might be intentional under the description “flipping the switch” but unintentional under the description “alerting the prowler.” Attributions of intentionality are semantically opaque: even if the description “flipping the switch” picks out the same action as the description “alerting the prowler,” one cannot validly infer from \emph{A}'s flipped the switch \emph{intentionally} to \emph{A}'s alerted the prowler \emph{intentionally}.


The descriptions under which an action is intentional are determined by its primary reason (or primary reasons if there are more than one). More precisely, they are determined by the features under which the agent subsumes the action in the belief component (Davidson 1971: 5, 1978: 87). For instance, consider an agent who desires to illuminate the room and believes that action φ – \emph{as a particular flipping of the switch} – is expected to bring about the illuminating of the room. In this case, the action is intentional under the description “flipping the switch.”


Although Davidson does not explicitly state so, it also seems that the agent can be said to act intentionally under the description of the property toward which the agent has the pro-attitude (at least when the action succeeds in having that property). In the example earlier, the agent is acting intentionally also under the description “illuminating the room,” given that she flips the switch in light of her belief that this flipping is going to cause the satisfaction of her pro-attitude in favor of the illumination of the room.


By contrast, the prowler becoming alert to the agent's presence in the room is a causal effect of the flipping no conception of which plays a role in the primary reason and which is unknown to the agent. As such, the alerting is not an aspect under which her action is intentional. Nonetheless, the alerting of the prowler is still something that the agent does, albeit unintentionally.


Davidson's discussion of acting under a description captures a basic feature of intentional agency. But it does not explicitly address all of the possible ways in which the descriptions of an action might bear on its intentionality.


For instance, what should we say about the causal effects (or other properties of the action) that the agent foresees but do not feature in her primary reason? Let us imagine that the primary reason is only in favor of turning on the light. Say, the agent is an electrician who only cares about demonstrating that the electric circuit is working properly but does not care about illuminating the room. In order to test the circuit, it would be sufficient to turn on a very dim LED light that is unable to illuminate the room. But given that the bulb currently attached to the circuit is strong enough to illuminate the room, the electrician \emph{predicts} that the room will be illuminated as a result of her flipping the switch and turning on of the light. In this case, both the flipping of the switch and the turning on of the light are intentional. But what about the illuminating of the room? Is it just an unintentional deed? And if so, is it unintentional in the same way as the \emph{unforeseen} alerting of the prowler would be?


Another potential problem might arise for the description of an action that fails to achieve the intended goal. If I flip the switch in order to illuminate the room, but the electric circuit fails, am I acting intentionally under the description “illuminating the room”? Could an action be intentional under a description that turns out to be false of it? This seems problematic given that “A intentionally φ-ed” implies that “A φ-ed,” and thus if A did not φ, then A did not intentionally φ (see Davidson 1963: fn. 3).


It is not uncommon for intentional actions to fail at attaining the property \emph{K} mentioned in the pro-attitude. These actions might still be intentional under the description that individuates them in the belief component. Consider the agent who desires to illuminate the room and believes that flipping the switch will bring about the illuminating of the room. If the flipping fails to illuminate the room (say, because the bulb is burnt out), the action can still be said to be intentional under the description “flipping the switch.” But what should one say if the action fails even at satisfying the description “flipping the switch”? Imagine that the switch is stuck and the agent is unable to flip it. Is there something that the agent does intentionally even if none of the descriptions mentioned in the primary reason are true of her action?


It might be plausibly suggested that what is intentional is the agent's finger movement. Unlike descriptions such as “illuminating the room” or “flipping the switch,” it seems that the description “moving the finger” always apply to the action in question. This is so if moving the finger is a \emph{primitive action}, that is, something that one does but not \emph{by} doing something else (Davidson 1971: 59). Usually a primitive action is a bodily movement. An action that is not primitive is nothing other than a primitive action under a different description: a primitive action described in terms of some of its causal effects. (For further discussion of primitive actions, see Lepore and Ludwig (2013: ch. 3).)


Davidson's account of the relation between intentionality, action descriptions, and primary reason might thus be modified so that the primary reason necessarily include or entail a reference to the description of the action in its primitive form. In this way, as long as the action is performed, there is always something that the agent does intentionally (in our example, moving the finger), even if the action fails either at accomplishing what the agent desires (illuminating the room) or at satisfying the nonprimitive description under which it was undertaken (flipping the switch).


A further complication arises because of Davidson's statements about the relationship between acting intentionally and knowing what one is doing.


Davidson claims that one might be doing something intentionally and yet not know that one is doing it: “A man may be making ten carbon copies as he writes, and this may be intentional; yet he may not know that he is; all he knows is that he is trying” (Davidson 1971: 50, see also 60). But then he goes on to claim that: “Action does require that what the agent does is intentional under some description, and this in turn requires, I think, that what the agent does is known to him under some description” (Davidson 1971: 50).


Is the description under which one knows what one is doing the same as one of the descriptions under which the action is intentional? If so, the description would have to be a feature of the action that is guaranteed to be cognitively accessible by the agent and true of the action regardless of the action's ultimate success. As before, a description of this sort might thus be the one under which the action is primitive (Davidson does not explicitly endorse this claim, although he seems to come close to it at Davidson (1971: 50)).


The notion of a primitive action might thus be crucial to tie together Davidson's remarks about the relationship between the intentionality of an action with, on the one hand, the descriptions of the action and its primary reason(s), and with, on the other hand, the extent of the agent's knowledge of what she is doing. However, Davidson never explicitly clarifies how the descriptions of actions in their primitive guise both (a) fit into his account of the content of primary reasons and (b) relate to descriptions of actions in nonprimitive terms (which appear to be the descriptions under which many actions are usually said to be intentional).


The primary reason rationalizes the action in virtue of the logical relation between the contents of its components: the belief and the pro-attitude could be made into the premises of a practical syllogism from which one can deductively infer that the action has some desirable feature (Davidson 1963: 9). For instance, from the major premise, “Any act of mine that results in the illuminating of the room has a desirable characteristic,” and the minor premise, “This action φ will result in the illuminating of the room,” one can deduce the conclusion, “This action φ has a desirable characteristic.” A practical syllogism of this kind is part of the analysis of the concept of the reason with which one acts. It is not part of the agent's practical reasoning, the reasoning about what to do. Davidson criticizes both Aristotle and Anscombe for taking the practical syllogism as a piece of practical reasoning, hence taking its conclusion to be that the action does not simply have a desirable characteristic but it is desirable, that is, worth doing (Davidson 1963: fn. 4; Davidson 1978: 98); whereas practical reasoning for Davidson has a more complicated structure, which involves the weighing of reasons (Davidson 1963: 16, 1969).


Davidson's (1963) main goal is to argue that reasons are causes: that they not only rationalize the action but also explain it by causing it. To explain the actual performance of φ, it is not sufficient to have a pro-attitude and a belief that, taken together, would make the action φ intelligible. An agent might have several primary reasons that could be separately sufficient to rationalize the action. Explanation, however, requires that the belief\Slash{}desire pair be the reason \emph{for} which the agent did φ. Davidson argues that this can be so only if that particular primary reason, rather than any of the alternative ones, \emph{causes} the action. (For further discussion of this argument, see Lepore and Ludwig (2013: ch. 1).)


Hence, the sense in which a reason is “primary” is a matter of its contribution to the \emph{explanation} rather than the justification of the action. This is not to deny that the rationalization provided by the primary reason offers some justification for the action, but it does so only in the “anemic” sense that it shows that “from the agent's point of view there was, when he acted, something to be said for the action” (Davidson 1963: 9). This is because, in the order of justification, the existence of the primary reason only tells us that the agent looks favorably on the action given her belief that that action satisfies one of her pro-attitudes. More interesting questions about justification concern the specific pro-attitude in support of the action (including which properties of the action the agent looks favorably on and the kind of attitude she takes toward it – a desire? a sense of obligation? an urge? – and how these pro-attitude is to be weighed with respect to any competing considerations). The fact that a reason is primary is no indication of its strength in justification over competing reasons in support of alternative courses of action. It only shows that the primary reason is the particular belief\Slash{}pro-attitude pair that was effective in causing the action among the agent's other pairs of attitudes that provided actual alternative rationalizations (and thus potentially competing causal explanations) for that same action.


Notice that, as mental \emph{states}, the pro-attitude and the belief cannot cause the action. They rather operate as causal conditions that can be triggered by the circumstances. It is only the “onslaughts” of the attitudes, which are actual \emph{events}, that can play the proper role in the causation of action (Davidson 1963: 12).


Although reasons for action are causes, the causal relation between the attitudes and the action is neither identical nor necessarily isomorphic to their logical relation. Reasons are not causes in virtue of the features that make them justificatory. According to Davidson, the laws of rational psychology are not laws of efficient causality. (This is a very important theme in Davidson's philosophy that will become more prominent in his defense of “anomalous monism.” See discussion in Lepore and Ludwig (2013: ch. 26).)


Beliefs and desires rationalize an action only if they cause it \emph{in the right way}. The action is not intentional if it is caused by the attitudes in a \emph{causally deviant} way. As Davidson writes:



\begin{quote}


A climber might want to rid himself of the weight and danger of holding another man on a rope, and he might know that by loosening his hold on the rope he could rid himself of the weight and danger. This belief and want might so unnerve him as to cause him to loosen his hold, and yet it might be the case that he never chose to loosen his hold, nor did he do it intentionally.


(Davidson 1973: 79)



\end{quote}


Davidson despairs of being able to offer an analysis of causal deviancy (Davidson 1973: 79). Many philosophers believe that the fate of the causalist account of action explanation depends on the availability of a purely causal account of this deviancy. But Davidson does not seem to suggest that his view is jeopardized by the impossibility of spelling out the conditions of deviancy in non-mentalistic and non-normative terms. After all, his view of the relation between psychological and causal laws seems to entail the impossibility of a purely causal account of deviancy, given that deviancy is a concern for psychology and rationality but not for mere causality.


What is the role of talk of intention in Davidson's account of intentional agency? According to Davidson's initial account, the term “intention” is \emph{syncategorematic}; it has meaning only within a larger linguistic context. To say that the action φ is performed \emph{with the intention to K} only means that φ is caused in the right way by a primary reason that includes a pro-attitude for actions of kind \emph{K} (Davidson 1963: 8). The justification and explanation of intentional action only requires beliefs and pro-attitudes. On this view, performing φ intentionally does not require that the agent have an intention to φ as a \emph{distinct} and \emph{irreducible} mental state.


Davidson's early account of intentional agency has three main merits: (a) it combines rational justification with causal explanation; (b) it is ontologically parsimonious, since it does not countenance the existence of intentions as distinct mental states; and (c) it avoids the problems of traditional volitionism, since the intentionality of action does not depend on the contribution of an additional volitional attitude or mysterious acts of the will.


The account has two main limitations. First, it is silent on the deliberative process that might precede the acquisition of the pro-attitude and might handle conflicts among reasons for action. Second, it does not address the future-directed or prospective dimension of intentions, that is, the role that intentions might play in guiding temporally extended activities, controlling conduct in the distal future, framing future deliberation, and coordinating deliberation and action over time.


The prospective dimension of intentions is only accidental to the role Davidson attributes to the primary reason. The belief\Slash{}pro-attitude pair might justify and explain an action in the distal future if the combination of the two attitudes initiates a causal chain that leads to a delayed execution of the action. Even so, the temporal distance between the acquisition of the primary reason and the action is not bridged by any kind of \emph{guidance} by the primary reason.


A further prospective element might be located in the pro-attitude, since the agent might look favorably on the action on account of some of its distal effects. For instance, when the queen pours the poison in the king's ear in order to kill him, she does so out of pro-attitude in favor of the distal causal effects of her action. But the action that is rationalized and explained by this future-directed pro-attitude is a \emph{present} action – the pouring of the poison – although a present action that is intentional in light of some of its future causal effects. These effects are not necessarily produced by the continuous guidance of the primary reason. The queen's agential control is over once the poison has been poured. At that point, “she has done her work; it only remains for the poison to do its” (Davidson 1971: 58).


Davidson's initial account of intention pays limited attention to the upstream and downstream dimensions of intentional agency. Its main focus is on what might be called the “executive transition,” the transition from the presence of adequate reasons for action to the action's inception. This transition amounts to the minimal and nonprospective form of the \emph{settling} of a practical matter.


With respect to the executive transition, Davidson espouses a form of \emph{volitional internalism}: once the primary reason is in place, no additional volitional attitude is necessary to give rise to the action (even if the action is at some causal distance from the primary reason). As a result, Davidson faces the standard problem of volitional internalism: how is clear-eyed weakness of will possible? How could one act intentionally contrary to one's better judgment? Addressing this problem will induce some significant changes in Davidson's account, as we are going to see in the discussion of Davidson (1969) later on.

\section{2. Agency}


Davidson (1971) discusses intentional action in relation to the metaphysical question of the distinction between actions and mere happenings. In this paper, Davidson expands on the account of action individuation already presented in Davidson (1963) while leaving untouched the account of intentional agency. (The paper does not hint at the revisions of the original account of intention contained in Davidson 1969, a paper that was published earlier but on which Davidson was working roughly around the same time as Davidson 1971 – see Davidson (1991: ix).)


Davidson first suggests accounting for the nature of agency by appealing to causality rather than to intentionality. The question of the nature of agency is “greatly simplified” by formulating it in terms of \emph{primitive actions} (Davidson 1971: 61). In terms of primitive actions, the problem of agency becomes the problem of accounting for the relation between the agent and the event that makes that event a primitive action.


Davidson first rejects the suggestion of appealing to \emph{agent} causality. If the agent's causing the action in the mode of agent causality is a distinct event, one faces the problem of traditional volitionism about “acts of will”: either they are actions, in which case we still need an account of their agency, or they are not, in which case we would be trying “to explain agency by appeal to an even more obscure notion, that of a causing that is not a doing” (Davidson 1971: 52).


Davidson turns next to \emph{event} causality. This seems to be more promising given that there is a distinctive relationship that an action bears to its causal effects. Unlike all other events, actions can be described in terms of their causal effects, even if these effects are not part of the action itself. Only actions are subjected to the “accordion effect” (Davidson 1971: 53). This is what makes possible describing a finger movement as “turning on the light” or “alerting the prowler,” say. This feature of agency does not involve intention. \emph{Any} causal effect of the action can be a legitimate description of it – this is why the alerting of the prowler, although unintentional, is as acceptable as a description of the action as any of the other effects: “Once he has done one thing (move a finger), each consequence presents us with a deed; an agent causes what his actions cause” (Davidson 1971: 53). The agent's deeds are not necessarily \emph{intentional} ones.


The accordion effect, however, only offers a linguistic \emph{mark} of agency, not an analysis of it (Davidson 1971: 52, 60). It speaks to the way in which agency (and possibly responsibility for it) can spread from primitive actions to their causal effects, but it says nothing about what makes a primitive action an action in the first place.


Davidson's conclusion is that it is impossible to offer an analysis of agency without appealing to the concept of intention. As Davidson (1963) already stated, a person is the agent of an event only insofar as there is a description of the event (possibly in terms of some of its causal effects) under which it is true to say that the person did it \emph{intentionally} (Davidson 1971: 46). The relation between the agent and the event is extensional (it is independent of how it is described), but its analysis relies on the concept of intention and its intensional character (Davidson 1971: 61).


For Davidson, this conclusion is somewhat “disappointing,” given his initial hope for an account of agency that would not appeal to the “more obscure” concept of intention (Davidson 1971: 47). In the concluding section of the paper, Davidson leaves open the question whether the concept of intention can be analyzed in simpler terms. Nevertheless, he hints at the availability of such an analysis in his earlier work. As seen earlier, Davidson (1963: 8) suggests that the term “intention” has meaning only as part of the locution “with the intention of”; a locution that is basic and refers to certain features of the action's primary reason (viz., to say that an action φ is performed with the intention to \emph{K} means that φ is caused in the right way by a primary reason that includes a pro-attitude for actions of kind \emph{K}). Although Davidson's (1963) suggestion was not originally offered as an analysis of intentional action, it provides the basis for an account of the notion of intention in terms of the idea of “primary reason” and its role in causing actions. Hence, by combining the claims of Davidson (1963) and Davidson (1971), Davidson is able to provide an account of agency (both in its intentional and nonintentional aspects) in terms of efficient causality and without the need of intentions as distinct mental states.


Although “intentional” is only a qualification that applies to an action in virtue of the reason why one performs it, for Davidson, \emph{all} actions are intentional (that is, under some description). For any given action, there is always a description that applies to it in the mode that makes that action intentional. Davidson does not discuss agency of a lesser and nonintentional kind, what other philosophers call “purposive” or “goal-directed” agency (such as the agency that might be attributed to nonhuman animals). Davidson only contrasts intentional agency to either events that are not actions \emph{at all} or to the nonintentional \emph{aspects} of intentional actions. His discussion is internal to the kind of agency that is distinctive (but not exhaustive) of the conduct of adult human beings. However, his account in terms of primary reasons might be a better fit for merely purposive action, which seems to require nothing more than motivation by the belief\Slash{}pro-attitude pair in the way indicated by Davidson (Velleman 1992). This might explain some of the limitations of his initial account of intentionality, including the lack of attention to more complex forms of deliberation and to the prospective character of intentions.

\section{3. Weakness of Will}


Davidson (1969) amends the initial account of intentional action to make room for the possibility of akrasia or weakness of will – the possibility of acting intentionally against one's better judgment. The belief\Slash{}pro-attitude pair is no longer said to give rise to a primary reason that causes the intentional action φ. Rather, the combination of the two attitudes gives rise to a \emph{conditional evaluative judgment} about the desirability of the particular action φ. The agent judges that the action φ is \emph{prima facie} desirable. This means that the agent looks favorably on the action in light of some considerations but that, at least for the time being, she is not supporting it \emph{unconditionally} or \emph{no matter what}. The action, however, is supposed to follow only from an unconditional evaluative judgment: “Reasoning that stops at conditional judgments \dots{} is practical only in its subject, not in its issue” (Davidson 1969: 39).


A \emph{prima facie} judgment in support of φ is consistent with other contemporaneous \emph{prima facie} evaluative judgments in support of actions that are incompatible with φ-ing. But the agent cannot pursue incompatible actions; hence, she needs to reach an \emph{unconditional} judgment in support of only one of the incompatible actions.


For Davidson, the rational transition to the unconditional judgment takes two distinct steps: first, the transition from the various conditional judgments to a single judgment, which Davidson calls an “all things considered” judgment (ATC); second, a transition from the ATC judgment to an unconditional judgment that is supposed to lead to the action.


Consider the first transition. Starting from the prima facie judgments, the agent needs to form an “all things considered” (ATC) judgment, which can support only one of the incompatible actions. For instance, take an agent who makes the following two \emph{prima facie} judgments (where φ and ψ are incompatible):


PF1: action φ of kind \emph{K} is \emph{prima facie} desirable.


PF2: action ψ of kind \emph{L} is \emph{prima facie} desirable.


On the basis of these two judgments, she needs to reach an ATC judgment that supports only one the two incompatible actions. Let us imagine that, all things considered, she judges that φ is the desirable action (where the “things” to be taken into account are only the considerations that are accessible to the agent and deemed relevant by her (Davidson 1969: 40)).


According to Davidson (1969: 36), the formation of the ATC judgment is a matter of “weighing” the relevant considerations. His account of weakness of will, however, does not depend on a specific view about the sort of practical reasoning required in order to take into account all relevant considerations and determine which action to perform. What is crucial to his argument for the possibility of weakness of will is only that there is some form of practical reasoning that concludes with a single ATC judgment on the basis of the various \emph{prima facie} judgments. (Notice that according to the current philosophical usage the conditional judgments should be better described as being \emph{pro tanto} rather than \emph{prima facie}. The expression “prima facie” might suggest that the considerations in support of the action might lose their justificatory force as the agent proceeds to combine the qualified judgments into the ATC one. But in ordinary practical reasoning, the ATC judgment does not normally \emph{cancel} the force of prima facie considerations; it only indicates which among the competing pro-attitudes is going to be satisfied under the current circumstances.)


The ATC judgment is still conditional, even if conditional on all the things considered by the agent. As such, the ATC judgment does not yet issue in an action. Action is supposed to follow only from an “all-out,” unconditional judgment in support of the action (Davidson 1978: 98).


The all-out judgment takes up the role in the justification and explanation of intentional action that was earlier attributed to the primary reason. The belief\Slash{}pro-attitude pair still contributes to justification and explanation, but only indirectly. First, the pair is an input to practical reasoning. Second, if it eventuates in an all-out judgment, the pair determines the descriptions under which the action is intentional. (The ATC and all-out judgments do not provide their own descriptions, but rather inherits them from the prima facie judgment.)


The rational transition from an ATC judgment to an all-out one is a matter of conforming to the “principle of continence,” which demands that one “perform the action judged best on the basis of all available relevant reasons” (Davidson 1969: 41). In other words, this principle requires that one form the unqualified judgment (and act out of it) simply by dropping the qualification from the ATC judgment.


The step from the ATC judgment to the all-out one makes weakness of will possible. If the agent fails to comply with the principle of continence, she derives the all-out judgment from one of the prima facie judgments rather than from the ATC one. The akratic agent judges all things considered that φ is desirable but derives the all-out judgment that ψ is desirable directly from the prima facie judgment that ψ is desirable.


The performance of ψ counts as a genuine case of weakness of will because it is an intentional action (it is performed on the basis of an all-out judgment) contrary to one's better judgment (the ATC judgment in support of φ).


Davidson's account has been very influential in rekindling the philosophical discussion on the nature of weakness of will and in framing it in nonmoralized terms. The account has also been influential in presenting weakness of will as a problem of practical reasoning rather than the resultant of a mere conflict of desires. Nevertheless, Davidson has been far less successful in convincing other philosophers of the correctness of his positive account. (For an introduction to the contemporary development of the discussion of weakness of will, see Stroud 2008.)


Even if one were to accept the positive account, notice that for Davidson, weakness of will arises only in the transition from the ATC judgment to the all-out judgment. Couldn't there be a form of weakness of will that might strike \emph{after} the all-out judgment has been acquired? This is possible to the extent that one claims that the all-out judgment is distinct both from the intention to act and the action itself. If so, it might be possible to imagine a form of weakness of will that consists in the acquisition of akratic intentions (intentions that go against one's all-out judgments, rather than against one's ATC judgments), or in the failure to acquire the intention to φ in spite of one's all-out judgment in favor of φ-ing. Or one might imagine cases in which one fails to act in accordance with one's all-out judgment. This might seem especially plausible when there is a time interval between the all-out judgment in favor of φ-ing and the time when one is to φ.


Davidson does not explicitly discuss these scenarios, but his view has the resources to deny at least the possibility of akratic intentions and the failure to acquire intentions in accordance with one's all-out judgments. In order to do so, Davidson would have to identify the intention with the all-out judgment – which is the position that Davidson comes to embrace in his later work on intention; see Davidson (1978: 99).


What is the import of the account of weakness of will on Davidson's view of intentional agency as presented in Davidson (1969)? First, acting intentionally is no longer equated with being caused by a primary reason as a belief–pro-attitude pair. Rather, one acts intentionally when the action is caused by the all-out judgment of the desirability of that action. Up to this point, he does not need to countenance intentions as distinct states of mind. But there is something distinctive about this judgment of the desirability of the action: its \emph{all-out} character. Davidson has come to acknowledge that the executive transition requires a kind of settling of the practical matter that is not secured by the mere combination of a belief and a pro-attitude. Settling a practical matter now calls for two steps: (a) the coming to a close of the deliberation – that is, the acquisition of the ATC judgment; and (b) the move toward action – that is, the dropping of the ATC qualification and the acquisition of the all-out judgment, which makes the judgment “practical in its issue” (Davidson 1969: 39).


Second, the account is still compatible with volitional internalism. No additional volitional attitude is introduced to account for the executive transition, for the move from the acquisition of all-out judgment about the action's desirability to the action itself. One might wonder whether the compliance with the principle of continence (which presides over the transition from the ATC to the all-out judgment) might not require a novel attitude, such as the endorsement of the principle, which the weak-willed agent might either lack or fail to be moved by. According to Davidson's view of the principles of rationality, however, there is no need for such additional attitude. For him, the principles of rationality describe \emph{patterns} of attitudes too much deviation from which undermines the possibility of continuing to describe their subject as a rational agent (see Chapter 10).


Third, the pro-attitudes involved in intentional agency are now explicitly presented as \emph{evaluative judgments}. In the earlier account, they were characterized more broadly, since they encompassed conative attitudes – such as urges and promptings – that might have no evaluative dimension (although they indicate “what it was about the action that appealed” to the agent (Davidson 1963: 3–4)). In their guise as evaluative judgments, the pro-attitudes are a better fit to work as premises and conclusions of practical deliberation.


Although he does not explicitly discuss the relation between intentions and all-out judgments, the special role of these judgments might make one wonder whether they might be closely related to intentions. Davidson does not raise this question in the paper, but he eventually comes to argue for the \emph{identification} of intentions with all-out evaluative judgments, as we are going to see now.

\section{4. Intending}


In his last sustained discussion of intentional agency in Davidson (1978), Davidson changes his mind about the nature and existence of intentions. He comes to the conclusion that intentions are psychological attitudes of a \emph{distinct} and \emph{irreducible} kind.


Davidson begins his discussion by introducing \emph{pure intending}: “an intending that may occur without practical reasoning, action, or consequence” (Davidson 1978: 83). He offers the following illustration:



\begin{quote}


Someone may intend to build a squirrel house without having decided to do it, deliberated about it, formed an intention to do it, or reasoned about it. And despite his intention, he may never build a squirrel house, try to build a squirrel house, or do anything whatever with the intention of getting a squirrel house built.


(Davidson 1978: 83)



\end{quote}


Pure intendings cannot be accommodated by the earlier account of intentional agency in Davidson (1963) and Davidson (1971). But one might wonder whether their isolation from both deliberation and action makes them irrelevant for the understanding of the nature of intentional action. In response, Davidson claims that although one might imagine that intentional action could occur without the prior extra element of pure intending, “it would be \emph{astonishing} if that extra element were foreign to our understanding of intentional action” (Davidson 1978: 88, my emphasis; see also 89). Consider a temporally extended action ψ. As the agent takes any of the momentary steps necessary to carry it out at any particular moment, one continues to have an intention toward the complete action that is still in progress. It would be surprising, Davidson argues, if this future-directed intention, which the agent has throughout the execution of the extended action ψ, were not the same as the pure intention to ψ that he had prior to the inception of the action (Davidson 1978: 88, 96).


Davidson goes on to argue that this distinct component of intentional action is \emph{irreducible} to any of the elements that are already available in his earlier account (actions, beliefs, and desires).


Can intention be an action? Pure intending cannot be an action because it is a mental \emph{state} rather than an event. The acquisition of the intention, on the other hand, is an event and thus might be an action. But this claim offers “little illumination” about the nature of intention (Davidson 1978: 89).


A performative theory of intentions might seem more promising. It would equate forming an intention to the issuing of a self-directed promise or command. But this account does not work because, unlike intentions, promises and commands involve highly specific conventions and public performances. In addition, they generate obligations that persist even when one changes one's mind, whereas “if an agent does not do what he intended to do, he does not normally owe himself an explanation or apology, especially if he simply changed his mind” (Davidson 1978: 90).


Davidson goes on to argue that the intention to φ cannot be identified with the belief that one will φ. To begin with, he presents a case where one can do something intentionally without believing that one is doing it:



\begin{quote}


In writing heavily on this page I may be intentioned to produce ten legible carbon copies. I do not know, or believe with any confidence, that I am succeeding. But if I am producing ten legible carbon copies, I am certainly doing it intentionally.


(Davidson 1978: 92)



\end{quote}


A similar distinction holds of future-directed intentions: I can intend to do something in the future without believing that I will do it. One might reply that the distinction is only apparent because the intention is not accurately stated. Given the uncertainty about one's future conduct, one only believes that one is going to \emph{try} to φ. The intention can be identical with this belief if what one really intends is to \emph{try} to φ rather than to φ. Davidson's response is that although in some cases it might be appropriate to claim that one just intends to try, this is not true of intentions in general.


The reduction of intention to belief might be supported by claiming that ordinary statements of intention are usually \emph{elliptical}: an intention to φ usually omits to specify the conditions under which one does not expect to φ. If those conditions are made explicit, the intention has the same content as one's belief about one's future conduct, which makes the identification of the intention with that belief possible.


Davidson sees an insurmountable problem with this suggestion. It is impossible to specify \emph{all} the conditions that stand in the way of one's future performance since “there can be no finite list of things we think might prevent us from doing what we intend, or circumstances that might cause us to stay our hand” (Davidson 1978: 94). To get around this, one might try to use a general and generic qualification, such as “I intend to φ if nothing prevents me, if I don't change my mind, and if nothing untoward happens.” But this would not help with the identification of the intention with the belief, since the corresponding belief – the belief that I will φ if nothing prevents me if I don't change my mind, and if nothing untoward happens – would “tell us almost nothing about what the agent believes about the future” (Davidson 1978: 93). A generic qualification of this kind would be in terms of what Davidson (1978: 94) deems to be “bogus conditions.”


Davidson does not deny that there could be genuinely conditional intentions. These intentions only qualify the action in terms of a \emph{limited} set of \emph{specific} circumstances: the conditions that the agent \emph{explicitly} considers in acquiring the intention and that count as “bona fide.” They are conditions that refer to “reasons for acting that are \emph{contemporaneous} with the intention” (Davidson 1978: 94, my emphasis). These are conditions on the \emph{advisability} of the intention and the action, rather than on their \emph{possibility}. The latter conditions are not reasons for acting that could be contemporaneous with the intention to φ. They are \emph{enabling} conditions for intending and acting. If the agent knows that they are not going to hold, she cannot intend to φ, since the intention is either impossible or irrational on account of the impossibility of her doing φ.


The bona fide conditions, however, fall far short of specifying \emph{all} the circumstances under which one expects not to φ even if one intends to do it. Hence, the intention to φ cannot be identical to a belief that one will φ, even if one were to state the intention in more accurate conditional terms (Davidson 1978: 94–95). (For additional discussion of Davidson's account of conditional intentions, see Ferrero 2009.)


The “strongest argument” against the reduction of intention to belief is the difference in the reasons that support the two kinds of attitude. Whereas the intention expressed by “I will do φ” is supported by the kinds of considerations advanced in first-person practical reasoning, the belief that I will do φ requires “additional assumptions,” including beliefs about one's psychological states and the working of one's psychology, from which one can derive third-personal predictions about one's future conduct (Davidson 1978: 95).


The “most promising” attempt at the reduction of intentions is in terms of desires\Slash{}wants, given that both intentions and wants are kinds of pro-attitudes. But desires are only \emph{prima facie} judgments and, as such, “cannot be directly associated to actions, for its not reasonable to perform an action merely because it has a desirable characteristic” (Davidson 1978: 98). The performance of an action requires a \emph{further} judgment that “the desirable characteristic was enough to act on” (Davidson 1978: 98). This further judgment is the all-out one. If the execution of the desirable action is immediately possible, the judgment might be identical with the action itself. When the action lies in the future, the judgment is the same as the future-directed intention.


But how can the judgment be about a particular action, given that the action lies in the future and the agent is not yet acquainted with it? The all-out future-directed judgment is actually about a \emph{set} of actions, but it is more specific than the prima facie judgment on the desirability of actions of kind \emph{K}. It would be “mad” to approve of and set oneself to perform \emph{any} future action just because it is of kind \emph{K}, regardless of the circumstances (Davidson 1978: 99). But given one's current beliefs about the future, which exclude circumstances that would make an action of kind \emph{K} impossible or inadvisable, one does approve of any of the actions of kind \emph{K} that one expects to be able to perform at the intended future time.


The role of this “view of the future” explains two features of intentions. First, it explains why the intention is not conditional on the circumstances that make it possible and reasonable. The intention is rather \emph{conditioned} by the beliefs about its possibility and advisability. These beliefs are conditions on the adoption of the intention, rather than qualifiers of its content. Second, it explains why the intention to φ usually goes together with (but does not reduce to) the belief that one will φ (Davidson 1978: 100).


In his later account of intentions, Davidson offers a sustained and plausible case for the existence of intentions as irreducible mental states. Most of his argument aims at rejecting attempts at reduction. Davidson ends up saying little about the positive nature of intentions. His discussion of their role in practical reasoning complements the earlier discussion of all-out judgments in Davidson (1969). He offers some novel considerations about the role of intentions as directed to \emph{future} actions. In particular, he claims that an intention for an extended action continues to persist as the same attitude from the inception of the action throughout its unfolding, and moves the agent at each given time to take whatever step is required at that time. The same intention also exists \emph{prior} to the inception of the action as a pure intending. And the inception of the action is explained by the agent coming to believe that the time of the intended action has now arrived (Davidson 1978: 88, 96).


This account still leaves some open questions. To begin with, what does explain the possibility of a pure intention that \emph{never} issues into action? If I intend to build a squirrel house but I never try to build it or take any preparatory steps, is it just because I never come to believe that it is now the time to act? This explanation would fit Davidson's account if my intention to build the squirrel house does not specify the time of action (“I intend to build a squirrel house \emph{one day}”). But is it possible to have a pure intention to do something at a particular time, come to believe that the time is now, and yet not be moved to action? Failures to carry out an occurrent intention to φ when one believes that now is the time to φ are not unheard of. Some of these failures seem to be instances of weakness of will, but they cannot be accommodated by Davidson's (1969) account. According to that account, weakness of will is a matter of the violation of the principle of continence in the transition from an ATC judgment to an all-out judgment. But in this case, the problem arises with the transition from the all-out judgment (the pure intending) to the action.


The identification of intentions with all-out judgments speaks to what might be called the upstream dimension of intentions, that is, to their justification and to their relation to the practical reasoning that might lead to their acquisition. (Notice that an actual deliberation is not necessary to acquire an intention; see Davidson 1978: 85.) But by identifying the intentions with all-out evaluative judgments, Davidson is unable to account for intentions that we seemingly acquire independently of, if not even contrary to, our evaluative judgments, including intentions that might be spontaneously acquired for no reason, and those acquired by choosing a particular action over an equally choiceworthy alternative one in cases of normative underdetermination (see Bratman 1999: 219).


Finally, what about the downstream dimension of intentions – their role in guiding temporally extended activities, controlling future action, coordinating conduct and deliberation over time? Davidson only focuses on the guiding role of a future-directed intention in initiating action and in carrying it out over time. He discusses how incompatible actions are ruled out at the deliberative stage (when one is to reach a single ATC judgment in the face of prima facie judgments in support of incompatible actions), but he does not explicitly address the role that an intention, once adopted, an intention plays in framing \emph{further} deliberation and in coordinating with other actions over time (for this criticism, see Bratman 1999).

\section{References}


Bratman, M. (1999). Davidson's theory of intentions. In \emph{Faces of Intention}, Chapter 11. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 209–224.


Davidson, D. (1963). Action, reasons, and causes. In \emph{Essays on Actions and Events}, Chapter 1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–20.


———. (1969). How is weakness of the will possible? In \emph{Essays on Actions and Events}. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 21–42.


———. (1971). Agency. In \emph{Essays on Actions and Events}, Chapter 3,. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 43–61.


———. (1973). Freedom to act. In \emph{Essays on Actions and Events}, Chapter 4. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 63–82.


———. (1978). Intending. In \emph{Essays on Actions and Events}, Chapter 5,. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 83–102.


———. (1991). \emph{Essays on Actions and Events}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Ferrero, L. (2009). Conditional intentions. \emph{Noûs} 43(4):700–741.


Lepore, E. and Ludwig, K. (eds). (2013). \emph{Companion to Davidson}. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.


Stroud, S. (2008). Weakness of will. In \emph{Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy}, E.N. Zalta (ed.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University. \href{http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/weakness\%00\%2Dwill/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}plato.stanford.edu\Slash{}entries\Slash{}weakness-will\Slash{}} (accessed February 8, 2013).


Velleman, J.D. (1992). The guise of the good. \emph{Noûs} 26(1):3–26.

\part{Part II: Metaphysics}

\chapter{6. Event Variables and Their Values}


Paul M. Pietroski


Let us idealize and say that English is a single language that has endlessly many declarative sentences but only finitely many atomic expressions. At least initially, let us also suppose that each declarative sentence S of English has a compositionally determined truth condition: S is true or false relative to each context of use, and this semantic property of S is determined by the syntax and atomic constituents of S. Davidson (1967b) proposed and initiated a research program of showing how the truth conditions of English declaratives could be determined by axioms concerning the truth-theoretic properties of atomic expressions and modes of expression combination. Given such axioms, they might serve as the core of a theory of what speakers come to know when they come to know what English expressions mean. But in many cases, it is not clear how the supposed truth conditions of declaratives could be compositionally determined.


Davidson (1967a) focused on examples involving adverbial modifiers, as in (1).


\textbf{(1)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard with a dagger in the library.


Part of the challenge is to say how such modifiers are semantically related to the rest of the sentence. Davidson offered a hypothesis that proved fruitful, though potentially in conflict with his larger program. Building on the ancient observation that verbs are often used to talk about what happened, he argued that an action report implies the occurrence of an \emph{event} that meets the conditions specified by the report, where an event can be described in endless ways – for example, as a stabbing of an officer, an assault by a spy, a felonious act amidst books. In this essay, I review Davidson's account of sentences like (1), his arguments in favor of it, and his responses to some initial objections. I also discuss some subsequent work that supports central aspects of Davidson's proposal while presenting challenges for other aspects.

\section{1. Quantifying over Events}


Sentence (2) can be used to report some of what happened on a certain day in a certain house.


\textbf{(2)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard.


If (2) is true, then Miss Scarlet did something, and Colonel Mustard was affected.\footnote{Gillon (2007) and others have noted that Panini's grammar of Sanskrit reflected this general observation about transitive action sentences in a sophisticated way, relating case (and grammatical subjects\Slash{}objects) to thematic roles of the sort discussed later (e.g., Agent\Slash{}Patient).} More specifically, there was an event of Scarlet stabbing Mustard. Though even if the reporter has a particular episode in mind, (2) allows for the possibility that Scarlet stabbed Mustard more than once; see, for example, Ramsey (1927). In this respect, (2) is like (3),


\textbf{(3)} Miss Scarlet stabbed an officer.


which is compatible with Miss Scarlet having stabbed many officers. So as Davidson noted, (4) seems like a decent if slightly awkward paraphrase of (2).


\textbf{(4)} There was a stabbing of Colonel Mustard by Miss Scarlet.


But even if (2) is true if and only if (4) is true, this does not tell us how to specify the truth condition of either sentence – much less (1) – compositionally. Davidson went further, offering arguments for a specific proposal about the semantic properties of verbs like “stabbed” and phrases like “with a dagger.” This illustrated Davidson's project of specifying truth conditions for declaratives, and the details are independently interesting.

\subsection{1.1. Implications and logical form}


\emph{Prima facie}, (4) is an indefinite claim like (5).


\textbf{(5)} There was a spy from Sweden in the library.


Ignoring tense for simplicity, it seems that both (4) and (5) can be translated (or “regimented”) into a logician's language – designed for the study of truth and valid inference – as sentences of the form ∃\emph{x}[S(\emph{x}) \& P(\emph{x}) \& Q(\emph{x})]; where “S” corresponds to “stabbing”\Slash{}“spy,” “P” and “Q” correspond to the prepositional phrases, ampersands signify conjunction, and “∃” is an existential quantifier binding the variable “\emph{x}.” Perhaps such translation is misleading, and (4)


\textbf{(4)} There was a stabbing of Colonel Mustard by Miss Scarlet.


is really just a long winded variant of (2), with “There was a” being pleonastic apart from tense.


\textbf{(2)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard.


But let us assume that as a matter of \emph{logic}, the truth of (4) implies at least one stabbing, much as (5) implies at least one spy. It does not yet follow that (2) is like (4) in this respect. As Davidson recognized, sentential paraphrases might specify similar but distinct truth conditions, or specify a shared truth condition in different ways with different logical consequences.


This is not a mere skeptical possibility. One might think that according to (2), Miss Scarlet bears a certain \emph{relation} to Colonel Mustard. Indicating this relation with \emph{stabbed}(\emph{x}, \emph{y}), one might translate (2) as follows, treating referential devices as atomic names for simplicity: \emph{stabbed}(M\emph{s}S\emph{carlet}, C\emph{ol}M\emph{ustard}). Perhaps any individuals who exhibit this relation were involved in an event of stabbing that can also be described as a stab. But this may be a point about the metaphysics of stabbing, or events and relations, rather than the meaning of (2). So while (2) presumably implies the existence of Miss Scarlet and Colonel Mustard, one might deny that this sentence itself implies a stabbing. By way of comparison, if (6) is true,


\textbf{(6)} Miss Scarlet loathed Colonel Mustard.


then at some point, there was an event of Miss Scarlet coming to be in a state of loathing Colonel Mustard. But it does not follow that a semantics for English should specify the truth condition of (6) in terms of events and\Slash{}or states of loathing. It might be that someone knows what (6) means – in the sense of being able to determine its truth condition via some procedure that specifies the truth conditions of English sentences – without knowing that (6) is true only if there was some loathing.\footnote{One can understand “ice” and “melts” without knowing that when ice melts, some water undergoes a decrease in volume and a rise in mean molecular energy. Perhaps “loathe” is, in fact, understood in terms of events; “loathed Mustard upon meeting him” certainly highlights the limitations of \emph{loathed}(\emph{x}, \emph{y}). But truth specifications require justification, especially when they have ontological implications not overtly marked with referential or quantificational expressions.} And even if all actual speakers of English know that (2) is true if and only if (4) is true, this might be due in part to aspects of human knowledge that go beyond recognizing logical implications; cf. Quine (1951).


As these remarks suggest, Davidson assumed that sentences exhibit logical relations. Compositional specifications of unboundedly many truth conditions will exhibit patterns corresponding to valid inference. We might fail to recognize certain valid inferences as such, and we can misdiagnose plausible inferences as valid. But apparent implications provide important clues for theorists attempting to specify the truth conditions of declarative sentences. For example, while neither (7) nor (8) implies (9), it seems clear that (9) implies both (7) and (8).


\textbf{(7)} A spy arrived.


\textbf{(8)} A soldier slept.


\textbf{(9)} A spy arrived and a soldier slept.


Likewise, (10) implies both (7) and (11).


\textbf{(10)} A spy from Sweden arrived.


\textbf{(11)} Someone from Sweden arrived.


This invites the hypothesis that (9) is understood as a conjunction of (7) and (8), and that “spy from Sweden” is understood as a conjunction of two predicates.\footnote{Here and throughout, I use “conjunction” to talk about a \emph{logical} relation. Sentence (9) is also a \emph{grammatical} conjunction of simpler sentences, but so is “A spy arrived or a soldier slept.” It is a substantive claim that “and” signifies some form of logical conjunction. One can imagine a language in which the sound of “and” has the actual meaning of “or,” and the string of words in (10) constitutes a sentence that is true iff someone who was a spy \emph{or} from Sweden arrived.} In terms of truth, (9) is true \emph{if and only if} – henceforth, \emph{iff} – both (7) and (8) are true. Similarly, (10) is true iff at least one individual is such that both “spy from Sweden” and “arrived” are true of her; and “spy from Sweden” is true of an individual iff both “spy” and “from Sweden” are true of her.\footnote{Following Tarski (1944), we can say treat sentences as special cases of predicates, and say that a sentence is true iff it is “true of” each thing. If (10) is true, then each thing is such that a spy from Sweden arrived.}


We can model this pattern of implications and truth conditions with (7a–11a).


\emph{\textbf{(7a)} ∃}x\emph{[}spy\emph{(}x\emph{) \&} arrived\emph{(}x\emph{)]}


\emph{\textbf{(8a)} ∃}x\emph{[}soldier\emph{(}x\emph{) \&} slept\emph{(}x\emph{)]}


\emph{\textbf{(9a)} ∃}x\emph{[}spy\emph{(}x\emph{) \&} arrived\emph{(}x\emph{)] \& ∃}x\emph{[}soldier\emph{(}x\emph{) \&} slept\emph{(}x\emph{)]}


\emph{\textbf{(10a)} ∃}x\emph{[}spy\emph{(}x\emph{) \&} from\emph{(}x\emph{, S}weden\emph{) \&} arrived\emph{(}x\emph{)]}


\emph{\textbf{(11a)} ∃}x\emph{[}person\emph{(}x\emph{) \&} from\emph{(}x\emph{, S}weden\emph{) \&} arrived\emph{(}x\emph{)]}


The semantic properties of these invented sentences, of a logician's language, are determined explicitly by stipulation. For example, \emph{from}(\emph{x}, \emph{y}) is a predicate that applies to certain \emph{ordered pairs} of individuals: \emph{from}(\emph{x}, \emph{y}) is true of <α, β> iff α is from β. So \emph{from}(\emph{x}, S\emph{weden}) is true of α iff α is from Sweden; this predicate is true of α iff \emph{from}(\emph{x}, \emph{y}) is true of <α, Sweden>. Hence, (10a) implies (7a), given the stipulations governing “\&,” “\emph{x},” and “∃.”


Given sentences whose implication relations are not in doubt, we can use them to model the implication relations exhibited by English sentences. Using traditional terminology, let us say that each declarative sentence S of English has a \emph{logical form} that can be identified with some sentence L of an ideal formal language – call it Loglish, that might also be viewed as an ideal language of thought.\footnote{Or if you prefer, the thoughts expressed with S in particular contexts share a logical form that can be identified with some equivalence class of Loglish sentences. For now, set aside questions about vagueness, context sensitivity, indeterminacy of translation, the logical forms of nondeclarative sentences, and in virtue of what English sentences have logical forms. At its core, Davidson's project was to specify the truth conditions of English declaratives by specifying a procedure that pairs these sentences with sentences of Loglish; cf. Montague (1974). Davidson also appealed to an idealized (“radical”) interpreter who uses a metalanguage to describe the truth conditions of sentences used by speakers of English, instead of saying that those who actually acquire English can think in Loglish. But one can adopt the more psychologically committed view; see, for example, Larson and Segal (1995).} We do not know how sophisticated or simple the logical forms of natural sentences are. Correlatively, Loglish may await full and explicit characterization. But at least initially, we can use familiar formal languages, often in illuminating ways.


Note that (12a), the conjunction of (7a) and (11a), does not imply (10a).


\emph{\textbf{(12a)} ∃}x\emph{[}spy\emph{(}x\emph{) \&} arrived\emph{(}x\emph{)] \& ∃}x\emph{[}person\emph{(}x\emph{) \&} from\emph{(}x\emph{, S}weden\emph{) \&} arrived\emph{(}x\emph{)]}


But (10a) implies (12a), given that spies are people. This suggests that the simple model illustrated with (7–12) is on a right track, since (12) does not imply (10), but (10) implies (12).


\textbf{(12)} A spy arrived, and someone from Sweden arrived.


Conjunction licenses reduction with regard to truth. For any predicates Φ and Ψ, if Φ \& Ψ is true of some individual α, then Ψ is true of α. So trivially, ∃\emph{x}[S(\emph{x}) \& P(\emph{x})] implies ∃\emph{x}[S(\emph{x})]. But the conjunction ∃\emph{x}[S(\emph{x})] \& ∃\emph{x}[P(\emph{x})] does not imply ∃\emph{x}[S(\emph{x}) \& P(\emph{x})], since S(\emph{x}) can be true of one individual while P(\emph{x}) is true of another. Given this general feature of conjunction, Davidson argued that the adverbial modifiers in a sentence like (1) are understood as reducible conjuncts.


\textbf{(1)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard with a dagger in the library.


It seems that (1) implies both (13) and (14), each of which implies (2).


\textbf{(13)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard with a dagger.


\textbf{(14)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard in the library.


\textbf{(2)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard.


Davidson was not explicit about nonimplications. But it is obvious that (2) does not imply (13) or (14), neither of which implies (1). Indeed, not even the conjunction of (13) and (14) implies (1), since Miss Scarlet might have stabbed Colonel Mustard twice: once with a dagger in the kitchen, and once in the library with a stiletto.


Strictly speaking, (1) is ambiguous, with a reading that permits the following scenario: Scarlet stabbed Mustard with a dagger that was in the library, but the stabbing was not (or at least not entirely) in the library. Perhaps Scarlet was in the hall, stealthily operating a long robotic arm. But set aside this reading, which stems from “in the library” modifying “dagger” instead of the verb phrase. Likewise, set aside the adjectival reading of “with a dagger” in (15),


\textbf{(15)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard in the library with a dagger.


according to which Scarlet stabbed Mustard in the library that contained a dagger (as opposed to some other library). Given the “instrumental” reading of “with,” (15) implies and is implied by (1). In this sense, the order of the adverbial modifiers does not matter, as if (1) and (15) are mutually implicating claims of the form ∃\emph{x}[S(\emph{x}) \& P(\emph{x}) \& Q(\emph{x})] and ∃\emph{x}[S(\emph{x}) \& Q(\emph{x}) \& P(\emph{x})].

\subsection{1.2. Adverb reduction as conjunction reduction}


The pattern of apparent implications can be summarized as shown:


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-17.jpg}
\end{figure}


This suggests that (13) and (14) are understood as claims of the form ∃\emph{x}[S(\emph{x}) \& P(\emph{x})], with P(\emph{x}) corresponding to the prepositional phrase, and S(\emph{x}) corresponding to “Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard.” In which case, this string of five words need not be understood as a complete sentence: it can be understood as a predicate that can be true of certain things – for example, stabbings – that were (done) in the library and with a dagger. On this view, (2) is of the form ∃\emph{x}[S(\emph{x})].


Think of S(\emph{x}) as the predicate “ScarStabMusty,” which is true of something iff that thing was a stabbing of Mustard by Scarlet. Davidson offered a proposal about how the components of (2) could combine to form such a predicate: “stabbed” is true of ordered \emph{triples} <α, β, γ> such that α was an event of β stabbing γ. Using “\emph{e}” as a variable that is mnemonic for events, the idea is that \emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) is the logical analog of “stabbed,” and (2a) is the logical form of (2);


\textbf{(2)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard.


\emph{\textbf{(2a)} ∃}e\emph{[}stabbed\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{)]}


where \emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, M\emph{s}S\emph{carlet}, C\emph{ol}M\emph{ustard}) is true of <α, Scarlet, Mustard> iff α was an event of Scarlet stabbing Mustard. The prepositional phrases in (13–14) can then be described as added conjuncts, as in (13a–14a), ignoring structure within these phrases;


\emph{\textbf{(13a)} ∃}e\emph{[}stabbed\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{) \&} with\emph{(}e\emph{,} a dagger\emph{)]}


\emph{\textbf{(14a)} ∃}e\emph{[}stabbed\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{) \&} in\emph{(}e\emph{,} the library\emph{)]}


where \emph{with}(\emph{e}, \emph{a dagger}) – or more explicitly, ∃\emph{x}[\emph{with}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}) \& \emph{dagger}(\emph{x})] – is true of events done with a dagger, and \emph{in}(\emph{e}, \emph{the library}) is true of events that occurred in the relevant library.


Let “LeStab” be a name for some event of Scarlet stabbing Mustard. If it was done with a dagger, then (13a) is true, wherever LeStab occurred. If it occurred in the library, then (14a) is true, however LeStab was done. If both prepositional phrases are true of LeStab, (1a) and (15a)


\emph{\textbf{(1a)} ∃}e\emph{[S}car\emph{S}tab\emph{M}usty\emph{(}e\emph{) \&} with\emph{(}e\emph{,} a dagger\emph{) \&} in\emph{(}e\emph{, T}he\emph{L}ibrary\emph{)]}


\emph{\textbf{(15a)} ∃}e\emph{[S}car\emph{S}tab\emph{M}usty\emph{(}e\emph{) \&} in\emph{(}e\emph{,} the library\emph{) \&} with\emph{(}e\emph{,} a dagger\emph{)]}


are both true, with S\emph{car}S\emph{tab}M\emph{usty}(\emph{e}) abbreviating \emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, M\emph{s}S\emph{carlet}, C\emph{ol}M\emph{ustard}).


This preserves the idea that if (2) is true, then Miss Scarlet bore a certain relation to Colonel Mustard. We can say that \emph{stabbed}(\emph{x}, \emph{y}) is true of the ordered pair <β, γ> iff for some event α, \emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) is true of <α, β, γ>. More briefly, \emph{stabbed}(\emph{x}, \emph{y}) is true of <β, γ> iff β stabbed γ. In which case, (2b) is true iff (2\Slash{}2a) is true.


\textbf{\emph{(2b)}} stabbed\emph{(M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{)}


We can even say that (2) has (2b) as a “simplified” logical form. For if we simply wanted to explain why (2) implies both (16) and (17), then (2b) might be an adequate model for (2).


\textbf{(16)} Someone stabbed Colonel Mustard.


\textbf{(17)} Miss Scarlet stabbed someone.


But if we want to explain why (2) follows from longer sentences like (13),


\textbf{(13)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard with a dagger.


we cannot think of “stabbed” as a predicate that is true of ordered pairs like <Scarlet, Mustard>.


We can stipulate that \emph{stabbed}-\emph{with}(\emph{x}, \emph{y}, \emph{z}) is true of <β, γ, δ> iff β stabbed γ with δ, and hypothesize that (13) has the logical form (13b).


\textbf{\emph{(13b)}} stabbed-with\emph{(M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{,} a dagger\emph{)}


But \emph{stabbed}-\emph{with}(\emph{x}, \emph{y}, \emph{z}) and \emph{stabbed}(\emph{x}, \emph{y}) are different predicates, with different adicities, like \emph{between}(\emph{x}, \emph{y}, \emph{z}) and \emph{from}(\emph{x}, \emph{y}). So even if specifications like (13b) and (2b) are adequate for some purposes, they leave relevant facts about English unexplained, absent some account of \emph{why} \emph{stabbed}(\emph{x}, \emph{y}) is true of <β, γ> whenever \emph{stabbed}-\emph{with}(\emph{x}, \emph{y}, \emph{z}) is true of <β, γ, δ>.


The inadequacy of (13b) becomes clearer if Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard twice. Suppose one stab was a bit clumsy, resulting in a superficial wound on Mustard's left side, but the other was a proficient and fatal stab on his right side. Gareth Evans used this kind of example to highlight two related points.\footnote{Taylor (1985) discusses such examples, citing Christopher Arnold who cited Evans.} The first is that Davidson's analysis makes a correct prediction: (18) and (19) can be true, along with their implications (20–23), while (24) and (25) are false.


\textbf{(18)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard clumsily with a grey dagger.


\textbf{(19)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard proficiently with a red dagger.


\textbf{(20)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard clumsily.


\textbf{(21)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard with a grey dagger.


\textbf{(22)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard proficiently.


\textbf{(23)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard with a red dagger.


\textbf{(24)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard clumsily with a red dagger.


\textbf{(25)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard proficiently with a grey dagger.


Given ∃\emph{x}[S(\emph{x}) \& C(\emph{x}) \& G(\emph{x})] and ∃\emph{x}[S(\emph{x}) \& P(\emph{x}) \& R(\emph{x})], then trivially: ∃\emph{x}[S(\emph{x}) \& C(\emph{x})]; ∃\emph{x}[S(\emph{x}) \& G(\emph{x})]; ∃\emph{x}[S(\emph{x}) \& P(\emph{x})]; and ∃\emph{x}[S(\emph{x}) \& R(\emph{x})]. But neither ∃\emph{x}[S(\emph{x}) \& C(\emph{x}) \& R(\emph{x})] nor ∃\emph{x}[S(\emph{x}) \& P(\emph{x}) \& G(\emph{x})] follows.


By contrast, the implication facts illustrated with (18–25) are puzzling if adverbial modification is analyzed relationally as in (13b) or (20a–21a).


\textbf{\emph{(20a)}} stabbed-clumsily\emph{(S}carlet\emph{, M}ustard\emph{)}


\textbf{\emph{(21a)}} stabbed-with-a-grey-dagger\emph{(S}carlet\emph{, M}ustard\emph{)}


For in that case, (18) is presumably to be analyzed as in (18a),


\textbf{\emph{(18a)}} stabbed-clumsily-with-a-grey-dagger\emph{(S}carlet\emph{, M}ustard\emph{)}


while (23–24) are to be analyzed as in (23a–24a).


\textbf{\emph{(23a)}} stabbed-with-a-red-dagger\emph{(S}carlet\emph{, M}ustard\emph{)}


\textbf{\emph{(24a)}} stabbed-clumsily-with-a-red-dagger\emph{(S}carlet\emph{, M}ustard\emph{)}


This raises the question of why (18) implies (20) and (21), but (20) and (23) do \emph{not} jointly imply (24) – and why (19) implies (22) and (23), but (22) and (21) do \emph{not} jointly imply (25).


This suggests replacing (18a) with (18b).


\emph{\textbf{(18b)} ∃}e\emph{[}stabbed\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{) \&} clumsily\emph{(}e\emph{) \&} with\emph{(}e\emph{,} a grey dagger\emph{)]}


Evans' second point concerned the requisite “truthmakers” for any such logical forms; where a truthmaker for ∃\emph{x}[Φ(\emph{x})] is simply a thing that Φ(\emph{x}) is true of, and Φ(\emph{x}) may be complex without specifying the \emph{sort} of thing it is true of. An invented sentence like (7a)


\emph{\textbf{(7a)} ∃}x\emph{[}spy\emph{(}x\emph{) \&} arrived\emph{(}x\emph{)]}


does not itself reveal what sort of thing the predicate \emph{spy}(\emph{x}) \& \emph{arrived}(\emph{x}) is true of. Rather, we have an independent conception of spies as spatiotemporally located individuals. But our independent conception of stabbings is less clear. So if only to understand formalism like (18b), in the context of Davidson's proposal, one wants to hear more about what the constituent predicates are true of – or rather, what such predicates need to be true of, in order for Davidsonian logical forms to capture the assumed truth conditions of English declaratives.


The issue here is not simply a matter of wanting to know what events are, in the way that a metaphysician might want to know what people, ships, or numbers are. Note that (2a)


\emph{\textbf{(2a)} ∃}e\emph{[}stabbed\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{)]}


does not itself rule out the possibility that “\emph{e}” ranges over sets like \{Scarlet, Mustard\}. But \emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) is not substantively different than \emph{stabbed}(\emph{x}, \emph{y}) if the triadic predicate can only be true of triples of the form <\{α, β\}, α, β>. For in that case, \emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) is not true of \emph{two} events of Scarlet stabbing Mustard, and we lose the explanation for how (18–19) can be true while (24–25) are false. More interestingly, as Evans noted, Davidsonian truth-makers for logical forms like (18b) need to be individuated more finely than ordered triples of the form <\emph{t}, α, β>, where \emph{t} is the relevant moment\Slash{}interval of time. Suppose the two stabs of Mustard by Scarlet – call them LeStabGauche and LeStabDroite – were simultaneous, each occurring at dawn. Since only one stab was proficient and fatal, we cannot identify both with <dawn, Scarlet, Mustard>.\footnote{The daggers differed. But Mustard could have been wounded twice, at dawn, with one weapon.}


More generally, Davidsonian events need to be things that happen at times and have participants, without \emph{being} n-tuples of times and participants. One wants some sense of what these things are, in order to evaluate the claim that English declaratives imply that there are such things.

\subsection{1.3. Enough but not too many}


Intuitively, events happen in places. And while both stabs occurred in the library, their specific “paths” differed. So perhaps events are, or at least are individuated by, regions of spacetime. Following Quine (1960), one might adopt (26) as a generalization;


\textbf{(26)} ∀e∀f[e = f iff e has the same spatiotemporal properties as f]


where by hypothesis, “e” and “f” range over events, and talk of properties can be replaced with talk of predicates and truth. This is a special case of a familiar but tendentious principle concerning all spatiotemporally located entities: there cannot be \emph{two} that “match” the same region of space-time in the sense of fully occupying and being included entirely by that region.\footnote{For any spatiotemporally located entity x, let R(x) be the region that both includes x entirely and is fully occupied by x. If a particular entity α is a proper part of another entity β, then R(α) will not include β entirely, and α will not fully occupy R(β); although β may fully occupy R(α), and R(β) may include α entirely. If neither α nor β is a part of the other, but γ is a proper part of both – with the consequence that R(α) ≠ R(β), although both regions include R(γ) – then α and β can be distinct entities that “overlap” in R(γ).} We need not worry here about whether a person\Slash{}ship\Slash{}statue, whose constituting molecules vary over time, can be wholly present at a moment and thus match a brief region of space-time that is also matched by the corresponding fusion of molecules. For even if it makes sense to speak of an event (or process) undergoing change over time, one can plausibly maintain that if an event α begins at time \emph{t} and ends at time \emph{t}\textsuperscript{+}, then α is not wholly present at \emph{t}, \emph{t}\textsuperscript{+}, or any intervening moment. Events that are not instantaneous may well unfold over time without enduring through time. Still, Quinean events seem to be individuated too coarsely for a Davidsonian semantics.


Consider the much-discussed example of a ball that is spinning while it is warming up. Let α be a minute-long event of the ball spinning. Let α′ be the event of the ball warming up in that same spatiotemporal region. It seems that α can have effects that differ from those of α′. For example, it might be that α caused α′ (but not vice versa), or that α (but not α′) caught Scarlet's attention. In which case, α and α′ are distinct colocated events. Appealing to n-tuples of regions and participants would not help. For even if parts of the ball count as participants, α and α′ seem to involve the same parts. And if only because it is hard to specify the locations of human actions that involve planning or cooperation, one might think that many actions share their (vague) spatiotemporal boundaries with other events. Perhaps as Davidson (1970) claimed, each action can be described in physical terms and identified with a physical event that has certain spatiotemporal coordinates. But it seems that distinct physical events can share their coordinates.


One might suggest that the spinning differs from the warming because the property of spinning differs from the property of warming. Perhaps an event is an exemplification of – or change with respect to – some property by one or more objects at a time; see Kim (1976). On this view, events can be represented as triples of the form <P, \emph{t}, o>; where property P is exemplified at time \emph{t} by o, which may be an ordered n-tuple of objects that exemplify a relational property. One can say that at dawn, Mustard exemplified many properties: being stabbed with a grey dagger, being stabbed with a red dagger, being an officer, and so on. Likewise, one can say that <Scarlet, Mustard> exemplified various relational properties: stabbing clumsily, stabbing proficiently, loathing, and so on. The corresponding exemplifications are of the form <P, \emph{dawn}, o>. One can call these abstracta “events,” and stipulate that predicates like \emph{in}(\emph{e}, \emph{the library}) can be true of them. But these things seem to be individuated too finely for a Davidsonian semantics.


The property of being stabbed with a grey dagger differs from the property of being stabbed with a dagger, even though Mustard exemplified both at dawn. Likewise, the properties of stabbing, stabbing clumsily, and stabbing proficiently – call them π, π′, and π″ – differ, even if <Scarlet, Mustard> exemplified all three at dawn.\footnote{Some pairs of predicates may correspond to the same property. But those that exhibit asymmetric implications correspond to different properties. Compare (20a–24) earlier.} So we can distinguish the corresponding exemplifications ε, ε′, and ε″. And let us stipulate that \emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, M\emph{s}S\emph{carlet}, C\emph{ol}M\emph{ustard}) is true of and only of past exemplifications of π, the property of stabbing, by <Scarlet, Mustard>. Then \emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, M\emph{s}S\emph{carlet}, C\emph{ol}M\emph{ustard}) is true of ε. But it does not follow that this predicate is true of ε′ and ε″. If ε′ and ε″ exemplify π – or their existence in any way implies that π is exemplified, and hence that (2a) is true – this further fact calls for explanation.


\emph{\textbf{(2a)} ∃}e\emph{[}stabbed\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{)]}


And this is no alternative to Davidson's proposal if the explanation is that π, π′, and π″ are complex properties of the forms ∃\emph{e}[S(\emph{e})], ∃\emph{e}[S(\emph{e}) \& C(\emph{e})], and ∃\emph{e}[S(\emph{e}) \& P(\emph{e})]; cp. (20a–24a).


On Davidson's view, the event of Scarlet stabbing Mustard clumsily \emph{is} the event of Scarlet stabbing Mustard – and hence a truthmaker for (2a) – just as each spy from Sweden is a spy. The idea is that endlessly many predicates can be true of a single event, person, or whatever. As Davidson stressed, satisfying logically related but distinct descriptions is a special case of satisfying distinct descriptions. A certain spy from Sweden can be the woman who played the piano, though of course, “spy from Sweden” does not imply “woman who played the piano.” Likewise, on Davidson's view, a certain stabbing that occurred at dawn can be an action that was done with a dagger, a cause of an officer's death, a felony not witnessed by Mrs. Peacock, and so on.


In this sense, Davidsonian events are description neutral: many English predicates can be true of the \emph{same} event. But Davidson did not merely assume that the world includes things that we can call events and describe in many ways. These things must include enough truthmakers for the proposed logical forms of true English sentences. And these truthmakers need to be individuated more coarsely than property exemplifications, yet more finely than (n-tuples of participants and) spatiotemporal regions. But it is not obvious that the world includes the requisite “medium-grain” events.\footnote{If there are no truthmakers for logical forms like (13a), \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf \emph{\textbf{(13a)} ∃}e\emph{[}stabbed\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{) \&} with\emph{(}e\emph{,} a dagger\emph{)]} \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf one can still adopt Davidson's semantic proposal and say that (13–25) are all false. But this is a bit like saying that countries don't really exist, and hence that (10) must be false. \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf \textbf{(10)} A spy from Sweden arrived. \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf And for Davidson, it was important that a semantic theory \emph{not} be part of a broader conception of the world (and what happens in it) according to which ordinary declaratives are regularly false even when endorsed by competent judges.}

\section{2. Events to Quantify Over}


In thinking about the alleged truthmakers for logical forms like (20a),


\emph{\textbf{(20a)} ∃}e\emph{[}stabbed\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{) \&} clumsily\emph{(}e\emph{)]}


we quickly encounter a question about Davidson's choice of notation, and then more substantive questions about when distinct predicates can be true of the same event.

\subsection{2.1. Ordering participants}


Suppose the adverb “clumsily” is true of LeStabGauche, the stabbing of Mustard (on his left side) done by Scarlet with a gray dagger in the library at dawn. Then on Davidson's view, the verb “stabbed” is true of <LeStabGauche, Scarlet, Mustard> rather than LeStabGauche itself, or the sextuple <LeStabGauche, Scarlet, Mustard, the grey dagger, the library, dawn>. Section 3 addresses the possibility that “stabbed” is not true of ordered triples, and that the verb has a simple monadic logical form. But suppose that Scarlet and Mustard are not only the stabber and stabbee of a certain clumsy stabbing, they and the stabbing form a trio that the verb is true of. As noted earlier, this preserves a relational description of the verb meaning by \emph{adding} a relatum. The transitive verb, which combines with a grammatical subject and object in both (20) and the adverbless (2), is analyzed in terms of a \emph{three}-place relation.\footnote{The ditransitive verb in “Mustard gave Scarlet a dollar” can analyzed in terms of a \emph{four}-place relation, and the intransitive verb in “Scarlet arrived” can be analyzed in terms of a \emph{two}-place relation. In this respect, Davidson's proposal is formally akin to Frege's (1892) observation that for every function that maps each natural number to another there is a corresponding function that maps each ordered pair of natural numbers to one of two truth values.}


\textbf{(2)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard.


Davidson's notation thus allows for the possibility that a verb might be true of both <α, β, γ> and the distinct ordered triple <α, γ, β>, where α is an event in which β and γ participate.


Imagine two rocks colliding, exactly once, with (27) and (28) being equally true.


\textbf{(27)} The red rock struck the yellow rock.


\textbf{(28)} The yellow rock struck the red rock.


If \emph{struck}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) is the logical form of “struck,” while \emph{struck}(\emph{e}, T\emph{he}R\emph{ed}R\emph{ock}, T\emph{he}Y\emph{ellow}R\emph{ock}) and \emph{struck}(\emph{e}, T\emph{he}Y\emph{ellow}R\emph{ock}, T\emph{he}R\emph{ed}R\emph{ock}) are both true of the one collision, this raises questions about how to handle examples like (29–30).


\textbf{(29)} The red rock struck the yellow rock forcefully from the west.


\textbf{(30)} The yellow rock struck the red rock forcefully from the east.


\emph{Prima facie}, \emph{from}(\emph{e}, T\emph{he}W\emph{est}) and \emph{from}(\emph{e}, T\emph{he}E\emph{ast}) cannot both be true of the collision. So one might treat \emph{struck}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) as shorthand for \emph{struck}(\emph{e}) \& ∃\emph{f}[\emph{e} = <\emph{f}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}>]. On this view, not quite Davidson's, the logical forms of (27) and (28) are as shown.


\emph{\textbf{(27a)} ∃}e\emph{\{}struck\emph{(}e\emph{) \& ∃}f\emph{[}e \emph{= <}f\emph{, T}he\emph{R}ed\emph{R}ock\emph{, T}he\emph{Y}ellow\emph{R}ock\emph{>]\}}


\emph{\textbf{(28a)} ∃}e\emph{\{}struck\emph{(}e\emph{) \& ∃}f\emph{[}e \emph{= <}f\emph{, T}he\emph{Y}ellow\emph{R}ock\emph{, T}he\emph{R}ed\emph{R}ock\emph{>]\}}


One can still say that “struck” is true of <α, β, γ> iff α was an event of β striking γ, and that such an event can be one of γ striking β. So the collision can be the one relevant value of “\emph{f}” – and in that sense, a shared truthmaker – for both (27a) and (27a). But there are still two relevant values of “\emph{e},” and in that sense, distinct truthmakers for (27a) and (28a): \emph{struck}(\emph{e}) is true of \emph{both} <the collision, the red rock, the yellow rock> \emph{and} <the collision, the yellow rock, the red rock>. One can add that adverbial modifiers are like verbs in being true of ordered n-tuples that include participants, rather than mere events. Perhaps \emph{forcefully}(\emph{e}) is also true of both triples, while \emph{from}(\emph{e}, T\emph{he}W\emph{est}) is only true of the first, and \emph{from}(\emph{e}, T\emph{he}E\emph{ast}) is only true of the second. This accommodates (29–30). But the proliferation of truthmakers, irrelevant for many examples, suggests that linguistic descriptions do matter with regard to what the conjuncts of logical forms are true of. The one collision corresponds to a pair of relevant things that \emph{struck}(\emph{e}) is true of. This threatens the spirit of appeal to medium grained events as truth makers.


As we will see, the tension here is not confined to overtly “perspectival” predicates like “from the west.” And the issue is not merely whether the relevant values of \emph{e}-variables are spatiotemporally located particulars, or n-tuples that have such particulars as elements. Davidson took the relevant variable values to be (medium-grained) things that can be described in many conjunctive ways, in an ideal language, \emph{and} things that predicates of a naturally acquirable language like English are often true of. The question is whether our naturally acquired words conform to this semantic conception of them. So unsurprisingly, discussion in the literature often focuses on examples of episodes that can be described in grammatically distinct but symmetric ways, as in (28–29), or in a correspondingly neutral way as in (31–32).\footnote{See Costa (1987), Lasersohn (1990), Lombard (1985), Schein (2002, forthcoming), Taylor (1985). Discussion of “The rocks collided and rained down on the huts,” with its plural subject, is beyond the scope of this essay; but see Boolos (1998), Lasersohn (1995), Pietroski (2005), and Schein (1993).}


\textbf{(31)} A rock struck a rock forcefully.


\textbf{(32)} There was a collision.


One wants to say that a certain spatotemporally located event can be the sole truthmaker for (32), and the only event that ∃\emph{x}∃\emph{y}[\emph{struck}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) \& \emph{rock}(\emph{x}) \& \emph{rock}(\emph{y}) \& \emph{forceful}(\emph{e})] is true of. But was the striking of the yellow rock (by the red) exactly as forceful as the collision? More generally, is each English predicate true of the collision iff it is true of either striking of rock by rock? And is this biconditional compatible with saying that predicates like “a rock struck a rock,” which can be combined with “forcefully,” are true of events like the collision?


Examples like (33) and (34) raise similar issues, though with further complications.


\textbf{(33)} Mister Green married Miss Scarlet enthusiastically, but Miss Scarlet married Mister Green without any enthusiasm.


\textbf{(34)} One squirrel happily chased another around a tree, while the second squirrel unhappily chased the first around the same tree.


One can say that \emph{married}(\emph{e}, M\emph{r}G\emph{reen}, M\emph{s}S\emph{carlet}) and \emph{married}(\emph{e}, M\emph{s}S\emph{carlet}, M\emph{r}G\emph{reen}) are true of different events. Perhaps wherever there is marrying, there are distinct events of marrying, corresponding to what each participant does. But this seems to be inferring ontology from adverbial modifiers that are oriented to grammatical subjects. Green's role – reciting his lines, giving a ring, and so on – was distinct from Scarlet's. But one might have expected Davidsonians to identify the event of Green marrying Scarlet with the entire ceremony, which was also the event of Scarlet marrying Green, and a wedding. Davidsonians may need a different view, since no event is both enthusiastic and devoid of enthusiasm. But this illustrates the tension between positing the events required by conjunction reduction analyses, and treating ordinary phrases as predicates of description neutral episodes. And this tension is not easily resolved.

\subsection{2.2. Timing}


Suppose that Green made his vows, then Scarlet made hers, and then a minister declared them married. If the event of Green marrying Scarlet was identical with \emph{his} contribution to the ceremony, then that event ended before Scarlet completed \emph{her} contribution, and before either Mustard or Scarlet was married to the other. But while (35) is true, (36) seems false.


\textbf{(35)} Mister Green pledged his troth before Miss Scarlet pledged her troth.


\textbf{(36)} Mister Green married Miss Scarlet before she married him.


In one respect, “before” is grist for Davidson's mill, since he can offer plausible logical forms.


\emph{\textbf{(35a)} ∃}e\emph{[}pledged\emph{(}e\emph{, M}r\emph{G}reen\emph{,} his troth\emph{) \&\forcelinebreak  ∃}f\emph{[}before\emph{(}e\emph{,} f\emph{) \&} pledged\emph{(}f\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{,} her troth\emph{)]}


\emph{\textbf{(36a)} ∃}e\emph{[}married\emph{(}e\emph{, M}r\emph{G}reen\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{) \&\forcelinebreak  ∃}f\emph{[}before\emph{(}e\emph{,} f\emph{) \&} married\emph{(}f\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{)]}


And given that β marries γ iff γ marries β, one might have expected \emph{married}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) to be true of <α, β, γ> iff this predicate is true of <α, γ, β>. But if \emph{married}(\emph{e}, M\emph{r}G\emph{reen}, M\emph{s}S\emph{carlet}) and \emph{married}(\emph{f}, M\emph{s}S\emph{carlet}, M\emph{r}G\emph{reen}) are both true of the same event, then (36a) is false.


One can instead insist that (36\Slash{}36a) is true, but sounds wrong because Green's action could not be described as a marrying until others did their bits, much as an Oscar-winning performance cannot be correctly described as such until the Oscar is awarded. Davidson (1967a) offered this kind of response to the similar question of when a killing occurs. Suppose that Colonel Mustard died an hour after being stabbed. \emph{Prima facie}, (37) is true but (38) is false.


\textbf{(37)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard at dawn, and he died an hour later.


\textbf{(38)} Miss Scarlet killed Colonel Mustard at dawn, and he died an hour later.


This suggests that the stabbing and the killing are different events, with the killing not being over until Mustard's death, which was caused by the stabbing in question. But on Davidson's view, “stab” and “kill” provide different ways of describing something that Scarlet did, so the predicates \emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, M\emph{s}S\emph{carlet}, C\emph{ol}M\emph{ustard}) and \emph{killed}(\emph{e}, M\emph{s}S\emph{carlet}, C\emph{ol}M\emph{ustard}) are both true of Scarlet's use of the red dagger in the library at dawn. In which case, (38) is true; it just sounds wrong because Scarlet's action could not be described as a killing until Mustard died.


Davidson sharply distinguished descriptions and their logical consequences from things described. He noted that given what “sunburnt” means, skin is sunburnt only if it was burnt by exposure to the sun. But intuitively, the burning occurs wholly where the skin is. And according to Davidson, an action occurs wholly where the relevant agent is: if the action was a killing, then someone died; but the death was not part of the action. Yet one might grant this point, taking actions to be the causal contributions of agents, and conclude that \emph{killed}(\emph{e}, M\emph{s}S\emph{carlet}, C\emph{ol}M\emph{ustard}) is not true of an action in this sense. For one might think that (38) is false, as opposed to odd sounding for the reason Davidson suggests, especially since (39) sounds fine.


\textbf{(39)} Scarlet stabbed Mustard fatally at dawn, and he died an hour later.


A stabbing, like an illness, can be described as fatal before the relevant death. So it seems that the killing differs from the fatal stabbing after all. Moreover, (40) and (41) can be true,


\textbf{(40)} Scarlet shot Green with a revolver.


\textbf{(41)} Scarlet pulled the trigger with her ring finger.


while (42) and certainly (43) are false. So apparently, the shooting differs from the pulling.


\textbf{(42)} Scarlet shot Green with her ring finger.


\textbf{(43)} Scarlet pulled the trigger with a revolver.


Hence, \emph{shot}(\emph{e}, S\emph{carlet}, G\emph{reen}) and \emph{pulled}(\emph{e}, S\emph{carlet}, T\emph{he}T\emph{rigger}) need to be true of different events if (40a–41a) are the logical forms of (40–41); see, for example, Pietroski (1998).


\emph{\textbf{(40a)} ∃}e\emph{[}shot\emph{(}e\emph{, S}carlet\emph{, G}reen\emph{) \&} with\emph{(}e\emph{,} a revolver\emph{)]}


\emph{\textbf{(41a)} ∃}e\emph{[}pulled\emph{(}e\emph{, S}carlet\emph{, T}he \emph{T}rigger\emph{) \&} with\emph{(}e\emph{,} her ring finger\emph{)]}


This raises further questions about what actions are. But whatever the answers, individuating events as required by conjunction reduction analyses may not cohere with treatments of English phrases as predicates that are true of description neutral episodes.


One can agree with Davidson that when Scarlet shot Green, her action was \emph{her} contribution to the causal order, and that this contribution was finished when she squeezed the trigger. But in light of adverbial modifiers, one can still distinguish pullings from shootings, pledgings from marryings, and so on. Feinberg (1965) spoke of the “accordion effect,” exhibited when we describe what people do in terms of sequenced effects of their actions – for example, the motion of a trigger, a bullet entering Green, and his subsequent death. Correlatively, a single action might be the root of distinct but nested processes, as indicated.\footnote{See Thalberg (1972) and Thomson (1971, 1977).}


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But if this action is itself the truthmaker for (40a) and (41a), then (42a) and (43a) would be true.


\emph{\textbf{(42a)} ∃}e\emph{[}shot\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, M}r\emph{G}reen\emph{) \&} with\emph{(}e\emph{,} her ring finger\emph{)]}


\emph{\textbf{(43a)} ∃}e\emph{[}pulled\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, T}he\emph{T}rigger\emph{) \&} with\emph{(}e\emph{,} a revolver\emph{)]}


So it seems that Scarlet's action is \emph{not} the truthmaker for (40a) and (41a), even if (40) and (41) can often be used to talk about the same root action, whatever that action is.\footnote{See note 12. See also Francken and Lombard (1992), Ginet (1990), Pietroski (2000), and Wilson (1989). Speakers can use expressions to talk about things that the expressions are not true of; see, for example, Donnellan (1966). One might posit more complex forms like (40b); \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf \emph{\textbf{(40b)} ∃}a\emph{∃}e\emph{[R(}a\emph{,} e\emph{) \&} shot\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, M}r\emph{G}reen\emph{) \&} with\emph{(}e\emph{,} a revolver\emph{)]} \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf where R(\emph{a}, \emph{e}) is true of <α, β> iff α is the action “at the root of” β. But even if (40b) is true iff (40a) is true, this may reflect the metaphysics of shooting (or the accordion effect).}

\subsection{2.3. Intentions}


Consider (44), in which the understood subject of “shoot” goes unpronounced.


\textbf{(44)} Scarlet killed Green by shooting him.


In one respect, “by” is grist for Davidson's mill, since he can offer a plausible logical form;


\emph{\textbf{(44a)} ∃}e\emph{[}killed\emph{(}e\emph{, S}carlet\emph{, G}reen\emph{) \& ∃}f\emph{[}by\emph{(}e\emph{,} f\emph{) \&} stabbing\emph{(}f\emph{,} her\emph{,} him\emph{)]]}


where the pronouns are to be understood, anaphorically, in the obvious way. Compare (45\Slash{}45a).


\textbf{(45)} Scarlet married Green before shooting him.


\emph{\textbf{(45a)} ∃}e\emph{[}married\emph{(}e\emph{, S}carlet\emph{, G}reen\emph{) \&\forcelinebreak  ∃}f\emph{[}before\emph{(}e\emph{,} f\emph{) \&} shooting\emph{(}f\emph{,} her\emph{,} him\emph{)]]}


But in each case, the preposition indicates an asymmetric relation. Scarlet did not shoot Green by killing him (or by shooting him). So again, it seems that the killing was somehow distinct from the corresponding use of a weapon. And if Scarlet fired the revolver in the kitchen, but Green died days later in a hospital, (46) seems wrong while (47) seems right.


\textbf{(46)} Scarlet killed Green in the kitchen.


\textbf{(47)} Scarlet shot Green in the kitchen and thereby killed him.


It seems that “by” can indicate a relation exhibited by event-description pairs, rather than mere event pairs. But in specifying logical forms, one can employ the predicate \emph{by}(<\emph{e}, @@@ 
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 \&\&\&>, <\emph{f},@@@
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′>), where@@@
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 ranges over descriptions of events. Davidson's emphasis on the linguistic neutrality of \emph{events} is compatible with the hypothesis that \emph{certain} sentences have logical forms that somehow involve quantification over both events and descriptions. And with regard to “by,” some such hypothesis may be correct, given how (48) is related to (49).


\textbf{(48)} Scarlet killed Green by shooting him, and she shot him Φ.


\textbf{(49)} Scarlet killed Green by shooting him Φ.


It does not seem to be a matter of logic that for each modifier Φ, (49) is true if (48) is true and Scarlet shot Green exactly once. Suppose that Scarlet shot Green with pleasure for the insurance money. Did she kill him \emph{by} shooting him with pleasure for the insurance money? Perhaps. But it is far clearer that she married Green \emph{before} shooting him with pleasure for the insurance money.


This point is related to the contrast, noted earlier, between Davidson's medium grained events and Kim's (1976) property exemplifications. Suppose the bridge across the piranha pond collapsed because a certain bolt suddenly gave way. On Davidson's view, this cause of the collapse might have been the motion at midnight of the second item that Scarlet bought at the local hardware store. But one does not explain the collapse by noting that her second purchase from that store moved at midnight. Indeed, it seems that (50) might be true while (51) is false.


\textbf{(50)} The bridge collapsed because the bolt gave way suddenly.


\textbf{(51)} The bridge collapsed because the bolt gave way.


Suppose that the bridge would have stayed up had the bolt given way gradually. Kim used this kind of example to argue for a conception of events according to which the event of the bolt giving way suddenly \emph{differs} from the event of the bolt giving way. Davidson took the example to show that “because” can indicate an explanatory relation that is description sensitive in a way that causation – a relation exhibited by pairs of events – is not.


Let α, β, and γ be, respectively, the collapse, the bolt giving way suddenly, and the bolt giving way. And assume that \emph{cause}(\emph{e}, \emph{f}) applies to the event pair <β, α>. If \emph{because}(\emph{e}, \emph{f}) applies to <α, β>, and β = γ, then \emph{because}(\emph{e}, \emph{f}) applies to <α, γ>. Kim rejected the identity claim, saying that β and γ are distinct property exemplifications. But as discussed earlier, this makes it hard to see why (52) implies (53).


\textbf{(52)} The bolt gave way suddenly.


\textbf{(53)} The bolt gave way.


Davidson maintained the identity claim, holding that the contrast in (52–53) reflects the description sensitivity of explanation. Instead of saying that “because” is true of event pairs, one can appeal to a predicate \emph{because}(<\emph{e},@@@
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>, <\emph{f},@@@
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′>) that applies to pairs of event-description pairs, where this predicate can apply to <<α, “bridge collapse”>, <β, “bolt gave way suddenly”>> without applying to <<α, “bridge collapse”>, <β, “bolt gave way”>>. The event of the bolt giving way can be \emph{described so that} its occurrence explains why bridge collapsed. But this event can also be described in ways that do not provide any such explanation.


On Davidson's view, the midnight motion of Scarlet's second purchase from the hardware store did \emph{cause} the bridge across the piranha pond to collapse. Indeed, Davidson (1969) proposed the generalization (54), according to which events are individuated by their causes and effects.


\textbf{(54)} ∀e∀f[e = f iff e has the same causes and effects as f]


Setting aside the possibility of events that have \emph{no} causes or effects, a counterexample to (54) would be a pair of distinct events that have the same causes and effects. And if explanation is distinguished from description neutral causation, then cases like the bridge collapse do not constitute counterexamples. So (54) may well be correct. But this “identity criterion” is not reductive if, as Davidson maintained, causes and effects are themselves events. Given two event descriptions,@@@
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 and@@@
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′, (54) implies that they describe the \emph{same} event iff the event described by@@@
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 has the same causes and effects as the event described by@@@
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′. In short, two descriptions describe the same event iff they describe the same node in the causal network of events. And this has implications for truth, given event analyses.


If the logical form of (55) is (55a), and (56) implies (55),


\textbf{(55)} Mr. Green flipped the switch.


\emph{\textbf{(55a)} ∃}e\emph{[}flipped\emph{(}e\emph{, M}r\emph{G}reen\emph{, T}he\emph{S}witch\emph{)]}


\textbf{(56)} Mr. Green intentionally flipped the switch.


then (56a) is presumably the logical form of (55).


\emph{\textbf{(56a)} ∃}e\emph{[}flipped\emph{(}e\emph{, M}r\emph{G}reen\emph{, T}he\emph{S}witch\emph{) \&} intentional\emph{(}e\emph{)]}


But suppose that by flipping the light switch in the conservatory, Mr. Green thereby electrocuted Mrs. Peacocke unintentionally: Green just wanted to turn on the lights; he did not know the switch had been rigged. Then (55–57) are true, while (58) is false.\footnote{Uncontextualized, (63) would be misleading. But if Green electrocuted Peacocke without intending to do – if he electrocuted her \emph{unintentionally} – then he electrocuted her.}


\textbf{(57)} Mr. Green electrocuted Mrs. Peacocke.


\textbf{(58)} Mr. Green intentionally electrocuted Mrs. Peacocke.


But if the logical forms of (57–58) are (57a–58a), Davidsonians face a difficulty.


\emph{\textbf{(57a)} ∃}e\emph{[}electrocuted\emph{(}e\emph{, M}r\emph{G}reen\emph{, M}rs\emph{P}eacocke\emph{)]}


\emph{\textbf{(58a)} ∃}e\emph{[}electrocuted\emph{(}e\emph{, M}r\emph{G}reen\emph{, M}rs\emph{P}eacocke\emph{) \&} intentional\emph{(}e\emph{)]}


Let “Flip” and “Zap” be names for, respectively, the truthmakers for (55a) and (57a). Even if Flip and Zap are distinct, say because only Zap involves a flow of electricity into Peacocke, it is initially hard to see how \emph{intentional}(\emph{e}) could be true of Flip but not Zap. For like Flip, Zap was guided by an intention to turn on the lights. But Davidson suggested that this is another special case of event descriptions being relevant to truth. If (59) can be true while (60) is false,


\textbf{(59)} Mr. Green flipped the switch, guided by the intention to do that.


\textbf{(60)} Mr. Green electrocuted Mrs. Peacocke, guided by the intention to do that.


perhaps “intentionally” should be treated – one way or another – as a description sensitive predicate, with the relevant description provided by the sentence in which the adverb appears.


Working out the details is not easy. But the general strategy coheres with Davidson's (1968) treatment of phrases like “said\Slash{}knew\Slash{}suspected that Scarlet shot Green” and “said\Slash{}knew\Slash{}promised he would electrocute Peacocke” as predicates that classify events or mental states in description sensitive ways, with the relevant descriptions provided by the embedded sentences.\footnote{Likewise, “In White's opinion, Scarlet shot Green” must differ logically from “In White's kitchen, Scarlet shot Green.” But to mention just one source of complication that Davidson (1963) stressed in a different context, (65) is logically stronger than “Green electrocuted Peacocke, and he intended to do so,” which does not logically imply a connection between the intention and the electrocution.}


By appealing to event descriptions, Davidsonians can accommodate many constructions that otherwise present difficulties for combining event analyses of natural sentences with a medium grained conception of events. But such accommodation is a double-edged sword.

\subsection{2.4. Perspectives and direct objects}


Consider (61–63) and the corresponding Davidsonian logical forms.


\textbf{(61)} Miss Scarlet played the sonata on the piano.


\emph{\textbf{(61a)} ∃}e\emph{[}played\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, T}he\emph{S}onata\emph{) \&} on\emph{(}e\emph{, T}he\emph{P}iano\emph{)]}


\textbf{(62)} Miss Scarlet played the sonata.


\emph{\textbf{(62a)} ∃}e\emph{[}played\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, T}he\emph{S}onata\emph{)]}


\textbf{(63)} Miss Scarlet played the piano.


\emph{\textbf{(63a)} ∃}e\emph{[}played\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, T}he\emph{P}iano\emph{)]}


Suppose that Scarlet played the sonata in question exactly once. Let α be the event of her playing it, so that α is plausibly the truthmaker for (61a) and (62a). Do not worry about whether (61) logically implies (63). But if (61) is true, then as a matter of fact, (63) is true. Of course, (63) would be true if Miss Scarlet only played the first movement of the sonata. But let α′ be the event of her playing the piano that has the same spatiotemporal properties as α. Then α′ is one among many overlapping truthmakers for (63a). And intuitively, α (the sonata-playing) is the same event as α′ (the piano-playing). If α can be described as a performance of Beethoven's 14th, starting at 8 p.m. and ending 16 minutes later, then α′ can also be described this way.


To be sure, Scarlet played the sonata by playing the piano, and not vice versa. But as we have seen, this is no reason for a Davidsonian to distinguish α from α′. And prima facie, α has the same causes and effects as α′: if β was a vibration of air caused by α, β was caused by α′; if α was caused by a desire to make Green drowsy, so was α′. Nonetheless, there are reasons for thinking that this one event – call it Moonlight – cannot be the common truthmaker for (61–63).


Suppose that \emph{played}(\emph{e}, M\emph{iss}S\emph{carlet}, T\emph{he}S\emph{onata}) and \emph{on}(\emph{e}, T\emph{he}P\emph{iano}) and \emph{played}(\emph{e}, M\emph{iss}S\emph{carlet}, T\emph{he}P\emph{iano}) are all true of Moonlight. Then (64a) is true.


\emph{\textbf{(64a)} ∃}e\emph{[}played\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, T}he\emph{P}iano\emph{) \&} on\emph{(}e\emph{, T}he\emph{P}iano\emph{)]}


But (64a) is presumably the logical form of (64), which seems false.


\textbf{(64)} Miss Scarlet played the piano on the piano.


And if (65\Slash{}65a) is true, then \emph{in}(\emph{e}, S\emph{ixteen}M\emph{inutes}) is true of Moonlight.


\textbf{(65)} Miss Scarlet played the sonata in 16 minutes.


\emph{\textbf{(65a)} ∃}e\emph{[}played\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, T}he\emph{S}onata\emph{) \&} in\emph{(}e\emph{, S}ixteen\emph{M}inutes\emph{)]}


In which case, (66a) is equally true. Yet (66) is anomalous, as indicated with the asterisk.


\emph{\textbf{(66a)} ∃}e\emph{[}played\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, T}he\emph{P}iano\emph{) \&} in\emph{(}e\emph{, S}ixteen\emph{M}inutes\emph{)]}


\textbf{(66)} *Miss Scarlet played the piano in 16 minutes.


Moreover, if (67) is true, then “gracefully” and “with confidence” are true of Moonlight.


\textbf{(67)} Miss Scarlet played the piano gracefully and with confidence.


Yet even given (61), (68) seems like a logically independent claim,


\textbf{(68)} Miss Scarlet played the sonata gracefully and with confidence.


which would have to be evaluated by considering what it would be to play that particular piece gracefully and with confidence. Compare (69–71).


\textbf{(69)} Professor Plum played \emph{My Way} in the style of Sinatra.


\textbf{(70)} Professor Plum played \emph{My Way} on his tuba.


\textbf{(71)} Professor Plum played his tuba in the style of Sinatra.


None of these points is decisive. One can insist that (64) is relevantly like (72),


\textbf{(72)} Miss Scarlet played the piano by playing the sonata.


and again invoke description sensitivity. Perhaps (66) is literally true but anomalous for purely formal reasons. And one might say that (67–71) are variants of an example that Davidson (1967a) discussed. If someone swims across the English Channel quickly, so that the swimming is the crossing, it can still be true that the person crossed the channel slowly – since an event can be slow for a channel crossing yet quick for a channel swimming, much as an insect can be large for an ant yet small for an animal. But defending such claims is no easy task. For example, if only because “big” and “slow” can appear in constructions like (73),


\textbf{(73)} Of those two ants, Adam is the big one, but other ants are even bigger.


plausible accounts of “big ant” and “crossed slowly” may not extend to “played his tuba in the style of Sinatra.” The concerns illustrated with (61–70) also raise the question of whether \emph{played}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) – or any Davidonian predicate of the form Φ(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) – can be true of \emph{any} pair of triples <α, β, γ> and <α, β, δ> such that γ and δ are distinct.


It seems that \emph{played}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) cannot be true of both <α, β, γ> and <α, δ, γ> if β and δ are distinct. So long as Scarlet differs from Plum, her playing of the piano differs from his, even if they played the same piano simultaneously; if they played a four-handed piece, then the relevant playing of the piano was not done by either \emph{one} of them. And since no piano is a tuba, it seems that \emph{played}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) cannot be true of both <α, Plum, the piano> and <α, Plum, the tuba>.\footnote{Plum may have used a device that let him play piano and tuba simultaneously, by performing one action α′ that did not include the sounding of either instrument; cf. John Wallace's case, discussed in Parsons (1990), of sinking two billiard balls with one shot. But then it seems that \emph{played}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) is not true of <α′, Plum, the piano> or <α′, Plum, the tuba>.} Intuition suggests that nonetheless, the event of Scarlet playing the sonata can \emph{be} an event of her playing the piano. Perhaps the abstractness of the sonata keeps it from competing with the piano as \emph{the} thing played in the relevant event. But it does not follow that “played”\Slash{}\emph{played}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) is true of both <Moonlight, Scarlet, the sonata> and <Moonlight, Scarlet, the piano>. For even if we can talk about events like Moonlight, by using verbs like “played,” the natural semantics for English – as opposed to a stipulated semantics for an invented analog of English – may preclude “played” from being true of both <α, β, γ> and <α, β, δ> if β and δ are distinct.


This is not idle skepticism about Davidson's proposal, since the adverbial modifiers in (61–70) suggest that Moonlight is not a common truthmaker for these sentences. And other considerations bolster this suggestion. Suppose that Professor Plum was one of ten people who together lifted a certain piano that no one person could lift. Then (74) seems wrong.\footnote{Perhaps one could say that Plum did a little piano-lifting before dinner. But the intended sense of (52a) is that at least one event was a \emph{lifting} of the piano by Professor Plum, not merely that he exerted some upward force on the piano. If it helps, replace “lifted the piano” with “raised five pianos to the ceiling.”}


\textbf{(74)} Professor Plum lifted the piano.


We can talk about the event of the piano rising off the ground, and say that it was brought about by 10 lifters acting in concert. But this event is not a truthmaker for (74a) if (74a) is false.


\emph{\textbf{(74a)} ∃}e\emph{[}lifted\emph{(}e\emph{, P}rof\emph{P}lum\emph{, T}he\emph{P}iano\emph{)]}


So \emph{prima facie}, “lifted” imposes an exhaustivity condition: \emph{lifted}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) is true of <α, β, γ> iff α is an event of β \emph{and no other individual} lifting γ, where this allows for help, from a friend or a machine, but not another individual β′ who counts as \emph{lifting} γ with help from β. One can deny that natural predicates are this demanding, and instead specify the logical form of “ate” with a predicate \emph{ate}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) that is true of <α, β, γ> iff α is an event of β \emph{and perhaps some other individuals} eating γ. But then we need some explanation for how (75) can be false if (76) is true.


\textbf{(75)} Professor Plum ate the largest watermelon that was eaten.


\textbf{(76)} Professor Plum ate a slice of the largest watermelon that was eaten.


Similar considerations suggest that “ate”\Slash{}\emph{ate}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) is true of <α, β, γ> iff α is an eating by β of γ and nothing else. If the predicate can be true of <α, β, γ> if α is an eating of γ and some other things, then a (description neutral) event of Plum eating an appetizer can also be an event of him eating a three course meal.\footnote{One might be tempted to say that eating the whole meal is one of many events that can be described as eating the appetizer, and also one of many events that can be described as eating the dessert. But then some (though not all) events of eating the appetizer are events of eating dessert.} As discussed later, some independently plausible developments of Davidson's proposal assume that participant variables respect exhaustivity constraints quite generally. But for now, the point is just that if \emph{played}(\emph{e}, S\emph{carlet}, T\emph{he}P\emph{iano}) and \emph{played}(\emph{e}, S\emph{carlet}, T\emph{he}S\emph{onata}) can true of the same event, then we need to know what constraints there are on which things can be played\Slash{}eaten\Slash{}and so on in a single truthmaker for an English sentence. Perhaps an ideal predicate \emph{played}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) would be equally true of <Moonlight, Scarlet, the piano> and <Moonlight, Scarlet, the sonata>. But especially given considerations in favor of exhaustivity, examples like (61–71) reveal costs of combining Davidson's conception of events with his hypotheses concerning logical forms.


Let me end this section by noting that independent evidence for the posited logical forms can heighten this tension. Reports of perceptions, as in (77–79),


\textbf{(77)} Peacock heard Mustard yell.


\textbf{(78)} Peacock heard Mustard's yell.


\textbf{(79)} Mustard yelled, and Peacock heard him.


remind us that a verb like “heard” can combine with an untensed clausal complement, like “Mustard yell,” to form a phrase.\footnote{The phrase “heard that Colonel Mustard yelled” is different again. If (74) is true, and Colonel Mustard was the tallest officer, Mrs. Peacocke heard the tallest officer yell. But if she heard that the Colonel yelled – say, because Professor Plum passed on the rumor – she need not have heard that the tallest officer yelled.} It is hard to accommodate this point if the logical form of “heard” is simply \emph{heard}(\emph{x}, \emph{y}). But if the logical form of (79) is (79a),


\emph{\textbf{(79a)} ∃}e\emph{[}yelled\emph{(}e\emph{, M}ustard\emph{)] \& ∃}e\emph{[}heard\emph{(}e\emph{, P}eacock\emph{,} him\emph{)]}


then (78a) is plausibly the logical form of (78).


\emph{\textbf{(78a)} ∃}e\emph{∃}f\emph{[}heard\emph{(}e\emph{, P}eacock\emph{,} f\emph{) \& M}ustard\emph{'}s\emph{(}f\emph{) \&} yell\emph{(}f\emph{)]}


And given this double quantification, according to which there was a hearing (by Peacock) of a yell (that in some sense belongs to Mustard), the logical form of (77) is plausibly (77a).


\emph{\textbf{(77a)} ∃}e\emph{∃}f\emph{[}heard\emph{(}e\emph{, P}eacock\emph{,} f\emph{) \&} yell\emph{(}f\emph{, M}ustard\emph{)]}


This hypothesis (see Higginbotham 1983; Vlach 1983) is supported by the ambiguity of (80).


\textbf{(80)} Peacock heard Mustard yell in the hall.


Peacock may have been in the hall when she perceived the yell, or Mustard may have been in the hall when he yelled. These readings are captured with (80a) and (80b).


\emph{\textbf{(80a)} ∃}e\emph{∃}f\emph{[}heard\emph{(}e\emph{, P}eacock\emph{,} f\emph{) \&} yell\emph{(}f\emph{, M}ustard\emph{) \&} in\emph{(}e\emph{, T}he \emph{H}all\emph{)]}


\emph{\textbf{(80b)} ∃}e\emph{∃}f\emph{[}heard\emph{(}e\emph{, P}eacock\emph{,} f\emph{) \&} yell\emph{(}f\emph{, M}ustard\emph{) \&} in\emph{(}f\emph{, T}he \emph{H}all\emph{)]}


This attractive analysis raises the question of whether (77–79) have the same truthmakers. Peacock's perception can be described as hearing Mustard, hearing his yell, or hearing Mustard yell. It seems gratuitous to posit multiple nodes in the network of causes\Slash{}effects just because her perception can be described in these ways. But if we cannot be sure that “heard” is only true of events that occur entirely where the hearer is, we face a question: is the perception α and yell β such that “heard” is true of both <α, Peacock, β> and <α, Peacock, Mustard>? We can say what we like about invented predicates like \emph{heard}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}). But if “heard” can be true of both ordered triples, are there limits on which things a single event of hearing can be a hearing of? Or does the distinction between Mustard and his yell already preclude “heard” from being true of both ordered triples, even if we use this verb to talk about auditory events in various ways?


Having raised these questions, let us now bracket them and return to the question of whether the verb “stabbed” is really true of \emph{triples} like <LeStabGauche, Scarlet, Mustard>. At this point, let us also assume that (2a) is better than (2b) as a candidate for the logical form of (2).


\textbf{(2)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard.


\emph{\textbf{(2a)} ∃}e\emph{[}stabbed\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{)]}


\textbf{\emph{(2b)}} stabbed\emph{(M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{)}


But if (2b) is at best a simplified version of a more perspicuous logical form, perhaps (2a) is an improvement that can itself be improved.

\section{3. Logical Form and Grammatical Form}


Davidson's initial proposal invited variant proposals about what verbs are true of, especially in light of questions about how logical forms related to grammatical structures and why are they so related. For example, “Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard” is not a constituent of (13). As indicated with the phrase marker (13-PM),


\textbf{(13)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard with a dagger.


\textbf{(13-PM)} [Miss Scarlet [[stabbed Colonel Mustard] [with a dagger]]]


the transitive verb combines with a direct object (or \emph{internal} argument) to form the modifiable “stabbed Colonel Mustard,” which does not include the subject (or \emph{external} argument) of the verb.


But “Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard” corresponds to the first conjunct of (13a).


\textbf{(13a)} ∃e[stabbed(e, MsScarlet, ColMustard) \& with(e, a dagger)]


This is not yet an objection to Davidson's proposal.\footnote{See, for example, Williams (1981) on the importance of the internal\Slash{}external asymmetry. Though one can provide a theory that pairs (13PM) with (13a), so long as a verb phrase and prepositional phrase – understood as a dyadic and monadic predicate – can combine to form a predicate of the form Δ(\emph{e}, \emph{x}) \& Φ(\emph{e}), as opposed to Δ(\emph{e}, \emph{x}) \& Φ(\emph{x}); see Chung and Ladusaw (2003).} But given variations on (13a), one wants to know how and to what degree logical constituents can fail to reflect grammatical constituents.

\subsection{3.1. Thematic decomposition}


As Castañeda (1967) noted, Davidson's central idea – treating many cases of adverb reduction as conjunct reduction – is easily extended to sentences like (4), which paraphrases (2).


\textbf{(4)} There was a stabbing of Colonel Mustard by Miss Scarlet.


\textbf{(2)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard.


Since (4) implies (81) and (82), both of which imply (83),


\textbf{(81)} There was a stabbing of Colonel Mustard.


\textbf{(82)} There was a stabbing by Miss Scarlet.


\textbf{(83)} There was a stabbing.


sentence (4) is plausibly understood along the lines of (4a), with (81–83) being reductions.


\emph{\textbf{(4a)} ∃}e\emph{[}past-stab\emph{(}e\emph{) \&} of\emph{(}e\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{) \&} by\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{)]}


Or more precisely, since “of” and “by” are not univocal, (4) has a reading indicated with (4b);


\emph{\textbf{(4b)} ∃}e\emph{[}past-stab\emph{(}e\emph{) \&} patient\emph{(}e\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{) \&} agent\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{)]}


where to a first approximation, \emph{past}-\emph{stab}(\emph{e}) applies to past events of stabbing, \emph{patient}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}) is true of <α, β> iff α is an event in which β is the most saliently affected participant in α, and \emph{agent}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}) is true of <α, β> iff α is an event done by β.


Predicates like \emph{agent}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}) and \emph{patient}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}) are formally dyadic. But an event done by Scarlet is not, like her red dagger, an entity independent of Scarlet. Any such event has Scarlet as an essential participant. Likewise, Mustard participates in events in which he is affected. The corresponding participation relations, which can be indicated with prepositions, are often called \emph{thematic}. And certain thematic relations are associated, somehow, with certain grammatical relations that verbs bear to their arguments. For example, in (4), “by” is used to represent Miss Scarlet as an agent. In (2), this semantic effect is achieved by using “Miss Scarlet” as the subject of the verb.\footnote{For discussion in linguistics, reviving ancient observations going back at least to Panini, see Baker (1997), Carlson (1984), Dowty (1979, 1991), Fillmore (1968), Gruber (1965), and Jackendoff (1972), among others.} So perhaps (4b), or the equivalent (2c), is the logical form of (2).


\emph{\textbf{(2c)} ∃}e\emph{[}agent\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{) \&} past-stab\emph{(}e\emph{) \&} patient\emph{(}e\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{)]}


This hypothesis is compatible with (2a) being a partial but incomplete analysis of (2).


\emph{\textbf{(2a)} ∃}e\emph{[}stabbed\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{)]}


One can view \emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) as an abbreviation, in Loglish, for the complex triadic predicate


\emph{agent}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}) \& \emph{past}-\emph{stab}(\emph{e}) \& \emph{patient}(\emph{e}, \emph{y}). Put another way, one can supplement Davidson's claim that “stabbed” is understood as a triadic predicate with a proposed “decomposition,” according to which “stabbed” has the logical form \emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) \emph{because} it has the less abbreviated logical form \emph{agent}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}) \& \emph{past}-\emph{stab}(\emph{e}) \& \emph{patient}(\emph{e}, \emph{y}). In Section 3.2, I consider a different perspective on (2c). But one can view (2c) as a supplementary amendment to Davidson's proposal, not as a contrary hypothesis; cf. Parsons (1990) on “subatomic” semantics.


Davidson (1985) accepted a version of this amendment, though he initially refrained from endorsing it. One might think that (2c) posits logical structure without necessity. Why say that (2) implies not only an event of Scarlet stabbing Mustard, but an event in which Scarlet and Mustard participate as agent and patient? But transitive expressions exhibit a striking asymmetry with regard to thematic relations. If a subject–verb–object construction is understood as if the verb's arguments are associated with the thematic predicates \emph{agent}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}) and \emph{patient}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}), then the \emph{subject} is understood as if associated with \emph{agent}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}) while the \emph{object} is understood as if associated with \emph{patient}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}). This may seem trivial. But there is nothing logically amiss with a predicate \emph{quased}(\emph{x}, \emph{y}) that is true of <α, β> iff α was chased by β, or \emph{quased}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) – true of <α, β, γ> iff α was a chasing of β by γ – or a predicate \emph{quabbed}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) that is true of <α, β, γ> iff α was a stabbing of β by γ. One can imagine children who naturally acquire a language that is like English except for having verbs that are “thematic inverses” of their English counterparts. In such a language, “stabbed Mustard” would have the logical form \emph{quabbed}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, M\emph{ustard}) and thus be true of <α, β> iff α was a stabbing of β \emph{by} Mustard. But it seems to be a robust generalization that humans do not acquire such verbs; see Baker (1997) and references there.


Even if “Scarlet saw Mustard” does not represent Scarlet as an agent, or Mustard as a patient, it still represents Scarlet as the \emph{experiencer} (or subject) of an event of seeing Mustard. Yet we can imagine a verb “saw” that is true of <α, β, γ> iff α was a seeing of β by γ, with the result that “saw Mustard” is true of <α, β> iff α was a seeing of β by Mustard. The counterpart of “Scarlet saw Mustard” would then represent Scarlet as the \emph{theme} (or object) of a seeing that Mustard experienced. Similar points apply to ditransitive constructions. In (84) and (85),


\textbf{(84)} White gave Scarlet a knife.


\textbf{(85)} White tossed Green a fig.


White is represented as the agent of event in which the person indicated with the verb's indirect object is the \emph{recipient} of something corresponding to the direct object (“knife”\Slash{}“fig”). But one could invent a language in which the grammatical analog of (84) is true iff White was given a knife by Scarlet, or the analog of (85) is true iff White tossed Green towards a fig. There is a logically contingent generalization here, concerning the way in which grammatical relations are correlated with thematic relations. But to formulate this generalization, it seems that we need to posit logical forms that include thematic predicates like \emph{agent}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}) and \emph{patient}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}).


By itself, (2a) is no better than (2b) in this respect.


\emph{\textbf{(2a)} ∃}e\emph{[}stabbed\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{)]}


\textbf{\emph{(2b)}} stabbed\emph{(M}iss\emph{S}carlet\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard


Though given thematic decomposition, as in (2c), we can at least describe some explananda.


\emph{\textbf{(2c)} ∃}e\emph{[}agent\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{) \&} past-stab\emph{(}e\emph{) \&} patient\emph{(}e\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{)]}


In a transitive construction like (2),


\textbf{(2)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard.


“stabbed” is related to its internal argument in a way that indicates patienthood, and the verb is related to its external argument in a way that indicates agenthood. With “saw,” objects and subjects may be associated with themes and experiencers, and examples like (84–85) associate indirect objects with recipients. But no constructions associate direct objects with agents\Slash{}experiencers and subjects with patients\Slash{}themes or recipients.

\subsection{3.2. Grades of decomposition}


Connecting back to Castañeda's (1967) points, (2) implies (86), which implies (87).


\textbf{(86)} Colonel Mustard was stabbed by Miss Scarlet.


\textbf{(87)} Colonel Mustard was stabbed.


We can capture the latter implication, in Davidsonian fashion, with logical forms like (86a–87a);


\emph{\textbf{(86a)} ∃}e\emph{[}was-stabbed\emph{(}e\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{) \&} by\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{)]}


\emph{\textbf{(87a)} ∃}e\emph{[}was-stabbed\emph{(}e\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{)]}


where \emph{was}-\emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}) is true of <α, β> iff α was an event of β getting stabbed. But then an obvious hypothesis is that (2a) abbreviates (2d), which may itself decompose further.


\emph{\textbf{(2a)} ∃}e\emph{[}stabbed\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{)]}


\emph{\textbf{(2d)} ∃}e\emph{[}agent\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{) \&} was-stabbed\emph{(}e\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{)]}


The formally atomic predicate \emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) may be Loglish shorthand for \emph{agent}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}) \& \emph{was}-\emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, \emph{y}); where the latter conjunct may abbreviate \emph{past}-\emph{stab}(\emph{e}) \& \emph{patient}(\emph{e}, \emph{y}).


One might say instead that \emph{was}-\emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, \emph{y}) abbreviates ∃\emph{x}[\emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y})]. But it is not obvious that (87) implies, as a matter of logic, that something\Slash{}someone stabbed Mustard. And if it does, (86) has the somewhat redundant logical form (86b).


\textbf{(86b)} ∃\emph{e}∃x[stabbed(e, x, ColMustard)] \& by(e, MsScarlet)]Describing passive constructions in terms of existential closure also raises the question of why the active voice verb in (2) is not also described in terms of existential closure, as in (2e);(2e) ∃\emph{e}∃\emph{x}[\emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, C\emph{ol}M\emph{ustard})] \& \emph{by}(\emph{e}, M\emph{s}S\emph{carlet})]


Describing passive constructions in terms of existential closure also raises the question of why the active voice verb in (2) is not also described in terms of existential closure, as in (2e);


\emph{\textbf{(2e)} ∃}e\emph{∃}z\emph{[}stabbed\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{,} z\emph{)]}


where the fourth position in the tetradic predicate is for the instrument used. If each stabbing involves a stabber who may go unmentioned in passive constructions, it seems equally true that each stabbing involves an instrument that may go unmentioned in active constructions. One can insist that mentioning the instrument is deeply optional in a way mentioning the agent is not. But even if this claim is correct, and passives are special cases, it is hard to see how this could be a point of logic as opposed to grammar. Conceptually, instruments seem as essential as agents to events of stabbing people (jimmying locks, beaning batters, etc.); see Williams (2005).


Describing passive and active constructions as in (87a) and (2d) also suggests an attractive diagnosis of so-called causative implications. \emph{Prima facie}, (88) implies (89),


\textbf{(88)} Mrs. White froze the pastry.


\textbf{(89)} The pastry froze.


and likewise for many verbs that can appear in both transitive and intransitive constructions. So perhaps (89) has the logical form (89a), but (88) has a logical form other than the simple (88a).


\emph{\textbf{(89a)} ∃}e\emph{[}froze\emph{(}e\emph{, T}he\emph{P}astry\emph{)]}


\emph{\textbf{(88a)} ∃}e\emph{[}froze\emph{(}e\emph{, M}rs\emph{.W}hite\emph{, T}he\emph{P}astry\emph{)]}


The predicate \emph{froze}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) may abbreviate \emph{agent}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}) \& ∃\emph{f}[ℜ(\emph{e}, \emph{f}) \& \emph{froze}(\emph{f}, \emph{y})], where \emph{froze}(\emph{f}, \emph{y}) is true of <α, β> iff α was an event of β becoming frozen, and ℜ(\emph{e}, \emph{f}) is true of <α, β> iff α bears a certain causal relation to β. There are complications here, as Fodor (1970) stressed. For example, if Mrs. White inadvertently left the pastry outside on a cold night, (90)


\textbf{(90)} Mrs. White did something that led to the pastry freezing.


may be true while (88) is not. So it would not do to say that ℜ(\emph{e}, \emph{f}) is true of <α, β> iff α caused β. Still, (88a) might decompose as (88b), which implies ∃\emph{f}[\emph{froze}(\emph{f}, T\emph{he}P\emph{astry})] and hence (89a).


\textbf{(88b)} ∃\emph{e}[\emph{agent}(\emph{e}, M\emph{rs}W\emph{hite}) \& ∃\emph{f}[ℜ(\emph{e}, \emph{f}) \& \emph{froze}(\emph{f}, T\emph{he}P\emph{astry})]]


Perhaps ℜ(\emph{e}, \emph{f}) is true of <α, β> iff α caused β in a suitably “direct” way – or alternatively, iff α is a suitably “unified” causal process that has β as a final part.\footnote{See Baker (1997), Lakoff (1965), McCawley (1968), but cf. Fodor and Lepore (2002). Hart and Honoré (1959) discuss related points that arise in common law.}


This kind of diagnosis can be extended to (91) and (92),


\textbf{(91)} Miss Scarlet killed Colonel Mustard


\emph{\textbf{(91a)} ∃}e\emph{[}agent\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{) \& ∃}f\emph{[ℜ(}e\emph{,} f\emph{) \&} past\emph{-}die\emph{(}e\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{)]]}


\textbf{(92)} Colonel Mustard died.


\emph{\textbf{(92a)} ∃}f\emph{[}past\emph{-}die\emph{(}f\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{)]]}


especially since “cwell” was the Old English analog of both “kill” and “die”; see Traugott (1972). Sentence (91) seems to mean, at least roughly, that Scarlet initiated a process that ended in Mustard's death. Davidson (198x) offered analyses of this sort, proposing at least some thematic decomposition for predicates like \emph{froze}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) and \emph{killed}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}).


This does not yet require thematic decomposition of predicates like \emph{was}-\emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, \emph{y}) into conjunctions like \emph{past}-\emph{stab}(\emph{e}) \& \emph{patient}(\emph{e}, \emph{y}). While (81) paraphrases (87),


\textbf{(81)} There was a stabbing of Colonel Mustard.


\textbf{(87)} Colonel Mustard was stabbed.


one need not view (87a) as shorthand for (87b).


\emph{\textbf{(87a)} ∃}e\emph{[}was-stabbed\emph{(}e\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{)]}


\emph{\textbf{(87b)} ∃}e\emph{[}past-stab\emph{(}e\emph{) \&} patient\emph{(}e\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{)]}


The subject–object thematic asymmetry can be captured without logical forms that associate objects with thematic significance. But one cannot just say that (85) has the logical form (85a);


\textbf{(85)} White tossed Green a fig.


\emph{\textbf{(85a)} ∃}e\emph{[}agent\emph{(}e\emph{, W}hite\emph{) \& ∃}y\emph{[}fig\emph{(}y\emph{) \&} was\emph{-}tossed\emph{(}e\emph{, G}reen\emph{,} y\emph{)]]}


where \emph{was}-\emph{tossed}(\emph{e}, \emph{z}, \emph{y}) is true of <α, β, γ> iff α was an event of γ being tossed to β. This does not explain the apparent synonymy of (85) and (93), which presumably implies (94).


\textbf{(93)} White tossed a fig to Green.


\textbf{(94)} White tossed a fig.


\emph{Prima facie}, (93) and (94) have the logical forms (93a) and (94a);


\emph{\textbf{(93a)} ∃}e\emph{[}agent\emph{(}e\emph{, W}hite\emph{) \&} was-tossed\emph{(}e\emph{,} a fig\emph{) \&} recipient\emph{(}e\emph{, G}reen\emph{)]}


\emph{\textbf{(94a)} ∃}e\emph{[}agent\emph{(}e\emph{, W}hite\emph{) \& ∃}y\emph{[}fig\emph{(}y\emph{) \&} was\emph{-}tossed\emph{(}e\emph{,} y\emph{)]]}


where \emph{was}-\emph{tossed}(\emph{e}, \emph{y}) is true of <α, β> iff α was an event of β being tossed. But this predicate has a different adicity than \emph{was}-\emph{tossed}(\emph{e}, \emph{z}, \emph{y}); cf. \emph{stabbed}(\emph{x}, \emph{y}) and \emph{stabbed}-\emph{with}(\emph{x}, \emph{y}, \emph{z}). Moreover, even if each stabbing involves an instrument, a tossing may not involve a recipient. A fig can be tossed but not tossed to anyone, suggesting decomposition of \emph{was}-\emph{tossed}(\emph{e}, \emph{z}, \emph{y}) as \emph{was}-\emph{tossed}(\emph{e}, \emph{y}) \& \emph{recipient}(\emph{e}, \emph{z}). From this perspective, (85a) is shorthand for (93a).\footnote{See, for example, Larson (1988). While “Mrs. White gave a knife” may sound a little odd discourse initially, it can be a perfectly fine report of gift-giving.}


It still does not follow that direct objects are understood in terms of thematic predicates. One can admit other kinds of thematic decomposition – and even handle tense by decomposing \emph{was}-\emph{tossed}(\emph{e}, \emph{y}) into \emph{past}(\emph{e}) \& \emph{toss}(\emph{e}, \emph{y}) – yet maintain that a verb and its most internal argument are understood together in terms of undecomposed dyadic predicates like \emph{toss}(\emph{e}, \emph{y}) as opposed to conjunctions like \emph{toss}(\emph{e}) \& \emph{patient}(\emph{e}, \emph{y}); see Kratzer (1996), though cf. Schein (1993) and Williams (2007, 2009). But examples like (95) and (96) must be accommodated.


\textbf{(95)} There was at least one stab.


\textbf{(96)} Scarlet stabbed at Mustard.


While we naturally hear (83) as implying a crime, in which a stabber stabbed a stabbee,


\textbf{(83)} There was a stabbing.


(96) is compatible with Scarlet missing her target, and Mustard remaining unstabbed. And \emph{prima facie}, (96) implies (95). Similarly, (97) is compatible with Scarlet not reaching Devon.


\textbf{(97)} Scarlet drove toward Devon.


But (97) implies that there was at least one event of driving. This invites appeal to logical forms like (95a) and (96a), even if (95) and (96) are in some sense special uses of “stab.”


\emph{\textbf{(95a)} ∃}e\emph{[}past\emph{-}stab\emph{(}e\emph{)]}


\emph{\textbf{(96a)} ∃}e\emph{[}agent\emph{(}e\emph{, S}carlet\emph{) \&} past-stab\emph{(}e\emph{) \&} at\emph{(}e\emph{, M}ustard\emph{)]}

\subsection{3.3. Thematic separation}


Whatever one says about particular sentences, one can hypothesize that “stab” is understood primarily as a verb whose logical form is triadic: \emph{agent}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}) \& \emph{stab}(\emph{e}, \emph{y}) or \emph{agent}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}) \& \emph{stab}(\emph{e}) \& \emph{patient}(\emph{e}, \emph{y}). Passives, nominals, and unaccusatives – as in (87), (95), and (96) – can be treated as special cases in which a lexical item exhibits alternative logical forms like \emph{stab}(\emph{e}, \emph{y}) or \emph{stab}(\emph{e}) or perhaps \emph{agent}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}) \& \emph{stab}(\emph{e}). If lexical items are logically ambiguous in some such way, then we face the questions of how many logical forms “stab” can exhibit, and why those; see Ramchand (2008). Though even if “stab” is not logically univocal, it may not ever be triadic. Recall (13) and the corresponding phrase marker.


\textbf{(13)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard with a dagger.


\textbf{(13-PM)} [Miss Scarlet [[stabbed Colonel Mustard] [with a dagger]]]


Suppose the logical form of “stabbed” is some decomposition of the triadic \emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}). Then “stabbed Colonel Mustard” corresponds to some decomposition of the first conjunct in \emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, C\emph{ol}M\emph{ustard}) \& \emph{with}(\emph{e}, \emph{a dagger}). On this view, “with a dagger” is conjoined with a \emph{dyadic} predicate, and “stabbed Colonel Mustard with a dagger” is also dyadic. This point is masked by decomposing \emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, \emph{x}, \emph{y}) and displaying the logical form of (13) as in (13c),


\emph{\textbf{(13c)} ∃}e\emph{[}agent\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{) \&\forcelinebreak  }was-stabbed\emph{(}e\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{) \&} with\emph{(}e\emph{,} a dagger\emph{)]}


in which three monadic predicates are conjoined. And this highlights a question that must be addressed if any implications are described in terms of conjunction reduction: what kinds of conjuncts are permitted?\footnote{In familiar invented languages, a three-place predicate can be conjoined with a four-place predicate to form a predicate that may have four-, five-, six-, or seven-free variables. But English is more constrained.}


An alternative hypothesis, is that the primary logical form of “stab” is dyadic: \emph{stab}(\emph{e}, \emph{y}) or \emph{stab}(\emph{e}) \& \emph{patient}(\emph{e}, \emph{y}). Using Schein's (1993) terminology, subjects may be “thematically separated” from verbs, with the first conjunct of (13c) reflecting how “Miss Scarlet” is grammatically related to “stabbed.” The verb itself need not imply a stabber. Kratzer (1998) speaks of “severing” agents from lexical verb meanings, using examples like (90) as models for how to treat transitive constructions as involving a (covert) second verb; cf. (98).


\textbf{(90)} Mrs. White froze the pastry.


\textbf{(98)} Mrs. White made the pastry freeze.


If objects are also thematically separated, then (95) and (96) are not special cases:


\textbf{(95)} There was at least one stab.


\textbf{(96)} Scarlet stabbed at Mustard.


“stab” always has the logical form \emph{stab}(\emph{e}); see also Borer (2005) and Pietroski (2005). But if \emph{was}-\emph{stabbed}(\emph{e}, \emph{y}) is the logical form of “stabbed,” at least the agent variable is severed from the verb meaning. So “stabbed Colonel Mustard with a dagger” can still correspond to a constituent of (13d), whose conjuncts are all monadic.


\emph{\textbf{(13d)} ∃}e\emph{[}agent\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{) \&\forcelinebreak  [}was-stabbed\emph{(}e\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{) \&} with\emph{(}e\emph{,} a dagger\emph{)]]}


Subtly different hypotheses about logical form thus have implications for how logical form is – and hence can be – related to grammatical form. I cannot here review the many conceptions of this relation. But thematically separated variants of Davidson's proposal might be attractively simple in this respect.\footnote{Schein (1993, 2002, forthcoming) offers many detailed arguments for thematic separation based on \emph{plural} constructions like “Three cooks tossed five guests four figs.” But discussion of plural noun phrases, and the corresponding logical formalism is beyond the scope of this chapter. Not unrelatedly, Schein (forthcoming) also argues that all logical forms are description sensitive.}

\subsection{3.4. Conclusion}


According to Davidson, expressions of a naturally acquirable language like English correspond to the world in a substantive way: bits of sentences are, modulo some logical vocabulary and description-sensitive terminology, true of bits of the world, and sentences have compositionally determined truth conditions. Initially, it is hard to see what verb phrases could be true of, given the possibility of adverbial modification as in (13).


\textbf{(13)} Miss Scarlet stabbed Colonel Mustard with a dagger.


But if verb phrases and their modifiers are true of events – in much the way that many nouns and adjectival modifiers seem to be true of individuals that often participate in events – then many kinds of modification can be analyzed in terms of conjunction, with corresponding implications described as instances of conjunction reduction. Developing this attractive hypothesis reveals complications and a tension in the idea that ordinary verb phrases are both truth of the requisite events and understood as conjuncts in the scope of an existential quantifier, as in (13a).


\emph{\textbf{(13a)} ∃}e\emph{[}stabbed\emph{(}e\emph{, M}s\emph{S}carlet\emph{, C}ol\emph{M}ustard\emph{) \&} with\emph{(}e\emph{,} a dagger\emph{)]}


Preserving a truth-theoretic conception of meaning may require more complicated logical forms. Preserving the simple logical forms may require a conception of meaning according to which bits of sentences correspond to mental representations whose relation to the language-independent world is more complicated. But whatever the details, Davidson's event analyses provided significant insight into how linguistic meanings can be compositionally determined, and what kinds of truths might be indicated with sentences like (13).

% Notes
\section{References}


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Gillon, B. (2007). Pā@@@
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ini's \emph{A}@@@
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\end{figure}
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\chapter{7. Causation}


John Heil


In 1970, Davidson published “Mental Events,” setting out a conception of mental causation that has proved to be remarkably influential. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that Davidson set the agenda for discussions of mental causation for four decades. Even philosophers who disagreed with Davidson felt compelled to respond to Davidson's arguments. I shall say something about the philosophical background against which Davidson was writing, discuss what could be called the received view of the line of argument taken by Davidson, move on to an account of what I believe to be a more charitable construal of Davidson's view, and conclude with some observations concerning the current state of play in the debate over mental causation.

\section{1. Actions, Reasons, and Causes}


Davidson's (1963) “Actions, Reasons, and Causes” offered a defense of the thesis that an agent's acting \emph{on} or \emph{for} a particular reason – as distinct from the agent's merely acting \emph{in accord with} a reason – requires that the reason contribute causally to the production of the action.



\begin{quote}


What is the relation between a reason and an action when the reason explains the action by giving the agent's reasons for doing what he did? We may call such explanations \emph{rationalizations}, and say that the reason \emph{rationalizes} the action\dots{}I want to defend the ancient—and commonsense—position that rationalization is a species of causal explanation.\footnote{Davidson (1963: 3). References to this paper and to Davidson (1970) are to the more easily accessible reprints in Davidson (1980) and Davidson (2001).}



\end{quote}


In so arguing, Davidson was setting his sights on a philosophical establishment steeped in attitudes encouraged by Wittgenstein. Davidson cites Gilbert Ryle, Elizabeth Anscombe, Stuart Hampshire, H.L.A. Hart and A.M. Honoré, William Dray, Anthony Kenny, and A.I. Melden as prominent philosophers who had argued that reason explanations are not a species of causal explanation.\footnote{See Anscombe (1957), Dray (1957), Hampshire (1959), Hart and Honoré (1959), Kenny (1963), Melden (1961), and Ryle (1949).}


One line of anticausal reasoning began with a comparison of ordinary explanations of actions and causal explanations found in the sciences. Causal explanations invoke natural laws. You explain why a particular natural event occurred by showing that its occurring then and there is an instance of a law. This might mean deducing the occurrence from a statement of the circumstances under which the event occurred together with a law. Explanations of actions appear to be dramatically different. You explain Betty's suddenly leaving the room by reference to Betty's beliefs (that her car is parked at a meter that is about to expire) and desires (that she not be ticketed for illegal parking). It is most doubtful that there is a natural law governing such occurrences. Even if there were, your explanation of Betty's action appears not to rely on laws in any way. Reasons apparently explain, not by playing a causal role in the production of actions, but by \emph{illuminating}, or \emph{making sense of} actions performed. To think of reasons as causes is to confuse intentional explanation, which aims at an understanding of agents' perspectives on their own actions, with mechanistic explanation of the sort appropriate in the nonintentional sphere.


In response, Davidson notes that you could have a reason, a good reason, to perform a given action and perform the action, but not for that reason. As Kant observed ruefully, actions can \emph{accord with} more than one of an agent's reasons, some commendable, some not. When agents act, the question is, \emph{on} what reason did they act, what is the reason \emph{for which} they acted?



\begin{quote}


A person can have a reason for an action, and perform the action, and yet this reason not be the reason why he did it. Central to the relation between a reason and an action it explains is the idea that the agent performed the action \emph{because} he had the reason


(Davidson 1970: 9).



\end{quote}


The force of “because” here, Davidson contends, is causal. Reasons rationalize an action when they \emph{motivate} the action, and motivating is a causal notion.


One consideration thought to bear on the question whether reasons were causes appealed to the manifest contingency of causal relations. Reasons explanations could not be a species of causal explanation because reasons bear logically on actions they rationalize. Part of what it is to want to \emph{A} is to \emph{A} unless something prevents it. Causal relations, in contrast, hold between logically independent events. This is the “logical connection” argument developed most expressly by Melden (1961). Davidson (1970: 10) suggests that the argument might be put this way: “when we explain the action by giving the reason, we\dots{}redescribe the action; redescribing the action gives the action a place in a pattern, and in this way the action is explained.”


Davidson points out, however, that a reason (or the onset of a reason, an event) and the action it rationalizes \emph{are} distinct events. Their being distinct does not preclude \emph{descriptions} of the events being logically related. Think of a case not involving reasons. Suppose your pulling the rope caused the bell to ring. In that case, it would be true that what caused the bell to ring (namely, your pulling the rope) caused the bell to ring. A “logical connection” holds between \emph{descriptions} of the events, not the events themselves, not the causal relata.


Although “anticausalist” conceptions of action have recently made a comeback (see, for instance, Dancy 2000; Lowe 2008), it is probably safe to say that most philosophers, even philosophers who have little sympathy for Davidson's views on other matters, are happy to accept his conception of reasons as causes, or at least accept that explanations of intentional actions are causal in nature. Now, however, a number of other problems must be faced. It would seem that psychological explanations generally, not merely reasons explanations of actions, are causal. But how is this supposed to \emph{work}? Causality might be thought to require natural laws, and, although psychology has gradually produced a host of important lawlike generalizations, these fall short of the kinds of “strict” law you find in the “hard sciences.”


More seriously, it would seem that psychological explanations are inherently provisional. Intelligent agents are, whatever else they are, physical systems that operate on physical principles. When an agent acts on a reason, the agent's body moves in particular ways. Bodily motions are apparently brought about by purely physical occurrences. Suppose Betty leaves the room because she wants to top up a parking meter. Betty's leaving the room includes her body's moving in particular ways. Surely there is a purely physical, nonpsychological, explanation for these bodily motions, a “mechanistic” explanation that appeals only to purely physical events (see Malcolm 1968). Were that \emph{not} so, there would be physical events – all the physical events constituting actions – that lacked complete physical explanations. We regard the physical world as “causally closed,” however: every physical event that has a cause has a proximate physical cause.


You might be skeptical about such closure principles, but even if you are, you might want some account of how physical and mental causes could coexist peacefully. Attention now shifts from the question, \emph{whether} reasons cause actions, to, \emph{how} reasons could cause actions. This brings us to “Mental Events.”

\section{2. Mental Causes}


In “Mental Events,” Davidson (1970: 208) defends the compatibility of three theses (or “principles”) that bring these questions into focus:


\textbf{(1)} Principle of Causal Interaction: “at least some mental events interact causally with physical events.”


\textbf{(2)} Principle of the Nomological Character of Causality: “where there is causality, there must be a law: events related as cause and effect will fall under strict deterministic laws.”


\textbf{(3)} Anomalism of the Mental: “there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained.”


You might find one or more of these theses objectionable, but if you do only, or primarily, because you regard them as inconsistent, you would do well to hear Davidson out. Each thesis has a measure of plausibility quite independently of questions about the mind–body problem and mental causation. An attempt at reconciliation, if successful, would afford a satisfying depiction of mind–body interaction, a depiction not requiring controversial trade-offs or ad hoc adjustment to otherwise plausible doctrines.


I shall begin by spelling out Davidson's position as it is most often spelled out. The position, which has spawned countless discussions and responses, will be familiar to many readers. I will then back up and describe what I understand as Davidson's \emph{actual} position. If I am right, then much of what has been written about Davidson's approach to the mind–body problem will be revealed as irrelevant. This is important, I think, because the view standardly attributed to Davidson has been hugely influential in motivating “nonreductive physicalism,” today's orthodoxy in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of science. Getting Davidson right exposes the shaky foundations of this orthodoxy.


Start with mental and physical events. Physical events, Davidson says, fall under “strict deterministic laws,” but there are no such laws governing mental events. This would seem immediately to exclude the possibility of either mental–mental or mental–physical causal interaction. Davidson insists, however, that “at least some mental events interact causally with physical events.” How could this be?


What if every mental event \emph{were} a physical event, what if mental and physical events were “token identical”? That would allow for mental–mental and mental–physical causation, but it would also seem to allow for “strict deterministic” psychophysical laws, a possibility Davidson (1970: 212–213) denies. And what if, while accepting mental–physical “token identity” (every mental event is a physical event), you rejected mental–physical “type identity” – mental types are not identifiable with or reducible to physical types? Every event falling under a mental type, falls under some physical type, even though mental types are not “reducible to” physical types.


So what are “types”? Davidson speaks of mental and physical “terms” and “descriptions.” Presumably, terms or descriptions apply to events in virtue of those events' characteristics or properties. “Types,” then, must be properties, where properties are taken to be universals. So, mental properties are distinct from physical properties.


Now we have the thesis that every (particular) mental event is a physical event, but mental properties are distinct from physical properties. An event is mental when it “falls under a mental description” and physical when it “falls under a physical description” (Davidson 1970: 210). Descriptions apply to events owing to those events' properties, so we have the thesis that every mental event, every event with a mental property, is identical with some physical event, some event with a physical property. Jaegwon Kim summarizes.



\begin{quote}


Imagine a Davidsonian universe of events: all of these events are physical, and some of them are also mental. That is to say, all events have physical properties, and some of them have mental properties as well. Such is Davidson's celebrated “anomalous monism.”


(Kim 1989: 269)



\end{quote}


Mental properties are not reducible to, or identifiable with, physical properties. This, however, is consistent with a kind of \emph{dependence} of mental properties on physical properties.



\begin{quote}


Although the position I describe denies that there are psychophysical laws, it is consistent with the view that mental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on physical characteristics. Such supervenience might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respect, or that an object cannot alter in some mental respect without altering in some physical respect.


(Davidson 1970: 214)



\end{quote}


Mental properties “supervene” on physical properties. Given the intimate connection between what goes on in our brains and our mental lives, this is to be expected. Supervenience as characterized by Davidson is consistent with reducibility, consistent with “type identity,” consistent with the possibility that mental properties are physical properties. However, this possibility is excluded in the course of reconciling the three theses with which the argument began.


An event is mental, then, if it has a mental property and physical if it has a physical property. In light of supervenience, every mental event, every event with a mental property, is a physical event, an event with a physical property. There is no difficulty in the idea that “some mental events interact causally with physical events”; the mental events in question are (also) physical events, and, in consequence, the interactions “will fall under strict deterministic laws.” Mental properties, although dependent on, are distinct from, physical properties. This is why “there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained.” When a mental event falls under a law, it does so owing to its physical properties. Think of a law as having the form, the \emph{F}s necessitate the \emph{G}s: \emph{N}(\emph{F},\emph{G}). The \emph{F}s and \emph{G}s are physical properties.


Whenever an event has a mental property, it has some physical property, some property apt to figure in a law. This is the supervenience of the mental on the physical. The denial of reducibility means that you can know of any mental event that it is physical, know that it has some physical property, without having a clue as to what that physical property is. Events' causes or effects, however, depend on their physical properties: events fall under laws in virtue of their physical properties. So long as you identify an event by its mental property, you are in no position to say with certainty what caused it or what it might cause. The event falls under a law, but to know \emph{which} law, you would need to know its physical properties, a practical impossibility in most cases.\footnote{This will be true for ordinary physical events as well. Exceptionless laws govern only the fundamental things. Ordinary physical objects supervene on distributions of the fundamental things. Events involving ordinary physical objects figure in causal laws only to the extent that they are decomposable into events involving the fundamental things, fundamental events.} Mentality is “anomalous” with respect to the physical.


Compare the moral case. Suppose moral properties supervene on nonmoral, natural properties (Hare 1952). If you have two physically indiscernible agents, they will be morally indiscernible: if one is good, the other will be good as well. But there are endless ways of being good, so no prospect of reducing moral properties to nonmoral properties, no prospect of reformulating moral claims in a naturalistic vocabulary. In this regard, morality is anomalous with respect to the natural.

\section{3. Difficulties With This Account}


Many philosophers have found fault with Davidson's argument. Jerry Fodor, for instance, takes issue with Davidson's contention that causality requires \emph{strict} laws. Fodor accepts, indeed insists on, the irreducibility of psychology, but argues that psychological kinds can figure in “hedged,” \emph{ceteris paribus} laws (see, e.g., Fodor 1974). This, he thinks, is enough to underwrite respectable causal relations among mental and physical events.


Other philosophers have argued at length that Davidson's anomalous monism in fact \emph{undercuts} the possibility that reasons could be causes or, more generally, that mental properties could have a hand in the production of physical or mental effects.\footnote{Philosophers who made this kind of argument early on include Honderich (1982), Kim (1984) , Sosa (1984), and Stoutland (1980). Many more followed.} An analogy might help. Suppose your placing a red billiard ball on a cushion creates a depression in the cushion. The ball is red. A red ball creates a depression in the cushion. But the ball's being red has nothing to do with this effect. The ball has a number of properties, among these a particular density and mass. \emph{These} properties are responsible for the ball's effect on the cushion. Its color is irrelevant.


The worry in the case of mental causation is that mental events could have particular effects, but those events' having these effects has nothing to do with those events' being mental. Given Davidson's insistence that it is only in virtue of possessing physical properties that they fall under strict laws, any effects a mental event might have would depend exclusively on the event's physical properties. A given mental event could have a particular physical effect, then, but not because it is mental, not \emph{qua} mental.


Suppose your acquiring a reason to leave the room \emph{is} your brain's going into a particular state. These events are “token identical.” Given Davidson's conception of causation (“events related as cause and effect will fall under strict deterministic laws”), and given his denial that mental properties figure in causal laws (“there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained”), your acquiring a reason to leave the room could cause your leaving the room, but the physical nature of this event is what is responsible for your departure, not its being the onset of a reason, not \emph{qua} reason. (Compare: the red ball depresses the cushion in a particular way, but not because it is red, not \emph{qua} red.) By insisting on a physical basis for causality and on the irreducibility of mental properties, Davidson has rendered the mental “causally irrelevant” epiphenomenal.


All of this can be depicted by means of diagrams (inspired by Kim) that have become standard fare in discussions of mental causation. Suppose a particular event, \emph{c}, causes an event \emph{e}. The cause, \emph{c}, possesses a physical property, \emph{P}\textsubscript{1}, and \emph{e} possesses a physical property, \emph{P}\textsubscript{2}. Suppose, further, that \emph{c} causes \emph{e} by virtue of this sequence's instantiating a strict, deterministic law of the form, \emph{P}\textsubscript{1}-type events necessitate \emph{P}\textsubscript{2}-type events. The events fall under this law in virtue of being \emph{P}\textsubscript{1} and \emph{P}\textsubscript{2}. Finally, suppose that \emph{M}\textsubscript{1} and \emph{M}\textsubscript{2} are mental properties supervenient on \emph{P}\textsubscript{1} and \emph{P}\textsubscript{2}, respectively. By Davidson's lights, \emph{c}, a mental event, an event possessing a mental property \emph{M}\textsubscript{1}, causes a physical event, \emph{e}, an event possessing a physical property \emph{P}\textsubscript{2}. Because both events are mental \emph{and} physical, we could say, as well that a mental event causes a mental event (the event possessing \emph{M}\textsubscript{1} causes the event possessing \emph{M}\textsubscript{2}), that a physical event causes another physical event (an event possessing \emph{P}\textsubscript{1} causes an event possessing \emph{P}\textsubscript{2}), and that a physical event causes a mental event (an event possessing \emph{P}\textsubscript{1} causes an event possessing \emph{M}\textsubscript{2}).

\bigskip
\noindent
 \begin{minipage}[t]{\textwidth}
\begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{|X|X|X|}
\hline
\relax  M1  &    &  M2   \\
\relax  ⇑  &  →  &  ⇑   \\
\relax  P1  &    &  P2   \\
\hline
\end{tabularx}
\end{minipage}
\bigskip


But really this is misleading. Event c causes event e in virtue of c's being P1. M1 has nothing to do with it. Event c possesses M1, but M1 is in no way responsible for c's causing e. Here is a more accurate depiction of the situation:

\bigskip
\noindent
 \begin{minipage}[t]{\textwidth}
\begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{|X|X|X|}
\hline
\relax  M1  &    &  M2   \\
\relax  ⇑  &    &  ⇑   \\
\relax  P1  &  →  &  P2   \\
\hline
\end{tabularx}
\end{minipage}
\bigskip


The “causally relevant” properties are \emph{P}\textsubscript{1} and \emph{P}\textsubscript{2}. \emph{M}\textsubscript{1} and \emph{M}\textsubscript{2} are along for the ride. \emph{M}\textsubscript{1} and \emph{M}\textsubscript{2} appear \emph{epiphenomenal}. This is what Brian McLaughlin calls “type epiphenomenalism”: mental types, mental properties, add nothing by way of causal efficacy to events possessing them (McLaughlin 1989).


Davidson's problem has evolved into a problem for “nonreductive physicalism” generally. Suppose, inspired by Davidson, you thought that \emph{all} the properties distinctive of the “special sciences” that figure in causal explanations supervene on more basic physical properties. That is, not just psychological properties, but biological properties, meteorological properties, geological properties, not to mention sociological properties, and economic properties, depend on, but are distinct from, fundamental physical properties. It looks as though all such “higher-level,” supervenient properties would be preempted or “screened off” in causal interactions.


This is unacceptable. It seems clear that mental properties play a role in what we do and think, a causal role. Even if you were prepared to concede the inefficacy of mental properties, you are much less likely to doubt that biological properties, or meteorological properties, or geological properties “make a causal difference.” Special science explanations are causal through and through.


One option might be to weaken Davidson's requirements for causation. Perhaps causal sequences need not be backed by strict, exceptionless laws, but only by “hedged” \emph{ceteris paribus} laws (Fodor 1974). These laws would preside over causal relations within restricted domains. Laws of physics are exceptionless because there is nothing “outside” physics to disrupt their operation. Physics is unique in this regard. Psychological laws, in contrast, are subject to nonpsychological interventions.


To see the point, imagine that it is a psychological law that, if you want something and believe that some action, \emph{A}, would enable you to get what you wanted, you will form an intention to \emph{A}, and subsequently \emph{A}. Now imagine that you have the requisite desire and belief, but, before you have a chance to form the intention, you are distracted by a loud noise and, as a result, the intention is never formed. Alternatively, you might form the intention, but fail to act because you are struck on the head by a falling tree branch and lose consciousness.


This is how it would be for any special science law. Consider biology. The dinosaurs were on track to evolve in particular ways, but their biological milieu was disrupted by a meteor's striking the Earth and changing the atmosphere in ways that proved catastrophic. Biological laws must be “hedged.” No one doubts that biologists identify genuine biological causes, however, no one doubts that specifically biological properties can be “causally relevant.”


The situation in fundamental physics is completely different. When the behavior of a particle is affected by other particles, the whole system of particles is governed by exceptionless laws. The particles are not subject to outside interference because, at the fundamental level, there is no “outside.”


Maybe Fodor is right, all we need are “hedged,” \emph{ceteris paribus} laws to underwrite causal interactions. The trouble with this suggestion is that it threatens to introduce a kind of systematic causal “overdetermination.” The point can be appreciated by considering again \emph{c}'s causing \emph{e}, where \emph{c} is \emph{P}\textsubscript{1}, \emph{e} is \emph{P}\textsubscript{2}, and \emph{M}\textsubscript{1} and \emph{M}\textsubscript{2} supervene on \emph{P}\textsubscript{1} and \emph{P}\textsubscript{2}. Suppose you thought that \emph{c}'s being \emph{P}\textsubscript{1} caused \emph{e}'s being \emph{P}\textsubscript{2} \emph{and} that \emph{c}'s being \emph{M}\textsubscript{1} caused \emph{e}'s being \emph{M}\textsubscript{2}.

\bigskip
\noindent
 \begin{minipage}[t]{\textwidth}
\begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{|X|X|X|}
\hline
\relax  M1  &  →  &  M2   \\
\relax  ⇑  &    &  ⇑   \\
\relax  P1  &  →  &  P2   \\
\hline
\end{tabularx}
\end{minipage}
\bigskip


Presumably, the law governing P1 → P2 is strict, and the law governing M1 → M2 is a “hedged,” ceteris paribus law. But now ask yourself why M2 is on the scene. M2, recall, supervenes on P2, so P2 suffices for the presence of M2. In fact, it looks as though the only way M1 could influence the production of M2 is by bringing about P2.

\bigskip
\noindent
 \begin{minipage}[t]{\textwidth}
\begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{|X|X|X|}
\hline
\relax  M1  &    &  M2   \\
\relax  ⇑  &   &  ⇑   \\
\relax  P1  &  →  &  P2   \\
\hline
\end{tabularx}
\end{minipage}
\bigskip


This suggests that P2 has not one cause, but two: P1 and M1. That, however, flies in the face of the thought that P1 → P2 is itself a “strict deterministic law.” The “strictness” of this law makes it hard to see how M1 could have a role in producing P2, hence how M1 could be thought responsible for M2. It appears that we must choose between “systematic overdetermination” and “type epiphenomenalism.”

\bigskip
\noindent
 \begin{minipage}[t]{\textwidth}
\begin{tabularx}{\textwidth}{|X|X|X|}
\hline
\relax  M1  &    &  M2   \\
\relax  ⇑  &    &  ⇑   \\
\relax  P1  &  →  &  P2   \\
\hline
\end{tabularx}
\end{minipage}
\bigskip


If neither option appeals to you, you might want to give up on the claim that mental properties – or any other “higher-level,” supervenient properties you regard as causally efficacious – are irreducible. Kim argues that in many cases in the special sciences, this is the most promising option (Kim 2005). Where reduction is not feasible, we must accept epiphenomenalism. At the present time, the philosophical community is divided on the matter. Some accept Kim-style reduction, others embrace epiphenomenalism, and still others are happy to allow widespread systematic “overdetermination.”

\section{4. Another Look at Davidson}


The preceding discussion presumes a particular reading of Davidson, a reading not obviously supported by the text and implausible on the face of it. In this section I shall provide an alternative reading that has at least two advantages: first, it fits with what Davidson actually says in “Mental Events”; second, it avoids the kinds of difficulty I have been discussing.


On the received reading, Davidson accepts the “token identity” of mental and physical events (every mental event is identical with some physical event), but rejects mental–physical “type identity,” where types are taken to be properties. This commits Davidson to property dualism: mental properties are distinct from physical properties. The supervenience of the mental on the physical yields the dependence of mental properties on physical properties. Distinctness and dependence, coupled with the idea that causation requires “strict deterministic laws” and the denial that there are any “strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted or explained” seems to guarantee the causal irrelevance of mental properties.


The received reading is fundamentally mistaken, however. The key to understanding Davidson is to recognize that, for Davidson, the mental–physical distinction is not ontologically deep. The mental–physical distinction is one of conception only, not a “real distinction,” not a distinction in reality. Davidson says repeatedly that an event is mental or physical “only as described.” Mental–physical supervenience is the doctrine that any event that can be given a description in a mental vocabulary could be described in a physical vocabulary. This ensures token identity: if an event answers to a mental description, there is some physical description to which it, the very same event, would answer.


Davidson admits that it is not easy to say what makes a description mental.



\begin{quote}


We may call those verbs mental that express propositional attitudes like believing, intending, desiring, hoping, knowing, perceiving, noticing, remembering. Such verbs are characterized by the fact that they sometimes feature in sentences with subjects that refer to persons, and are completed by embedded sentences in which the usual rules of substitution appear to break down.


(Davidson 1970: 210)



\end{quote}


You might think that this characterization is wholly inadequate. This would be worrisome had Davidson set out to give an analysis of the mental. But this is not his aim. Let mental descriptions be whatever you like. Make a list of mental terms and use the list as a basis for an account of what makes a description mental. Davidson's idea is that whenever an event is identified by means of a term on the list, the event would answer to a physical description.


So what makes a description \emph{physical}? Let a physical description be a description couched in terms of fundamental physics. Now the claim would be that whenever an event can be picked out using a mental vocabulary, that very event could just as well be picked out using predicates at home in fundamental physics. Thus, token identity: every mental event, every event describable using a mental vocabulary could, as well, be described in terms of fundamental physics.


Although Davidson does not identify the physical vocabulary as I have done, I believe that invoking fundamental physics captures the spirit of Davidson's approach. In addition, this makes it easier to understand his claim that causal sequences are governed by “strict, deterministic laws.” Such laws are what you get in fundamental physics. Thus, whenever events are related causally, there is some description of the events in fundamental physical terms that includes the application of a strict, exceptionless, deterministic law. Although there are typically many ways to describe a causal sequence, fundamental physics takes us to the causal nexus.


Davidson says that while every event is physical, every event answers to a physical description, and some events answer to mental descriptions. This suggests that some events, indeed most events, are not mentally describable, hence would not count as mental events. You might worry that Davidson's technique for identifying an event as mental would lead to the exclusion of an important class of mental events: experiences of pains and afterimages, sensations and feelings of dread, what E.C. Tolman called “raw feels” (Tolman 1932: 426–7).


This might be a concern were Davidson aiming to provide an analysis of mental concepts. But this is not on the agenda.



\begin{quote}


The criterion actually covers not only the havings of pains and after-images, but much more besides. Take some event one would intuitively accept as physical, let's say the collision of two stars in distant space. There must be a purely physical predicate “\emph{Px}” true of this collision and of others, but true of only this one at the time it occurred. This particular time, though, may be pinpointed as the same time that Jones notices that a pencil starts to roll across his desk. The collision has now been picked out by a mental description and must be counted as a mental event.


(Davidson 1970: 211)



\end{quote}


Davidson goes on to note that



\begin{quote}


This strategy will probably work to show every event to be mental; we have obviously failed to capture the intuitive concept of the mental. It would be instructive to try to mend this trouble, but it is not necessary for present purposes. We can afford Spinozistic extravagance with the mental since accidental inclusions can only strengthen the hypothesis that all mental events are identical with physical events. What would matter would be failure to include bona fide mental events, but of this there seems to be no danger.


(Davidson 1970: 212)



\end{quote}


Do those philosophers who think Davidson distinguishes mental and physical events on the basis of distinctive mental and physical properties really think that Davidson would be sanguine about the possibility that \emph{every} event has a mental property? What these passages illustrate is Davidson's rejection of the idea that the mental–physical distinction is ontologically deep. The distinction, rather, is not for Davidson, as it was not for Spinoza but was for Descartes, a real distinction. The distinction is one of conception only.


What of “type diversity”? What of Davidson's robust antireductionism? There is no question of mental properties reducing, or failing to reduce, to physical properties. The idea, rather, is that categories and taxonomies of psychology and physics are \emph{orthogonal}. This means, in part, that there is no hope of expressing application conditions for psychological terms in fundamental physical terms, no hope of eliminating psychological categories and replacing them with categories of fundamental physics.


Many philosophers have pointed out that what Davidson says about the autonomy of psychology extends to all the special sciences. Take biology. Any biological event, any event describable in biological terms must be describable as well by means of categories of fundamental physics. Biological categories, no less than psychological categories, will be orthogonal to these. Here is how Jerry Fodor puts it.



\begin{quote}


Physics develops the taxonomy of its subject-matter which best suits its purposes: the formulation of exceptionless laws which are basic. \dots{} But this is not the only taxonomy which may be required if the purposes of science in general are to be served: e.g., if we are to state such true, counterfactual supporting generalizations as there are to state. So, there are special sciences, with their specialized taxonomies, in the business of stating some of these generalizations. If science is to be unified, then all such taxonomies must apply to the same things. If physics is to be basic science, then each of these things had better be a physical thing. But it is not further required that the taxonomies which the special sciences employ must themselves reduce to the taxonomy of physics. It is not required, and it is probably not true.


(Fodor 1974: 114)



\end{quote}


Some readers will be surprised to find Fodor lumped with Davidson. But both Fodor and Davidson are antireductionists, and both regard reduction as a matter of replacing categories (or predicates, or taxonomies) in one science with those in another, presumably more basic, science.


Philosophers sometimes talk as though reduction is a relation among properties or families of properties. But what would it mean to reduce one \emph{property} to another? The mistake underlying “nonreductive physicalism” is to start with warranted premises concerning predicates and categories, ways of representing real divisions in the world, and draw from these unwarranted ontological conclusions. The fact that biological or psychological categories are not reducible to, or replaceable with, categories belonging to fundamental physics, does not imply that there are realms of “irreducible” biological and psychological properties. What follows is that there are truths about the world expressible in biological or psychological vocabularies that have no systematic counterparts in physics.


Plato described science as being in the business of carving the world at its joints. The mistake is to imagine that there is just one correct way of doing this. On the contrary, the world includes endless joints, endless divisions, and endless opportunities for classifying. We have little interest in most of these. Some joints, however, are salient, some reflect important causal and qualitative similarities. These form the basis of our various taxonomies. Now think of fundamental physics as endeavoring to discover joints that themselves have no joints.


Here is one way to read Davidson. Psychological truths, truths expressible in a psychological vocabulary, are made true by ways the world is that could be given an exhaustive description in the language of fundamental physics. Physics, fundamental physics, gives us the deep story about the truthmakers for every truth that has a worldly truthmaker. Because psychological (biological, meteorological, geological, \&c) predicates are not replaceable by predicates of fundamental physics, reduction is not in the cards.


Unthinking reliance on Quine's “criterion of ontological commitment” is responsible for much of the confusion here.\footnote{You are “committed to the existence” of whatever you ineliminably quantify over in those theories you accept (Quine 1948).} Linguistic, classificatory differences are turned into ontological differences. In fact, what we get from Quine is not an ontological inventory, but an accounting of all the truths to which we are committed. It is an open question what the truthmakers are for these truths.


How could you know the truths without knowing the truthmakers? The truthmaker for “snow is white” is snow's being white. So, when you know that “snow is white” is true, do you not know the truthmaker? It is one thing to be able to say what the truthmaker is, one thing to identify the truthmaker, however, and another matter altogether to know its nature, to know the deep story, for instance, about snow and snow's whiteness.


What \emph{is} snow? What \emph{is} snow's whiteness? You can know that this is snow and that it is white without knowing what makes this snow or what makes snow white. Snow could be an arrangement of corpuscles, a fluctuation in the quantum field, a particular kind of thickening in space–time. The ontology of snow is not revealed by our ways of talking about snow. To know snow's ontology, you will need to know the physics and chemistry of snow.

\section{5. Causation and Mental Causation}


Suppose I am right about how to read Davidson. In that case, problems associated with Davidson's position, most particularly the problem of “causal relevance,” recede. Consider the following combination of theses.


\textbf{(1)} Mental events are events possessing mental properties and physical events are events possessing physical properties.


\textbf{(2)} Although mental properties depend on physical properties, mental and physical properties are distinct.


\textbf{(3)} Every mental event (every event possessing a mental property) is identical with a physical event (an event possessing a physical property).


\textbf{(4)} Events' causally interacting is a matter of those events falling under some strict law.


\textbf{(5)} Only physical properties figure in strict laws, so events fall under strict laws solely in virtue of their physical properties.


This combination of theses, mistakenly ascribed to Davidson, is thought to generate the problem of “causal relevance.” Mental events can have physical effects, but not in virtue of being mental, not \emph{qua} mental.


I take (1)–(3) to be central tenets of “nonreductive physicalism.” If you accept, as well, (4) and (5), if you accept (1)–(5), you are going to have trouble explaining how mental properties could be “causally relevant” in the production of physical effects – and, given the dependence of the mental on the physical, on the production of mental effects as well. This is why nonreductivists are so often willing to jettison (4) and (5). Some, Fodor, for instance, accept (5) but reject (4), holding that strict laws are not required to back causal relations. Others, Sydney Shoemaker, for instance, have advanced intricate accounts of the mental–physical dependence relation in hopes of defusing the problem (Shoemaker 1998, 2001, 2007, 2011).


What all of these attempts have in common is a commitment to a strong ontological construal of reduction according to which the nonreducibility of the mental to the physical is explicated, as in (2), by reference mental and physical properties. This places property dualism at the heart of antireductionism. Dualism is the source of the problem of causal relevance, but it is nonnegotiable.


Suppose, however, Davidson – \emph{my} Davidson – is right, suppose the mental–physical distinction is not a real distinction, but only a distinction in conception. In that case, it would make no sense to wonder whether an event caused a particular effect \emph{qua} mental or \emph{qua} physical. An event is mental or physical “only as described,” and how you choose to describe an event has nothing to do with what it causes.


Does this toss the baby out with the bathwater? Does it merely pretend to solve the problem of “causal relevance” while in reality eliminating or downgrading the mental? You would think that only if you thought that psychological truths required distinctively mental properties as truthmakers. But why think \emph{that}? Davidson allows all the mental truths – and all the biological truths, all the meteorological truths, and all the sociological truths. Truthmakers for these will be particular ways the world is. The world \emph{really is} those ways. If our aim is to provide the deep story of the nature of the truthmakers, we must turn to fundamental physics. This is rarely our aim, however; we are rarely interested in the deep story concerning the ontology of the world as we find it.


One ongoing source of confusion stems from the fact that, in some philosophical idiolects, “property” functions as a synonym for “predicate.” In that case, to say that \emph{a} possesses the property of being \emph{F}, is just to say that \emph{a} is \emph{F}. If that sounds strange, consider that what makes it true that \emph{a} is \emph{F} might not be the possession, by \emph{a}, of a property, \emph{F}. This billiard ball is red. Does this mean that there is a property, being red, possessed by the billiard ball? The billiard ball is a determinate shade of red, crimson, say. Pretend that this determinate shade of red is a property. Does the billiard ball possess two properties, the property of being crimson and, in addition, the property of being red? Or is it rather that it is true to \emph{describe} the billiard ball as red (or, for that matter, as colored) because it is a determinate shade of red? You would think the former only if you thought that distinct truths require distinct truthmakers. But this is just what Davidson denies. Every mental truth is made true by some way the world is, a way that also makes true some truth expressible in a very different vocabulary, the vocabulary of fundamental physics.


There is no crime in taking a relaxed view of properties, no crime in equating properties and predicates. Mistakes arise, however, when premises invoking properties in this relaxed sense are used to support conclusions concerning properties in an ontologically serious sense. This, arguably, is the mistake at the heart of “nonreductive physicalism.” But it is not Davidson's mistake.

\section{6. Concluding Remarks}


“Nonreductive physicalists” start with arguments such as Fodor's that make important points about categories we use to describe and explain the world. Then, encouraged by Quine's criterion of “ontological commitment,” draw from these arguments substantive ontological conclusions. The conclusions, most significantly, property dualism, are not supported by the arguments. And it is just these conclusions that lead to intractable problems in the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of science. One way out of the fly bottle is to read Davidson on his own terms.


A final comment. Some readers might cringe at my invoking a notion of truthmaking in explicating Davidson. The thought is that truthmaking is just the kind of philosophical concoction Davidson would likely reject out of hand.


This is not the place to argue the point, but I believe that, rightly understood, all of us all the time make use of the truthmaking idea. When biologists wondered about the nature of genes prior to the discovery of DNA, they were concerned to identify truthmakers for genetic truths. When physicists debate interpretations of quantum mechanics, they are trying to ascertain truthmakers for quantum theory. Truthmaking is not a technical notion, not a substantive “theory of truth.” Truthmaking, the relation a truth bearer bears to whatever makes the truth bearer true, is an internal relation: if you have a truth bearer and you have the world's being as the truth bearer says it is, you have the truth bear being made true by the world's being as it is. This is certainly consistent with much of what Davidson says about truth. And it is, I would argue, central to a Davidsonian conception of mental and physical events.

% Notes
\section{References}


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Dancy, J. (2000). \emph{Practical Reality}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Davidson, D. (1963). Actions, reasons, and causes. \emph{The Journal of Philosophy} 60:685–700. Reprinted in Davidson (1980): 3–19.


———. (1970). Mental events. In \emph{Experience and Theory}, L. Foster and J. Swanson (eds). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 79–101. Reprinted in Davidson (1980\Slash{}2001): 207–225 (citations are to the latter).


———. (1980). \emph{Essays on Actions and Events}. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Reprinted in 2001.


Dray, W. (1957). \emph{Laws and Explanation in History}. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


Fodor, J.A. (1974). Special sciences (or: the disunity of science as a working hypothesis). \emph{Synthese} 28:97–115.


Foster, L. and Swanson, J. (eds). (1970). \emph{Experience and Theory}. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.


Gillett, C. and Loewer, B. (eds). (2001). \emph{Physicalism and Its Discontents}. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.


Hampshire, S. (1959). \emph{Thought and Action}. New York: Viking Press.


Hare, R.M. (1952). \emph{The Language of Morals}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Hart, H.L.A. and Honoré, A.M. (1959). \emph{Causation and the Law}. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


Honderich, T. (1982). The argument for anomalous monism. \emph{Analysis} 42:59–64.


Kenny, A. (1963). \emph{Action, Emotion, and Will}. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.


Kim, J. (1984). Epiphenomenal and supervenient causation. \emph{Midwest Studies in Philosophy} 9:257–270. Reprinted in Kim (1993): 92–108.


———. (1989). The myth of non-reductive materialism. \emph{Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association} 63:31–47. Reprinted in Kim (1993): 265–84 (citations are to the latter).


———. (1993). \emph{Supervenience and Mind: Selected Philosophical Essays}. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.


———. (2005). \emph{Physicalism, or Something Near Enough}. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.


Lowe, E.J. (2008). \emph{Personal Agency: The Metaphysics of Mind and Action}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Malcolm, N. (1968). The conceivability of mechanism. \emph{Philosophical Review} 77:45–72.


McLaughlin, B.P. (1989). Type epiphenomenalism, type dualism, and the causal priority of the physical. \emph{Philosophical Perspectives} 3:109–135.


Melden, A.I. (1961). \emph{Free Action}. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.


Quine, W.V.O. (1948). On what there is. \emph{Review of Metaphysics} 5:21–38. Reprinted in Quine (1961): 1–19.


———. (1961). \emph{From a Logical Point of View}, 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Reprinted in 1963 by Harper and Row.


Ryle, G. (1949). \emph{The Concept of Mind}. London: Hutchinson.


Shoemaker, S. (1998). Causal and metaphysical necessity. \emph{Pacific Philosophical Quarterly} 79:59–77.


———. (2001). Realization and mental causation. In Gillett and Loewer (2001): 74–98.


———. (2007). \emph{Physical Realization}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


———. (2011). Realization, powers, and property identity. \emph{The Monist} 94:3–18.


Sosa, E. (1984). Mind-body interaction and supervenient causation. \emph{Midwest Studies in Philosophy} 9:271–281.


Stoutland, F. (1980). Oblique causation and reasons for action. \emph{Synthese} 43:351–367.


Tolman, E.C. (1932). \emph{Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men}. New York: The Century Co.

\chapter{8. Davidson's “Method of Truth” in Metaphysics}


William G. Lycan


Davidson made a strikingly distinctive and valuable contribution to the practice of ontology. It was a species of argument for the existence of things of one kind or another. It was inspired by Quine's doctrine that “To be is to be the value of a bound variable,” but it combined that with Davidson's own apparently anti-Quinean views on semantics and logical form in natural language. Roughly: Suppose truth-conditional analysis of certain English sentences assigns them logical forms containing characteristic quantifiers, and the quantifiers' domains include entities of a certain sort. Then, assuming that some of the relevant sentences are true, it follows that there exist entities of that sort.


\textbf{1.} Davidson's (1967b) own classic instance of this method was his argument for the existence of events, in “The Logical Form of Action Sentences.” But, preliminaries:\forcelinebreak  According to his theory of meaning (Davidson 1967c, 1970a), the core meaning of a natural-language sentence – its propositional or locutionary content as opposed to its illocutionary force or what on an occasion its utterer might have meant by it – is that sentence's truth condition. The truth condition is determined by the meanings of the sentence's smallest meaningful parts together with their syntactic mode of composition, and it is best represented by a formula of some explicitly truth-defined logical system acting as what Quine called a canonical idiom.\footnote{Though Quine had in mind an ideal language designed to replace natural language for purposes of theorizing, while Davidson (1977: 246) intends only a “standardized notation” in which to do semantics of natural language.} Such a formula wears its own truth condition on its sleeve, in that its truth condition is computable on the basis of the usual Tarskian set of extensions for the atomic elements of that system plus a set of recursive rules that project the semantic values of a formula's elements through truth-functional and other syntactic compounding into a truth condition for the formula as a whole.\forcelinebreak  In that way, our original English sentence has its logical and semantical features predicted by its associated formula (call that explicitly truth-defined formula the sentence's \emph{semantic representation}, though that is not Davidson's own term). Via the semantic representation, too, logical anomalies are resolved, and other semantically puzzling features of the target sentences explained, just as Russell intended at the time he fashioned the theory of descriptions. The natural-language sentences simply inherit their perceived semantical features, such as entailments, from the formal properties of their semantic representations.\forcelinebreak  To do semantics in Davidsonian fashion is (using his method of deriving Tarskian “T-sentences”) to assign semantic representations and thereby explicit truth conditions to natural-language sentences, in such a way as to illuminate semantic structure consonantly with what is known of the sentence's syntactic structure. A semantic analysis of a target sentence will have, or should have, testable consequences: it will predict ambiguities, synonymies, anomalies, logical implications, and the like. Capturing implications is a main goal, perhaps the main goal, of the enterprise.\footnote{Lycan (1984) is an extended elaboration and defense of this program.}


\textbf{2.} Davidson did all that, in the most dramatic way, for the case of action verbs and their most typical modifiers. Focusing on the demodification inference (from “Jones buttered the toast slowly, deliberately, in the bathroom, with a knife, at midnight” to “Jones buttered the toast slowly, with a knife, at midnight,” “Jones buttered the toast deliberately, in the bathroom,” “Jones buttered the toast,” and the like), Davidson hypothesized that the modified verbs are really existential quantifications over actions construed as concrete events, and that their modifiers are really conjoined predications of the corresponding bound event variables. Thus, the sentence “Jones buttered the toast” would be represented as


\textbf{(1)} (∃e)BUTTERING(e, Jones, the toast)


(“There occurred a buttering, by Jones, of the toast”), or more elaborately, picking up further obvious implications, as


\textbf{(1*)} (∃e)(BUTTERING(e) \& AGENT(Jones, e) \& PATIENT (the toast, e)).


((1*) will allow the derivation of “Jones did something,” “Something happened to the toast,” and the like.) Modifiers, then, are just further conjoined predications, which explains why they may be stripped singly or in groups:


\textbf{(2)} (∃e)(BUTTERING(e, Jones, the toast) \& SLOW(e) \& DELIBERATE(e) \& OCCURRED-IN(e, the bathroom) \& (∃x) (KNIFE (x) \& INSTRUMENT(e,x)) \& OCCURRED-AT(e, midnight)).


So demodification is at bottom just ampersand elimination, the trivial derivation of one or more conjuncts from a conjunction. A puzzling and potentially troublesome felt implication is reduced to a clean, extensional, and indeed classical form of inference.\footnote{Similarly, the analysis solves the problem of “variable polyadicity”: On a naïve representation, “Buttered” would be a relational predicate. But depending on the number of modifiers, it would have to be a two-place predicate here, a three-place predicate there, and so on to infinity; and each such predicate would have a different meaning. On Davidson's view, “Buttered” is always monadic.}


But for ontological purposes, the point is the event quantifiers that occur in those semantic representations. If (1) directly exhibits the logical form of “Jones buttered the toast,” then that sentence itself existentially quantifies over events. If the sentence is true, that is, if Jones did butter the toast, then there exist events, occurrences, in addition to ordinary physical objects, people, and whatever else there may be.


Of course, it is left open exactly what an “event” is, but an event has to be such as to ground the fact of Jones’ doing the buttering, for according to Davidson's semantics, the buttering \emph{is} that event. One well-known candidate that is ruled out is a Kim-event (Kim 1976), a triple of an entity, a property and a time. For a triple is a set, an abstract entity, and no act of buttering is an abstract entity. (Assuming that there are sets, properties and times, there is no doubt that Kim-events exist. But if sound, Davidson's reasoning shows that there also exist events of a more robust and physical nature.)


It should be noted that this ontological method can be used especially in the face of deliberate attempts to deflate ontology by semantical posturing. Consider the “adverbial” approach to sensory contents (Chisholm 1957; Sellars 1956) that reigned in the philosophy of mind until the late 1970s.\footnote{Davidson (1977: 253) himself gives this example; he also mentions the Goodmanian idea of adverbializing “that”-clauses as a way of avoiding commitment to propositions. As he says, “It is mildly ironic that in [then] recent philosophy it has become a popular maneuver to try to \emph{avoid} ontological problems by treating certain phrases as adverbial.”} It originated as a way of eschewing Russellian sense-data: Instead of saying “There exists a blue patch [sense-datum] in my visual field,” we should say only “I am appeared to bluely.” But Jackson (1977) and Lycan (1987) argued that (a) the adverbial analysis is a semantic proposal and so is subject to semantic evaluation on the basis of specifically linguistic evidence and (b) that the evidence, especially in the form of felt implications, goes directly contrary to the adverbial view; semantic analysis of the proposed adverbial constructions themselves reintroduces reference to colored individual items.


(The “ordinary language” philosophers of the 1950s tried to draw ontological conclusions, positive or negative, from observations about the ordinary uses of relevant linguistic expressions. Whatever the merits of that project, it is not Davidson's. It had no use for formal logic and certainly none for any notion of logical form, which notion is central to Davidson's style of ontological investigation.\footnote{N.B., Davidson made no claim of exclusivity for his “method of truth.” It is one guide to ontology among others.})


\textbf{3.} Not until 10 years after “The Logical Form of Action Sentences” and “Truth and Meaning” did Davidson present his distinctive argument form in a considered way. “The Method of Truth in Metaphysics” (Davidson 1977, hereafter “Method”) wove it up out of his previously defended views and elaborated it.\footnote{Of course, there is another approach that could have been called the “method of truth,” a highly reliable one: It can be formulated as “Always hold true metaphysical views.”}


The paper begins:



\begin{quote}


In sharing a language, in whatever sense this is required for communication, we share a picture of the world that must, in its large features, be true. It follows that in making manifest the large features of our language, we make manifest the large features of reality. One way of pursuing metaphysics is therefore to study the general structure of our language. (p. 244)



\end{quote}


Speaking of large, these are highly substantive claims. (i) To share a language is to share a picture of the world. Well, I suppose. But then (ii) that picture “must, in its large features, be true” (!). And then (iii) it follows that to exhibit the large features of our language, we reveal the large features of reality.


The largest of the claims is (ii). It is defended by appeal to Davidson's (1973b) familiar interpretivism with regard to both utterance meaning and belief content. He is highly sympathetic to Quine's model of “radical translation,” and appreciates the epistemological difficulty of assigning meanings without knowing beliefs and attributing beliefs without knowing meanings. His solution is based on the principle of charity, according to which, other things being equal, we should attribute beliefs to our subject that agree with ours and fit obvious features of the environment.



\begin{quote}


[W]e damage the intelligibility of our readings of the utterances of others when our method of reading puts others into what we take to be broad error. We can make sense of differences all right, but only against a background of shared belief.


(“Method,” p. 244)



\end{quote}


That accounts for (i) earlier. Acknowledging that (ii) is a vastly further claim, Davidson proceeds:



\begin{quote}


Just as too much attributed error risks depriving the subject of his subject matter, so too much error robs a person of things to go wrong about. \dots{} We do not need to be omniscient to interpret, but there is nothing absurd in the idea of an omniscient interpreter; he attributes beliefs to others, and interprets their speech on the basis of his own beliefs, just as the rest of us do. Since he does this as the rest of us do, he perforce finds as much agreement as is needed to make sense of his attributions and interpretations; and in this case, of course, what is agreed is by hypothesis true. But now it is plain why massive error about the world is simply unintelligible \dots{} (p. 245).



\end{quote}


Hence (ii). This is a brilliantly original argument.\footnote{The omniscient interpreter first made his appearance in Davidson (1975).} I do not accept it, but for a reason to be given later, I shall not evaluate it here.


\textbf{4.} “Method” goes on (p. 247) to compare Davidson's semantic project with that of Tarski, which had inspired it. Of course, Tarski had no concern for natural languages in the first place. But in addition, Davidson's T-sentences are not homophonic, since their RHSs are formulas of a formal system.\footnote{Davidson actually qualifies this (p. 250): “[T]he part of the language used in stating truth conditions for all sentences may become indistinguishable from what is often called a formalized or artificial language. It would be a mistake, however, to suppose that it is essential to find such a canonical subdivision of the language.”} Moreover, some relativization is needed to accommodate indexicals and such, and the RHSs will accordingly contain some technical vocabulary; there will no longer be any clear sense in which the RHS formula is supposed to “translate” the target sentence mentioned on the LHS, and Tarski's Convention T is not available as a purely formal test. Finally, for the latter reason, the Davidsonian semantic program cannot and does not claim to have defined truth itself, but must “assume a partial understanding of truth, and use the theory to throw light on meaning, interpretation, and translation.”


\textbf{5.} Davidson now goes on to argue (section III) that although semantically relevant structure does not always force ontological commitment,\footnote{Did a language contain only finitely many sentences, the homophonic T-sentences themselves would constitute a finite truth theory for the language. Even to make that language infinite by adding iterable connectives such as the truth functions would not introduce ontology.} “[i]n general, \dots{} [it] is apt to demand ontology” (p. 249). He leads off with the example of quotation.


Take the simple view of quotations as proper names of their contained expressions. That view is untenable in a Davidsonian semantics, for there are infinitely many quotations and each would have to be taken as primitive. (Davidsonian semantics cannot allow infinitely many primitives, for such a language could not have been learned by a finite being (Davidson 1965).) One solution would be Quine's, to replace quotation with spelling. Instead of “cat,” use “((see@@@
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\end{figure}
)@@@
\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-25.jpg}
\end{figure}
).” This treats the original quotation as a complex description. But to give such structure to quotations is to introduce structural \emph{elements}, the letter-words, which commits us to the existence of letters – for English, 26 of them. To see that there really is ontological commitment here (not Davidson's way of putting it), notice that from “((see@@@
\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-24.jpg}
\end{figure}
)@@@
\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-25.jpg}
\end{figure}
) is a noun” we can deduce “(∃x)((see@@@
\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-26.jpg}
\end{figure}
)@@@
\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-25.jpg}
\end{figure}
).”


Second (pp. 249–450), he turns to Frege's theory of oblique contexts. Frege recognized that the propositional sense named by the complement clause of a belief sentence had to have structure for there are infinitely many such propositional senses; they must be built up out of the individual senses of the complement's component terms. And of course in Frege's own ontology “senses” are intensional abstract entities \emph{referred to} by the relevant terms.\footnote{In an aside (p. 251), Davidson comments on the apparent asymmetry of subject and predicate. At least in a system based on first-order logic, “for large stretches of language, anyway, variables, quantifiers, and singular terms must be construed as referential in function; not so for predicates.” Subjects bring quantification over particular individuals with them, but (so far as has been shown) predicates do not; “(∃x)(Mouse(x) \& Edible(x))” does not by itself require the existence of \emph{a class of} edible mice, but only that of some such mice themselves or other.} But, Davidson points out, his finitude problem has not been solved merely by assigning structure to propositional senses, for intentional operators such as “believe” can iterate to infinity, which requires an infinite hierarchy of senses for each term. New approach needed.


Next (pp. 251–52), consider “Jack fell down before Jack broke his crown.” “Before” is not truth-functional. Following Frege, Davidson tries the obvious if ungainly philosophical monster, “true iff there exists a time \emph{t} and there exists a time \emph{t′} such that Jack fell down at \emph{t} and Jack broke his crown at \emph{t′}, and \emph{t} is before \emph{t′}” – which would commit us to the existence of \emph{times}. (Presumably, for deeper analysis, we could revert to Davidson's theory of action sentences and use the time variables as parameters on the event predicates “Falling” and “Breaking.” But he suggests we may even dispense with the time variable, by making “Before” a direct relation on events, and thereby at least temporarily lay down the ontological burden of individual entities called “times.”)


Finally, Davidson moves to consider causal predication. As in Davidson (1967a, again invoking event predication, “Causes” becomes a simple relation on events, here the falling and the breaking. (Davidson (1967a) of course compared this analysis with competitors and argued that it is superior on semantic grounds.) That provides further support for the existence of events, and helps to illuminate the metaphysical nature of causation.


\textbf{6.} On p. 253, Davidson alleges “a further, rather different way in which a theory of truth may have metaphysical repercussions: if for its own explanatory purposes, \emph{it} must quantify over items of certain kinds.” Davidson (1967c) argued that to handle demonstratives, other indexicals, tense, and such, entities such as \emph{utterances} must be introduced in the T-sentences' RHSs, an utterance presupposing a speaker, a sentence, and (anew) a time. Some such entities may also be ascribed to the respective target sentences, but obviously others will not be. Yet the theorist is committed to that ontology, because \emph{she\Slash{}he} has quantified over those items.


Quite so, but (perhaps a bit stipulatively) I would not count such an argument as an instance of the “method of truth.” For it does not require the truth of any target sentence as a premise, but proceeds directly from the assumed truth of the semanticist's own theory; it is a humdrum application of Quine's criterion of ontological commitment, and not the unique style of ontologizing that is afforded by Davidsonian semantics.


\textbf{7.} Now it is time to consider a panoply of objections to the method of truth. But first a potential complaint, not about the method itself, but about its degree of support: The method has been defended on the basis of the Davidsonian program for semantics. But that program is highly elaborate, and committed to each of many claims that are vigorously disputed. Indeed, there are few philosophers who accept all of them. Thus, Davidson's overall case for the method is very weak, and we have little reason to accept it.


Some of the disputed components: His interpretivism. Much more so, obviously, his claim that massive error is conceptually impossible. His Tarskian appeal to derivations of T-sentences. His rigid extensionalism, in particular his assumption that truth rules for every natural-language can be stated in first-order logic with identity. His (early) view that the concept of truth is more fundamental than those of meaning, asserting, and utterer's meaning. Quite a lot to have to defend.


But notice that very little of this figures in the method of truth proper. In particular, despite the structure of “Method” 's sections I and II, the method itself is entirely independent of interpretivism and can be defended just as well without it – indeed, it is so defended by Davidson (1965, 1970b) himself. In fact, as we shall see later, interpretivism is in tension with each of several other Davidsonian positions.


Nor, though less obviously, does the method require support from the Tarskian format, and certainly not extensionalism. It would be too strong to say that those are just other things Davidson believes, since they do figure directly in his development of his semantic format; but the method of truth could equally be supported by Montague grammar, which makes no use of T-sentences and is based triumphantly on intensional logic.


All the method (proper) needs are: a motivated truth-conditional assignment of logical forms to target sentences, revealing quantificational structure, and the premise that at least one of the relevant target sentences is true. Ontology follows.


But now for the objections to the method itself.


\textbf{8.} \emph{Objection 1}: Quine (1960, 1970) notoriously defended the radical claim that a sentence's meaning properties – synonymy, entailment and the like, as well as the sentence's meaning itself – are entirely relative to a “translation manual” based on an utterer's behavior, and that there are different such manuals equally well justified by the behavioral evidence. Accordingly, the meanings are objectively indeterminate; a sentence does not have a meaning except relative to an arbitrarily chosen “manual” parameter. “There is no fact of the matter.” This is an eliminative view of meaning, for if sentence S had a determinate meaning and translation manual M assigned that meaning to S, then M would be to that extent objectively correct.


And clearly, if a target sentence has no determinate meaning the first place, it has no determinate logical form either, and the method of truth cannot get a grip.


Quine's thesis is, to say the least, highly counterintuitive. And some of his arguments are entirely unconvincing; but he worked hard to produce better ones and to remove obstacles to seeing the indeterminacy. It would be hard to say how many philosophers have ever been convinced. But if Quine is right, the method of truth is bankrupt; there would be no fact of the matter regarding a sentence ‘s ontological commitments either.\footnote{Lycan (1976, 1984) considered two different ways of deflating the Davidsonian semantic program in order to make it compatible with Quinean indeterminacy, but argued that neither deflated view would answer to Davidson's own demands on a semantic theory.}


What is odd, and has been widely remarked (as by Lycan 1976), is that Davidson himself has evinced at least great sympathy for the indeterminacy doctrine. Davidson (1970a) appealed to it as part of his case for the “anomalous monist” theory of the mental.\footnote{Notice that there is also a strong tension – I do not say an outright contradiction – between Davidson's interpretivism about belief, and the token identity theory of mental states that is entailed by his anomalous monism. To ascribe beliefs by interpretation using the principle of charity is a form of projection of a belief scheme onto the whole subject; it could scarcely identify a particular brain state within the subject.} Davidson (1973a) seemed to defend it as a way of showing the unintelligibility of the idea of radically different conceptual schemes. Davidson (1973b, 1974) tried to elaborate some methodology, more liberal than Quine's own, for reducing the scope of indeterminacy, but he did not claim it could be eliminated entirely, and he did not frankly repudiate the indeterminacy doctrine. Davidson (1979) defends an “inscrutability” claim about reference that seems to entail the indeterminacy of interpretation.


Incidentally, return for a moment to Davidson's notion of an “omniscient interpreter” (section 3), and notice that it is an oxymoron. If the being is omniscient, he knows everything there is to know, that is, every fact. But then he has no epistemological need to interpret. Alternately, if he is omniscient but is still doing some interpreting, the latter activity cannot be a matter of getting at facts, but can be only the imposing or projecting of a nonfactual interpretation.


\textbf{9.} \emph{Objection 2}: Some philosophers, most notably Wittgenstein and his followers, granted that meaning is determinate, but repudiated the entire notion of logical form, the idea of a subterranean conceptual system that differs dramatically from surface grammar and\Slash{}but as dramatically explains why the surface grammar and the target sentences' semantic behavior are as they are.\footnote{The repudiation is sometimes dramatic as well. Wittgenstein's biographers have suggested that what helped to disabuse him of his original allegiance to logical form was Piero Sraffa's question to him, “What is the logical form of \emph{that}?” (vulgar Neapolitan gesture here).} If linguistic meaning arises out of conventional social behavior, it should be and will be able to be explained in term of conventions governing overt behavior; appeals to spooky, hidden “logical forms” are specious.\footnote{An intermediate view might be an inferentialist one such as Robert Brandom's (1994), according to which we may speak of logical forms, but they are abstractions from a Sellarsian system of social inferential norms. Thus, it is the social norms that ground and explain the logical forms, not vice versa.}


Alternately, a theorist might grant a notion of “logical form” but deflate it to a device of what Quine (1960) called “regimentation.” The idea would be that it is often useful to paraphrase natural-language sentences into formulas of some canonical idiom, say for purposes of disambiguation or other clarification, or of drawing attention to inferential similarities or whatever. But no claim of actual synonymy or exact truth-conditional equivalence is made, much less any about the target sentence inheriting its semantic properties from the formula used as a paraphrase. Moreover, there need be no single privileged (“canonical”) idiom; different formal languages may be useful for different purposes as well.


These two views are mutually compatible, and each stands opposed to the idea that a natural-language sentence has a determinate logical form. On either view, the method of truth falls apart, for it infers the ontological commitments of a sentence from a factual claim about the sentence's logical form.


Now, given the illuminating power of Frege's semantic arguments (accept them or not), the brilliance and staying power of Russell's theory of descriptions, the breakthrough quality of Davidson's work on actions and events, and many other such, it is otiose to take the hardline Wittgensteinian view as against the regimentation view. So the only question is, have we been given – by Davidson, or by Russell or Montague or methodologically inclined linguists – sufficient reason to maintain that there is a single most efficacious canonical idiom and that natural-language sentences can determinately be assigned truth conditions with respect to it? Here opinions will differ, depending on one's experience of the literature and on one's standard of proof. My own position is that we have strong, though not crushing reason for belief here, so long as we are not dogmatic in our choice of standardized notation and allow it to co-evolve with our variously best semantic analyses. (This is the way many linguists look at the issue.)


Moreover, even if there is no single best canonical idiom and\Slash{}or no single best semantical representation modulo a given idiom, there may be invariances. If every reasonable semantic representation in every efficacious idiom includes quantification over Fs, then the method of truth yields a powerful argument for the existence of Fs.


\textbf{10.} \emph{Objection 3}: As noted earlier, the method of truth requires a premise to the effect that at least one member of the relevant class of target sentences is true. That premise is normally secure (has Jones \emph{never once} buttered toast?). If, barring demon skepticism, it is perfectly obvious that lots of members of the class are true, then if you want to reject the proffered ontology, you must either make an objection to the semantic defense of the logical form in question, or reject the entire method of truth on some independent grounds.


But it is not always so obvious that the relevant class does have any true members; sometimes, an error theory is possible. To take an obvious example, Mackie (1977) argued that for moral properties to exist, they would require the existence of “objective prescriptions.” Let us imagine an ontologically clearer version of this claim made on semantic grounds. Someone looks at moral judgments and assigns them logical forms that quantify over God (or some relevantly similar cosmic lawgiver), so that by the method of truth it follows that God exists. (Now, \emph{there's} ontology.) Mackie of course would turn this argument on its head. The atheist, or for that matter anyone else who inclines against moral realism, need not reject the semantic argument; she\Slash{}he has the option of adopting an error theory and denying that any moral judgment is ever true.\footnote{Indispensability arguments for the existence of numbers are normally instances of the method of truth. It may seem undeniable that “2 + 2 = 4” is true. But notoriously, Hartry Field (1980) has defended an error theory of arithmetic, precisely as a way of turning such arguments on their heads. \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf An interesting variant on the Mackie position is that of Harman (1975), who argues \emph{positively}, on (allegedly) semantic grounds, not for any particular ontology, but for moral relativism – the view that moral predicates contain hidden parameters. On that view, some apparent moral disagreements will not qualify as genuine disagreements, because of parameter shift, and moral realism is to that extent impugned.}


But considered as an objection to the method, that point is weak. Any instance of the method is a deductive argument, and of course any deductive argument may be turned on its head. One who wants to resist the ontology always has the option of rejecting the truth premise. In some cases, that will be ludicrously implausible, but in other cases it may be tenable. No proponent of the method of truth should, or would, say otherwise.


However:


\textbf{11.} \emph{Objection 4}: So far, our discussion has ignored the question of whether truth itself is robust or in some way deflationary.\footnote{Lycan (1984) defended the view now called Maximetaminimalism: that \emph{it is extremely important not to care what theory of truth is true}.} But now consider views according to which although truth per se is deflationary, we should still distinguish between two different kinds of explanation in regard to the making of judgments. Quasi-realists regarding, for example, moral judgments,\footnote{Blackburn (1993), Gibbard (1990), and Smart (1984).} grant that such judgments can be true. But they are selectively concerned to explain the makings of moral judgments in an expressivist way, without reference to any actual moral properties, while allowing the makings of ordinary factual and scientific claims to be explained as responses to real worldly objects and properties. What motivates the “quasi-” is that such theorists are concerned not to deny the \emph{semantic} appearances, including especially the fact that the logical behavior of a moral judgment is typically just the same as that of an uncontroversially factual judgment; that is why they grant that moral judgments have truth values.


Does this selective sort of position affect the method of truth? Presumably so, though I am not entirely sure how. Take a moral judgment such as “Eating people is wrong.” Davidsonian semantics will assign it a semantic representation that applies the predicate “Wrong” to a type of action (however the latter is represented). And so an existential statement can be derived: “(∃x)(Wrong(x)).” Yet by the quasi-realist's design, no ontology is intended, because the original judgment was true only in the deflationary sense.


Of course quasi-realists think that truth itself always deflationary; what makes someone a realist rather than only a quasi-realist about a subject-matter is what they believe about what explains people's moral judgings.\footnote{Asay (2012, 2013) offers a different characterization of the difference between the realist and the quasi-realist, in terms of kinds of truthmaker; I myself prefer his account. Quasi-realists regarding moral judgments are as before concerned to expunge moral ontology in favor of expressivism, and so they hold that the judgments' truthmakers are facts about people's attitudes and preferences, while ordinary factual and scientific claims have truthmakers of the face-value sort.} If that view is correct, does it simply invalidate the method of truth?


Not \emph{eo ipso}, because the moral realist can still point to the existentially quantified conclusion concessively shared by the quasi-realist: There are types of action that are wrong. What the quasi-realist resists is the ontological inference that the world contains substantive moral properties. (Shades of Davidson's contention that predication per se is of no ontological import.) So perhaps she\Slash{}he will want to say that neither truth \emph{nor quantification} is the issue. The realist will rejoin that the battle has been won once the quasi-realist has conceded that \emph{there are} wrongful types of action; whether there are “substantive” moral “properties” is a further question about which s\Slash{}he does not care.


In any case, it seems that the quasi-realist has in mind a deflationary notion of quantification to go with her\Slash{}his deflationary notion of truth. If so, or if not, that brings us the next and final objection.


\textbf{12.} \emph{Objection 5}: Following Quine, Davidson has assumed that the quantifiers employed in the method of truth are classical and, in particular, objectual. Quine can do what he likes, because he does not endorse the method, but why does Davidson get to assume that? So far as has been shown, the quantifiers appearing in the semantic representations may be substitutionally interpreted, or they may be of some third sort that do not deliver the promised ontological conclusions.


Quine (1968, 1969) of course acknowledged the substitution interpretation, which he attributed to Leśniewski. Presumably, Davidson acknowledges it too, since it is formally impeccable. But I know of no work in which Davidson discusses it.


Yet Quine offered two caveats, each of which would seem to help Davidson resist the present objection. First, for a quantifier to “range over” a given individual, the individual must have a name that occurs in the relevant formal system. Of course, names need not be proper names, and complex descriptions can be concocted for individuals that in fact satisfy those descriptions. But there is a well-known problem of cardinality. No lexicon affords more than denumerably many expressions, and so it appears that universal quantifiers substitutionally interpreted will not be able to range over all the real numbers, much less possible worlds. Thus, Davidson may say, substitutional quantification will not allow us to quantify over everything that science does.\footnote{And what about “(∃x)(x has no name)”?}


Quine's second caveat, following Leśniewski (in conversation), is that in another way, substitutional quantification is cheap: It is not restricted to singular-term positions, but can apply within any syntactic category, including, famously, parentheses. Thus, formulas like “(∃x)(y)(Admiresxy, Davidson)” (not a misprint!) are perfectly well-formed and have clear truth conditions; this one is true because “(y)(Admires(y, Davidson)” is true and we have substitutionally quantified into the left-parenthesis position. “To conclude that entities are being assumed that trivially, and that far out, is simply to drop ontological questions” (p. 106). (The Leśniewski example struck Lycan (1979) as posing a deeper and more pervasive problem for appealing to substitutional quantification in analyzing natural language, though I shall not here digress into that. For a related argument, see van Inwagen 1981.) Thus, Davidson may say, substitutional quantification cannot be an ontological mark at all. Do not be fooled by the fact that our semantic representations quantify only into singular term or possibly also predicate positions, for that is only a happenstance due to the structures of the natural-language target sentences; it does not make the substitution interpretation of those quantifiers any less ontologically trivial than that which occurs in the foregoing Leśniewski formula.


However, since Quine's time, advocates for the substitutional approach have put in some work on the not-enough-names problem. Lance (1996) makes a bold and technically brilliant attempt at it, first allowing merely possible names in order to provide for uncountability,\footnote{This move goes back to Dunn and Belnap (1968).} but then, admitting that there are other sorts of objects that we could not in principle name, he brings in possible \emph{arbitrary} names, and argues that they take up the slack. One may wonder if the introduction of merely possible expressions does not reintroduce substantive ontological commitment in the metatheory, but Lance and other Sellarsians have an answer to that.\footnote{Roughly that \emph{all} quantification, formal and natural-language, always and everywhere, is substitutional. Lance's containing project is to defend that thesis, and to make a novel contribution to the program of normative inferential as opposed to truth-conditional semantics generally.}


If Lance is right, then Davidson must after all say why he gets to insist that the quantifiers occurring in his semantic representations are objectual – or at least that some of them are, and how to tell the difference.


There is a further nonobjectual option, a kind of quietism. Suppose we are mathematical anti-realists, and we want to account for quantification over numbers without incurring Quinean commitment. Well: \emph{There are things that do not exist}. That is a near-Moorean fact. So there are (at least) two distinct quantifiers or anyway existential expressions in English, and one of them is ontologically noncommissive. Now, it is possible for us to say, truly or not: There are numbers, prime ones and large ones and irrational ones and imaginary ones, but they do not exist.


Is this not just Quine's dreaded “Wyman” position, = Meinongianism? Not yet. All our objector has pointed out is that, like it or not, there are things that do not exist, an indisputable truth. What \emph{metaphysical exegesis} one gives of it is what is horribly difficult and contentious. Meinong's own exegesis is just one among eight or nine. (Another, still among eight or nine, is Ruth Marcus’ (1975–1976) suggestion that the noncommissive quantifier is substitutional.\footnote{Others (I will not take up space with full references): N can be paraphrased away in terms of counterfactuals or the like (Kripke); N ranges over Ersatzes, like sets of sentences or structured sets of properties (Carnap, Hintikka, Adams, Plantinga, and Lycan); what I am calling noncommissive is no such thing, but can in context be restricted to worldmates of ours (Lewis); N is used fictionally (Rosen); N occurs as part of a pretense, or with an illocutionary force different from that of standard assertion, or the like (Walton and Currie).}) But it remains: There is at least one noncommissive quantifier in English. And for illustrative purposes, I have stipulated that I am using that one on numbers.


So again we can challenge Davidson to say how he can tell which of the quantifiers in one of his semantic representations are objectual. But here I think he has a reasonable reply: If we try to flag the noncommissive quantifier as such, say by writing it as “(Nx) \dots{} x \dots{}” in a semantic representation, we need to have in mind an interpretation of some sort. If we deliberately leave it unexplicated, \emph{then} we will have gone over to Meinong. If we say it is substitutional, then we collapse the present option back into the previous one. If we give it a nonstandard domain, we must say what that domain is, and be answerable for the consequences. If we offer an analysis of it, then it would no longer qualify as an element of a semantic representation, for it merely abbreviates further hidden structure. So Davidson would be within his rights to ask which option the objector has in mind, even though the objector has tried precisely to be neutral as among them.


Davidson is still subject to the Lance challenge, though he has made the aforementioned further reply to Objection 4 based on Quine's second caveat. And now we come to something of an impasse. As portrayed here (unsupported by text), Davidson holds that substitutional quantification is of no ontological import. I said that he owes us a principled account of when an apparent commitment can be written off as merely the shadow of a substitutional quantifier. But he will be pulled in opposite ways here, in each way, by Quine. First, when we speak, we make ontological commitments; everyone should agree to that. So some of our quantification must be objectual. But, second, when we are able to avoid ontological commitment consistently with the first point, we should do so, on grounds of parsimony.


Quine himself would favor objectual quantification over things to be found in nature and, be it adequate following a solution to the not-enough-names problem, merely substitutional quantification over everything else. But that is a metaphysical preference on his part that is in no way inspired by the method of truth. If the method is to be effective, it must come with its own guide to the choice between objectual and substitutional interpretations.


All that assumes that Lance (or someone) has indeed solved the not-enough-names problem. There may be objections of various kinds to Lance's construction, and the Lycan–van Inwagen argument aforementioned may undercut it as well, but those issues abide our question.


I offer a criterion on Davidson's behalf, obliquely supported by at least one important metasemantical view of his. The view is that, as noted earlier, elements of semantic representations are not allowed to abbreviate or otherwise contain hidden structure; even though the RHS of a T-sentence is no longer required to be synonymous with the target sentence, it is at least supposed to be fully explicit, itself requiring no further truth-conditional analysis. But that suggests that semantic representations should not contain substitutional quantifiers, for, as is well known, the semantics of substitutional quantifiers are given by objectual quantification over linguistic entities.\footnote{Well known or not, it may not be so. That is the radical move proposed by Lance (note 21): to hold that all quantification is substitutional. For me, it raises an issue of intelligibility: I understand substitutionally quantified formulas (up to the separate Lycan–van Inwagen argument aforementioned) so long as their truth conditions are given objectually. But if you give me a semantic interpretation and add the caveat that the quantifiers occurring in it are themselves substitutional, I feel I am none the wiser until a further semantic interpretation has been given for the semantic interpretation. \dots{}} As is equally well known, it does not follow that the relevant target sentence is or entails anything about linguistic entities, but a semantic representation is supposed to wear its own truth condition on its sleeve. (Granted, this is not a case of an RHS containing hidden \emph{structure}, but it is at least a small failing of candor.)


There may of course be semantic or even syntactic reasons for analyzing some natural-language quantificational expressions as substitutional.\footnote{For example, Hofweber (2005).} But that would at least be a departure from normal semantic practice. The Davidsonian should treat objectual quantification as the default, resorting to substitutional only when some special specifically linguistic reason is in view.


\textbf{13.} Where does all this leave the method of truth?


Objection 1 stands or falls with Quine's radical indeterminacy doctrine. Objection 2 will succeed if truth-conditional semantics is entirely wrongheaded to begin with, or if short of that there are no sufficiently determinate logical forms.


Objection 3 (error theory) simply fails. Objection 4 (deflationary truth) gets nowhere unless the deflationist deflates quantification along with truth, in which case the complaint collapses into Objection 5.


Objection 5 is hard to adjudicate, as the substitution interpretation remains controversial in each of several ways, while at the same time we have not supplied Davidson with an independent way of deciding between objectual and substitutional. My own inclination is to treat objectual quantification as the default, resorting to substitutional only when some special reason is in view; but then I grew up with Quine and Davidson.

% Notes
\section{References}


Asay, J. (2013). Truthmaking, metaethics, and creeping minimalism. \emph{Philosophical Studies}.


———. (2012). A truthmaking account of realism and anti-realism. \emph{Pacific Philosophical Quarterly} 93:373–394.


Blackburn, S.W. (1993). \emph{Essays in Quasi-Realism}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Brandom, R. (1994). \emph{Making It Explicit}. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


Chisholm, R.M. (1957). \emph{Perceiving}. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.


Davidson, D. (1965). Theories of meaning and learnable languages. In \emph{Proceedings of the 1964 International Congress for Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science}, Y. Bar-Hillel (ed.). Amsterdam: North-Holland.


———. (1967a). Causal relations. \emph{The Journal of Philosophy} 64:691–703.


———. (1967b). The logical form of action sentences. In \emph{The Logic of Decision and Action}, N. Rescher (ed.). Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press.


———. (1967c). Truth and meaning. \emph{Synthése} 17:304–323.


———. (1970a). Mental events. In \emph{Experience and Theory}, L. Foster and J.W. Swanson (eds). Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.


———. (1970b). Semantics for natural languages. In \emph{Linguaggi nella Societá e nella Tecnica}, B. Visentini \emph{et al}. (eds). Milan: Edizioni di Communitá.


\emph{———. (1973a). On the very idea of a conceptual scheme.} Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association \emph{47:5–20.}


———. (1973b). Radical interpretation. \emph{Dialectica} 27:314–328.


———. (1974). Belief and the basis of meaning. \emph{Synthése} 27:309–323.


———. (1975). Thought and talk. In \emph{Mind and Language}, S. Guttenplan (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.


———. (1977). The method of truth in metaphysics. In \emph{Midwest Studies in Philosophy, II: Studies in Metaphysics}, P.A. French, T.E. Uehling and H. Wettstein (eds). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.


———. (1979). The inscrutability of reference. \emph{The Southwestern Journal of Philosophy} 10:7–19.


Dunn, J.M. and Belnap, N.D. (1968). The substitution interpretation of the quantifiers. \emph{Noûs} 2:177–185.


Field, H. (1980). \emph{Science without Numbers}. Oxford: Blackwell.


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Harman, G.H. (1975). Moral relativism defended. \emph{Philosophical Review} 84:3–22.


Hofweber, T. (2005). A puzzle about ontology. \emph{Noûs} 39:256–283.


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Kim, J. (1976). Events as property exemplifications. In \emph{Action Theory}, M. Brand and D. Walton (eds). Dordrecht: D. Reidel.


Lance, M. (1996). Quantification, substitution, and conceptual content. \emph{Noûs} 30:481–507.


Lycan, W.G. (1976). Reality and semantic representation. \emph{The Monist} 59:424–440.


———. (1979). Semantic competence and funny functors. \emph{The Monist} 62:209–222.


———. (1984). \emph{Logical Form in Natural Language}. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books\Slash{}MIT Press.


———. (1987). \emph{Consciousness}. Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books\Slash{}MIT Press.


Mackie, J.L. (1977). \emph{Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong}. Harmondsworth: Penguin.


\emph{Marcus, R.B. (1975–76). Dispensing with possibilia.} Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association \emph{49:39–51.}


Quine, W.V. (1960). \emph{Word and Object}. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.


———. (1968). Ontological relativity. \emph{The Journal of Philosophy} 65:185–212.


———. (1969). Existence and quantification. In \emph{Fact and Existence: Proceedings of the University of Western Ontario Philosophy Colloquium 1966}, J. Margolis (ed.). Toronto: University of Toronto Press.


———. (1970). On the reasons for indeterminacy of translation. \emph{The Journal of Philosophy} 67:178–183.


Sellars, W. (1956). Empiricism and the philosophy of mind. In \emph{Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science}, (Volume I), H. Feigl and M. Scriven (eds). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.


Smart, J.J.C. (1984). \emph{Ethics, Persuasion, and Truth}. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.


van Inwagen, P. (1981). Why I don't understand substitutional quantification. \emph{Philosophical Studies} 39:281–285.

\chapter{9. The Concept of Truth}


Michael Glanzberg


Davidson discussed the concept of truth consistently throughout his career. It is central to the early Davidson (1967) and to the late Davidson (2005). His views on the subject are not absolutely static. At one point, he endorses a version of the correspondence theory of truth, and he comes to emphatically reject that view later. At one point, he calls his view a coherence theory of truth, and he later comes to doubt that characterization. Even so, over the period of nearly 40 years that he wrestled with questions about the nature of truth, Davidson is remarkably consistent. Certain points appear early in his thinking and remain constant: Tarski's work on truth is fundamental to understanding the concept, as is the relation of truth to meaning, and we fail to understand that connection adequately unless we take into account the constraints of radical interpretation. Furthermore, in understanding those connections, we see that truth is not a redundant or trivial concept, but equally, it is not a locus for metaphysical commitments. Actually, I shall suggest that a stronger conclusion about these points is in order. Not only are they stable points of Davidson's view; they are his view. By his later writings, it becomes clear that we understand the concept of truth through these features of it, and we should not hope for a more direct definition of the concept.


This essay will review Davidson's main work on truth, more or less in chronological order. It will focus on the ways the connections between truth, meaning, and interpretation form the core of Davidson's views, and on the relations of his views to traditional theories of truth.

\section{1. Tarski, Truth, and Meaning}


Any discussion of Davidson's views on truth must begin with the connection between truth and meaning. I discuss this connection, emphasizing what it tells us about Davidson's views on truth. I shall, for the most part, leave the complex issues of meaning to other discussions.\footnote{For more on Davidsonian approaches to meaning, see Davies (1981) and Lepore and Ludwig (2005, 2007). Some important discussions include the exchange between Higginbotham (1992) and Soames (1992), as well as Larson and Segal (1995).}


Davidson's ideas about truth and meaning start with the seminal work of Tarski (e.g., Tarski 1935, 1944) on truth. Recall that Tarski is concerned with how to characterize truth for a given interpreted language@@@
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.\footnote{Of course, this is a somewhat anachronistic way of putting things and skips a great deal of detail. For a historically accurate discussion, see Patterson (2012).} To do this, Tarski first introduces an adequacy condition on theories or definitions of truth. It relies on the T-sentences, which are sentences of the form


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where “\emph{s}” is a sentence of@@@
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 and “\emph{p}” is a sentence of an appropriate metalanguage. In Tarski's original formulation, it is required that “\emph{p}” be a translation of “\emph{s}”, but we will see that for Davidson, this condition cannot be assumed. The condition of adequacy on a theory of truth is embodied in “Convention T,” which requires that for each sentence of@@@
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, the corresponding T-sentence is derivable. Satisfying Convention T (with the translation requirement in place) guarantees that the extension of “is true” contains all and only the true sentences of@@@
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. Thus, it is a reasonable (extensional) adequacy condition on theories of truth.


It is tempting to think that the T-sentences comprise a definition of truth, and indeed, for finite languages, Tarski considers that they could be treated as such. For a finite language, simply conjoining all the T-sentences is an adequate definition of truth, by lights of Convention T. But for any infinite language, we cannot do this. Instead, we need to find a recursive way to generate the T-sentences.


Tarski provides just such a way, and moreover, a highly natural way to capture how the truth of sentences depends on the semantic properties of their parts. Tarski's method begins with axioms stating the reference conditions for terms and satisfaction conditions for predicates. For a term “\emph{t}”, we should have something like


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For a predicate “\emph{P}”, we want


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In addition, we need recursion axioms telling us how satisfaction for complex sentences – including sentences with quantifiers – is determined from satisfaction for their parts. I shall skip the details.\footnote{See Lepore and Ludwig (2007) or Soames (1999) for more thorough presentations.} However, there are a couple of technical points that will matter for our discussion of Davidson's views of truth. First, because we have predicates with multiple arguments, satisfaction is defined as a relation to a \emph{sequence} σ of assignments of values to variables. As the theory recursively determines satisfaction, what results is a satisfaction relation for formulas. Of course, for a sentence, with no free variables, satisfaction is inert. Thus, for a sentence “\emph{s}”, truth can be defined from satisfaction by quantifying out the sequence: “\emph{s}” is true if and only if there is a sequence σ (equivalently, for all sequences σ) such that σ satisfies “\emph{s}”. The theory that includes the sorts of axioms I have just described shows how truth for complex sentences is determined by satisfaction for their parts. Thus, following the terminology of Halbach (2011), we may call it the \emph{Tarskian compositional truth theory} for a language@@@
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.\footnote{For another technical review of Tarskian truth theories, see McGee (1991).}


Famously, Tarski is interested in \emph{definitions} of truth, not theories (hence my ambivalence about definitions and theories in introducing Convention T). He shows, essentially, how for a large class of languages, the compositional truth theory can be converted into an explicit definition of truth for the language. Roughly, using a second-order quantifier, one defines the truth predicate to be the smallest collection making the compositional truth theory come out true.\footnote{For more discussion of the role of definitions in Tarski's work, see Heck (1997).}


With this background on theories of truth in hand, we can turn to Davidson's use of them. In a widely discussed series of papers (Davidson 1966, 1967, 1970, 1973a, 1976), Davidson makes the proposal that a Tarskian compositional truth theory plays a central role in a theory of meaning. To simplify somewhat, a Tarskian compositional truth theory \emph{is} a theory of meaning.


Davidson relies on two aspects of the Tarskian apparatus to create the link between truth and meaning: the T-sentences and the compositional theory. First, a correct T-sentence, like “ “snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white”, does more than indicate that the sentence is true; it states the truth \emph{conditions} of the sentence, and moreover, when the sentence on the right-hand side is really the right one, it goes a long way toward stating the meaning of the sentence on the left-hand side. Davidson is careful about how he puts this, in part because he holds rather holistic views about meaning, but he does propose that a theory which provides the right T-sentences will be a good theory of meaning. Thus, a theory of \emph{truth} is the core of a theory of meaning.


There are some departures from Tarski's original formulation that are required to make Davidson's proposal work. As I mentioned earlier, if we are to use a theory of truth as a theory of meaning, we cannot build translation into the T-sentences. Hence, I have described things in terms of “the right T-sentences.” Just how to capture which are the right T-sentences has been an issue of ongoing debate for neo-Davidsonians. As we will discuss more later, Davidson himself often shifts the focus to the general question of the empirical constraints on attributing a truth theory to a speaker. Davidson's ideas on radical interpretation are fundamental to how he answers this question, and we will explore how this affects his views on truth in Section 3.


The compositional truth theory is also important to Davidson's views. Tarski shows how, for a language with infinitely many sentences, we can derive all the T-sentences from such a theory. In Davidson's hands, this shows us several things about meaning. It shows how the meanings of sentences depend on the meanings of their parts (Davidson 1967: 23), and that, in turn, shows how an infinite language could be learnable by a creature like us with a finite mind (Davidson 1966). This is in part why Davidson is so optimistic about the use of Tarskian truth theories, concluding (Davidson 1967: 24), “a Tarski-type truth definition supplies all we have asked so far of a theory of meaning.”


One issue that has come up repeatedly in the literature on Davidson is whether this equation of a truth \emph{definition} with a theory of meaning embodies a mistake. The worry is that Tarski shows how to define a truth predicate as an exercise in logic or mathematics for interpreted languages. But then, the T-sentences that Davidson sees as showing that we have a plausible theory of meaning are really facts of pure mathematics or logic. How, it is objected, can a collection of facts of pure mathematics or logic be a good theory of meaning for a language like the ones we speak? Surely, the facts about what our words and sentences mean are empirical, not mathematical.\footnote{This sort of objection has been voiced often. In the recent literature, it can be seen in Etchemendy (1988) and Soames (1984). See also Putnam (1985–1986).}


Davidson has discussed this point in several places and at length in Davidson (1990). It is arguable that in Davidson (1967), he might have indeed made the mistake he is accused of, and the language quoted earlier about Tarskian truth \emph{definitions} does make that reading plausible. But by the time he wrote the introduction to Davidson (2001), he was clear that what plays a role in a theory of meaning is a truth \emph{theory}, not an explicit definition of truth. Though Tarski was interested in the latter, Davidson is only interested in the former. When he talks about a Tarskian theory of truth, he means what I called the compositional truth theory, not the explicit definition we might build from it. In such a theory, the term “true” is a primitive. But moreover, as is typically the case with primitives of empirical theories, we assume they are given in an interpreted metalanguage, and so the term “true” in the compositional truth theory really means true. Then, the axioms of the theory can perfectly well state empirical facts about the truth conditions of sentences in the object language. I thus believe that Davidson should be cleared of the charge of confusing the mathematical with the empirical, at least in his later writings.


We now have one of Davidson's fundamental theses about truth: A Tarskian compositional truth theory plays a key role in a theory of meaning. So far, we have one thesis from Davidson connecting truth and meaning. As things looked in 1967, though, it seemed that Davidson had little interest in exploring the concept of truth itself. The correct understanding of Davidson's thesis linking truth and meaning requires \emph{using} the concept of truth in an empirical theory of meaning, not analyzing it. Ultimately, as we will see in the following sections, Davidson is interested in the nature of truth itself, and he sees the link between truth and meaning as a key step toward understanding that nature.

\section{2. Satisfaction and Correspondence}


One way to get a more substantial theory of truth out of the link between truth and meaning is to see a Tarskian compositional theory of truth as providing one. In particular, the Tarskian theory has sometimes been seen as giving a correspondence theory of truth. Early on, Davidson endorsed this proposal. It is not his considered view on the matter, but it is an important episode in the development of Davidson's views. In this section, we will review the episode.


One of the leading ideas about truth over many years has been the “correspondence theory of truth.” Very roughly, and informally, such a theory proposes that for a truthbearer to be true is for it to “correspond to” or correctly describe what really is the case. There are two ways one can view this idea. It can be taken as something near to a platitude about truth, and many have taken it as such (e.g., Wright 1992). But it is also the beginnings of a metaphysically substantial theory of truth: one that seeks to answer directly the question of what the basic nature of truth is. The platitude already posits that truth is a relation, between something appropriate for bearing truth – something that is or has a content, like a statement or proposition – and some extraintentional part of reality to which the representation corresponds. The traditional correspondence theory, as I shall call it, seeks to develop this idea into a full-fledged metaphysical theory of the nature of truth.


Tarski's work on truth has been seen by commentators as supporting a number of different views on truth, including correspondence theories. Tarski himself endorses at least the platitude behind the correspondence theory, saying (Tarski 1935: 153) that his work on truth captures the “classical conception of truth (‘true – corresponding with reality’).” T-sentences, as Davidson and others have noted, express a relation between a sentence and something extralinguistic, which would seem to capture in precise terms what the platitude might be saying. But moreover, many readers of Tarski have thought that the role of satisfaction in the compositional theory of truth makes for a more substantial sort of correspondence theory.


Davidson (1969) takes up this idea and endorses it (though he later comes to change his mind). In that paper, he argues that a Tarskian compositional theory is a nontraditional but substantial kind of correspondence theory of truth. Let us begin with the nontraditional aspects. Davidson rejects key components of the traditional correspondence theory, and indeed, the negative aspects of his position in 1969 endure through his later work. The traditional correspondence theory, in the hands of Russell (1912) or Moore (1953), posited \emph{facts} as the things to which a truthbearer corresponds. Facts are structured entities, which are in effect small pieces of reality suitable for being truthmakers for specific claims. The traditional correspondence theory is based on the idea of a structural similarity relation (an isomorphism) between facts and suitable truthbearers. The relation of structural similarity is the relation of correspondence. When Russell and Moore held the correspondence theory, those truthbearers were beliefs, though many have offered propositions, or sentences, as the truthbearers for the correspondence theory. Following the terminology of Davidson (1969), we can simply talk about “the statement that \emph{s}” as a truthbearer, without worrying too much about what a statement is. So, by Davidson's lights, a key component of the traditional correspondence theory is the idea that for a given sentence “\emph{s}”, there is an appropriate fact, let us say the fact that \emph{p}, to which the statement that \emph{s} corresponds if it is true.


Davidson rejects any such role for facts. In particular, he rejects the idea that we can make sense of a particular fact corresponding to a statement. In a number of places, including Davidson (1967, 1969, 1990), he cites an argument that seeks to show this by showing that if a true statement corresponds to a fact, it corresponds to the fact reported by any true sentence. For any true sentences “\emph{s}” and “\emph{t}”, the argument claims, the statement that \emph{s} corresponds to the fact that \emph{t}. If this holds, the idea of truth as a relation between statements (truthbearers) and the facts they characterize loses its substance, and the traditional correspondence theory is badly damaged.


This sort of argument has a long history. Davidson attributes it to Church (1943, 1956), but also notes its connection to ideas of Frege (1892). Related arguments can be found in Quine (1953) and importantly in Gödel (1944). Here is Davidson's (1969: 42) version.\footnote{The argument was dubbed the “slingshot” by Barwise and Perry (1981).} The claim, as I said, is that for any true sentences “\emph{s}” and “\emph{t}”, the statement that \emph{s} corresponds to the fact that \emph{t}. Thus, any true statement corresponds to any fact. The argument in Davidson's hands relies on two premises: (1) If “\emph{p}” and “\emph{q}” are logically equivalent, then the statement that \emph{s} corresponds to the fact that \emph{p} if and only if the statement that \emph{s} corresponds to the fact that \emph{q}, and (2) if “\emph{p}” and “\emph{q}” differ only by substitution of coreferential singular terms, then the statement that \emph{s} corresponds to the fact that \emph{p} if and only if the statement that \emph{s} corresponds to the fact that \emph{q}. Now, let “\emph{s}” be some true sentence. It is taken for granted that the statement that \emph{s} corresponds to the fact that \emph{s}. Observe that “the \emph{x} such that (\emph{x} = Diogenes and \emph{s}) = the \emph{x} such that (\emph{x} = Diogenes)” is logically equivalent to “\emph{s}”. Call this complicated sentence “\emph{L}”. By premise (1), we can conclude that the statement that \emph{s} corresponds to the fact that \emph{L}. Suppose “\emph{t}” is true. Then “the \emph{x} such that (\emph{x} = Diogenes and \emph{s})” is coreferential with “the \emph{x} such that (\emph{x} = Diogenes and \emph{t})”. Let “\emph{L}′” be “the \emph{x} such that (\emph{x} = Diogenes and \emph{t}) = the \emph{x} such that (\emph{x} = Diogenes)”. Then “\emph{L}” and “\emph{L}′” differ only in the substitution of coreferential terms.\footnote{Issues about the nature of descriptions are crucial here, as Neale (2001) discusses at length.} Hence, by premise (2), the statement that \emph{s} corresponds to the fact that \emph{L}′. Finally, note that “\emph{L}′” is logically equivalent to “\emph{t}”, so by one more application of premise (1), we conclude that the statement that \emph{s} corresponds to the fact that \emph{t}.


We thus have an argument for the collapse of the notion of fact: Any fact is as good as any other for standing in the correspondence relation to sentences. We might suppose there is one “great fact,” which conjoins all the facts, and any true sentence corresponds to that. Of course, there are a number of places where the premises of the argument might be rejected,\footnote{See Neale (2001) for an extensive discussion. Some responses from theorists of facts (or related notions) include Barwise and Perry (1981) and Vision (2004).} but, to Davidson, it provides good reason to reject the apparatus of facts that was at the core of the traditional correspondence theory.


Davidson thus rejects one of the key tenets of the traditional correspondence theory, but even so, in 1969, he endorses a nontraditional version that he thinks still deserves the name “correspondence theory.” Not surprisingly, it is in Tarski's theory of truth that he sees the possibility of a correspondence theory. Indeed, he says that the compositional theory “deserves to be called a correspondence theory” (Davidson 1969: 48) because of the role played by satisfaction. A Tarskian compositional truth theory determines truth for sentences via reference and satisfaction. These are relations “between language and something else” (Davidson 1969: 48), and one central aspect of the correspondence theory was that it tried to capture such relations. Though we do not have a traditional correspondence theory, which sets up a structural similarity relation between statements and facts, we have the truth of sentences determined by word-to-world relations, in particular, relations between linguistic items and objects. This reflects the platitude behind correspondence, but the Tarskian apparatus gives the platitude more substance.


This provides a way to see truth as determined by satisfaction, but it seems to leave out any relation between sentences and anything else. Even if having relations of satisfaction constitutes a form of correspondence, it is thus drastically different from the traditional form, which posited truth-making relata for each statement. But Davidson is happy to extend the sort of correspondence he finds to whole sentences (without free variables). As we discussed earlier, we still have the relation of σ satisfying “\emph{s}” for a sentence “\emph{s}” and sequence σ. This, Davidson suggests, is a correspondence relation for sentences, just as it is for terms. A sentence is true if it is satisfied by any or all sequences. If we think of satisfaction as correspondence, a sentence is true if it corresponds to any or all sequences. We have built in the “great fact,” but for sequences of objects, rather than facts per se. According to Davidson, we thereby have all the correspondence we should want.


So, at least at one point, Davidson does offer a form of a correspondence theory. Whether or not it is much like its traditional counterpart, it is striking that Davidson offers a theory that addresses the same questions as traditional metaphysical theories of truth. All the same, Davidson comes to reject the correspondence theory. To see why, and to see what replaces it, we need to consider another aspect of his views about meaning: the important role for radical interpretation.

\section{3. Radical Interpretation and Coherence}


Davidson's ideas about radical interpretation and its place in the theory of meaning are fundamental to the way his view of truth develops. I shall not here attempt to review all the important aspects of Davidson's notion of radical interpretation and its uses. However, I shall outline enough of them to examine the impact of radical interpretation on his understanding of truth.


In early papers like Davidson (1967), he highlights the role of a truth theory in the theory of meaning. But as his thinking developed, Davidson came to place more emphasis on the question of how a theory of meaning – now in the form of a truth theory – might be correctly attributed to a speaker. Knowing that a theory of truth can play the role of a theory of meaning does not by itself tell you what truth theory captures a speaker's meanings, or how you should decide what truth theory to use to interpret a speaker.


In addressing these issues, of course, Davidson is heavily and explicitly influenced by Quine (e.g., 1960). Following Quine, he puts great emphasis on the kinds of publicly available evidence that an interpreter might use to understand a speaker (though he explicitly distances himself from Quine's behaviorist take on this idea). To see what that evidence can support, we consider the situation of radical interpretation, where an interpreter knows nothing about what a speaker believes or thinks, and tries to interpret them.


The basic evidence that Davidson sees as available for radical interpretation is the attitude of \emph{holding true}, which a speaker takes toward a sentence (cf. Quine's use of assent and dissent behavior). This evidence can be used to assess whether T-sentences are correct for a speaker, that is, what the truth conditions of (some) sentences used by the speaker are (e.g., Davidson 1973b, 1974). Importantly, this sort of evidence applies at the level of sentences and their truth conditions, that is, at the level of Convention T. It does not apply at the level of individual facts about reference or satisfaction that are used to build up a Tarskian compositional truth theory. But this is all the evidence there is, and so, Davidson concludes, the compositional apparatus outstrips the evidence. He writes (Davidson 1973b: 133), “All this apparatus is properly viewed as theoretical construction, beyond the reach of direct verification. It has done its work provided only it entails testable results in the form of T-sentences, and these make no mention of the machinery.” (He repeats this point in Davidson 1977.)


As Davidson himself is well aware, this conclusion undermines the position he took in Davidson (1969) that Tarskian compositional truth theories are correspondence theories of truth. That position relied on the use of reference and satisfaction to provide word-to-world relations. But now, these relations are seen as nothing but theoretical constructs with no empirical content. They outstrip the possible evidence, and so, do not report any real facts of the matter. Thus, there is nothing left of the correspondence theory except such an empirically empty theoretical construct. At one point (Davidson 1986), he suggests this means we have a sort of “lightweight” correspondence theory, but his more considered view is that we should reject talk of correspondence. He explicitly says so in the “Afterthoughts” to Davidson (1986); he calls his earlier view a “mistake” (Davidson 1988) and expresses “regret” (Davidson 1990). At one point (Davidson 1990), he notes the “oddity” of holding that sequences of objects stand in a correspondence relation to sentences. That seems to be something of a technical trick and not a real version of correspondence. But the reasons Davidson rejects the correspondence theory go much further than that, as he sees there being no facts of the matter about satisfaction at the subsentential level.


Obviously, Davidson's argument only goes through if we accept his view that the facts about meaning are fundamentally exhausted by the kinds of information available to radical interpretation, especially, facts like those about holding true. A number of other views about meaning, including some in the neo-Davidsonian tradition, will not accept this.\footnote{See, for instance, Higginbotham (1989).} When it comes to the theory of truth, an alternative view was defended by Field (1972). Field argues that a Tarskian theory of truth needs to be supplemented with a reductive account of reference and satisfaction. If we had such an account, then the kinds of word-to-world relations Davidson originally relied upon would be substantiated, and we would have a correspondence theory in much the form Davidson originally envisaged.


The approach taken in Field (1972) calls for a reductive account of reference, and he argues that without such an account, a Tarskian theory loses its value. However, one might imagine other positions as well. We might, for instance, imagine a more direct sort of response in the manner of scientific realism, which might insist that insofar as a Tarskian theory is confirmed, so too are all the facts stated by the apparatus it uses. We might also ask if Davidson is really right about what the possible sources of evidence might be. Whatever the other possibilities may be, Davidson does not accept them, and the only substance Davidson comes to see for the compositional apparatus of reference and satisfaction is its instrumental role in building theories that can derive sufficiently many T-sentences.


The basic constraints of radical interpretation lead Davidson to reject the idea that the role of a compositional truth theory in the theory of meaning could substantiate a correspondence view. But this does not lead Davidson to give up on trying to make sense of traditional theories of truth within the broader setting of relating truth and meaning. The role of radical interpretation points Davidson in a very different direction than correspondence theories. At one point, he entertains what he calls a coherence theory of truth on the basis of considerations of radical interpretation. He ultimately comes to reject this proposal too, but it comes closer to his considered position. We will discuss these points for the remainder of this section.


Whenever he discusses radical interpretation, Davidson is quick to point out that it must simultaneously identify what a speaker believes and what they mean. When we assume we have evidence that a speaker holds a sentence true, it is simultaneously evidence of what the speaker means by that sentence and what the speaker thinks: The sentences mean something that the speaker thinks is true in the circumstances. But to produce a theory of meaning, we need to disentangle these two factors. We do so by interpreting the speaker as broadly holding true beliefs, judged, of course, from the perspective of the interpreter (Davidson 1973b, 1974). Thus, we interpret the speaker as holding beliefs that broadly match up with our own. This affects radical interpretation in at least two ways. First, when we come to assess an individual case of holding true, we rely on our own beliefs (which we take to be true!) to factor belief from meaning. If I believe it is raining near Kurt and hear Kurt utter “Es regnet,” it is evidence that “Es regnet” is true if and only if it is raining (near the speaker, at the time of utterance, etc.). But also, the instruction to interpret speakers as holding true beliefs functions as a maximizing principle for interpretation (as highlighted in Davidson 1973b). As a strategy for radical interpretation, we should interpret speakers so as to have their beliefs come out true as much as is possible. This is a \emph{principle of charity} for radical interpretation.


The principle of charity can be seen as simply a strategy for solving the problems of radical interpretation. But in Davidson's hands, it becomes more. The reason is that there are, to Davidson, no other facts beyond those revealed by radical interpretation that could fix meaning or belief. It is radical interpretation, and only radical interpretation, that reveals the nature of belief and meaning and sustains the connection between truth and meaning. There is thus no other check on truth than what we get from the process of radical interpretation. We thus conclude not only that our strategy for radical interpretation is to interpret speakers as broadly holding beliefs which are true by our lights, but that they really do hold beliefs which are broadly true by our lights. This is part of the nature of belief. Furthermore, the proviso “by our lights” does not really matter. To make this point vivid, Davidson (1986) asks us to suppose there was some other interpreter than us who was omniscient. Such an interpreter would find the beliefs of any subject of interpretation mostly true, as we would. Indeed, the omniscient interpreter would find our beliefs mostly true. Hence, our beliefs are mostly true, by the very nature of belief, and so are the beliefs of those we interpret. But we do not really need to appeal to omniscience to get this result. The nature of belief – ours, those we interpret, those who interpret us, omniscient or not – is revealed by radical interpretation, and that builds in the veridicality of belief. The veridicality of belief implies the surprising and much discussed thesis that most of the beliefs held by a speaker are true. This thesis is a key lemma for many of Davidson's subsequent arguments. So, I shall call it the \emph{Davidsonian lemma}.


The Davidsonian lemma, as we will see, invites the view that truth is epistemic in nature. The traditional version of this view is the coherence theory of truth. At one point, Davidson (1986) entertains the idea that a coherence theory of truth (at least, a form of one) could be defended on the basis of the Davidsonian lemma. He soon modifies this position and, in later work, considers and substantially rejects other epistemic views of truth, as we will discuss more in Section 5. Yet, even if it does not support a coherence theory, the lemma provides another fundamental insight into truth, along with the association of truth and meaning.


The coherence theory of truth is another traditional theory and indeed is often the main competitor to correspondence theories. Very roughly, the traditional coherence theory holds that to be true is to be part of a coherent set (of appropriate truthbearers). This view is closely associated with forms of idealism. Like many long-standing philosophical ideas, genuine forms of the coherence theory were far more sophisticated than the slogan that truth is coherence indicates.\footnote{For instance, the much discussed view of Joachim (1906) has a complex notion of “coherence” relying not only on idealism but also on a form of monism. For an extended discussion of coherence theories, see Walker (1989).} However, this overly simple slogan will be enough to discuss Davidson's own views and to see why the coherence theory is a genuine alternative to the correspondence theory.


The connection between the Davidsonian lemma and the coherence theory of truth is tantalizing but also rather delicate. The lemma shows something about belief (and meaning): It is, as Davidson says, “intrinsically veridical” (Davidson 1986). But the beliefs in question are really systems of belief, as radical interpretation interprets the whole language of a speaker, and gets to the veridical nature of belief by maximizing true belief across all the speaker's beliefs and meanings. So, it would appear that beliefs become veridical in nature by being part of the systems of belief held by agents. This does not quite get us the traditional coherence theory. In this setting, a version of the traditional theory would tell us that any one belief is true in virtue of being part of a system of beliefs under radical interpretation, which would render it part of a coherent and otherwise rational system. What we get from Davidson is less than this. We only know that each belief is veridical in nature, in virtue of being part of such a coherent system. We cannot conclude that each belief individually is true. Only the weaker conclusion that most of a speaker's beliefs are true follows. That is in the spirit of a coherence theory, but not as strong as the traditional version.


In Davidson (1986), Davidson still thought the result was worth calling a coherence theory of truth and of knowledge. The reason was that even if it is not the traditional coherence theory, the connection between veridicality and coherence is a substantial insight into the nature of truth. Moreover, this connection gives truth significant epistemological properties, as the traditional coherence theory did. Belief enjoys a kind of justification because of its veridical nature. According to Davidson, any sufficiently sophisticated thinker who asks whether their beliefs are justified may understand the nature of belief, and so conclude they are mostly true in virtue of what belief is. The conclusion that most beliefs are true thus requires no further justification. Of course, individual beliefs might require some additional justification, but the general conclusion still holds. This is enough to draw some significant epistemological conclusions. For instance, it is enough to reject global skepticism. Thus, the coherence-like aspects of radical interpretation show us something important about truth and justification. Truth thereby acquires at least some epistemic properties.


Not long after he wrote Davidson (1986), Davidson decided it was better not to call the view a coherence theory of truth. As he says in the “Afterthoughts” to that paper, his position is not really a coherence theory of truth of the traditional kind. As we already saw, it does not say that being part of a coherent set of beliefs makes any one belief true. But more importantly, Davidson's view does not provide any direct answer to the question of what truth is. That was what the traditional coherence theory was trying to do, and in not doing it, Davidson does not offer a theory that should be called a coherence theory. Yet as Davidson's view of truth develops, the veridical nature of belief, and the role of radical interpretation in understanding truth, remain fundamental. As this is a reflection of an idea of coherence, we can say that aspects of coherence are an important part of Davidson's view, even if he does not hold a traditional coherence theory.


We can now list two basic theses of Davidson on truth: Truth is fundamentally connected to meaning, and the facts about how truth connects to meaning are limited by what is available in radical interpretation. These later facts give empirical substance to attributing Tarskian compositional truth theories to speakers, and it is from them that we find out what we can about the nature of truth. We have also seen that Davidson in two separate instances considered identifying his own views of truth with traditional metaphysical theories of truth. In each case, he eventually rejected the identification, but all the same we see how Davidson is concerned with traditional questions in his thinking about truth. In the next section, I shall turn to how far Davidson thinks the traditional questions really can be answered.

\section{4. Defining Truth and Deflationism}


In each case where Davidson considers allying his own views of truth with traditional theories, he eventually decides the facts needed to do so are not to be found. In later work, Davidson comes to conclude that we cannot define truth, and so, the aims of the traditional theories cannot be met. Indeed, he describes the project of defining truth as a “folly.” But at the same time, Davidson rejects contemporary deflationist positions which conclude that truth has no nature. To better understand Davidson's later views on truth, we should examine how, and why, he holds both positions.


First, let us consider Davidson's rejection of deflationism. His objections to this family of views are of a very general variety. He takes the main idea of deflationism to be that Tarski has told us all there is to know about truth and, perhaps more explicitly, that the T-sentences tell us all there is to know about truth. Along with this, he notes, goes the idea that truth is not a substantial concept and does not have an “underlying essence” (Horwich 1990: 2) or is not “deep or interesting” (Davidson 2005: 18).\footnote{At this level of generality, Davidson's objections to deflationism cover a wide range of more specific views. He has discussed some of these in more detail. The early views of Ramsey (1927) and Strawson (1950) are mentioned often in his writings, while Field (1994), Horwich (1990), Leeds (1978), Quine (1970), and Williams (1986) are discussed in later work.}


Davidson's response to the idea that the T-sentences show us all there is to the concept of truth is quite direct. That cannot be, Davidson observes, because Tarski's work does not show us how to characterize truth in general. It only shows us how to characterize truth for individual languages. As he writes (Davidson 1996: 26), “[Tarski] has not told us what the concept is that his truth definitions for particular languages have in common.” Indeed, as Davidson notes, according to one way of taking Tarski's undefinability theorem, it shows that no such general definition can be given. Hence, according to Davidson, we should reject any view that sees a general characterization of truth in the T-sentences or other Tarskian apparatus. This includes a number of contemporary forms of deflationism.\footnote{In Davidson (1990), he associates this objection with the famous claim of Dummett (1959) that the T-sentences fail to explain the \emph{point} of classifying something as true.}


What of the more general idea that truth lacks an underlying nature, or other “essence” that philosophical theories like the correspondence theory or the coherence theory sought to capture? Davidson is generally in favor of stripping the concept of truth of some of its metaphysical weight, which some broadly deflationist view such as that of Soames (1984) emphasized. But he resists the full deflationist idea that truth is a trivial concept. We have already seen why. Truth, to Davidson, is a fundamental concept that interrelates with those of meaning and belief (and perhaps also other basic concepts, like knowledge, cause, or action). So, for instance, he writes (Davidson 2005: 28), “The concept of truth has essential connections with the concepts of belief and meaning, but these connections are untouched by Tarski's work.” In these connections, and in the kind of facts that support them, we find substantial properties of truth. Deflationists miss these properties and their source.


But if that is right, then should we not persevere with the traditional quest to find a definition of truth, or at least a theory that directly explains what the nature of truth is? According to Davidson, we should not. We will not, he suggests, do better than isolating the kinds of connections we have seen and the kinds of facts that support them. We should not expect a more direct theory or an explicit definition. Why not? Davidson puts the reason quite succinctly (Davidson 1996: 20):



\begin{quote}


For the most part, the concepts philosophers single out for attention, like truth, knowledge, belief, action, cause, the good and the right, are the most elementary concepts we have, concepts without which (I am inclined to say) we would not have concepts at all. Why then should we expect to be able to reduce these concepts definitionally to other concepts which are simpler, clearer, and more basic?



\end{quote}


There is a nature to truth, as Davidson sees it, and we can investigate it; hence, deflationism is to be rejected. But we cannot investigate a concept like truth directly, by looking for a definition, or a theory that directly reveals its nature. Rather, we find its nature in the connections between concepts. Thus, Davidson's theses that truth connects to meaning, and that attributions of truth theories are constrained by radical interpretation, really do stand as examples how he thinks we should explore the concept of truth.


There is one other way Davidson thinks we can learn about the concept of truth. We can see its structure in the theories of meaning we develop for specific languages. Tarskian compositional truth theories are the prime example. Davidson (2005: 28) writes, “What Tarski has done for us is show in detail how to describe the kind of pattern truth must make, whether in language or in thought.” This is another indirect source of knowledge about the concept of truth in general. It is indirect, as each Tarskian theory is a theory for an individual language, not truth in general. Yet from such theories, and from the facts about how they are correctly attributed to speakers, we can sometimes extract general patterns that reveal something of the nature of truth.

\section{5. Objectivity and Truth}


We have seen the importance to Davidson of the connections between truth and meaning, and the constraints on meaning flowing from radical interpretation. At some points earlier on, Davidson saw those connections and contraints as indicating traditional theories of truth, including sometimes the correspondence theory and sometimes the coherence theory. But his views about truth definitions and deflationism show that over time, these connections became not the basis for a further theory of truth but the theory itself. As we saw earlier, he sees basic concepts like truth as accessible only through the sort of indirect theorizing those connections illustrate.


The traditional theories of truth were theories in metaphysics, and they went hand in hand with broader metaphysical views. Coherence theories were associated with idealism, and the correspondence theory with realism. Though he is no friend of deflationism, Davidson is happy to distance the concept of truth from these sorts of metaphysical commitments. I will conclude, in this section, by reviewing the antimetaphysical side of Davidson's view of truth.


The background to the question of what the metaphysical content of truth might be was set by the discussion of truth running through the 1970s and 1980s. In that discussion, the ideas of correspondence and coherence were generalized into positions we can reasonably label as realism and antirealism. Antirealist positions endorse some epistemically conditioned notion of truth, such as warranted assertibility or verifiability (e.g., Dummett 1976; Putnam 1981; Wright 1976). Like coherence, these notions are epistemically tractable and within the powers of human agents to assess (perhaps idealized agents). Just as coherence theories went hand in hand with idealism, views of truth like these are identified with more general forms of antirealism. We can, for purposes of discussing Davidson, group them as “epistemic” views of truth, as he does.


Realism can be described as the view that the facts we describe are independent of us and our thoughts (cf. Wright 1992). All the epistemic views of truth in some way depart from this idea, and hence get their label of “antirealism.” Traditionally, realism has been associated with the correspondence theory of truth, as the appeal to facts might suggest. The idea is that our claims are true or false independently of us, as there are facts about what in the world our words pick out, facts about what those things are like, and those in turn determine whether our claims are true. The correspondence theory in its traditional form tries to capture this view of truth, but it was later observed that the realist implications of the correspondence theory are largely independent of the details of the traditional theory. So, for instance, Dummett (1976) suggests that the mark of realism is bivalence: Epistemic notions of truth do not support bivalence, whereas realist ones do. Though this hardly scratches the surface of the many complicated issues relating realism and truth, let us turn to how Davidson sees these matters.


We know already that Davidson came to reject the correspondence theory. Later, he came to see this as amounting to a general rejection of realist positions. His reason is simply that he does not see any substance to this sort of position without a correspondence theory of truth. As we saw, according to Davidson, the correspondence theory fails because there is nothing for sentences to correspond to, and no substantial facts about reference or satisfaction. But without these, Davidson says, the idea of realism is just an empty slogan. As he sees it, a realist position would require there to be things in the world that make our sentences true, and substantial facts about how they do so, and he has rejected both. He writes (Davidson 2005: 42), “The only evident positive sense we can make of this phrase [the real and the true are independent of our beliefs], the only use that consorts with the interpretations of those who prize it, derives from the idea of correspondence, and this is an idea without content.” We can still maintain such platitudes as that believing something does not make it true, but to Davidson there is no substance to a realist position in the metaphysics of truth.


Does this make Davidson an antirealist? Antirealism is marked by accepting some sort of epistemic notion of truth, and ultimately, Davidson concludes that epistemic views of truth are generally unacceptable. He is no antirealist either. This might seem surprising. Even though Davidson came to reject the traditional coherence theory, his considered views might seem to drive him toward an epistemic view of truth. As he essentially argued in Davidson (1986), the ultimate source of facts about truth is the evidence speakers can rely on to interpret each other, as captured by radical interpretation. This sort of evidence is designed to be epistemically accessible to interpreters (which leads to substantial epistemic consequences). Is the result not an epistemic constraint on truth, of just the sort epistemic theories of truth require?


Davidson clearly says no. Epistemic views are false. He does grant that they are merely false and are not unintelligible as he found realist views to be (Davidson 2005: 47). Views that make truth radically epistemic, depending on individual agents' ability to verify or find evidence for asserting, make truth far too subjective. As he notes, it might allow that a truth could be “lost” as a person loses some epistemic position. Likewise, it deprives truth of its central role as an intersubjective standard. These, he holds, are sufficiently fundamental features of truth that we cannot accept any view which is incompatible with them (e.g., Davidson 2000, 2005).


Davidson's position here is subtle and difficult. There are basically epistemic constraints on truth from radical interpretation, but we are not to take the step from those to making truth itself an epistemic notion. To do so would get the basic facts about the concept of truth wrong. Davidson thinks we need not take the step since he sees the connection between truth and belief created by radical interpretation as a basic one but not a reduction. This connection is not enough to make truth behave like the epistemic notions of warranted assertibility or verification. Hence, the epistemic implications of radical interpretation do not make truth thoroughly epistemic, even if they have epistemic consequences for the veridicality of belief.\footnote{Here I essentially follow an editorial footnote to Davidson (2005: 75) by Charles Parsons. The delicate nature of Davidson's position is revealed by he himself suggesting in a note to the manuscript of Davidson (2005) that some form of epistemic view must be right after all. Parsons' note attempts to make sense of this in light of Davidson's own clear rejection of epistemic views earlier in the book.}


Davidson rejects both realist and antirealist positions about truth, and is generally skeptical of there being substantial metaphysical content to the concept of truth. This skeptical view has led some to associate Davidson with the pragmatist tradition. Rorty (1986) has suggested as much. Though Davidson is not completely unhappy with this characterization, he does resist some of its consequences. Particularly, the kinds of pragmatist views that make truth the end result of scientific investigation, or what promotes certain kinds of successful outcomes, or is useful, are no more congenial to his views than the traditional metaphysical theories are. They require a normative role for truth that he does not find, and fail to recognize the fundamental relations between truth and meaning which are so central to Davidson's thinking (e.g., Davidson 2000, 2005).


Davidson takes a different approach to truth than many in the traditional and current debates. Against deflationists, he holds that truth is a substantial concept. Against many traditional metaphysical theories, he holds that we are not going to be able to define or directly analyze truth, while against many contemporary metaphysical views, he holds that what more there is to truth than deflationists admit will not be found in the metaphysics of realism, objectivity, or epistemic notions. He rejects most of the standard positions on truth – both traditional and contemporary – in favor of the view that truth is a basic concept, which we explore through its connections with other concepts. According to Davidson, it is connections between truth, meaning, and belief, seen through the lens of radical interpretation, which give us our understanding of truth.

% Notes
\section{References}


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\part{Part III: Philosophy of Language}

\chapter{10. Truth in the Theory of Meaning}


Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig

\section{1. Introduction}


The publication of “Truth and Meaning” (TM) (2001c) in 1967 revolutionized work in the theory of meaning in three ways. First, it focused attention on the task how to understand compositionality in natural languages. Second, it advanced a powerful critique of the appeal to meanings, construed as entities, in the theory of meaning. Third, it proposed that the problem of compositionality be approached by constructing axiomatic truth theories for natural languages, modeled on the sort of truth theory that Alfred Tarski (1983) had shown how to construct for formal languages. The positive proposal, in particular, has been enormously influential. However, there has also been considerable controversy over exactly how to understand it.


There are two main interpretive positions. The first is the replacement theory, according to which Davidson aimed to replace the theory of meaning with a theory of truth conditions on the grounds that the concept of meaning is too confused to be an appropriate target for theorizing about language (Chihara 1975; Cummins 2002; Glock 2003: 142ff.; Katz 1982; Soames 1992, 2008; Stich 1976). A variant is that Davidson was engaged in a Carnapian explication of meaning aiming to capture certain features of the ordinary concept for certain theoretical purposes, without aiming to retain everything it involves (Ebbs 2012).\footnote{A third less prominent suggestion is that he aims to reduce meaning to a special sort of truth conditions (Burge 1992: 20–1; Horwich 2005: 4, chapter 8). One version of the explication reading holds instead that Davidson aimed to replace, not reduce, meaning with a strong notion of truth condition.} The second is the traditional pursuit theory, according to which Davidson aimed neither to abandon nor to reduce meaning, but to pursue the traditional project in the theory of meaning by a bit of indirection, and, in particular, by showing how putting appropriate empirical and formal constraints on a truth theory for a language yields theorems that provide interpretations of its sentences. In this chapter, we defend the traditional pursuit theory.\footnote{We have defended this position in Lepore and Ludwig (2003, 2005, 2007, 2011) and Ludwig (2002, 2011).}


There are three sources for the replacement theory. This first is puzzlement about how constructing a truth theory could be pursuing the traditional project. The second lies in certain passages in TM especially that suggest that he is abandoning the theory of meaning. The third is an appeal to the historical context, in which it is natural to suppose that Davidson, who acknowledges Quine's influence (see Chapter 34 in this volume), was taking his lead from Quine (1960) in aiming to replace the ordinary notion with a new and more scientifically respectable concept.


In the following, we show, first, that the positive proposal can be seen as a straightforward pursuit of the traditional project, and, second, that the replacement theory fails to take into account the context of the passages which are its source in TM and the larger context of Davidson's work. In Section 2, we consider the immediate context of TM and its ostensible project: to spell out how one can provide a constructive account of the meanings of sentences in natural languages. In Section 3, we review Davidson's criticisms of then extant approaches to the theory of meaning and, with this as a background, make the case, in Section 4, that Davidson's proposal aims not to replace the theory of meaning but only to bypass difficulties that the direct approach encounters. In Section 5, we review passages that have been the primary source of the replacement theory and argue that the only the traditional pursuit theory makes good sense of them in their context. In Section 6, we show that Davidson's remarks about his project in later work, especially “Radical Interpretation” (RI) (2001d) and “Reply to Foster” (RF) (2001e), support this conclusion. In Section 7, we summarize.

\section{2. Compositionality}


In “Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages” (TMLL) (2001b), published in 1965, Davidson writes:



\begin{quote}


I propose \dots{} a necessary feature of a learnable language: it must be possible to give a constructive account of the meaning of sentences in the language. Such an account I call a theory of meaning for the language, \dots{} a theory of meaning that conflicts with this condition \dots{} cannot be a theory of a natural language.


(Davidson 2001f: 3; all citations are to this volume)



\end{quote}


The argument that a constructive account of the meanings of sentences in natural languages is possible rests on the fact we are finite beings and that natural languages have an infinity of nonsynonymous sentences. Understanding them must then rest on grasp of a finite number of semantical primitives and rules governing their combination (pp. 8–9). Davidson characterizes the project abstractly in the following passage:



\begin{quote}


we are entitled to consider in advance of empirical study \dots{} how we shall describe the skill or ability of a person who has learned to speak a language. \dots{} [A natural condition on this] is that \dots{} our theory should equip us to say, for an arbitrary sentence, what a speaker of the language means by that sentence (or takes it to mean). Guided by an adequate theory, we see how the actions and dispositions of speakers induce on the sentences of the language a semantic structure. (p. 8)



\end{quote}


We call such a theory for a particular language a meaning theory. We use “theory of meaning” for the project of explaining meaning in general. While Davidson goes on to criticize, with this requirement in mind, a number of proposals about the meanings of constructions in natural languages (pp. 9–15), the importance of these passages here lies in the context they provide for interpreting TM. For clearly, this project focuses on understanding \emph{meaning} in natural language, and Davidson is not rejecting it but arguing that it should take a particular form. That this is the \emph{same project} as that of TM is established by three considerations. First, these papers were written at roughly the same time. Second, in explaining his project at the beginning of TM, Davidson refers back to the conclusion he reaches in TMLL.



\begin{quote}


It is conceded by most [theorists] that a satisfactory theory of meaning must give an account of how the meanings of sentences depend upon the meanings of words. Unless such an account could be supplied for a particular language \dots{} there would be no explaining the fact that we can learn the language: no explaining the fact that, on mastering a finite vocabulary and a finitely stated set of rules, we are prepared to produce and understand any of a potential infinitude of sentences. I do not dispute these vague claims, in which I sense more than a kernel of truth [and here Davidson cites TMLL in a footnote]. Instead I want to ask what it is for a theory to give an account of the kind adumbrated. (p. 17)



\end{quote}


Third, he suggests already in TMLL that a truth theory can provide an appropriate vehicle for carrying out the project (p. 8). Thus, it is clear that these two papers are parts of a single project. The first argues for a condition on an adequate meaning theory, and the second takes up the project of saying how it could be carried out. At the end of TM, he writes,


\emph{In this paper I have assumed that the speakers of a language can effectively determine the meaning or meanings of an arbitrary expression (if it has a meaning), and that it is} a central task of a theory of meaning to show how this is possible\emph{. I have argued that} a characterization of a truth predicate describes the required kind of structure, and provides a clear and testable criterion of an adequate semantics for a natural language\emph{. No doubt there are other reasonable demands that may be put on a theory of meaning. But} a theory that does no more than define truth for a language comes far closer to constituting a complete theory of meaning than superficial analysis might suggest; so, at least, I have urged\emph{. (p. 35; emphasis added)}


That is to say, the project was to show how to give a compositional meaning theory, and the argument of the paper aimed to show that a truth theory could go a long way to doing \emph{that job}. We will see how in Section 4.

\section{3. Criticism of Traditional Approaches}


Many interpreters treat TM as if it began five pages into the essay with the positive proposal. But the initial critical discussion of attempts to provide a meaning theory by assigning entities to expressions is essential for understanding that proposal for at least three reasons. First, it is essential for understanding what Davidson found inadequate in prior approaches, namely, the futility of quantifying over expression meanings. Second, it lays the groundwork for the positive proposal by working out a characterization of the project that does not build into its statement the requirement that things called meanings be associated with every sentence. Third, it provides, in the context of a discussion of a reference theory for a fragment of a language, a simplified model for the full proposal.


A plausible constraint on a constructive theory is that it entails, from axioms about semantical primitives, all true sentences of the form: s means that p (or a generalization to allow for context sensitivity; see (Lepore and Ludwig 2007: chapter 1, sections 6–8). An initially attractive approach is to take every expression to refer to its meaning, and to take meanings of complex expressions to be constructed out of the meanings of their parts. An initial problem is how this could distinguish between a sentence and a list (p. 17): What distinguishes “Theatetus flies” from “the meaning of \emph{Theatetus} the meaning of \emph{flies”}? The moral Davidson draws is that we need a rule that tells us how to go from terms in different categories (referring term and predicate) to one in a third (a sentence), which is evaluable as true or false (p. 18). Once the need for a rule is recognized, he argues, it becomes clear that assigning an entity to every expression is not needed.


He illustrates the point with a simple reference theory (pp. 18–19). To bring out the full force of the example, we modify it by distinguishing the language of the theory (the metalanguage) from the language it is about (the object language). Consider a reference theory (in English) for a fragment of French consisting of the singular terms “Marie” and “Annette” and the functor “la mére de,” which, when concatenated with a singular term, yields a singular term. We specify that “Marie” refers to Marie and that “Annette” refers to Annette. To show the insufficiency of just assigning entities to expressions for understanding (even for a reference theory), suppose that “la mere de” refers to a function, and we heed the advice to introduce a rule specifying referents of complex singular terms:



\begin{quote}


the concatenation of ‘la mére de’ with a singular term t refers to the value of the function referred to by ‘la mére de’ given the referent of t as argument.



\end{quote}


This gives the referent \emph{in a sense}. But it gives us no insight into it. Even here it is clear we want to \emph{understand} what the term refers to. The obvious response is to add that \emph{the function takes individuals to their mothers}. But now the function drops out as unnecessary, for we can give instead the rule:



\begin{quote}


the concatenation of ‘la mére de’ with a singular term t refers to the mother of the referent of t.



\end{quote}


If the goal of the theory can be accomplished without assigning an entity to every expression, then the success condition should be stated so as not to require this. Davidson suggests (when object and metalanguage are identical) we require that



\begin{quote}


a theory entails every sentence of the form ‘t refers to x’ where ‘t’ is replaced by a structural description of a singular term and ‘x’ is replaced by that term itself (p. 18).



\end{quote}


When, as in our example, object and metalanguage are distinct, we require (what the syntactic condition in the former case secures) that



\begin{quote}


a theory entails every sentence of the form ‘t refers to x’ where ‘x’ is replaced by a term that translates t.



\end{quote}


We now make an observation Davidson does not, but must have had in mind, that helps to illuminate how he thought a truth theory, ostensibly falling “comfortably within the theory of reference” (p. 23), could discharge the duties of a meaning theory. The key lies in the requirement that the simple reference theory use metalanguage terms that translate object language terms in giving their referents. This explains why it gives genuine \emph{insight into} referents of object language terms. But this also means that, knowing this, we can read off from the theorems what the object language singular terms \emph{mean}. For if we know that “La mére de Marie” refers to the mother of Marie, and we know that in stating that we have given the referent using a term that translates the object language term, we can see also that “La mére de Marie” means \emph{the mother of Marie}. We have then squeezed out of a reference theory an interpretation of each singular term in the language fragment. We have achieved the goal through a bit of indirection. This is Davidson's key idea, and we will see how it is pressed into service in the positive proposal.


Before turning to the positive proposal, Davidson rejects two other suggestions and specifies a desideratum on an adequate account, which prefigures the condition of success it turns out a suitable truth theory can meet.


The first proposal is the suggestion that predicates be treated on analogy with the functor “la mere de” and sentences as referring terms, with the hope of reduplicating the success of the reference theory for the full language. Davidson rejected this with an argument, famously dubbed the slingshot (Barwise and Perry 1981), designed to show that if sentences refer to anything, sentences alike in truth value refer to the same things, “an intolerable result” (p. 19). The argument assumes that logically equivalent singular terms corefer and that replacing a singular term in another does not affect reference of the containing term. Then, any sentence “R” is logically equivalent to “\{x: x = x \& R\} = \{x: = x\}”; substituting “\{x: x = x \& S\}” for the first singular term does not affect reference if “S” and “R” are alike in truth value; the result is logically equivalent to “S.” So, any two sentences alike in truth value refer to the same thing. However, this presupposes that sentential logical equivalence, sameness of \emph{truth value} under all reinterpretations of nonlogical terms, suffices for logical equivalence of singular terms, sameness of \emph{reference} under all reinterpretations of nonlogical terms, which begs the question. Despite this, there is remarkably little to be said for sentences being referring terms, and so we may, in any case, set the proposal aside as misguided.


Dropping sentential reference, one might simply appeal to a function from meanings of parts to meanings of complexes. Yet, it is no help just to say: the meaning of “Theatetus flies” is the value of the meaning of “flies” given the meaning of “Theatetus” as argument, for this (again) does not help us understand what “Theatetus flies” means. As Davidson sums it up,



\begin{quote}


What analogy demands is a theory that has as consequences all sentences of the form ‘\emph{s} means \emph{m}’ where ‘\emph{s}’ is replaced by a structural description of a sentence and ‘\emph{m}’ is replaced by a singular term that refers to the meaning of that sentence; a theory, moreover, that provides an effective method for arriving at the meaning of an arbitrary sentence structurally described. Clearly some more articulate way of referring to meanings than any we have seen is essential if these criteria are to be met. (p. 20)



\end{quote}


Davidson has no objection to a theory taking this form except that we have no way of picking out meanings of sentences that enables us to understand them. He concludes:



\begin{quote}


Paradoxically, the one thing \emph{meanings} do not seem to do is oil the wheels of a theory of meaning—at least as long as we require of such a theory that it \emph{non-trivially give the meaning} of every sentence in the language. My objection to \emph{meanings} in the theory of meaning is not that they are abstract or that their identity conditions are obscure, but that they have no demonstrated use. (pp. 20–21; emphasis added)



\end{quote}


The charge is that \emph{meanings}, construed as entities, do not advance the project of \emph{giving the meaning} of sentences in the sense of enabling us to interpret them. There is no suggestion here that we abandon the \emph{theory of meaning} as opposed to giving up the fruitless appeal to \emph{meanings}.


The second proposal is to add a dictionary to a recursive syntax. But “Hopes will be dashed \dots{} if semantics is to comprise a theory of meaning in our sense, for knowledge of the structural characteristics that make for meaningfulness in a sentence, plus knowledge of the meanings of the ultimate parts, does not add up to knowledge of what a sentence means” (p. 21), at least in the sense of being able to understand it. The trouble is that the syntax, which specifies meaningful strings, does not give us any rules for interpreting complexes on the basis of their parts. Davidson goes on to say that while “there is agreement that it is the central task of semantics to give the semantic interpretation (the meaning) of every sentence in the language, nowhere in the linguistic literature will one find, so far as I know, a straightforward account of how a theory performs this task, or how to tell when it has been accomplished” (p. 21). This again shows that Davidson is interested in a theory that gives semantic interpretations of sentences from a finite basis, in the sense of putting us in a position to interpret them. The problem he addresses is how to do that.

\section{4. The Positive Proposal}


The immediate preamble to the positive proposal is often cited as the place Davidson abandons the theory of meaning. But a careful look at this and the following paragraphs (pp. 22–23) show that something more subtle and interesting is going on:



\begin{quote}


[the suggestion was that] an adequate theory of meaning must entail \emph{all} sentences of the form ‘\emph{s} means \emph{m}’. But now, having found no more help in meanings of sentences than in meanings of words, let us ask whether we can get rid of the troublesome singular terms supposed to replace ‘\emph{m}’ in ‘\emph{s} means \emph{m}’ and to refer to meanings. In a way, nothing could be easier: just write ‘\emph{s} means that \emph{p}’, and imagine ‘\emph{p}’ replaced by a sentence. Sentences, as we have seen, cannot name meanings, and sentences with ‘that’ prefixed are not names at all. \dots{} It looks as though we are in trouble on another count, however, for it is reasonable to expect that in wrestling with the logic of the apparently non-extensional ‘means that’ we will encounter problems as hard as, or perhaps identical with, the problems our theory is out to solve. (p. 22)



\end{quote}


Two proposals are dismissed, but they are proposals for how to achieve the goal of giving a compositional meaning theory. The first appeals to meanings as entities, but these have proved no help. The second, a theory with theorems of the form “s means that p,” avoids this difficulty but raises another. Without a referring term after “means,” we must formulate a logic for replacements in such contexts sensitive to what terms mean, for \emph{complex} as well as simple terms. This requires a prior analysis of semantic structure, however, of just the sort the theory is to provide. How then to achieve our goal? It is in this light that the next passage should be understood (roman numerals added).



\begin{quote}


(i) The only way I know to deal with this difficulty is simple, and radical. (ii) Anxiety that we are enmeshed in the intensional springs from using the words “means that” as filling between description of sentence and sentence, but it may be that the success of our venture depends not on the filling but on what it fills. (iii) The theory will have done its work if it provides, for every sentence \emph{s} in the language under study, a matching sentence (to replace “\emph{p}”) that, in some way yet to be made clear, “gives the meaning” of \emph{s}. (iv) One obvious candidate for matching sentence is just \emph{s} itself, if the object language is contained in the metalanguage; otherwise a translation of s in the metalanguage. (v) As a final bold step, let us try treating the position occupied by “\emph{p}” extensionally: to implement this, sweep away the obscure “means that”, provide the sentence that replaces “\emph{p}” with a proper sentential connective and supply the description that replaces “\emph{s}” with its own predicate. (vi) The plausible result is



\end{quote}


\textbf{(T)} \emph{s} is \emph{T} if and only if \emph{p}



\begin{quote}


(vii) What we require of a theory of meaning for a language \emph{L} is that without appeal to any (further) semantical notions it place enough restrictions on the predicate “is \emph{T}” to entail all sentences got from schema \emph{T} when “\emph{s}” is replaced by a structural description of a sentence of \emph{L} and “\emph{p}” by that sentence.



\end{quote}


The difficulty in (i) is just that of avoiding the dilemma sketched in the preamble. (ii) remarks that perhaps the crucial thing is not so much the use of “means that” but the matching thereby achieved of a mentioned object language sentence with a used metalanguage sentence that (we know) interprets it. For (iii), we want a theory that “gives the meaning” of the sentence in the sense of enabling us to understand it (the parenthetical “in a sense to be made clear” has to do with eliminating the lingering use of “meaning” as a count noun). An obvious candidate (iv), if the metalanguage contains the object language, is to match the mentioned sentence with the sentence itself in use, and otherwise a \emph{translation} of it (recall the reference theory). To avoid the “springs of the intensional,” we should then (v) replace “means that” with a sentential connective (“if and only if” being the obvious candidate), and apply a predicate to the mentioned sentence so that we have a sentence on each side of the connective. (vi) The result is (T). A theory that met this constraint (and was otherwise formally correct) would, as Davidson immediately notes (and had in mind all along), satisfy Tarski's Convention T: “the condition we have placed on satisfactory theories of meaning is in essence Tarski's Convention T that tests the adequacy of a formal semantical definition of truth” (p. 23).


Convention T requires an adequate theory (consisting of base axioms for referring terms and predicates and recursive axioms for logical connectives, quantifiers, etc.) to entail all theorems of the form (T) in which “s” is replaced by a description of an object language sentences as composed out of its significant parts and “p” by a metalanguage sentence translating it. An axiomatic theory of a predicate “is true” meeting this condition has all and only the true sentences of the language in its extension (setting aside the semantic paradoxes and context sensitivity). The right-hand sides of its canonical theorems (those of form (T) whose proofs draw minimally on the content of the axioms) would use sentences that translated the sentence mentioned on the left. Having such a theory and knowing that we did (and a proof procedure for canonical theorems) would enable us to “give the meaning” of each object language sentence in the sense of being in a position to interpret it. In fact, since the relation that Convention T requires between s and “p” in relevant instances of (T) is exactly that required between them in (M) “s means that p,” we could infer (M) from (T), as Davidson notes in “Semantics for Natural Languages” (1970; first read in 1968 – the year after TM was published):



\begin{quote}


A theory of truth entails, for each sentence \emph{s}, a statement of the form ‘\emph{s} is true if and only if \emph{p}’ where in the simplest case ‘\emph{p}’ is replaced by \emph{s}. Since the words ‘is true if and only if’ are invariant, we may interpret them if we please as meaning ‘means that’. So construed, a sample might then read ‘“Socrates is wise” means that Socrates is wise’. (p. 60)



\end{quote}


We have thus found a promising approach to avoiding the two horns of the dilemma in the preamble.\footnote{Our discussion has focused on a central interpretive question about Davidson's project. Details about the use of an interpretive truth theory in giving a compositional meaning theory for natural languages can be found in Lepore and Ludwig (2005: part I, 2007).}

\section{5. Problematic Passages?}


Davidson's announced project is providing a compositional meaning theory for a natural language. He develops a dilemma for the project, and then he urges a way around it by a bit of indirection, namely, by constructing an axiomatic truth theory for the language that meets Convention T. Seeing how this works to achieve the aims of the announced project undermines the first of the motivations for the replacement theory, and the argument from historical context cannot stand on its own. This leaves the passages alluded to earlier which follow the transitional passage, which have been a rich source for the replacement theory.


First, though, in the transitional passage itself [vii], Davidson requires that “without appeal to any (further) semantical notions,” a theory of meaning put enough restrictions on the predicate “is T” to satisfy Convention T. What could this signify except the desire to eschew the concept of meaning? But this makes no sense of our requiring something of a \emph{theory of meaning}. Rather, at this point, we suggest, Davidson had in effect shifted from focusing on the initial project of just giving a compositional meaning theory to the extended project of illuminating more generally what it is for words to mean what they do (see Davidson 2001a: xiii). He hoped that once we adjusted a truth theory to handle context-sensitive constructions and treated it as an empirical theory of a speaker (as elaborated in “RI” – see Chapters 13–14 in this volume), merely getting a workable theory would guarantee that it had met Convention T. This would promise illumination of meaning in terms of more basic concepts, and so not just illuminate how we understand complexes on the basis of their parts but also semantical primitives. Without this additional ambition that enters at this point, we could instead simply require that the axioms of the truth theory themselves meet an analog of Convention T, requiring them to use metalanguage terms that interpret object language terms for which they give reference, truth and satisfaction conditions (Lepore and Ludwig 2005: 109, chapter 4, section 4, 2007: chapters 1–3, esp. chapter 3, section 4). This turns out to be important for understanding what follows.


One of the chief sources of the view that Davidson has abandoned the theory of meaning in favor of a different project lies in the passage following the transitional paragraphs (labels added):



\begin{quote}


[a] There is no need to suppress, of course, the obvious connection between a definition of truth of the kind Tarski has shown how to construct, and the concept of meaning. [b] It is this: the definition works by giving necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of every sentence, and to give truth conditions is a way of giving the meaning of a sentence. [c] To know the semantic concept of truth for a language is to know what it is for a sentence—any sentence—to be true, and this amounts, in one good sense we can give to the phrase, to understanding the language. [d] This at any rate is my excuse for a feature of the present discussion that is apt to shock old hands; my freewheeling use of the word ‘meaning’, for what I call a theory of meaning has after all turned out to make no use of meanings, whether of sentences or of words. [e] Indeed, since a Tarski-type truth definition supplies all we have asked so far of a theory of meaning, it is clear that such a theory falls comfortably within what Quine terms the ‘theory of reference’ as distinguished from what he terms the ‘theory of meaning’. [f] So much to the good for what I call a theory of meaning, and so much, perhaps, against my so calling it. (p. 24)



\end{quote}


This should be read in the light of what precedes it. [b] and [c] have been taken to suggest that Davidson abandons meaning for truth conditions: But given that we have in mind truth conditions stated in canonical theorems of a truth theory meeting Convention T (i.e., “the semantic concept of truth”), it is clear how this “gives the meaning” of the object language sentence. [d] likewise has been cited as evidence that Davidson throws out the theory of meaning, using the word but discarding its traditional use: But it is clear that it is meaning\emph{s} in the plural, that is, as entities, that he rejects, as is clear in the critical discussion. [e] and [f] should be interpreted in context as well: The theory of truth itself does not employ concepts other than those drawn from the theory of reference – it is only in light of knowledge that it satisfies Convention T that it puts us in a position to interpret object language sentences, and the theory does not state that it satisfies Convention T. Read in context, everything falls into place.


Davidson does make a mistake, which he notes later (Davidson 2001d: 138–139, 2001e: 171–173). He fails to distinguish between the knowledge we have about a suitable truth theory (that it meets constraints sufficing for it to satisfy Convention T), and what the truth theory itself states. He puts it this way:



\begin{quote}


My mistake was not \dots{} to suppose that any theory that correctly gave truth conditions would serve for interpretation; my mistake was to overlook the fact that someone might know a sufficiently unique theory without knowing that it was sufficiently unique. The distinction was easy for me to neglect because I imagined the theory to be known by someone who had constructed it from evidence, and such a person could not fail to realize that his theory satisfied the constraints.


(Davidson 2001e: 173)



\end{quote}


Another passage that has fueled the replacement theory follows a paragraph in which Davidson says that the truth theory is an empirical theory, the empirical power of which “depends on success in recovering the structure of a very complicated ability—the ability to speak and understand a language” (p. 25). The striking thing Davidson says is



\begin{quote}


[We ought not to be conned] into thinking a theory any more correct that entails ‘“Snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white’ than one that entails instead:



\end{quote}


\textbf{(S)} ‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if grass is green.



\begin{quote}


Provided \dots{} we are as sure of the truth of (S) as we are of that of its more celebrated predecessor. (pp. 25–26)



\end{quote}


Further,



\begin{quote}


The grotesqueness of (S) is in itself nothing against a theory of which it is a consequence, provided the theory gives the correct results for every sentence (on the basis of its structure, there being no other way). It is not easy to see how (S) could be party to such an enterprise, but if it were—if, that is, (S) followed from a characterization of the predicate ‘is true’ that led to the invariable pairing of truths with truths and falsehoods with falsehoods—then there would not, I think, be anything essential to the idea of meaning that remained to be captured. (p. 26)



\end{quote}


Yet it seems clear that there would be much that was not captured about the meaning of “snow is white” in using “grass is green” to interpret it! How then can one construe what Davidson is saying sensibly without taking him to be simply abandoning the traditional project as intractable?


A footnote added in 1982 provides an essential clue:



\begin{quote}


Critics have often failed to notice the essential proviso mentioned in this paragraph. The point is that (S) could not belong to any reasonably simple theory that also gave the right truth conditions for ‘That is snow’ and ‘This is white’. (See the discussion of indexical expressions below.) (p. 26, note 10)



\end{quote}


This shows that he does not think (S) could belong to an adequate theory. For an \emph{empirical} theory, assigning truth conditions \emph{relative to context} has to capture the “ability to speak and understand a language.” It must then assign correct truth conditions to demonstrative sentences. A theory using “is green” to say how “is white” is used would incorrectly entail that uses of “That is white” would be true iff what was demonstrated was green. So the point is to express the view that a theory empirically adequate to a language actually spoken would also be adequate for interpretation, not to replace a thick notion of meaning with a newly contrived thin notion of equivalence in truth value (something Davidson clearly rejects in the slingshot).


The next paragraph is puzzling as well, but in a footnote added in 1982, Davidson says that it is simply confused.



\begin{quote}


It would be ill advised for someone who had any doubts about the colour of snow or grass to accept a theory that yielded (S), even if his doubts were of equal degree, unless he thought the colour of the one was tied to the colour of the other. Omniscience can obviously afford more bizarre theories of meaning than ignorance; but then, omniscience has less need of communication. (pp. 26–27)



\end{quote}


The footnote adds, however,



\begin{quote}


This paragraph is confused. What it should say is that sentences of the theory are empirical generalizations about speakers, and so must not only be true but also lawlike. (S) presumably is not a law, since it does not support appropriate counterfactuals. It's also important that the evidence for accepting the (time and speaker relativized) truth conditions for ‘That is snow’ is based on the causal connection between a speaker's assent to the sentence and the demonstrative presentation of snow. For further discussion see Essay 12 [“Reply to Foster”]. (p. 26, n. 11)



\end{quote}


Davidson's considered view is that the trouble with (S) is that it is not a law and so does not track the dispositions that guide our use of words, as is shown by the false predictions a theory generating it makes about demonstrative sentences. The point again is that a truth theory empirically confirmed for a speaker will \emph{in fact} meet Convention T.


Davidson takes up this project later in RI, in which he explains the methodology as follows:



\begin{quote}


In philosophy we are used to definitions, analyses, reductions. Typically these are intended to carry us from concepts better understood, or clear, or more basic epistemologically or ontologically, to others we want to understand. \dots{} I have proposed a looser relation between concepts to be illuminated and the relatively more basic. At the centre stands a formal theory, a theory of truth, which imposes a complex structure on sentences containing the primitive notions of truth and satisfaction. These notions are given application by the form of the theory and the nature of the evidence. The result is a partially interpreted theory. The advantage of the method lies not in its free-style appeal to the notion of evidential support but in the idea of a powerful theory interpreted at the most advantageous point. This allows us to reconcile the need for a semantically articulated structure with a theory testable only at the sentential level. The more subtle gain is that very thin evidence in support of each of a potential infinity of points can yield rich results, even with respect to the points. By knowing only the conditions under which speakers hold sentences true, we can come out, given a satisfactory theory, with an interpretation of each sentence. It remains to make good on this last claim. The theory itself at best gives truth conditions. What we need to show is that if such a theory satisfies the constraints we have specified, it may be used to yield interpretations. (pp. 137–138)



\end{quote}


The goal is to put nonsemantic constraints on a truth theory to yield interpretive truth conditions. This is a broadly empiricist approach to illuminating the concept of meaning, but it contains no commitment to any simple translation of talk of meaning into talk of patterns of behavior, or to any other concepts. If the approach is right, then truth and meaning are intimately connected, but neither is reducible to the other. (See Chapters 13–14 in this volume and (Lepore and Ludwig 2005, esp. chapters 11–16) for a fuller discussion of this aspect of the project.)

\section{6. Later Work}


Davidson's development of his project confirms the reading we have given of it in TM. In this section, we concentrate on RI and RF.


A problem with the suggestion that a correct truth theory is adequate for interpretation is that given one theory, we can generate another that is true iff it is by adding a true conjunct to the application conditions in any axiom for any predicate. If we start with [A1], we can find an extensionally equivalent theory by replacing it with [A2]:


[A1] “Snow” applies to something iff it is snow.


[A2] “Snow” applies to something iff it is snow and the earth moves.


But while [A1] could be party to a theory that met Convention T, [A2] could not. In RF (delivered in 1973 but published in 1976), Davidson remarks that in RI, he criticized his earlier attempts to say what the relation was between a truth theory and a meaning theory and “tried to do better” (p. 171). One of the problems was the extensionality problem just mentioned. This alone casts doubt on the replacement theory, for if Davidson were simply replacing meaning with truth, there would be no problem in the first place.



\begin{quote}


RI begins with two questions:


Kurt utters the words ‘Es regnet’ and under the right conditions we know that he has said that it is raining. Having identified his utterance as intentional and linguistic, we are able to go on and to interpret his words: we can say what his words, on that occasion, meant. What could we know that would enable us to do this? How could we come to know it? (p. 125)



\end{quote}


It is clear then that the project of the paper is focused on what knowledge would suffice to interpret a speaker in the sense of putting us in a position to say “what his words, on that occasion, meant,” and for assertion this is saying that his utterance meant that p, for some “p”:



\begin{quote}


What knowledge would serve for interpretation? A short answer would be, knowledge of what each meaningful expression means. In German, those words Kurt spoke mean that it is raining and Kurt was speaking German. So in uttering the words ‘Es regnet’, Kurt said that it was raining. (p. 126)



\end{quote}


The trouble with this answer is not that it traffics in meaning, but that it does not say “what it is to know what an expression means” (p. 126). The appeal to assigning “to each meaningful expression \dots{} an entity, its meaning” is dismissed as “very little help” and as an expedient that “at best hypostatizes the problem” (p. 126), echoing the criticism of TM. On developing the problem, it is clear that the “interpreter must be able to understand any of the infinity of sentences the speaker might utter” (p. 127), and so in explaining what enables him to do it, “we must put it in finite form” (p. 128). So we want a compositional meaning theory—the same project that TM opens with. In view of the inutility of meanings, we should “describe what is wanted \dots{} without apparent reference to meanings or interpretations: someone who knows the theory can interpret the utterance to which the theory applies” (p. 128). “A satisfactory theory \dots{} will [therefore] reveal significant semantic structure” (p. 130). If we had an interpretation theory for our language, and a translation theory for another language, we could provide interpretations of its sentences. But the reference to the home language is “an unneeded intermediary between interpretation and alien idiom.” We should apply an interpretation theory directly to the foreign language: “what is left is a structurally revealing theory of interpretation for the object language. \dots{} We have such theories,” Davidson suggests, “in theories of truth of the kind Tarski first showed how to give” (p. 130).


Thus, in RI, Davidson's proposal is that we would have an interpretation theory for a language that enables us to say what utterances in it mean, in the sense of enabling us to understand them, if we can construct for it a truth theory we know to satisfy Convention T. This is his answer to the first of the two questions posed at the outset of the paper. It is clearly continuous with the project of TM, in which he treats the truth theory as an empirical theory ultimately justified from the standpoint of radical interpretation (p. 27).


Davidson goes on to describe a procedure for confirming a truth theory from evidence that does not presuppose knowledge of meanings or detailed contents of attitudes. He asks whether a theory satisfying the constraints would enable us to interpret utterances of the language. Davidson is clear in RI, in contrast to TM, that just knowing the truth theory is not enough, for (p. 138) “a T-sentence does not give the meaning of the sentence it concerns: the T-sentences [sic] does fix the truth value relative to certain conditions, but it does not say the object language sentence is true because the conditions hold” (because the conditions are that p and it means that p).



\begin{quote}


Yet if truth values were all that mattered, the T-sentence for ‘Snow is white’ could as well say that it is true if and only if grass is green or 2 + 2 = 4 as say that it is true if and only if snow is white. (p. 138)



\end{quote}


Adding “the canonical proof of a T-sentence” does not help, for anomalous ones have proofs as well. “If we knew that a T-sentence satisfied Tarski's Convention T,” Davidson notes, “we would know that it was true, and we could use it to interpret a sentence because we would know that the right branch of the biconditional translated the sentence to be interpreted” (p. 139). But this has to be confirmed in RI, so we have to say how we could come to know this. However,



\begin{quote}


What we have been overlooking \dots{} is that we have supplied an alternative criterion: this criterion is that the totality of T-sentences should (in the sense described above) optimally fit evidence about sentences held true by native speakers. The present idea is that what Tarski assumed outright for each T-sentence can be indirectly elicited by a holistic constraint. If that constraint is adequate, each T-sentence will in fact yield an acceptable interpretation. (p. 139)



\end{quote}


It is satisfaction of those constraints that is to ensure the theory meets Convention T and solve the extensionality problem. Knowledge that the theory meets the constraints plus knowledge of a canonical proof procedure puts us in a position to interpret any utterance of the language. This again shows Davidson is not abandoning the theory of meaning as hopeless, but arguing that it can be pursued in a deeply illuminating way by considering what empirical constraints on a truth theory would suffice for it to meet Convention T.


RF is Davidson's most explicit discussion of the goals and structure of his project, and he reiterates the position we have just outlined. He says, echoing the last paragraph of RI:



\begin{quote}


Since Tarski was interested in defining truth \dots{} he could take the concept of translation for granted. But in \emph{radical} interpretation, this is just what cannot be assumed. So I have proposed instead some empirical constraints on accepting a theory of truth that can be stated without appeal to such concepts as those of meaning, translation, or synonymy, though not without a certain understanding of the notion of truth. By a course of reasoning, \emph{I have tried to show that if the constraints are met by a theory, the T-sentences that flow from that theory will in fact have translations of s replacing ‘p’}. (p. 172; emphasis added).



\end{quote}


The challenge Foster raises is not that the constraints Davidson gives are inadequate to respond to the extensionality problem (p. 173), but rather two nested problems, one of which he thinks can be met only at the cost of raising the other. The first is that Davidson treats knowledge of what the truth theory states as sufficient for interpretation, but it is not. The second problem is that what has to be added – knowledge that a truth theory meeting the constraints \emph{states that} s is true iff p – is not available to Davidson because it draws on intensional notions. On the first, Davidson flatly denies that he ever thought that knowledge of what the truth theory states was sufficient (p. 174): “So far as I know, I never held the view \dots{} which leaves unconnected the knowledge of what a theory of truth states and the knowledge that the truth theory is T-theoretical” (i.e., satisfies Convention T). “The interpreter does, indeed, know that his knowledge consists in what is stated by a T-theory, a T-theory that is translational (satisfies Convention T)” (p. 175).



\begin{quote}


Someone who can interpret English knows \dots{} that an utterance of the sentence ‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white; he knows in addition that this fact is entailed by a translational theory—that it is not an accidental fact about that English sentence, but a fact that interprets the sentence. Once the point of putting things this way is clear, I see no harm in rephrasing what the interpreter knows in this case in a more familiar vein: he knows that ‘Snow is white’ in English \emph{means that} snow is white. (p. 175)



\end{quote}


This is exactly the view that we attributed to him in TM. To the second charge, Davidson denies having the goal that Foster “foists” on him. He says that he does not “believe it is possible to reduce these notions [language, meaning, belief, and intention] to anything more scientific or behavioristic.” Further, “What I have tried to do is to give an account of meaning (interpretation) that makes no essential use of unexplained linguistic concepts. \dots{} It will ruin no plan of mine if in saying what an interpreter knows it is necessary to use a so-called intensional notion—one that consorts with belief and intention and the like” (p. 176). The restriction Davidson has in mind is on the constraints a truth theory has to meet to satisfy Convention T, but not on specifying what the interpreter knows, and, in particular, it does not rule out his knowing that a theory that meets the constraints entails a certain thing (p. 178).

\section{7. Conclusion}


Davidson's project is not to reduce meaning to truth conditions or to replace the theory of meaning with a successor project more suitable to scientific progress, but a pursuit of a theory of meaning by a bit of clever indirection. This is not an esoteric doctrine of Davidson's. He announces it in TM and he explains it in the introduction to \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation} (Davidson 2001a):



\begin{quote}


What is it for words to mean what they do? In the essays collected here I explore the idea that we would have an answer to this question if we knew how to construct a theory satisfying two demands: it would provide an interpretation of all utterances, actual and potential, of a speaker or group of speakers; and it would be verifiable without knowledge of the detailed propositional attitudes of the speaker. The first condition acknowledges the holistic nature of linguistic understanding. The second condition aims to prevent smuggling into the foundations of the theory concepts too closely allied to the concept of meaning. A theory that does not satisfy both conditions cannot be said to answer our opening question in a philosophically instructive way. (p. xiii)



\end{quote}


The project of explaining what it is for words to mean what they do is carried out by reflecting on how to construct and confirm from the standpoint of an interpreter a theory for particular languages without presupposing knowledge of what the theory is about. Davidson's suggestion is that a truth theory (known to satisfy Convention T or an analog for natural languages) would satisfy the first demand; he aimed to show how it could be verified from the standpoint of the radical interpreter to satisfy the second. That this is Davidson's project has nevertheless escaped many commentators, and we have aimed both to explain where some of the most difficult interpretive puzzles have arisen and how they are to be solved. We have shown how a truth theory can be employed in the pursuit of providing a meaning theory. We have shown how it solves a dilemma that Davidson develops in the critical phase of TM. We have shown that this project is continuous with that of TMLL. We have explained how passages in TM cited for the replacement theory fit with this project. And we have shown that the project we extract from TM is exactly the project that Davidson later pursues and attributes to his earlier self.

% Notes
\section{References}


Barwise, J. and Perry, J. (1981). Semantic innocence and uncompromising situations. \emph{Midwest Studies in Philosophy} 6:387–403.


Burge, T. (1992). Philosophy of language and mind: 1950–1990. \emph{Philosophical Review} 101(1):3–51.


Chihara, C.S. (1975). Davidson's extensional theory of meaning. \emph{Philosophical Studies} 28(1):1–15.


Cummins, R. (2002). Truth and meaning. In \emph{Meaning and Truth: Investigations in Philosophical Semantics}, J.K. Campbell, M. O'Rourke, and D. Shier (eds). New York: Seven Bridges Press.


Davidson, D. (2001a). Introduction. In \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


———(2001b). Theories of meaning and learnable languages. In \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}, 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Original publication, 1965.


——— (2001c). Truth and meaning. In \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}, 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Original publication, 1967.


——— (2001d). Radical interpretation. In \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Original publication, 1973.


——— (2001e). Reply to Foster. In \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Original publication, 1976.


——— (2001f). \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}, 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Original edition, 1984.


Ebbs, G. (2012). Davidson's explication of meaning. In \emph{Donald Davidson on Truth, Meaning and the Mental}, G. Preyer (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Glock, H.-J. (2003). \emph{Quine and Davidson on Language, Thought, and Reality}. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Horwich, P. (2005). \emph{Reflections on Meaning}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Katz, J.J. (1982). Common sense in semantics. \emph{Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic} 23:174–218.


Lepore, E. and Ludwig, K. (2003). Truth and meaning. In \emph{Donald Davidson}, K. Ludwig (ed.). New York: Cambridge University Press.


\emph{——— (2005).} Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality\emph{. Oxford: Oxford University Press.}


——— (2007). \emph{Donald Davidson: Truth-Theoretic Semantics}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


——— (2011). Truth and meaning redux. \emph{Philosophical Studies} 154:251–277.


Ludwig, K. (2002). What is the role of a truth theory in a meaning theory? In \emph{Meaning and Truth: Investigations in Philosophical Semantics}, D. Shier, J.K. Campbell, and M. O'Rourke (eds). New York: Seven Bridges Press.


——— (2011). Donald Davidson. In \emph{Key Thinkers in the Philosophy of Language}, B. Lee (ed.). London: Continuum Press.


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\chapter{11. Parataxis}


Adam Sennet


You cleverly eliminate reference to propositions and higher-order entities from your ontology by reducing meaning to truth conditions. You argue for this by means of slingshot arguments, unity of the proposition arguments, and dispensability arguments. You refine your theory using radical interpretation, passing and standing theories, and an event analysis to handle adverbial modification (that would otherwise require positing odious entities such as functions from functions to functions). However, you are still stuck with some of the problems that motivate many to accept intensional entities: first, there are transitive verbs that seem opaque in their object position:


\textbf{(1)} Darla wants a unicorn.


\textbf{(2)} Joe looked for the Prime Minister of Canada.


\textbf{(3)} Joe looked for Stephen Harper.


(1) can be true in a world without unicorns. (2) can be true while (3) is false, despite Stephen Harper's (current) occupation as Canada's Prime Minister.\footnote{Barbara Partee's case, “the temperature is rising,” presents another interesting challenge for an extensionalist semantics.} These constructions are difficult for any extensionalist semantics and a great deal of ink has been put to the purpose of treating these constructions as covert clausal clauses.\footnote{See Larson, Dikken, and Ludlow (1997) for a defense of covert sentential structure in these sorts of constructions.}


Second, there are indirect discourse reports. He came, he saw, and he conquered. Caesar said that. The question for us is whether or not the last two sentences give a (roughly) correct semantic equivalent for:


\textbf{(4)} Caesar said that he came, he saw, and he conquered.


(4) presents a problem for any semantics that rejects intensional objects (i.e., propositions): Without coordination of speech and speech report on same proposition, it is difficult to give truth conditions for indirect reports. We are faced with either non-compositionality of the meaning of (4) or non-extensionality.


Third, mood presents a problem for any truth-conditional theory of meaning:


\textbf{(5)} Did you eat dinner?


\textbf{(6)} Eat some dinner!


\textbf{(7)} If only you ate dinner!


It would be a category mistake to call any of (5)–(7) “true” or “false.” But they are all meaningful. Thus, it looks like meaning is not truth conditions.


Davidson's answer to the second and third of these issues, but not the first, involves parataxis, which consists in placing two expressions side by side for the purpose of demonstration. Interestingly, Davidson also uses parataxis to give a theory of quotation. We will look at these three uses of parataxis and their problems. Section 1 will deal with indirect discourse, Section 2 will deal with mood, and Section 3 with quotation.

\section{1. Indirect Discourse}


Let us examine the problem with (4) more carefully. On a semantics that avails itself of propositions, “he came, he saw, he conquered” expresses a proposition and (4) is true just in case Caesar expressed the proposition that “he came, he saw, and he conquered” expresses. Eliminating propositions from semantic theory (if not ontology) makes this route unavailable. So, it is natural to try to analyze indirect discourse as a variant of direct discourse: (4) is true iff Caesar uttered the sentence “he came, he saw, and he conquered.” This is clearly a bad analysis, however, seeing as Caesar presumably never uttered an English word in his life, but he did say that he came, he saw, and he conquered. What is worse is that even if he had uttered those words, they presumably would not mean the same thing as we are reporting him as saying. We could try to have a different idiomatic interpretation for every instance of “said that.” For instance, we could treat (4) as:


\textbf{(8)} Caesar said-that-he-came-,-he-saw-,-and-he-conquered.


This requires treating “said-that-he-came-,-he-saw-,-and-he-conquered” as a simple, unanalyzed monadic predicate with no internal structure. But this seems absurd: Clearly, the words after “Caesar” have semantic significance. It also masks the important fact that “said that” reports are highly productive, thus missing an interesting generalization about the meaning of “said that.”


There is a second, familiar problem with indirect speech reports. Consider:


\textbf{(9)} Caesar said that cowards die many times before their actual deaths.


Say that every coward happened to have blue eyes, and everyone with blue eyes happened to be a coward. The truth of (9) does not license the substitution resulting in:


\textbf{(10)} Caesar said that blue-eyed people die many times before their actual deaths.


If we treat the indirect report extensionally, we run into the problem that coextensive terms do not seem to be substitutable \emph{salva veritate}. So much the worse for a semantics that eschews intensions, properties, and propositions.


So what is there in between a reified meaning for the sentence and the sentence itself that lets an extensionalist maintain his extensionalism? Davidson's answer is clever. Here are a few steps you can follow to get yourself in the right frame of mind. Step 1: Treat “that” in the semantics not as a complementizer but as a demonstrative. Step 2: Treat “he came, he saw, he conquered” as making no direct contribution to the truth conditions of (4) – the utterance is an object of demonstration. Step 3: Adopt a primitive dyadic predicate, “samesaying (SS),” which holds between utterances and phrases. In Davidson's words:



\begin{quote}


The proposal then is this: sentences in indirect discourse, as it happens, wear their logical form on their sleeves (except for one small point). They consist of an expression referring to a speaker, the two-place predicate said, and a demonstrative referring to an utterance. Period. What follows gives the content of the subjects saying, but has no logical or semantic connection with the original attribution of a saying. This last point is no doubt the novel one, and upon it everything depends: from a semantic point of view the content-sentence in indirect discourse is not contained in the sentence whose truth counts, that is, the sentence that ends with that.


(Davidson 2001c: 106)



\end{quote}


In other words, what one asserts by (4) is treated semantically as “Caesar said that” with the “that” referring to the utterance of “he came, he saw, he conquered” – which plays no other role in the assertion expressed by (4). You say (4) truly just in case Caesar said that, and the demonstrated sentence samesays a sentence that Caesar uttered. This seems to solve Davidson's problem: No intensional items are invoked and Caesar need not have spoken in English to make (4) true. Substitutability \emph{salva veritate} is no longer an issue – the extensions of the terms in the direct object of the report no longer contribute their extensions to the semantics of the report.


There is no shortage of the complaints one might make and no doubt you have by now thought of or heard many of them. But we should pause to appreciate just how radical, inventive, and creative the paratactic view really is. With relatively little mutilation to the surface syntax of the sentence, it manages to thread the needle between two troublesome positions which looked to be exhaustive. It might be objected that the mutilation is much greater than I am making out since (4) is in effect being treated as:


\textbf{(11)} He came, he saw, he conquered. Caesar said that.


Surely (11) is very different in surface structure than (4). But (11) is not Davidson's official view of the syntax of (4); it is simply a sloppy rendering of the canonical analysis Davidson is offering. As Davidson himself points out (Davidson 2001d), a paratactic theory's commitments only require assigning to (4) the same semantic value as “Caesar said that,” where in context “that” picks out the sentence “he came, he saw, and he conquered.” It is important not to be misled by the heuristic way the account can be stated from the official view about how sentences like (4) are assigned T-sentences by the semantic theory. The official view, at least as a first pass, looks like:


\textbf{(12)} ∃\emph{x} (A uttered \emph{x} \& SS (\emph{x}, that)).


This is far too simple, of course, even to handle (4) where the context sensitivity of “he” in the complement clause needs to be resolved. The options for handling this, however, are well known and involve the resources already needed in the theory (see Davidson 1967; Elugardo 1999; Lepore and Ludwig 2007; Ludwig and Ray 1998). We shall ignore issues concerning context sensitivity (including tense) in what follows.

\subsection{1.1. Samesaying}


A key to the Davidsonian approach is the notion of “samesaying” and one might ask what it takes to samesay. First, notice that samesaying is a dyadic predicate linking an utterance with a sentence, not the uttered sentence with a sentence. Davidson argued for the utterance-based notion rather than the sentential-based notion on grounds of translation: while we may translate (4) directly into a French sentence, the analysis of the French sentence will contain a French sentence that stands in the samesaying relation, not an English sentence. The analysis of (4), however, contains an English sentence (“he came, he saw, and he conquered”) and not a French one. This suggests that the translation of the target sentence is distinct from the translation of the analyzed sentence. Interestingly, however, this complaint runs afoul of Davidson’t account of quotation (further discussed later), where quoted items are also the subject of parataxis. Thus, if Davidson's argument were convincing, it would hold against his own account of quotation. I will take it provisionally, then, that we need not concern ourselves too much about the relevant relata.\footnote{This discussion is indebted to Lepore and Ludwig (2007: 246).}


It is fairly natural to say that P samesays an utterance of Q iff P and Q are synonymous. Alternatively, one might claim that P samesays an utterance of Q iff P and Q translate one another. These are not quite the same claims, as Elugardo (1999) points out. However, either of these options runs us into some trouble if we take our normal, loose approach to reporting as reflective of true reports (see Cappelen and Lepore 1997). For example:


A: I'd rather die than miss Mardi Gras.


B: A said that he is going to Mardi Gras.


We tend to judge B's report as being accurate (and true), and insofar as that means that his utterance was true, samesaying clearly cannot simply be synonymy or translation as no respectable semantic theory will claim that “I'd rather die than miss Mardi Gras” in English is true if and only if “he's going to Mardi Gras” is true, even once we settle context sensitivity. This is complicated by some of Davidson's considerations about standing and passing theories (see Davidson 1986), but the point is clear: we sometimes paraphrase rather than re-express the same content. This leads some theorists to claim that the samesaying relationship is a primitive relationship that is fixed by our reporting practices (though usually they decline to offer a recipe for determining the samesaying facts from the reporting facts). Presumably, in context, the samesaying relationship is fairly flexible – if we take into account irony, sarcasm, and metaphors, then it will be difficult to prevent any two arbitrary sentences from samesaying relative to some reporting contexts. But this is to be expected: we do report ironic, sarcastic, and metaphoric utterances with sentences that do not plausibly mean the same thing (often with negations of the originally uttered sentences).


One interesting take on samesaying comes from Cappelen and Lepore (1999), who argue that the samesaying relation is determined by our practices of reporting. As they put it:



\begin{quote}


What samesays what is determined by the practice of indirect quotation; we place no a priori constraints on what can samesay what. Mixed reports containing meaningless or unknown words can be true. It is simply part of the data that an utterance of an ill-formed sentence of English can samesay one of Bob's utterances. Maybe this is difficult to understand, but difficulty is no excuse for denial or dismissal. So, what we actually do inside the complements of indirect reports must be reflected in the extension of samesay relation. Indeed, it constitutes this relation.


(Cappelen and Lepore 1999: 94)



\end{quote}


In other words, there will not be an illuminating account of samesaying in terms of synonymy or even similarity of meaning – but we are nonetheless familiar with samesaying as it tracks our practices of reporting.

\subsection{1.2. Virtues of the paratactic account}


Davidson's account has some virtues, though are desirable only if you already like truth-theoretic semantics. First, the account contains no commitment to propositions or intensions. Second, it blocks substitutions of expressions that are coextensive in indirect speech reports. Third, one need not violate the principle that terms do not shift their meaning with linguistic context: we do not import a new semantics for “cowards” in (9). In other words, Davidson's account preserves the principle of semantic innocence. Davidson puts this nicely:



\begin{quote}


If we could recover our pre-Fregean semantic innocence, I think it would seem to us plainly incredible that the words The Earth moves, uttered after the words Galileo said that, mean anything different, or refer to anything else, than is their wont when they come in other environments. \dots{} Language is the instrument it is because the same expression, with semantic features (meaning) unchanged, can serve countless purposes.


(Davidson 2001c: 108)\footnote{Of course, one might balk at this claim. Famously, Davidsonian accounts have difficulty dealing with other intensional contexts (i.e., modality), and one might think that if modality requires a violation of semantic innocence and resorting to propositions, then why not employ them in says that reports? This is a tricky issue but not one we will deal with here.}



\end{quote}


We thus have a nice account of the truth conditions of indirect speech reports. Furthermore, it is an account that may well generalize to other problematic constructions. For instance “Believes that” constructions are opaque and thus worrisome for a Davidsonian. Consider:


\textbf{(13)} Caesar believed that Caesar's wife should be above suspicion.


One may well extend the proposal for “says that” to account for the truth conditions of (13). The idea would be to claim that Caesar was in some belief state whose content samesays “Caesar's wife should be above suspicion” (see Lepore and Ludwig 2007; Chapter 11). It is not clear that the same samesaying relation will be employed: Perhaps our belief reporting practices and our indirect speech reporting practices come apart. In other words, Davidson's proposal may offer a treatment of a range of “ψ that” constructions.

\subsection{1.3. Some problems for the paratactic account of indirect speech reports}


Nonetheless, the paratactic account has served as something of a whipping post for philosophers of language over the years. Many of these objections are dealt with at length in Lepore and Ludwig (2007; Chapter 11), in the context of a thorough work on Davidsonian semantics. We will mention a few in this section.

\section{1.3.1. Syntactic worries}


There is an apparent clash between the syntax of sentences like (4) and the paratactic account of the semantics. As Segal and Speas (1986) note, it is highly suspicious that the “that” in (4) is a noun phrase rather than a complementizer. Thus, if we were to treat (4) as two sentences, we would be getting its syntax wrong, and if we treat “that” as demonstrative, we mistake its lexical category.


A more sophisticated worry is advanced by Hand (1991), who notes that there are grammatical interactions that occur between the complement clause of a sentence and the main clause. For example, we see negative polarity effects:


\textbf{(14)} I didn't say that I went anywhere.


If we treat (14) in the manner suggested by the paratactic theory, we end up with the oddity that my indirect speech report is true just in case I did not utter something that samesays “I went anywhere,” which is clearly ungrammatical. The claim seems to be that I did not utter something that samesays “I went somewhere.” It is a little hard to know what to make of these objections as they depend on some assumptions about the syntax–semantic interface. Lepore and Ludwig are fairly dismissive of both, claiming that:



\begin{quote}


It is not clear that the paratactic account runs into serious difficulty on this head, for we might say that the utterance of [I went anywhere], even if of an ungrammatical stand-alone sentence, nonetheless expresses in use the same as an utterance of [I went somewhere].


(Lepore and Ludwig 2007: 247 fn. 191)



\end{quote}


This argument is slippery since the ungrammatical utterance “I went anywhere” is mentioned rather than used. Nonetheless, the idea is clear: The grammaticality of the sentence uttered is not what is at issue. What is at issue is what the speaker can express “in use” with the sentence. It is not easy to say what rules govern what a speaker can mean in use by an utterance of an ungrammatical sentence – but notice that if we take the samesaying relation to be fixed by our practices of speech report, we can claim that “I went anywhere” can samesay an utterance of “I went somewhere.” After all, one would use (14) to report one's failing to say “I went somewhere.”


The interaction between main clause and complement clause, however, can go well beyond effects such as negative polarity triggering. One can bind into complement clauses. For example:


\textbf{(15)} Everyone said that he came, he saw, and he conquered.


This is badly rendered as


\textbf{(16)} Everyone said that. He came, he saw, and he conquered.


It is not better to render it as


\textbf{(17)} ∀\emph{y}∃\emph{x} (Uttered (\emph{y},\emph{x}) \& SS (\emph{x}, “he came, he saw, he conquered”))


Universal quantification across sentential boundaries (and into a quotation) is well known to be problematic:


\textbf{(18)} ?Every man drove a Volvo. He kissed his wife.


There are various tricks for handling such cases – Lepore and Ludwig (2007; Chapter 11) argue for a complex truth clause that involves quantifying over possible extensions of a speaker's language that are stipulated to contain names that can then be used to evaluate the quantified claim.\footnote{Along the way, they replace the Davidsonian notion of parataxis with a treatment of the “that” clause according to which it is treated as a complex demonstrative.} Whether or not this keeps to the Davidsonian ideal is tricky as the metalanguage requires quantification over entities that look to be of the sort Davidson was anxious to dispense with.

\section{1.3.2. Logical and semantic worries}


Some critics have focused on patterns of reasoning that seem valid but are rendered invalid on a paratactic account (see Schiffer (1987); Seymour (1994)). For example, the following is invalid on Davidson's account:


\textbf{(19)} Joe said that he wants a hot dog. Therefore, Joe said that he wants a hot dog.


(19)'s invalidity is due to a peculiarity of the Davidsonian account – the demonstrative that demonstrates the utterance is not logically guaranteed to pick out the complement clause sentence, even if it is true that we tend to use it as such. On the other hand, perhaps the inference is not \emph{logically} valid. After all, we have to assume that “Joe” in both sentences is coreferential or we would not treat the inference as valid at all. Why not think that the inference is guaranteed to be valid if we presuppose that the demonstrative has the same value in both sentences, as we do with the referent of “Joe”?\footnote{Lepore and Ludwig (2007) offer a similar response. Interestingly, they modify the account to be nonparatactic, treating the phrase “that φ” as a complex referential term rather than treating “that” and φ separately as a demonstrative and mentioned sentence. The idea here is to disallow any reading of an indirect speech report in which the demonstrative refers to anything but the sentence following “that.” This on its own seems sufficient to answer the worry posed by the missing entailment. It also helps with the syntactic worry since “that” is no longer treated as a demonstrative.}


A more serious worry involves embedded speech reports. Burge (1986) and Foster (1976) argue that one can indirectly report indirect reports, such as:


\textbf{(20)} Joe said that Mary said that Jane went to Mardi Gras.


(20) is true just in case Joe says that:


\textbf{(21)} Mary said that Jane went to Mardi Gras.


is true. But it is no easy task to ensure this result. After all, (20) contains a demonstrative that demonstrates the speaker's utterance of “Mary said that Jane went to Mardi Gras.” On Davidson's account, (21) contains a demonstrative that demonstrates Joe's utterance “Jane went to Mardi Gras.” Since Joe's utterance is distinct from Mary's utterance, the indirect speech report reports something whose content is distinct from that which is reported, by dint of different references for the demonstratives. The objection brings out the tension mentioned earlier between accepting an account of samesaying that reduces to sameness of meaning (in context) or a pragmatic relation fixed by the speaker's practices of indirect speech reporting. The objection, after all, presupposes that matching of content is required for supplying indirect speech reports with appropriate truth conditions. A more flexible approach to samesaying may well allow that the indirect reports match in appropriate ways without requiring that the demonstratives corefer.

\section{1.3.3. Counterfactuals}


Recall that the paratactic truth conditions for indirect speech reports depend on two independent conjuncts: the fact that the subject of the report uttered something and that it bears an important relationship to the utterance of the object of the speech report. Let us assume (for now) a standard possible-worlds account of counterfactuals, where at the “nearest” world at which the antecedent is true, the consequent is true and that nearness relations are fixed by similarity. Now, consider Joe, who is only able to utter one sentence due to a strange, incurable disease: “Cheese is tasty” (though his linguistic comprehension is fine otherwise). With all this in place, we should worry that the following could come out true on a paratactic account:


\textbf{(22)} If Joe were to say that Paris is in France, then my utterance of “Paris is in France” would samesay Joe's utterance that “Cheese is tasty.”


The reason (22) is true (in some contexts) given a paratactic account of indirect speech reports is that there may well be worlds in which the meaning of “Paris is in France” is the same as “Cheese is tasty.” Recall that to make the antecedent true, we need a world where Joe says something that (at that world) samesays “Paris is in France.” The nearest world where that is true, however, may well be one where “Paris is in France” no longer samesays what \emph{we} would say by uttering “Paris is in France” but samesays what we would say by “Cheese is tasty.”


The Davidsonian account presents this dimension of freedom in counterfactual evaluation precisely by avoiding reifying the meaning of “Paris is in France” and thus allows us to consider worlds where the words used in the report mean something different than they actually do. Notice that this seems less ridiculous:


\textbf{(23)} If Joe were to utter something that samesaid my utterance of “Paris is in France,” then my utterance of “Paris is in France” would samesay his utterance that “Cheese is tasty.”


While we are not used to evaluating sentences like (23), there is clearly a reading on which it is true. The problem, furthermore, is not a problem for non-paratactic accounts. On a traditional account, indirect speech reports relate a speaker to a proposition and the utterance itself plays no separate role as the object of a samesaying relationship – samesaying simply is not built into the analysis. This prevents the problem above from occurring as it is irrelevant what samesaying relationship holds between utterances at the nearest world where Joe says that Paris is in France.


The argument is not conclusive, but it points to the difference between treating “that clauses” as expressing propositions as opposed to demonstrating utterances that are related to another utterance. It also depends on taking “samesaying” to be fixed pragmatically as opposed to by translation or synonymy.

\section{2. Mood and Mood-Setting}


Mood, as noted earlier, is an issue for any truth-conditional semanticist. It is important to distinguish mood from force.\footnoteB{Mood is a grammatical feature of a sentence, while force is a pragmatic feature of an utterance. There is an interesting question about how the two relate. Davidson is adamant that mood does not determine force.} At first blush, this might seem to be an issue for \emph{everyone} – if one thinks that meaning is a matter of associating propositions with sentences and propositions have truth values, then how can one account for the meaningfulness of interrogatives, imperatives, exclamatives, and the like? The trick for fans of propositions involves using whatever one takes to be a proposition (structured entity, set of possible worlds, etc.) and to use sets of them to give semantic values to other moods. For example, questions can be analyzed as sets of answers (see Groenendijk and Stokhof (1989); Karttunen (1977)). Lacking propositions, one has some options. One could analyze all moods as indicatives by turning every apparently nonindicative mood into a report (see Lewis (1970) for relevant considerations). For example, the question:


\textbf{(24)} Where is the CN Tower?


is analyzed as:


\textbf{(25)} I hereby ask for the location of the CN tower. Similarly, the imperative:


\textbf{(26)} Get me a cookie!


is analyzed as:


\textbf{(27)} I command you to bring me a cookie.


The above analysis has its virtues: It explains why one can use a performative sentence like (27) to issue a command just like one could by uttering (26). Nonetheless, Davidson argues against this approach:



\begin{quote}


\dots{} simply reducing imperatives or interrogatives to indicatives leaves us with no account at all of the differences among the moods. If any of the reductive theories is right, mood is as irrelevant to meaning as voice is often said to be. If mood does not affect meaning, how can we hope to explain the connection between mood and use, whatever the connection comes to? Reductive analyses abandon rather than solve the problem with which we began.


(Davidson 2001b: 115)



\end{quote}


The phrase “irrelevant to meaning” is a suspicious character in this passage. On the one hand, Davidson is right that the moodiness of mood seems lost on the analysis. On the other hand, the view allows mood to play a role in affecting meaning: it is because a sentence is in the interrogative mood that it is paraphrased with “I hereby ask” and because it is in the imperative mood that it is analyzed as “I command.” However, the real cost of this view is that it solves the problem of meaning by making nonindicative moods truth evaluable. The problem we began with is that they are not truth evaluable.


So the question for us is, how do we make sense of the meaning of nonindicative sentences in a truth-conditional theory of meaning without assigning them truth conditions?


Davidson's answer is interesting and employs parataxis. He sets the stage for defending his view by identifying three criteria his view is intended to satisfy:


\textbf{(1)} It must show or preserve the relations between indicatives and corresponding sentences in the other moods; it must, for example, articulate the sense in which ‘You will take off your shoes’, ‘Take off your shoes’, and ‘Will you take off your shoes?’ have a common element.


\textbf{(2)} It must assign an element of meaning to utterances in a given mood that is not present in utterances in other moods. And this element should connect with the difference in force between assertions, questions, and commands in such a way as to explain our intuition of a conventional relation between mood and use.


\textbf{(3)} Finally, the theory should be semantically tractable. If the theory conforms to the standards of a theory of truth, then I would say all is well. And on the other hand if \dots{} a standard theory of truth can be shown to be incapable of explaining mood, then truth theory is inadequate as a general theory of language. (Davidson 2001b: 115–116)


This approach treats mood (besides the declarative mood) as, in effect, two sentences:



\begin{quote}


If we were to represent in linear form the utterance of, say, the imperative sentence Put on your hat, it would come out as the utterance of a sentence like My next utterance is imperatival in force, followed by an utterance of You will put on your hat.


(Davidson 2001b: 120)



\end{quote}


However, the linear representation is not to be confused with the official view:



\begin{quote}


I do not want to claim that imperative sentences are two indicative sentences. Rather, we can give the semantics of the utterance of an imperative sentence by considering two specifications of truth conditions, the truth conditions of the utterance of an indicative sentence got by transforming the original imperative, and the truth conditions of the moodsetter. The mood-setter of an utterance of Put on your hat is true if and only if the utterance of the indicative core is imperatival in force.


(Davidson 2001b: 120)



\end{quote}


The statement of the view requires some comment. First, Davidson assumes that imperatives, interrogatives, and the like have an “indicative core.” For example, the indicative core of “Get me a cookie!” is something like “you will get me a cookie.” This assumption may be problematic in the case of interrogatives such as “Where is Jones?”, which seems to have an open sentence as its indicative core – we will return to this issue.


The mood-setter is the sentence that demonstrates the indicative core and makes a claim about its force. The idea, however, is to give an account of mood in terms of truth conditions that are expressed at once by the imperative sentence. There is no attempt to give a compositional analysis of how this occurs (and it would be difficult to implement in complex cases). The assertion is also not a conjunction of the two specified truth conditions – they are co-asserted. This is crucial as it is intended to explain why it is difficult to attribute truth or falsity to interrogatives, imperatives, and the like.\footnote{Though not impossible – see E. Lepore and S.-J. Leslie (unpublished results) for some interesting cases.}


The account may seem to succeed in the tasks Davidson sets for it: it shows what is common between the various moods (the indicative core); it assigns an “element of meaning” to utterances in a given mood – the mood-setter is responsible for that; and it conforms to the standards of a “theory of truth” – the analysis of interrogatives is entirely in terms of truth conditions, which is sufficient for “semantic tractability.” Nonetheless, it runs into trouble fairly quickly. Many objections have been leveled against the view, and we will canvas a few and some responses.


First, as noted by Lepore and Ludwig (2007; chapter 12), it is not really clear that the view succeeds in being semantically tractable. There are two truth conditions that are used to analyze an imperative but no conjunction of them. If the two were expressed as a conjunction after all, the imperative would be truth evaluable, but it is not. In other words, there is a worry that any success one might have at integrating interrogatives and imperatives in a truth conditional semantics would require giving them truth conditions. Second, imperatives and interrogatives embed in constructions that are difficult to integrate into mood-setting. For example:


\textbf{(28)} The kids are home or why else would the lights be on?


(28) is tricky to handle since it is difficult to know how to apply a mood-setter. Conditionals make life even harder for the paratactic account:


\textbf{(29)} If John isn't home, go find him!


(29) is tricky because it is not clear where the mood-setter should be. The prospects for letting the mood-setting occur in the consequent are not promising. That would force us to understand (29) as:


\textbf{(30)} If John isn't home, then the next utterance is a command. You will find John.


There are many things wrong with (30): First, presumably the force of the consequent depends in no way on whether or not John is at home. Second, the conditional seems a bit like the following “biscuit” conditional:


\textbf{(31)} If you want biscuits, they are on the table.


It is tempting to treat (an utterance of) (31) as a conditional speech act rather than a conditional with two moods embedded inside it – something like “I assert that there are biscuits on the table on the condition that you want biscuits.” This might tempt one to assign “conditional imperative” force to the sentences like (29). However, this approach seems fraught with problems, as Lepore and Ludwig point out:



\begin{quote}


To put it in a nutshell, a conditional directive is not a simple directive whose content is given by the consequent, or a directive to make true a conditional, or something that fails to put any requirement on the speaker at all. But the paratactic account must treat it as having the force of a simple directive whose content is given by the consequent, or as a directive to make a conditional true, or as placing no constraints on the speakers behavior at all.


(Lepore and Ludwig 2007: 275)\footnote{In the same section, Lepore and Ludwig also point out that the conditional mood-setter view is difficult to reconcile with the fact that you can bind into the imperatival\Slash{}interrogative consequent of a conditional such as \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf \textbf{(32)} Give every person you love a present! \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf If this gets treated as a conditional imperative rather than as a full imperative, we have a problem – if we think of (32) as an imperative to give a present to someone on the condition that you love them, we might get the following representation: \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf \textbf{(33)} ∀ \emph{x} [\emph{x} is someone you love] (the next sentence is imperative). Give \emph{x} a present. \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf The “next sentence” is mentioned rather than used so it is hard to see how to incorporate the variable binding operations that are not at home, as noted earlier, in non-c-commanding, cross-sentential environments.}



\end{quote}


The fan of a paratactic account is left with a few options. One is to argue that mood always applies to the utterance as a whole and that every sentential core to which a mood-setter applies is itself moodless. This way is pursued by E. Lepore and S.-J. Leslie (unpublished). Part of the concern applies to whether or not cases such as (29) should be treated as a question or a conditional question. Lepore and Leslie point out that for commands, it is not obvious that the conditionals embedding commands are not to be treated with the mood-setter governing the whole sentence rather than merely the consequent. Thus, the command expressed by (29) may seem merely conditional, but perhaps the entire conditional is imperative – one can obey it, for instance, by ensuring that John is at home. As they point out, “don't drink and drive” can be obeyed by simply not driving.\footnote{Of course, it is worth taking note that the semantics of an imperative and our views about what it takes to obey an imperative may differ.}


Alternatively, one may develop a fulfillment-conditional semantics for non-declarative moods. Imperatives have satisfaction conditions and one may develop a satisfaction condition semantics for them (roughly, the imperative has satisfaction conditions that involve the indicative core of the sentence being true).\footnote{See Ludwig (1997), McGinn (1977), and Segal (1991) for developments of theories along these lines.} Questions, for example, can be given “answer” conditions. One worry for fulfillment-conditional views is that certain compositions of fulfillment conditions do not seem possible, such as:


\textbf{(34)} *If where are you going then get me a sandwich!


One may attempt to give a pragmatic explanation for the infelicity of (34) – see Boisvert (1999) for an extended investigation into this option. Another set of worries concerns the motivations for the view – why should one think that the meaning of a question is to be given in terms of when it is answered, or an imperative in terms of when it is fulfilled? Why think that there is any interesting connection between future claims or actions of an addressee and the meaning of the sentence?

\section{3. Quotation}


Davidson's treatment of quotation aims to satisfy three desiderata:


\textbf{1.} The theory should merge with a general theory of truth for the sentences of the language (Davidson 2001a: 89).


\textbf{2.} [T]he theory [must] provide an articulate semantic role for the devices of quotation (quotation marks, or verbal equivalents). When we learn to understand quotation we learn a rule with endless applications: if you want to refer to an expression, you may do it by putting quotation marks around a token of the expression you want to mention (Davidson 2001a: 89, 90).


\textbf{3.} The theory must explain the sense in which a quotation pictures what is referred to, otherwise it will be inadequate to account for important uses of quotation, for example, to introduce novel pieces of notation and new alphabets (Davidson 2001a: 90).


On the basis of these desiderata, Davidson rejects any theory on which quotation is used to picture, or display the spelling, of the quoted items. These views fail to provide a semantic role for quotation marks, thus failing to satisfy the second and third desiderata. Davidson's approach is paratactic: it treats the quoted item as mentioned in its own clause and provide a sentence that has, as a part, a demonstration of the quoted item. Thus, (35) is analyzed as (36):


\textbf{(35)} “Rumplestiltskin” is a hard name to pronounce.


\textbf{(36)} Rumplestiltskin. The expression of which this is a token is a hard name to pronounce.


Parataxis allows Davidson to push the problematic expression out of the sentence by invoking a demonstrative that demonstrates the offending part. The truth theory interprets the sentence as: “The expression of which this is a token is a hard name to pronounce,” which is treated as the canonical form of “ ‘Rumplestiltskin’ is a hard name to pronounce.” Thus, the truth theory is blind to the quotation marks as they are paraphrased away in the analysis of the sentence. This view clearly satisfies the desiderata: quotation is integrated into the theory of truth; quotation marks are given a semantic function that you can learn via one rule; and the theory explains how a quotation pictures its referent – quotation provides the referent of the demonstrative.


Mixed quotation, however, presents some problems. In mixed quotation, one gets the phenomenon of use and mention at once – the quotation marks seem to indicate that the words are copies of what were originally used, but the meaning of the quoted expression is semantically relevant to the sentence's truth conditions. For example, consider the claim:


\textbf{(37)} Gibbs said that the GOP Primary “has been a race to the bottom.”


It is pretty clear that (37) is true just in case Gibbs said that the GOP Primary has been a race to the bottom \emph{and} Gibbs uttered the words “has been a race to the bottom.”\footnote{We also need to integrate mixed quotation into the theory of indirect speech reports, which, on a straightforward paratactic view of the former, is tricky, sans bells and whistles. After all, if (37) were to be handled in Davidson's original framework, we would get: \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf • Gibbs said something \emph{s} and \emph{s} samesays “The GOP Primary has been a race to the bottom.” \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf Since the second sentence is mentioned, it is not immediately clear how to apply the theory of quotation. Lepore and Ludwig take this problem on by incorporating a function, UNQ, that unquotes and a function, QUO, that adds quotes (Lepore and Ludwig 2007: chapter 11). Then, the idea is to allow that one can treat “a said that p” by first stripping any quotation marks away in p and then applying the paratactic analysis and then, where the result of applying UNQ does not yield the original sentence in the report, you apply UNQ to another sentence s' for which it is true that a said that s' (when he uttered the sentence that samesaid p) and letting QUO determine whether the quoted items in s' are appropriately related to the unquoted items in p. This helps us in mixed quotation cases where the speaker uses a sound that is not actually a word of the language (or perhaps any language). Lepore and Cappelen (1999) argue that if we allow a relation “sametokening” (“ST” for short), we can explain mixed quotation cases as ones in which there is a sametokening clause that holds between a demonstrative and the words in mixed quotation. Thus, in our case, we get \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf • Gibbs uttered \emph{s} and \emph{s} samesays that and \emph{s} sametokens these. The GOP Primary is a race to the bottom.} One question is whether or not we should treat mixed quotation along the model of pure quotation, as they seem to diverge fairly crucially – we need to include the contents of the mixed quote in the account of the truth conditions. Thus, we end up with something like:


\textbf{(38)} Gibbs said that the GOP Primary, using words of which these are a token, has been a race to the bottom.


How we get to (38) is tricky and not \emph{via} straightforward application of the theory Davidson provides. Thus, quotation marks will have to be ambiguous between pure and mixed uses.


The literature is replete with objections to Davidson's theory – some of them common to the case of indirect speech reports. For example, Davidson requires demonstrative reference in one sentence to the nonasserted material – but what semantic guarantee can we provide that the demonstrative refers to that material, rather than to something else? This problem is somewhat exacerbated in the context of quotation since we can quote multiple phrases in the sentence:


\textbf{(39)} “Hippopotami” is as acceptable a plural form of “hippopotamus” as “hippopotamuses” is.


A paratactic account is going to have to ensure that the demonstratives demonstrate the right words. So, clearly, the demonstratives will have to be indexed to the relevant words. Otherwise, we will end up with


\textbf{(40)} Hippopotami, hippopotamus, hippopotamuses. The expression of which this is a token is as acceptable a plural form of the expression of which this is a token as the expression of which this is a token.


It is thus clear that we cannot simply import a solution to the worries about demonstratives in indirect speech report parataxis to solve this trouble with quotation.

\section{4. A Parting Shot}


A more pressing worry involves trying to mix the paratactic accounts of quotation, mood, and indirect speech reports. If Jones says (to Shechar),


\textbf{(41)} If Robin won't pay lip service to Kenny, then say that she is “fired.”


We know how to handle the indirect speech report paratactically. We know how to handle the mixed quotation paratactically and we know how to handle mood paratactically. But it is not clear that we know how to apply them in any systematic order or compositionally. For simplicity, consider an account of mixed quotation like Cappelen and Lepore's (1999). We will get the following result:


\textbf{(42)} If Robin won't pay lip service to Kenny, then the next sentence is an imperative. ∃\emph{x} (Shechar will utter \emph{x} \& SS (\emph{x}, that) \& ST (\emph{x}, these)). She is “fired.”\footnoteB{“ST” stands for “sametokening.” Cappelen and Lepore use this notion of “sametokening” to express a pragmatic relation between the utterance and the demonstrated words. The details need not concern us here.}


However, (42) does not account for mood. If we take a simple account like E. Lepore and S.-J. Leslie (unpublished) where mood always scopes out of connective, we get the wrong results – we will get:


\textbf{(43)} The next sentence is imperatival. If Robin won't pay lip service to Kenny, then ∃\emph{x} (Shechar will utter \emph{x} \& SS (\emph{x}, that) \& ST (\emph{x}, these)). She is “fired.”


(43) attributes imperatival force to the whole sentence. So we need it to scope under the “says that” to give us:


\textbf{(44)} If Robin won't pay lip service to Kenny, then the next sentence is imperatival. ∃\emph{x} (Shechar will utter \emph{x} \& SS (\emph{x}, that) \& ST (\emph{x}, these)). She is “fired.”


But this gets the mixed quotation facts wrong – the point was to retain the “move out” as the words that are demonstrated. We get similar results for pure quotation.


The problem is that we have too much parataxis and no clear way to coordinate them systematically. If we think of parataxis as separation of a sentence or expression from a sentence that contains a demonstrating item, we run the risk of being unable to “put them back together” when multiple demonstrations are called upon to do the same work. There may well be a way to coherently give the semantics of indirect speech reports, mood, and quotation (mixed and unmixed). But the above considerations do reveal a moral we should take seriously: we are obliged to not simply treat recalcitrant constructions in a successful manner – we are required to integrate them in a unified semantic theory. And this is no easy task.


Davidson himself may have had no problem with the considerations adduced in this paper – it is not clear that he thought of each paratactic treatment as on a semantic par. While his account of indirect speech reports gives the truth conditions of indirect speech reports, one may well take his views on mood and quotation as providing an understanding of the logic and features of these linguistic phenomena rather than their truth conditions. However, this leaves open the worry that we have no account of the truth conditions for mood and quotation.\footnote{Thanks to Bernard Katz for discussion of this point.},\footnote{Thanks to Tyrus Fisher, Michael Glanzberg, Chris Healow, Bernard Katz, Kirk Ludwig, and Robert May. Extra gratitude is due to Ernest Lepore for teaching me about Davidson and providing invaluable suggestions.}

% Notes
\section{References}


Boisvert, D. (1999) The semantics and pragmatics of mixed mood sentences. Master's thesis, University of Florida, Gainesville.


Burge, T. (1986). On Davidson's “saying that.” In \emph{Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson}, E. Lepore (ed.). Oxford, UK: Blackwell, pp. 190–208.


Cappelen, H. and Lepore, E. (1997). On an alleged connection between indirect speech and the theory of meaning. \emph{Mind and Language} 12(3\Slash{}4):278–296.


——— (1999). Semantics for quotation. In \emph{Donald Davidson: Truth, Meaning and Knowldge}, Chapter 7, U.M. Zeglen (ed.). London: Routledge, pp. 85–95.


Davidson, D. (1967). Truth and meaning. \emph{Synthese} 17(3):304–323.


———. (1986). A nice derangement of epitaphs. In \emph{Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson}, E. Lepore (ed.). Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, pp. 433–446.


———. (2001a). Quotation. In \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}, 2nd ed. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, p. 79.


———. (2001b). Moods and performances. In \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}, 2nd ed. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, p. 109.


———. (2001c). On saying that. In \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, p. 93.


———. (2001d). Reply to Foster. In \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}, 2nd ed. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, p. 171.


Elugardo, R. (1999). Samesaying. In \emph{Donald Davidson: Truth, Meaning and Knowledge}, Chapter 8, U.M. Zeglen (ed.). London: Routledge, pp. 97–113.


Foster, J.A. (1976). Meaning and truth theory. In \emph{Truth and Meaning: Essays in Semantics}, Chapter 1, G. Evans and J. McDowell (eds). Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, pp. 1–32.


Groenendijk, J.A.G. and Stokhof, M. (1989). Type-shifting rules and the semantics of interrogatives. In \emph{Properties, Types and Meaning} (Volume 2), \emph{Volume 2: Semantic Issues}, B.H. Partee, G. Chierchia, and R. Turner (eds). Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 21–68.


Hand, M. (1991). On saying that again. \emph{Linguistics and Philosophy} 14:349–365.


Karttunen, L. (1977). Syntax and semantics of questions. \emph{Linguistics and Philosophy} 1(1):3–44.


Larson, R., Dikken, M.D., and Ludlow, P. (1997) Intensional “transitive” verbs and abstract clausal complementation.


Lepore, E. and Ludwig, K. (2007). \emph{Donald Davidson's Truth Theoretic Semantics}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Lewis, D. (1970). General semantics. \emph{Synthese} 22:18–67.


Ludwig, K. (1997). The truth about moods. \emph{Protosociology} 10:19–66.


Ludwig, K. and Ray, G. (1998). Semantics for opaque contexts. \emph{Philosophical Perspectives} 12(S12):41–166.


McGinn, C. (1977). Semantics for non-indicative sentences. \emph{Philosophical Studies} 32:301–311.


Schiffer, S. (1987). Extensionalist semantics and sententialist theories of belief. In \emph{New Directions in Semantics}, E. Lepore (ed.). New York: Academic Press, pp. 113–142.


Segal, G. (1991). The mood for a semantic theory. \emph{Aristotelian Proceedings} 91:103–118.


Segal, G. and Speas, M. (1986). On saying ð∂†. \emph{Mind and Language} 1(2):124–132.


Seymour, M. (1994). Indirect discourse and quotation. \emph{Philosophical Studies} 74(1):1–38.

\chapter{12. Logical Form}


Miguel Hoeltje


Donald Davidson contributed to the discussion of logical form in two ways. On the one hand, he made several influential suggestions on how to give the logical forms of certain constructions of natural language. His account of adverbial modification and so-called action sentences is nowadays, in some form or other, widely employed in linguistics (Harman 2012 calls it “the standard view”). Davidson's approaches to indirect discourse and quotation, while not as influential, also still attract attention today. On the other hand, Davidson provided a general account of what logical form \emph{is}. This chapter is concerned with this general account. Its foremost aim is to give a faithful and detailed picture of what, according to Davidson, it means to give the logical form of a sentence. Discussions of Davidson's proposals concerning action sentences and indirect discourse can be found in Chapters 6 and 11 of this collection. For two excellent recent overview articles on logical form that are not confined to Davidson's understanding of the concept, see Pietroski (2009) and Ludwig (2012).


The structure of the chapter is as follows. (1) I will first informally introduce a notion of logical form as the form that matters in certain kinds of entailments, and indicate why philosophers have taken an interest in such a notion. (2) The second section develops constraints that we should arguably abide by in giving an account of logical form. (3) I then turn to Davidson's view of what is involved in giving such an account. To this end, I will try to reconstruct Davidson's view of the connection between an assignment of logical forms, a truth theory and a meaning theory. (4) Finally, I will briefly discuss possible problems of Davidson's account as developed in this chapter.

\section{1. The Idea of Logical Form and Its Philosophical Significance}


Whenever you believe something, what you believe can only be true if many other things are true as well. It is thus not hard to fathom why we should be interested in an account of the entailment relation. Such an account would further the avoidance of mistaken beliefs, by pointing to unacceptable consequences, as well as the discovery of new insights, by following wherever unshakeable assumptions may lead. But for such an account to be possible, the realm of entailments must be structured. After all, there are infinitely many things that are linked by the relation of entailment. Thus, if there were no general principles that imposed a significant order, all we could hope for would be an endless list that registered every entailment in its own right. But such a list could neither be compiled nor be used by creatures like us.


Fortunately, there does seem to be structure of the right kind. First, some terminology: An \emph{argument} consists of a set of sentences (the premises) and a sentence (the conclusion); an argument is \emph{valid} if and only if the premises entail the conclusion, that is, iff, necessarily, if all the premises are true, the conclusion is also true. Since sentences are structured, arguments themselves have significant structure. The most fundamental observation in our quest for an account of the entailment relation is that valid arguments seem to come in two varieties. Some valid arguments are such that any argument of the same form is also valid; we may call these \emph{formally valid}. The simplest example would be an argument that consists of a single premise and repeats this premise as its conclusion. In contrast, some valid arguments are \emph{merely valid}: they are valid even though some arguments of the same form fail to be. Compare the argument that moves from “Peter knows that snow is white” to “Snow is white” with one that moves from “Peter believes that snow is white” to the same conclusion.


This notion of formal validity is rather shallow: to be formally valid simply means having a form such that all equiform arguments are valid. It is instructive to contrast this notion with a more ambitious one. According to a time-honored distinction, while some entailments \emph{depend} on the content of the sentences involved, other entailments hold solely \emph{in virtue of} the form of premises and conclusion. This notion, too, has some claim to the title \emph{formal validity}. This is not the place to provide a thorough discussion of this deeper notion (for some brief remarks, see the final section). Suffice it to say that the two notions differ conceptually and may turn out to differ extensionally. They differ conceptually for in contrast to the shallow notion, the deep notion contains an \emph{explanatory} component (expressed by “in virtue of”). And they may differ extensionally, for it could turn out that the deep notion is stronger than the shallow one: the former entails the latter, while the reverse claim can reasonably be doubted. The more ambitious notion may thus be considered to be more interesting. Note, however, that the goal set out in the opening remarks will already be served by an account of the more modest conception. Where nothing hinges on the difference, I will talk indiscriminately about \emph{formal validity}.


The project of describing the formally valid arguments of a language is only worthwhile if there are significant classes of such arguments. In pursuing this project, one will thus be tempted to claim that the surface forms (SFs) of some sentences are misleading. For often, on discovering certain regularities, there will be troublemakers that appear to break the rules. The sentences “This is a black horse,” “This is a beautiful horse,” “This is a strong horse” (and many more like them) all entail “this is a horse.” On these grounds, we may be attracted to classifying (A) as formally valid, while also noticing that (B) is not even valid:


\textbf{(A)} This is a black horse.\forcelinebreak  Therefore: This is a horse.


\textbf{(B)} This is a fake horse.\forcelinebreak  Therefore: This is a horse.


We have two choices: either we deny that (A) is formally valid, or we deny that (A)'s premise has the same form as (B)'s.


Considerations like these have encouraged talk of \emph{merely superficial} SFs as opposed to \emph{real}, \emph{underlying} forms. Among philosophers, the term \emph{logical form} has come to be used to mark this distinction. This idea has had a significant impact on philosophy, and it is easy to see why. Given a serious distinction between SF and logical form, an account of the formal validity should operate at the level of logical form. Furthermore, the notion of misleading SF would be of interest to other philosophical inquiries, for example, in descriptive metaphysics. Sentences whose real form differs from their SF are bound to lead us astray. What looks like, say, reference and quantification may turn out to \emph{merely} look like reference and quantification. Hence, in order to draw ontological conclusions from the assumed truth of certain sentences, we should be able to defend the claim that the ontologically relevant devices seemingly present are to be taken at face value. (On the connection between logical form and ontology, see Davidson 1967c: 162, 1969: 166, 1970b: 181f., 1977a: 210f.).


The distinction between mere appearance and the real thing raises a question. As Varzi (2006: 150) puts it: “The big lesson from the early days of analytic philosophy is that what you see is not what you get. But who decides what lies beneath the surface?” Consider two philosophers quarrelling about the existence of abstract objects. Both agree that “2 is a prime number” or “I have a favored color” express truths. But while one takes the apparent reference to and quantification over abstract objects at face value, the other rejects the appearances in favor of assigning logical forms in which the apparent reference and quantification is no longer present. How should we settle such a dispute?

\section{2. Constraints on Accounts of Logical Form}


In this section, I will do two things: (1) I will introduce the notion of an \emph{LF-theory for a language L}. (2) I will call attention to a number of \emph{constraints} that we should aim to meet in constructing such theories. Together, these two parts yield, I hope, a fair picture of what Davidson takes to be the proper framework for evaluating claims about logical form.


(1) What is an account of logical form an account of? We must distinguish two different answers. First, one might be interested in an analysis of the \emph{concept} of logical form. Second, we may attempt to specify, for a certain range of items, what the logical form of each of these items is. An account of the first kind will not necessarily yield one of the second. Compare the case of sentential meaning: an analysis of this concept will leave you in the dark as to what “snow is white” means. And an account of the second kind does not necessarily yield one of the first: knowing what “snow is white” means does not by itself put you into a position to say what sentential meaning is. I will call an account of the first kind a \emph{theory of logical form} and one of the second an \emph{LF-theory}.


Varzi's question can now be slightly rephrased: by which criteria are we to choose between competing LF-theories? Before I turn to Davidson's answer, I must address one further fundamental issue. What are the kinds of things that an LF-theory should assign logical forms to? Surely \emph{sentences}; for sentences can be true in virtue of their logical form. But we also talk of \emph{arguments} as being valid in virtue of their form. It may seem that we do not need to bother with arguments in addition to sentences, for once all the relevant sentences have been covered, the logical forms of the arguments will already have been settled. This is not so. If any sentences have the same logical form, these do:


\textbf{(C)} Socrates is wise.


\textbf{(D)} Plato is wise.


But if the logical form of an argument was fully determined by the logical forms of its premises and its conclusion, then the argument that has (C) as both premise and conclusion would have the same logical form as the argument that moves from (C) to (D). Yet only the first is valid in virtue of form. Hence, the logical form of an argument is not fully determined by the logical forms of its premises and conclusion. We should thus cover both sentences and arguments. When I sometimes talk as though an LF-theory was only concerned with sentences, I would ask the reader to keep this caveat in mind. (Logical form is sometimes also attributed to non-linguistic items such as \emph{facts} or \emph{propositions}. I will confine myself to accounts of logical form that target the linguistic realm, since Davidson's conception clearly falls into this category. Again, for surveys with a less restricted focus, see Pietroski 2009 and Ludwig 2012.)


Suppose someone suggested an LF-theory for a language-fragment \emph{F}. What Davidson urges us to observe is that certain features of the logical forms of the sentences in \emph{F} may only become apparent once we consider constructions \emph{outside} of \emph{F}. Suppose that \emph{F} contained “Earwicker slept” and “Shem kicked Shaun,” and the conjunctions that can be built from these by using “and.” If we consider this fragment in isolation, it may seem that nothing would keep us from identifying the relevant primitive expressions as two predicates (one monadic, the other dyadic), three terms, and a two-placed connective. But now consider


\textbf{(E)} Earwicker slept before Shem kicked Shaun.


(E) entails both its constituent sentences. Following Frege, we may attribute a quantificational-conjunctive structure to (E); it says, roughly, that Earwicker slept at some time, that Shem kicked Shaun at some time, and that the first time came before the second. But note that according to this account, there must be an argument place for times in “Earwicker slept” at the level of logical form. Thus, even though (E) is not in \emph{F}, accounting for certain properties of (E) can have consequences for the assignment of forms to the sentences in \emph{F}. Since there is no general way to predict which constructions may call for further revisions, we cannot be sure that we have covered all the bases until we have given an account for the whole language (Davidson 1970c: 138f., 1977a: 211).


In principle, then, we should be concerned with an LF-theory that covers the whole language. What features should such a theory have to qualify as \emph{adequate}? First, we should note that according to Davidson, an LF-theory is \emph{only} acceptable if it is \emph{finite}. As indicated in the introduction, an account that was essentially infinite would not be of much use to us. But as I understand Davidson, he would point to a further reason. Competent speakers are finite beings, and yet, Davidson (1967b: 123) assumes, they have some intuitive grasp of the logical forms of the sentences of their language. An LF-theory should illustrate how this is possible, and it can only do so by being finite. It is worth noting, however, that the first reason suffices to justify the desire for finite theories. From now on, I will understand “LF-theory” to mean “\emph{finite} LF-theory.”


\textbf{(2)} In theory building, we should try to meet demands like the following:


\textbf{(2.1)} Account for as much data as possible.


\textbf{(2.2)} Do so in a simple, elegant, and parsimonious way.


\textbf{(2.3)} Other things being equal, take appearances seriously.


In the remainder of this section, I will try to spell out Davidson's view of what these constraints entail with respect to LF-theories.


(2.1) In a sense, the first principle is obvious. But what exactly is to count as \emph{data}? And what is it to \emph{account for} the data? There have been conflicting views on these points and it will pay off to be precise. It is generally assumed that the relevant data has something to do with entailment relations. But arguably not every case of entailment should matter. Given that “Norma Jeane Baker = Marilyn Monroe” is necessarily true, it is entailed by “Socrates is wise.” However, most people would not consider this to be the business of an LF-theory.


Gilbert Harman (1972) has stated that an LF-theory must account for all “obvious implications.” This may rule out the case mentioned earlier, but it still includes more than Davidson would want to. “3 is larger than 2” obviously entails “2 is smaller than 3,” but Davidson (1967d: 125) denies that this is a matter of logical form (cf. Davidson 1970c: 143). In Davidson's view, the data is not constituted simply by obvious entailments. As competent speakers, Davidson assumes, not only can we make intuitive judgments about the \emph{validity} of certain arguments, but indeed about their \emph{formal} validity (Davidson 1967a: 33). Furthermore, Davidson has the \emph{explanatory} notion of formal validity in mind (Davidson 1967d: 125, 1969: 166, 1970c: 139, 144). According to Davidson, these judgments constitute the primary data (this is particularly palpable in Davidson 1970c: 144, 1985: 295.). If, for example, you believe, like Davidson did, that (F) is not merely valid, but valid in virtue of its form:


\textbf{(F)} Sebastian strolled through the streets of Bologna at 2 a.m.\forcelinebreak  Therefore: Sebastian strolled through the streets of Bologna.


then, \emph{ceteris paribus}, you would want an LF-theory to respect this belief. Correspondingly, if you think that a certain argument is \emph{not} formally valid, then, \emph{ceteris paribus}, you would want an LF-theory to respect \emph{this} belief.


But what would an LF-theory have to do to respect these beliefs? We can distinguish two requirements, a weak and a strong one. The weak requirement states that an LF-theory should not assign the same logical form to two arguments if only one of them is intuitively formally valid. The strong requirement states that given that an argument is intuitively formally valid, an LF-theory should assign a logical form on the basis of which we can \emph{explain} the validity of the argument. I will go into more detail in the next section.


Let us take a brief look at the remaining two constraints. (2.2) We should not merely strive to account for the data, but we should try to do so in an \emph{efficient} and \emph{elegant} way. Thus, if two LF-theories accounted for the same amount of data while one used fewer and simpler principles, this constitutes a reason to prefer it to its more convoluted competitor.


(2.3) I believe Mark Sainsbury is correct when he writes: “[M]ost adherents of the methodology of logical form, including Davidson, feel happier when logical forms are as close as possible to surface forms” (Sainsbury 2005: 41). Although I do not think that Davidson stated this point explicitly, it seems rather natural. It simply states that, other things being equal, we should take appearances seriously. If, for example, there does not seem to be a quantifier in “Peter drank his beer,” then we will not assign this sentence a quantified logical form \emph{unless we have a good reason}. Thus, an LF-theory is better off than a competitor if it minimizes departures from SF.


This list of constraints is not exhaustive. But it contains entries that have been, and arguably should be, central in the discussion of logical form. It may be worth pointing out that these constraints will often be in conflict. Some LF-theories may account for more data at the price of employing more complicated principles; some may gain in efficiency at the expense of assigning more deviant logical forms, and so on. But here the situation is not different from other areas of scientific inquiry.

\section{3. Davidson's Account of Logical Form}


We have not yet touched upon the question of how we can actually go about in constructing LF-theories. I will now give a reconstruction of what I take to be Davidson's answer.


It will be helpful to distinguish three projects that we may pursue with respect to some infinite language (i.e., a language that contains infinitely many sentences): giving an LF-theory, giving a finite truth theory, and giving a meaning theory. These projects are intimately intertwined in Davidson's philosophy, and to appreciate Davidson's account of logical form, we need to understand his view of the connection between them. First, we should note that all of the three projects necessitate the assignment of some kind of structure to the sentences of the target language. This arises from the fact that in each case, we want a finite theory that covers infinitely many sentences. Central to Davidson's approach to logical form is the emphasis of a strong link between these projects. Roughly, I believe Davidson would accept the following identity claim (\emph{modulo} certain refinements and disambiguations to be introduced later):


\textbf{LF-1} The logical form of a sentence is the form assigned to it by a meaning theory, which in turn is the form assigned to it by a certain kind of truth theory.


(1) To understand LF-1, we need a grasp of what truth theories and meaning theories are. I will first briefly introduce the pertinent notions. (2) I will then sketch an argument for LF-1 in the spirit of Davidson. (3) For LF-1 to be of any real use, we need to be clear about how a truth theory assigns a form to a sentence. I will try to give an account of what this amounts to and illustrate how, with this account in hand, we can use certain truth theories to obtain LF-theories.


(1) Let me explicitly introduce some terminology. A \emph{theory} consists of a set of \emph{axioms} and a set of \emph{rules}. A \emph{theorem} of a theory is a sentence that can be derived from the axioms by the rules. (It should be noted that the rules need not constitute a \emph{logic} in any robust sense. In particular, they are not intended to fix the \emph{logical consequences} of the theory; more on this later.) A \emph{T-sentence} is a sentence of the form “\emph{S} is true if and only if \emph{p},” where “\emph{p}” does not contain semantic vocabulary. An \emph{interpretive} T-sentence is one where “\emph{p}” translates \emph{S}. A \emph{truth theory} for \emph{L} is a theory that has, for every \emph{L}-sentence, an interpretive T-sentence among its theorems. In the following, I will only be concerned with finite truth theories. The defining task of a \emph{meaning theory} for an infinite language, in Davidson's view, is that of explaining how a finite being can have knowledge of such a language. In order to do so, the theory must itself be finite and it must be such that knowledge of the theory would suffice for knowledge of the language (Davidson 1973b, 1976: 171, 1977b: 215, 1990: 312).


One of the central tenets of Davidson's philosophy of language is the view that there is a close connection between a truth theory and a meaning theory. Whether this is plausible and if so, what exactly this connection could amount to, is still a matter of debate (Davidson 1976; Foster 1976; Hoeltje 2012b; Kölbel 2001; Lepore and Ludwig 2007; Ludwig 2002; Soames 1992, 2008). For the purposes of this chapter, it will suffice to note that a truth theory will only be able to play a central role within a meaning theory by identifying T-sentences that could serve as the basis for explicit meaning specifications. But a truth theory that employs the full deductive apparatus of, say, classical logic, will have infinitely many noninterpretive T-sentences among its theorems; for example, it will not only yield “ ‘Sokrates ist weise’ is true if and only if Socrates is wise,” but also “ ‘Sokrates ist weise’ is true if and only if (Socrates is wise and Plato = Plato).” However, only in the first case is the move to a genuine meaning ascription – that is, to a sentence like “ ‘Sokrates ist weise’ means that Socrates is wise” – truth preserving.


The standard way of addressing this problem makes use of the following observation: At least for simple languages, and given an adequate set of semantic axioms, it is possible to identify an \emph{interpretive} T-sentence for each sentence of the object language in a purely syntactic way. This may be done either by specifying a set of rules that allow the derivation of a T-sentence only if it is interpretive (Larson and Segal 1995; Lepore and Ludwig 2007); or we may specify certain restrictions on how the deductive apparatus of, for example, classical logic, is to be applied (Davies 1981; Kölbel 2001). Ambiguities aside, we will typically end up with a theory that has, for every object language sentence \emph{S}, exactly one T-sentence among its theorems, and every such T-sentence will be interpretive. I will call such truth theories \emph{canonical}. It seems clear that Davidson is thinking of truth theories along roughly these lines (Davidson 1970c: 139, 145).


(2) What speaks in favor of LF-1? Natural languages are infinite. But LF-theories must be finite. In constructing an LF-theory, we will thus have to identify a finite stock of expressions and characterize these in a way that enables us to deduce a specification of a logical form for each sentence. Furthermore, if we want to account for the data in a strong sense, these specifications should give us some insight into why certain validities hold; minimally, it should be clear from an LF-theory why, given that certain sentences are true, other sentences will be true as well. Thus, an LF-theory should take as its starting point the contributions that lexical items make to a sentence's truth conditions and issue in characterizations of sentences from which their logical profile can be read off. But, as Davidson notes, in a sense, this is precisely what a standard truth theory does (Davidson 1967a: 33, 1970a: 61, 1973a: 71). First, a finite truth theory gives an account of the truth-conditionally relevant features of primitive expressions. Second, a truth theory does go some way toward specifying the logical status of object language sentences. Let me use “\emph{x} logically entails \emph{y}” to say that a sentence or a theory \emph{x} has some sentence \emph{y} as a logical consequence in some standard sense (for the purposes of this chapter, we may think of the relevant relation of logical consequence as being captured by classical predicate logic, but not much hangs on this). Take a theory \emph{T} that logically entails (I) and (J) as interpretive T-sentences for (G) and (H):


\textbf{(G)} Sokrates ist weise und Plato ist weise.


\textbf{(H)} Sokrates ist weise.


\textbf{(I)} (G) is true if and only if (Socrates is wise and Plato is wise).


\textbf{(J)} (H) is true if and only if Socrates is wise.


Since the right-hand side of (I) logically entails that of (J), \emph{T} logically entails


\textbf{(K)} If (G) is true, then (H) is true.


Also note that, on a standard treatment of “und,” there is no need to invoke (I) and (J); apart from syntax and semantic machinery, (K) will depend only on axioms for logical constants (Evans (1976) calls (K) the \emph{validating conditional} for the inference from (G) to (H)). Furthermore, given the standard treatment of “und,” \emph{T} will logically entail that this holds for \emph{all} sentences that stand in the relevant formal relationship; that is, \emph{T} will logically entail


\textbf{(L)} ∀\emph{S}∀\emph{S*} (if \emph{S}\textsuperscript{∩}“und”\textsuperscript{∩}\emph{S*} is true, then \emph{S} is true).


On some conceptions of logical consequence, (L) already comes fairly close to an explicit statement of the fact that (H) is a logical consequence of (G) (Quine 1936, 1954). Stronger results would issue if we used a modally strengthened truth theory or one that quantified over permitted interpretations.


In probing the informational potential of a truth theory with regard to the logical status of object language sentences, I have appealed to the \emph{logical consequences} of such a theory. As indicated earlier, the class of logical consequences need not (and in the case of canonical truth theories: does not) coincide with the class of the theory's theorems in my sense. Thus, a canonical truth theory may well fail to yield (K) or (L) as theorems. Does this show that such a theory is silent on the logical connection between (G) and (H) (as Szabó 2012 seems to hold)? Of course not; the axioms of the theory logically entail (K) and (L), and these express substantial truths about the connection in question. Anyone for whom the axioms express knowledge, and who can draw logical conclusions from her knowledge, is in a position to know what is stated by (K) and (L). But neither the axioms nor (K) and (L) are logical truths. (Relatedly, given that we are concerned with a relation of logical consequence holding between linguistic items, Szabó seems to be wrong when he claims that “any theory logically entails the validity of all logically valid inferences.” That a given logical validity is valid is not logically true. Try to logically prove something like (L) from the theory of evolution.)


There are interesting issues involved in spelling out the connection between the logical status of object language sentences and the way in which they are characterized by a truth theory (see e.g., Edwards 2007; Hoeltje 2007, 2012a). But we need not go into the details here. What has been said so far should be sufficient to motivate the claim that in our search for LF-theories, it is natural to look to finite truth theories. (For considerations in favor of LF-1 along the lines developed here, see in particular Davidson 1968: 94f..)


LF-1 does not simply claim a connection between truth theories and logical form. So how do \emph{meaning theories} enter into the picture? The relevance of meaning theories becomes apparent once we ask ourselves how we could get from a truth theory to an explicit LF-theory. Consider the following passage:



\begin{quote}


[A]ll I mean by saying that ‘Jones buttered the toast’ has the logical form of an existentially quantified sentence, and that ‘buttered’ is a three-piece predicate, is that a theory of truth meeting Tarski's criteria would entail that this sentence is true if and only if there exists \dots{} etc.


(Davidson 1970c: 143)



\end{quote}


First, a small point. This passage could be read as providing a \emph{stipulation} of the term “logical form.” In this case, there would be no need to \emph{argue} for a close connection between logical form and truth theories. However, as I have indicated earlier, Davidson takes the connection asserted by LF-1 to be more substantial. So let us consider the passage more closely. A truth theory would entail that \emph{S} is true if and only if there exists \dots{} by having a theorem of the form “\emph{S} is true if and only if ∃\emph{x}. \dots{}” Thus, the following thought suggests itself: with respect to a truth theory \emph{T}, the logical form of a sentence \emph{S} is given by the right-hand side of \emph{T}'s T-sentence for \emph{S}. But, in the classical case, there is no such thing as \emph{the} T-sentence for \emph{S}. We have, of course, already noted a way around this problem: in order to do duty in a meaning theory, a truth theory should be \emph{canonical}. We are thus led to LF-1: the logical form of a sentence \emph{S} is given by a truth theory that can do duty in a meaning theory. More specifically, it is given by the right-hand side of the canonical T-sentence for \emph{S}.


(3) This idea needs to be both clarified and modified. First, let us state the claim at issue more precisely. I will call the right-hand side of the T-sentence of a canonical truth theory \emph{T} for a sentence \emph{S} \emph{T's counterpart for S}, and denote it by “\emph{C\textsubscript{T}}(\emph{S}).” Given a canonical truth theory \emph{T}, the following schema yields, for every sentence \emph{S} in the relevant language, a claim of the form “\emph{x} gives the logical form of \emph{y}”:


\textbf{LF-2} \emph{C\textsubscript{T}}(\emph{S}) gives the logical form of \emph{S}.


If we knew how to move from “\emph{x} gives the logical form of \emph{y}” to something of the form “\emph{z} is the logical form of \emph{y},” we could obtain explicit LF-theories.


The languages in which we give truth theories are usually held to rather strict standards. Typically, they are assumed to be context-insensitive, nonambiguous, with a clear syntax and semantics. Minimally, I will assume, they are languages with respect to which we can have an unproblematic notion of the \emph{surface form} (SF) of a sentence, where the SF may be represented by a schema that results from systematically replacing all primitive expressions by placeholders of the appropriate syntactical type (note that I do not \emph{identify} the SF of a sentence with a schema; I will briefly return to this in the final section). Thus, pretending that (M) and (N) belonged to such a language, their SF may be represented by (O):


\textbf{(M)} Socrates is wise and Plato is wise.


\textbf{(N)} Socrates is wise or Plato is wise.


\textbf{(O)} aF C bF.


This notion of SF accounts for the fact that, in one sense, (M) and (N) clearly have the same form. We may distinguish this notion from one that, for lack of a better term, I will call \emph{logical} surface form (LSF). The LSF of a sentence can be represented by a schema that results from systematically replacing \emph{nonlogical} vocabulary. On a common choice of logical vocabulary, (M) and (N) do not share their LSF; only that of (M) is represented by (P):


\textbf{(P)} aF and bF.


We can use this notion of LSF to formulate the necessary bridge principle: If \emph{x} gives the logical form of \emph{y}, then the logical form of \emph{y} is the LSF of \emph{x}. Applying this to LF-2 yields:


\textbf{LF-3} The logical form of \emph{S} is the LSF of \emph{C\textsubscript{T}}(\emph{S}).


We can obtain an explicit LF-theory by adding LF-3 to a canonical truth theory \emph{T} and an account of LSF for \emph{T}'s language. Two issues remain to be settled: What is an account of LSF for a language? Does this approach make logical form in some sense \emph{relative} or \emph{indeterminate}?


In justifying LF-1, I have appealed to a notion of logical consequence that can be applied to the language of a truth theory. If we are absolutists about logic, there is no need to specify “a logic” in order for this to be legitimate. However, we would want an LF-theory to be explicit. It should be clear from an LF-theory according to which the logical form of \emph{S} is given by \emph{C\textsubscript{T}}(\emph{S}) what the logical properties of \emph{C\textsubscript{T}}(\emph{S}) are. Hence, an LF-theory must specify a logical consequence relation for the metalanguage. I will call this component of an LF-theory \emph{a logic}. Among other things, it settles the LSFs of metalanguage expressions.


Suppose that we could give nonequivalent canonical truth theories T1 and T2 which, together with particular logics for their languages, assigned different forms to a sentence \emph{S}. Combining T1 and T2 with the principle LF-3 yields two nonequivalent LF-theories. Indeed, if we take the definite article at the beginning of claims of the form LF-3 seriously, these LF-theories will not only be nonequivalent, but \emph{incompatible}. Two options suggest themselves. We could resolve the incompatibility and say that sentences have logical forms only \emph{relative} to an LF-theory. Alternatively, we could try to decide in favor of one of the contenders by appealing to the constraints mentioned in the preceding section and say that the logical form of a sentence is the form assigned to it by the \emph{best} LF-theory. Note, however, that this opens the possibility of logical form being \emph{indeterminate}, for there could be several nonequivalent LF-theories that cannot be improved upon.


It has often been pointed out that according to Davidson, logical form is \emph{relative} – relative to the choice of a truth theory and a logic. Davidson has indeed made statements to this effect (e.g., Davidson 1970c: 139). But I think we must be careful how to understand this. It is not that “\emph{x} is the logical form of \emph{y}” is relative to a theory in the same way that “\emph{x} is to the left of \emph{y}” is to a perspective. In the latter case, we only need to specify the relevant perspective; there is no point in arguing over which perspectives are better than others. Not so in the case of logical form. Consider the following passage:



\begin{quote}


That the two sentences [“Shem kicked Shaun” and “∃\emph{x} Kicking(\emph{x}, Shem, Shaun)”] have very different syntactical structures is evident; that is why the claim that the logical form is the same is interesting and, if correct, revealing.


(Davidson 1970c: 145)



\end{quote}


Davidson cannot be concerned here simply with a claim about what, \emph{relative to a given LF-theory}, the logical form of “Shem kicked Shaun” is. For, given the theory, there are no interesting questions of this sort left open. Rather, as the surrounding text makes clear, what would be revealing would be the fact that the theory issuing in such assignments could be seen to be the best on offer. A choice of a truth theory and a logic \emph{give rise to} claims about logical form; claims that, in light of the data, we can use to evaluate our choices.


It is a familiar phenomenon that the choice of a theory may be underdetermined by the available data. Thus, given this account of logical form, it is natural to expect logical form to be indeterminate to a certain extent. And indeed, while Davidson (1973b: 136) conjectured that no indeterminacies of logical form will arise, he later explicitly stated (Davidson 1979: 228): “logical form may be indeterminate: two satisfactory theories may differ in what they count as singular terms or quantifiers or predicates, or even with respect to the underlying logic itself.” We could of course also put this in terms of relativity: logical form is relative to \emph{the best LF-theories}. This kind of relativity does not lead to triviality, since it is a nontrivial matter what the best theories are.


Earlier, I mentioned the need to specify not only the logical forms of sentences, but also of arguments. This is easily done on the current account. A theory \emph{T}'s counterpart \emph{C\textsubscript{T}}(\emph{A}) for an argument \emph{A} consists of \emph{T}'s counterparts of \emph{A}'s premises and conclusion. Given a logic, the logical form of \emph{A} according to \emph{T} is the LSF of \emph{C\textsubscript{T}}(\emph{A}), where the LSF is represented by systematically replacing nonlogical vocabulary in all elements of \emph{A}. Thus, even though “Socrates is wise” and “Plato is wise” have identical LSFs, the LSF of an argument that has the first sentence as both premise and conclusion differs from one that moves from the first sentence to the second.


Figure 12.1 provides an overview of how the components of this account interact. A canonical truth theory \emph{T} will map every argument of the object language \emph{L} onto an argument in the metalanguage \emph{ML}. This gives us the set of \emph{T}'s counterparts for \emph{L}-arguments, \emph{C\textsubscript{T}}(Arguments of \emph{L}). Let \emph{IFV-L} be the set of (in Davidson's sense) intuitively formally valid arguments of \emph{L}. This gives us \emph{C\textsubscript{T}}(\emph{IFV-L}), the corresponding set of counterparts. Let \emph{LOG}-\emph{V} be the set of elements of \emph{C\textsubscript{T}}(Arguments of \emph{L}) that can be shown to be valid by a logic \emph{LOG} and \emph{IFV}-\emph{ML} the set of elements of \emph{C\textsubscript{T}}(Arguments of \emph{L}) that are intuitively formally valid. Ideally, we want the following to hold: \emph{C\textsubscript{T}}(\emph{IFV-L}) = \emph{LOG}-\emph{V} = \emph{IFV}-\emph{ML}. The first identity ensures that \emph{T}, in combination with \emph{LOG}, yields all and only validating conditionals for arguments considered to be formally valid (but let's not quibble about arguments with infinitely many premises). The second identity ensures that the logic is maximally acceptable.


Figure 12.1


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-31.jpg}
\end{figure}

\section{4. Criticisms}


(1) Davidson explicitly appeals to the notion of \emph{validity solely in virtue of logical form}. This is a close relative of the notion of \emph{truth solely in virtue of meaning}. However, the latter notion has received substantial criticism (Boghossian 1997; Quine 1951; Williamson 2007). It is thus not surprising that the weapons that have been used to assault analyticity would also be turned against the explanatory notion of formal validity. Szabó (2012) argues that there is no robust sense in which natural languages contain inferences that hold solely in virtue of logical form. I want to briefly indicate where I see room for maneuver.


Szabó raises two \emph{triviality objections}. Here is the first: No inference is valid solely in virtue of its logical form, because matters of fact are always also relevant. This is witnessed by the absurdity of saying (cf. Williamson 2007: 59):


\textbf{(Q)} No matter whether every father in fact is a father or a mother, the inference “Alex is a father; therefore Alex is a father or a mother” is valid simply because of its form.


Let us distinguish two proposals about what it means to say that \emph{A} is valid solely in virtue of its logical form: (i) There is an acceptable explanation of \emph{A}'s validity that draws only on \emph{A}'s logical form. (ii) Every acceptable explanation of \emph{A}'s validity draws only on \emph{A}'s logical form. The argument, if it works at all, works against (ii); but proponents of logical form can be content with (i).


Pretend you do not understand a word of German. The following does \emph{not} sound absurd (or, at least, it does not sound absurd for reasons that the proponent of validity in virtue of form needs to be troubled by):


\textbf{(R)} Never mind whether every father in fact is a father or a mother; “Alex ist ein Vater” entails “Alex ist ein Vater oder Alex ist eine Mutter” because, \emph{first}, the conclusion is a sentence formed by “oder” that contains the premise as a constituent sentence, and \emph{second}, a sentence formed by “oder” is true if any of its constituent sentences are.


Where does the absurdity of (Q) come from? Given that you understand English, you know that whether


\textbf{(S)} every father is a father or a mother


is relevant to the validity claim in (Q). But on the proposed understanding of “solely in virtue of form,” the relevance of (S) need not be disputed. Almost no acceptable explanation cites everything that is relevant. We are bound to slide into absurdity if, as in (Q), we preface an explanation by calling attention to a fact \emph{known} to be relevant while at the same time insisting that we should not worry about whether it is actually the case. But this does not show that the explanation was not acceptable to begin with. The explanation embedded in (R) is acceptable, and it draws only on logico-formal features. It is exactly the kind of explanation that is made available by a truth theory. Moreover, in many other cases of valid inferences, this kind of explanation is not available. The corresponding class of arguments is thus neither empty nor trivial.


Szabó's second objection states that even inferences involving “or”-introduction are not valid solely in virtue of form, for they rely on the definition of “or.” I think this is correct as far as it goes: the explanation in (R) would cease to be acceptable if we did not specify the particular contribution of “or.” However, “or” is a logical constant, and the claim is that the inference is valid in virtue of its \emph{logical} form; that is, that there is an acceptable explanation of its validity that mentions only formal features \emph{and the function of logical constants}. This relies on an antecedent characterization of logical constants. But it does not require a very strong or absolute notion. Even a simple list, if carefully compiled, would yield an interesting notion.


(2) On the account developed earlier, the logical form of a sentence is identified with the logical SF of another sentence. This idea is rather old fashioned. (While, e.g., the account proposed by Kalish 1952 is similar in certain respects, there are also important differences.) According to Ludwig (2012), proposals of this kind run the risk of making logical form language relative to an undesirable degree. Depending on whether we use infix, prefix, or postfix notation, we might end up with the following counterparts for (T):


\textbf{(T)} Socrates is wise and Plato is wise.


\textbf{C\textsubscript{T1}(T)} Wise(Socrates)\&Wise(Plato).


\textbf{C\textsubscript{T2}(T)} \&Wise(Socrates)Wise(Plato).


\textbf{C\textsubscript{T3}(T)} Wise(Socrates)Wise(Plato)\&.


On some natural notion of form, C\textsubscript{T1}(T)–C\textsubscript{T3}(T) have \emph{different} forms. But then, if the logical form of a sentence is the form of its counterpart, we would have to say that theories assigned different logical forms simply on the grounds that one uses infix, the other prefix notation, and surely that should not make a difference. I agree that it should not. But there is, I think, a straightforward notion of form available on which C\textsubscript{T1}(T)–C\textsubscript{T3}(T) all exhibit the same form. All of them are composed out of two sentences governed in the same way by the same kind of connective. While it is correct that we arrive at different \emph{schemas} if we try to give the LSF of C\textsubscript{T1}(T)–C\textsubscript{T3}(T), this does not mean that their LSFs differ. A schema \emph{represents} an LSF, and different schemas may represent the same LSF. There is no way to simply write down the LSF itself, because a form is not the kind of thing that can be written down.


Lepore and Ludwig (2002) prefer to do away with talk of logical forms as objects in their own rights and are content with an equivalence relation of \emph{sameness of logical form}. According to their proposal, S1 and S2 have the same logical form if some interpretive truth theories have corresponding canonical proofs for their T-sentences. For reasons of space, I cannot go into the details of their account here. Let me just point out that I believe they must strengthen the notion of canonical proofs in order to differentiate between sentences like “Socrates = Socrates or Plato = Plato” and “Socrates = Plato or Plato = Socrates.” A natural way of doing so would require a canonical proof of a T-sentence to mirror the structure of the T-sentence's right-hand side. Such an amended approach may turn out to be equivalent to the one developed here. Since I see no reason to doubt the existence of LSFs, I see no harm in appealing to them directly.


(3) Truth theories play a central role within Davidson's account of logical form. However, according to the way I have set things up, not all truth theories are on par when it comes to revealing logical form. Rather, each pair of a truth theory and a logic gives rise to certain claims about logical form, and we can bring additional constraints to the table to evaluate these claims. But we should note two things: First, if we did not impose significant constraints on LF-theories, this would probably lead to a high degree of indeterminacy. Second, we may wonder whether, in light of Davidson's larger philosophical enterprise, it is legitimate for him to appeal to these further constraints. Let me briefly elaborate the relevant worry and then indicate how it might be disarmed.


Suppose we could give two canonical truth theories T1 and T2, which produced the following counterparts for (U) and (V) (I use “Boiling\emph{\textsubscript{t}}” and “Boiling\emph{\textsubscript{i}}” as event predicates corresponding to transitive and intransitive uses of “boiled,” and I will pretend that boiling something simply consists in causing it to boil):


\textbf{(U)} Chloe boiled the lobster.


\textbf{(V)} The lobster boiled.


\textbf{C\textsubscript{T1}(U)} ∃e Boiling\emph{\textsubscript{t}}(e, the lobster, Chloe)


\textbf{C\textsubscript{T1}(V)} ∃e Boiling\emph{\textsubscript{i}}(e, the lobster)


\textbf{C\textsubscript{T2}(U)} ∃e (Agent(e, Chloe) \& ∃e* (Boiling(e*) \& Patient(e*, the lobster) \& Cause(e, e*))).


\textbf{C\textsubscript{T2}(V)} ∃e* (Boiling(e*) \& Patient(e*, the lobster)).


Which theory gives the logical form of (U)? Given that we can appeal to the constraints developed in Section 12.2, we have a certain grip on this question. In combination with standard logic, T2, but not T1, yields a validating conditional for the inference from (U) to (V). Thus, according to the LF-theory associated with T2, but not according to that associated with T1, the inference is a matter of logical form. If you consider the move from (U) to (V) to be valid in virtue of form, this speaks in favor of T2. If you do not, you may prefer T1, since surely C\textsubscript{T2}(U) constitutes an even further departure from SF than C\textsubscript{T1}(U).


There is ample textual evidence for the claim that Davidson in fact does appeal to the constraints I have made explicit. In particular, it is clear that Davidson takes judgments about formal entailment relations to be central. But this, we might worry, involves a semantic notion as applied to the object language, and we may think that this is off-limits for Davidson (cf. Jackson 2007: 364f.). As Jackson points out, without appealing to substantial constraints, we have no basis to decide between T1 and T2. Thus, given the restrictions imposed by Davidson's larger philosophical enterprise, logical form may turn out to be highly indeterminate – perhaps much more so than Davidson was willing to countenance.


I believe this worry is unsubstantiated. The information we can appeal to in order to choose between T1 and T2 need not be semantic information about the object language. Rather, what may count in favor of one theory over the other is that it complies better with \emph{speaker judgments} about which entailment relations hold as a matter of form. Thus, what counts as data is not the (assumed) fact that, for example, (U) formally entails (V), but rather that speakers \emph{believe} or \emph{accept} that (U) formally entails (V). However, as Pagin (2006) points out, this latter fact is \emph{not}, strictly speaking, a semantic fact about the object language, but a \emph{psychological} fact about the speakers of the language.


Let me end with some brief concluding remarks. I have tried to give a precise explication of Davidson's conception of logical form. I am, however, sympathetic to those who feel the need for further clarifications. First, since the conception relies on some intuitive notion of validity solely in virtue of logical form, it is reasonable to demand a thorough account of what this amounts to. I have briefly indicated what I believe would be involved in such an account, but I am aware that much more would need to be said to satisfy the skeptic. Second, even granted a viable account of formal validity, for example, in terms of explanations that draw only on logico-formal material, we may have doubts about the assumption that ordinary speakers apply such a notion to the arguments of their language. Third, even granted that speakers do apply such a notion, it may not be entirely clear how a radical interpreter should be able to find out when they do – in particular how she could distinguish speaker's accepting that a certain argument is \emph{formally} valid from their accepting that it is (merely) valid.


Although these are serious challenges, I am optimistic that they can be met (for lack of space, however, I will not attempt to show this here). In any case, I feel that these remaining issues should not keep us from appreciating the fact that Davidson has drawn attention to a theoretical framework in which “the concept of logical form can be clarified and thus defended” (Davidson 1970c: 138). In particular, Davidson's emphasis on framing questions about logical form in terms of truth theories for natural languages that are backed by speaker judgments about formal validities seems to me to have had a lasting influence, and rightly so. And while Davidson was surely not alone in developing an account of logical form along roughly these lines, one would be hard-pressed to find someone who rivals him in having made such systematic and important contributions in this connection.

\section{Acknowledgment}


For helpful discussions of a previous draft of this chapter, I am very grateful to Nick Haverkamp, Benjamin Schnieder, Moritz Schulz, Thomas Spitzley, Alex Steinberg and Raphael van Riel.

\section{References}


Boghossian, P. (1997). Analyticity. In \emph{A Companion to the Philosophy of Language}, B. Hale and C. Wright (eds). Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 331–368.


Davidson, D. (1967a). Truth and meaning. In Davidson (2001b): 17–36.


———. (1967b). Reply to Lemmon on tenses. In Davidson (2001a): 123–124.


———. (1967c). Causal relations. In Davidson (2001a): 149–162.


———. (1967d). Reply to Castaneda on agent and patient. In Davidson (2001a): 125–127.


———. (1968). On saying that. In Davidson (2001b): 93–108.


———. (1969). The individuation of events. In Davidson (2001a): 163–180.


———. (1970a). Semantics for natural languages. In Davidson (2001b): 55–64.


———. (1970b). Events as particulars. In Davidson (2001a): 181–188.


———. (1970c). Reply to Cargile. In Davidson (2001a): 137–146.


———. (1973a). In defence of Convention T. In Davidson (2001b): 65–75.


———. (1973b). Radical interpretation. In Davidson (2001b): 125–139.


———. (1976). Reply to Foster. In Davidson (2001b): 171–179.


———. (1977a). The method of truth in metaphysics. In Davidson (2001b): 199–214.


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\emph{———. (2012a).} Wahrheit, Bedeutung und Form. Eine Auseinandersetzung mit dem Davidson'schen Programm\emph{. Münster: Mentis.}


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\chapter{13. Radical Interpretation and the Principle of Charity}


Peter Pagin

\section{1. What Is Radical Interpretation?}


Radical interpretation is a species of interpretation. The term “interpretation” itself has a process–product ambiguity: in the product sense, it denotes a \emph{content} attribution, or the content itself that is attributed, by an interpreter. In the process sense, an interpretation is the process that leads to an interpretation in the product sense. The “aim” of an interpretation process is \emph{understanding}, that is, knowledge of content.


Interpretation, in the process sense, covers everything from the automatic or semiautomatic comprehension of utterances in a well-known language to the methodologically elaborate exegesis of old texts or the struggle to understand speakers of an alien language. In case the goal is to understand an entire language, the interpretation \emph{product} is what Davidson calls a \emph{meaning theory}. We shall be concerned with the process of interpretation that leads to a meaning theory.


Davidson emphasizes that a theory of interpretation must reveal semantic structure in the object language, whereas a theory of translation need not:



\begin{quote}


A theory of translation must read some sort of structure into sentences, but there is no reason to expect that it will provide any insight into how the meanings of sentences depend on their structure.


A satisfactory theory for interpreting the utterances of any language, our own included, will reveal significant semantic structure: the interpretation of utterances of complex sentences will systematically depend on the interpretation of utterances of simpler sentences, for example.


(Davidson 1973: 130)



\end{quote}


Both interpretation and translation into one's own language yields understanding of foreign utterances, but interpretation is a more \emph{theoretical} endeavour.\footnote{Davidson points out in “Truth and Meaning” (Davidson 1967: 21) that a syntactic theory plus a lexicon does not add up to a meaning theory, and the same can be said about translation: we can translate belief sentences into our own language without knowing how to provide a compositional semantics for them.}


The term “radical interpretation” is nonetheless coined in analogy to Quine's “radical translation” in chapter 2 of \emph{Word and Object} (Quine 1960). The intuitive idea, in both cases, is that of translation\Slash{}interpretation that “starts from scratch,” without any previous knowledge of the language in question, or detailed knowledge of the attitudes of the speakers. Although radical translation\Slash{}interpretation in this sense has taken place in history, for both Quine and Davidson describing it is rather a thought experiment. The point is to identify the kind of \emph{evidence} that is ultimately available to an interpreter and how that evidence \emph{supports} a meaning theory, that is, the evidential relation (Davidson 1973: 128).


Although the idea of interpretation from scratch highlights the problems and resources of the interpreter, it cannot be essential to radical interpretation, for if were, the interpreter would \emph{cease} to be radical when he has made some progress. Furthermore, whether or not the interpretation process once \emph{started} from scratch is historically contingent. What matters is what the ultimate evidential basis is:



\begin{quote}


The problem of interpretation is domestic as well as foreign: it surfaces for speakers of the same language in the form of the question, how can it be determined that the language is the same? Speakers of the same language can go on the assumption that for them the same expressions are to be interpreted in the same way, but this does not indicate what justifies the assumption. All understanding of the speech of another involves radical interpretation.


(Davidson 1973: 125)



\end{quote}


That my fellow speakers mean the same as I with words we both use, is not, on this view, anything we have the right to take for granted, but something that requires justification, and ultimately from evidence of the very same kind as is available to the interpreter that does start from scratch.


This has an immediate consequence for the question of identifying the \emph{interpretee} of radical interpretation. It cannot be a speech \emph{community}, but must be an individual speaker. The reason is that we need evidence to determine whether or not two speakers belong to the same speech community (cf. Davidson 1973: 135).\footnote{Davidson is somewhat ambivalent on this important issue. He does suggest (Davidson 1975: 169) that the interpreter should aim at a theory that optimizes agreement in the speech community. However, this is different from taking for granted that agreement exists.}


When interpreting a speaker who makes an assertion in a familiar language, we typically infer what she \emph{believes} on the basis of what we take the sentence to mean. If she speaks an unfamiliar language but we happen to have independent information about what she believes or wants, we can move on to a plausible guess about the meaning of the sentence she used. Ultimately, however, the radical interpreter does not have access to sentence meaning as basic evidence, and neither does he have access to information about particular beliefs, desires, or intentions as data for interpretation. The meaning of sentences and the contents of attitudes will be what his theory attributes to the speaker. The evidence must be something else (Davidson 1973: 134).


Without knowing what the speaker believes or expresses the interpreter can, however, observe the speaker's linguistic utterances and reactions to utterances by others, including the interpreter himself. The interpreter can form a hypothesis about the \emph{attitude} to a sentence that the speaker manifests. In particular, Davidson focused on the attitude of \emph{holding true}, or more precisely, holding true relative to a time, in order to take account of indexical sentences, like “it is raining” (Davidson 1973: 135, 1974a: 144). Holding a sentence true is an attitude to a sentence that corresponds to \emph{believing} the proposition that is the meaning of the sentence. Holding true is indeed a kind of belief, but it is a belief with a very coarse-grained, impoverished content; identifying the \emph{content} of such a belief requires no more than identifying the sentence the belief is about, for there is no need to identify the meaning of the sentence. Provided the radical interpreter can identify manifestations of the holding-true attitude on the part of the speaker, he has access to data that are independent of knowledge of sentence meaning or fine-grained individual beliefs.


It might be objected that the radical interpretation theory fails because it must illicitly assume that we can pretheoretically recognize the behavior that manifests the holding-true attitude. But there is no need to \emph{know} this in advance of interpretation. Rather, the interpreter forms a hypothesis about it and tries to establish an interpretation on that basis. If things work out well, this confirms the hypothesis, and if no reasonable interpretation results, it will have to be rejected. This hypothesis is part of the overall interpretation package, although it relates as evidence to the rest of his theory.


The most important difference between assent behavior and holding true is that holding true is related to meaning and belief in a \emph{uniform} way, while the disposition to assent to a sentence is not. For instance, \emph{insincere} assent is still assent, but it does not, in the relevant sense, manifest a holding-true attitude. Similarly, a speaker may systematically be disposed \emph{not} to assent to a sentence in circumstances where she nonetheless holds it true, for example, for reasons of prudence. With holding true, a general statement like


(1) For any time \emph{t}, Kurt holds “Es regent” true at \emph{t} iff it is raining near Kurt at \emph{t},


(Davidson 1973: 135) describes data for interpretation, but we cannot in general expect corresponding regularities for dispositions to assent. Davidson was not a behaviorist, and regarded appeal to mental states as fully legitimate in theoretical contexts. The reason for not trying to connect meaning and belief directly to behavior is not that behaviorism is false, but that the behaviorist project is more difficult (cf. Davidson 1974a: 142). The behaviorist project would be even more informative if successful, but without regularities analogous to the one stated in (1), success might be too much to hope for. Still, the data for the interpreter ultimately comes from observation of linguistic behavior (that this is a weak form of behaviorism is emphasized by Glüer (2011: 27)).


At the next step, the interpreter faces a serious problem of \emph{underdetermination}: just as the truth of a sentence depends in part on what the sentence means and in part of what the \emph{facts} are, so the speaker holding true a sentence depends in part on what the sentence means in the speaker's language and in part on what the speaker \emph{believes}. So, if the interpreter knows what the speaker believes and what a sentence in the speaker's language means, he can infer what the speaker will hold true:


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-32.jpg}
\end{figure}


Similarly, if the interpreter knows what a sentence means, and knows that a speaker holds it true, he can infer what the speaker believes:


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-33.jpg}
\end{figure}


There is no analogous simple inference from belief to meaning:


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-34.jpg}
\end{figure}


The simple reason why (INF2) goes through but (INF3) does not is that a (disambiguated) sentence has only one meaning, while a speaker has many beliefs, and the second premise of (INF3) does not provide the information that \emph{this particular belief is} responsible for holding \emph{s} true. Still, the interpreter \emph{can} infer that among the sentences the speaker holds true, at least one means that \emph{p} (since we are dealing with beliefs expressible in the speaker's language). Knowledge of all the beliefs of the speaker would then allow the interpreter to infer what meanings many sentences of the speaker's language must have, but not directly how these meanings are distributed over the sentences.


Initially, the interpreter knows only what sentences the speaker holds true. Different hypotheses about what the sentences mean lead to different hypotheses about what the speaker believes, and, indirectly, vice versa. Davidson refers to this as the \emph{interdependence of belief and meaning} (Davidson 1973: 134). Strictly speaking, however, so far we only have an interdependence between \emph{ascriptions} of meaning and \emph{ascriptions} of belief.


We have now seen what the ultimate evidence is for radical interpretation, which largely explains what radical interpretation is: it is facts about when and under what circumstances the speaker holds sentences true.\footnote{Davidson also tried to unify the theory of meaning and the theory of action (cf. Chapter 14). In doing so, \emph{desire}, or \emph{preference}, must be added to belief, as a basic attitude. This alternative was never much developed, however, and has no demonstrated advantage.} The other aspect of radical interpretation is the methodology of \emph{using} the evidence for breaking into the interdependence. We will return to this in Section 3.

\section{2. The Role of Radical Interpretation for Meaning Theory}


The opening of Davidson (1973) runs:



\begin{quote}


Kurt utters the words “Es regnet” and under the right conditions we know that he has said that it is raining. Having identified his utterance as intentional and linguistic, we are able to go on to interpret his words: we can say what his words, on that occasion, meant. What could we know that would enable us to do this? How could we come to know it?



\end{quote}


The questions at the end of the quote can be spelled out as follows:


\textbf{(A)} What is the form of a theory knowledge of which allows an interpreter to understand any sentence of a speaker's language?


\textbf{(B)} On what basis can an interpreter acquire such knowledge?


The (A) question is really two questions stylistically merged into one:


\textbf{(A1)} What is the format of a theory such that some knowledge about it is sufficient for an interpreter to understand any sentence of a speaker's language?


\textbf{(A2)} What knowledge about such a theory is required for an interpreter to have this ability?


Clearly, it is not enough to know a theory that \emph{in fact} has the right property. I must also know \emph{that} it has the right property, and at least it must be true. So, the answer to (A2) will at the very least include knowledge that the theory is true.


Davidson's proposed answer to (A) is that a meaning theory for a natural language should have the form of a Tarskian truth definition, with theorems – T-sentences – of the form of (2).


(2) \emph{s} is true in L iff \emph{p}


(cf. this volume, Chapter 10). Davidson's answer to question (B) is radical interpretation. At the very least, this means that it is \emph{possible} to reach knowledge that a particular meaning theory is true by means of radical interpretation. As we shall see, Davidson's claims are stronger than that.\footnote{In one sense, the claim is weaker, for Davidson immediately adds that he is not asking for what interpreters \emph{in fact} know, or how they \emph{in fact} acquire the knowledge.}


We can now see why interpretation must be radical for playing this role. For if it is to deliver the evidence for a meaning theory, the account of meaning would be circular if facts about meaning would also serve as evidence for the theory (Davidson 1974a: 142). An appeal to fine-grained beliefs of the speaker would not be directly circular, but still indirectly so, given that we can gain knowledge of others' fine-grained attitudes only through interpretation.


The crucial question is what reason there is to believe that radical interpretation carried out in the right way \emph{will} deliver the right result, that is, give knowledge of the correct theory, or theories. Some critics have claimed that the view that it will is just verificationism on Davidson's part.\footnote{For instance, Williamson (2004: 137).} Davidson's view, however, was that it is because of the special nature of the object of knowledge – what speakers mean – that facts in this area are knowable. Language is a social phenomenon (Davidson 2005b: 56), and so linguistic meaning must be essentially public; what one person means must be accessible to others (Davidson 1979: 235, 2005a: 56):



\begin{quote}


Quine revolutionized our understanding of verbal communication by taking seriously the fact, obvious enough in itself, that there can be no more to meaning than an adequately equipped person can learn and observe; the interpreter's point of view is therefore the revealing one to bring to the subject.


(Davidson 2005a)



\end{quote}


There is a tension here with the early claim, noted in the preceding section, that we cannot take for granted that two speakers belong to the same speech community, that only the application of radical interpretation will reveal whether they do. To motivate the radical interpretation approach by appeal to the social and public nature of language is precisely to presuppose pretheoretically that there \emph{is} successful linguistic communication. That is just what makes language a social phenomenon.\footnote{This is made explicit by Davidson in Davidson and Glüer (1995: 81).} Hence, if radical interpretation with a chosen method would deliver the result that there is no successful linguistic communication, or substantially less than believed, there would be something wrong with that method.


The view that meaning is public is not only a view about the epistemology of language. It does not only entail that speakers can know what other speakers mean, but also that this in the \emph{nature} of linguistic meaning:



\begin{quote}


The semantic features of language are public features. What no one can, in the nature of the case, figure out from the totality of the relevant evidence cannot be part of meaning.


(Davidson 1979: 235)



\end{quote}


This is, in a sense, a metaphysical conclusion, about the nature of meaning, from an epistemological premise, that speakers can know what others mean. In taking this step, the epistemological fact is taken as \emph{constitutive} of linguistic meaning. It is not just the case that radical interpretation provides the \emph{evidence} for a meaning theory, successful interpretation is what also makes it \emph{correct}. In a sense, radical interpretation (or interpretability) \emph{determines} meaning and belief. If this is correct, then it immediately explains why properly performed radical interpretation of any speaker is guaranteed to succeed, for meaning and belief is precisely what \emph{can} be known in this way.


This is a controversial view.\footnote{Critics include Fodor and Lepore (1994), Lepore and Ludwig (2005: ch. 12), and more recently also García-Carpintero (2012).} Why could there not be speakers with radically different conceptual schemes that we simply would not be able to interpret? In fact, it does \emph{not} follow that there could not. What follows is that anyone who is a speaker can be radically interpreted by \emph{some} interpreter (perhaps someone who is sufficiently alike), not necessarily by \emph{all} interpreters, and not necessarily by “us.” Nevertheless, the claim that any speaker is interpretable seems to have been taken in this stronger sense of \emph{interpretable by us}, also by Davidson himself.


Davidson discusses this issue at length in Davidson (1974b). At one point, Davidson remarks that “we could not be in a position to judge that others had concepts or beliefs radically different from our own” (Davidson 1974b: 197). This is an epistemic remark, but it is connected with a conceptual claim about truth: our best grasp of the concept of truth derives from Tarski's work, but Tarski's concept of truth as applied to an arbitrary object language is essentially connected with translation into our language, or a language we understand, as metalanguage (Davidson 1974b: 194–195). It is not completely clear, however, why the translation of the object must be into a language we understand; Tarski explicitly allows the metalanguage to be an extension of the object language. So, if translation is possible between languages that we cannot understand, then Tarski's concept of truth appears to be applicable to them as well.


The idea of a radically different conceptual scheme is closely connected with the role of the radical \emph{interpreter} in radical interpretation. If meaning is \emph{determined} by the result a properly performed radical interpretation could give, is the interpreter himself really needed? David Lewis (1974) claimed that the figure of the interpreter is only a dramatic device: what determines meaning is the totality of \emph{facts} that the interpreter, if he did his job well, would make use of, and meaning \emph{supervenes} on these facts in accordance the correct principles of interpretation. The appeal to the interpreter only dramatizes the supervenience relation. In his reply (Davidson 1974c), Davidson agrees. The appeal to the interpreter serves to highlight the nature of the supervenience base, which comprises exactly what can also serve as evidence to an interpreter, and the supervenience relation, which is encoded in the principles of interpretation. But strictly speaking, the interpreter can be dropped.\footnote{On this theme, see especially Glüer (2011: 132–137). Note that if the interpreter is dropped, truth \emph{by the lights of the interpreter} is dropped as well; what remains is \emph{truth} itself.}


The idea that facts about the speaker determines meaning, rather than the activity of an interpreter, helps with understanding two puzzling features of the radical interpretation idea. The first is the apparent circularity of determination. On the one hand, the fact that a speaker X holds a particular sentence \emph{s} true at a time \emph{t} depends on what the speaker believes at \emph{t} (or just before) and on the meaning of \emph{s} in the language of X (at \emph{t} or just before). On the other hand, since meaning and belief is determined by the results of interpretation, what X believes and what \emph{s} means depends on the fact that X holds \emph{s} true. Does this really add up? If we understand determination as a temporal relation, it does not. For then holding \emph{s} true would depend on preexisting facts about belief and meaning, while on the other hand, those facts would not themselves be determined until \emph{after s} is held true by X.


We can make sense of the situation in the following way. X has a mental state \emph{α} and a relation \emph{ρ} to the sentence \emph{s}, and together these two facts cause X to hold \emph{s} true. The causal powers of \emph{α} and \emph{ρ} precede, or make up the basis of, the holding-true attitude. \emph{α} is in fact the state of believing that \emph{p}, but it is that state \emph{in virtue of} satisfying certain conditions, and among these conditions is precisely that together with instantiating the relation \emph{ρ} to \emph{s}, it results in holding \emph{s} true. So, in virtue of fitting into a causal pattern, \emph{α qualifies} as being a belief that \emph{p}.\footnote{Analogously, a shooting \emph{qualifies} as being a killing after the victim dies; the dying does not \emph{cause} the shooting to be a killing. This view of the relation between belief, meaning, and holding true makes the radical interpretation account into a kind of \emph{functionalist} account. Cf. Loar (1986).} This asymmetry between a causal relation in one direction and a satisfaction relation in the other is obscured if being a belief and having meaning depends on an actually performed interpretation.


We can also note here that this view justifies the talk of “interdependence of belief and meaning,” since for a state to be a belief that \emph{p} depends on a sentence having the meaning that \emph{p} (perhaps in context), and vice versa.


The second puzzling feature concerns the totality of the evidence. In Davidson (1979: 235), Davidson says that “what no one can, in the nature of the case, figure out from the totality of the relevant evidence cannot be part of meaning.” What is this totality? Davidson says that “we may as well suppose we have available all that could be known of such attitudes, past, present, and future” (Davidson 1974a: 144). All that could be known is a lot, and it is more than any real interpreter can acquire, partly because the quantity is huge, partly because he cannot look into the future.


The advantage of allowing\Slash{}requiring this massive amount of evidence is that the meaning-determining role of radical interpretation becomes more plausible. Any real interpreter will have access to only a very small subset of the attitudes of the speaker, and will need to extrapolate heavily from these attitudes. New evidence might easily point in a different direction, disconfirming current hypotheses. So, in a sense, the appeal to the totality of evidence takes care of the problem of induction. Of course, since the appeal to the totality of evidence leaves all actual interpreters behind, the relation between actual interpretation and the meaning theoretical project becomes less clear.


Two questions emerge at this point: First, will appeal to the totality of evidence help with guaranteeing that radical interpretation of a speaker will succeed? Second, if the interpreter is dropped from interpretation, where do the \emph{concepts} used in interpretation come from? These two questions are interconnected, but to see how, we need to turn to the \emph{methodology} of radical interpretation.

\section{3. The Principle of Charity}


How can the radical interpreter break into the interdependence of belief and meaning? Davidson's proposal for doing this is a cornerstone in his philosophy of language. Basically, the proposal is that although the interpreter does not at the outset have any \emph{particular} knowledge of the speaker's fine-grained beliefs or other attitudes, he does have \emph{general} knowledge, which he can put to use. He can know that if someone has beliefs at all, most of these beliefs are true (by the interpreter's lights).



\begin{quote}


The method is intended to solve the problem of the interdependence of belief and meaning by holding belief constant as far as possible while solving for meaning. This is accomplished by assigning truth conditions to alien sentences that make native speakers right when plausibly possible, according, of course, to our own view of what is right.


(Davidson 1973: 137)



\end{quote}


This is a statement of what became known as \emph{the principle of charity}. In its simplest version, the idea of using charity in interpretation is the idea that an interpretation is \emph{better} if it leads to attributing \emph{more} true beliefs. This works precisely because of the interdependence of belief and meaning, in particular because of the validity of schema (INF2):


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-33.jpg}
\end{figure}


Premise (1) here records the evidence for the interpreter. Premise (2) states his interpretation \emph{hypothesis}. The conclusion is used for \emph{evaluating} the hypothesis.


Consider two global meaning theoretical hypotheses, theories T1 and T2. For a great number of sentences held true by the speaker, T1 and T2 contain substantially different hypotheses about their meaning. According to T1, say, \emph{s} means that \emph{there is a hippopotamus in the refrigerator}, and according to T2, \emph{s} means that \emph{there is an orange in the refrigerator} (cf. Davidson 1969: 100–101). As a consequence, the interpreter has a choice between two belief attributions to the speaker: that there is a hippopotamus in the refrigerator and that there is an orange in the refrigerator. The first belief is pretty absurd, while the second may well be true. The second is preferable, in particular if it \emph{is} true. This then speaks in favor of T2 over T1. This exemplifies the basic mechanism of how belief attribution influences semantics, via charity.


Before moving on to elaborate on the idea of charity, a few remarks on the mechanism are in order.


\textbf{(1)} The role of charity is that of comparison and evaluation. In terms of the philosophy of science: Charity belongs to the \emph{context of justification}, not the \emph{context of discovery}. Charity is a tool for testing whether a meaning theory is acceptable, not primarily a method of selecting hypotheses to test. Other factors, such as relevance and general psychological plausibility, will be important for hypothesis formation. As Davidson emphasizes as regards actual interpretation, a theory is “derived by wit, luck, and wisdom” (Davidson 1986b: 107). Neither is required for testing.


\textbf{(2)} Charity is primarily applicable to a theory as a whole, not to individual theorems. A speaker may well have a number of false beliefs (we probably all do), and may even have some absurd beliefs as well. What is compared is the totality of belief attributions according to one theory with the totality of belief attributions according to another.


\textbf{(3)} One reason the interpreter cannot (with ordinary concepts) simply devise a meaning theory that makes the speaker hold \emph{only} true beliefs is that the theory must be compositional; the theorems must be connected by being derived from a shared basis. If that were not the case, the interpreter could simply pick a true interpretation for any sentence held true by the speaker, because then the interpretation of one sentence would not impose any restriction on the interpretation of any other sentence. Since any belief could then come out true, the interpreter could score high on charity. This observation shows that compositionality must be an independent requirement, because it cannot be justified from charity (cf. Pagin 1999).


Let us go back to the content of the charity principle. A typical early formulation is:



\begin{quote}


The general policy \dots{} is to choose truth conditions that do as well as possible in making speakers hold sentences true when (according to the theory and the theory builder's view of the facts) those sentences are true


(Davidson 1974a: 152).



\end{quote}


So, in the most basic version, interpretations should be chosen that \emph{maximize} the rate of true beliefs among the speaker's beliefs, judged according to the standards of the interpreter (cf. Davidson 1975: 169). Theories that do \emph{not} reach the maximum rate of truths, that is, those that are not among the \emph{best} theories, must be rejected.\footnote{Davidson accepts the consequence that two or more different theories can be equally good but better than all others. These top-ranking theories are then \emph{all} true, despite being apparently incompatible. This is what Davidson calls “indeterminacy of interpretation,” analogous to Quine's indeterminacy of translation. Cf. Davidson (1979) and this volume, Chapter 15.}


The interpreter is always to maximize the rate of true beliefs \emph{by the interpreter's standards}, or \emph{according to the interpreter's view of the facts}, and this comes to the same thing as maximizing agreement; it is compatible with the falsity of the beliefs of both speaker and interpreter. We get real maximizing of the rate of truth only by assuming that the interpreter's beliefs are all true (or the interpreter is dropped).\footnote{Davidson did assume the possibility of an omniscient interpreter in Davidson (1986a).}


In the most basic formulations, applying charity is to make a \emph{comparison} between theories. However, \emph{acceptable} theories must not only be best, they must also be \emph{good}. They must be such that speaker and hearer are rendered \emph{largely} in agreement, that is, such that \emph{most} of the speaker's beliefs come out true, by the interpreter's standards:



\begin{quote}


What justifies the procedure is the fact that disagreement and agreement alike are intelligible only against a background of massive agreement.


(Davidson 1973: 137)



\end{quote}


(Cf. Davidson 1975: 168–169.) The requirement of massive agreement is typically presented in the context of an \emph{argument} for charity in the previous respect. However, it is clearly an aspect of charity in its own right, since it provides an \emph{absolute} requirement on the rate of truth (it must be high), which complements the \emph{relative} requirement (it must be the highest).


Davidson nowhere gives a numerical value of the rate of true beliefs. On the contrary, from early on, he stresses that this cannot be done. One reason is infinity: there are not \emph{more} sentences in a natural language, then there are sentences in the same language with an odd number of words. Both sets are countably infinite, and hence of the same cardinality (cf. Davidson 1973: 136).


It may be immediately objected here that what is compared for size are sets of beliefs, or sentences held true, and since these are only finitely many, the problem of infinity does not arise. But this is not so clear. I believe much more than I happen to express verbally. If I belief \emph{that snow is white}, do I also believe \emph{that snow is white or grass is red}, and in general \emph{that p or q}, for arbitrary \emph{q}, if I believe \emph{that p}? If so, it seems that I have infinitely many beliefs after all, and if not, where do we draw the line? Davidson later claimed that “there is no useful way of counting beliefs, and so no clear meaning to the idea that most of a person's beliefs are true” (Davidson 1986a: 138). And in the preface to Davidson (1984: xvii), he called maximizing agreement “a confused ideal,” since what we want is “the right sort of agreement.” And already early on Davidson (1973: 136, 1974a: 197), he used the locution “optimize agreement.”


One main difference between simple maximizing and optimizing is that the latter takes \emph{epistemological} aspects into account. As stressed by Føllesdal (1975) and Lewis (1974), it is bad interpretation to ascribe a true belief to speaker when the speaker is not in an epistemic position to have a reason for that belief (like a rabbit behind a tree, not in view from where the speaker is). By the same token, it is bad interpretation to ascribe a \emph{false} belief to a speaker when she is in a very good epistemic position for it.



\begin{quote}


Some disagreements are more destructive of understanding than others, and a sophisticated theory must naturally take this into account. Disagreement about theoretical matters may (in some cases) be more tolerable than disagreement about what is more evident; disagreement about how things look or appear is less tolerable than disagreement about how they are; disagreement about the truth of attributions of certain attitudes to a speaker by that same speaker may not be tolerable at all, or barely. [\dots{}] The methodology of interpretation is, in this respect, nothing but epistemology seen in the mirror of meaning.


(Davidson 1975: 169)



\end{quote}


In particular, observation sentences, such as “that is white,” or near observation sentences, such “that is snow,” are particularly important. On the one hand, they are sentences that the speaker holds true in some situations but not in others, and therefore they give richer data for interpretation than sentences always or never held true. On the other hand, they are sentence that speakers are very seldom wrong about. So, on the assumption that a particular sentence \emph{s} is an observation sentence for the speaker, it is best interpreted so as to be true almost whenever the speaker holds it true. We could sum this up as follows: Charity requires the interpreter to choose the theory that scores highest on some scale (yet to be fully specified), summing the measures of these beliefs according to their varying epistemic weights.


Later on, a new ingredient emerges: the connection between content and causality. In basic cases, a belief is \emph{about} what causes it:



\begin{quote}


What stands in the way of global skepticism of the senses is, in my view, the fact that we must, in the plainest and methodologically most basic cases, take the objects of a belief to be the causes of that belief.


(Davidson 1986a: 151)



\end{quote}


The most basic cases are the cases of perceptual belief, that is, beliefs based directly on perceptual experience, which again are observational beliefs. This is an element of \emph{Content Externalism} that emerges in Davidson's philosophy in the early 1980s. The content of a belief is determined by features of the environment, and in particular by what causes it. This idea is closely connected with how he later comes to think of charity. For on the later conception, \emph{part} of the principle of charity is then taken to be what he then calls \emph{the principle of correspondence}:



\begin{quote}


The Principle of Correspondence prompts the interpreter to take the speaker to be responding to the same features of the world that he (the interpreter) would be responding to under similar circumstances.


(Davidson 2001b: 211)



\end{quote}


\emph{Prima facie}, correspondence seems rather unlike charity as it had been presented earlier on. Charity is used for getting content out of truth and linguistic structure, with no appeal to causality. Correspondence is used for getting content out of causality, with no appeal to truth or structure. While charity, as earlier conceived, applies to the totality of a speaker's beliefs, correspondence seems to apply to individual perceptual beliefs. I shall treat it as a \emph{complement} to charity rather than a new conception of it.


Correspondence, together with externalism, is connected with the theme of \emph{triangulation} that emerges together with externalism. According to the basic idea of triangulation, \emph{what} the cause of a belief is remains indeterminate until the believer is in communication with a second believer, for then we can look back in the causal chains to what is \emph{shared} between the two subjects:



\begin{quote}


Communication begins where causes converge: your utterance means what mine does if belief in its truth is systematically caused by the same events and objects.


(Davidson 1986a: 151)



\end{quote}


By the triangulation idea, a speaker must be not only interpretable, but actually interpreted. The idea of the radical interpreter as just a dramatic device is far away. And what does the job is causality and the shared environment, not the principles of interpretation. Although it may be thought that triangulation underlies the possibility of radical interpretation, it is a different theme.\footnote{Cf. Chapter 27.}


The principle of correspondence is presented together with the principle of coherence:



\begin{quote}


The Principle of Coherence prompts the interpreter to discover a degree of logical consistency in the thought of the speaker; [\dots{}] Both principles can be (and have been) called principles of charity: one principle endows the speaker with a modicum of logic, the other endows him with a degree of what the interpreter takes to be true belief about the world.


(Davidson 2001b: 211)



\end{quote}


The idea that the interpreter must take the speaker to be largely consistent and coherent was part of Davidson's principles of interpretation from the outset in “Truth and Meaning,” and in a sense part of charity.


This is not yet all that has been connected with charity. Davidson also thought that the interpreter needed to track the speaker's beliefs in \emph{evidential connections}, and in action explanation. This was part of his idea of a \emph{unified theory thought, meaning, and action} (Davidson 1980).\footnote{Cf. Chapter 14.} Since the relevance for interpretation was not worked out in detail, I shall not pursue the theme here.

\section{4. The Power of Charity}


When we ask what charity can deliver when applied in interpretation, we are interested in two questions:


\textbf{(1)} Can charity fail to yield true meaning theories?


\textbf{(2)} Can charity yield false or unilluminating meaning theories?


These questions are connected with the idea of testing charity \emph{empirically} by comparing results with actual interpretation. This is an issue we will return to in the final section. Here we will be concerned with abstract possibilities. The first question concerns \emph{undergeneration} of true theories, the second \emph{overgeneration}. Two lines of reasoning will be examined here, both related to question (2), the first also to question (1).


In general, charity does not require that the interpreter can translate the speaker's language into his own \emph{preexisting} language. The speaker may have a more sophisticated theory of nature, so that the interpreter needs to define \emph{new} vocabulary in order for the interpretation to go through. Is there a limit to this?


Assume that we \emph{can} state a compositional meaning theory with theorems of the form “\emph{s} means that \emph{p}.” Assume that interpreter Casey from Earth embarks on interpretation of apparent speaker Alien from Outer Space. Casey identifies a candidate predicate Φ that seems applied to some objects and withheld from others by Alien, but Casey sees no pattern in the usage. None of the property concepts Casey can come up with matches even approximately the pattern of Alien's applications.


Casey then decides to learn from Alien, and starts defining a new predicate \emph{F} in his own language. It is defined by cases: true of objects that Alien applies Φ to, false of objects that Alien withholds Φ from, and for all objects \emph{b unconsidered} by Alien, \emph{F} is true of \emph{b} just in case \emph{b} is a \emph{rocket}. Clearly, by interpreting Φ to mean \emph{F}, and assuming Casey has identified atomic sentences with Φ as predicate and a demonstrative as subject term, Alien's demonstrative Φ sentences all come out true.


Casey then goes on to do the same with other predicates, and also with what he identifies as grammatical particles, and sentence constructions. For each sentence held true at time, on a case by case basis, an interpretation is given of the parts and the syntactic operations that makes the sentence come out true at that time. Some arbitrary interpretation is provided for all cases \emph{not} considered by Alien. So Casey's meaning theory is compositional and complete (with respect to the syntax he has identified), and results in only true beliefs being attributed to Alien.


Still, something is wrong. We feel that question (2) earlier should be answered affirmatively: the interpretation does not deliver any real \emph{understanding} of Alien. It would be natural to locate the problem in \emph{predictability}. However, the problem is not that Casey's theory does not deliver predictions, for it does. It is only that we have no good reasons to believe that those predictions would be borne out. But what exactly would give us such reasons?


Davidson never emphasizes the predictive capacity of meaning theories. Charity itself is adapted only to successful \emph{accommodation}, that is, to give a theory that fits the data. The very idea of having access to the \emph{totality of evidence}, as proposed in Davidson (1974a: 144) (“all that could be known of such attitudes, past, present, and future”) suggests that no actual prediction will ever have to be made.


Successful prediction increases our confidence in a theory, but does not in itself make the theory better supported by the data than had it been devised by accommodation. In the present case, we feel Casey's theory is utterly worthless, and this cannot apparently be explained by the fact that no successful prediction has \emph{actually} been made. Nevertheless, the problem seems to have something to do with prediction.


Casey clearly has no idea of what is \emph{similar} to the objects that are \emph{F}, by his definition, over and above being \emph{treated} as similar by Alien. With an \emph{independent} grasp of the similarity, that is, with the ability of applying a previously given or independently defined concept to all or nearly all of them, Casey would also have been able predict, with reasonable confidence, how Alien would apply Φ to new cases. This, then, seems to be a reasonable restriction: interpretation takes place only with independently possessed concepts. And, in fact, it is plausible to read such a restriction into the principle of correspondence, for it requires the interpreter to take the speaker to be responding to the \emph{same features} of the world has he himself. That condition is not met in Casey's interpretation, for he cannot \emph{discover} the features Alien is responding to, only define them through Alien's responses.\footnote{What happens with this condition if the idea of an actual interpreter is not needed? We should assume that there are \emph{properties} that speakers\Slash{}interpreters may and may not have a concept of, and may and may not be \emph{able} to have a concept of (a subject can fail to be \emph{sensitive} to a certain property). If Alien's Φ expresses a concept at all, there is a property it represents. Interpreters sensitive to the same concept could then succeed with charity.}


Without this restriction from correspondence, charity would intuitively overgenerate. With the restriction, perhaps it might undergenerate.


The second issue is connected the fact that Davidsonian meaning theories are truth theories, with theorems of the form of


(2) \emph{s} is true in L iff \emph{p}


If theorem were to be of the form


(3) \emph{s} means that \emph{p}


then the task of radical interpretation would consist in finding evidence that the theory is true. By contrast, with theorems of the form (2), this is not obviously enough, since biconditionals of that form may be true even if the meaning of \emph{s} is not \emph{that p}. Davidson's own classical example from Davidson (1967: 25), is


(4) “Snow is white” is true iff grass is green


A theory with (4) as theorem would be noninterpretive. Such theories should be weeded out by a combination of structural and interpretational measures. In particular, the semantic axiom for “white” would also be used in giving a theorem for the sentence “This is white” (Davidson 1967: 26, note 10). A theorem for this sentence saying that the sentence is true iff what is demonstrated by the speaker is \emph{green}, would be incorrect. Moreover, it would be detected by charity, for the resulting belief attributions would represent the speaker as systematically believing of white things that they are green. Therefore, such a theorem about “This is white” would have to be rejected, and together with it the axiom for “white” on which is was based. Once the axiom is rejected, (4) is no longer a theorem either.


In this way, theories with true but noninterpretive theorems would be sorted out by means of charity. Hopefully, then, the remaining \emph{true} theories would all be interpretive as well. It may be said to have been Davidson's most central idea in the philosophy of language that a meaning theory may be extensional, and indeed have the Tarskian format, because the evidence for it provides more than just its truth. With the right evidence, the theory is not just true, it is also \emph{interpretive}, that is, interpretationally adequate:



\begin{quote}


What we have been overlooking, however, is that we have supplied an alternative criterion: this criterion is that the totality of T-sentences should (in the sense described above) optimally fit evidence about sentences held true by native speakers. The present idea is that what Tarski assumed outright for each T-sentence can be indirectly elicited by a holistic constraint. If that constraint is adequate, each T-sentence will in fact yield an acceptable interpretation.


(Davidson 1973: 139)



\end{quote}


This hope that structure and charity together would suffice was challenged in an objection to Davidson by John Foster (1976). Suppose we have an interpretive T-theory T1. Then, we devise another theory T2, so that they are related for any \emph{s} and \emph{p} as follows:


Figure 13.1


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-35.jpg}
\end{figure}


Given that the Earth \emph{does} move, the two theories are equally well supported by charity, and should both be correct if one is.


One possible response would be to accept the result, say that both theories are true, and both interpretive, and that therefore we have an example of indeterminacy of interpretation. But Davidson did not accept it. According to Davidson's reply (Davidson 1976), interpretive T-theorems have a kind of modal force: they are \emph{lawlike}. (5a) is lawlike, but (5b) is not. So, although theory \emph{T}2 would be true, it would not be interpretive.


What does lawlikeness amount to here? The lawlikeness pertains to the generalization over (speakers of the same language and) instances of holding true, and entails that such generalizations are \emph{counterfactual supporting}. So the theorem (5a) is lawlike because it holds that


(6) If the speaker \emph{were to hold s} true, she \emph{would} believe that \emph{p}.\footnote{Davidson does not make this understanding of lawlikeness explicit in his writings, but this is the answer he gave to a direct question, during a Q\&A at the Davidson conference outside Kazimierz Dolny, near Lublin, in the summer of 1995, organized by Ursula Zeglen. \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf Lepore and Ludwig (2005: 162–163), take lawlikeness to amount to the idea that the theorem itself is true in all nomically possible worlds. They subsequently (correctly) criticize this idea for failing to guarantee interpretiveness, since it rules out some but not all Foster-style alternatives (it does not rule out theories where the added conjunct is itself lawlike).}


In this sense, (5b) would not be lawlike, for a speaker might well hold true “snow is white” without believing that the Earth moves, or believing lawlike statements, such as \emph{E} = \emph{mc} \textsuperscript{2}.


This raises several questions. First, we would have hoped to replace the second premise of (INF2) by an appeal to theorems of true T-theories. In this way, Davidson would not need to explicitly use the concept of \emph{meaning} in his theory. This would give:where the inference would be valid if theory \emph{T} is true (the premise as stated then (somewhat sloppily) abbreviates the conjunction of the statement that \emph{T} is true and that what follows that turnstile is one of its theorems). But the inference is valid just in case the theory is interpretive, and its truth does not guarantee this. The alternative of making it instead an explicit \emph{premise} that the theory is interpretive (and hence that \emph{s} means that \emph{p}) would surrender part (but not all) of the ambition of explicating the concept of meaning.\footnote{Lepore and Ludwig (2005: 152–166) argue that appeal to being interpretive (p. 153) \emph{should} be accepted in characterizing the adequacy of a truth theory (that it suffices for interpretation). Part of their reason is exactly that appeal to lawlikeness, as they understand it, does not guarantee interpretiveness.}


Figure 13.2


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-36.jpg}
\end{figure}


You might think that an appeal to lawlikeness, in the sense of (6), would solve this: the second premise of (INF2′) would require exactly that the truth theory has lawlike theorems. This would have the additional advantage of making the inference not only conceptually valid, but even \emph{logically} valid. But although the idea is natural and promising, it has serious problems.


The first problem is that the proposal does not seem to avoid the need of appealing to the concept of meaning after all. For when we consider all the alternative circumstances (possible worlds) under which a speaker could hold a sentence \emph{s} true, we are interested only in those circumstances where \emph{the meaning of s} remains the same. Allow the meaning to change, and the law need not hold; the speaker could hold \emph{s} true without believing \emph{p} in a world where \emph{s} means something else. There does not seem to be any way of specifying the worlds we are interested in other than exactly as those worlds where the meaning of \emph{s} is the same.\footnote{An appeal to the Stalnaker–Lewis idea about counterfactuals is no guarantee, for we have no reason to believe that worlds where the meaning changes are further away than worlds where it stays the same.}


The second problem is that the appeal to laws includes an appeal to \emph{counterfactual} holding true. Holding true that \emph{could} have taken place but does not will never be evidence for the interpreter. So distinctions in meaning that we could capture only by appeal to counterfactual holding true could not be detected by applying charity.\footnote{An example would be Casey's interpretations of Alien. His theory would not be lawlike (since the counterfactuals would be massively false), but it would satisfy charity with respect to all actually available evidence.}


The third problem is that the solution anyway faces a strengthened version of Foster's problem. Take a proposition that the speaker X is sure to believe, for instance, \emph{that} 1 + 1 = 2, or \emph{that something exists}, or whatever would be believed in any world where the speaker has the same language; call it \emph{q}.


Then, first, we could assign \emph{q} as the meaning of every sentence \emph{s}, for whichever sentence X holds true, she believes that \emph{q}. Second, even if we somehow filter out such propositions, there remain the conjunctions \emph{p and q}, for arbitrary \emph{p}. A speaker that has conjunctive beliefs in the first place would believe that \emph{p and q} whenever she believes that \emph{p}. So, we would not be able distinguish between the meaning hypothesis that \emph{s} means that \emph{p} and the hypothesis that \emph{s} means that \emph{p and q}. If the one law holds, so does the other.\footnote{Note that this is exactly the analogue of the possible-worlds semantics problem that if \emph{s}′ is true in all worlds, then for any sentence \emph{s}, \emph{s} \& \emph{s}′ have the same intension.} A way around this problem would be accept the result and conclude that the two hypotheses are just as good and hence both true, that is, appeal to the indeterminacy of interpretation. But the question is why this is to be preferred over accepting that the appeal to laws does not help.


A more constructive and promising way is to make use of correspondence and externalism. If the interpreter can conclude, by correspondence, that the speaker reacts to a particular feature of the environment, then by externalism, the speaker's belief is \emph{about} that feature. This can help against the strengthened Foster's problem in this way: if the speaker's belief is \emph{about} the wetness of the grass, then it is not the belief that \emph{the grass is wet and} 1 + 1 = 2, for \emph{that} belief is only \emph{in part} about the wetness of the grass. Then, by means of appeal to the later principles, which derive content from causality rather than truth, there may be a way out of the strengthened Foster problem, but more work is needed here.\footnote{As far as I am aware, Davidson never explicitly appealed to correspondence and externalism as a solution to Foster's problem, and one can only speculate about any historical connection. The connection is explicit in Lepore and Ludwig (2005: ch. 12), but developed with respect to a different principle, which they call “Grace.”} Much of this work would connect the theory of meaning with the philosophy of perception.\footnote{Compare here a passage from Davidson (thanks here to Kathrin Glüer): \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf The second part of the argument has to do with the empirical content of perceptions, and of the observation sentences that express them. We learn how to apply our earliest observation sentences from others in the conspicuous (to us) presence of mutually sensed objects, events, and features of the world. It is this that anchors language and belief to the world, and guarantees that what we mean in using these sentences is usually true. (\dots{}) The principle of charity recognizes the way in which we must learn perceptual sentences. \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf (Davidson 1999: 343)}

\section{5. The Justification of Charity}


What would \emph{justify} the belief that charity is the right principle of interpretation? In this final section, we shall be concerned with this question, and focus on charity in the old, optimization sense.


It is clear from many passages in Davidson's writings that he took the principle of charity to have a validity of a foundational kind, so that justification would not be empirical, for instance:



\begin{quote}


I suggest that the existence of lawlike statements in physical science depends upon the existence of constitutive (or synthetic a priori) laws like those of the measurement of length within the same conceptual domain. Just as we cannot intelligibly assign length to any object unless a comprehensive theory holds of objects of that sort, we cannot intelligibly attribute any propositional attitude to an agent except within the framework of a viable theory of his beliefs, desires intentions, and decisions


(Davidson 1970: 221).


What makes interpretation possible, then, is the fact that we can dismiss a priori the chance of massive error.


(Davidson 1975: 168)\footnote{For a thorough survey of Davidson's views on the matter, see Glüer (2006).}



\end{quote}


These quotes do not themselves give any justification of charity, but pronounces on the epistemic or modal status the principle. Davidson refrained from saying that the statement of charity is analytic. But calling Charity \emph{constitutive} is close enough. What will it amount to? Davidson himself refers to measurement theory. Consider an example. In order for a function \emph{H}, from physical objects to real numbers, to be a \emph{measure function} for \emph{extensive measurement}, there must be a binary operation@@@
\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-37.jpg}
\end{figure}
 on physical objects (a concatenation operation) such that for all objects \emph{d}, \emph{d t}


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-38.jpg}
\end{figure}


(see Krantz \emph{et al}. 1971: ch. 1).\footnote{In case of weight, the concatenation operation consists in weighing two objects together.} This is part of a definition of a reconstructed, technical notion – call it measurement*. (7) is indeed constitutive of that notion, and it is analytic (follows from the definition) that (7) is true of measure* functions. What is less clear is in what sense (7) could be said to be constitutive of \emph{measurement} (in the old sense) as well. Probably in no good sense, but this does not matter much, for measurement theory is normative, not descriptive; it sets scientific standards for what to call “measurement.” It is not a theory \emph{about} measurement as historically given.


By contrast, Charity is supposed to be part of a theory of meaning and belief as historically given. It is a descriptive theory, telling us something about the nature of meaning and belief as previously known. It is hard to understand in what sense Charity would be \emph{constitutive} of meaning so understood.\footnote{It may be the claim that charity is in fact already part of folk psychology (thanks to Kathrin Glüer here). That is an empirical question, however.} Maybe the idea simply reduces to the related idea that we can realize \emph{a priori} that charity is true.


In what follows, I shall first discuss the possibility of empirical argument for or against Charity, and then turn to \emph{a priori} arguments.


Could Charity come into conflict with empirical claims? One possibility of arriving at such a result would be to apply charity to two speakers who pretheoretically appear to communicate well, and check whether the same meaning theories would hold for them. If it would turn out that by the standards of Charity they do not, then should we say that contrary to appearances, there was failure of communication, or that Charity is false?\footnote{I had the chance of asking Professor Davidson this question during a conference dinner in 1998. His answer was that “it is open for adjustment on both sides.”} If the latter is the case, then at least to some extent, Charity can be empirically tested. This is definitely the case if we would have greater confidence, concerning crucial cases, in the claim that appearances of successful communication are veridical than in the truth of the principle.


If Charity can be tested, then it can also get empirical support. An idea is suggested in Pagin (2006). We start from the fact that there is massive verbal agreement, and hence agreement in holding true, between speakers of (what appears to be) the same language. The second step is to argue that the \emph{best explanation} of this fact is that there is also agreement in meaning and belief (and hence in belief-forming mechanisms). The alternative would be either agreement by chance, or else that differences in belief are systematically \emph{offset} by compensating differences in meaning. Sameness of meaning and belief-forming mechanisms is chosen as the simpler theory, and therefore the better explanation.


This argument (which has its complications) leads to the conclusion that interpretation \emph{should} proceed by charity, for if the interpreter \emph{has} achieved massive agreement, there is also reason to believe that interpretation has succeeded. However, no negative conclusions result: if massive agreement is not reached, there might be agreement in meaning and disagreement in belief, or agreement in belief and disagreement in meaning, or disagreement in both, and the interpretee might not be a speaker at all.


Turning to \emph{a priori} arguments, one idea discussed in the literature is that the mere possibility of radical interpretation provides an argument for charity, since charity is required for radical interpretation to succeed (cf. Lepore and Ludwig 2005: 204–207). In short, the argument goes:


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-39.jpg}
\end{figure}


We can see immediately that the argument as stated is invalid. A conclusion that \emph{does} follow is that charity is \emph{possibly true}, not that it is actually true. Lepore and Ludwig do not make this mistake, since \emph{their} second premise (Lepore and Ludwig 2005: 204) is that Charity is \emph{true} if radical interpretation is \emph{possible}. One may wonder here why the success of radical interpretation in some \emph{possible} world requires the truth of charity in the \emph{actual} world. Presumably, premise (i) is implicitly \emph{strengthened} to concern only possible worlds \emph{w} so close to the actual world \emph{a} that if charity is true in \emph{w}, it is also true in \emph{a}. This makes the second premise of Lepore and Ludwig true, but it makes argument (8) valid as well. However, the strengthening also makes premise (i) much more controversial.


There is a further question why the success of radical interpretation would require charity in the first place. As pointed out by Glüer (2011: 143), \emph{any} applicable principle that would map available evidence on meaning would suffice for the radical interpreter. Charity is just one among many. It is indeed one of the most plausible principles, but this plausibility does not derive from its being alone. Further, Davidson has explicitly denied that he argued for charity from radical interpretation. He suggests rather that on his view, radical interpretation is possible \emph{because} charity is true (Davidson 1994: 127).


A different argument for charity is based on belief holism.\footnote{That Davidson argues this way is stressed in Glüer (2011: 114–119).} In a crucial passage, Davidson says:



\begin{quote}


If I am right in attributing the belief to you, then you must have a pattern of beliefs much like mine. No wonder, then, I can interpret your words correctly only by interpreting so as to put us largely in agreement.


(Davidson 1977: 200)



\end{quote}


The reasoning seems to be that having certain \emph{concepts} requires having some general beliefs and certain patterns among the particular beliefs. For instance, “I can believe a cloud is passing before the sun, but only because I believe there is a sun, that clouds are made of water vapour, that water can exist in liquid and gaseous form; and so on, without end” (Davidson 1977: 201). Then, if the interpreter attributes beliefs with these concepts, he must also attribute some appropriate general beliefs, and appropriately related particular beliefs. Then, large-scale agreement will result.


Even if we accept this belief holism, the argument does not have the consequence of large-scale agreement. As Lepore and Ludwig (2005: 201–202) point out, the agreement required only concerns the general beliefs, which need not be that many. That condition the speaker must have a certain \emph{pattern} among the particular beliefs, however, can be satisfied even if most or all of the particular beliefs are false (by the interpreter's lights). The speaker believes of a table that it is a cloud, and accordingly also believes that it consists of water vapor, and so on. Insanity is often characterized by large-scale coherence among equally crazy beliefs.


Davidson's most basic a priori-style argument for Charity concerns the inadmissibility of too many absurd beliefs. A famous passage is this:



\begin{quote}


Let someone say (and now discourse is direct), “There's a hippopotamus in the refrigerator”; am I necessarily right in reporting him as having said that there is a hippopotamus in the refrigerator? Perhaps; but under questioning he goes on, “It's roundish, has a wrinkled skin, does not mind being touched. It has a pleasant taste, at least the juice, and it costs a dime. I squeeze two or three for breakfast.” After some finite amount of such talk we slip over the line where it is plausible or even possible to say correctly that he said there was a hippopotamus in the refrigerator, for it becomes clear he means something else by at least some of his words than I do. The simplest hypothesis so far is that my word ‘hippopotamus’ no longer translates his word ‘hippopotamus’; my word ‘orange’ might do better.


(Davidson 1969: 100–101)



\end{quote}


There is a strong intuition that the homophonic interpretation \emph{hippopotamus} is absurd and the nonhomophonic \emph{orange} is clearly better. The former cannot really be right; it “does not make sense.”


This is in accordance with how the principle of charity was originally introduced, under that name.\footnote{Cf. Wilson (1959).} How wrong can you be about something and still correctly be taken to be talking about it? Not extremely much, the claim is. However, the intuition of the example only shows that between an absurd and a nonabsurd interpretation, the latter is to be chosen, other (global) things equal.


This may indeed be seen as a good \emph{a priori} argument. But note that this intuition does not alone support the view that absurd interpretations \emph{without} nonabsurd alternatives are unacceptable. And even if there were an intuition against absurd interpretations categorically, this would not suffice for justifying negative conclusions; that the failure of finding nonabsurd interpretations by charity is a sufficient reason for saying that the interpretee is a nonspeaker. Nor would it suffice for justifying the maximizing principle that \emph{all} interpretations with alternatives that are \emph{better} should be discarded, even if they are not themselves absurd, merely suboptimal.


Consider the possibility that the interpretability relation, \emph{x can interpret y}, is not transitive: A can interpret B, B can interpret C, but A cannot interpret C, because differences between A and B, and between B and C, are small enough, but the differences between A and C are too great. From A's perspective, B is a speaker and interpreter, and by Charity B successfully interprets C. So A has reason both to say that C is a speaker and that C is not a speaker. If this possibility \emph{cannot} be ruled out \emph{a priori}, then there is no \emph{a priori} argument that charitable interpretability by \emph{us} is a necessary condition for being a speaker. And we can make an analogous argument about nonabsurd but suboptimal interpretations. All in all, the justification of charity remains much of an open question.

% Notes
\section{References}


Davidson, D. (1967). Truth and meaning. In \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 17–36. Originally published in \emph{Synthèse} 17(1967):304–23.


———. (1969). On saying that. In \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 93–108. Originally published in \emph{Synthèse} 19(1969):130–46.


———. (1970). Mental events. In \emph{Actions and Events}. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 207–225. Originally published in Foster, L., and Swanson, J.W. (eds). \emph{Experience and Theory}. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press (1970).


———. (1973). Radical interpretation. In \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 125–139. Originally published in \emph{Dialectica} 27(1973):313–328.


———. (1974a). Belief and the basis of meaning. In \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 141–154. Originally published in \emph{Synthèse} 27(1974):329–343.


———. (1974b). On the very idea of a conceptual scheme. In \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 183–198. Originally published in \emph{Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association}, Volume 47 (1974).


———. (1974c). Replies to David Lewis and W. V. Quine. \emph{Synthèse} 27:345–349.


———. (1975). Thought and talk. In \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 155–170. Originally published in Guttenplan, S. (ed.). \emph{Mind and Language}. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1975).


———. (1976). Reply to Foster. In \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 171–179. Originally published in Evans, G. and McDowell, J. (eds). \emph{Truth and Meaning. Essays in Semantics}. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1976), pp. 33–41.


———. (1977). The method of truth in metaphysics. In \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 199–214.


———. (1979). The inscrutability of reference. In \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 227–241.


———. (1980). A unified theory of thought, meaning and action. In \emph{Problems of Rationality}. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 151–166.


———. (1984). \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


———. (1986a). A coherence theory of truth and knowledge. In \emph{Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective}. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 137–153. Originally published in Lepore, E. (ed.). \emph{Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson}. Oxford: Blackwell (1986).


———. (1986b). A nice derangement of epitaphs. In \emph{Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson}, E. Lepore (ed.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 89–107. Reprinted in \emph{Truth, Language, and History}. Oxford: Clarendon Press (2005c). Page references to the reprint.


———. (1994). Radical interpretation interpreted. \emph{Philosophical Perspectives} 8:121–128.


———. (1999). Reply to Andrew Cutrofello. In \emph{The Philosophy of Donald Davidson}, L.E. Hahn (ed.). La Salle and Chicago, IL: Open Court, pp. 342–344.


———. (2001a). \emph{Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


———. (2001b). Three varieties of knowledge. In \emph{Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective}. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 205–220.


———. (2005a). Meaning, truth and evidence. In \emph{Truth, Language, and History}, Donald Davidson (ed.). Clarendon Press, pp. 47–62. Originally published in R. Barrett and R. Gibson, eds. (1990). \emph{Perspectives on Quine}. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 68–79.


———. (2005b). \emph{Truth and Predication}. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press.


Davidson, D. and Glüer, K. (1995). Relations and transitions. An interview with Donald Davidson. \emph{Dialectica} 49:75–86.


Evans, G. and McDowell, J. (eds) (1976). \emph{Truth and Meaning. Essays in Semantics}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Fodor, J. and Lepore, E. (1994). Is radical interpretation possible. \emph{Philosophical Perspectives} 8:101–119.


Føllesdal, D. (1975). Meaning and experience. In \emph{Mind and Language}, S. Guttenplan (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 25–44.


Foster, J. (1976). Meaning and truth theory. In \emph{Truth and Meaning. Essays in Semantics}, G. Evans and J. McDowell (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1–32.


García-Carpintero, M. (2012). Foundational semantics, descriptive theories. \emph{Philosophy Compass} 7:397–409.


Glüer, K. (2006). The status of charity I. Conceptual truth or a posteriori necessity? \emph{International Journal of Philosophical Studies} 14:337–359.


———. (2011). \emph{Donald Davidson. A Short Introduction}. New York: Oxford University Press.


Guttenplan, S. (ed.) (1975). \emph{Mind and Language}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Krantz, D.H. \emph{et al}. (1971). \emph{Foundations of Measurement}, (Volume I). New York: Academic Press. Republished by Dover Publications (2007).


Lepore, E. and Ludwig, K. (2005). \emph{Donald Davidson. Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


\emph{Lepore, E. (ed.) (1986).} Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson\emph{. Oxford: Blackwell.}


Lewis, D. (1974). Radical interpretation. \emph{Synthèse} 27:331–344.


Loar, B. (1986). \emph{Mind and Meaning}. Cambridge, UK: California University Press.


Pagin, P. (1999). Radical interpretation and compositional structure. In \emph{Discussions with Donald Davidson; Truth, Meaning and Knowledge}, U. Zeglen (ed.). London: Routledge, pp. 59–74.


———. (2006). The status of charity II: charity, probability and simplicity. \emph{International Journal of Philosophical Studies} 14:361–383.


Quine, W.V.O. (1960). \emph{Word and Object}. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.


Williamson, T. (2004). Philosophical “intuitions” and scepticism about judgment. \emph{Dialectica} 58:109–153.


Wilson, N.L. (1959). Substances without substrata. \emph{Review of Metaphysics} 12:521–539.

\chapter{14. Davidson's Measurement-Theoretic Analogy}


Piers Rawling

\section[{1. Introduction}]{1. Introduction\footnote{My understanding of Donald Davidson's work has benefitted from discussion with many people over the years – primarily with Don himself, when he was directing my dissertation. I owe him a huge debt in many ways (although he would, no doubt, have disputed at least some of what I have to say later). Kirk Ludwig also deserves special mention in this regard – from his efforts when he was Don's TA in one of the first philosophy courses that I took, to the present day.}}


Donald Davidson is famous for, among other things, his theory of radical interpretation – an account of how it is that we can attribute meanings to people's words, and contents to their mental states, based on an apparent paucity of evidence. This account is infused with ideas from, and applications of, the general theory of measurement, as well as one specific instance of that theory – decision theory. In addition, however, Davidson also applies measurement theory – in the form of his “measurement theoretic analogy” – from outside the theory of radical interpretation, to yield a novel account of one of its notable features: the indeterminacy of interpretation.


This indeterminacy results from the fact that the available evidence will never force a unique interpretation of any interpretee, no matter how well you get to know her; there will always be, claims Davidson, a multiplicity of acceptable and competing interpretations. Furthermore, Davidson claims, it is not as though one of these interpretations is the correct one, but we cannot determine which; rather, there is no fact of this matter.


Davidson's view here echoes a position on scientific theories taken by certain opponents of realism. Realists in the philosophy of science acknowledge, of course, that scientific theories are underdetermined by the evidence – there will always be more than one theory that can account for the empirical data. But what makes realists \emph{realists} is that they think there is a fact of the matter concerning which one competing theory is true, regardless of our ability to determine this. Davidson's view of the indeterminacy of interpretation, then, is not like the realist's view of underdetermination of theory by evidence. Rather, his view bears a closer analogy to that of an instrumentalist who claims that there is no fact of the matter as to which of several competing but empirically adequate theories (i.e., theories that are inconsistent with one another yet each account for all the empirical data) is true.


Such an instrumentalist claims that we should abandon the quest for truth when it comes to scientific theories that go beyond our observational capacities. Rather, such theories should be viewed as convenient instruments that aid us in making accurate observational predictions about, and successful interventions in, our world. Such a view may be tied to an epistemic conception of truth, according to which the truth cannot outrun our ability to know it. If observation is required for scientific knowledge, and theory outruns our powers of observation, then theories cannot be known. If in addition truth-value is tied to knowledge, then theories lack a truth-value – it is not merely that their truth-values cannot be known; rather, they have no truth-value. We might say that their truth-values are not merely epistemically indeterminate, but metaphysically so.


Indeterminacy, then, enters this instrumentalist account in two places. First, there is the claim that observation does not determine theory. And second, it is claimed that truth-value is metaphysically indeterminate in the absence of knowledge obtained through observation. Compare this with Davidson's account of the indeterminacy of interpretation. As a parallel to the first indeterminacy, there is the claim that many interpretations account for the behavioral data. As a parallel to the second indeterminacy, we have Davidson's claim that “meaning is entirely determined by observable behaviour” (Davidson 1990: 314). And the same goes for all the propositional attitudes – there is “no more” to, say, beliefs than what can be gleaned from radical interpretation, and radical interpretations are not unique (cf. Quine 1960).


So now it looks as though Davidson must abandon claims to the effect that we really do have propositional attitudes – just as the instrumentalist earlier abandoned truth-values when it comes to theory, so Davidson must abandon truth-values when it comes to, say, remarks to the effect that so-and-so believes that \emph{p}. Or, to put it more starkly, there are no beliefs, nor any other propositional attitudes for that matter. The indeterminacy of interpretation is not only epistemic, but also metaphysical.


However, is this plausible? It is at this point that Davidson deploys his measurement-theoretic analogy. The indeterminacy of interpretation, he claims, is no more puzzling than the “indeterminacy of length.” Just as we can assign different scales to measure length (meters and feet, and so on), so we can assign different schemes of interpretation to “measure” another's meanings and mental states.


In Section 2, I will take a closer look at radical interpretation and its indeterminacy. In Section 3, I will examine a special case of indeterminacy: the “inscrutability of reference.” The measurement-theoretic analogy may help here to dispel the worry that we have no mental states. But in Section 4, I will explore the general case, and here the results are not so positive.

\section{2. Radical Interpretation and Indeterminacy}


You find yourself stranded on a desert island with one fellow castaway, and rapidly discover that you cannot communicate with her; indeed, it is perhaps not clear initially that she \emph{has} a language. You must build your interpretation of her, as agent and speaker, from scratch. How is such \emph{radical} interpretation possible? Davidson is famous for pursuing this question by exploring the constraints on interpreting the raw data of overt behavior that we must obey if we are to count as interpreting our fellows as speakers and thinkers. He argues that for interaction to be mutual interpretation, the parties must make assumptions about each other – to deny these assumptions is to refuse to engage in interpretation. In a sense, then, no interpretation \emph{is} built \emph{entirely} from scratch, and it is this that makes radical interpretation possible.


What are these assumptions? Broadly speaking, the idea is that in order for our attribution of meanings and mental states to another person to count as interpretation, our attributions must make her out to be rational, and to have largely true “plain” beliefs – beliefs about such matters as whether, say, there is a solid object in her grasp. Davidson largely follows W.V.O. Quine in appealing to the famous “principle of charity”:\footnote{A term coined by Wilson (1959). See Quine (1960: 59).}



\begin{quote}


\dots{} assertions startlingly false on the face of them are likely to turn on hidden differences of language. This maxim is strong enough in all of us to swerve us even from the homophonic method that is so fundamental to the very acquisition and use of the mother tongue.


The common sense behind the maxim is that one's interlocutor's silliness, beyond a certain point, is less likely than bad translation – or, in the domestic case, linguistic divergence.


(Quine 1960: 59)



\end{quote}


A crucial form of silliness for Quine is the flouting of logic: “fair translation preserves logical laws” (Quine 1960: 59). To call this “charity” is, of course, a witty misnomer: to be uncharitable is to disengage from the practice of interpretation (I will not worry here about the difference between interpretation and translation). Davidson (1984a: xvii) “appl[ies] the Principle of Charity across the board. So applied, it counsels us quite generally to prefer theories of interpretation that minimize disagreement.”


What makes interpretation possible, according to Davidson (1990: 325), “is the structure the normative character of thought, desire, speech, and action imposes on correct attributions of attitudes to others, and hence on interpretations of their speech and explanations of their actions.” Davidson's purpose is to show how it is possible to attribute meanings and other propositional attitudes when observable behavior is our only evidence. He gives us a sketch of how an idealized interpretation might proceed. Neither the procedure nor the implicit procedural sequence in the sketch is, however, to be taken literally. Rather, the function of the sketch is to illustrate the structural restrictions on interpretation: interpretation is possible because the interpreter is forced to interpret the behavior of interpretees as conforming to patterns dictated by the principle of charity – that is, it is constitutive of the propositional attitudes that they be largely rational, where rationality encompasses, among others, norms of evidence, preference, desirability, and action. This is not to say that there is no room for irrationality, but it cannot be too pervasive. Just as there is no chaos unless against a background of order, so there is no irrationality unless against a background of rationality.


Interpretation begins with observable behavior, where this is restricted to bodily movements, nonintentionally described, and their attendant circumstances. Various hypotheses are then entertained – concerning such matters as which behaviors are actions, which of those are utterances of sentences, and what the agent's attitudes toward those sentences are. Two key sentential attitudes for Davidson are those of holding true a sentence, and preferring one sentence true above another.


Suppose we have worked out that an agent holds true one of her sentences, \emph{u}, under certain circumstances, but holds it false under others. How are we to work out what she means by it? We confront the following difficulty: her holding \emph{u} true is dependent both upon what she means by it, and upon what she believes the circumstances to be. Meaning and belief must be accessed simultaneously. How is this to be accomplished? Davidson (1990: 319) appeals to “Quine's key idea \dots{} that the correct interpretation of an agent by another cannot intelligibly admit certain kinds and degrees of difference between interpreter and interpreted with respect to belief.” That is, roughly speaking, in the absence of some obvious reason to deny it, the interpreter should assume that she and her interpretee share many of their beliefs. And if the interpreter can work out what belief \emph{u} expresses, she can work out what \emph{u} means.


In general, however, the problem is even more challenging: in interpreting patterns of bodily movement, we must invoke a host of propositional attitudes. And within the bounds of the constraints imposed by charity, there are arbitrarily many ways of attributing the attitudes so as to account for the bodily movements.


The more restrictions imposed, however, the less the indeterminacy, and decision theory is a source of further restriction. Davidson (1985) sees a modified version of Richard Jeffrey's (1983) version of decision theory as a crucial part of the normative structure imposed by interpretation: qualitative normative constraints (such as, e.g., transitivity) are imposed on preferences for the truth of (initially uninterpreted) sentences. An agent might have individually weird preferences from our point of view, and he might violate standard canons of preference on occasion, but apparent wholesale unconcern for such canons throughout his pattern of preference would alert us to the fact that we were not tracking \emph{preference}.


Jeffrey employs a uniform ontology of propositions, and sees preference as a matter of preferring some propositions true above others. If these preferences satisfy certain qualitative conditions – the Bolker–Jeffrey preference axioms (which include transitivity of preference, for instance) – then there are two mappings of the set of propositions to the real numbers: one yielding degrees of belief, the other yielding conditional expectations of utility, where the degrees of belief are “coherent” – that is, obey the laws of probability – and the conditional expectations of utility represent preference (the higher the proposition on the preference ranking, the greater its conditional expected utility). (The proof of this “representation theorem” is due to Bolker – see, e.g., Bolker 1967 and Jeffrey 1983: 112, 142–149.)


Davidson modifies Jeffrey's ontology to quantify over (initially) uninterpreted sentences of a language, rather than propositions, because access to the propositions that sentences express (insofar as they do) is, of course, a goal, not a starting point, of interpretation.\footnote{There are technical difficulties here that Davidson does not go into – for example, Bolker's representation theorem requires that the domain of preference be a complete atomless Boolean algebra. I shall ignore such difficulties for present purposes.} Davidson then applies the theory in two distinct ways (see, e.g., Davidson 1985, 1990: 326–328).


First, he supposes that we have formulated hypotheses as to the agent's preferences across uninterpreted sentences, and that we have identified a sentential connective with certain properties as a truth-functional connective. He then shows that provided the agent's preferences conform to the Bolker-Jeffrey preference axioms as applied to sentences, the agent's sentential connectives are structurally fixed relative to our hypotheses concerning the agent's sentential preferences.\footnote{In fact, as I have shown elsewhere (Rawling 2003: 109–111), decision theory is not required to get thus far. In effect Davidson is using strict preference as a mark of logical inequivalence: given Davidson's suppositions, an agent's sentential connectives are structurally fixed relative to any indicator of inequivalence.}


Second, having uncovered the truth-functional sentential connectives, the agent is seen to have preferences over (roughly) the sentences of sentential logic, and if these preferences conform to the Bolker–Jeffrey preference axioms then, applying the representation theorem earlier (to sentences rather than propositions), we can be assured that the sentences carry (roughly) coherent degrees of belief and conditional expected utilities that measure preference.\footnote{In decision theories such as Ramsey's (1931), the qualitative preference axioms fix degrees of belief uniquely, and utilities up to a linear transformation (yielding an interval scale, structurally similar to, say, the measure of temperature in Celsius or Fahrenheit). But unless utilities are unbounded above and below, Bolker–Jeffrey degrees of belief and utilities are determined less uniquely (see Jeffrey 1983). However, from Davidson's perspective, this is merely a further part of the indeterminacy of interpretation. Indeed, a perusal of the axioms in chapter 9 of Jeffrey (1983) should make it clear that charity only requires an agent's preferences to meet an approximation of the Bolker-Jeffrey preference axioms, thus leaving even more room for indeterminacy.}


And, of course, if we manage to uncover the truth-functional sentential connectives and assign preferences and approximate degrees of belief across an agent's sentences, then we have part of the initial infrastructure upon which to build a complete interpretation.\footnote{Notice that if we have access to degrees of belief, it seems we can determine which sentences the agent holds true – those that are assigned degree of belief one. But perhaps holding true should be taken less strictly: degree of belief one is “infinitely stringent” in the sense that if p(A) = 1, the ratio P(A)\Slash{}p(Not A) is infinite.}


To say that interpretation must follow the dictates of the principle of charity is to say, among other things, that interpretation must make out the interpretee as rational. Decision theory and traditional logic give, in combination, an account of what it is to be rational in the “thin” sense of being coherent and consistent in one's preferences and beliefs. But charity, for Davidson, extends beyond this. For example, as noted earlier, the interpreter should assume that she and her interpretee share many of their beliefs, and, indeed, “it cannot happen that most of our plainest beliefs about what exists in the world are false” (Davidson 1991). The strictures of charity notwithstanding, however, complete interpretations are far from unique: even in the face of all the relevant evidence (were we able to acquire it), the principle of charity leaves many interpretations open: “\dots{} the evidence on which all these matters depend gives us no way of separating out the contributions of thought, action, desire, and meaning one by one. Total theories are what we must construct, and many theories will do equally well” (Davidson 1984c: 241).


These total theories are holistic in the sense that propositional attitudes can occur only in interdependent patterns. The foregoing considerations speak in favor of the idea that attitudes must meet certain criteria of rationality: for instance, there are strong presumptions that if an agent believes that \emph{p\&q}, then she believes that \emph{p}, and if her degree of belief in \emph{p} is high, then her degree of belief in its negation is low. And there are other forms of interdependence – for example:



\begin{quote}


In order to believe the cat went up the oak tree I must have many true beliefs about cats and oak trees, this cat and this tree, the place, appearance and habits of cats and trees, and so on; but the same holds if I wonder whether the cat went up the oak tree, fear that it did, hope that it did, wish that it had, or intend to make it do so.


(Davidson 1982: 321)



\end{quote}


Two questions immediately arise: how rigid is the interdependence, and how large must the pattern be?


Davidson rejects a sharp analytic–synthetic distinction. In this context, the rejection is tantamount to denying that conceptual grasp depends upon a fixed list of particular beliefs:



\begin{quote}


\dots{} can the dog believe of an object that it is a tree? This would seem impossible unless we suppose the dog has many general beliefs about trees: that they are growing things, that they need soil and water, that they have leaves or needles, that they burn. There is no fixed list of things someone with the concept of a tree must believe, but without many general beliefs, there would be no reason to identify a belief as a belief about a tree. \dots{}


(Davidson 1982: 320)



\end{quote}


This passage sensibly suggests both a flexible interdependence, and a degree of flexibility concerning the size of the pattern of beliefs that comprise a necessary concomitant of any particular belief.\footnote{However, Davidson does make remarks that can be interpreted as denying such flexibilities: \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf \textbf{(A)} Frege said that only in the context of a sentence does a word have meaning; in the same vein, he might have added that only in the context of the language does a sentence (and therefore a word) have meaning. (Davidson 1984d: 22) \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf \textbf{(B)} Since the identity of a thought cannot be divorced from its place in the logical network of other thoughts, it cannot be relocated in the network without becoming a different thought. (Davidson 1982: 321) \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf Davidson has retracted somewhat from (A) (see, for example, note 3 of Davidson 1994), and, under its most stringent interpretation, (B) misstates his intent (at least as conveyed in verbal remarks).}


If the required scale of the pattern were too large, interpretation might be rendered practically impossible, because we could not attribute one belief unless we attributed beliefs on a huge number of abstruse matters.


If the required interdependence were too rigid, there would be the danger that, for example, an agent could not move from believing that \emph{p} to believing that \emph{not p}, because the interdependence would entail that \emph{p} could be no part of the content of the new belief. I could not, say, move from believing that Bush is president to believing that he is not, because my concept of “president” would not remain invariant across the two beliefs. This, however, is to misconstrue the nature of the interdependence.\footnote{I am not the first person to note this: G. Priest, for example, makes the point (on p. 78 of his review of \emph{Theory and Meaning} (by D. Papineau; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) in \emph{The Philosophical Quarterly} 31(1981):77–79).} There are dependences in which changes in one factor can leave other factors stable. Consider Ohm's law: voltage (in certain ideal circuits, at least) is the product of resistance and current (\emph{V} = \emph{RI}). Here we have three mutually interdependent quantities, and certainly a change in one of them must result in a change in \emph{one} of the others, but the third can remain fixed (e.g., by increasing the voltage in a circuit of fixed resistance, we increase the current). In the case of the contents of propositional attitudes and utterances, of course, we have a vast number of variables – but the same point applies: changes cause disruptions, but their scope will typically affect only a very small portion of the network of propositional attitudes and meanings. And I can share part of your network without sharing all of it (two circuits can share a potential difference of three volts, while differing in current and resistance).


To sum up, interpretations must be constructed on the basis of observable behavior. Any interpretation that saves the behavioral phenomena and satisfies charity (I will refer to such interpretations as “adequate”) is as good as any other – and there will be many interpretations of any given interpretee that fit these criteria. That is, the constraints on interpretation are not sufficient to force uniqueness – myriad interpretations of any given interpretee are adequate – so that interpretation is inevitably indeterminate. Hence, given the view that there can be nothing more to meaning and the propositional attitudes than the directly observable phenomena provide, there appear to be no facts of the matter concerning what we mean by our words, or the contents of our mental states.


But is this plausible? For example, it leaves us in the following quandary – we apparently have:


\textbf{(1)} Radical interpretation requires charity (recall that this is what makes radical interpretation possible, by ensuring that radical interpretations are not constructed only from nonintentionally described behavior). And charity requires the existence of beliefs (not only must the interpretee have beliefs, but many of them must be true).


\textbf{(2)} There is “no more” to beliefs than what can be gleaned from radical interpretation.


\textbf{(3)} But radical interpretations – including attributions of beliefs – are not uniquely determined by the evidence.


(2) and (3) together seem to entail that there are no beliefs; yet (1) entails that radical interpretation requires their existence.


Thus, if to say that radical interpretation is possible is in part to say that we have beliefs and they can be determined from the stance of the radical interpreter, then radical interpretation appears impossible. Davidson, of course, would disagree. Rather, he claims that the multiplicity of radical interpretations is no more problematic than, say, the multiplicity of scales of length or temperature measurement – radical interpretation is analogous to measurement. In the next section, I will examine how well the analogy applies to one specific kind of indeterminacy: the “inscrutability of reference” (Davidson 1984c).

\section{3. The Inscrutability of Reference}


An interpretation of someone is, as we have seen, a theory concerning both the contents of her mind – what she believes, desires, intends, and so on – and what she means by her utterances. And famously, on Davidson's account, the latter part of an interpretation – the theory of meaning – takes, for a variety of reasons that I will not address here, the form of a theory of truth (see Davidson 1984a). Roughly, the idea is that rather than clauses of the form:



\begin{quote}


In Anne's language, \emph{u} means that \emph{p}



\end{quote}


a theory of meaning for Anne is instead going to issue in clauses of the form:



\begin{quote}


\emph{u} is true in Anne's language if and only if \emph{p}



\end{quote}


So, for example, it might be that:


\textbf{(1)} “Wilton est grand” is true in Anne's language if and only if Wilt is tall.


And this stands proxy for



\begin{quote}


In Anne's language, “Wilton est grand” means that Wilt is tall.



\end{quote}


To continue this adaptation of Davidson's (1984c: 230) own example, since Wilt is tall if and only if the shadow of Wilt is the shadow of a tall thing, then, in addition to (1), we have:


\textbf{(2)} “Wilton est grand” is true in Anne's language if and only if the shadow of Wilt is the shadow of a tall thing


Note that, in order to preserve truth conditions, we have shifted both the referent of “Wilton” from Wilt to Wilt's shadow, and the extension of the predicate “est grand” from the set of tall things to the set of shadows of tall things. And if meaning is a matter only of truth conditions (more on this later), we can then interpret “Wilton” as referring either to Wilt or to Wilt's shadow (assuming for the purposes of this example that Wilt always has one, and only one, shadow), and “est grand” as picking out either tall things or their shadows. The referent of “Wilton” and the extension of “est grand” are thus “inscrutable.”


Mapping objects to their shadows is but one illustration of inscrutability – as Davidson (1984c: 229) puts it:



\begin{quote}


The simplest, least questionable way of showing that reference is inscrutable depends on the idea of a permutation of the universe, some one-to-one mapping of every object onto another. Let us suppose \emph{f} is such a permutation. If we have a satisfactory scheme of reference for a language that speaks of this universe, we can produce another scheme of reference by using the permutation: whenever, on the first scheme, a name refers to an object \emph{x}, on the second scheme it refers to \emph{f}(\emph{x}); whenever, on the first scheme, a predicate refers to (is true of) each thing x such that \emph{Fx}, on the second scheme it refers to each thing \emph{x} such that \emph{Ff}(\emph{x}). Assuming that reference is geared to an appropriate characterization of a relation like satisfaction in each case, it is easy to see that the truth conditions the second scheme assigns to a sentence will in every case be equivalent to the truth conditions assigned to that sentence by the first scheme.



\end{quote}


In fact, we need not actually permute objects onto other objects; we could use distance and direction instead. Whenever Anne utters something of the form “x est grand,” we could interpret her as saying that x is tall, but we could equally well, on Davidson's account, interpret her as saying that whatever is \emph{d} feet west of x is \emph{d} feet west of something tall, for any real number \emph{d} (negative numbers are employed in moving east, as it were). Assuming Anne is sincere in uttering “Wilton est grand,” we can then interpret, for each value of \emph{d}, Anne as having a belief of the form:



\begin{quote}


(W) Whatever is \emph{d} feet west of Wilt is \emph{d} feet west of something tall.



\end{quote}


She has all these beliefs, at least tacitly (or so we will assume for the sake of argument). And we are not forced by the canons of interpretation, as Davidson sees them, to see Anne's utterance as expressing one of them rather than another. We just have to pick one, by picking a value of \emph{d}. But having picked, this then ramifies throughout our interpretation. Suppose we make \emph{d} equal to three. Then:


\textbf{(3)} “Wilton est grand” is true in Anne's language if and only if whatever is 3 ft west of Wilt is 3 ft west of something tall


gives the meaning of “Wilton est grand” in this interpretation of Anne – that is, in this interpretation, “Wilton est grand” means that whatever is 3 ft west of Wilt is 3 ft west of something tall. Now suppose we have good evidence that


\textbf{(4)} “Wilton est à côté de Guillame” is true in Anne's language if and only if Wilt is next to Bill


“Wilton” now refers to whatever is 3 ft west of Wilt (which may, of course, simply be a region of space), so (4) is not going to serve to give the meaning of “Wilton est à côté de Guillame” in our current interpretation – rather, that would be:


\textbf{(5)} “Wilton est à côté de Guillame” is true in Anne's language if and only if whatever is 3 ft west of Wilt is next to whatever is 3 ft west of Bill.


Inscrutability of reference, then, is a very systematic form of indeterminacy. And it would appear that it need raise no challenge to the existence of mental states: rather, as previously, it would seem that inscrutability simply draws our attention to, among other things, the fact that in addition to believing that Wilt is tall, Anne also has infinitely many other tacit beliefs of form (W). When we interpret Anne, we have to pick a referent for “Wilton,” and that is going to dictate which of this infinity of Anne's beliefs we interpret “Wilton est grand” as expressing.


How does the measurement theoretic analogy apply here? First, here is a brief account of the four common kinds of measurement scale: nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio. (I include this discussion largely for the sake of completeness – it will turn out that the details of the different kinds of scale will not play a central role in the argument.) In distinguishing between them, it is helpful to consider the acceptable transformations between scales of the same type. Nominal scales use numbers merely as names – football jersey numbers are a standard example, and any transformation is acceptable provided that it that does not assign the same number to two different players. Ordinal scales use the fact that numbers are ordered to represent an ordering of some relation – and only its ordering: any transformation that preserves order is acceptable. The Mohs scale of mineral hardness is an example: the higher a mineral's ranking on the scale, the harder it is, but neither the numerical difference between scores, nor their ratios, have any significance.


On an interval scale, differences are significant. Any transformation that preserves differences and their directions will produce another acceptable interval scale. Consider temperature measurement on the Celsius (centigrade) and Fahrenheit scales. Both scales track the relation “is at least as hot as” between objects: the higher the temperature, the hotter the object. And on both scales, the differences between temperatures – temperature intervals – are also significant, in the following way: if the difference between the temperatures of A and B is the same as the difference between the temperatures of C and D on one scale, it will be the same on the other. We can say, then, that the temperature difference between A and B is the same as that between C and D (whereas we cannot say of minerals A, B, C, and D that have respective Mohs hardnesses of 1, 2, 5, and 6, that the hardness difference between A and B is the same as that between C and D – another ordinal hardness scale need only preserve the ordering, not the intervals). If \emph{t} is a transformation function taking us from one interval scale to another, and \emph{x} is the measurement of the quantity in question on the first scale, then there are real numbers \emph{m} (positive) and \emph{b} such that \emph{t}(\emph{x}) = \emph{mx} + \emph{b} yields the measurement on the second.\footnote{This is equivalent to the following conjunction being the case:\protect\endgraf \emph{x} \emph{>} \emph{y} if and only if \emph{t}(\emph{x}) > \emph{t}(\emph{y}); and \emph{x} − \emph{y} = \emph{v} − \emph{w} if and only if \emph{t}(\emph{x}) − \emph{t}(\emph{y}) = \emph{t}(\emph{v}) − \emph{t}(\emph{w})).} Multiplying by 1.8 and adding 32, for instance, takes us from Celsius to Fahrenheit.


On a ratio scale, as the name suggests, ratios are significant in addition to intervals. Transformation functions between ratio scales are just like those between interval scales, except that \emph{b} = 0, so that \emph{t}(\emph{x}) = \emph{mx}. That is, we insist that \emph{t}(0) = 0 because there is a nonarbitrary zero measurement. Consider the measurement of length, for example. All length scales track the relation “is at least as long as” between objects, and all scales agree that there is a nonarbitrary limit to how short objects can be. And we can meaningfully say that one object is, say, twice as long as another, since if an object is twice as long as another on one scale, then it will be twice as long on all scales (\emph{t}(2\emph{x}) = \emph{m}2\emph{x} = 2\emph{mx} = 2\emph{t}(\emph{x})).


On all but nominal scales, then, measurements assign numbers to objects in order to track a qualitative relation (such as “is at least as long as”) in a quantitative way. Two questions concerning Davidson's analogy, then, are: What are analogous to the measured objects and the numbers? Is there something analogous to a relation, or is the analogy to a nominal scale?


Interpretation, as we have seen, is a global enterprise in the sense that not only are meanings assigned to utterances, but also contents to mental states, such as beliefs, desires, and intentions. For the sake of simplicity, I will focus here on Anne's beliefs and the utterances that express them – and for the time being only on her beliefs of form (W) and their expression. In employing a measurement-theoretic analogy, these play the role of the objects to which numbers are assigned. And our interpretative sentences play the role of the numbers: they assign content to Anne's beliefs, and meanings to her utterances.


As we have seen, Anne's sincere utterance of “Wilton est grand” can be interpreted as expressing any belief form (W), provided that suitable adjustments are made elsewhere in the interpretation. And there is a systematic relation among the beliefs of form (W), so we can perhaps draw an analogy to a scale beyond the merely nominal.


Interpretations of Anne can be indexed in accord with our interpretation of her utterance of “Wilton est grand.” Let us assign an index of zero to the interpretation that assigns the proposition that Wilt is tall as the content of that utterance and the belief that it expresses, and an index of \emph{d} to the interpretation that assigns as content to these the proposition that whatever is \emph{d} feet west of Wilt is \emph{d} feet west of something tall. Let \emph{I}(\emph{d}) designate the interpretation with index \emph{d}. Based on Anne's sincere utterance of “Wilton est grand,” \emph{I}(0) attributes to her the belief that Wilt is tall, whereas \emph{I}(\emph{d}) attributes to her the belief that whatever is \emph{d} feet west of Wilt is \emph{d} feet west of something tall (where, as noted previously, \emph{d} can be negative if we are “heading east”). But, given that Anne has all beliefs of form (W), \emph{I}(\emph{d}) is an accurate interpretation of her, whatever the value of \emph{d}, in the sense that it attributes to her a belief that she has, as determined by its content. Are all such interpretations, however, accurate in the sense that they correctly interpret Anne's utterance? Davidson's claim, of course, is that they are: the idea is that all these interpretations are adequate – that is, they are all equally “charitable” and equally good at accounting for Anne's behavior (or, at least, we are assuming this for the sake of argument), and hence there is no fact of the matter concerning which value of \emph{d} is “correct.”


In order to fill out the analogy in our example, however, we need to assume not only that Anne has all beliefs of form (W), but can also express all these beliefs. For instance, let “\emph{s}” name the sentence:



\begin{quote}


Tout ce qui est de trois pieds à l'ouest de Wilt est de trois pieds à l'ouest de quelque chose de grand



\end{quote}


And let us suppose we work out that:


\textbf{(6)} \emph{s} is true in Anne's language if and only if whatever is 3 ft west of Wilt is 3 ft west of something tall.


Then it will also be true that:


\textbf{(7)} \emph{s} is true in Anne's language if and only if Wilt is tall.


According to \emph{I}(0), (6) furnishes the meaning of \emph{s} (or so we will suppose we have concluded). But according to \emph{I}(–3), it is (7) that does so.


To sum up, we are supposing that Anne has all beliefs of form (W), and can express them. \emph{I}(0) interprets these expressions in the “obvious” way, but as far as charity and explanation go, all of the \emph{I}(\emph{d}) do just as well – they are all adequate. Indexing is already numerical, so transformations between one interpretation and another (interpretations being, of course, the analogue of scales) are trivial – although we might say that the analogy is to transformations between interval scales with \emph{m} = 1 and \emph{b} = \emph{d}. In shifting index, we move, as it were, either east or west in the utterance (and corresponding belief) of Anne's that we interpret with our sentence: “Wilt is tall,” and likewise with our sentences of the form: “whatever is \emph{d} feet west of Wilt is \emph{d} feet west of something tall.”


In this somewhat contrived example, then, Davidson appears to be correct: shifting between different interpretations by shifting indices is akin in some ways to switching measurement scales, and seems relatively benign. So the case furnishes us with a model of how the analogy is supposed to work. Note the ingredients. Anne has a set of beliefs, and sentences that express them. These beliefs are related in a systematic way, and we can track them with any one of innumerable adequate interpretations. These all attribute the same set of belief contents to Anne, in the sense that the same set of propositions is employed by each interpretation to assign contents to the beliefs in question, with the relations between the beliefs being mirrored by the relations between the sentences that interpret them – the only thing that differentiates one interpretation from another is a “shift” east or west.


In order to have any chance of applying to the general case, however, we need to tweak things somewhat. So far, I have followed tradition in identifying beliefs by their propositional contents. But this is not going to work for the general case, as I will discuss later. However, Davidson can avail himself of another way of identifying Anne's beliefs – namely, by the sentences of Anne's that express them. Identifying beliefs in this way means that although the interpretations all attribute the same \emph{set} of belief contents to Anne, each of the beliefs in question is assigned a \emph{different} content by each different interpretation. In the discussion earlier, Anne's sentence “Wilton est grand” is taken as expressing different beliefs on different interpretations. But the idea now is to think of this sentence as expressing one and the same belief across different interpretations – a belief that gets assigned \emph{different} contents by different interpretations: \emph{I}(0) assigns to it the content that Wilt is tall, but \emph{I}(\emph{d}) assigns to it the content that whatever is \emph{d} feet west of Wilt is \emph{d} feet west of something tall.

\section{4. The General Case}


I shall now move outside the confines of my simple example to explore the general case of a full interpretation of all of Anne's utterances and propositional attitudes. For simplicity, I will focus initially, as before, on Anne's beliefs and the sentences of hers that express them. And I will assume that there are many adequate full interpretations of Anne. How, then, does the analogy play out in the case of a full interpretation of Anne's beliefs?


As we saw in the previous section, beliefs can be identified by the utterances that express them, and thus one and the same belief can be assigned different contents by differing interpretations in analogy to one and the same object being assigned different numbers on different scales of length. Holding a sentence true (recall section II) takes centre stage: to hold (sincerely) a sentence true is to express a belief with it, and it is the beliefs so expressed that are to remain invariant across interpretations. What varies across interpretations are the contents of these beliefs, as assigned by the interpreter using her sentences. It is these content assigning sentences that are the analogue of numbers; the interpretee's beliefs (as identified by those of the interpretee's sentences that express them – the “held true” sentences) are the analogue of the relata – the objects measured. In measurement theory, the relata are invariant across different measurement scales. In moving from feet to meters, for example, we are measuring the length of the \emph{same objects} using different scales; thus, in interpreting Anne's beliefs, we should be “measuring” the \emph{same beliefs} using different interpretations. This, it seems to me, is a minimal condition for there to be an analogy between measurement theory and interpretation. And in order to accomplish this, we cannot identify beliefs by their content, since indeterminacy entails exactly that different interpretations assign \emph{different} contents to the interpretee's beliefs – and we are not guaranteed, as we are in the simple example from Section 3, that all the different contents will be represented among the beliefs assigned by every interpretation. Hence the requirement that we identify beliefs by the held true sentences.


So much for the relata; what about the relations? Each length scale preserves the relation “is at least as long as” – the greater the number on any given length scale, the longer the object; and if it is longer on one, it is longer on all the others. Is there an analogue to this in the case of the totality of Anne's beliefs? The lack of such an analogue need not spoil the analogy – no analogy is without some disanalogies. Or the analogy might, of course, be to a nominal scale, in which case all that matters is that each interpretation assign distinct contents to distinct beliefs. As we saw in Section 2, there is flexible interdependence among beliefs, so that not all of a belief's relations are essential to it, in the sense of being necessary for it to be the belief that it is. However, there do seem to be some relations between beliefs that should remain invariant across different interpretations – many of their logical relations, for instance. And our interpretative content-assigning sentences, with their own logical relations, are ideal for doing this, of course. (If we move beyond beliefs to the other propositional attitudes, other relations come into play – such as preference and relative \emph{degrees of} belief.)


The upshot, then, is that, on this account of Davidson's measurement-theoretic analogy, although different interpretations assign different contents to one and the same belief (identified by the sentence of the interpretee that expresses it), the totality of the interpretee's beliefs (as determined by the totality of the interpretee's held true sentences), and many of the logical relations between them, remain invariant from one adequate interpretation to another. But is this plausible in the general case, if the underdetermination of adequate interpretations by the evidence is significant? In the example from Section 3, the analogy works because Anne was assumed to have all beliefs of form (W), and our differing interpretations simply moved the assignment of the proposition that Wilt is tall westward through these beliefs, as it were. The general case, however, is far more complex.


First, what about keeping invariant sufficient of the logical relations among the beliefs? Each held true sentence would always have to be interpreted so as to preserve, at least roughly, its logical location relative to the others. But surely one place in which adequate, but competing, interpretations might differ is precisely in the attribution of such locations. On one interpretation, \emph{u} is interpreted as meaning that \emph{p}, on another it is interpreted as meaning that \emph{q}, but where is the guarantee that \emph{p} and \emph{q} are going to interact in the same way logically with the interpretations of the other held true sentences of the interpretee?


Second, how do we know that all adequate interpretations are going to attribute exactly the same set of beliefs (as determined by held true sentences) to the interpretee? I doubt that the beliefs attributed by one adequate interpretation need even map one to one onto the beliefs attributed by another. Adequate interpretations might, for instance, differ as to whether two different held true sentences express one belief or two. Further, adequate interpretations might also differ on which noises that emanate from the interpretee are to be interpreted as sincerely held true sentences.


And when we turn to include all the propositional attitudes, this difficulty appears even more pressing. Consider the following possibility: on one interpretation, a piece of behavior, \emph{B}, is interpreted as a signal; on another interpretation (that also saves all the relevant phenomena), \emph{B} is interpreted as a simple scratch.\footnote{This example is similar to one suggested to me by Kirk Ludwig.} Thus, on the first interpretation, \emph{B} is explained by a complex of propositional attitude states that is simply larger than that invoked in the second. Or, indeed, the explanation of \emph{B} on some scheme might invoke no propositional attitudes at all. This would, to reiterate, violate the requirement that the set of propositional attitudes (as the analogue of the set of objects measured) remain invariant.


In the final section, I will briefly explore some different possible conclusions. At one extreme, we might conclude that interpretation is radically and metaphysically indeterminate, and that there are no propositional attitudes. At the other, we might deny both that interpretation is as indeterminate as Davidson claims, and that indeterminacy has metaphysical consequences – as opposed to merely reflecting our epistemic limitations.

\section{5. Instrumentalism or Realism?}


If propositional attitudes are not invariant across interpretations, what are, if anything? Quine (1960: ix) has us tracking “men's dispositions to respond overtly to socially observable stimulations.” And according to Davidson (1984c: 237), “\dots{} a satisfactory theory is one that yields an acceptable explanation of verbal behaviour and dispositions.” So one possibility is that behavioral dispositions are the invariant nodes across different schemes of interpretation, and we “measure” them with propositional attitude attributions. Just as we attribute numbers in the form of lengths to track the relation “is at least as long as,” so we attribute propositional attitudes to track behavioral dispositions.


On this account, then, the invariants have the following form: a disposition to \emph{B} under circumstance \emph{C}, where \emph{B} is a bodily movement nonintentionally described, and \emph{C} is specified without reference to propositional attitudes of the agent. A full interpretation of an agent – something unattainable by mere mortals – would account for the totality of the agent's behavioral dispositions. And all adequate interpretations must agree on these dispositions; but (modulo charity, of course) that is all they must agree on. Propositional attitude states seem to be mere posits; they vary from interpretation to interpretation.


To return to the instrumentalist in the philosophy of science, she holds something akin to the following. The constraints on a theory are that it saves the phenomena, and that it meets some criteria of coherence and simplicity (and elegance, perhaps). Theories will (usually) posit entities that underlie the appearances; but, according to the instrumentalist, these are only posits – constructions designed to save the phenomena. If two theories were to save the phenomena, score equally well in other respects, but disagree as to posits, the instrumentalist would have no difficulty in countenancing both: the posits, being merely that, would not compete.


Davidson's view of the mind, then, might appear to be instrumentalist, the relevant criteria of coherence being provided by the principle of charity, the posits comprising, among other things, propositional attitudes; and (nonintentionally described) behaviors and behavioral dispositions constituting the phenomena to be saved. About some posits Davidson is quite explicit:



\begin{quote}


words, meanings of words, reference, and satisfaction are posits we need to implement a theory of truth. They serve this purpose without needing independent confirmation or empirical basis \dots{} [Satisfaction and reference are] notions we must treat as theoretical constructs whose function is exhausted in stating the truth conditions for sentences.


(Davidson 1984b: 222–223)



\end{quote}


And:



\begin{quote}


degree of belief is a construction based on more elementary attitudes.


(Davidson 1990: 322)



\end{quote}


When it comes to the propositional attitudes he seems, however, more wary. He does say:



\begin{quote}


In thinking and talking of the weights of physical objects we do not need to suppose there are such things as weights for objects to have. Similarly in thinking and talking about the beliefs of people we needn't suppose there are such entities as beliefs.


(Davidson 2001c)



\end{quote}


However, in the same paper, he speaks of beliefs as mental states with identity conditions. (But see also Davidson 2001a: 297–300.)


However, if Davidson is correct in his views that


\textbf{(i)} interpretation is epistemically indeterminate: many different and competing interpretations will save the phenomena;\forcelinebreak  and


\textbf{(ii)} all of these will be “correct,” since there is no more to correctness here than saving the phenomena


then there are no propositional attitudes. (i) implies that the propositional attitudes are epistemically underdetermined in the sense of outrunning the evidence. Yet (ii) implies that there is no more to the propositional attitudes than the evidence provides, so that it cannot be outrun. Nothing can fit both these bills.


Instrumentalism concerning the propositional attitudes would come at a considerable cost, however. One difficulty, alluded to at the end of Section 2, is that the principle of charity would have to be reformulated – it could no longer commit us to the existence of beliefs, let alone true ones. And then there are the more overarching concerns that there would be no perspective from which the view itself could be stated since there would be no statements, and we could not know any of this since (as Eve Garrard pointed out to me) there would be no states of knowledge. There would also be more specific troubles for others of Davidson's views. For example, he relies upon the existence of propositional attitude states in his (justly famous) causal theory of action – roughly speaking, they are what do the causing (see Davidson 1963).


So, what are the prospects for realism on Davidson's account? A central concern is that if the epistemic indeterminacy is as great as Davidson contends, then realism about the attitudes is an outmoded article of faith, and we would do better to look only to brain states neurologically described, or some such. Is the degree of indeterminacy, then, as large it might appear?


Perhaps not. Consider again, for instance, the inscrutability of reference. While it is true that reference is inscrutable if we adopt Davidson's Tarskian approach with no constraints, why should we do this? Recall from section III that, assuming the following both hold,


\textbf{(1)} “Wilton est grand” is true in Anne's language if and only if Wilt is tall.


\textbf{(2)} “Wilton est grand” is true in Anne's language if and only if the shadow of Wilt is the shadow of a tall thing


we can apparently interpret “Wilton est grand” as meaning (in Anne's language) either that Wilt is tall or that the shadow of Wilt is the shadow of a tall thing. But this is the case only if meaning is a matter only of truth conditions. However, why hold this? For instance, it is also the case that:


\textbf{(3)} “Wilton est grand” is true in Anne's language if and only if Wilt is tall and 2 + 2 = 4.


But need we interpret any truth-value bearer in Anne's language as having the proposition that 2 + 2 = 4 (or any other necessary truth) as part of its meaning?


Surely there are restrictions on which biconditionals give meaning, and it is possible to obtain evidence that distinguishes between theories of truth that, though equivalent qua theories of \emph{truth}, are not equivalent qua theories of \emph{meaning}. If, for example, we admit the relevant pointing behavior as evidence that “Wilton” refers to Wilt,\footnote{This need not commit us to some naïve causal theory of reference, by the way.} then only (1) will serve as a meaning-giving clause in our theory of truth for Anne, even though it remains the case that (2) holds. Such evidential considerations might decrease markedly the potential indeterminacy of meaning, while in no way compromising the use of theories of truth as theories of meaning, provided we acknowledge that not all biconditionals are meaning-giving.


Indeterminacy can, however, never be eliminated. In some cases, the evidence might take us further than Davidson supposes, but in others perhaps, the propositional attitudes outrun even all potential evidence. The interpretative task is to construct a complex of propositional attitudes that saves all the behavioral evidence. And, Davidson's measurement-theoretic analogy notwithstanding, if we are to be realists about these constructions, we must acknowledge that they are evidence transcendent.

% Notes
\section{References}


Bolker, E. (1967). A simultaneous axiomatization of utility and subjective probability. \emph{Philosophy of Science} 34:333–340.


Davidson, D. (1963). Actions, reasons, and causes. \emph{The Journal of Philosophy} 60:685–699.


———. (1982). Rational animals. \emph{Dialectica} 36:317–328.


———. (1984a). \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


———. (1984b). Reality without reference. Reprinted in Davidson (1984): 215–225.


———. (1984c). The inscrutability of reference. Reprinted in Davidson (1984): 227–241.


———. (1984d). Truth and meaning. Reprinted in Davidson (1984): 17–36.


———. (1985). A new basis for decision theory. \emph{Theory and Decision} 18:87–98.


———. (1990). The structure and content of truth. \emph{Journal of Philosophy} 87(6):279–328.


———. (1991). Epistemology externalized. \emph{Dialectica} 45(2–3):191–202.


———. (1994). Radical Interpretation interpreted. In Tomberlin (1994).


———. (2001a). Reply to Karlovy Vary papers. In Kotatko \emph{et al}. (2001): 285–307.


———. (2001b). \emph{Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective}. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


———. (2001c). What is present to the mind? Reprinted in Davidson (2001b): 53–68.


Jeffrey, R. (1983). \emph{The Logic of Decision}, 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago.


Kotatko, P., Pagin, P. and Segal, G. (eds) (2001). \emph{Interpreting Davidson}. Stanford, CA: CSLI.


Ludwig, K. (ed.) (2003). \emph{Donald Davidson}. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.


Quine, W.V.O. (1960). \emph{Word and Object}. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.


Ramsey, F.P. (1931). Truth and probability. In \emph{The Foundations of Mathematics and other Logical Essays}, R.B. Braithwaite (ed.). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.


Rawling, P. (2003). Radical interpretation. In Ludwig (2003): 85–112.


Tomberlin, J. (ed.) (1994). \emph{Philosophical Perspectives: Logic and Language}. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview.


Wilson, N. (1959). Substances without substrata. \emph{Review of Metaphysics} XII:521–539.

\chapter{15. Reference}


J. Robert G. Williams


[Reference is] a theoretical construct, whose function is exhausted in stating the truth-conditions for sentences. (Davidson 1977: 223)\footnote{All page references to articles by Davidson will be to the collected editions (Davidson 1984).}


Reference leads a strange double life in Donald Davidson's philosophy of language. On the one hand, it is at the heart of his account of the meaning of words and the learnability of language. On the other, he is concerned to combat overly “realist” views about the relation. And he explicitly endorses the seemingly incredible position that reference is wildly \emph{inscrutable}: there is no fact of the matter \emph{at all} about what our words refer to.


Section 1 reviews the role of reference within Davidson's T-theoretic account of language. Section 2 examines the case for the inscrutability of reference based on Davidson's account of radical interpretation. Section 3 concerns the explanatory role of reference, which we cover in two parts: the first concerning explanations that \emph{directly} appeal to reference; the second concerning explanations that appeal to \emph{beliefs} about reference.

\section{1. Reference in T-Theories}

\subsection{1.1. Fitting an infinite capacity in a finite head}


Each one of us is in a position to understand infinitely many, never-before-encountered sentences of our language. How, even in principle, could a finite being manage to acquire such an infinite capacity?\footnote{Davidson (1965, 1967).}


Suppose that the infinitely-many sentences have a very simple vocabulary and syntax. There are one name “Asa,” one (monadic) predicates “runs,” and the sentential connectives “not: \dots{} ,” and “ \dots{} and. \dots{}” They combine into grammatical sentences just as you would expect. This generates infinitely many sentences, for example:


\begin{itemize}
\item\relax 
Asa runs.



\item\relax 
Not: Asa runs.



\item\relax 
(Asa runs and Not: Asa runs).



\item\relax 
Not: (Asa runs and Not: Asa runs).



\item\relax 
\dots{}




\end{itemize}

A T-biconditional links the truth of any one of these object-language sentences to a way the world might be. For example:


\begin{itemize}
\item\relax 
“Asa runs” is true iff Asa runs.



\item\relax 
“Not: Asa runs” is true iff Asa does not run.



\item\relax 
“(Asa runs and Not: Asa runs)” is true iff Asa runs and Asa does not run.



\item\relax 
“Not: (Asa runs and Not: Asa runs)” is true iff it is not the case that Asa runs and Asa does not run.



\item\relax 
\dots{}




\end{itemize}

Users of the language are in a position to pick out biconditionals of this form for each sentence they understand. This itself is an infinitary capacity, and surely not unconnected to the infinite capacity to understand the sentences (we will look at what the relation is further in Section 3.2). Let us see how a finite creature might in principle get into a position to know all these biconditionals.


The obvious solution is for the creature to have a small range of core information from which the whole range of claims we have identified may be derived – plus the ability to derive any given claim on the list when prompted. This is the job description for Davidson's T-theories. The core information are the axioms of the T-theory, and it is here that the notion of reference is introduced. A sample T-theory for our toy language might be:\footnote{I follow Lepore and Ludwig (2005) in the construction of this toy T-theory.}


\textbf{(1)} “Asa” refers to Asa.


\textbf{(2)} For any name N,@@@
\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-40.jpg}
\end{figure}
N runs@@@
\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-41.jpg}
\end{figure}
 is true iff the referent of N runs.


\textbf{(3)} For any sentence S,@@@
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Not: S@@@
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 is true iff S is not true


\textbf{(4)} For any sentences, S, T,@@@
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(S and T)@@@
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 is true iff S is true and T is true.


Someone who knew these axioms, with minimal reasoning, could work out each T-biconditional on our earlier list, and infinitely many more besides. Nor would they need creativity in figuring out \emph{how} the derivation should go. There is a canonical method, depending only on the syntax of the sentence in question, for deriving the corresponding T-biconditional. A derivation from the axioms of a T-biconditional that implements this method will be called a \emph{canonical derivation}, and the T-biconditional that results the \emph{canonical T-biconditional for S} of the T-theory in question.\footnote{For canonical derivations, see, \emph{inter alia}, Davies (1981), Kölbel (2001), Lepore and Ludwig (2005).}


We have seen one way of accounting for our (infinite) capacity to know each of the T-biconditionals on the list in question, by storing a small range of information and draw out their consequences. Davidson (1965) claims that in setting out this T-theory, we have also answered the original question of explaining how \emph{in principle} we could acquire the infinite capacity to understand all the sentences – for he claims that learning the T-theory (or perhaps: learning the T-theory and that it is a T-theory; or learning the T-theory and knowing that it is a T-theory adequate by the lights of radical interpretation) suffices for understanding.


At the heart of Davidson's explanation of the learnability of language, then, are T-theories. And at the heart of T-theories lies reference.

\subsection{1.2. Conditions under which reference is required}


Our toy language is extraordinarily simple, and natural languages are extraordinarily complex. Whether a Davidsonian T-theory can be constructed for natural language and if so, what shape it will finally take, is a major empirical issue.\footnote{See for example, Larson and Segal (1995) and Lepore and Ludwig (2007).} This matters! Perhaps it will turn out that for English, reference is not the key notion in generating a T-theory; perhaps a specification of the intension of a name rather than its reference will be required; perhaps we will find a need for reference relations for expressions in other syntactic categories.\footnote{The semantic theory presented in the influential textbook (Heim and Kratzer 1998) is an interesting point of comparison and contrast, since, like Davidson (and unlike for example, Lewis (1970) ), it emphasizes the derivation of (something close to) T-sentences, but works from the start with semantic values for expressions of all types, and ultimately introduces intensions.} However, I will work here under the assumption that reference remains at the heart of a T-theory for natural language.


It is illuminating to study in very simple cases the conditions under which to answer the learnability question, we require a referential axiomatization (or more generally, an axiomatization that attributes semantic properties to subsentential expressions). The toy language given earlier is so simple, that appeal to reference does not seem mandatory to explain an ability to derive each T-biconditional. For example, we could replace (1) and (2) earlier with the single axiom


\textbf{(1 + 2)} “Asa runs” is true iff Asa runs.


This would bring both quantitative and qualitative parsimony to the theory. Quantitatively, we switch two axioms for one of comparable complexity. Qualitatively, we eliminate appeal to any relation other than truth from our theory. From this perspective, appeal to reference to explain the in-principle learnability of the language is otiose, and rather unmotivated.


As we add more names and predicates into our toy language, however, the two kinds of economy work against each other. With 10 names, and 10 monadic predicates, there will be one hundred atomic sentences in the toy language (“Asa runs,” “Asa walks,” “Beth runs,” \dots{} ). Finitely axiomatizing the T-theory in our later “truth-only” style, via a T-biconditional for each atomic sentence, plus the recursive axioms, would require 102 axioms – one for each atomic sentence, plus the recursive clauses for connectives labeled (3) and (4) earlier. If we stuck with the approach of our original toy theory, with an axiom stating the referent of each name (plus an appropriate axiom for each predicate), we require only 20 axioms for names and predicates plus the axioms for the connectives.


There is a kind of structure to the knowledge obtained via learning the 22 lexical axioms.\footnote{Compare Evans (1981).} If our agent forgets one piece of the basic information – for example, she forgets what “Asa” refers to – then she loses the ability to derive T-biconditionals for the 10 atomic sentences in which “Asa” figures. Conversely, if she learns the referent of a new name, she is immediately in the position to understand 10 new atomic sentences. An understanding obtained through learning a separate piece of information for each atomic sentence separately would not manifest these kinds of patterns.


We have three results. First, even with many names and predicates, appeal to reference is theoretically dispensable if one is solely concerned with specifying a finite way to gain an infinite capacity. Second, there's a clear sense in which the extra ideology of reference simplifies the learning task: far fewer pieces of information need be stored on a subsentential axiomatization. And finally, one who learned a language via the subsentential route would have a kind of structured ability that matches patterns familiar from our own case. The significance of this last point will depend on what \emph{other} than answering the in-principle learnability question we wish to extract from studying T-theories – a question we turn to shortly.


There is a point at which the appeal to subsentential semantic properties becomes (prima facie) ineliminable.\footnote{I am emphasizing quantification here; but see Evans (1975) for further considerations about the kinds of linguistic structure that motivate discerning reference within language (emphasizing in particular predicate modification).} When \emph{quantifiers} are added to the language, one cannot even in principle get away with just talking of truth (or even reference and truth, as in our original theory). To relate the truth conditions of “something runs” to information about the predicate “runs,” we need more than just information about how that predicate combines with names – we need to know whether the predicate applies to arbitrary things in the domain of discourse (not just those that happen to be named). One important change that is required is the need for a second subsentential semantic notion (satisfaction; or, what amounts to the same thing, the relativization of truth to a variable assignment). But equally, one cannot even in principle derive the T-biconditionals for all sentences from the T-biconditionals of the atoms.


I note one last characteristic of Davidson's approach: compared with his rivals, he has only a limited role for reference. Davidson's preferred approach assigns referents to names (and other singular terms – descriptions and demonstratives, for example). He does not appeal to reference – or indeed any relation between word and “semantic value” – for other linguistic items, such as predicates (or connectives or complex expressions such as sentences). This contrasts with a Fregean approach,\footnote{As set out for example, in Heim and Kratzer (1998).} which might replace (2) in our toy theory with:


\textbf{(2*)} “runs” refers to the function f such that, for all x, f maps x to the True iff x runs.


If we switch from (2) to (2*), we have to add extra information to tell us about how this information about the reference of parts of sentences relates to their truth, for example:


\textbf{(5)} for N a name, and F a predicate,@@@
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N F@@@
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 is true iff the referent of N is mapped by the referent of F to the True.


From a Fregean perspective, the earlier axioms for predicates fuse two separable bits of information: the semantic significance of predicates (their reference), and the semantic significance of concatenation (in this case, function-application). It is a substantive issue whether or not the technical project of natural language semantics requires such a disentanglement, or can proceed without it.\footnote{Compare Heim and Kratzer (1998) and Larson and Segal (1995). Davidson's T-theories use a satisfaction relation on predicates, which requires a compositional axiom to link it to claims about truth. See Davies (1987) for discussion (if one is to do without satisfaction, one must give an alternative semantics for quantifiers – perhaps such as the one (Dummett 1981) attributes to Frege). \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf The project of general semantics (Lewis 1970) promised that the semantic significance of concatenation in general, for arbitrary syntactic categories, would be function application (compare the analysis of connectives as referring to truth functions, which then operate on the semantic values of sentences – truth-values). This project hit problems, as discussed in the appendices to the collected edition. Heim and Kratzer (1998) show how to cover a large variety of concatenation with just a few kinds of compositional principles. There seem to be interesting generalizations (and cross-linguistically stable ones) about the semantic significance of concatenation that would be hidden from view if we packed them into axioms. Moreover, disentangling composition from lexical axioms in the right way may allow us to articulate theses about different ways in which semantic theory is learned: for example, perhaps our understanding of concatenation is \emph{innate}, whereas clearly lexical meaning must be learned.}


Following Davidson, we have been presenting the significance of T-theories as an answer to the question of how a finite agent can \emph{in principle} acquire the capacity to understand a language. But it is natural to ask the follow-up: how do \emph{we} manage to pull the trick off? Can T-theories illuminate our own case?


The obvious conjecture is this: the way we ourselves understand a language is by having internalized a T-theory. This involves \emph{inter alia}, believing the referential axioms, and standing ready to derive T-biconditionals for arbitrary sentences in the language in question. On this view, our understanding of language is ultimately constituted by our \emph{beliefs about what words refer to}. This does not seem to be Davidson's view (Lepore and Ludwig 2005: pp. 119–24).


It is often suggested that the T-theoretic model illuminates but does not directly describe our actual understanding – that our understanding of language consists of a \emph{structured ability}, and the ability to understand a sentence is derived from \emph{subabilities} systematically associated the sentences' components.\footnote{Davidson (1967: 25) says that a success T-theory requires it recover “the structure of a very complicated ability – the ability to speak and understanding a language.”} If so, then although the \emph{T-theory} appeals to reference, all we can say in the abstract about our actual understanding is that there is some “subability” that plays the same role – and it is very much an open question what sort of thing this is.\footnote{Compare the “mirror constraint” and the discussion of “tacit knowledge” in Davies (1981, 1987), Evans (1981), Miller (1997) and Wright (1981).} The worry with this is that it abstracts away from the very feature of learning T-theories that gave them their explanatory power. In deductive reasoning, we have an extant model for how a set of inference rules, applied to a finite stock of beliefs, can put us in a position to acquire any of an infinite stock of beliefs. But it is not clear what nondoxastic model is available for putting together a finite stock of abilities to “derive” some set of “structured abilities.” Some (even if not Davidson himself) have thought that best version of the Davidsonian project will involve attributing attitudes to reference to language users as part of linguistic competence. We look at this view – the \emph{strong cognitive conception of understanding} – in Section 3.2.

\section{2. The Inscrutability of Reference}


In virtue of what do our utterances mean what they do? It is tempting to see a T-theory as one step toward an answer. What it is for “Asa runs” to be true iff Asa runs, we may say, is \emph{inter alia} for “Asa” to refer to Asa, for “runs” to have the appropriate satisfaction conditions. Having reduced the concept of truth to the notions of reference (of names) and satisfaction conditions (of predicates), we can then look outside language, to get a fix on what sort of nonsemantic facts make it the case that a name refers to a particular individual, or a predicate is satisfied by some object. Some kind of systematic causal relation between tokenings of the name and states of the world involving the object, might be appealed to at this point. The general strategy – the building block approach – reduces truth to reference and then reference to causation.\footnote{A locus classicus is Field (1972). The name is introduced in Davidson (1977).}


Davidson views the building block approach as misguided. Interestingly, he says that it \emph{would} work on condition that a reduction of the reference relation to nonsemantic relations could be performed.\footnote{Davidson (1977: 219)} His case against it rests on pessimism over the availability of this final step. He does not lay out the grounds for his pessimism – as he says, many have been attracted to the view, and tried to make it work.\footnote{One influential program in the 1980s was the asymmetric dependence causal analysis of Fodor (1987).} But I think we should have sympathy for Davidson's pessimism. The building block theory is based on a grand promissory note, of reducing to the nonsemantic the semantic significance of expressions in all categories. It is hard enough to get a credible theory of this kind for names of medium-sized dry goods and their bearers, but a building block metasemantics needs much more: to account for the reference of singular terms for unobservables, for abstracta, and beyond singular terms, for determiners, modifiers, connectives, and many other things.


The building block approach to the metaphysics of meaning adopts one familiar naturalizing strategy: identification of the queried relation (reference) with some relation in the “reductive base.” Davidson instead aims to provide a characterization of when a T-theory as a whole (in particular, a set of lexical axioms) is \emph{selected} by an appropriate range of nonsemantic facts. The account of what this “selection” amounts to we find in Davidson's discussion of radical interpretation.\footnote{Davidson (1973, 1974, 1975, 1980). For a nice comparison and contrast between Field's building block approach and the Davidsonian one, see McDowell (1978). Lepore and Ludwig (2005) contains an excellent, detailed examination of the prospects and pitfalls of Davidson's account of radical interpretation.} In particular, we find the radical interpreter noting regularities in patterns of assent and dissent, and deriving from these a set of target T-biconditionals. The selected T-theory is, minimally, one that will enable one to derive the target T-biconditionals.


From a metaphysical point of view, it is less transparent what is going on here, than in the case of simple reductive identification. Whether the kind of indeterminacy or inscrutability of reference we are about to mention is even coherently formulable, depends on the view of the metaphysics of meaning that it is paired with; I will delay further discussion until we have inscrutability on the table.

\subsection{2.1. Twisted T-theories}


As Davidson describes the process, the selection of a T-theory proceeds primarily by gathering data at the level of the T-biconditionals the selected T-theory must entail. Thus, on the basis of an observed regularity such as:



\begin{quote}


Subjects hold-true “Asa runs” iff Asa runs.



\end{quote}


THE radical interpreter will attempt to find T-theories that entail:



\begin{quote}


“Asa runs” is true iff Asa runs.



\end{quote}


There will be many such data points to account for. Many T-theories can be ruled out on this basis. For example, one that assigned Beth as the referent of “Asa,” while giving “runs” its usual interpretation, would entail that “Asa runs” is true iff Beth runs, and fail to entail the target T-biconditional. On these grounds, that T-theory is knocked out of the running.


But odd-seeming theories are (seemingly) let through this filter.\footnote{See Davidson (1979). For other discussions of permutation based arguments for inscrutability, see Putnam (1981), Quine (1964), and Wallace (1977).} For example, suppose that we consider the following T-theory for our toy language (with the standard clauses for connectives):


\textbf{(1*)} “Asa” refers to the best friend of Asa (only).


\textbf{(2*)} N runs is true iff the referent of N is the best friend of someone who runs.


Given that Beth is Asa's best friend, the first axiom assigns Beth, rather than Asa, as the individual to whom the name refers. But the second axiom, for runs, makes a compensating twist, and so, according to theory, we will derive:



\begin{quote}


“Asa runs” will be true iff the best friend of Asa (only) is the best friend of someone who runs.



\end{quote}


The right-hand side of this biconditional is obviously equivalent to the requirement that Asa runs (at least under the assumption that Asa has a best friend). So it looks like by twisting the reference scheme, and then compensatingly twisting the interpretation of predicates, we can derive targeted T-theorems in unexpected ways.


In general, for any set of “target” T-biconditional generated by a “sensible” T-theory θ, and an arbitrary individual β, we can design an alternative T-theory@@@
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ϕ@@@
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 that both assigns β as the reference for “Asa” and still allows one to derive the T-biconditionals.


Here is how to do it. Suppose θ says that “Asa” refers to α. Now choose a 1–1 mapping of individuals onto individuals, \emph{f} (a “permutation” of the universe), such that \emph{f} maps α to β. The chosen function could, for example, map α to β, and β to α, and leave every other object fixed.


We can then piggyback on θ and \emph{f} to specify the new T-theory ϕ. For each name N in the language, if θ includes an axiom that says that N refers to \emph{n}, ϕ is to include an axiom that says that N refers to \emph{f}(\emph{n}). If θ includes an axiom for predicate P that says that@@@
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N P@@@
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 is true iff the referent of N is \emph{F}, then ϕ will include an axiom that says that@@@
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N P@@@
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\end{figure}
 is true iff there is some \emph{x} such that \emph{f}(\emph{x}) = the referent of N, and \emph{x} is \emph{F}.


In general, the T-biconditionals derivable in θ for atomic sentences will take the form:



\begin{quote}


<\Slash{}quote>@@@
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N P@@@
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 is true iff α is \emph{F}.


And the corresponding T-biconditionals derivable in ϕ take the form:



\begin{quote}


<\Slash{}quote>@@@
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N P@@@
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 is true iff there exists some \emph{x} such that \emph{f} (\emph{x}) = \emph{f} (α) and \emph{x} is \emph{F}.


The two sentences are obviously equivalent, so the original T-biconditional will be derivable in the twisted theory (in this case, the equivalence presupposes the “side information” that \emph{f} is a function defined for α).


A particularly dramatic kind of underdetermination of T-theory by data arises.\footnote{Well, at least it does if the earlier result can be generalized to total theory. As we will see later, it is worth thinking hard about the details – and paying particular attention to the range of devices involved in natural languages, which may call for extra tweaks. In the case of intensional semantics, an extremely general version of permutation inscrutability, for multiplying intensional type theory, is given in Williams (2008b).} The data does not even eliminate T-theories according to which “Aristotle” refers to a small furry creature on Alpha Centauri, rather than the ancient Greek philosopher. When extended to language with demonstratives, the argument implies that the demonstrative “that,” uttered while you poke your finger at a ball you are holding up and making salient, might just as well refers to the Titanic, rather than the poked ball. If “selection” of a T-theory does not impose further constraints, then it appears that either the twisted theories are selected along with the sensible one, or no T-theories are selected at all.


Davidson appears to embrace the first horn of this dilemma. He takes the conclusion to be that there is simply no fact of the matter which T-theory “gets things right.” And what we learn from permutation constructions is that reference is utterly indeterminate. For any \emph{x} whatsoever, there is no fact of the matter about whether or not “Asa” refers to \emph{x}.



\end{quote}



\end{quote}

\subsection{2.2. The grain of the data}


Do twisted T-theories really generate the data just as well as sensible ones? It is important to note that the argument is sensitive to exactly what is taken to be required for a T-theory to “generate” some target T-biconditionals. A very strict understanding of this relation is possible. To motivate this, note that even in a sensible T-theory, if we can show:



\begin{quote}


“Asa runs” is true iff Asa runs



\end{quote}


Then if “derivability” is as strong as first-order consequence, then equally the following T-biconditional will be derivable:



\begin{quote}


“Asa runs” is true iff Asa runs and everything is self-identical.



\end{quote}


Intuitively, the first “gives the meaning” of the sentence mentioned on the left, in the way the second does not.\footnote{See Davidson (1976) and Foster (1976).} As mentioned earlier, sensible T-theories will generate what appears to be meaning-specifying biconditionals “canonically” – in a way that step-by-step reflects the syntactic build up of the sentence. From sensible axioms, the first T-biconditional earlier is \emph{canonically} derivable, while the second is not. Its proof requires some extra steps: proving the relevant tautology and adjoining it to the biconditional. Valid moves, true, but not ones that have a place in the canonical derivation.


What happens if in radical interpretation we require target T-sentences to be \emph{canonically} generated from the T-theory?\footnote{See Williams (2008a).} What is canonically derivable from the twisted theories described earlier are T-biconditionals such as:



\begin{quote}


“Asa runs” is true iff Asa's best friend is the best friend of someone who runs.



\end{quote}


Or, for permutation \emph{f}:



\begin{quote}


“Asa runs” is true iff there is an \emph{x}, such that \emph{f} (\emph{x}) = \emph{f} (Asa), and \emph{x} runs.



\end{quote}


So the twisted theories simply fail the test of allowing the \emph{canonical} derivation of the following target T-biconditional:



\begin{quote}


‘Asa runs’ is true iff Asa runs.



\end{quote}


What the twisted T-theories canonically generate are biconditionals obviously equivalent to the targeted one. But that cuts no ice if canonically derivability is really the criterion they are to be judged by.


Does this mean that we do not need to worry about the inscrutability of reference in a Davidsonian theory, then? That would be far too quick. For the move to canonical derivability essentially fine-grains the data to which we are helping ourselves (the target T-biconditionals). The radical interpreter might find it comparatively easy to shift from a set of T-biconditionals to a T-theory, but how is she to get a fix on the T-biconditionals themselves, on the basis of the kind of hold-true data we are supposing? Thus, suppose it is a regularity that:



\begin{quote}


Speakers hold-true “Asa runs” iff Asa runs.



\end{quote}


The following will also be a regularity:



\begin{quote}


Speakers hold-true “Asa runs” iff there is an x, such that \emph{f}(Asa) = \emph{f}(x), and x runs.



\end{quote}


So which regularity should the radical interpreter take as her guide to picking a target T-biconditional? If the former, then the sensible interpretation of the language will be (determinately) selected. If the latter, then the twisted interpretation will be (determinately) selected. There is still, \emph{prima facie}, just as much indeterminacy in the process of selecting a T-theory. It simply enters at an earlier stage.


Theorists of radical interpretation (if not Davidson himself) could try to block the argument for radical inscrutability by putting pressure at this point. For example, perhaps not all regularities are created equal. Some regularities may be lawlike, others not. And perhaps only \emph{lawlike} regularities should be data the radical interpreter uses to form target T-sentences.\footnote{Compare Davidson's appeal to lawlike regularites in Davidson (1984: introduction).} For this to be relevant to the current case, one would have to argue that our first regularity is lawlike, and the second (permutation-involving) regularity is not. There are a few options to explore here. Even if the two regularities are conceded to be necessarily equivalent, it might be that lawlikeness is hyperintentional: only the \emph{simple} formulations count as laws. Or one could question lawlikeness by pointing to issues with their alleged equivalence. For example, suppose that \emph{f}(Asa) = Beth. Now consider a situation in which Asa exists but Beth does not. Relative to that situation, the condition laid down in the right hand side of the “twisted” T-biconditional is false, though that laid down in the original is true.\footnote{Compare McGee (2005) and Williams (2008b). Why then did I say earlier they seem “obviously” equivalent? Well, they are equivalent under the “side constraint” that \emph{f} is a well-defined function. In any counterfactual scenario in which \emph{f} maps Asa to anything, the two conditions are equivalent. Moreover, just as one can arguably know \emph{a priori} the (contingent) truth that the standard meter is a meter; one can arguably know \emph{a priori} the (contingent) truth that \emph{f} is a function that maps Asa to Beth. So the two conditions may be \emph{a priori}, though only contingently, equivalent. \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf Note that we would be unable to rule out on these grounds twisted T-theories that map Asa to Asa's singleton, or to necessary existents like numbers. So arguably, the strategy does not go to the heart of the problem.}

\subsection{2.3. Simplicity}


We have seen one reason for thinking that radical inscrutability of reference does not follow even from Davidson's very liberal constraints on theory selection. To exploit this line in defending the determinacy of reference would require an ultra-fine-grained story about the target data for radical interpretation.


The other way of blocking inscrutability appeals, not to fine-grained data, but to theoretical constraints, the radical interpreter uses to pick a T-theory on the basis of that data. We might argue, for example, that among the various theories that would generate the right T-biconditionals (or something obviously equivalent to the right T-biconditionals), the radical interpreter should believe the simplest. This seems not at all ad hoc, but simply an application of usual canons of theory choice to the particular situation the radical interpreter faces.


Simplicity, it might be said, will favor sensible axioms such as:


\textbf{(1)} “Asa” refers to Asa.


\textbf{(2)}@@@
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N runs@@@
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 is true iff the referent of N runs.


over their twisted, and slightly more complex, counterparts:


\textbf{(1*)} “Asa” refers to \emph{f}(Asa).


\textbf{(2*)}@@@
\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-40.jpg}
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N run@@@
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 is true iff there is an x, such that \emph{f}(the referent of N) = \emph{f}(x), and x runs.


So the sensible theory will rank as a \emph{better} theory accounting for the relevant data, when compared with its twisted rivals.


This is the kind of thing that David Lewis once advocated as a response to “Quinean” worries about indeterminacy within an interpretationist metasemantics.\footnote{Lewis (1975). For more on Lewis' version of radical interpretation, see Lewis (1969, 1974, 1984, 1992).} And he added a useful caveat: facts about reference, he said, would on this account be “no more objective” than our canons of simplicity. One can appreciate the concern: simplicity might very well be understood in ethnocentric terms – as what people like us find simple, or tractable, or useable.\footnote{Compare the detailed discussion of the appeals to theoretical virtues in generative linguistics in Ludlow (2011).} But if that is the case, then it seems that even if indeterminacy is avoided, a relativity to our practical concerns or limitations is not.


One way in which simplicity might be relative, is that its evaluation may be sensitive to the language the interpreter happens to use. Suppose, for example, that we introduce a descriptive name for \emph{f}(Asa) – Fasa, say. And suppose that we introduce a primitive predicate “fruns” synonymous with “y such that there is an x, such that \emph{f}(y) = \emph{f}(x), and x runs.”\footnote{Compare the trouble for Humean theories of laws described in (Lewis 1983).} Then we could replace (1*) and (2*) with:


\textbf{(1**)} “Asa” refers to Fasa.


\textbf{(2**)}@@@
\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-40.jpg}
\end{figure}
N runs@@@
\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-41.jpg}
\end{figure}
 is true iff the referent of N fruns.


Now from a syntactical point of view, this new theory exactly parallels the original, sensible one. To the extent that we are using syntactic economy as a stalking horse for whatever criterion of theoretical simplicity we will ultimately appeal to, then (at least for radical interpreters with the enriched metalanguage) there is no discriminating between sensible and twisted T-theories on these grounds.


One reaction is to say that there is a \emph{privileged} metalanguage in which to assess simplicity. This is the root, as I see it, of David Lewis's appeal to eligibility as a constraint on radical interpretation.\footnote{Lewis (1983, 1984, 1992). I discuss and defend this reading in Williams (2007), and “Lewis on Reference” (unpublished manuscript).} In essence, Lewis picks a canonical metalanguage (the language of “Ontolegese,” where primitive predicates stand for metaphysically fundamental properties) and constrains interpreters to pick theories that (all else equal) are simplest when formulated in it. Davidsonians impatient with the Lewisian metaphysics (or even those happy with the metaphysics, but disliking its invocation as a way of “objectivizing” the notion of simplicity) might still be able to use the \emph{general} idea if they can by some other means identify a \emph{privileged} metalanguage from which to assess simplicity\Slash{}complexity.

\subsection{2.4. The formulation of inscrutability: relativizations}


Suppose, \emph{pro tem}, that total inscrutability of reference does follow from Davidson's overall position. In the next section, we will look at Davidson's thesis of the unexplanatoriness of reference, which might help to draw the sting from the initially counterintuitive thesis being put forward. But a preliminary question is how this thesis should even be formulated.


The threat of inscrutability arises because multiple theories are “selected” by the radical interpretation procedure. But on the face of it, we cannot consistently endorse all of them – they say incompatible things! But that leaves us with a puzzle. If we are to use one of the T-theories in interpreting one another, are not we committed to thinking it gets things \emph{right} – but thinking it is \emph{right}, and hence the incompatible coselected T-theories are \emph{wrong}, seems exactly what the thesis of the inscrutability of reference was trying to avoid commitment to.


One option is to deny that the T-theories that are “selected” are inconsistent. Relativizing the semantic predicates they involve is an obvious way to achieve this. There is no contradiction in saying that “Ada” refers\textsubscript{1} to Ada and not \emph{f}(Ada); but refers\textsubscript{2} to \emph{f}(Ada) rather than Ada. Davidson in fact endorses a version of this proposal. Semantic properties on his treatment are already relativized to a language, as well as a speaker and a time (the existence of homologues and homophones across different languages makes this necessary: “gift” applies to poisons in Scandinavian languages, but applies to very different things in English). Drawing on this, Davidson suggests that rather than two candidate reference relations for a single language, we have two languages, each with a single candidate reference relation. You might have thought “English” (or “my idiolect of English”) named a single language. For Davidson, it picks out an infinite cluster of languages, one for each precisification of the reference scheme.\footnote{See Davidson (1979: 239).} The idea is striking. But it is unclear whether it answers the problem. What makes the word “Ada” in one such \emph{L}, relate to Ada rather than \emph{f}(Ada)?\footnote{Davidson says “all that we can say gets fixed relativization is the way that we answer questions about reference, not reference itself.” I do not understand this qualification, but it seems relevant to the challenge being put forward here.} Not the empirical factors that feed into radical interpretation, \emph{ex hypothesi}\footnote{“[I]t is not entirely an empirical question which language a person speaks” (Davidson 1979: 240).} – but then what are these mysterious “nonempirical” factors that complete the job?\footnote{Davidson appears to think that “the language that \emph{P} speak” fails to pick out a unique language, but we can describe one among the cluster by specifying which \emph{T}-theory we are using. But we if picked out the \emph{L} to which we relativize \emph{as} the one spoken by population \emph{P and} characterized by T-theory θ, then the claim that θ is the right \emph{T}-theory for \emph{L} will become tautologous, and the empirical constraints of radical interpretation utterly redundant. What we want is a sense of how the work factorizes, into an empirical component provided by radical interpretation, and some nonempirical component somehow built into the languages themselves.} Indeed, the very supervenience of word meaning on nonsemantic facts that Davidson took as initial motivation for his project, appears to be being denied – since the relevant nonsemantic facts are the same for each of the “languages” being posited, and yet the reference relations differ.


Davidson's approach to relativization is to give an informative account of what the relativization is to – in this case, a language. Relativity to language and to context (speaker and time) are precedents for this approach. The other relativization strategies he considers (and rejects) share this characteristic. But there are other models for relativization within semantics. In quantification theory, we relativize semantic properties (satisfaction, in particular) to a sequence of objects. The relativization “disappears” at the level at which the theory makes contact with data – we say that S is true simpliciter just in case S is satisfied relative to every sequence.


We could relativize reference and predicate satisfaction to \emph{arbitrary} indices. Our metasemantics will say that every individually empirically adequate T-scheme should be assigned an index in this super-T-theory. We can then derive relativized T-biconditionals, and our rule will again be that a sentence is true simpliciter iff it is true on every index. If it is possible to derive that S is true-i iff p, for all i, then by the definition of truth simpliciter, we will be able to derive the unrelativized T-biconditional that S is true iff p. For the case of permutation inscrutability, where the truth conditions of whole sentences are (with the caveats noted earlier about fine-graining derivability) held fixed, then the relativization makes no difference at the level of whole sentences. In other cases of indeterminacy of interpretation, sentences might (in given conditions) come out true on one adequate interpretation, and false on another. The kind of approach just sketched (a broadly “supervaluational” one), predicts in this case they are neither true nor false.\footnote{For supervaluations, see Fine (1975) and Keefe (2000). Another way a Davidsonian could get this effect is by endorsing \emph{disjunctions} of T-theories. If θ and@@@ \begin{figure}[htbp!] \centering \includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-40.jpg} \end{figure} ϕ@@@ \begin{figure}[htbp!] \centering \includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-41.jpg} \end{figure} are selected T-theories, then one could endorse θ ∨@@@ \begin{figure}[htbp!] \centering \includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-40.jpg} \end{figure} ϕ@@@ \begin{figure}[htbp!] \centering \includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-41.jpg} \end{figure} , and use reasoning by cases to derive the common consequences of each theory. Notice, however, that the derivations would not have the usual canonical form (requirement two such derivations under suppositions, plus the disjunction-discharge step). Moreover, only disjunctions of whole theories would work – disjoining the lexical atoms individually would not have the same power, since one loses the “penumbral connections” between twisted reference schemes and twisted predicate axioms that is vital to pulling off the trick.}


The abstract relativization move is worth considering, if only for its popularity elsewhere in philosophy. To mention one immediate worry: it is not obvious that it resolves the problem of “too many adequate theories” – if anything, it worsens it, by adding yet another seemingly adequate theory, generating the target T-sentences, to the mix. Does it have virtues the original cluster lacked? It certainly is \emph{less committal}, not making any definitive predictions about what refers to what. Perhaps a theorist should favor theories, all else equal, that are cautious in this way.


Davidson's frequent invocation of instrumentalism suggests a third response, rather different from his official relativization strategy. The characteristic move of the instrumentalist about theory \emph{T} is to shift attention from whether \emph{T} is true (or whether we believe it) to whether \emph{T} is useful (and what we can use it to do). In the context of T-theories, rather than asking in the first instance about whether “Ada” refers to Ada, we might instead ask: under what conditions is it okay to use a T-theory θ that says that “Ada” refers to Ada, in interpreting a speaker? Here are two possible answers:


\textbf{(a)} The use of θ is okay so long as θ fits the relevant data in the way described in radical interpretation.


\textbf{(b)} The use of θ is okay so long as (\emph{inter alia}) “Ada” refers to Ada.


Those who endorses (b) commit themselves to the view that T-theories used in interpretation must get the semantic facts right. Endorsing (a) does not have this commitment. For all (a) says, a T-theory I use to interpret you could be false, or meaningless – the question of θ's status simply does not arise if (a) alone is the criterion. The advocate of (a) will insist that there is no direct inconsistency between the view it is permissible to use θ in interpreting a speaker, and also permissible to use ϕ for the same task – even if θ and ϕ themselves are mutually contradictory. Two fictional tales can be equally good at helping a child to sleep – they do not have to be mutually consistent to play that role.


Of course, giving answer (a) cannot prevent us from asking the question whether a particular theory θ is in fact true. And it looks as if (for the reasons set out earlier) unless we somehow adjust what the T-theories say (by a relativization strategy, for example), (b) tells us straight off that it cannot be that θ and ϕ are both permissible interpretative strategies. If mutually incompatible theories both “fit” the radical interpreter's data, therefore, then (a) and (b) contradict each other. (a) will tell us that the theories are all ok to use in interpretation. (b) tells us that at least one of these theories is not ok to use in interpretation. One reaction would be to hold (b) fixed, and consider this a problem for those Davidsonians who would endorse (a). But a legitimate and interesting reaction for the Davidsonian, it seems to me, is to hold onto (a), and dismiss (b).


This kind of view has genuine instrumentalist precedent. Consider the position on the use of mathematics in science advocated in (Field 1980, 1989). Field's position is that it is acceptable to use mathematics in science so long as the mathematized science is conservative over true, nominalized science. But he rejects that permissible use requires the mathematized scientific theory itself be true (“Mathematics doesn't have to be true to be good”). Field's own original view is that we should in fact disbelieve existentially committing parts of mathematics. But the core of his view is that the issue of the truth of mathematics is \emph{irrelevant} to its applicability. Note that analogues to the situation of incompatible T-theories can well arise. Two incompatible set theories, each conservative over nominalistic science, might equally well serve the purposes of formulating an instrumentally useful mathematized science.


Davidson explicitly endorses both the relativization strategy, and the analogy to instrumentalism. In the terms just sketched, we can view this as him endorsing (a), and thinking of this as \emph{sufficient} to account for the utility of T-theories, but then rather than rejecting (b) (as an error-theorist like Field advocates), he attempts to hold onto it by trying to make the T-theories compatible via relativization. Rather than pursue relativization, perhaps he would have been better giving up on (b) altogether, and simply insist that semantics does not have to be true to be good.

\section{3. Explanations and Reference}


Suppose Ada raises her arm. This may (in context) be explained by pointing to the beliefs and desires that Ada has – that she wanted to be excused, and believed that the best way to do this was by attracting attention by raising his arm. Beliefs, and desires, \emph{prima facie}, have a wide explanatory role – they explain a wide variety of events in the outside world. Plausibly, they \emph{immediately} explain actions, and mediately, \emph{via} the actions, many other events are brought about. Presumably, an agents' beliefs are also involved in immediate explanations of various other aspects of her psychology (e.g., emotional states), which themselves go on to have behavioral and worldly consequences.


It is less clear that semantic properties of sentence (truth, reference, and the rest) feature in such immediate explanations of worldly happenings. If they do, the most likely candidate explananda would be to do with communication. The fact that I uttered “Ada runs” may be explained by the truth of that sentence (given the fact that I am a reliable detector of the truth of such sentences, a truthful interlocutor, etc.). And the fact someone formed the belief that Ada runs may be explained by the fact that the truth conditions for “Ada runs” are that Ada runs, plus the fact she heard me utter those words, trusts me as informant, and so on. A first question for anyone thinking about the explanatory role of semantic properties concerns the \emph{breadth} of that role – the varieties and kinds of events that are (in part) \emph{immediately} explained by citing semantic properties.


Say that a property \emph{P} is involved in an explanation \emph{directly} if one of the things that explains the event in question is something's having \emph{P}. Say that it is involved merely \emph{indirectly} if one of the things that explains the event is an agent's \emph{believing} something has \emph{P}. It is not obvious that we need to invoke semantic properties \emph{directly} in linguistic explanations at all. Prima facie, my uttering “Ada runs” is just as well explained by the fact that I believe the sentence true (plus my sincerity) as it is by the fact that they are true (plus my truthfulness). A second question for anyone thinking about the explanatory role of semantic properties is whether the role is direct or indirect.


The third question – and our focus here – is whether there is difference on either dimension between the explanatory role of sentential semantic properties like truth, and the explanatory role of subsentential reference.

\subsection{3.1. Reference-invoking explanations}


Let us make the assumption that the only happenings immediately explained by semantic properties involve speech acts – either on the producer or consumer side (uttering a true sentence or forming a true belief). We assert by uttering a sentence with assertoric force (“the door is shut”), question by uttering a sentence with interrogative force (“is the door shut?”), command by uttering a sentence with imperatival force (“shut the door”). In each case, you might well think we should cite the truth conditions of the sentence in explaining why the speaker uttered the sentence or why their audience reacted as they did. Thus: Ada utters “the door is shut” \emph{inter alia} because she wished to convey whether the door was shut, and “the door is shut” means that the door is shut.


Is reference involved in such explanations? \emph{Prima facie}, it is involved \emph{mediately} – facts about reference explain facts about truth conditions, which in turn explain other things.


On the assumption that the only locus for semantic explanations involve speech acts, and the \emph{only} relevant speech acts are sentential, then (strangely) reference-involving explanations will always pass through a bottleneck: they only explain anything at all \emph{via} grounding truth-conditional properties. Reference would be extraordinarily \emph{narrow} in explanatory power – immediately explaining \emph{only} the obtaining of other semantic properties.


Davidson's radical interpretation allows him to add a distinctive twist. After all, here we have T-sentences as the basic data, and the success of a T-theory is tested by how well it matches them. Does this mean that truth conditions explain reference, rather than vice versa? That might make reference utterly explanatorily idle. But Davidson does not straightforwardly endorse this. He distinguishes “the order of explanation that is appropriate once the theory is in place” from “the explanation of why the theory is correct.”\footnote{Davidson (1990: 300). In earlier writings, for example, throughout Davidson ([1984] 1970), Davidson is happy to talk of \emph{explaining} the truth conditions of sentences.} In the second sense, truth has priority over reference, for the interpretationist. But that still leaves \emph{another} sense of explanation in which reference explains truth. But \emph{what} is this sense? To be sure, when learning a language, perhaps one proceeds from conjectures about truth conditions, to establishing a theory invoking reference, and then (later, with the theory in place) derive novel predictions about truth. One has those final beliefs about truth only \emph{because of} the beliefs about reference possessed at the intermediate phase. But here we have beliefs explaining beliefs, not reference explaining truth.


Davidson (1990: 300) claims there is an \emph{exact} analogy between appeal to reference in semantics, and appeal to unobservables in physical explanations. So perhaps his answer would be to claim that reference explains truth in a sense of “explanation” utterly familiar from the physical sciences. But \emph{pace} Davidson, there are real differences between the cases. Posit atoms for one explanatory purpose (reducing thermodynamics) and one can generate new surprising predictions in a quite different area (Brownian motion). Davidson says “there can be no question about the use of these theoretical concepts [reference and satisfaction] beyond the question of whether they yield a satisfactory account of the use of sentences” (Davidson 1990: 300). But, I think, one should not say that “there can be no question of the use of concepts of atomic particles, beyond the question of whether they yield a satisfactory account of thermodynamic properties.” Physical posits break free of the particular theories for which they are originally introduced. It is really not obvious whether reference does so, and this puts pressure on the claim that it is \emph{explanatory} of truth conditions in any strict sense.


A bottlenecked (at best) explanatory role for reference has consequences for our assessment of the tenability of radical inscrutability of reference. After all, why are revisionary philosophical theories to be regarded with suspicion in the first place? Not simply because they require us to change our beliefs (we might welcome the shock of the new). We are and should be wary of them because we want assurance that the revisions being proposed would not wreak havoc on our wider theory of the world – that the baby is not being thrown away with the bathwater. A \emph{confined} revisionism, where we have an assurance that we can change our views on one subject matter while keeping views on \emph{other} subject matters untouched, would be far less worrying. If reference truly does have (at best) the extraordinarily narrow explanatorily role outlined earlier, then it looks like we are in this position. What we think about reference is a “don't care” issue so far as total theory is concerned, so long as the appropriate truth conditions are generated. And, of course, the twisted reference schemes that generate the inscrutability of reference do all agree (more or less) at the level of truth conditions of whole sentences.


It is interesting that Field (1975) – even in a phase where he was an explicit advocate of the building block metaphysics of meaning that Davidson deprecated – explicitly endorsed the narrow, bottlenecked conception of the explanatory role of reference. He distanced himself from what he saw as Davidson's instrumentalism. But he did think that facts about reference were \emph{conventional}, in the sense that there was no \emph{deep} rationale for our focusing on the reference relation (which Field took to match up with certain causal relations) rather than some permuted variant of it. Someone who worked with what Field regarded as a determinately \emph{different} subsentential semantic relation arising from a permutation of the original, would be able to explain all that needs to be explained equally well. He compared our focus on reference over its twisted cousins as comparable to the convention of driving on the right side of the road. It gets the job done – perhaps in a rather elegant way – but it is not the only way to do it.


An absent, or bottlenecked explanatory role for reference would make the inscrutability of reference livable with. But we should subject the starting points to scrutiny. Can semantic properties explain things other than speech acts? And must a putative explanatory role for reference in communication always go via truth conditions? Fragmentary speech acts (discussed further in the next section) might provide cases where reference has an \emph{immediate} explanatory role.

\subsection{3.2. Explanations involving beliefs about reference?}


Even the bottlenecked explanatory role for reference presupposed that truth or truth conditions have direct explanatory work to do. But it is not obvious that the kind of explanatory contexts that have been discussed – communicative ones – require direct appeal to facts about truth or truth conditions as opposed to \emph{opinions} on the part of speakers and audience on the matter. Perhaps the role of semantics in explanations is always “indirect” in this sense. Even if this is not the case, the explanatory profiles of reference versus truth, and beliefs about reference versus beliefs about truth, may differ. Even if reference itself is explanatorily idle, in at least some cases, there is a strong case that what one \emph{believes} about reference, explains what one believes about truth conditions of whole sentences. Second-language learning is a case in point. Some go further, and say that first-language linguistic competence is constituted, in part, by (perhaps knowledgeable) beliefs about reference.\footnote{Compare the slogan that understanding is knowing the meaning of one's words. Pettit (2002) contains an interesting discussion about whether \emph{knowledge} is appropriate here.}


The role of beliefs about reference in linguistic competence is of independent interest. And it is particularly relevant to Davidson's project, since it makes a difference to the tenability of the inscrutability theses he endorses. If one believes \emph{p}, and there is no fact of the matter about \emph{p}, there is no fact of the matter about whether one's belief is correct. The fully informed and reflective will know this full well. It seems an uncomfortable – even Moore-paradoxical – state to be in.\footnote{In fact, the issues here run deep, since it turns on what rational constraints believing \emph{p} to be indeterminate place on one's attitudes to \emph{p}. See Williams (2012) and the references therein.} But if beliefs about reference are constitutive of linguistic competence, and reference is inscrutable, then competence itself commits us to this uncomfortable situation.


Call the view that person-level beliefs about semantic properties are (in part) constitutive of competence the \emph{cognitive} view of understanding. Cognitive views come in various strengths. A \emph{weak} cognitive view says that only beliefs about the truth conditions of sentences are required for linguistic understanding.\footnote{Such a view is proposed in Wright (1987). It is worth considering whether Davidson held a version of the weak theory. At Davidson (1974: 142), he writes that any competent interpreter knows “a specifiable infinite subset of the truths of the theory,” and seems to have in mind the T-theorems that connect most directly to patterns of usage. For a different reading of the passages, see Lepore and Ludwig (2005: 122).} A \emph{strong} view says that beliefs about the reference of names are required for understanding. The strong version need not be ultra-strong; it need not attribute knowledge of an entire semantic theory, or every axiom within it (which would be phenomenologically very implausible, if we are talking about person-level, consciously accessible beliefs).


One case for a cognitive view of (first-language) competence is based on the \emph{verbal rationality} of linguistic acts.\footnote{What follows is heavily influenced by the excellent Heck (2006). For deployment of this kind of consideration against Davidson, see especially Rumfitt (1995: sec. XI). Hornsby (2005) argues for a model of linguistic rationality that does not taken the form sketched later.} I utter “Ada runs.” My action is an intentional one, not something that just “happens to me.” Characteristically, then, we should expect practical reasoning explanations to be available, showing how my beliefs and desires interact so as to make the action “the thing to do.” A natural suggestion is that this involves a wish to communicate that Ada runs, the belief I can communicate this by uttering something that means that Ada runs, plus the belief that “Ada runs” means that Ada runs. A nice aspect of this story is that it can show why certain inappropriate speech acts are nevertheless rationally performed – I might say that “Asa runs” when wanting to convey Ada runs, mistakenly believing that “Asa runs” means that Ada runs. The action would be rationalized as normal, and we can pinpoint the faulty belief that makes it misfire.


Suppose we accept that person-level beliefs about truth conditions are involved in first-person competence.\footnote{Incidentally, one issue here is whether “competence” is the right word to use, or whether we should really be thinking of this as a higher achievement – \emph{mastery} of the language. Perhaps young children are competent with a language, in virtue of simple immersion, without their linguistic actions being fully verbally rational.} This does not immediately take us to a strong cognitive conception. To be sure, if one systematically believes the right things about the truth conditions of sentences, this must be explained. But the mechanism providing the explanation might be causal, rather than person level and inferential.\footnote{For discussion, see Wright (1981), Evans (1981), Davies (1981), and Miller (1997). As an example of the “subpersonal” strategy, consider the conjecture that human psychology involves a \emph{semantic module} – a representation of semantic axioms of a T-theory, formulated in the “language of thought”, as discussed in Larson and Segal (1995). The module stands ready to process the canonical derivations, to output T-biconditionals (perhaps into consciously-accessible beliefs) for any given sentence. The representations of reference relations would not deserve the name “beliefs” (as part of a mental module, they would be unavailable for general processing, and we would not have person-level introspective access to them).}


It is not clear that the weak cognitive conception just sketched is stable. Consider again the patterns in our understanding of sentences. If I mistakenly think that “Ada runs” means that Asa runs, I will also think that “Ada sits” means that Asa sits. But consider someone who did not operate this way: who confidently believed the first while retaining the belief that “Ada Gs” is true if and only Ada Gs for all other \emph{G}. The weak cognitive conception would depict this as a mere processing error, and think there need be no rational criticism of the linguistic beliefs that constitute understanding. Consider also dictionary learning of new words. A strong cognitive view of understanding has a straightforward account: one learns new facts about what words refer to, or what predicates are true of, which are directly relevant to one's understanding. The weak cognitive view depicts the process as strangely indirect: involving a post hoc management of the subpersonal capacities that dispose one to acquire person-level beliefs about truth conditions.


If there are (verbally rational) subsentential speech acts, then the motivation for a strong cognitive conception may transfer directly. Stainton (1998) gives an example from which the following is adapted. We are at a roundtable meeting, and I am describing seating arrangements. I do so by pointing at various chairs, while uttering, successively, “the boss,” “anyone who needs to go early,” “a representative from the faculty board,” “Ada.” The audience forms appropriate beliefs. Clearly I have managed to communicate propositional contents, but I have done so by uttering fragments of sentences. The motivations at this point for a strong cognitive conception can parallel those for the weak one. This sort of language use looks verbally rational. To secure verbal rationality, we need semantic beliefs to play a role in the practical reasoning explanation of the speech act. Suppose that I wrongly believe that the chairperson is called “Ada.” My pointing to the chair and uttering “Ada” is a rational act, with a practical reasoning explanation routing through the (mistaken) belief that:



\begin{quote}


“Ada” refers to the Chairperson.



\end{quote}


This argument turns crucially on the principle that my utterances are truly \emph{subsentential} speech acts. There is an alternative diagnosis: even though a fragment is all that is phonetically realized, it may be that a sentence is uttered. The obvious parallel is to ellipsis. For example, the material in square brackets in the following might not be pronounced:



\begin{quote}


Ada was walking and Jean was [walking] too.



\end{quote}


\emph{The ellipsis hypothesis} (Stainton 1998) is that the kind of speech acts we have been considering are elliptical for full sentences, and are \emph{syntactically} sentential, that what is uttered is:



\begin{quote}


“Ada [sits here]”



\end{quote}


Only a sentential semantic beliefs would be required to account for the verbal rationality of the speech act. Whether the ellipsis hypothesis is correct is a contested, empirical question.\footnote{Stainton argues that the ellipsis hypothesis is false (Stainton 1998: 854), preferring the view that semantic information received from the linguistic fragment is processed \emph{pragmatically} to determine a propositional content for the speech act as a whole. To give a flavor of the debate, consider the following. According to Stainton, paradigm examples of ellipsis do not occur in discourse-initial position, yet fragmentary speech acts can do so (Stainton's example is starting a conversation in a shop with “five red apples, please”). Stainton holds that ellipsis proper requires prior linguistic cues that allow the audience to “fill in” the unpronounced material. The fragmentary utterances do not fit this description. For further discussion and debate, see Merchant (2005) and the references therein.}


A strong cognitive view of understanding, as mentioned, seems \emph{prima facie} in tension with the view that reference is radically indeterminate. It is worth recalling, however, that Davidson's own articulation of the inscrutability of reference was rather nuanced: he did think there were correct things to think about appropriately \emph{relativized} reference relations, and perhaps belief in \emph{these} could subserve the verbal rationality of language use.


I earlier suggested that he might have been better off embracing a more full-blooded instrumentalism.\footnote{I floated earlier the suggestion that semantic properties had only indirect explanatory roles – via propositional attitudes in which they are embedded. This fits an antirealist\Slash{}instrumentalist position much better than does the view that they are themselves directly involved in explaining worldly happenings. (Compare Wright (1992) on “wide cosmological role” as a test for realism). But there is a tension here: Davidson bundles together reference, truth and the content of attitudes to be determined by the radical interpreter. And the case for contentful beliefs and desires figuring in direct, immediate explanations of worldly happenings is much stronger (though compare Stich (1991). What Lewis (1994) calls the \emph{headfirst} approach to content, on which at least the coarse-grained content of beliefs and desires are settled independently of linguistic content, fipp more nicely here.} Such a position, on the face of it, would be in severe tension with cognitive views of understanding – linguistic competence would commit one to a range of semantic beliefs, to which the informed and reflective would on the contrary advocate an instrumentalist (perhaps error-theoretic) attitude. How could we square this circle? Perhaps the instrumentalist could appeal to some surrogate attitude: \emph{as-if belief} or \emph{pretense} rather than \emph{belief} as the appropriate cognitive attitude to take to T-theories. Whether appeal to pretense can really provide practical reasoning explanations is another matter – a wish for a cup of tea, plus the pretense that the liquid in the toy cup is tea, does not rationalize taking a sip.

% Notes
\section{References}


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———. (1992). \emph{Truth and Objectivity}. Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press.

\chapter{16. Language and Thought}


A.P. Martinich

\section{1. Davidson's View and Two Others}


Thought and language are closely connected both empirically and conceptually. But how? Is one prior to the other, and if so, in what sense? Donald Davidson held that the two are equally primary and emerge together: no language without thoughts; but no thought without language. This answer is challenging because it is not clear how both could emerge simultaneously. It is like answering the question, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” by saying “Both. From the beginning, there was a chicken and an egg. They evolved simultaneously.” We will be able to understand his answer better if we begin by considering two obvious answers to the question, “Which came first, language or thought?” The first is (A) that language precedes thought, and the second is (B) that thought precedes language.


These answers are intended to assert a metaphysical priority of one to the other. Metaphysical priority may be able to be explicated in various ways. For our purposes, the following will be the test of it: if one phenomenon \emph{P} can exist without another phenomenon \emph{Q} but not vice versa, then \emph{P} is metaphysically prior to Q. Chimpanzees evolved before human beings did, but they are not metaphysically prior to human beings because humans could have evolved first.


An argument for the view that language precedes thought\footnote{This view is most closely associated with L.S. Vygotsky (1962). Derek Bickerton is a more recent proponent of the view. After rejecting the view of Tomasello and his associates that language is not basic but derived, presumably, derived from elements of thought (Tomasello \emph{et al.} 2005), Bickerton adds that language is “a means of structuring experience and representing the world” (Bickerton 2005: 692). This suggests that thought does not precede language, which structures and represents the world directly. Something similar seems to be implied by his comment that “the emergence of language was a triggering factor” for intentionality; “language provided the spark, but thereafter language and shared intentionality coevolved” (Bickerton 2005: 691; see Bickerton 2007). Michael Dummett has still another perspective on the sense in which language precedes thought. See Dummett (1991) and Peacocke (1997).} is that while young children begin to speak a language around the age of 18 months, thought requires the concept of a self that is thinking, and they do not acquire the concept of a self until the age of two and a half or possibly as late as three and a half (Bickerton 2005 and Southgate, van Maanen, and Csibra 2007). Since children are talking at about the age of 18 months, language must precede thought. In order to explain how thought could precede language, a proponent of this view could explain the supposed first uses of language in a child as being nothing more than part of a stimulus-response mechanism. The random babbling that is natural to an infant includes, among many other sounds, “mama” or “papa.” The proud parent interprets this as a statement by the infant and provides positive reinforcement for those utterances with smiles, kisses, and cooing, while other babbling does not. But the baby has no thoughts.\footnote{For a behaviorist, the infant's babbling “mama” or “papa” is a stimulus for the response of the parent.} These positive experiences push the infant and then the toddler to utter sounds that are genuinely linguistic even though the infant or toddler still does not have the necessary cognitive abilities to have thoughts accompany what it is saying. One can explain an infant's utterance of “nana” to get mashed bananas as the result of a noncognitive association between the utterance, induced by hunger, and food. This view is empirically based and accepted by many developmental psychologists. But the view is also highly interpretive and not accepted by all of them.


The line of reasoning presented to support position A has a critical flaw. An infant who utters sounds instinctively and spontaneously is not talking at all. If certain sounds are merely the result of selective reinforcement, merely responses to noncognized stimuli, it is not talk. The situations, as described by the proponent of A, do not prove that language is primary because no linguistic behavior is present in them, any more than it would be present in a dog that barked “bark” in response to the utterance of “What does a tree have?” It is simply not correct or accurate to describe either the babbling infant or the dog as speaking. Related to this point, as regards the infant, is the distinction between learning a language and knowing (or being able to use) a language. Even if language learning is preceded by stimulus-response parings, it does not follow that these infantile utterances are part of language at all. They may be only homophonic with one.


Another reason for denying that the infant's babblings are linguistic is that a characteristic of human languages is that they consist of a potentially infinite number of sentences (Davidson 1967). Although no one produces or understands an actual infinity of sentences, there is no limit to how many one could produce or understand. In contrast, an infant has the resources to produce or understand only a relatively small number of utterances. Infantile utterances may be precursors of language learning but are not linguistic themselves; so these examples, as described, do not support the view that language precedes thought.


An advocate of A may claim that any utterance of an infant or toddler that is homophonic with the language of the parent counts as linguistic. If the advocate is unwilling to yield on this point, then the appropriate criterion for being linguistic is in dispute, and the discussion ends. So, for the purposes of this chapter, an utterance is linguistic only if that utterance is part of a system that consists of an infinite number of sentences.


This condition on what it is for something to be linguistic does not prejudice the discussion against position A or give position B an advantage. What makes the view that thought precedes language intuitively more plausible is that before one can say \emph{something}, one has to have \emph{something} to say. An occurrence of the word “something” in the preceding sentence marks a place for some expression that would denote or otherwise indicate a thought; that is, thought precedes language.


The evidence for this is “behavioral,” not in the eviscerated sense used by Skinnerian behaviorists but in the ordinary sense in which much behavior is deliberate and intentional, part of a plan or goal oriented, and so on. “Behavior” is a fine word to apply to intentional actions, and we do not need to yield it to behaviorists.


Animal behavior is studied by scientists, and perhaps the answer to the question whether thought precedes language can be found in those studies, especially the study of nonhuman primate behavior. If these primates can think but do not have language, then thought can and does precede language. A principal reason for thinking that primates do have thoughts is that they sometimes seem to try to size up a situation and to think of solutions to problems, such as getting a banana that is outside its reach or to use a stick to collect ants in their nest and inaccessible to their hands. More generally, primates seem to have some flexibility in their responses to various situations. This is not to say that primates can communicate or have language. Whether they can communicate nonlinguistically or not, they do not talk. A half century ago, many linguistics and anthropologists maintained that nonhuman primates had thoughts but could not talk only because their tongues and vocal cords did not have the right shapes. That was never very plausible since it would have been easy enough for them to have devised a sign language or acoustical language, consisting of various slaps, grunts, and pointings, if they had had any thoughts to express. The point here is that nonhuman primates might have thoughts without language. Many primatologists and anthropologists will insist that primates either have a language or can learn one, but that is because their criterion for having a language is weaker than that of philosophers and linguists, who hold that nonhuman primates do not have languages because the repertoire of signs that primates can learn is highly limited. Even if a primate could put together the words “water” and “bird” to denote a duck, they are not able to construct or understand a potentially infinite number of sentences or sentence-like utterances, and philosophers and linguists do require this latter ability in order for a creature to have a language.


If we revert to cognitive flexibility as the criterion for thought, then children at least by the time they can crawl are at least equally good examples of creatures with thoughts that do not have a language (cf. Peacocke 1997: 4). They explore things and may not have any broader intention than to find out things about their environment. More evidence for the view that thought precedes language after a preliminary description of Davidson's view is given. For him,



\begin{quote}


neither language nor thinking can be fully explained in terms of the other, and neither has conceptual priority. The two are, indeed, linked in the sense that each requires the other to be understood; but the linkage is not so complete that either suffices, even when reasonably reinforced to explicate the other.


(Davidson 1975: 156)



\end{quote}


Obviously, thought and talk are not the same because one often thinks without talking. But can one think without language? Davidson's suggestion is that one cannot. It may appear that when he says, “thought depends on speech,” he is expressing position A, that language is prior to thought (Davidson 1975: 156). But that is not his position: “the thesis that a creature cannot have thoughts unless it is an interpreter of the speech of another \dots{} imputes no priority to language” (Davidson 1975: 157).


He says that his view has room for the claims that “there may be thoughts for which the speaker cannot find words, or for which there are no words”; but he does not explain what he has in mind (Davidson 1975: 158). If the issue concerns not having an individual word for something, then it is easy to prove his claims. Suppose that a person understands “crimson” to be a particular deep shade of red. The person may imagine or perceive a shade of red even deeper, which she believes is an even deeper shade of red. And a person who notices for the first time an icy crust of snow that resulted from a partial melting and refreezing may have no word for this. But Davidson may have had something more important in mind when he said that there may be thoughts for which the speaker cannot find words or for which there are no words. His thesis is that thought in general and talk in general are equally primary. Once one has thought, it is quite possible for a person to have a particular thought for which she has no words. We might add that the “thoughtless comments” that people make and the assertions of dubious intelligibility of some philosophers are not counterexamples to either the thesis that thought and talk emerge simultaneously or that thought precedes language.


Two paragraphs earlier, Davidson was quoted as saying, “thought depends on speech.” This gives the impression that he, like most philosophers, is primarily interested in the relation between a speaker's talk and the speaker's thought. But that is not the case. His primary focus is revealed in part of another quotation from the same paragraph: “a creature cannot have thoughts unless it is an interpreter of the speech of another.” Notice that here he is taking the interpreter's perspective to understand the speech of another, not the speaker's ability to talk. From the “second-person” perspective, the interpreter does not begin with either speech or language, or at least it is not obvious that the interpreter would have either. What Davidson wants to describe is the process by which a person who has no ability to think or talk can come to understand the speech of another.


Davidson's considered position is that the perspective of the interpreter and not the speaker is the right one because a person's language is determined by what happened when she was learning the language, and language learning begins by observing the behavior of others engaged in linguistic behavior. As learning proceeds, the interpreter makes some tentative attempts to say something in order to verify whether her judgments or hypotheses about the behavior are correct. Whether these utterances become part of her language or not depends on her success with them, and her success is measured by the responses of others. Each judgment by the interpreter about the linguistic situation is a response to the behavior of speakers. The speakers already have thoughts and know the meanings of sentences; so they are not the focal point of the inquiry about the priority of language or thought. It is the second- or third-person perspective on linguistic behavior is more important than the first person.


One might object that infants begin to learn language not by interpreting the speech of others but by spontaneously talking to adults. This was the view we described earlier as part of the first position. At that time, we pointed out the problem with that view. The spontaneous babbling of infants is not speech and not even the beginning of speech.


In the earliest part of genuine language learning, infants and toddlers try to imitate the utterances of the parents in order to communicate. (Note: not all communication is linguistic.) Infants may be inspired to imitate because of some recognized correlation between the utterances and certain mental attributes of the parents in particular circumstances. I have used the stilted and vague phrase, “certain mental attributes,” because it is not clear whether these mental attributes are intentions, beliefs, desires, or something else. The important point is that the infant or toddler needs to accommodate – again I resort to a vague locution – two things: the (meaning of the) utterances and some mental attribute. Eventually, the child knows that the utterances have meaning and can make reliable judgments about the relevant intentions, beliefs, and desires that accompany them.


The importance of the interpreter in learning a language may be easier to see in the case of a person learning a second language. The paradigmatic thought experiment here is Quine's linguist, who is trying to learn a native's language, completely unrelated to his own. In Quine's philosophy, the linguist is a “translator,” that is, a person whose goal is to correlate sentences of the second language, uttered in certain situations, with sentences of his first language. “Gavagai,” uttered when a rabbit runs by, gets translated as “There's a rabbit.” This yields the beginning of the stimulus meaning of “gavagai.” The stimulus of the running rabbit elicits the response of “gavagai,” just as a running rabbit would elicit the response of “There's a rabbit” in a speaker of English (supposedly). Stimulus meaning is as close to a no-meaning theory of meaning as possible. In contrast, Davidson has a much richer semantic theory than Quine and so a much richer ontology. Davidson's linguist would be an “interpreter,” who assigns meanings to sentences and makes judgments about what the speaker believes. In “Belief and the Basis of Meaning,” Davidson describes what is involved:



\begin{quote}


We interpret a bit of behaviour when we say what a speaker's words mean on an occasion of use. The task may be seen as one of redescription. We know that the words “Es schneit” have been uttered on a particular occasion and we want to redescribe this uttering as an act of saying that it is snowing. \dots{} My claim is only that making a detailed sense of a person's intentions and beliefs cannot be independent of making sense of his utterances. \dots{} I conclude that in interpreting utterances from scratch – in \emph{radical} interpretation – we must somehow deliver simultaneously a theory of belief and a theory of meaning\emph{.}


(Davidson 1974: 141, 144)



\end{quote}


This quotation provides the key to understanding Davidson's view that thought and language are equally primary. The interpreter has to make a judgment about the meaning of the sentence (the talk) simultaneously with a judgment about the beliefs of the speaker (the thought). That the speaker has thought and language is presupposed, for there would not be anything linguistic to interpret if the speaker did not have a language and the necessary accompanying beliefs. So the question about priority is a question (primarily) about interpreters, not speakers:



\begin{quote}


beliefs and meanings conspire to account for utterances. A speaker who holds a sentence to be true on an occasion does so in part because of what he means, or would mean, by an utterance of that sentence, and in part because of what he believes. If all we have to go on is the fact of honest utterance, we cannot infer the belief without knowing the meaning and have no chance of inferring the meaning without the belief.


(Davidson 1974: 142)



\end{quote}


It is important to notice that when Davidson uses the word “meaning,” he is almost always talking about a property of sentences. When he talks about understanding what the person is doing in uttering the sentences, he talks about interpreting “the person” and not about interpreting “what the speaker means.” “Interpreting the person” is an odd phrase, unlike the phrases, “I can read him like a book,” “I can't read him,” and “I don't understand him at all,” which are either idioms of English or idiomatic. There is no idiom like “I can interpret him,” and it is not idiomatic. While “read” and “understand” overlap in usage or sometimes mean the same thing as “interpret” – a reading or an understanding of a text is an interpretation of a text – when people \emph{read} or \emph{understand} a person, the person's linguistic behavior is rarely the primary reason for using the words “read” or “understand.” Not being able to read a person means not knowing what that person is thinking, probably because of his past behavior, which need not include having said one thing and having done another.

\section{2. Davidson and the View that Thought Precedes Language}


Why then does Davidson use the phrase “interpret the person” and not “interpret what the person means”? I believe he wants to avoid the impression that he thinks that there is any theoretical merit in H.P. Grice's analysis of “utterer's occasion meaning,” a form of “nonnatural meaning,” as the basic type (Grice 1957). There are two important asymmetries between Davidson's theory and Grice's. First, Davidson takes meaning to apply primarily (and virtually exclusively) to sentences or utterances. In contrast, for Grice, the primary subject of semantics is what people mean; the sense in which an utterance or sentence has meaning is derivative from what people mean or might mean by utterances and sentences. The second asymmetry is related. For Grice, meaning is primarily a first-person phenomenon, as it is for John Searle. In his well-known criticism of Quine's thesis of the indeterminacy of meaning, Searle says,



\begin{quote}


we now from our own case that we do mean by “rabbit' something different from ‘rabbit stage’ or ‘undetached rabbit part.” \dots{} When I saw a rabbit recently, as I did in fact, and I called it a rabbit, I meant rabbit. In all discussions in the philosophy of mind, it is absolute essential at some point to remind oneself of the first-person case.


(Searle 1987: 598)



\end{quote}


A person who nonnaturally means something by what she utters can know determinatively what she means, even if she determinatively means something vague. Davidson, like Quine, thinks that linguistic use is essentially a non-first-person phenomenon for the reason given earlier: learning a language proceeds from the perspective of a second or third person.


Because of these asymmetric differences, Davidson objects to Gricean approaches to the philosophy of language in the following way:



\begin{quote}


The present theme is the nature of the evidence for the adequacy of a theory of interpretation. The evidence must be describable in nonsemantic, non-linguistic terms if it is to respond to the question we have set; it must be evidence we can imagine the virgin investigator having without his already being in possession of the theory it is supposed to be evidence for. This is where I spy the trouble [with a Gricean theory]. There is a principled, and not merely a practical obstacle to verifying the existence of detailed, general and abstract beliefs and intentions, while being unable to tell what a speaker's words mean.


(Davidson 1974: 143–144).



\end{quote}


Davidson is alluding to the structure and content of Grice's analysis of utterer's meaning, even in its simplest form, namely,



\begin{quote}


An utterer U means something by an utterance x if and only if U intended the utterance of x to produce some effect in an audience by means of the recognition of this intention.


(Grice 1957)



\end{quote}


Davidson doubts that a creature without language, say, a toddler, would be able to verify the existence of a speaker's intentions and \emph{a fortiori} the existence of an intention as complex as the one expressed by “means of the recognition of this [the first] intention” without already having the word “intention.”


Now one can grant that a toddler would not have the words “intention,” not to mention “recognition” and the phrase “produce some effect.” But to assume that the toddler would have to have these words in order to recognize the intentions to produce an effect is to beg the question about whether thought can precede talk. Even casual interaction with toddlers between the ages of 18 and 24 months shows that they can communicate without language. They produce and understand short utterances, sometimes consisting of four or more “vocables” that they treat as separable units, for example, “water,” “milk,” “juice,” and “nana” in the proto-sentence frame, “I want \_\_\_” (Tomasello 2008: 266). That the toddlers do not have a language is evident from the fact that they could not produce and could not understand more than a couple of thousand utterances at most. Since these claims may be dismissed as unscientific, let us consider some of the scientific evidence for the presence of thoughts in humans younger than toddlers, infants between the ages of 12−16 months.\footnote{I rely primarily on the research of Michael Tomasello and his associates. See the Bibliography in Tomasello (2008), and Call and Tomasello (2008). Additional empirical evidence is given in Carey (2009).}


Psychologists who believe infants and toddlers can recognize intentions and even have a proto-communicative ability design their experiments in ways to show that the inference to the best explanation of the infant's behavior is that she has intentions and shares knowledge with an audience. If infants have intentions and joint knowledge, then by Davidson's own criterion, they have beliefs, and if beliefs, then thoughts.


By the age of one year, infants purposefully point in the presence of adults.\footnote{In fact, the characteristic arrangement of fingers used for pointing seems to be innate to humans, and no other primates, and occurs even earlier.} Merely pointing is not even quasi-communicative if one “points” to an object or in a direction, with no discernible purpose, and in such a case, one is not expressing an intention either. An intentional quasi-communicator Q has to get the recipient R to recognize that Q has a certain intention and also intends R to recognize that Q wants R to help Q realize that intention. Infants as young as one have the ability to have such complex intentions. Their pointing begins only if they see that the recipient (an adult in the studies) can see what the infant wants. What the infants have is the ability to recognize that the agent and recipient have joint knowledge: the “two individuals both know that they both know” (Tomasello, Carpenter, and Liszkowski 2007: 706; see also 714–715). Anything having this complex of knowledge and intentions is a thing that has thought. Some examples of infants indicating that they have joint knowledge with a recipient include pointing to a window that the infant wants opened; pointing to an empty glass to get the mother to pour more water into it after the infant has drunk all the water; and the infant pointing to a chair for a grandparent to sit down next to the infant (Tomasello, Carpenter, and Liszkowski 2007: 709). In each case, the pointing ends when the infant has gotten what it wants.


It is no good for a skeptic to claim that an equally good explanation of the behavior is that the infant is using the recipient as a mere tool. The fact that the pointing occurs only when the infant sees that the recipient can see the same thing that she does and only when the recipient has the same knowledge relevant to the situation as the infant answers means that the infant recognizes a shared cognitive structure: she knows along with the recipient that “the indicated location is in some way \emph{relevant} to some larger context they share” (Tomasello, Carpenter, and Liszkowski 2007: 706). Even if communication or proto-communication does not occur until the child is a toddler of the age of 18−24 months, human infants would still have enough cognitive sophistication for thought (D'Entremont and Seamans 2007; Southgate, van Maanen, and Csibra 2007). The empirical evidence just reported concerns an infant's or toddler's ability to initiate utterances to achieve a goal, to function as a quasi-communicator or perhaps an actual nonlinguistic communicator. In either case, the infant has intentions, which accompany desires and beliefs.


Apropos an infant's and toddler's intentions and beliefs is Davidson's claim that thoughts are attributed to a creature when the creature asserts a positive sentence that has words like “believes,” “knows,” “fears,” and “forgets” (Davidson 1975: 156). Of the types of thought expressed by these words, belief is the central one according to Davidson because any other kind of thought must always relate to some belief or other. A creature who forgets where it left food believes that it once had food and that it needs food in the future. Each belief is part of an “endless [other] interlocked beliefs” (Davidson 1975: 157; cf. Jeffrey 1985: 485).


Davidson's requirement that creatures with thoughts have to be able to assert positive sentences with the word “believe” in them sounds quite strong. In my experience with toddlers, “believes” is not used before the age of at least three. However, toddlers do say such things as “I know it,” “I afraid (of) it,” and “I forgot.” And if Davidson is right that knowledge, fear, and forgetting relate to beliefs, then toddlers would have beliefs even if they do not have the word for them. It is not plausible to argue that the toddlers do not know the words “know,” “afraid,” and “forgot” because they are part of fused expressions, for example, “I-know-it” because they combine “know” with other grammatical persons and other objects.


Before leaving the topic of the structure and content of thoughts according to Davidson, we should describe what he holds is required for thinking in addition to beliefs. There is a substantial list of items, which includes: (a) concepts, (b) goals, (c) desires, (d) mistakes and jokes, (e) and other things. I will talk about each of these briefly.


(a) Concepts are abstractions. Just as the meanings of sentences are linguistically basic according to Davidson and words derivative from them, so are thoughts mentally basic and concepts derivative from them. Many words express concepts. Davidson thinks that it is difficult to describe the nature of thought because so many concepts are necessary for it. He mentions acting on a reason, believing, and doubting, which for him are interdependent. These interdependencies are the \emph{holism of the mental} (Davidson 1997: 123–124). But the holism of concepts, like the holism of beliefs, is much more complex. Every concept is connected with some other concept, through one or more other concepts, often through very many intermediate connections. Just as believing that a gun is loaded requires that one also believes that guns are weapons and weapons are enduring physical objects, the concept of a gun requires having the concepts of being able to be loaded, of being a weapon, and of being an enduring physical object and so on (Davidson 1975: 158). Also a



\begin{quote}


concept is defined by its typical cause only within the framework of a system of concepts that allows us to respond to certain stimuli as tables, friends, horses, and flies. A concept is defined for those who speak languages like ours by its typical causes, given that we are already in the world of language and conceptualization.


(Davidson 2001: 138)



\end{quote}


The facts described in the last several paragraphs constitute a large part of Davidson's holism.


(b) Goals. Thought requires having goals. This means that computers with their current capabilities cannot play chess. Although people casually say that computers can and that now they are now much better players than human beings, this talk is metaphorical according to Davidson. He says that in “order to play chess, it is necessary to want to win, or at least to understand the concept of winning. To understand the concept of winning, it is not enough to know what it is to win at chess; it is necessary to have a general conception of what it means to win at any activity. This involves in turn an understanding of the concept of a rule or convention, an idea of activities that may be ends in themselves, and an ability to classify certain activities as games” (Davidson 1990: 89).


(c) Computers cannot think for another reason. Thought requires desire in addition to belief (Davidson 1990: 89–90). This idea is implicit in the comment that the concept of winning is essential to being able to play chess. Winning requires desiring an end or goal. Of course, thought does not specifically depend on knowing what chess or winning is; the point is that thought is essentially connected with goals, and goals with desires. Current computers represent things in the world through programs that are wholly syntactic, and those who design and use these computers know how to correlate the representations with what is represented. But from this, it does not follow that the computer understands what it represents (Davidson 1990: 90–91; cf. Searle 1984, 1987). Another way to express this point is to say that computers lack semantics: connections between the syntactic structures and mental attitudes toward the “objects, or kinds of objects, with which the subject of those attitudes must have come into causal contact” (Davidson 1990: 95). These attitudes themselves are causal dispositions. Cain's desire to kill Abel was caused in part by certain beliefs that he had.


(d) Mistakes and Jokes. Thought also requires the idea that one has made a mistake, that some of one's beliefs have been false. It is not obvious that dogs, say, recognize errors. In the course of a game of throwing a stick and retrieving it, the master may move his arm in a throwing motion but not release the stick. The dog, anticipating that the stick will be thrown, begins to move away from the master, but comes back after a few steps when it sees that the stick has not been thrown. This process may be repeated until the dog no longer expects the stick to be thrown. Alternatively, a dog may chase a squirrel and seem to think that it went up a particular tree. The dog will look up the tree and, looking up the trunk and into the branches, walk around it; it may sniff at that tree or another. Eventually, it gives up the pursuit. In neither of these cases is there good evidence that the dog thinks that it has made a mistake. It is just as plausible that the dog, as a result of conditioning, is waiting for the complete stimulus (the throwing of the stick) to be completed, or is instinctively (driven by its visual and olfactory equipment) to look and smell in various places, respectively. But a 28-month-old toddler can make mistakes about the location of a toy and recognizes that she was mistaken. Asked to get a particular toy, she may look in a box where a grandparent had placed it in her presence (and later surreptitiously removed it for philosophical reasons). Not finding it, the toddler says, “It's not there.” Sometimes she waits for a suggestion from the grandparent, such as “Maybe it's in your room”; but sometimes she initiates her own search, having recognized a mistake has been made. Experiments have shown that a 30-month-old toddler recognized and corrected the mistake of an adult (Shwe and Markman 1997; cf. Wimmer and Perner 1983).


Davidson thinks that those who attribute thoughts to toddlers, and presumably dogs and great apes ignore the consequences of “\emph{the autonomy of meaning},” namely, the fact that anyone who knows a language knows that some of her sentences can be used “for dishonest assertion – or for joking, story-telling, goading, exaggerating, insulting, and all the rest of the jolly crew” (Davidson 1975: 165). Even if toddlers do not understand “the rest of the jolly crew,” they understand some of them. The grandmother of a 20-month-old toddler plays a game with him. Pointing at the mother she asks, “Is this mommy,” and the toddler nods; she points to the father and asks “Is that daddy?” and the toddler nods. When the grandmother points to the toddler and asks, “Is that Hazel?”, the toddler laughs vigorously because Hazel is the family pet. He knows that the grandmother is making a joke, partly because of the grandmother's inflection when she asks this question and partly because the toddler knows how absurd it is for the grandmother to say that he is Hazel. When the grandmother first asked this odd question, the toddler was confused, but soon caught onto the joke. The two toddlers of these examples can communicate, joke, and make mistakes but neither is so articulate as to have a language. The communicative skills of the 28-month-old toddler are much better developed than the younger one; but she is not a competent speaker of a human language. This evidence shows that nonlinguistic toddlers grasp something of the autonomy of meaning, the autonomy of nonlinguistic communicative meaning. The larger point being made here is that thought can precede knowledge of language because thought is necessary for any communication, and nonlinguistic communication has enough cognitive sophistication to be thought-full. If toddlers cannot conceptualize the full range of speech acts, that only shows that their thoughts are not as sophisticated as they will be one day.


(e) Other things. Davidson claims that other things are necessary for thought:



\begin{quote}


A creature without the concept of an object, however good it is at discriminating what we call objects, is a creature without even the rudiments of the framework of thought. What calls for ontology is the apparatus of pronouns and cross reference in natural languages, what we represent by the symbolism of quantifiers and variables in elementary logic. These devices provide the resources for constructing complex predicates, and at this point semantics must map names and predicates on to objects. \dots{} the ontology [must include] macroscopic physical objects, including animals \dots{} [and] there will be sortal concepts for classifying the items in the ontology. There must be concepts for marking spatial and temporal position. There must be concepts for some of the evident properties of objects, and for expression of the various changes and activities of objects.


(Davidson 2001: 140).



\end{quote}


What this long quotation shows – it is not Davidson's complete list of things that are necessary for thought – is that he is describing the full-fledged system of human thought. Davison understands that one might object that his list is anthropocentric and “revealing a provincial attitude toward intentionality” (Davidson 2001: 141). His reply is that the “important question \dots{} isn't whether some animals have a simpler or degraded set of concepts; it is the question whether they have concepts at all” (Davidson 2001: 140). He then uses the example of an octopod that acts differentially with respect to two kinds of things and concludes that this kind of behavior does not require thought. While that is true, there is a great distance between the octopod and the communicative toddler. Granting that nonlinguistic communication does not have the power of human languages and that it does not employ multiple quantifiers and cross-reference, it is not clear why these things are necessary for thought simpliciter.

\section{3. Conclusion}


I have relied heavily on empirical evidence for the existence of protocommunication in infants and nonlinguistic communication in toddlers in order to show that thought precedes language. In other words, I have produced counterexamples to Davidson's claim, “Necessarily, thought and talk are equally primary.” Davidson would probably not be pleased with my procedure because he was not interested in empirical data. There are several places where he said or implied that he was not interested in the facts or in real possibilities, for example, Davidson (1990: 90).


If Davidson is wrong about the relative priority of thought and language, is there a diagnosis of why he went wrong? One answer does not seem right: that he focused on the interpreter and not the speaker. Grice is not committed to the view that thought precedes language because he focuses on the utterer, for the utterer can mean something only if she has a reasonable expectation that he can understood by the hearer. The important difference between Grice's theory and Davidson's is that Grice begins at a prelinguistic level. Thought precedes language because nonlinguistic communication precedes linguistic communication.


Davidson began his work in the philosophy of language by discussing properties of full-fledged human languages (Davidson 1965, 1967, 1970, 1973, 1974). His interest in the relation of thought to talk arose when he asked what evidence was available to verify interpretations of linguistic use, given that a person (the interpreter) already had a truth theory for a language. If he had not had the idea of a complete language in the background, he might have seen that language had plausibly evolved from nonlinguistic conventional communication, and that this had plausibly evolved from nonconventional communication, which already requires both the interpreter and the utterer, hypotheses about beliefs, intentions and desires, the major components of thought.

\section{Acknowledgments}


Research on this chapter was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, Princeton University, Summer, 2011, directed by Gilbert Harman and Ernie Lepore. I want to thank them for their help. The participants of the Sixth Annual UNAM-University of Texas at Austin Conference, in Mexico City, October 1, 2011, for their comments, especially my commentator Raymundo Morado also deserve my thanks. Jake Galgon, Alex Grzankowski, Christopher Hom, and Leslie Martinich also provided helpful comments or discussion.

% Notes
\section{References}


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———. (2007). \emph{Adam's Tongue}. New York: Hill and Wang.


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Carey, S. (2009). \emph{The Origin of Concepts}. New York: Oxford University Press.


Davidson, D. (1965). Theories of meaning and learnable languages. In Davidson (1984): 3–15.


———. (1967). Truth and meaning. In Davidson (1984): 125–139.


———. (1970). Semantics for natural languages. In Davidson (1984): 55–64.


———. (1973). Radical interpretation. In Davidson (1984): 125–154.


———. (1974). Belief and the basis of meaning. In Davidson (1984): 141–154.


———. (1975). Thought and talk. In Davidson (1984): 155–170.


———. (1984). \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Meaning}. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


———. (1990). Representation and interpretation. In Davidson (2004): 87–99.


———. (1997). The emergence of thought. In \emph{Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective}. Oxford: Clarendon Press (2001), pp. 123–134.


———. (2001). What thought requires. In Davidson (2004): 135–149.


———. (2004). \emph{Problems of Rationality}. New York: Oxford University Press.


D'Entremont, B. and Seamans, E. (2007). Do infants need social cognition to act socially? \emph{Child Development} 78:723–728.


Dummett, M. (1991). The relative priority of thought and language. In \emph{Frege and Other Philosophers}. Oxford: Clarendon Press, pp. 315–325.


Grice, H.P. (1957). Meaning. In \emph{Studies in the Way of Words}. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 213–222.


Jeffrey, R. (1985). Animal interpretation. In \emph{Actions and Events}, E. Lepore and B. McLaughlin (eds). Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 481–487.


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———. (1987). Indeterminacy, empiricism, and the first person. In \emph{The Philosophy of Language}, 5th ed, A.P. Martinich (ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.


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Tomasello, M., Carpenter, M. Call, J., Behne, T. and Moll, H. (2005). Understanding and sharing intentions. \emph{Behavioral and Brain Sciences} 28:675–735.


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Wimmer, H. and Perner, J. (1983). Beliefs about beliefs: representation and constraining function of wrong beliefs in young children's understanding of deception. \emph{Cognition} 13:103–128.

\chapter{17. Conceptual Schemes}


David Henderson


A diversity of thinkers have written about conceptual schemes. Their claims doubtless constitute a motley. Still, this much seems common cause: conceptual schemes “are points of view from which individuals, cultures, or periods survey the passing scene” (Davidson 1984b: 183). The points of view supposedly result from the different concepts that folk developed in the course of their respective individual biographies or cultural histories. In turn, concepts are presumed to be encoded in languages, so talk of conceptual schemes is intimately associated with talk of differences across languages. The relevant differences across languages are commonly understood to be those that make for difficulties of translation – as the speech of those speaking the one language, with its concepts, would not readily be translated into the other language, with its different concepts. Following this trail left by proponents of conceptual schemes, Davidson writes:



\begin{quote}


We may identify conceptual schemes with languages, then, or better, allowing for the possibility that more than one language may express the same scheme, sets of inter-translatable languages. \dots{} Can we then say that two people have different conceptual schemes if then speak languages that fail of inter-translatability?


(Davidson 1984b: 185)



\end{quote}


Thus, as Davidson understands these issues, to posit radically different conceptual schemes is to posit languages that totally and completely fail of intertranslatability. He famously argues that one cannot make sense of this idea of radically different conceptual schemes.


It is worth noting that Davidson associates the idea of radically different conceptual schemes with the idea of conceptual relativism – thus his criticism of the idea of radically different conceptual schemes is designed to also serve as a criticism of the idea of conceptual relativism. A conceptual relativist insists that these radically different conceptual schemes may be deployed in alternate accounts of the world that are both true (true but untranslatable). This association of talk of radically different conceptual schemes with conceptual relativism may not be shared by a number of those proponents of conceptual schemes that Davidson himself seems to take as targets (more on this below). So, some of his criticisms of the idea of conceptual schemes may not be wholly fair to some of his apparent targets (such as Quine, perhaps).


Davidson argues that this idea that there might be languages that fail completely and totally of intertranslatability is unintelligible – and thus the idea of radically different conceptual schemes is as well. While allowing that there can be relatively shallow, local, differences in the concepts in play across groups, and that these can occasion local awkwardness in translation, he insists that no such differences could constitute what proponents of “conceptual relativism” have envisioned. Central to his misgivings is this basic idea: the behavior of some folk counts as language use only to the extent that it is translatable – so the idea of non-intertranslatable languages makes no sense.


Davidson does not merely announce this principle, and argue from it; rather, he argues that anything that does what conceptual schemes are advertised as doing would need to be expressed in languages that are intertranslatable. Davidson's discussion of the central metaphors associated with conceptual schemes (the metaphors of organizing and of fitting) and how they themselves would require translatability of a language expressing a conceptual scheme constitutes his central line of argument against radically different conceptual schemes.


One might respond that talk of conceptual schemes has commonly invoked partial, rather than complete and total, failures of intertranslatability – and arguably this is true of those whom Davidson names as positing conceptual schemes. Davidson closes his classic critique of the idea of conceptual schemes with a quick discussion of this more moderate way of thinking about conceptual schemes. Davidson suggests that partial failures of intertranslatability will be relatively uninteresting, and thus there will be little of philosophical interest in what remains of the idea of differences in conceptual schemes.


The foregoing provides a sweeping outline of Davidson's brief against conceptual schemes. On the one hand, the idea of radically different conceptual schemes is unintelligible, as being a language is conceptually tied to being translatable. On the other hand, while mild conceptual differences are possible, the character of successful translation insures that such differences will necessarily be relatively minor, isolated, and thus uninteresting. Let us now focus on how Davidson argues for the distinct strands in his critique.


Let us focus first on Davidson's argument against the idea of differing conceptual schemes when these are understood as involving complete failures of translatability between languages. As noted, he is tempted by a “short line” of response: nothing could count as evidence for an activity being wholly untranslatable into our language that is not also evidence for that activity not being a bit of linguistic behavior (Davidson 1984b: 185). Put simply, translatability into a familiar language might be taken to be a criterion for being a language. On this criterion, it would follow that there could be no languages expressing radically different conceptual schemes because there could be no languages that completely failed of intertranslatability. However, while this criterion indeed is at the heart of Davidson's misgivings regarding conceptual schemes, he realizes that it would best emerge as a conclusion of an argument, a lemma. He seeks to better understand the connection between translatability and languagehood, and he does so by thinking about what languages expressing conceptual schemes would need to do.


Davidson notices that the central metaphors motivating talk of conceptual schemes each view languages and concepts as doing something distinctive and characteristic. He argues that were languages and concepts to perform as advertised by proponents of conceptual schemes, they would necessarily be intertranslatable – or at least that any evidence of such matters would necessarily be rooted in acceptable translation.\footnote{LePore and Ludwig (2005: 306–307) explore a way in which Davidson’ s discussion of his central “criterion” for languagehood is ambiguous: it may assert that translatability is a “condition at least sufficient for the required state of affairs [languagehood] to obtain, and which makes sense in detail of its obtaining,” or rather it may assert that “translatability” is “a way of telling” that certain speech behavior is a language (LePore and Ludwig 2005: 306–307). It is certainly the case that Davidson's argument seems to vacillate between two readings: (a) the claim that nothing of the nature of supposed conceptual schemes could obtain – nothing constituted by untranslatability could perform as advertised (by organizing the world or fitting experience) without being translatable, and (b) the claim that we have no way of telling, and would have no reason for thinking, that wholly untranslatable behavior amounted to a language doing what conceptual schemes are advertised as doing. Lepore and Ludwig rightly note that some strands in Davidson's argument seem stronger on the one reading, while others seem stronger on the other.} Translatability, Davidson argues, is necessary to make sense of the central metaphors motivating talk of conceptual schemes.


Those positing conceptual schemes draw a distinction between scheme and content – with elements of the world or elements of one's experience cast in the role of content. Conceptual Schemes are then understood in terms of how they function with respect to these elements of content. Sometimes conceptual schemes (and their respective expressing languages) are said to “organize” (or “systematize,” or “divide-up”) the world or experience. Other times, conceptual schemes (and their expressing language) are said to more or less “fit” (or “predict,” “account for,” or “face”) the world or experience. Davidson argues that neither of these metaphors (organizing or fitting) can be understood without supposing that what does so is itself translatable in some significant degree. It would follow that to do what conceptual schemes are supposed to do, the languages expressing them would need to be significantly translatable. Thus, the idea that there are radically different conceptual schemes expressed by languages that are then wholly untranslatable is incoherent: to do what radically different, and thus totally \emph{nontranslatable}, conceptual schemes would do, they would need to be such as would be \emph{intertranslatable}.


Davidson develops this critique by pursuing each of the metaphors (Davidson 1984b: 187–95). Talk of organizing lends itself to thinking of predicates and the things or experiential events satisfying them, while talk of conceptual schemes fitting, facing, or predicting the content leads one to think of something on the order of sentences (or theories) and what satisfies them.


If conceptual schemes organize, they must organize some plurality – of objects or experiences. Consider first the idea that they organize objects. Davidson notes that, to think that some language and conceptual scheme organizes some objects, one would need to be in a position to say what objects would satisfy its various categories or predicates. To say in our language that some predicate in the other language is satisfied by some class of objects, we may need to use a complicated formulation in our own language. But, so be it. At some level, this is to translate by appeal to what Davidson terms a “common ontology” – that referenced in the satisfaction conditions, be they simple or complex, alluded to in our interpretive scheme. Thus, to think that we are dealing with a language organizing objects, we apparently must be able to translate the language (perhaps using awkward formulations).


A parallel point applies when thinking of schemes and languages organizing experience: “Whatever plurality we take experience to consist in – events like losing a button or stubbing a toe, having a sensation of warmth or hearing an oboe – we will have to individuate according to familiar principles. A language that organizes \emph{such} entities must be a language very like our own” (Davidson 1984b: 192). Thus, to think that we are dealing with a language organizing experiences, we apparently must be able to translate the language (again, perhaps using awkward formulations).


In sum, a language that organizes experience or that organizes “things” will be a translatable language. Davidson concludes that the metaphor of different languages organizing differently is no basis for thinking of radically different conceptual schemes.


What then of the idea that conceptual schemes fit the world? This presumably means that sentences or theories deploying that conceptual scheme fit the world. If sentences or a theory fit the world, they are true. In an extended sense, one might say that a conceptual scheme is true – if it is expressed in some true theory. What of a scheme and theory that fits experience? Of course, the scheme\Slash{}theory might fit some range of experience, and be supported to that extent, and yet be false. But, what of a scheme\Slash{}theory that fits “the totality of possible sensory evidence past, present, and future.” Davidson suggests that, “for a theory to fit or face up to the totality of possible sensory evidence is for that theory to be true” (Davidson 1984b: 193).


Thus, when thinking about the metaphor of “fitting” – either fitting the world or fitting (predicting, according with) the totality of possible experience – Davidson urges on us this result: performing as advertised entails that the scheme is associated with a language, and a theory deploying that scheme, that is true.\footnote{There is a disconcerting “rounding” or “near enough” character to this formulation – one associated with the question of just how tightly concepts and conceptual schemes are to be associated with theories. On highly holistic theories of meaning or concepts, to change one's theory of the world is to change one's concepts. On such a view, concepts and conceptual schemes are tightly associated with particular theories. This is implausible, and moderately externalist accounts that allow for various theoreticians disagreeing while using the same concept are clearly better on this score. A charitable reading of Davidson would have him associating conceptual schemes with theories that are “largely” true. What this amounts to would seem to turn on the extent to which one must “find agreement” under acceptable translation. We turn to such matters of degree when we turn to Davidson's insistence that the differences in conceptual schemes that would be allowable when thinking of conceptual schemes in terms of limited failures or difficulties in translation would be “uninteresting” or “unexciting.”} Accordingly, Davidson returns to the question of how such a conceptual scheme could utterly fail of intertranslatability:



\begin{quote}


[T]he criterion of a conceptual scheme different from our own now becomes: largely true but not translatable. The question whether this is a useful criterion is just the question how well we understand the notion of truth applied to language, independent of the notion of translation. The answer is, I think, that we do not understand it independently at all.


(Davidson 1984b: 194)



\end{quote}


To make the point, Davidson invokes Tarski's Convention T, Tarski's test for the adequacy of any account of truth. According to Convention T, a satisfactory theory of truth for a language, \emph{L}, will need to entail, for every sentence \emph{s} of \emph{L}, a sentence of the form “\emph{s} is true if and only if \emph{p}” where “\emph{s}” is replaced by a description of \emph{s} and “\emph{p}” is replaced by a translation of \emph{s} into the language, \emph{L*} (in which the theory of truth in \emph{L} is given). (It is supposed that \emph{L*} is different from, and essentially richer than, \emph{L}, as any language containing its own truth predicate will give rise to paradox, as Tarski noted.) Davidson's point is that the notion of translation is implicated or involved in any understanding of truth – as it is involved in the criterion for the adequacy of any account of truth.


Of course, Davidson famously invokes Convention T in his account of translation or interpretation, arguing that an adequate scheme for the translation of one language into another will itself provide an extensional truth theory for the translated language in the other language.\footnote{This approach raises delicate questions having to do with the applicability of Tarski's account to natural languages. Central here would be Tarski's insistence that the language, \emph{L*}, in which an account of truth in some language, \emph{L}, is expressed would need to be essentially richer than the language, \emph{L} – as no nonparadoxical language can contain its own truth predicate. Natural languages do not respect such neat limits. Further, one may wonder what becomes of \emph{intertranslat}ability under such constraints. For translatability of \emph{L} into \emph{L*}, \emph{L*} would need to be essentially richer than \emph{L}, and \emph{L*} would need to include a predicate (not in \emph{L}) for truth-in-\emph{L}. For translatability of \emph{L*} into \emph{L}, *, \emph{L} would need to be essentially richer than \emph{L*}, and \emph{L} would need to include a predicate (not in \emph{L*}) for truth-in-\emph{L*}. However, we will put such niceties to the side for purposes of this discussion.} For Davidson's argument in the present context to make the point that translation and truth cannot be understood independently, he need not appeal to anything distinctive of his own account of translation or interpretation. On the basis of Convention T as central to the concept of truth, he can claim that any account or understanding of truth in a language would necessarily involve its translatability into the language in which its truth is asserted. Any account or understanding of what it is for some sentence to be true in language \emph{L} involves \emph{L}'s being translatable into the language deployed in the account. Our understanding of truth presupposes translatability. On this basis, Davidson can conclude that one cannot understand the idea of a conceptual scheme associated with a theory that is true but utterly untranslatable.


Bringing all this together, we get the result that when thinking about either of the central metaphors (of “organizing” and “fitting”) motivating thought of conceptual schemes, we get to the result that such a scheme would need to be translatable into our own language. Such is Davidson's argument against the idea that there are conceptual schemes that are wholly untranslatable. We will soon turn to that part of his discussion that focuses on the idea that conceptual schemes are associated with partial untranslatability. But, before doing so, I want to raise several questions regarding the significance of Davidson's argument just rehearsed.


One may wonder whether there really are prominent proponents of the idea of conceptual schemes who would be corrected by Davidson's arguments against the idea of conceptual schemes. Are there proponents of the idea that there are conceptual schemes marked by total failures of translatability? Are there proponents of the idea that those deploying different conceptual schemes would be expressing different and utterly untranslatable truths? There are really two points to be pursued here. The first has to do with the association between conceptual schemes and a kind of conceptual relativism: Do proponents of conceptual schemes commonly think that those using alternative conceptual schemes each speak and think truths? The second has to do with whether the paradigmatic proponents of conceptual schemes (those Davidson himself mentions) themselves have posited total failures of translatability as a mark of different conceptual schemes.


The idea of conceptual schemes associated with conceptual relativism concerns Davidson in much of the argumentation just rehearsed. This is clearly in evidence when Davidson focuses on the idea that there might be multiple conceptual schemes (and associated languages) each fitting the world, or experience, and thus true. However, for anthropologists and social scientists generally, this conceptual relativism might seem something of a distraction. They could easily have an interest in differences across conceptual schemes as a kind of social phenomena – and not be committed to the relativist view that there can be multiple conceptual schemes that can make for divergent, incompatible, truths. For example, an anthropologist might be concerned to reconstruct some folk's religious or magical view of the world – the scheme in which those folk view the passing show of fortunes and misfortunes – without supposing that this very different way of seeing the world represents the world truly. Indeed, they may suppose that such conceptual schemes – those associated with religions – generally provide a framework that amounts to a kind of \emph{mis}representation. Still, the general phenomena, and its various cultural iterations, may be worth understanding – and call for talk of various conceptual schemes. This would \emph{not} amount to conceptual relativism. However, this kind of social scientific motivation for thinking about conceptual schemes does not get much attention in Davidson's argument. For one who has such a social scientific concern for conceptual schemes in mind, Davidson's discussion of the metaphor of schemes fitting the world or the totality of experience is bound to be disconcertingly unrealistic. Instead of writing flatly of the idea that schemes fit the world or experience, one would instead want to think of schemes (expressed in languages) \emph{fitting the world or experience more or less well.} What would seem important is something on the order of the intention to fit the world or experience – not supposing that any conceptual scheme flatly fit the world, or flatly “fit the totality of possible sensory evidence.”\footnote{One might add that there may be multiple, inarticulate, influences on conceptual scheme formation. While the intention to fit the world is common, even pervasive, other influences may also be significant – for example, the need to symbolize values might also play a role. Such was a view of ritual, myth, and related domains, expressed by some cultural anthropologists.}


Of course, Davidson's concern with conceptual relativism may be partially motivated by Quine's struggles with what to make his thesis that empirical theory is underdetermined by the totality of possible evidence (Quine 1960, 1992). When thinking about the possibility of multiple, empirically adequate, “empirically equivalent systems of the world,” Quine has vacillated. Sometimes, he has espoused a “sectarian” position, according to which only one of the systems can be true. He seems driven to this when the two are incompatible, or when combining the two within a hybrid account would be inelegant. However, sometimes he espouses an “ecumenical” position, suggesting that both or all might be true. Becker (2012) suggests that Quine has advanced no less than six variants on such sectarian and ecumenical positions.\footnote{See Becker's Appendix on Empirically Equivalent Systems for the details and for references supporting the attribution of various positions to various time slices of Quine.} What Quine held is, at best, complicated (maybe even deeply problematic). But arguably Quine has not been much tempted by the idea that two “empirically equivalent systems of the world” would amount to two conceptual schemes that are both true \emph{and mutually untranslatable}. Even while flirting with (maybe even dating) ecumenism (he never married it), he does not seem to hold that the alternative empirically equivalent systems amount to untranslatable languages. In his last word on the matter (Quine 1992b: 100–101), Quine insists that the responses to which he remains attracted take two forms: the sectarian line on which only one, our home theory, is true, and the ecumenical line suggested by Davidson – according to which “both theories are separately true, the truth predicate being understood as disquotation in an inclusive and theory-neutral language in which both theories are couched.” Notably, in neither case would Quine be espousing conceptual schemes that are true but not intertranslatable. Admittedly, it is hard to know what to make of such last words, as they reflect more than a decade of exchanges and discussions between Quine and Davidson (and others). But it is notable that Quine's earlier, and reasonably careful articulation of his understanding of conceptual differences, does not support the charge that he posits radically different conceptual schemes of the sort that would worry Davidson.\footnote{I do believe that Quine faces deep problems regarding what to make of truth, given his underdetermination thesis, and these are clearly related to Davidson's worries regarding conceptual schemes. But, there is little reason to think that Quine himself has been particularly tempted by, much less committed to, the idea that such systems would be untranslatable. Indeed, when one pauses to recall the free play that Quine envisions in translation, it would be hard to see why he would be inclined to see these systems as being not mutually translatable. Of course, one might insist, such translation would not result in seeing the alternative system as “agreeing” with one's own. Granted. , But this is to say that the sense in which to two systems would be intertranslatable, for Quine, is not a sense in which translation requires agreement – it is a sense in which translation does not require theory reduction.}


This brings us to the question of whether it would be fair to paradigmatic proponents of the idea of conceptual schemes – those mentioned by Davidson – to understand them to be deploying the idea that Davidson has critiqued as earlier. Did Whorf, Kuhn, or Quine intend to invoke schemes and languages that completely resisted intertranslation? This itself is a question about interpretation of the proponents of conceptual schemes – and one who, like Davidson, thinks that interpretation is as strongly constrained by the need to attribute truths and rationality, surely needs to be careful in imputing incoherent ideas to people. As I read them, important friends of conceptual schemes, largely characterize the differentiation of schemes in terms of certain sorts of \emph{differences that} \emph{show up under translation.} We will focus first on Quine, as he is the most articulate in providing positive philosophical guidance regarding the matter.


While Quine is wary of both posited cultural universals and posited radical differences in conceptual schemes, he does think that there can be crude measures of real cultural differences (Quine 1960, 1970,1981). His basic idea is that \emph{once a translation scheme has been developed} that duly makes our informants out to be conveying generally plausible messages, the extent to which we need to employ gerrymandered constructions in our home language in translating them provides a measure of linguistic differences:



\begin{quote}


If we find a language hard to translate, if we find very little word-by-word isomorphism with genuine and idiomatic English, then we already have right there, in a featureless sort of way, a kind of measure of remoteness.


(Quine 1970)



\end{quote}


Developing this idea, Quine suggests a “measure of what might be called the remoteness of a conceptual scheme by what might better be called the conceptual difference between languages” (Quine 1981: 41–42). This treatment of “conceptual schemes,” which has seen a consistent development since 1960, makes the unqualified suggestion that Quine adheres to a notion of such schemes wedded to complete nontranslatability extremely uncharitable. We must look for a way of developing the more guarded suggestion that conceptual scheme differentiation is associated with certain classes of difficulties or awkwardness in translation.


Davidson views Whorf's insistence that Hopi and English cannot be “calibrated” as a case of positing untranslatable languages, and as indicating that, for Whorf, such untranslatability is necessary for conceptual scheme differentiation (Davidson 1984b: 190). However, this squares poorly with Whorf's (1956) own discussion in which he freely writes of “the character of the phenomena denoted” by certain verbs, seeks to express “the nature of the change” affected by particular modifying particles, and illustrates the relevant shifts in content by using examples in which short Hopi phrases are rendered by relatively sprawling English phrases. The results seem to be what Davidson would recognize as translation. Accordingly, Davidson takes Whorf's own practice to obviously undermine the latter's assertion of untranslatability and insistence that Hopi expresses an alternative conceptual scheme. This is analogous to viewing someone as denying that she is walking even as she is walking. Surely this would be a sort of silliness that is generally less likely than poor interpretation. It would seem that a better interpretation would be to read Whorf as supposing that conceptual schemes and associated difficulties in calibration force one to deploy the kind of crafted, awkward, translation to which Quine alludes – translation in which we “coin new words or distort the usage of old ones” (Quine 1960: 76).


Far from associating paradigms (as conceptual schemes) with untranslatability, Kuhn (1970: 202) insists that the “communication breakdowns” that arise between investigators employing “incommensurable paradigms” can and should provide the occasion for translation. (Although, in fairness to Davidson, one must admit that Kuhn had not marked this point clearly before 1970.)


The implication is clear. To join issue with those who Davidson treats as central proponents of the conceptual scheme idea – Quine, Whorf, and Kuhn – one would do well to take the sorts of difficulties in translation that they have discussed as the putative markers of differences in conceptual schemes. This will not get you to a doctrine that might be termed “full-on conceptual relativism,” and Davidson's arguments against complete untranslatability of conceptual schemes should suffice to show that such conceptual relativism is a nonstarter. But, in their careful moments, none of these purveyors of the idea of conceptual scheme have been committed to conceptual relativism (although Quine's struggles with truth and underdetermination suggest that it has been a concern of his). Setting conceptual relativism to the side, then, we have it that different conceptual schemes would be marked by certain difficulties in translation – and these would not amount to complete and utter untranslatability. That was never really envisioned by the proponents of conceptual schemes. The differences in question are those that preclude what we might term direct translation in which one word or short phrase is readily translated with another – as when one equates “chien” with “dog.” What then marks different conceptual schemes would be \emph{deep differences in theories that would result in many} \emph{of the central concepts of the one theory having no ready parallels in} \emph{the other.} Were we to translate the languages expressing the two theories, we would need to resort to a loose sort of translation in which we coin new words within our own language in order to translate the other, or we might distort the usage of old words within our language. The reason one would need to do so is that \emph{one would need to reconstruct,} \emph{within the expressive resources of the target language, something of} \emph{the theory (and central concepts) being translated} – \emph{and one would not antecedently have had terms associated with central components of that foreign theory.} To better trace the distinction, I have elsewhere developed the contrast between “direct translation” and what I have termed “reconstructive translation” (Henderson 1994). There I illustrated the need for reconstructive translation by an extended discussion of Evans-Pritchard's (1937) classic attempt to understand Zande ideas about “witchcraft.”


If what marks differences between conceptual schemes are failures of simple or direct translatability – if conceptual schemes are then associated with the need for reconstructive translation – then Davidson's arguments against conceptual schemes turning on complete failures of intertranslatability have not joined issue with the idea of conceptual schemes in play in much of the literature. Or, to put the point somewhat more constructively: One might say that they begin to mark out the limits of the idea of differences in conceptual schemes. They do not show that the idea of conceptual schemes is itself deeply confused, but they serve notice that what some might have incautiously supposed were possible extreme and radical differences in conceptual schemes are not after all possible. While Quine may have been consistently relatively circumspect in his formulations, such cannot always be said of the nonphilosophers who have envisioned differences in conceptual schemes. Davidson's arguments serve to put them, or their incautious readers, on notice. But, to this point in Davidson argument, the limits of conceptual scheme variation have only been shown to rule out complete and utter failures of translation. One might then wonder whether the limits on the differences in conceptual scheme yet allows for pretty racy, pretty exciting, pretty interesting variation. To address this question, Davidson needs to provide a more substantive account of the limits of difference that can turn up under reconstructive translation or interpretation.


When Davidson turns to the idea that different conceptual schemes might be marked by partial failures of intertranslatability (or failures of direct translatability that call for reconstructive translation?), he then begins to provide a more substantive elaboration of the limits on the idea of different conceptual schemes. His discussion here is informed by central ideas in his understanding of interpretation and translation. Partial failures of (direct?) translatability clearly entail successes in translation, and this suggests that one can make “changes and contrasts in conceptual schemes intelligible by reference to the common part” (Davidson 1984b: 195) – differences in conceptual schemes are made intelligible by locating them within a “space” constituted by what is shared. The extent of sharing that is necessary to make intelligible various forms of disagreement or difference would then mark out the extent of difference that can be posited in an intelligible notion of different conceptual schemes.


Davidson consistently argued for an “interdependence of belief and meaning.” On the one hand, interpreting someone's speech behavior requires one to understand “a good deal about what the speaker believes”; on the other, “fine distinctions between beliefs are impossible without understood speech” (Davidson 1984b: 195). In effect, translation and interpretation requires one to determine, solve for, or sort out three unknowns on the basis of observed speech behavior: belief, desire, and meaning. One must arrive at an account that “simultaneously accounts for attitudes and interprets speech” (Davidson 1984b: 195; see also Davidson 1984a,c,d). Davidson insists that one can only manage this by “holding steady” belief so far as possible, particularly in the early goings, by charitably assuming that folk's beliefs are largely true or correct responses to salient elements of the their environment. That is, regarding salient aspects of their environment, we assume that the subjects of our interpretation hold beliefs that are true “by our lights.” We treat some of their rudimentary speech behavior as evincing the attitude of “holding true,” and understand the content of what is held true as reflected in the salient elements of the passing show. At least we do this when treating of utterances that seem most directly conditioned by salient aspects of the passing show. Thus, we begin to sort out some of their simpler beliefs – and we do so in a way that makes for a bridgehead of shared belief. We also suppose that further beliefs are related so as to make them largely reasonable or rational in light of these shared beliefs – enlarging our bridgehead of agreement. It is against this “background of common beliefs” that we can accommodate “anomalous details” or apparent disagreement (Davidson 1984b: 196). Thus, when we come to the stage where we can reliably locate differences in partially intertranslatable conceptual schemes, “we improve the clarity and bite of declarations of difference, whether of scheme or opinion, by enlarging the basis of shared (translatable) language or of shared opinion” (Davidson 1984b: 197).


This much seems well argued and established: We do locate disagreement or difference in conceptual scheme in the space provided by an understanding that rests on significant found agreement. This need for an understood background, commonly of agreement, is a striking feature of interpretation. This means that differences identifiable in interpretation cannot (one might say) “go all the way down,” but must be localized. Differences must be understood in terms of a background, with significant sharing of belief.\footnote{The fundamental character of the constraint here and the ultimate character of the bridgehead of agreement needed for interpretive success remains subject to disagreement, but the need for a bridgehead of agreement seems common coin. That is, there is agreement on the need for a bridgehead of agreement whether one ultimately understands charity in interpretation in the largely conceptual, aprioristic fashion of Davidson, or in the more empirically informed fashion of Quine (see Henderson 1990).}


Does this mean that differences in conceptual schemes must remain so local as to be unexciting? This is a difficult question to answer, as interest and excitement are subjective responses – and even what are fitting in the way of subjective responses can vary with background. What may (rightly) interest and excite the anthropologist or historian (with their antecedent interests) may not much move the logician.


However, the question also seems difficult for a different reason. Davidson may have provided compelling arguments for the conclusion that some background or bridgehead of agreement is necessary for understanding or locating differences in conceptual schemes, and he may have furthered our understanding of the charity in interpretation that requires such agreement, but what he has managed to establish concerning the exact character and force of the fitting charity in translation or interpretation is not itself sufficient to settle the limits of plausible difference across conceptual schemes. Davidson's account of charity in interpretation is highly abstract. Even so, he does manage to (abstractly) allude to some needed complexities. He suggests, for example, that some attributions of actual error and irrationality are more destructive of understanding (and confidence in an understanding) than others. In particular, he notes that attributions of errors that would be cases of common human foibles are themselves less destructive of understanding than attributions of kinds of errors that are uncommon. However, this itself is to mention complexities without tracing them. If significant classes of foibles are common among humans, and it seems from much contemporary cognitive science that they may be, then there might be relatively significant scope for the attribution of nondestructive attributions of error. I suspect that this is the case (Henderson 1993). If so, then the limits of defensible error attribution would seem to be a matter to be determined on the basis of ongoing empirical cognitive science.\footnote{To illustrate, consider how anthropological accounts of religion, which commonly engage in attributions of error, can be supported by results from cognitive science. An interesting account along these lines – see, for example, Boyer (2001) – would be more constrained by the limits of cognitive science to explain error than by the need to attribute agreement. Of course, in an important sense, such work sees shared cognitive mechanisms in the various cases. However, these shared cognitive mechanisms can yield various beliefs – some correct, some erroneous – in varying settings.}


Despite such looming complexities, Davidson seems determined to draw some sweeping generalizations from his understanding of charity in interpretation. One example of such a sweeping generalization – one that is important in connection with the present issues – is Davidson's insistence that, regarding any topic on which we find (under interpretation) our subjects to be discoursing, most of their beliefs about that topic must be true. Thus:



\begin{quote}


We can, however, take it as given that \emph{most} beliefs are correct. The reason for this is that a belief is identified by its location in a pattern of belief; it is this pattern that determines the subject matter of the belief, what the belief is about. Before some object in, or aspect of, the world can become part of the subject matter of a belief (true or false) there must be endless true beliefs about the subject matter. False beliefs tend to undermine the identification of the subject matter; to undermine, therefore, the validity of a description of the belief as being about that subject.


(Davidson 1984d: 168)



\end{quote}


If most of one's beliefs about any subject matter must be true and rational, as Davidson insists, then there really cannot be significant difference across conceptual schemes. To recur to an example that I developed in Henderson (1994), the Zande utterances regarding \emph{mangu} are translated as utterances about “witchcraft” – but only with what are in effect monograph-length qualifications. Associated with this “subject matter” – \emph{mangu} – are various matters or topics that do seem much less delicate in their specification. Death and disease are associated with \emph{mangu,} as the Azande seem to commonly associate disease with the workings of \emph{mangu.} Grain and granaries are associated with \emph{mangu,} as the Azande seem to find \emph{mangu} implicated in the cases of misfortune – for example, a misfortune in which one's granary collapses or goes bad. Evans-Pritchard's confidence in these associations, and in the identification of these related topics, is presumably rooted in significant agreement. As he understands them, much that the Azande believe about grain and granaries is true. Certain grains are good to eat, can commonly be stored for certain periods in certain conditions, and so on. Much that the Azande believe about disease is doubtless true – that certain folk have diseases, that there are classes of disease common in their setting, that certain diseases have characteristic developments and prognoses, and so on. What seems false is that one can or need say the same thing about the Zande beliefs about \emph{mangu.} Evans-Pritchard argued that these beliefs functioned effectively in the context of Zande society, and that individual's regulated their lives with notable successes (and notable limits) using these beliefs. But, this is not to say that the (1930s-vintage) Zande beliefs about this subject matter – \emph{mangu} – are preponderantly true.


We do not need to go so far afield to illustrate the point. Stahlian chemists, such as Priestly, held many true beliefs about the compounds that they manipulated in their laboratories. They isolated a number of important “airs” – and they developed the ability to distinguish samples of one from another, and to identify samples of the same air. They noted how some of these airs combined to leave other materials (in one important case, two airs combined to leave a residue of water), or arose out of those materials (as when “the red calx of mercury” was heated in a closed vessel). They noted that these airs had various effects on objects and animals exposed to them. There is a lot about such matters that they had right. But, consider one famous topic on which they held beliefs – they had beliefs about an air that they believed was the result of removing the “phlogiston” from common air. For example, they noted (correctly) that mice and candle flames were particularly lively when exposed to this “dephlogistonated” air. (And again, they had many true beliefs about many of these topics – mice, candles, flames, water, mercury, the calx of mercury, and so on.) One might even argue that most of their beliefs about these related topics were true. This certainly does help us get a fix on the topics of their beliefs about phlogiston and dephlogistonated air. However, I deny that most of their beliefs about phlogiston or dephlogistonated air were true, or need be. I am inclined to say that their theory positing phlogiston amounted to a conceptual scheme – a small one that historians of science need to reconstruct in order to understand the chemistry of the period.


I am inclined to say much the same about the Zande system of beliefs regarding the topics of “witchcraft, magic, and oracles.” These beliefs arguably amounted to a different conceptual scheme, which one would need to reconstruct and understand in order to understand much that went on among these folk in the early twentieth century. Of course I am not unaware of the controversy engendered by such reconstructions – and how it was reflected in the course of cultural anthropology in the latter half of the twentieth century (again, see Henderson 1993, especially chapter 3, and pp. 84–85). It must be acknowledged that it took some time and much care to arrive at a considered understanding of this conceptual scheme, and that the attribution of significant falsehood and limited irrationality occasioned special care. One ultimately needed to be satisfied that the conceptual system was not anomalous in its relations to other beliefs possessed by the Azande, and one needed a significant bridgehead of agreement to support sorting out these matters. This much is as Davidson would have predicted. What is not as Davidson predicted is this: ultimately, as things get sorted out, one is able to attribute a preponderance of false beliefs on the limited topics of Zande witchcraft, magic, and oracles. It turns out that significant error is not rare among humans, that it can lead to systems of false beliefs embedded within, and related to true beliefs. The relations between these systems of false beliefs and their true neighbors need not be rational or epistemically fitting – and the epistemic errors involved may be pretty common among humans. This is reflected in recent attempts to understand a vast range of religious belief, found in truly diverse cultures, in terms of very general human cognitive mechanisms (see, e.g., Boyer 2001).


The take-home lesson: The extent to which one might find agreement under translation or interpretation, and the extent to which one must resort to awkward reconstructive translation that may or may not end with us finding agreement under interpretation, are subtle and complex matters. The issue of whether or not folk can hold importantly and interestingly (even excitingly) different conceptual schemes seems to turn on such matters. However, regarding such matters, Davidson seems to think in terms of a rather stylized idea of charity in interpretation. Thus, while he manages to raise important questions, his rather stylized and aprioristic response to them does not provide an ultimately satisfactory resolution of the issues.

% Notes
\section{References}


\emph{Becker, E. (2012).} The Themes of Quine's Philosophy: Meaning, Reference, and Knowledge\emph{. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.}


\emph{Boyer, P. (2001).} Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought\emph{. New York: Basic Books.}


Davidson, D. (1984a). Belief and the Basis of Meaning. \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. D. Davidson}. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 141.


———. (1984b). On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme. \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. D. Davidson}. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 183.


———. (1984c). Radical Interpretation. \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. D. Donald}. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 125.


———. (1984d). Thought and Talk. \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. D. Davidson}. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 155.


Evans-Pritchard, E.E. (1937). \emph{Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande}. Oxford: The Clarendon Press.


Henderson, D. (1990). An empirical basis for charity in interpretation. \emph{Erkenntnis: An International Journal of Analytic Philosophy} 32(1):83–103.


———. (1993). \emph{Interpretation and Explanation in the Human Sciences}. Albany: State University of New York Press.


———. (1994). Conceptual Schemes after Davidson. \emph{Language, Mind, and Epistemology: On Donald Davidson's Philosophy}. Dordrecht: Kluwer.


Kuhn, T.S. (1970). \emph{The Structure of Scientific Revolutions}. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.


Lepore, E. and Ludwig, K. (2005). \emph{Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality}. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press.


Quine, W.V. (1960). \emph{Word and Object}. Cambridge: Technology Press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.


———. (1970). Philosophical progress in language theory. \emph{Metaphilosophy} 1:2–19.


———. (1981). On the very idea of a third dogma. In \emph{Theories and Things}, W.V. Quine (ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 38–42.


———. (1992). \emph{Pursuit of Truth}. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


Whorf, B. (1956). The punctal and segmentative aspects of verbs in Hopi. In \emph{Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf}, J.B. Carroll (ed.). Cambridge, MA: The Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, pp. 51–56.

\chapter{18. Interpretation and Value}


Robert H. Myers

\section{Interpretation and Value}


Davidson's theory of radical interpretation and his principle of charity are well known in their application to beliefs and meanings, but rarely discussed in their application to desires and values. This is a pity, for they provide the makings of an argument for normative realism that is definitely worth exploring. As we shall see, Davidson himself does not develop this argument as thoroughly or as carefully as one might wish. But he clearly sees how such an argument would go; and he has at his disposal plausible answers to a good number of the questions that are likely to arise.


Since the theory of radical interpretation and the principle of charity are being discussed elsewhere in this volume, I will not take time to provide a detailed account of them here; I will just mention some misunderstandings that we must guard against as we explore their application to desires and values. My focus will be on whether their application to desires and values can underwrite an argument for normative realism, and on how other aspects of Davidson's philosophy of mind and action can be used to fashion responses to the main objections that his various opponents are likely to have.

\section{1. The Interpretation Argument}


Davidson's larger theory of radical interpretation can usefully be encapsulated in what I shall call his interpretation argument. This argument has two premises, from which two conclusions are ultimately claimed to follow. Davidson intends these premises and conclusions to hold of desires as well as beliefs; but since we will be assessing their application to desires later, I will concentrate here on their application to beliefs.



\begin{quote}


Premise 1: A person's propositional attitudes are in principle interpretable by anyone who has sufficient evidence concerning publicly observable features of her behavior and its relations to her environment (Davidson 1983: 147–8). As Lepore and Ludwig (2005: 166) say, “One can come to know something sufficient to interpret a speaker from the evidential position of the radical interpreter.” Call this premise \emph{Publicness}.


(Quick comment: Contrary to what some critics (e.g., Fodor and Lepore 1994) have suggested, this is not meant to deny that interpreters may also require background information of various sorts, including, perhaps, information about how previous attempts to interpret other people have fared. Nor is it meant to deny that there may be further important conditions that would have to be met in order for the in principle possibility of interpretation actually to be realized in a particular case. Famously, however, Davidson (1974) does deny that such conditions could include the sharing of conceptual schemes.)


Premise 2: The content of any one of a person's propositional attitudes is dependent on the contents of an indefinite number of the other propositional attitudes that she has. For example, what I believe in believing that the gun is loaded depends on what I believe in believing that a gun is a kind of weapon, which in turns depends on what I believe in believing that a weapon is a thing designed or used for inflicting bodily harm, and so on and so forth (Davidson 1975: 157, 1983: 147). Call this premise \emph{Holism}.


(Quick comment: Contrary again to what some critics (e.g., Fodor and Lepore 1992) have suggested, this is not to say that the content of any one of a person's propositional attitudes is somehow dependent on the content of every other. Nor is it to say that its content is equally dependent on the contents of each of the other attitudes on which it is dependent.)



\end{quote}


Why should we accept these premises? In his early writings, Davidson takes them to be too uncontroversial to need defending. He thinks it is obvious that public availability is a constitutive aspect not just of meaning but also of content, and that this leads not just to confirmation holism but also to the more constitutive holisms of meaning and content. As we shall see in Section 4, Davidson tries in his later writings to provide both premises with firmer support. First, though, let us see what he claims follows from them.



\begin{quote}


Conclusion 1: Given holism, Davidson (1975: 168–169, 1983: 148–149) concludes that interpretation must be governed by the principle of charity. Because the contents of a person's propositional attitudes are so highly interconnected, it is impossible to attribute one attitude to her without attributing many other attitudes to her as well. How, then, can interpreters decide among the different directions their interpretations could take? Only, Davidson maintains, because they can assume their subjects to have propositional attitudes like their own and then tailor this assumption to fit the facts about their particular histories and circumstances.


(Quick comment: The goal here is not, as is frequently said, to look for interpretations that maximize agreement, for in many cases differences in histories and circumstances would make agreement surprising. The goal is rather, as Davidson (1973: 137) sometimes puts it, to look for interpretations that find our subjects in agreement with us to the extent that that is “plausibly possible.”)



\end{quote}


Critics often acknowledge that holism makes some governing assumptions about propositional attitudes necessary to give interpretation direction but then deny that charity is the only form such assumptions could take.\footnote{For a recent example, see Glüer (2011: 143), where she says: “If the purpose is nothing but making radical interpretation possible, \emph{any} principle determining truth conditions on the basis of holding true attitudes would do.”} And indeed, one might wonder, if interpreters are allowed to have background information of various sorts, including, perhaps, information about how previous attempts to interpret other people have fared, could not the results of some previous attempt at interpretation provide the basis for an assumption to the effect that our current subjects have propositional attitudes radically different from our own?


In order to see why Davidson thinks this is not possible, let us try to imagine how it would work. Thus, let us try to imagine that we have interpreted some group of people, call them the As, and found them to have propositional attitudes radically different from our own, and that we are now seeking to interpret another group of people, call them the Bs, on the assumption that their propositional attitudes are like those possessed by the As. As I have noted, the goal of this endeavor would then be not to maximize agreement between the Bs and the As but to find the Bs in agreement with the As to the extent that that is plausibly possible. So the crucial question is whether we could do that, if these attitudes really were radically different from our own. How could we tell whether certain particular differences in their histories and circumstances make it implausible to attribute to the Bs certain particular attitudes that are possessed by the As, and what different attitudes would be more plausibly attributed to the Bs in that case? Davidson's claim is that we would not be able to answer questions of these sorts, and that if it seems otherwise, that is because, contrary to our intention when we embarked on this thought experiment, we are tacitly assuming that the attitudes possessed by the As are not so different from our own after all. In order to ask whether differences in their histories and circumstances might have led the Bs to have different attitudes, we must think of the Bs' histories and circumstances in terms of our own beliefs – of what we take to be true, not of what we take to be false. So the As' attitudes could help answer these questions only if they were, after all, not as different from our own as we were trying to imagine them to be. The fact that we have no choice but to see the subjects of our interpretations as engaging with a world we really believe to exist imposes serious limits on how radically we could find their attitudes departing from our own.



\begin{quote}


Conclusion 2: Given publicness, Davidson (1983: 150–151) concludes that the principle of charity must govern not simply our interpretations of other people's propositional attitudes but the very truth about their propositional attitudes. Since others are in principle interpretable by us, their attitudes must be largely like ours. But of course, it is also true that we are in principle interpretable by others, including others, if any there be, whose attitudes are perfectly correct to how things are. And so everyone's attitudes must be at least largely correct to how things are.


(Quick comment: It is worth noting that these conclusions would not follow if the in principle interpretability of one person by another required both of them to share a conceptual scheme. As I have already mentioned, Davidson (1974) denies that it does, but we are still waiting to see what sort of argument he can give for understanding publicness this way.)



\end{quote}


Now we should be careful not to overstate the antiskeptical force of this result. Pretty clearly, in assuming publicness, Davidson is assuming both external things and other people exist. Thus his argument here at most has force against those skeptics who allow that objects and people exist but wonder whether our attitudes concerning them are largely – or ever – correct. But as that is a quite common form of skepticism, we should also be careful not to understate the significance of the conclusion that Davidson is pressing on his here.


At this point, however, all those readers who have been waiting to hear about the application of Davidson's theory to desires and values are likely to start losing patience. After all, they might point out, while it is indeed common for skeptics to allow that objects and people exist but wonder whether our nonnormative beliefs about them are largely or ever true, it is extremely rare for skeptics to allow that situations involving those objects and people have normative properties but wonder whether our desires largely accord with them.\footnote{As Davidson (1995: 43–45) reminds us, the question is whether normative properties exist, not whether normative objects do. Pace Mackie (1977), realists need not regard values and reasons as part of the furniture of the universe.} As they might say, in the normative realm, skepticism tends to be metaphysical, not epistemological. So how, then, can Davidson's interpretation argument possibly be of any interest to normative philosophy?


There are two points to be made in response to such complaints. First, while it is doubtless true that normative skepticism tends to be metaphysical, rather than epistemological, in nature, there still may be much for us to learn by considering whether the interpretation argument would apply to desires if the metaphysical worries about normative properties could somehow be resolved. This will be our topic in Section 2. Second, when we do eventually push further upstream in search of some firmer grounds for granting that publicness and holism are true, we may discover that the arguments Davidson offers support a more elaborate realism incorporating normative properties almost as strongly as they support the more basic realism about objects and people. Note in this connection that the publicness condition is actually quite noncommittal about what the publicly observable features of the environment are in light of which people must be interpretable. It may not be obvious that some of these features will be normative in nature; but certainly, nothing we have been told to this point rules out that possibility either. Given this, together with the fact that the arguments for publicness are still to come, we should not be too quick to assume that there is nothing here for normative philosophy. Accordingly, in Section 3, I shall consider what Davidson can make of the very idea of normative properties. Section 4 will then examine his case for thinking they actually exist.

\section{2. The Application to Desires and Normative Beliefs}


Obviously enough, if desires were simply feelings, and not in fact propositional attitudes at all, then neither publicness and holism nor the interpretation argument would have any application to them. But even on the more plausible assumption that desires are propositional attitudes of a sort, one might wonder whether and to what extent publicness and especially holism apply to them. No doubt what is desired in desiring to ø will depend on what is believed about ø-ing, which will in turn depend on what is believed about many other things. But if this is the full extent of desire holism, one might wonder whether the principle of charity needs to govern attributions of desires as well as attributions of beliefs. Would it not be enough to assume that our subject's beliefs are like our own, and then assign her whatever desires prove necessary to make good sense of her behavior? And is it not possible that her behavior might be radically different from our own, obliging us to conclude that her desires are radically different from our own as well?\footnote{Tersman (2004) presses an objection along something like these lines.}


Now one might respond to this objection by insisting that we would need quite detailed knowledge of our subject's beliefs before we could solve for her desires in this way, and that such detailed knowledge of her beliefs could itself be acquired only by considering how best to make sense of her behavior given what we know about her desires. That is to say, one might maintain that interpretation is possible only if it is constrained by assumptions regarding the contents of desires as well as the contents of beliefs, because it could only be in tandem with one another that assumptions of these sorts might then be tailored to fit the facts about our subject's particular history and circumstances.


Such a response would be perfectly correct, so far as it went, but pretty clearly it would not go as far as it should. Because it would not speak to the underlying worry that desires are holistic only in a limited way, it would seem to leave open the possibility that charity applies to desires only to a limited degree. Perhaps it is true that interpretation would not be possible if it were not governed by some assumptions about the contents of people's desires. But would it not be possible for these assumptions to concern only the most basic of people's desires? And would it even be necessary for us to assume that people's basic desires are like our own? Our earlier worry that the availability of background information may make alternatives to charity possible would seem to be especially salient in this case. For it is far from clear at this stage how the arguments with which we overcame this worry and showed charity to be necessary in the case of beliefs would apply in the case of desires.


In the case of beliefs, the argument was that charity is necessary because interpretation requires governing assumptions about beliefs to be individually tailored to fit actual facts about particular subjects, facts interpreters necessarily couch in terms of their own beliefs about the nature of the world with which subjects have been engaging and the history of their engagements with it. If governing assumptions about beliefs could be worn straight off the rack, so to speak, charity would not be necessary and Davidson's interpretation argument would never get off the ground. Now it is the extensive holism of beliefs that rules this out; so desires must be extensively holistic as well if charity is likewise to prove necessary in their case.


In order to understand why Davidson thinks desires are extensively holistic, it is important to recognize that he rejects the neo-Humean conception of desire currently prevalent in the literature. He accepts (1963) that desires are necessary for motivation, but denies that one's desire to ø always involves a disposition to do \emph{whatever} one believes will increase one's chances of ø-ing. On the contrary, he thinks one's desire to ø typically involves a disposition to act the content of which depends on one's beliefs about one's reasons for trying to ø – that is to say, more precisely, a disposition to act in ways one believes will increase one's chances of addressing the reasons one believes one has for trying to ø. Davidson tends to discuss this in terms of the relation between desires and evaluative judgments, but it is better discussed in terms of the relation between desires and normative judgments. For the point here is to take a stand not on the nature of reasons – on the question whether reasons for action are always tied to the promotion of values, or whether they are in some instances tied to strictures that are deontological in character – but, less ambitiously, on the relation between one's beliefs about one's reasons and one's desires. In what follows, therefore, I shall assume that this is what Davidson really means. As I have intimated, his claims are also intended to be modest in another way. Contrary to what some critics (e.g., Velleman 1992) have suggested, he is not identifying desires with normative judgments. Obviously, one can believe one has reason to try to ø without desiring to ø, and one can desire to ø without believing one has reason to try to ø. Davidson's intention is not to deny this but to assert that such cases are atypical.


Consider one of his examples (Davidson 1990: 89). If someone desires to win at chess, is she thereby disposed to act in \emph{all} the ways she believes will increase her chances of winning? Suppose she believes she could increase her chances of winning by taking care only to play against opponents decidedly weaker than she is. Is she thereby disposed to do this? Davidson's claim is that, while she might be, this would be unusual. For she is unlikely to believe this addresses the reasons she believes she has for seeking to win. Of course, even if she quite explicitly rejects this, she could still find herself with some disposition to act in this way. She could prove to be weak of will. But if she is not now weak of will, her disposition is going to be shaped by her beliefs about the reasons she has for trying to win at chess. It is going to be, in T.M. Scanlon's (1998: ch. 1) useful phrase, a judgment-sensitive attitude – an attitude informed by the judgments she makes about the reasons for action she has. And as he thinks this will be the case with most of a person's desires, Davidson concludes that desires are much more extensively holistic than the neo-Humean conception allows. For the contents of a person's normative beliefs are going to depend in complex ways on one another and not simply on the contents of her related nonnormative beliefs. What a person believes in believing, for example, that excelling at difficult games is admirable is going to depend on what she believes in believing a host of other things, some of them having to do with the extension of the normative property in question, others of them having to do with its relations to normative properties of other sorts.


Why should we adopt this holistic conception of desire rather than the neo-Humean conception? Especially in his early papers, Davidson does not give us much guidance on this point. In fact, truth be told, he does not say enough about how he understands desires to make it absolutely certain that it actually is this holistic conception that he holds. It is no wonder, therefore, that some critics (e.g., Smith 1994: 138–141) insist on reading him as a neo-Humean who regards people's normative judgments as nothing more than expressions of their desires, while others, as we have seen, go the opposite route and read him as a non-Humean who regards people's desires as nothing more than entailments of their normative judgments. However, I think it is reasonably clear, even in his early papers, that he understands the relation between desires and normative judgments to be as the holistic conception portrays it. Moreover, as we shall see in Section 4, there is in his later writings a very powerful argument for concluding that the holistic conception of desire must be true.


What I propose, therefore, is that we press ahead on the assumption that Davidson accepts the holistic conception of desire and not the neo-Humean or non-Humean conceptions.\footnote{For more on this, see Hurley (2002) and Myers (2012).} And given this assumption, I think we must grant that Davidson has every reason to insist that charity governs the interpretation of desires and not just the interpretation of beliefs. Critics sometimes object to this on the grounds that anthropologists have succeeded in interpreting people who are alleged to have both desires and normative beliefs radically different from our own. In every case I can think of, however, these differences prove on inspection to be much less radical than advertised – and nowhere near radical enough to give Davidson pause.


It is important in this connection to recognize that charity is not threatened by the fact that people are sometimes correctly interpreted as disagreeing with us in certain fundamental respects. For example, Gopal Sreenivasan (2001) argues that charity cannot be necessary for interpretation because we can easily imagine coming to understand an alien group of people despite the fact that we do not share either their belief in their inherent superiority over everyone else or any of the desires and normative beliefs they form on the basis of that belief. This does not follow, however, because it remains possible that these disagreements, although extensive, could come to be understood by us only because we assume even more extensive agreements. What exactly do they believe in believing themselves to be inherently superior to everyone else? Why do they take that belief of theirs to justify some desires rather than others? What Sreenivasan needs to show is that charity is not necessary to answer such questions; but there is nothing in the isolated examples he offers that begins to show that.


If Davidson is right in insisting that charity governs the interpretation of desires, what follows? Given publicness, it follows that our desires must be largely like those of our interpreters, including those of our interpreters who have desires that are perfectly as they should be. But of course there could be such interpreters only if there actually are normative truths; and we have yet to see how metaphysical worries on this score can be resolved. Let us therefore turn next to an examination of Davidson's views on this matter. Since they are not always developed as thoroughly or as carefully as one might wish, we shall have to apply a certain amount of charity ourselves as we reconstruct them.

\section{3. The Application to Values and Normative Truths}


As I mentioned earlier, I propose to tackle this question in two stages. In this section, I consider what Davidson can make of the very idea of normative truths. Does it make really make sense to think there could be truths about people's reasons for action? In Section 4, I shall examine Davidson's case for thinking such truths actually exist.


Nobody doubts that there could be truths about what people \emph{would} have reason to do \emph{if} they had reason to promote certain ends or to respect certain principles or commitments. But could it be true that people actually have reason to do any such thing? Doubts on this score are often linked to something called the practicality or internalism requirement. The thought here is that nothing could be a truth about what someone has reason to do unless it were connected in some special way to facts about her motivations, but that nothing could be connected in this special way to facts about someone's motivations while being sufficiently independent of her motivations to count as a truth about her reasons. For example, it is often held that a normative truth would have to be such that a person's recognition of it would necessarily motivate her, at least to some degree, to act accordingly, but that this makes no sense because there could not be any necessary connection between the belief that constitutes her recognition and the desire that her motivation requires. Because motivation is held to require desire, and desires are held to be distinct from beliefs, in that no desire could be either identical to or entailed by any belief, it is often argued that the practicality or internalism requirement could not possibly be met and hence that the very idea of a normative truth turns out to be incoherent.\footnote{Or, if not incoherent, then empty. Mackie (1977) is an influential example.}


Now it might be thought that Davidson endorses some such version of the practicality or internalism requirement, and thus that he could prevent the very idea of a normative truth from being incoherent only by contradicting the reading of him that I proposed in Section 2 and denying either that motivation requires desire or that desires are distinct from beliefs. For example, when discussing weakness of the will, he endorses “a mild form of internalism” according to which “a judgment of value must be reflected in\dots{}motives” (Davidson 1969: 26). On the next page, however, he also acknowledges that this may be too strong, and that it is easy to interpret such principles in ways that make them false. More importantly, it emerges later in his discussion that his real concern is to allow that there can be discord between a person's all things considered and all-out judgments, not to deny that there can be discord between such judgments and a person's motivations. He does not mean to deny that weakness of the will can sometimes be interattitudinal; he simply wants to allow that it is sometimes also internal to a person's judgments. So we should be careful not to read too much into this endorsement of internalism. While it is clear that he endorses some version of the practicality or internalism requirement, which version of the requirement he endorses is less clear than many critics have supposed.


It is especially important that we proceed with caution here because the particular version of the practicality or internalism requirement we have been considering so far is almost certainly mistaken.\footnote{For more on this, see Smith (1994, ch. 1), and Myers (2012).} Why should we think a normative truth would have to be such that a person's recognition of it would \emph{necessarily} motivate her, at least to some degree, to act accordingly?


What seems more plausible is that the idea of a normative truth would be incoherent if people's motivations as a whole were not somehow aiming to get normative matters right – as, arguably, they would not be if the neo-Humean conception of desire were correct. Neo-Humeans might allow that a person could have individual desires to act on reasons. But on their view this would be a fact about only some of her desires; it would not suggest that she had a systemic aim to get normative matters right. Arguably, however, people need some such systemic aim in order to be acting for reasons in a manner that would suggest there might actually be reasons for them to act.


This line of thought requires a good deal more argument than I can provide here. Still, it suggests that the practicality or internalism requirement might best be understood as demanding, not that normative truths have the capacity to guarantee that people are appropriately motivated, but that people have the capacity to be motivated by normative considerations in an appropriate manner. It also suggests that the holistic conception of desire attributed to Davidson in Section 2 might be enough to prevent skeptical worries about normative truths from emerging on this front. If people's desires are typically judgment-sensitive attitudes informed by their beliefs about their reasons, that is presumably because they do have a systemic aim to get normative matters right. As I said earlier, we will see in Section 4 what Davidson's arguments for such claims could be. The point for now is simply that, if he can provide these arguments, he might be on safe ground when it comes to the practicality or internalism requirement, which is not to say he should not have given this requirement more attention than he does.


When (in 1995) Davidson does take up skeptical worries about the very idea of a normative truth, he tends to concentrate on worries that stem, not from the practicality or internalism requirement, but from the thought that truths always have to have some explanatory role to play. Does it really make sense to suppose that normative truths could play such a role? No doubt, if normative truths were to exist, some of them could help explain others. Thus the fact that people have reason not to murder one another could no doubt help explain why they also have reason not to hire one another to commit murders. But these are not the sorts of explanations on which realism is thought to depend. The thought is rather that normative truths would have to have a role to play in explaining how and when people could come to recognize that they are indeed true. And the worry is that it does not make sense to suppose that a truth could be normative and still have a role to play in explanations of this sort.


Now some advocates of normative realism respond to this worry by objecting that normative truths should not have to meet any such explanatory requirement. But this cannot be Davidson's response. As we shall see in the following section, his argument for thinking normative truths exist depends precisely on the claim that their existence helps explain how normative beliefs are possible. So he cannot dismiss this worry; he must instead confront it, and somehow overcome it. This is no easy task, however, because those who press this worry are rarely very clear about why they doubt that normative truths could play the requisite explanatory role. Too often one is left to speculate about what the grounds for their doubts could be.


For example, in his influential – indeed, canonical – presentation of this worry, Gilbert Harman (1977) maintains that normative truths could not possibly help explain how and when people form the particular normative judgments they form because those facts can instead be explained solely in terms of how people have been trained to respond to various of the nonnormative properties things possess. As has often been remarked in response, however, Harman cannot seriously mean to suggest that the mere possibility of nonnormative explanations suffices to establish the impossibility of normative ones. By that standard, most explanations, including the ones Harman favors, would prove to be incoherent. So it surely must be something else that he has in mind, but what, exactly?


Perhaps the thought is that normative properties could not possibly help explain facts about the normative judgments people make because there could not possibly be laws of the requisite sorts, neither “horizontal” laws linking the instantiation of normative properties to the making of normative judgments, nor “vertical” laws identifying the instantiation of normative properties with the instantiation of nonnormative properties. As we know from other parts of Davidson's philosophy of mind and action, however, he does not agree that the absence of such laws prevents explanation from being possible. In particular, he insists that reason-states – that is, suitably related pairs of desires and beliefs – can help explain – indeed, can help causally explain – people's actions despite the fact that, as he concedes (already in Davidson 1963; but see especially Davidson 1970), such states are covered neither by “horizontal” laws linking them to actions nor by “vertical” laws identifying them with states that are linked by laws to actions. But if this does not make it impossible for reason-states to help explain actions, why should it make it impossible for reasons themselves to help explain reason-states?


Of course, anomalous monism is not an uncontroversial view in the philosophy of mind and action; so we should not expect this argument of Davidson's to go through without challenge. And, again, I unfortunately do not have time to try to respond to those challenges here. Thus, the claim I am making here is a very modest and limited one – that there are, within Davidson's broader philosophy of mind and action, the resources one needs in order to rebut Harman's worries about what explanatory role normative truths could possibly play. Normative properties could help explain facts about the normative judgments people make in very much the same way as facts about the normative judgments people make help explain their actions – not by showing them to be necessary in virtue of the applicability of some law, but by showing them to be intelligible given the sort of creatures that people are.


Now at this point Harman might object that I have been misrepresenting his basic thought, which is simply that normative explanations are, if not actually impossible, then certainly quite implausible. Why should we spend any time bothering about the possibility that normative truths might exist, when normative judgments can so easily be explained in terms of training and the like? Is it not simply obvious that we have no good grounds for thinking normative truths exist? And this brings us, finally, to the crux of the issue as Davidson understands it. For his claim is precisely that normative truths will have a prominent role to play in any plausible and complete explanation of the facts about the normative judgments people make, since part of what needs explaining is how the contents of people's judgments are fixed, and that explanation cannot plausibly be provided with appealing to the existence of normative truths.

\section{4. The Triangulation Argument}


Davidson's later writings on these matters are dominated by what he calls his triangulation argument. Since both my reading and my assessment of this argument are similar to Claudine Verheggen's, and since she is devoting an entire chapter to this argument elsewhere in this volume, I will not attempt anything like a full discussion – let alone defense – of it here. I merely want to suggest that it could prove to be as helpful in the fight against normative skepticism as I think it is in the fight against other skepticisms.


The question that the triangulation argument is supposed to answer is this: what makes it the case that a person's particular propositional attitudes have the specific contents they do? Davidson (1992: 117–121) contends, first, that it must be something to do with the causes that have given shape to those attitudes, and then, second, that those causes must include the person's triangulations with other people and objects in their common environment. The argument he offers for this second contention is in many ways reminiscent of Wittgenstein's familiar arguments concerning ostensive definition. The idea, very quickly, is that objects could not by themselves give content to a person's attitudes, since by themselves there are too many possible contents they could be giving. Why do some aspects of some objects end up being content determining, while other aspects, and other objects, do not? Davidson's answer is that this can only be a result of the fact that the person herself, through her interactions with other people, has come to focus on those aspects of those objects and not other aspects or other objects. Other people are necessary, Davidson maintains, both to raise the question of what she might have in mind and to interact with her in the ways that provide the answers.


For example, an infant hears its parents uttering the word “cat” in the presence of cats, and begins to utter that word too, although at first in more haphazard ways. The parents applaud what they regard as its correct uses, they take issue with what they regard as the incorrect ones, and eventually its use of the word focuses on cats, rather than on furry objects in general, or just the family's cat in particular. And thus it finds itself in a position to have propositional attitudes that are about cats.


Now, again, I grant that an awful lot more would have to be said before these bare assertions could be turned into a serious argument and defended against likely objections. From the one side, some critics are going to object that causes are just causes – they explain what occasions the fact that people have some propositional attitudes rather than others, but not what constitutes the fact that those attitudes have the propositional contents they do. That they regard as something to be explained by intrinsic properties of the attitudes themselves. From the other side, a different set of critics will object that, while content determination must be causal, it need not have the interpersonal character on which Davidson is insisting. They think it is quite conceivable that a lifelong solitaire could engage with objects in ways that would make it possible for her to form determinate thoughts about them. Supposing objections of both these sorts could be met, however, where would the triangulation argument leave us in our struggle to overcome skepticism about the existence of normative truths? Would it actually give us the grounds we seek for concluding that normative truths have a role to play in explaining why particular propositional attitudes have the specific contents they do?


At first sight, one might wonder how it could. The argument tells us that we would not have propositional attitudes if we were not actually triangulating on objects with people, but it says nothing about the sorts of properties that either objects or people have. So why should we conclude that they, or the situations involving them, have normative properties? On closer inspection, however, I think the argument promises to deliver more than this. For of course it does not tell us merely that objects and other people exist; it also tells us that our interactions with them fix the contents of our thoughts. And this would seem to suggest that our thoughts must be by and large correct, for people who are triangulating with one another and with objects in their shared environment are effectively seeking to interpret one another and to make themselves interpretable to one another. Their efforts may be less sophisticated and reflective than interpretation is usually described as being, but they will inevitably be similar in form and thus analyzable in the same terms. In particular, if holism applies, then triangulation, just like interpretation, must be governed by charity. And if publicness also applies, then what triangulators largely agree on must be largely correct. But it seems obvious that holism does apply since people cannot triangulate on one aspect of their environment without, in so doing, also triangulating on many related aspects of it. And it seems obvious that publicness also applies since these triangulations fix contents despite comprising nothing more than publicly observable features of people's behavior and its relations to their environment.\footnote{Stroud (1999) denies this, insisting that the beliefs of the triangulators are what are ultimately determinative. Much like advocates of conceptual schemes, he refuses to allow that triangulations themselves might determine contents.} Thus, the triangulation argument suggests that the premises of the interpretation argument are both correct, while the interpretation argument shows how damaging to skepticism the triangulation argument could finally be.


If the triangulation argument goes through, therefore, our attitudes are at least largely correct. And since our normative beliefs and desires are, so to speak, half of our attitudes, it becomes difficult not to conclude that they are at least largely correct as well. This of course assumes that the triangulation argument applies to desires and not just beliefs, and indeed that it applies to normative beliefs and not just nonnormative ones – both assumptions that advocates of the neo-Humean conception of desire might want to challenge. But we know from Section 2 that Davidson's own conception of desire is very different. And we are now in an even better position than we were then to appreciate why Davidson favors the holistic conception of desire over the much simpler neo-Humean conception. For people would not triangulate with one another if they did not have it as their systemic aim to form determinate attitudes in hopes of believing and acting on truths. So their normative beliefs will typically shape their desires, not their desires their normative beliefs.


Of course, skeptics like Harman, who maintain that desires are typically trained responses to various of the nonnormative properties things possess, will not agree that the triangulation argument goes through. And obviously their very different views about content determination have not been ruled out here. But our brief was simply to show that we might have good grounds for concluding that normative truths have an important role to play in the explanation of normative judgments. Surely we do need an explanation of how the contents of propositional attitudes are fixed. Insofar as we have reason to think Davidson's account of this matter might be correct, so too we have reason to think there might be normative properties and truths.


Do Davidson's arguments have any further implications about the nature of these properties and truths? Do they imply, in particular, that reasons for action must be agent-neutral in nature? They might seem to, for it might seem that people who were triangulating on the same normative properties would have to find that they have the same reasons for action. On closer inspection, however, it actually is doubtful that any such conclusion would follow, and in fact Davidson (1995: 39 ff.) himself allows that people's reasons for action could be agent-relative.


Thus he would certainly allow, for example, that friends generally have reasons to promote one another's well-being that are in various ways different from the reasons mere strangers have. I think he could go considerably farther than this and also allow that what is required within particular friendships depends to some extent on facts about their histories and circumstances. The crucial point for Davidson is simply that there be a truth of the matter about what exactly friendship requires of any particular person at any particular place and time.\footnote{As Lillehammer (2007) remarks, Davidson (1995: 51) allows that such questions may occasionally lack determinate answers. Lillehammer sees this as a problem for Davidson; but I am not sure why it should be.} This is worth stressing, because it can be tempting to assume that the differences so obviously existing among different people's reasons for action pose a problem for realists like Davidson. Thus it is important to remember that differences are not always the result of disagreement, or of the fact that people are simply talking past each other in certain ways. On the contrary, we often have no trouble agreeing that the same situation gives each of us different reasons to act, and we are prepared to criticize one another accordingly. If someone is your friend but not mine, that makes a difference to our reasons, and if you fail to see this, then you are guilty of making a mistake.


How might moral reasons figure in this picture? Here Davidson has very little to say. Given his normative realism, together with his openness to the possibility of agent-relative reasons, I have argued elsewhere (Myers 1999) that morality should be regarded, not simply as promoting the good, but as \emph{cooperating} in its promotion, and thus as combining elements of consequentialism and contractualism. But whether this is an approach Davidson would have approved of, I do not know. He wrote a great deal on a wide range of topics, but not on morality.


Still, as Michael Smith (1994) has famously argued, the problem of overcoming the skeptics' doubts and showing that normative truths actually do exist is in many ways \emph{the} moral problem. Without assurances on this score, it is difficult to muster much interest in the rest. And here, for my money, Davidson is doing moral philosophers a great but underappreciated service. For the argument sketched here, while admittedly still in need of development at some points, seems to me more promising than the other responses to the skeptics currently on offer. Unlike Kantian responses, it does not pretend to pull substantive conclusions about reasons for action out of some purely procedural hat; it admits that normative truths are objects of discovery. Unlike other versions of realism, however, it does not argue for these normative truths in a manner that calls into question their status either as normative or as truths. It acknowledges that a strong version of the practicality or internalism requirement governs the normative, and that a strong version of the explanatory requirement governs the real or the true. Whether an argument along these lines can be made to work perhaps remains in question, but there is no question that it would be a good thing if it could.

% Notes
\section{References}


Davidson, D. (1963). Actions, reasons, and causes. Reprinted in Davidson (1980).


———. (1969). How is weakness of the will possible? Reprinted in Davidson (1980).


———. (1970). Mental events. Reprinted in Davidson (1980).


———. (1973). Radical interpretation. Reprinted in Davidson (1984).


———. (1974). On the very idea of a conceptual scheme. Reprinted in Davidson (1984).


———. (1975). Thought and talk. Reprinted in Davidson (1984).


———. (1980). \emph{Essays on Actions and Events}. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


———. (1983). A coherence theory of truth and knowledge. Reprinted in Davidson (2001).


———. (1984). \emph{Essays on Truth and Interpretation}. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


———. (1990). Representation and interpretation. Reprinted in Davidson (2004).


———. (1992). The second person. Reprinted in Davidson (2001).


———. (1995). The objectivity of values. Reprinted in Davidson (2004).


———. (2001). \emph{Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective}. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


———. (2004). \emph{Problems of Rationality}. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


Fodor, J. and Lepore, E. (1992). \emph{Holism: A Shopper's Guide}. Oxford: Blackwell.


———. (1994). Is radical interpretation possible? \emph{Philosophical Perspectives} 8:101–119.


Glüer, K. (2011). \emph{Donald Davidson: A Short Introduction}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Harman, G. (1977). \emph{The Nature of Morality}. New York: Oxford University Press.


Hurley, P. (2002). A Davidsonian reconciliation of internalism, objectivity, and the belief-desire theory. \emph{The Journal of Ethics} 6:1–20.


Lepore, E. and Ludwig, K. (2005). \emph{Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality}. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


Lillehammer, H. (2007). Davidson on value and objectivity. \emph{Dialectica} 61:203–217.


Mackie, J.L. (1977). \emph{Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong}. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.


Myers, R.H. (1999). \emph{Self-Governance and Cooperation}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


———. (2012). Desires and normative truths: a holist's response to the sceptics. \emph{Mind} 121:375–406.


Scanlon, T.M. (1998). \emph{What We Owe to Each Other}. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


Smith, M. (1994). \emph{The Moral Problem}. Oxford: Blackwell.


Sreenivasan, G. (2001). Understanding alien morals. \emph{Philosophy and Phenomenological Research} 62:1–32.


Stroud, B. (1999). Radical interpretation and philosophical scepticism. In \emph{The Philosophy of Donald Davidson}, L. Hahn (ed.). Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, pp. 139–161.


Tersman, F. (2004). Are we lovers of the good? \emph{Synthese} 138:247–260.


Velleman, D. (1992). The guise of the good. \emph{Nous} 26:3–26.

\chapter{19. Predication}


Jeff Speaks


The nature of predication, and its relation to truth, is the central topic of Davidson's posthumously published \emph{Truth and Predication}. The main task that an account of predication should accomplish is a solution to the problem of predication; and that, Davidson tells us, is the problem of explaining what makes some collections of words, but not others, true or false (Davidson 2005: 86). It is so called because, Davidson thinks, the principal challenge faced by any answer to this problem is the problem of explaining the distinctive contribution made by predicates to the truth or falsity of sentences.


One way to see the difficulty that Davidson has in mind, and to see the distinctive solution he proposes to that difficulty, is to begin by looking at the kinds of solutions to the problem of predication that he opposes. A good place to begin is with Davidson's discussion of Plato's explanation of predication. On Davidson's interpretation, Plato tried to solve the problem of predication by saying that while names, like “Theatetus,” refer to objects, verbs, like “sits,” stand for the property (or universal, or form) of sitting. But, Davidson points out, if we consider the sentence “Theaetetus sits,” we can see that



\begin{quote}


[i]f the semantics of the sentence were exhausted by referring to the two entities Theaetetus and the property of Sitting, it would be just a string of names; we would ask where the verb was. The verb, we understand, expresses the relation of instantiation. Our policy, however, is to explain verbs by relating them to properties and relations. But this cannot be the end of the matter, since we now have three entities, a person, a property, and a relation, but no verb. When we supply the appropriate verb, we will be forced to the next step, and so on.


(Davidson 2005: 85–86)



\end{quote}


We begin by noting that a name followed by a verb is a sentence – which can be true or false – whereas a name followed by another name is not. It is very plausible that, in Davidson's terms, this suggests that in order to solve the problem of predication, what we first need to do is to explain the differences in the “semantical roles” of names and predicates. Plato suggests, in effect, that we do this by assigning different sorts of entities as the contents of names and predicates: objects to the names, and universals to the predicates. Davidson's argument aims to show that no explanation of the difference between names and predicates of this sort can work. There are two ways to reconstruct this argument.


The first begins with the point that for any sentence that can be true or false – for example, “Theaetetus sits” – we can find another collection of words which correspond to the same contents – for example, “Theaetetus the property of sitting” or “Theatetus the relation of exemplification the property of sitting” – which is “just a string of names” and is therefore not the sort of thing which can be true or false.


The second is to point out that if we assign Theatetus as the content of “Theatetus” and sitting as the content of “sits,” we have then assigned to the sentence two entities: Theatetus and the property of sitting. But this is simply a list of two items, which is not the sort of thing that can be true or false. The fact that one of the two items is a property gets us no closer to understanding how a pair of things could be true or false, and hence gets us no closer to a solution to the problem of predication.


A natural response to this second way of pressing Davidson's objection is that it is not the list – Theatetus, the property of sitting – that is true or false, but rather the proposition that predicates sitting of Theatetus. To go this route is to advocate a style of solution to the problem of predication, which might be called propositionalism:



\begin{quote}


Propositionalism: ∀S (S is a string of words → (S has a truth-value → S has a truth-value because S expresses a proposition with that truth-value))



\end{quote}


If one gives a propositionalist answer to the problem of predication, then the problem of predication morphs into the problem of the unity of the proposition. This is because the propositionalist hopes to explain the truth or falsity of sentences in terms of the truth or falsity of the propositions that those sentences express. But this leads directly to the questions: (i) “What are propositions?,” and, given an answer to this question, (ii) “What makes those things apt to be true or false?” The problem of the unity of the proposition is, more or less, the problem of answering (i) and (ii).\footnote{It is true that classic discussions of this problem, like Russell's discussion in the \emph{Principles of Mathematics}, often sound as if the problem has more to do with, well, unity than (i) and (ii) do. Russell worries, for example, that he will be unable to give an adequate account of the nature of propositions on the grounds that “a proposition \dots{} is essentially a unity, and when analysis has destroyed the unity, no enumeration of constituents will restore the proposition” (Russell 1903: 51). But one can understand Russell here as operating under the assumptions that (to use his example) the proposition that A differs from B somehow involves the propositional constituents A, difference, and B, but also is genuinely a single entity, and asking (question i) what sort of entity could satisfy this condition. Russell then tests candidate entities – like the fact that A stands in the relation of difference to B – to see whether (as question ii requires) they are the sorts of things that could be true or false.}


It's worth flagging the fact that, even if the problem of the unity of the proposition could be solved, this by itself would not be enough to validate the propositionalist's solution to the problem of predication. That solution, after all, makes use not just of facts about the truth-values of propositions, but also of facts about the expression relation holding between sentences and propositions; hence it is reasonable to expect that the propositionalist should be able to say something about what this relation is, and the facts in virtue of which it holds between a sentence and one proposition, but not another. This is a notoriously difficult thing to do – but the difficulty of doing this was not Davidson's central objection to the propositionalist view, so we can set it aside for the moment.\footnote{Well-known attempts to solve the problem include the intention-based semantics of Grice (1969), the convention-theoretic view of Lewis (1975), and a use theory of the sort defended in Horwich (1998). The former two views lead directly to the question of what it takes for a subject to stand in attitude relations to propositions; for a sampling of answers to this question, see Stich and Warfield (1994). \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf One might, however, reasonably doubt whether Davidson could object that the propositionalist can give no satisfactory explanation of the expression relation since, arguably, if Davidson's own interpretivist approach to the foundations of intentionality is satisfactory, it should be able to provide the wanted account of this relation. More on Davidson's interpretivism later.} But, as we will see later, the fact that it does not face this extra explanatory burden can be seen as a significant strength of Davidson's view.


Davidson's target in \emph{Truth and Predication} is not the narrow one of refuting one or two attempted solutions to the problem of predication; rather, I think, his aim is to show that the propositionalist form of response to the problem of predication is fundamentally misguided. As I read him, Davidson thought that propositionalism was hopeless because he took the problem of the unity of the proposition that it engenders to be insoluble; an argument for this conclusion is the burden of the argument of chapter 5 (“Failed attempts”) of \emph{Truth and Predication}.


What we get there is, in large part, a guided tour through failed propositionalist responses to the problem of predication: Aristotle's view of predication as ascription of universals dependent on the substances that instantiate them, Russell's and Strawson's Platonic theories of propositions, and, finally, Frege's view of predicates as incomplete expressions.\footnote{The discussion of Frege comes a bit later, in Chapter 7. It is worth noting that some nonpropositionalists come in for criticism there as well. Quine and Sellars, for example, are, even if praised for avoiding the pitfalls of a propositionalist theory of predication, also criticized for failing to provide a sufficient positive account of predication. \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf One oddity here is that the very widely held view of propositions as sets of worlds, or functions from worlds to truth-values, gets no mention in Davidson's discussion. Perhaps that is because the view that assigns to predicates a function from world–object pairs to truth-values is sufficiently similar to Davidson's own positive view. More on the latter later.} In each case, the propositionalist theory in question is refuted by some version of the argument wielded against Plato.


As noted above, one way to press this argument is to point out (as Russell did, and as Davidson does) that for any true string of words (like “Theatetus sits”), there is a corresponding string of words that involves no predication, and hence is neither true or false, which differs from the true string of words only by the replacement of synonyms for synonyms (e.g., “Theatetus sitting”). Hence, one might think that the argument against the propositionalist theory of predication can be blocked by, following Frege (in spirit if not in terminology), insisting on the principle that expressions of different grammatical categories – like “sits” and “sitting” – can never refer to the same entity.


Davidson, I think rightly, rejects this as a superficial solution to the problem. As he nicely puts the point,



\begin{quote}


if \dots{} predicates refer to entities, and this fact exhausts their semantic role, it does not matter how odd or permeable some of the entities are, for we can still raise the question of how these entities are related to those other entities, objects.


(Davidson 2005: 145)



\end{quote}


Even if we assign to predicates entities that could never be the content of a singular term, we cannot explain the difference between truth apt and nontruth apt strings of words simply by a theory of the entities which those words have as their contents, because, as Davidson emphasizes, a collection of entities is not the sort of thing that can be true or false. We are still left with the questions of how those entities could combine with objects into a proposition (whatever that is) and of why that entity should be the sort of thing that can be true or false. That is, we are still left with questions (i) and (ii) above – the core of the problem of the unity of the proposition.


Davidson's skepticism about the appeal to propositions to solve the problem of predication is of a piece with the skepticism about explanatory appeals to “meanings as entities,” which has been a part of his work since the 1960s. As he famously remarked in “Truth and Meaning,”



\begin{quote}


“the one thing meanings do not seem to do is oil the wheels of the theory of meaning \dots{} My objection to meanings in the theory of meaning is not that they are abstract or that their identity conditions are obscure, but that they have no demonstrated use.”


(Davidson 1967: 116)



\end{quote}


This is something, as \emph{Truth and Predication} makes clear, about which Davidson never changed his mind. His objection to propositionalist attempts to solve the problem of predication is never that the entities postulated by those attempts do not exist, but rather that, even if they did, they would not help to explain truth and falsity.\footnote{See, for example, pp. 85–86.}


Even advocates of propositionalist views of predication – of which, for full disclosure, I am one – should admit that, in this chapter, Davidson is pretty much completely right.\footnote{Except, I think, when he moves from his criticisms of specific propositionalist theories to the falsity of propositionalism more generally. More on propositionalist theories that seem to avoid Davidson's criticisms further.} The propositionalist theories that he criticizes do not explain truth and falsity, and they do not explain truth and falsity for just the reasons that Davidson gives. And Davidson is surely right if we cannot give a satisfactory account of what propositions are, and how things of that sort could be true and false, then the propositionalist's attempt to explain the truth or falsity of sentences in terms of the truth or falsity of propositions looks a bit empty.


Of course, propositionalists might well respond to this argument not by giving up on propositionalism, but by looking for a better theory of propositions. I will return to this idea later. But first, now that we have a handle on the sort of view of predication that Davidson wants us to avoid, let us look at Davidson's nonpropositionalist solution to the problem of predication.


Davidson presents that solution in the final chapter of \emph{Truth and Predication}. If the key negative aspect of the view is his rejection of propositionalist accounts of predication, the key positive idea is that predication is to be explained in terms of truth. We begin with a Tarskian truth theory for a language, which specifies the conditions under which predicates are true of objects, and then explain the unity of sentences in terms of their possession of truth conditions:



\begin{quote}


How does Tarski's methodology solve the problem? The first thing I claimed that we could learn from the history of failures was how central the concept of truth is to any solution \dots{} The importance of the connection is this: if we can show that our account of the role of predicates is part of an explanation of the fact that sentences containing a given predicate are true or false, then we have incorporated our account of predicates into an explanation of the most obvious sense in which sentences are unified, and so we can understand how, by using a sentence, we can make assertions and perform other speech acts.


(Davidson 2005: 155)



\end{quote}


At first glance, this seems too easy. Could it really be that all that is needed to solve the problem of predication is a recognition that predicates are true of objects? And since any reasonable theory of predication – whether propositionalist or not – will be consistent with the fact that predicates can be true of objects, does this “solution” really tell us anything at all about predication?


This reaction is too quick. It is true that any reasonable view of predication will be compatible with the fact that predicates can be true of objects. But it is not obvious that every view of predication can explain the semantic role of predicates in terms of the truth conditions of sentences; and this last idea is the key to Davidson's theory.


Consider by contrast a propositionalist theory. Propositionalists explain the truth conditions of sentences in terms of the truth conditions of the propositions they express (in the relevant context) and hence explain the semantic role of predicates in terms of their contribution to those propositions. Hence, if Davidson is right that we cannot solve the unity of the proposition, and hence cannot explain the truth conditions of propositions, then, much as they might like to say that predicates are true of objects, propositionalists have not earned the right to this claim. One might view Davidson's positive theory of predication as an attempt to, unlike the propositionalist, earn the right to the claim that predicates are true of objects.


But if Davidson proposes to explain predication in terms of the truth conditions of sentences, how does he propose to explain the latter? The outlines of his answer to this question are well-known, but are presented nowhere more compactly and lucidly than in chapter 3 of \emph{Truth and Predication}.\footnote{For earlier presentations of Davidson's ideas on these topics, see Davidson (1973a) and Davidson (1973b), both reprinted in Davidson (1984).}


On Davidson's view, the truth conditions of sentences are given by the correct Tarskian truth theory for the languages of which those sentences are a part. Accordingly, the story about what it is for a sentence to have certain truth conditions will explain the facts about a language user in virtue of which the correct Tarskian truth theory for her language is correct. In outline, we begin with the agent's patterns of assent and dissent to sentences. These patterns interact with the “principle of charity” in two ways. First, the principle of charity guarantees that an agent's observation sentences (and observational beliefs) will (modulo qualifications about explicable error) be true in the salient environmental circumstances in which the agent is disposed to assent to those sentences; this gives us truth conditions for observation sentences (64–65). Second, the principle of charity guarantees both that (modulo the same qualifications) any two sentences to which a speaker assents must be logically consistent; this gives us an interpretation of the logical constants of the language (62–63). Given these facts about logical form, we use facts about which sentences an agent “prefers true” to which other sentences to extract, via Jeffrey's version of Bayesian decision theory, the subjective probability and “subjective desirability” assigned to each sentence (67–73). These facts about subjective probabilities then combine with the assignment of truth conditions to observation sentences to yield an assignment of truth conditions to every sentence of the language. This might be roughly diagrammed as shown in Figure 19.1.


\textbf{Figure 19.1} Davidson's theory of truth and prediction.


\begin{figure}[htbp!]
\centering
\includegraphics[keepaspectratio=true,height=\textheight,width=\textwidth]{e-l-ernest-lepore-kirk-ludwig-a-companion-to-donal-42.jpg}
\end{figure}


Davidson sometimes describes his theory as going beyond Tarski by giving the sense, or content, of “true,” which can suggest that he takes the concept of truth to be identical with the full set of the connections outlines above, so that “S is true” would be synonymous with “S is \dots{} ,”with the ellipsis filled in by the full story about radical interpretation, Bayesian decision theory, and the rest. But I do not think that this is the best way to view Davidson's theory.\footnote{And, in some places, he is clear that he is not offering a definition of truth to rival those given by correspondence or epistemic theories; see, for example, p. 75, note 18.} Rather, I think that we can understand Davidson as giving an account of what it is for a string of words S to be true or false: it is for the collection of facts diagrammed above to give S a truth condition.


If Davidson has succeeded in specifying conditions necessary and sufficient for a string of words to have a truth condition, then he has solved the problem of predication – and with vastly fewer resources than the propositionalist. Though Davidson sometimes talks as if the problem of predication just is the problem of the unity of the proposition, it might be more apt to think of Davidson as solving the problem of predication in such a way that the problem of the unity of the proposition does not arise. This is doubly advantageous, for not only does Davidson escape having to give an account of the nature of propositions – which, as he shows, leads to formidable problems – but also escapes having to give an account of the relation of “semantically expressing” which, the propositionalist says, holds between sentences (and contexts) and propositions. One might summarize the difference between propositionalist views of predications and Davidson's by saying that whereas the propositionalist locates the solution to the problem of predication in the special representational properties of a class of abstract objects, Davidson locates it in us, our actions, and our dispositions.


Of course, the “if” that begins the previous paragraph is a big one. The idea that we can give necessary and sufficient conditions for possession of a certain truth conditions in the way that Davidson suggests has been subjected to a variety of criticisms in the last few decades, and here I will not attempt anything like a summary or adjudication of these debates. Instead, I will just mention three problems which seem to me to be quite serious.


The first is whether the principle of charity can play anything like the central role Davidson assigns to it. The problem, as John Hawthorne puts it, is that there often seems to be an interpretation of the language of the subject that “has the virtue of being charitable \dots{} but the vice of being crazy.”\footnote{Hawthorne (2007: 427).} These interpretations will be, by anyone's lights, implausible – an example might be an interpretation which makes my (apparent) name for my wife a name for someone whom I have never met, but who has more of the qualities I attribute to my wife than she does. A theory like Davidson's always faces the question of whether the constraints put on the assignments of truth conditions to sentences are strong enough to rule out these crazy but charitable interpretations; Davidson's discussions of this topic, while suggestive, are not sufficient to answer these sorts of concerns.\footnote{For discussion of some of the problems here, and some possible solutions, see Bays (2007), Hawthorne (2007), and Williams (2007).}


The second concerns the extent to which Davidson's theory presupposes rather than explains the distinction – that between truth apt sentences and strings that lack this quality – for which the problem of predication asks for an account. As Davidson presents his view, patterns of assent and dissent to sentences come in near the ground floor of his explanation of the concept of truth (63). But one wonders how we are to distinguish assent and dissent to sentences from various nonverbal (and nontruth apt) noises, which, just as much as assent and dissent to observation sentences, might be well correlated with various features of the subject's environment. The worry is that if this cannot be done, and if we have to take the category of a sentence as basic, then we have assumed a solution to, rather than solved, Davidson's problem of predication.


The third concerns the question of whether we can, ultimately, do without propositions. Ordinary language is full of apparently true sentences that seem to immediately entail the existence of nonlinguistic abstract objects which are expressed by sentences, the contents of mental states, and the bearers of truth values – since that is what propositions are supposed to be, it seems fair to say that ordinary language is full of apparently true sentences that seem to immediately entail the existence of propositions.


Consider, for example:



\begin{quote}


John said something.


What John said was true.


Though what John said was true, it would have been false, if things had gone differently.


What John said is what Mary believed.



\end{quote}


It is hard to deny that sentences like these are often true; and equally hard to deny that these sentences jointly entail claims like:



\begin{quote}


There is something which John said, which was true, which could have been false, and which Mary believed,



\end{quote}


the logical form of which seems to be, roughly,



\begin{quote}


∃x (John said x \& x is true \& x could have been false \& Mary believed x)



\end{quote}


And what could make the parenthetical open sentence true other than a proposition?\footnote{It cannot be a sentence, for the familiar reason that John and Mary might be speakers of different languages.}


But once we let propositions in the door, a propositionalist account of predication is not far behind. Once we admit propositions which are true or false, and see that (if ordinary language is to be believed) everything else which is true or false (like a sentence token, an utterance, or a belief) is true or false iff the proposition which is its content is true or false, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the truth of sentences is to be explained in terms of the truth of propositions. After all, it would be very odd if the truth of some sentence S were utterly disconnected from the truth of the proposition it expresses, which suggests that either the truth of the sentence should be explained in terms of the truth of the relevant proposition, or the reverse. But the idea of explaining the truth of propositions in terms of the truth of sentences that express them seems less than promising, since instances of:



\begin{quote}


It could have been true that S, even if the sentence “S” had never existed



\end{quote}


seem (at least for sentences which are not about themselves) very plausible. Hence, we are apparently forced, by the existence of propositions, into a propositionalist approach to the problem of predication.


Davidson, of course, was well aware of this sort of problem, and proposed an ingenious theory – the paratactic analysis – which, he hoped, would enable us to admit the relevant natural language sentences as true without being thereby committed to propositions. Suffice to say that whether the paratactic analysis can succeed at this task is still very much an open question. Though I am skeptical, the issues are difficult and beyond the scope of this essay.\footnote{See Lepore and Loewer (1989) for an excellent summary of, and attempt to reply to, the main objections. I defend a more skeptical viewpoint in chapter 2 of King, Soames, and Speaks (forthcoming).} Hence, rather than further pursue the question of whether the proponent of Davidson's account of predication can ultimately escape propositionalism, I would like to conclude by examining some recent attempts by propositionalists to solve the problem of the unity of the proposition. This work is especially interesting in the present context, since some of the most important recent work on this topic can be understood as incorporating some of the central insights of Davidson's nonpropositionalist approach to predication.


I have in mind especially the theories defended in Jeff King's 2007 \emph{The Nature and Structure of Content}, and Scott Soames' 2010 \emph{What Is Meaning?} Both King and Soames believe in propositions, and each would, I think, give basically the propositionalist answer to Davidson's problem of predication. This is by itself unremarkable. What's interesting in the present context is that, unlike the theories of propositions Davidson criticizes, neither King nor Soames thinks that we can explain how propositions could be true or false just by saying what sorts of entities they are. King, for example, “just can't see how propositions or anything else could represent the world as being a certain way by their very natures and independently of minds and languages.”\footnote{King (2009: 260). Emphasis in original.} Soames, similarly, holds that “there is nothing \dots{} in any abstract structure we might construct, or explicitly specify, which, by its very nature, indicates that anything is predicated of anything. Hence, there is nothing intrinsic to such structures that make them representational, and so capable of being true or false.”\footnote{Soames (2010: 31). Emphasis in original.}


To this extent, King and Soames agree with Davidson's criticisms of traditional propositionalist treatments of predication. But, unlike Davidson, this does not lead them to throw out propositionalism altogether; rather, it pushes them toward a brand of propositionalism according to which the representational properties of propositions are not simply explained by their intrinsic properties, but rather are given to those propositions by the cognitive and linguistic activity of language using subjects.


It is not clear that Davidson's criticisms of propositionalism cut any ice against such views. Let us consider, for illustrative purposes, a simplified version of King's theory. On that theory, propositions are a certain sort of fact. To use one of King's examples, let us consider the proposition that Michael swims. This proposition is the fact whose constituents are Michael, the property of swimming, and the propositional relation corresponding to the following open sentence:



\begin{quote}


there is a context c and assignment g such that x is the semantic value (relative to c and g) of a lexical item e of some language L and y is the semantic value (relative to c and g) of a lexical item e' of L such that e occurs at the left terminal node of the sentential relation R that in L encodes ascription and e' occurs at R's right terminal node.\footnote{For more detailed presentations and discussions of King's view, see King (2007), King (2009), and King, Soames, and Speaks (forthcoming).}



\end{quote}


King's view (again, roughly speaking) identifies the proposition that Michael swims with the fact obtained by assigning Michael as value to the free variable “x,” and the property of swimming as value to the free variable “y.”


Davidson might press the question (as he does against other propositionalist views): what gives this fact representational properties? What makes it the sort of thing that could be true or false? Unlike traditional propositionalists, King (as well as Soames) thinks that this is a question to which he owes an answer. In King's view, the answer is that the proposition gets its representational properties from speakers of the language interpreting this propositional relation as ascribing the relevant property to the relevant object. As with Davidson's view, our explanation of truth and falsity, and hence of predication, bottoms out not with the specification of the structure of some class of abstract objects, but rather with the thought and action of language using subjects. One might, of course, object to various aspects of King's explanation of the truth and falsity of propositions, but Davidson provides no reason to think that no such explanation can be given.


Another objection Davidson might press is more directly concerned with unity: what unifies propositions, as King thinks of them? To this question, King has a ready answer: they are unified by propositional relations, which genuinely hold between the constituents of the proposition (in the earlier example, Michael and the property of swimming). Davidson would not, I think, be satisfied with this answer; according to Davidson, the problem of the unity of the proposition is “much the same problem” as Bradley's regress argument against the existence of relations (105). King's theory, he would object, leaves open the question of how the relevant propositional relation is related to the propositional constituents it supposedly relates. If it is “nothing to” those constituents, then it can hardly relate them. But if it is “something to” them, it must stand in another relation to them – but then we are off on a regress, the conclusion of which is that the holding of one relation requires the holding of indefinitely many other relations to connect that relation to its relata.


Here, I think, Davidson's argument is at its weakest. If his ultimate argument that the problem of the unity of the proposition is insoluble is really that unity can only be explained by relations and there are no relations, he owes substantially more argument for that last claim than the brief recital of Bradley that he offers. A plausible case can be made (as Russell pointed out in the very work that Davidson uses Bradley to criticize) that Bradley's regress is, even if genuine, not vicious.\footnote{See Russell (1903: §§55, 99).} (This use of Bradley's argument is also a departure from Davidson's more usual – and I think more powerful – style of argument, which objects to various metaphysical posits not on the grounds that their existence is incoherent, but rather on the grounds that they do not do the explanatory work for which they were introduced.)


Proponents of Davidson's program in semantics will likely not see the need for any propositionalist theory of the sort Soames and King defend, since they will take the case for propositions to be substantially undermined by the successes of the paratactic analysis of apparent references to propositions in ordinary language. But those who, on the one hand, find propositions difficult to give up, and, on the other hand, find Davidson's criticisms of traditional propositionalist views compelling, may find in the new propositionalist views of King and Soames a kind of view that incorporates the insights both of traditional views of propositions, and their critics.

% Notes
\section{References}


Bays, T. (2007). The problem with Charlie: some remarks on Putnam, Lewis, and Williams. \emph{Philosophical Review} 116(3):401–425.


Davidson, D. (1967). Truth and meaning. \emph{Synthese} 17:304–323. Reprinted in Davidson (1984): 17–36.


———. (1973a). Radical interpretation. \emph{Dialectica} 27:313–328.


———. (1973b). Belief and the basis of meaning. \emph{Synthese} 27:313–328.


———. (1984). \emph{Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


———. (2005). \emph{Truth and Predication}. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


Grice, P. (1969). Utterer's meaning and intentions. \emph{Philosophical Review} 78(2):147–177.


Hawthorne, J. (2007). Craziness and metasemantics. \emph{Philosophical Review} 116(3):427–440.


Horwich, P. (1998). \emph{Meaning}. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


King, J.C. (2007). \emph{The Nature and Structure of Content}. New York: Oxford University Press.


———. (2009). Questions of unity. \emph{Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society} 109:257–277.


King, J.C., Soames, S. and Speaks, J. (Forthcoming). \emph{New Thinking About Propositions}. Oxford University Press.


Lepore, E. and Loewer, B. (1989). You can say that again. \emph{Midwest Studies in Philosophy} 14:338–356.


Lewis, D. (1975). Languages and Language.


Russell, B. (1903). \emph{The Principles of Mathematics.} Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.


Soames, S. (2010). \emph{What Is Meaning?} Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.


Stich, S. and Warfield, T.A. (1994). \emph{Mental Representation: A Reader}. Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell.


Williams, J.R.G. (2007). Eligibility and inscrutability. \emph{Philosophical Review} 116(3):361–399.

\chapter{20. Convention and Meaning}


Kathrin Glüer

\section{1. Introduction}


Donald Davidson denied convention any interesting role in the philosophical theory of meaning: Conventions, he claimed, are neither necessary nor sufficient to account for communication by language. Davidson's anticonventionalism is part of his more general individualism about meaning. According to Davidson, it is first and foremost the individual speaker's words that have meaning. More precisely, it is the individual speaker's words on their particular occasion of utterance that are meaningful. These meanings need not be those commonly assigned throughout a speech community. Notions such as that of a shared language, shared practices of use, and the attendant notions of standard meaning and linguistic mistake, are as uninteresting to the philosophical theory of meaning as that of convention, Davidson maintains: “We want a deeper notion of what words, when spoken in context, mean” (Davidson 1986: 91).


Radical and controversial as these views may seem, their most intriguing feature may be that Davidson ultimately motivates both anticonventionalism and individualism by the social or public nature of language. It is because linguistic meaning is essentially public that neither convention nor any other form of shared regularity in the use of linguistic expressions is necessary for successful communication. And it is because linguistic meaning is essentially public that shared knowledge of conventional meanings is not sufficient to account for our actual communicative achievements, either.


I shall start by sketching the meaning theoretical background for Davidson's anticonventionalism. In Section 3, I shall take up his almost forgotten arguments against attempts to conventionally link semantics to nonsemantic purposes, and then devote the remainder of this article (Sections 4–6) to Davidson's much discussed attack on the idea that literal meaning is conventional meaning.

\section{2. The Public Nature of Meaning}


The most basic tenet of Davidsonian meaning theory may be that \emph{meaning is public}: “The semantic features of language are public features. What no one can, in the nature of the case, figure out from the totality of the relevant evidence cannot be part of meaning” (Davidson 1979: 235). This is a metaphysical claim: Meaning facts are essentially such that they are in principle \emph{knowable}.


In his meaning theoretical writings, Davidson explores the consequences of this basic claim in a variety of directions. In what we could call the “radical interpretation papers,” he focuses on the question of meaning determination.\footnote{The most important of the radical interpretation papers are Davidson (1973, 1974, 1975, 1976). A useful overview can be found in Davidson (2005).} Since meanings are essentially public, and understanding a linguistic utterance is knowing what it means, the interpreter is the central figure in these papers:



\begin{quote}


Quine revolutionized our understanding of verbal communication by taking seriously the fact, obvious enough in itself, that there can be no more to meaning than an adequately equipped person can learn and observe; the interpreter's point of view is therefore the revealing one to bring to the subject.


(Davidson 1990: 62)



\end{quote}


A Davidsonian interpreter is simply someone who understands – correctly interprets – what another says. To employ the interpreter for revealing what is essential to meaning, we need to look at what he knows, and how. Or rather, at how we, as philosophers or linguists, can model his knowledge, and what ultimately justifies it (cf. Davidson 1973: 125, 1986: 95f.). Davidson's answer to the first question was that we can use a Tarski-style theory of truth as our formal semantic theory. The “outputs” of such a theory – the T-sentences – correspond to what an interpreter who understands an utterance of a given sentence knows, and the inner workings of the theory provide us with a model of his linguistic ability. Given this answer, the question of what justifies the interpreter's knowledge becomes the question of what the data are for such a theory. And since we are interested in the nature of meaning, the data must be characterized in nonsemantic terms. According to Davidson, what follows is that meaning is determined by observable behavior:\footnote{For a more detailed introduction to Davidson's account of meaning determination, see Glüer (2011: chs. 2 and 3). See also Pagin, Chapter 13 in this volume.}



\begin{quote}


What we should demand (\dots{}) is that the evidence for the theory be in principle publicly accessible (\dots{}). The requirement that the evidence be publicly accessible is not due to an atavistic yearning for behavioristic or verificationist foundations, but to the fact that \emph{what is to be explained is a social phenomenon}. (\dots{}) As Ludwig Wittgenstein, not to mention Dewey, G.H Mead, Quine, and many others have insisted, language is intrinsically social. This does not entail that truth and meaning can be defined in terms of observable behavior, or that it is “nothing but” observable behavior; \emph{but it does imply that meaning is entirely determined by observable behavior, even readily observable behavior. That meanings are decipherable is not a matter of luck; public availability is a constitutive aspect of language}.


(Davidson 1990: 56, emphases added)



\end{quote}


Both constructing formal semantic theories for natural language, and foundational considerations regarding the evidence available for such theories ultimately serve meaning theoretical – or foundational – purposes, according to Davidson. Even though a formal semantic theory is an empirical theory, the explanation we are ultimately after is philosophical. We want to understand the nature of a social phenomenon: the phenomenon of communication by language.


From this perspective, familiar everyday notions such as that of a language, those of sentence, word and name, along with slightly more technical ones such as predicate or reference, and even that of meaning itself come to be seen as technical notions:



\begin{quote}


The concept of a language is of a sort with, and depends on, concepts like name, predicate, sentence, reference, meaning (\dots{}). \emph{These are all theoretical concepts}, and the items to which they apply are abstract objects. (\dots{}) Where we want these concepts is in talking about speech behavior. Philosophers, psychologists, and linguists need these theoretical terms if they want to describe, theorize about, and explain verbal activities. (\dots{}) The main point of the concept of a language, then, and its attendant concepts like those of predicate, sentence, and reference, is to enable us to give a coherent description of the behavior of speakers, and of what speakers and their interpreters know \emph{that allows them to communicate}.


(Davidson 1992: 108f., emphases added)



\end{quote}


As used by philosophers, psychologists, and linguists, the concepts of meaning and language are theoretical concepts, Davidson argues. From this perspective, we are not interested in the ordinary usage of terms like ‘meaning’ and ‘language.’ The philosophical theory of meaning, for instance, is not an account of what ‘meaning’ means in ordinary language. In particular, we are not interested in, or constrained by, what we might call “folk theories” about meaning. Rather, the sole purpose of these concepts is the explanation of successful communication by language. It is this context, and this context only, that provides them with content: “The notion of meaning depends entirely upon cases of successful communication” (Davidson and Glüer 1995: 81).


Any satisfactory account of successful linguistic communication must capture the phenomenon in all its actual variety. No clear cases must be left out, and we must not be misled by our already rather theoretical preconceptions. It seems a rather entrenched part of our folk theory of meaning, for instance, that meaning is conventional. But, or so Davidson claims, there are lots of “unconventional” cases of where linguistic communication clearly succeeds.


In what we might call the “anticonventional papers,” Davidson therefore reminds us of the extent to which the speaker is a free and creative agent.\footnote{The most important anticonventional papers are: Davidson (1982, 1986, 1989, 1993, 1994).} In what follows, I shall at times refer to the considerations Davidson presents in the anticonventional papers as the “convention considerations.” The convention considerations in a certain sense bring the speaker back into the picture; they focus on particular instances of linguistic communication as a creative interplay between a particular speaker and his hearer. And they provide a characterization of success meant to be sufficiently basic to capture all clear cases.


So, when does linguistic communication succeed? Take a particular utterance \emph{u}. The speaker of \emph{u} intends to mean something \emph{p} by the words she utters: She has, as Davidson puts it, a “semantic intention.” This intention is directed at her hearer; according to Davidson, it is an intention to be interpreted a certain way. More precisely, Davidson claims, the speaker \emph{S} intends the hearer \emph{H} to interpret \emph{u} as meaning \emph{p} because \emph{H} recognizes that \emph{S} intends him to do so, a feature familiar from Paul Grice's writings on meaning.\footnote{Cf. Davidson (1986: 91ff., 1993: 170ff.). For Grice's original suggestion for defining what he calls “nonnatural meaning” in terms of intentions to effect certain beliefs in the hearer, and to achieve this effect via the hearer's recognition of the intention, see Grice (1957). Because of what he calls “the interdependence of belief and meaning,” Davidson is skeptical toward the Gricean project insofar as it aims at analyzing meaning in terms of other propositional attitudes. Cf. Davidson (1974: 143ff.).} Let us call these Davidsonian semantic intentions “D-intentions.” Looking at it in this way, a particular utterance is a case of successful linguistic communication iff the speaker's D-intention is fulfilled. The speaker's D-intention is fulfilled iff the hearer interprets him the intended way (and by the right Gricean mechanism). This, Davidson himself comments, provides the basis for a “characterization of linguistic ability [that] is so nearly circular that it cannot be wrong: it comes to saying that the ability to communicate by speech consists in the ability to make oneself understood, and to understand” (Davidson 1986: 106).\footnote{This characterization is therefore \emph{not} a contribution to the Davidsonian account of meaning determination. As noted earlier (note 4), Davidson was skeptical toward the Gricean project of \emph{analyzing} nonnatural meaning in terms of beliefs and intentions. The very reason for this skepticism was that he thought of the notions of meaning and those of the propositional attitudes including intention as interdependent. Bringing out the connection between semantic intention and meaning is part of understanding and tracing these interdependencies, not part of a foundational account of how content in general – that is, meaning and propositional attitude content – is determined.}


According to Davidson, it is cases of language use that meet this characterization of success that the notion of meaning gets all its content from. And he takes this to mean that in a case of successful linguistic communication, the utterance means what the speaker intended the hearer to interpret it as meaning. Since the sole purpose of the notion of meaning is to explain or account for communication by language, this is the “deeper” notion of meaning Davidson seeks, the notion of meaning that is philosophically most basic and interesting. From the meaning theoretical point of view, he claims, it is the most interesting notion of what we usually call literal or semantic meaning.


The crux, however, is that there is an abundance of cases of successful communication where the intended meaning is anything but the standard or conventional meaning of the expressions uttered. Just think of any malapropism or neologism that you or others have “gotten away with.” Or take the example of Davidson's title, Mrs. Malaprop, who talks about “a nice derangement of epitaphs” – meaning \emph{a nice arrangement of epithets}. In such cases, Davidson argues, the speaker D-intends to mean something nonstandard, and if the hearer understands what he means and interprets the utterance accordingly, we have a case of successful communication. But the meaning both assign is nonstandard.


Before we investigate this notion of meaning, and its challenge to the meaning theoretical significance of conventions in more detail in the next section, I would like to emphasize the philosophical nature of the account of linguistic communication Davidson suggests. The philosophical theory of meaning investigates the very nature of meaning and communication by language. The relevant question to ask with respect to convention then is whether linguistic communication is an essentially convention-governed activity. In the opening paragraphs of his 1982 paper \emph{Communication and Convention}, Davidson takes some pains to clarify the modal nature of the question he is trying to answer:



\begin{quote}


Convention figures conspicuously in many of our activities, for example in playing tarot, in speaking, and in eating. In playing tarot, convention is essential, in eating it is not. In explaining what it is to play tarot we could not leave out of account the rules that define the game; in explaining what it is to eat no mention of rules or conventions needs to be made. What is the case with speech? Are conventions mere conveniences or social flourishes, or are they necessary to the existence of communication by language?


The question is delicate because it concerns not the truth of the claim that speech is convention-bound, but the importance and role of convention in speech. The issue may be put counterfactually: could there be communication by language without convention?


(Davidson 1982: 265)



\end{quote}


According to Davidson, meaning is not essentially conventional because convention is neither necessary nor sufficient to account for the full variety of actual cases of successful communication, and we are beginning to see why he thinks that. But that does not mean that it is not the case that there are conventions for the use of linguistic expressions, or that success is very often achieved by means of precisely standard or conventional meanings, or that speakers tend to use expressions regularly both over time and across whole communities. Davidson does not deny any of this. What he denies is that it is essential to meaningful speech:



\begin{quote}


It is easy to misconceive the role of society in language. Language is, to be sure, a social art. But it is an error to suppose we have seen deeply into the heart of linguistic communication when we have noticed how society bends linguistic habits to a social norm. What is conventional about language, if anything is, is that people tend to speak much as their neighbours do. But in indicating this element of the conventional, or of the conditioning process that makes speakers rough linguistic facsimiles of their friends and parents, we explain no more than the convergence; we throw no light on the essential nature of the skills that are thus made to converge.


(Davidson 1982: 278)



\end{quote}


Meaning is essentially public or social, Davidson argues, but we cannot use the notions of convention, shared regularity or shared practice of use to capture this. There is too much meaning outside the conventional, so to speak, too much perfectly understandable, but unconventional language use, for these notions to reach the required “depth.” Ultimately, it is thus his very insistence on the fundamentally public nature of meaning that motivates Davidson's anticonventionalism.

\section{3. Semantics and Ulterior Purposes}


In \emph{Communication and Convention}, Davidson actually examines three ways in which convention might be thought essential to linguistic communication. Roughly, these concern the relation between the mood of a sentence and the force of the speech act performed by means of an utterance of that sentence, the relation between the literal meaning of a sentence and the nonlinguistic purpose an utterance of it serves, and, finally, the relation between linguistic expressions and their literal meaning. None of these relations, he argues, is essentially conventional. In the first two cases, this is because it is impossible for there to be a convention of the relevant kind, that is, a convention explaining the existence of the relation in question, and in the third convention is neither necessary nor sufficient for its explanatory task.


Even though discussion of Davidsonian anticonventionalism has mostly focused on the third kind of conventionalism, I would like to quickly draw attention to two aspects of Davidson's discussion of what I shall call “purpose conventionalism”: Roughly, the claim that there are, or have to be, conventional links between semantics and nonsemantic intentions or purposes of speakers. For the upshot of Davidson's discussion is a conclusion of much more general significance: Not only is it impossible for there to be conventions linking the literal meaning of a sentence (or its mood indicator) to nonsemantic purposes, it is impossible for there to be systematic links of a certain kind between semantics and nonsemantic purposes or intentions whatsoever. This is the Davidsonian doctrine of the \emph{autonomy of meaning:}



\begin{quote}


I conclude that it is not an accidental feature of language that the ulterior purpose of an utterance and its literal meaning are independent, in the sense that the latter cannot be derived from the former: it is of the essence of language. I call this feature of language the principle of \emph{the autonomy of meaning}.


(Davidson 1982: 274)



\end{quote}


If Davidson is right about this, it would have significant implications for recent fights about the semantics–pragmatics distinction, implications, however, that this is not the place to spell out.\footnote{For a contribution to that discussion holding on to the autonomy of meaning, cf. Cappelen and Lepore (2004). Defenders of so-called truth-conditional pragmatics like Recanati, on the other hand, argue that because of the pervasive context-sensitivity of natural language pragmatic processing plays a role already for determining the truth conditional content of a large part of utterances of natural language expressions. Nevertheless, they hold, there can be systematic formal theories of truth-conditional content – pace Davidson. Cf. for instance Recanati (2004, 2010).}


What these forms of conventionalism have in common is the idea that literal meaning can be explained or accounted for by means of the relation between expressions and nonsemantic purposes: “the idea [is] that convention can link what our words mean – their literal semantic properties, including truth – and our purposes in using them” (Davidson 1982: 271). In the case of the mood-force relation, this concerns a certain part of the uttered sentence, that is, its mood indicator, and the illocutionary force of the utterance. In the case of the sentence meaning-ulterior purpose relation, it concerns the meaning of the whole sentence and what the speaker aims at accomplishing by means of uttering it.


Purpose conventionalism is a reaction to the observation that sentences can be used for all sorts of purposes. A declarative sentence can be used to perform basically any speech act – an utterance of it does not have to be an assertion, but can be a question, an order, or what have you. Likewise, a sentence meaning that \emph{p} can be used for all sorts of purposes – to get you to believe that \emph{p}, to get you to believe that not-\emph{p}, to order you to do something, to make you laugh, to give you an example of how strange some English sentences sound, and so on. There is literally no end to the things a speaker can do by means of uttering a declarative sentence. Davidson ties these observations together in terms of the autonomy of meaning: “We came across an application [of the principle of the autonomy of meaning] when discussing illocutionary force, where it took the form of the discovery that what is put into the literal meaning then becomes available for any ulterior (nonlinguistic) purpose – and even any illocutionary force” (Davidson 1982: 274f.).


The basic idea motivating purpose conventionalism then is the following: Since an utterance of a particular sentence \emph{S} can serve a large variety of different purposes, we need a convention to “pick out, in a way understood by both speaker and hearer, and in an intentionally identifiable way, those cases in which the ulterior purpose directly yields the literal meaning” (Davidson 1982: 273). It is precisely this job Davidson argues convention \emph{cannot} do.


The arguments Davidson levels at purpose conventionalism in \emph{Communication and Convention} are too intricate to fully unravel and do justice to here. But there are two basic strands that can be isolated: First, there is the question of how a convention would establish the relevant link in the first place. And Davidson's first impossibility claim is that the relevant convention linking a sentence \emph{S} to a purpose \emph{P cannot} be a convention to the effect that utterances of \emph{S} under certain “standard” conditions have \emph{P}. Take the case of sentence meaning. The convention is supposed to explain that \emph{S} literally means \emph{p}. But the most it could possibly explain is that \emph{S} means \emph{p} under standard conditions. \emph{S}, however, means \emph{p} under nonstandard conditions as well (cf. Davidson 1982: 275).


Second, there is the question of sincerity. The conventionalism at issue tries to explain \emph{S}'s literally meaning that \emph{p} by means of a convention linking \emph{S} and \emph{P}. The link effected needs to be such that under certain conditions uttering \emph{S} implies having \emph{P}. Davidson then points out that uttering \emph{S} only ever implies \emph{P} if the speaker is \emph{sincere}. We thus need a convention to the effect that under certain circumstances speakers are sincere. But, and that is Davidson's second impossibility claim, there cannot such a convention.


Why not? What we need is a convention that is in force under certain circumstances. These need to be such that speaker and hearer know what they are and can recognize their obtaining. To illustrate the impossibility, imagine that we would decide that whenever a certain red flag is up, the convention to utter \emph{S} only if you want to achieve \emph{P} is in force. Assume that you do not want to achieve \emph{P} but that you want to make your hearer believe that you want to achieve \emph{P}. A perfect time for doing this would be precisely when the red flag is up. So, Davidson concludes, “nothing is more obvious than that there cannot be a convention that signals sincerity” (Davidson 1982: 274).\footnote{Cf. also his discussion of Frege's assertion sign (Davidson 1982: 269ff.).} This does \emph{not} mean that there cannot be a convention of sincerity that is in force when the red flag is up. What it means is simply that there being such a convention does not ensure that when the red flag is up all uses of \emph{S} are made with the purpose \emph{P}. Conventions can be broken. It is in their nature. But since sincerity would have to be ensured if we want to make it the case that uttering \emph{S} implies having \emph{P}, this cannot be done by convention.

\section{4. Word Meaning and Speaker Meaning}


Even if we were to agree with Davidson on the autonomy of semantics, however, we might think that the connection between linguistic expressions and their literal meaning must be established by convention. After all, the connection clearly is in a certain sense \emph{arbitrary}; so, what could establish it if not convention? But, or so the Davidsonian argument goes, convention is not up to this job either, because convention is neither necessary nor sufficient to account for all the things utterances can, and actually do, mean. Davidson makes this argument first in the final parts of \emph{Communication and Convention}, and repeats it – in more spectacular form – in \emph{A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs} (1986). \emph{Nice Derangement} starts with a number of amusing examples of nonstandard language use: malapropisms, spoonerisms, and sheer neologisms. What these are supposed to illustrate is the existence and prevalence of a certain phenomenon: utterances with nonstandard or nonconventional but nevertheless literal meaning. In fact, Davidson claims, “the phenomenon is ubiquitous” (Davidson 1986: 89). Here is part of the quote he opens the paper with:



\begin{quote}


From time to time, Ace will, in a jerksome way, monotonise the conversation with witticisms too humorous to mention. It's high noon someone beat him at his own game, but I have never done it; cross my eyes and hope to die, he always wins thumbs down.


(Davidson 1986: 79)\footnote{Davidson here quotes Mark Singer writing in \emph{The New Yorker}, April 4, 1977, p. 56. Singer is writing about Goodman Ace, who wrote radio sitcoms.}



\end{quote}


Not all malapropisms are funny, deep, or even intentional. Often, speakers substitute one word for another without even being aware of it. Mrs. Malaprop speaks of “a nice derangement of epitaphs” or “the allegories on the bank of the Nile.” World literature contains a number of characters more than usually prone to this kind of “mistake”; besides Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop, there is Frau Stöhr in Thomas Mann's \emph{Magic Mountain} and the captain of the \emph{Patna} in Joseph Conrad's \emph{Lord Jim} – and, of course, Dogberry in \emph{Much Ado About Nothing}. But it happens to every one of us, and, as Davidson stresses, it can happen to any word or construction. In many cases of malapropism, the hearer is aided by similarity of sound. But that is not necessary, either. For these to be cases of successful linguistic communication, all we need is that the hearer gets what the speaker D-intends him to interpret the uttered words as meaning.


This does not mean that a speaker can mean whatever he D-intends by an utterance. Humpty Dumpty cannot mean that there is a nice knockdown argument for you by saying to Alice “There is glory for you” because she has no way of figuring this out (cf. Davidson 1986: 98, 121f.). The speaker can only D-intend to mean what he can reasonably expect the hearer to get – arguably, this restriction basically is part and parcel of the notion of a semantic intention (cf. Hornsby 2008: 113f.). And of course, often it is reasonable to expect your hearer to get the standard meaning of words. But not always. And it is perfectly possible, Davidson argues, to have nonstandard D-intentions – as long as you provide the hearer with cues enabling him to figure out what you mean.\footnote{Hornsby nevertheless argues that “shared knowledge of meaning is necessary for communication as we know it” (cf. Hornsby 2008: 114). If “communication as we know it” does not mean anything more than communication that does not require abilities such as magic or telepathy (cf. Hornsby 2008: 117), this seems unpersuasive in the particular cases Davidson lines up. But I think Hornsby is less interested in particular cases of successful communication than Davidson is. Rather, she seems interested in the ease and frequency of success in linguistic communication considered as a “mass phenomenon,” so to speak. Her point then would be that the frequency and ease of actual success throughout this phenomenon can only be explained as the result of heavy reliance on shared knowledge of standard meaning. It is important to note, however, that this is compatible with Davidson's claims about what is necessary for a particular utterance to be a case of successful linguistic communication.} Nor does it have to be similarity of sound that provides the cue. It can basically be whatever the context provides – as long as it is accessible to the hearer.


The cases of successful linguistic communication Davidson draws attention to are, he claims, such that


\textbf{(i)} the speaker intends his utterance \emph{u} of sentence \emph{S} to be interpreted as meaning \emph{p},


\textbf{(ii)} the hearer understands this and because of that interprets \emph{u} as meaning \emph{p},


\textbf{(iii)} \emph{p} is \emph{u}'s literal or “first” meaning,


\textbf{(iv)} and \emph{p} is not identical with \emph{S}'s standard or conventional meaning.


Let us call cases that fulfill these conditions “malaprop cases.” Davidson never spells out exactly what the standard or conventional meaning would be. He sometimes loosely characterizes it as what you would find in the dictionary, or the way the community or the experts use certain expressions.\footnote{In Davidson (1982: 276), he quotes David Lewis's (1975) definition of convention and – despite misgivings about some of its conditions – suggests granting that “something like Lewis's six conditions does hold roughly for speakers of the same language.” The relevant regularities would be regularities of assigning meanings to words and sentences.} Instead, he focuses on some essential aspects of conventional or standard meaning: If there is such a thing, it is such that speakers and hearers can know it \emph{in advance} of the particular conversation we are interested in, and this knowledge will be \emph{shared} by them. Moreover, if conventional meaning is essential to linguistic communication, what makes it so is precisely its being shared knowledge between speakers and hearers. If these indeed are necessary aspects of conventional meaning – and this assumption seems very plausible – Davidson can make his case against convention by concentrating on these aspects.


If there is a significant number of malaprop cases among the clear cases of success it should be clear that shared knowledge of standard meanings is not \emph{sufficient} to “explain our actual communicative achievements” (Davidson 1994: 110). In malaprop cases, speaker and hearer might very well know what the words uttered standardly mean. For instance, when Archie Bunker says “We need a few laughs to break up the monogamy,” these words do have a standard meaning. And both Archie and his hearer might know both that the words have a standard meaning and what it is. And even though this knowledge might play some role in arriving at the correct interpretation, it clearly is not sufficient for understanding what Archie actually means. Nor is it \emph{necessary}. Both Archie and his hearer might be blissfully ignorant of the standard meaning of the words uttered. Still, communication succeeds as long as the hearer interprets Archie as Archie D-intended him to. Consequently, convention is not essential to linguistic communication both in the sense of literal meaning not necessarily being identical to conventional meaning (condition iv) above), and in the sense of knowledge of conventional meaning not being necessary for understanding literal meaning.


These basically rather simple points might be somewhat obscured by Davidson's fondness for “cute” or literary examples. It has been observed that many of his examples heavily play on standard meanings to convey all sorts of things over and above what Davidson construes as their literal or first meaning.\footnote{Cf. Green (2001: 243), for instance.} But as far as Davidson is concerned, these are accidental features of the examples. It might therefore be better to use trivial, everyday examples like the following. One winter, I was looking out of my kitchen window. It was raining heavily. I turned to my friend, who was about to leave, pointed at the window and uttered (the German equivalent of) “Would you like to borrow a whisk broom?” Without hesitation, my friend pulled her umbrella from her backpack, waved it at me, and said “No, thank you, I've got one.” Only after that we both realized what I had in fact said, and burst out laughing. There are no subtle “deeper” meanings in an example like that, and all the relevant clues to what I D-intended were provided, not by the standard meaning of “whisk broom,” but by the context of the utterance, in particular my friend's being about to go out in connection with my pointing gesture. The whisk example thus might be a rather clear candidate for being a malaprop case.


But is the D-intended meaning the \emph{literal} meaning? This claim might well be the most controversial aspect of Davidson's anticonventionalism. It has been argued, for instance, that malaprop cases do not pose any challenge to conventionalism because there is no need to construe the D-intended meaning as the literal meaning: We can construe it as a kind of speaker meaning. The idea would be that we can treat malaprop cases just like cases of irony or metaphor. In irony, a speaker utters a sentence that literally means that \emph{p} in order to communicate that not-\emph{p}. And in metaphorical speech, a speaker utters a sentence that literally means that \emph{p} in order to communicate a “metaphorical meaning” \emph{q}. The question then is what reason there is to treat “malaproppy” meanings any different from metaphorical ones (cf. Green 2001: 241ff.; Reimer 2004: 321ff.).


According to Davidson, there is a crucial difference between malaprop cases and typical cases of speaker meaning, however. To see why, we need to look at his way of distinguishing literal meaning – what he prefers to call “first meaning” – from speaker meaning. Here is how he introduces the notion in \emph{Nice Derangement}:



\begin{quote}


Here is a preliminary stab at characterising what I have been calling literal meaning. The term is too incrusted with philosophical and other extras to do much work, so let me call what I am interested in \emph{first meaning}. The concept applies to words and sentences as uttered by a particular speaker on a particular occasion. But if the occasion, the speaker, and the audience are “normal” or “standard” (in a sense not to be further explained here), then the first meaning of an utterance will be what should be found by consulting a dictionary based on actual usage (such as \emph{Webster's Third}). Roughly speaking, first meaning comes first in the order of interpretation.


(Davidson 1986: 91)



\end{quote}


The best way of identifying the relevant notion of meaning, however, is by means of the intentions of the speaker, Davidson explains. The intentions with which a speaker made a particular utterance can be ordered by means of the means-ends relation. Such an ordering can be expressed by means of “in order to,” as in the following Davidsonian example:



\begin{quote}


Suppose Diogenes utters the words “I would have you stand from between me and the sun” (or their Greek equivalent) with the intentions of uttering words that will be interpreted by Alexander as true if and only if Diogenes would have him stand from between Diogenes and the sun, and this with the intention of getting Alexander to move from between him and the sun, and this with the intention of leaving a good anecdote to posterity.


(Davidson 1986: 92)



\end{quote}


In such an order, Davidson says, the first meaning is specified by the first intention that requires the Gricean feature. This intention is what he calls “the semantic intention.”


If literal meaning is understood as Davidsonian first meaning, the distinction between it and speaker meaning can be drawn along rather traditional lines: Cases of genuine speaker meaning are such that knowledge of literal or first meaning is required for understanding or explaining speaker meaning. Davidson illustrates this need by means of some lines from Shakespeare's \emph{Sonnet 53}:



\begin{quote}


We have no chance of explaining the image in the following lines, for example, unless we know what “foison” meant in Shakespeare's day:



\end{quote}


Speak of the spring and foison of the year,


The one doth shadow of your beauty show,


The other as your bounty doth appear \dots{}


Little here is to be taken literally, but unless we know the literal, or first, meaning of the words we do not grasp and cannot explain the image.



\begin{quote}


(Davidson 1986: 91)



\end{quote}


In the relevant order of intentions, the metaphorical or ironical intention necessarily comes after the semantic intention. Uttering words with a certain literal or first meaning is a necessary means for getting one's speaker meaning across. This necessity, Davidson argues, is simply lacking in malaprop cases. It is simply not the case that malaproppy meanings can only be understood by means of first grasping a different standard meaning. According to Davidson, it is not even necessary “that the speaker use a real word: most of ‘The Jabberwock’ is intelligible on first hearing” (Davidson 1986: 90). Moreover, as Lepore and Ludwig note, it is perfectly possible to use words nonstandardly \emph{and} ironically – as when they imagine answering Mrs. Malaprop by saying “And that's a nice derangement of words” (cf. Lepore and Ludwig 2005: 266).


The crucial difference between first and speaker meaning thus could be put in terms of pragmatic processing. Understanding speaker meaning requires pragmatic processes of the classical Gricean kind – these days sometimes called “secondary pragmatic processes”: “\emph{secondary} pragmatic processes are ordinary inferential processes taking us from what is said, or rather from the speaker's saying of what is said, to something that (under standard assumptions of rationality and cooperativeness) follows from the fact that the speaker has said what she has said” (cf. Recanati 2004: 17). Such processes take first meaning as input and derive speaker meaning from it. No such processing is necessary to arrive at first meanings. That is why Davidson says: “We want a deeper notion of what words, when spoken in context, mean; and like the shallow notion of correct usage, we want the deep concept to distinguish between what a speaker, on a given occasion, means, and what his words mean” (Davidson 1986: 91).\footnote{Green argues that malaprop cases do \emph{not} force any radical adjustment to our (conventional) notion of literal meaning because they either can be construed as involving secondary pragmatic processing of a rather particular kind or are such that the speaker does not have any clear semantic intention at all: \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf Either the agent is so confused that no clear first intention can be attributed to them, or the agent is aware of what they are doing, in which case their first intention is to produce a meaningless or deviant sentence that is sufficiently close in sound to a meaningful one to be interpretable by an audience with sufficient linguistic competence. \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf (Green 2001: 252) \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf It is not easy to see how this general claim could be substantiated. A few counterexamples are all that is needed to falsify it, however. Take the whisk example. I certainly was not aware of what I was doing. Nor do I think that I was so confused that no clear first intention could be attributed to me. Of course, I managed to inadvertently produce an expression I (probably) had not intended to produce. But it was completely clear what I intended to mean by the expression I produced. I intended to mean \emph{umbrella}. (Having such an intention does not require anything like consciously thinking something like “I intend to mean umbrella by ‘whisk broom’,” of course; cf. Davidson 1986: 122f.). Examples like these, it seems to me, can easily be multiplied. As Davidson says, “we all get away with it all the time” (Davidson 1986: 99). \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf And of course Davidson is not saying that all malapropisms are easily understood. What Davidson claims is that actual linguistic communication is such that easily understood malaprops occur all the time. Therefore, it does not help to establish that there also are numerous cases where malaprops are not or not fully understood. Reimer, for instance, observes “\emph{contra} Davidson” that “when confronted with a malaprop, we are often downright confused” (Reimer 2004: 323). That is no doubt true, and Reimer gives some plausible examples. But Davidson does not deny that idiosyncratic language use often fails to be understood. He claims that it often succeeds.}


Nevertheless, you might think that there is something counter-intuitive about construing malaproppy meanings as first or literal meanings. Intuitions about what was \emph{said} on a given occasion might be cited to motivate the claim that malaprops first and foremost mean what the words uttered standardly or conventionally mean.\footnote{For arguments along these lines, see Kemmerling (1993: 100) and Reimer (2004: 321ff.).} It is far from clear, however, that the intuitive or ordinary notion of what is said is at all precise enough to justify the claim that there is a clear intuition about what is said when speakers produce malapropisms. Nor is it clear that the intuitive or ordinary notion of what is said tracks standard semantic content.\footnote{Take the whisk example again. Of course, there is a sense in which I \emph{said} “Would you like to borrow a whisk broom?” In fact, there are several such senses. First, there is the sense in which “saying that” means uttering precisely the expressions following “that.” Then, there is the sense in which “saying that” means uttering words having the standard meaning that the words following “that” have. In this sense, I asked whether my friend wanted to borrow a whiskbroom. But that is not all. Take irony. The speaker who ironically utters “That's great” might be correctly reported as having said that that is great, but equally correctly as having said the opposite. What is correct here depends on the purpose of the said-that report. Thus, my friend might correctly report me as having asked whether she wanted to borrow an umbrella. The possibility of a correct said-that report (or asked-whether report) thus might not show all that much when it comes to literal meaning. For further critical discussion, see Cappelen and Lepore (1997, 2004).} And last, but not least, we saw already in the introduction that Davidson's project is not a reconstruction of the ordinary notions of meaning or language. Nor – we might add now – is he interested in a reconstruction of the ordinary notion of what is said. According to Davidson, any such project would be meaning theoretically interesting only if we otherwise would miss something essential to linguistic communication.\footnote{Kemmerling (1993) asks us to consider a case where a speaker \emph{S} who knows that her hearer \emph{H} is apt to interpret “arthritis” as meaning \emph{diabetes} utters “I have arthritis.” She does so because she is legally required to inform \emph{H} of her illness, but wants \emph{H} to believe that she has diabetes. Kemmerling claims that this is a clear case where \emph{S} has misled, but not lied. Moreover, he thinks that Davidson misses something essential about linguistic communication if he cannot draw the distinction illustrated by this case, “the distinction between lying and willfully-misleading-by-using-a-true-sentence” (Kemmerling 1993: 103). \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf But how clear is it that \emph{S} has not lied? The principle behind the verdict, I take it, is supposed to be that lying implies saying something that is not true, but then, we are just back to intuitions about what is said (see note 14). In any case, I would be surprised if intuitions regarding this example were at all clear. \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf Moreover, it is very hard to see why it should be difficult for Davidson to draw the distinction Kemmerling finds so important. All he needs to do is define a notion of shared or standard meaning along the lines he proposes for defining a notion of a shared language: “I am happy to say speakers share a language if and only if they tend to use the same words to mean the same thing, and once this idea is properly tidied up it is only a short, uninteresting step to defining the predicate ‘is a language’ in a way that corresponds, as nearly as may be, with ordinary usage,” Davidson writes (Davidson 1994: 111). On the basis of such a notion, the speaker in Kemmerling's example can be described as not uttering something the standard meaning of which is false. She can also be described as willfully misleading by using a sentence the standard meaning of which is true. The real question is not whether this distinction can be drawn, but whether it is meaning theoretically (as opposed to, for instance, legally) interesting to do so.}


There is a comeback to this, however. Reimer counters the Davidsonian claim that conventional meaning is uninteresting by arguing that, on the contrary, “the conventional construal of malaprop meaning is a theoretically fruitful one” (Reimer 2004: 322). Since speakers above all want to be understood, they usually intend to conform to conventions, according to Reimer, more precisely, they do so in all cases where they do not intentionally use words idiosyncratically. Therefore, the notion of conventional meaning is “a theoretically fruitful notion in that it can be appealed to in order to explain why speakers utter the particular words that they do” (Reimer 2004: 324). As we saw, Davidson does not deny that speakers often intend to speak as their neighbors do, nor does he deny that doing so facilitates understanding. Consequently, he does not deny either that very often, we can explain a speaker's choice of words in precisely this way. Again, his claim is only that there being such an explanation is not necessary for successful linguistic communication. Take the whisk example once more. My choice of the word “whisk broom” can certainly not be explained by my wanting to utter an expression the conventional meaning of which is \emph{umbrella:} If I had any such intention, it failed.


Once we accept malaprop cases as cases of successful linguistic communication, it seems to me, the Davidsonian case for the claim that conventional meaning is not essential to such communication is pretty strong. One might wonder, however, whether what is going on in these cases is properly \emph{linguistic} in nature. \emph{Which} language, you might ask, is Mrs. Malaprop speaking? Is she really speaking (any language) at all when producing her malaprops? That will be the topic of the next section.

\section{5. Is There Such a Thing as a Language?}


In \emph{Nice Derangement}, Davidson's anticonventional line of thought culminates in what has been perceived by many as an outright, possibly suicidal attack on language itself. He argues that the frequency, pervasiveness, and easy interpretability of idiosyncratic language use in a certain sense threatens the very idea that speaking a language is necessary for linguistic communication. Here is the original formulation of what I shall call the “no-language claim”:



\begin{quote}


(NL) “There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed.”


(Davidson 1986: 107)



\end{quote}


Maybe unsurprisingly, this is a claim for which Davidson got a lot of fire, most notably from Michael Dummett.\footnote{Cf. Dummett (1986). Among other things, Dummett interprets Davidson as claiming that each and every case of successful linguistic understanding requires interpretation of the uttered expressions, and argues that such an account of understanding would lead into an infinite regress of interpretations, a regress familiar from Wittgenstein's so-called rule-following considerations and clearly vicious in nature. Davidson counters that the supposed regress ensues only if the notions of interpretation is read in the particular way in which Wittgenstein explicitly employs it in those passages (where “interpretation” means replacing one linguistic expression by another linguistic expression), a notion completely at odds with Davidson's notion of interpretation (cf. Davidson 1994: 112). For other discussions of the no-language claim, cf. Bar-On and Risjord (1992), George (1990), Hacking (1986), Lepore and Ludwig (2005: ch. 17), Pietroski (1994), and Ramberg (1989: 98ff.).} And there certainly is something funny about a philosopher of language claiming that there is no such thing as a language. But to evaluate its philosophical merits, we have to see the no-language claim in its wider context, and we have to take seriously the proviso it contains – “if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed.”


The notion of a language is significant in the context of Davidson's convention considerations because it might furnish an answer to the question of when communication not only is successful, but also linguistic. After all, there is a difference between communicating by means of language and communicating by means of extra-linguistic gestures or signs, for instance. Communication by language involves the use of linguistic expressions, signs that have \emph{linguistic} meaning. So, what is required for communicating linguistic meanings? According to Davidson, “[t]he usual answer would (\dots{}) be that in the case of language the hearer shares a complex system or theory with the speaker, a system which makes possible the articulation of logical relations between utterances, and explains the ability to interpret novel utterances in an organized way” (Davidson 1986: 93). But, Davidson argues, this answer is mistaken: Language \emph{in this sense} is inessential for linguistic communication.


So, what exactly is language \emph{in this sense}? What is the notion of language that Davidson is attacking, a notion he claims has been employed by many philosophers and linguists – including himself? In retrospect, he characterized this notion as follows:



\begin{quote}


It was this: in learning a language, a person acquires the ability to operate in accord with a precise and specifiable set of syntactic and semantic rules; verbal communication depends on speaker and hearer sharing such and such an ability, and it requires no more than this.


(Davidson 1994: 110)



\end{quote}


What is under attack here is not so much a certain notion of a language as a certain notion of a language \emph{together} with a set of ideas about its relation to linguistic competence and the use of linguistic expressions.\footnote{One might have reasonable doubts about how common the notion of a language under attack actually is; cf. Lepore and Ludwig (2005: 275).} It is therefore quite consistent with the no-language claim that Davidson himself even after \emph{Nice Derangement} gives the following explanation of what a language is: “A language may be viewed as a complex abstract object, defined by giving a finite list of expressions (words), rules for constructing meaningful concatenations of expressions (sentences), and a semantic interpretation of the meaningful expressions based on the semantic features of individual words” (Davidson 1992: 107). The no-language claim does not dispute that there are languages in this sense. What it disputes is that an utterance \emph{u} is a case of successful linguistic communication if, and only if, there is a language in this technical, abstract sense that both models the speaker's and the hearer's linguistic competence in advance of \emph{u} and assigns the correct interpretation to \emph{u}.\footnote{It is, however, not very clear in what sense a speaker is “operating in accord” with the semantic rules of a language in the technical sense. According to Davidson, these are specified by a T-theory. But how can the speaker's production of an utterance be modeled as the product of following the rules of a T-theory? The speaker wants to express a certain meaning, and the theory modeling his ability to do so would presumably tell him how to find the expressions to use. One might think that the speaker could use the T-theory “the other way around” – as going from T-sentences to expressions, that is. But the number of T-sentences is infinite, and we can hardly model a speaker's ability to find expressions for his thoughts as a capacity to go through an infinite list of T-sentences until an expression with the required meaning is found. For more on this and on the idea of “inverse compositionality” that might provide an answer to this problem, see Pagin (2003).}


Just like the rest of Davidson's anticonventionalism, the no-language claim is a \emph{modal} claim about what is essential to successful linguistic communication. And indeed, the no-language claim, drastic as it may sound, does not add anything very radical to Davidson's anticonventionalism. In particular, Davidson does \emph{not} give up on the idea that what distinguishes linguistic communication is a certain kind of \emph{systematicity}. What he challenges is once more the idea that communication succeeds if, and only if, speaker and hearer share knowledge of conventional meanings in advance of their conversation. That claim, the point now is, does not get any more plausible by requiring them to share \emph{whole systems} of conventional or standard meanings in advance of their conversation. When Davidson argues that there is no such thing as a language, what he means is that it is not essential to particular cases of successful linguistic communication that there is \emph{a preestablished, shared language}.


In \emph{A Nice Derangement}, Davidson further spells out this idea. Focusing on the semantic rules of a language, as specified by a T-theory, he now suggests distinguishing between what he calls “prior theory” and “passing theory”:



\begin{quote}


For the hearer, the prior theory expresses how he is prepared in advance to interpret an utterance of the speaker, while the passing theory is how he does interpret the utterance. For the speaker, the prior theory is what he believes the interpreter's prior theory to be, while his passing theory is the theory he intends the interpreter to use.


(Davidson 1986: 101)\footnote{This is not supposed to be taken as implying claims “about the propositional knowledge of an interpreter, nor are they claims about the details of the inner workings of some part of the brain” (Davidson 1986: 96). And the same holds for the speaker.}



\end{quote}


All of these theories are T-theories. So, the question is how these four T-theories relate to one another in cases of successful communication.


As we saw above, Davidson conceives of an utterance \emph{u} as a case of successful linguistic communication iff the hearer \emph{H} of \emph{u} interprets it as the speaker \emph{S} D-intended it to be interpreted. This translates into the terms of the prior and passing T-theories as follows: Communication succeeds iff both \emph{S}'s and \emph{H}'s passing theories assign the same interpretation to \emph{u}. What needs to be shared, that is, is nothing but the interpretation of \emph{u} – after it has been made. Prior theories, whether shared or not, are irrelevant to the question of success. In a way, we can therefore reformulate the no-language claim like this:


(NL\emph{\textsuperscript{!}}) For an utterance \emph{u} by a speaker \emph{S} to a hearer \emph{H} to be a case of successful communication, it is neither necessary nor sufficient


\textbf{(i)} that \emph{S}'s prior theory is the same as \emph{S\textsuperscript{!}}s passing theory for \emph{u},


\textbf{(ii)} that \emph{H} 's prior theory is the same as \emph{H} 's passing theory for \emph{u}, or


\textbf{(iii)} that \emph{S}'s prior theory is the same as \emph{H} 's prior theory.\footnote{Of course, (i)–(iii) are \emph{jointly} sufficient for \emph{u}'s being a case of successful communication. Joint satisfaction of (i)–(iii), however, is not necessary for \emph{u}'s being a case of successful communication.}


Quite plainly, the basic point of these considerations remains the same – whether it is put in terms of conventional or standard meanings, or in the more fancy terminology of prior and passing theories. What this terminology does add is the insistence on \emph{systematicity:} To specify the meaning of an utterance, be it ever so fleeting, a whole, systematic semantic theory is required.


But why? Asking why a whole systematic semantic theory is required for the interpretation of every meaningful utterance, be it ever so idiosyncratic, amounts to asking: Why should the “meanings” that idiosyncratically used expressions have when understood count as \emph{linguistic} meanings at all? Are not these uses of words more like spontaneous gestures or the use of non linguistic objects to signal something than like typical uses of linguistic expressions?


“The answer is,” Davidson writes, “that when a word or phrase temporally or locally takes over the role of some other word or phrase (as treated in a prior theory, perhaps), the entire burden of that role, with all its implications for logical relations to other words, phrases, and sentences, must be carried along by the passing theory” (Davidson 1986: 103). For an expression to have a meaning is to (potentially) contribute to the meanings of \emph{all} the possible complex expressions it could be part of. There is broad consensus among philosophers and linguists that a formal semantic theory modeling actual speakers' linguistic abilities needs to have a finite base and be at least recursive (cf. Davidson 1986: 95). Any such theory is a (theory for a) whole language in the technical sense spelled out earlier. Any such language \emph{could} be spoken over any stretch of utterances. Potentially, that is, the speaker producing a malaprop \emph{could} go on speaking the language specified by the passing T-theory correctly interpreting it – for any length of time. But he does not have to.\footnote{Green claims that Davidson's passing theories are not systematic (cf. Green 2001: 248f., see also Hacking 1986: 455). She writes: “Systematicity was supposed to guarantee constancy of meaning across contexts of utterance and times, so there is no substance to the idea that the passing theory is systematic” (Green 2001: 248). The systematicity of a Davidsonian passing theory consists in its being a finitely axiomatized, recursive (and moreover compositional) T-theory. Systematicity is what allows such a theory to assign meanings to a potentially limitless number of sentences (and their utterances in varying contexts). It is hard to see, however, what systematicity is supposed to have to do with constancy of meaning across time. No theory, systematic or not, guarantees anything in cases where it does not apply (any longer). The question is not whether the passing theory is systematic. The question is whether constancy of meaning over time is essential to linguistic communication.} And according to Davidson, there is no particular set of elements of our prior theories that could not be changed in the passing theory required for understanding some utterance. These changes can be more or less short-lived, but they can occur basically anywhere:



\begin{quote}


there is no word or construction that cannot be converted to a new use by an ingenious or ignorant speaker. And such conversion, while easier to explain because it involves mere substitution, is not the only kind. Sheer invention is equally possible, and we can be as good at interpreting it (say in Joyce or Lewis Carroll) as we are at interpreting the errors or twists of substitution.


(Davidson 1986: 100)



\end{quote}


Moreover, basically any feature of the situation in which the word is uttered can be utilized for providing the relevant clue. Therefore, Davidson maintains, we have to modify how we think of our linguistic ability. To the extent that this capacity is truly creative both on the speaker's and on the hearer's part, we must not think of it on the model of an interpretation machine that we carry around with us and that for any arbitrary utterance (plus certain contextual parameters) that we feed it cranks out an interpretation (cf. Davidson 1986: 95). Essential parts of our linguistic competence cannot be captured in this way:



\begin{quote}


We may say that linguistic ability is the ability to converge on a passing theory from time to time – this is what I have suggested, and I have no better proposal. But if we do say this, then we should realize that we have abandoned not only the ordinary notion of a language, but we have erased the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally. For there are no rules for arriving at passing theories, no rules in any strict sense, as opposed to rough maxims and methodological generalities. A passing theory really is like a theory at least in this, that it is derived by wit, luck, and wisdom from a private vocabulary and grammar, knowledge of the ways people get their point across, and rules of thumb for figuring out what deviations from the dictionary are most likely.


(Davidson 1986: 107)



\end{quote}


But even if we agree with Davidson that linguistic ability is like any other knowledge in that there are no rules for arriving at correct theories, we might insist that the theories themselves remain sufficiently different. Even if the “evolution” of our beliefs and theories in general is a dynamic, uncodifiable process, not all of them can be correctly described by means of “evolving” formal semantic theories. These are and remain very different from, say, physical theories.\footnote{Some commentators worry that Davidson ultimately is committed to a picture on which passing theories necessarily change with each utterance. These changes are seen as undermining the very idea of an expression's having any meaning – that is, any conditions of correct application. The worry is supposed to arise because of the holisms Davidson subscribes to. Thus, Meredith Williams writes: “Given the argument of ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,’ the theory of meaning that describes the speaker's linguistic competence is not stable over time, but constantly changes with each new utterance. Any difference in belief or use of an expression marks a different language, given the holistic interdependence of meaning and belief” (Williams 2000: 305ff.). \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf Davidson does hold that meaning determination is holistic in the sense that the meanings of all the (atomic) expressions of a language are determined together. He also holds that meaning and belief are interdependent in the sense that meanings and belief contents are determined by the same determination base. It does not follow from this, however, that any change in belief is a change in meaning: According to Davidson, meaning and belief content are determined by the principle of charity, and the principle of charity is a many–one determination principle (for more on this, see Pagin 1997). Moreover, as Paul Pietroski points out, even if Davidsonian holism had such radical consequences, the appeal to passing theories would do nothing to aggravate them (cf. Pietroski 1994). \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf Nor does the appeal to passing theories aggravate what Williams – in explicit reference to Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations – calls “the paradox of interpretation.” The problem, according to Williams is that any given number of applications of an expression is “compatible with any of an array of distinct theories of meaning” (Williams 2000: 303). If there is such a problem for Davidson, it is a problem for his account of meaning determination. This is not the place to discuss Davidson's account of meaning determination, but it should be noted that if the problem is that no (finite) number of applications of an expression can, just by itself, determine the meaning of that expression, it really would not matter at all just how many actual applications we consider. Even if Davidson were concerned with meaning determination in the convention considerations, the problem would just be the same whether the meaning theories to be determined vary over time, or not. But as pointed out earlier (Section 2), Davidson's convention considerations are not concerned with questions of meaning determination – in contrast to Wittgenstein's rule-following considerations. The convention considerations operate on a level where it is taken for granted that the foundational problems of meaning determination have been taken care of and intensional notions such as that of intention can be made nonquestion begging use of (pace Williams 2000: 305).}


Moreover, the following question remains a good one: Is it really inessential to \emph{linguistic} communication that success usually is very swift and frequent? Davidson emphasizes the ease and swiftness with which idiosyncrasies often are interpreted. According to him, this is sufficient motivation for construing the underlying ability as linguistic. But \emph{standard} language use is understood easily and swiftly, too, and presumably with an even higher success rate than idiosyncratic use. If regular use of linguistic expressions is necessary for this feature of successful communication, it is hard to see why this should be meaning theoretically uninteresting. It would, after all, throw light on the nature of linguistic capacities that we actually use every day. This is not to say that Davidson is wrong when he claims that regular use is not necessary for success, or that the linguistic capacities that we actually use everyday are not exhausted by such a description. It is only to say that our linguistic capacities are essentially such that they allow for effortless, reliable, and predictable success.\footnote{It should be noted, however, that even if regularity of use is essential to the kind of success our linguistic endeavors very often meet, this does not imply that conventionality is in any way essential to meaning. Conventionality requires more than regularity; it is for instance intuitively very plausible to think that conventional action needs to be, in some way, \emph{motivated} by the convention. The same would seem to hold for rule following or norm guidedness, at least on any intuitive notion of rule following and norm guidedness. (See Glüer (2001) for a discussion of Davidson's anticonventionalism in relation to the currently popular idea that meaning is normative, Wittgenstein's game analogy, and his rule-following considerations. See Bilgrami (1993) for discussion relating Davidson's anticonventionalism to normativisim and (social) externalism.) According to Davidson, this element is redundant when it comes to meaning. In discussion with Dummett, who argues that speakers need to have a “prescriptive attitude” toward the common language (cf. Dummett 1991: 85), he puts the point as follows: \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf Suppose that someone learns to talk as others do, but feels no obligation whatever to do so. For this speaker obligation doesn't enter into it. We ask why she talks as others do. “I don't do it because I think I should,” she replies, “I just do talk that way. I don't think I have an obligation to walk upright, it just comes naturally.” If what she says is true, would she not be speaking a language, or would she cease to be intelligible? In other words, what magic ingredient does holding oneself responsible to the usual way of speaking add to the usual way of speaking? \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf (Davidson 1994: 117) \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf Lepore and Ludwig (2007) argue that there is no deep controversy between Davidson and Dummett when it comes to the role of convention in communication, but this would seem to be one clear bone of contention between them. Lepore and Ludwig also argue that “since the speaker and interpreter need to converge on a passing theory for successful communication, they must converge on a common set of rules governing the speaker's use of words, that is, on shared conventions. In this sense, conventions are necessary for communicative success, at least in so far as it is \emph{linguistic} communication” (Lepore and Ludwig 2005: 282). Given that they take being governed by rules to involve “intending to use words in accordance with certain rules” (Lepore and Ludwig 2005: 282), I think this is exegetically doubtful. No intention to follow any rule, be it ever so short-lived or individualistic, is necessary for meaningful speech according to Davidson. His point about obligation clearly generalizes to individual regularities. (Already in \emph{Communication and Convention}, he asks in passing “what ‘conforming’ to a regularity adds to the regularity itself ” (Davidson 1982: 276).) Moreover, it is neither obvious nor uncontroversial that “the speaker and the hearer in a communicative exchange do understand the speaker to be intending to use words in accordance with certain rules” (Lepore and Ludwig 2005: 282) – as witnessed by the recent debate regarding the normativity of meaning (for an overview, see Glüer and Wikforss 2009).}

\section{6. Radically Interpreting Mrs. Malaprop}


Last, but not least, we can ask how the dynamic, fleeting picture of meaning that the no-language claim seems to induce fares with respect to the possibility of radical interpretation. After all, a speaker who does not use his words with a certain regularity would not seem to be radically interpretable. Even though this is certainly true, it would be wrong to think that there consequently is some deep tension between Davidson's earlier and later work. This would be wrong because it, again, misconstrues the character of Davidson's individualism.\footnote{For a rather different way of reconciling the no-language picture, interpreted as an essentially dynamic view of meaning and language, with radical interpretation, cf. Ramberg (1989: 98ff.). For discussion, see Bar-On and Risjord (1992) and Pietroski (1994).} For even though Davidson holds that the notion of an idiolect has priority over that of a sociolect when it comes to accounting for meaning (cf. Davidson 1994: 111), this does not mean that there are no social constraints on what an individual speaker can mean by his words. Linguistic meaning, according to Davidson, is essentially public – he never departs from this basic doctrine.


To see why he therefore does not expect the no-language picture to cause any tension with radical interpretation, we need to look at that scenario from the speaker's perspective, too. The most pertinent question then is: What, if anything, can the radical speaker D-intend the radical interpreter to interpret him as meaning? An important, and intuitively plausible principle Davidson uses here is the following: You cannot intend what you know to be impossible (cf. Davidson 1989: 147). Thus, Humpty Dumpty cannot (intend to) mean \emph{a nice knockdown argument} by “glory,” because he knows that Alice will not be able to understand him.\footnote{Catherine Talmage argues that the account of (literal) meaning Davidson gives in the radical interpretation papers actually commits him to the claim that Humpty Dumpty is (radically) interpretable as long as he at the time of his utterance is \emph{disposed} to consistently use “glory” “in the way in which competent English speakers are disposed to use the phrase ‘a nice knockdown argument’ ” (Talmage 1996: 542). But that does not seem right; the radical interpreter will not be able to determine that Humpty Dumpty is so disposed if Humpty Dumpty does not actually use “glory” in that way across quite a number of utterances. The appeal to the so-called omniscient interpreter will not help here, because the omniscient interpreter does not have data that are any different in kind from those the “ordinary” radical interpreter has.} Prima facie, it might seem to follow that the radical speaker cannot (D-intend to) mean anything by any of his utterances, for he knows that, initially at least, the radical interpreter will not be able to understand him. But there is a crucial difference: The radical speaker can use his words in such a way that they are interpretable, in such a way, that is, that the radical interpreter will eventually be able to figure out what the speaker means: “The best the speaker can do is to be \emph{interpretable}, that is, to use a finite supply of distinguishable sounds applied consistently to objects and situations he believes are apparent to his hearer” (cf. Davidson 1984: 13). Radical interpretation thus appears as a limiting case on the no-language picture: The case where all other ways of being interpretable are blocked, and the only chance at communicating lies in the regular application of one's words.

% Notes
\section{References}


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\chapter{21. Metaphor and Varieties of Meaning}


Elisabeth Camp

\section{Davidson on Metaphor}


In discussions of metaphor, Davidson is (in)famous for claiming that metaphorical utterances lack any distinctive, nonliteral meaning. But there is much less agreement about just what he means by this. In this article, I explicate this claim as it occurs in “What Metaphors Mean” (1978) and relate it to his reflections on language in “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs” (1986), leaving the project of locating both papers within his broader views on interpretation for another time. In Section 1, I argue that despite some puzzling inconsistencies, the overall thrust of “What Metaphors Mean” is a radical form of noncogitivism. In Section 2, I argue that in “Nice Derangement,” Davidson applies several of the arguments offered against metaphorical meanings in “What Metaphors Mean” to linguistic meaning more generally; but his criteria for what counts as “meaning” have shifted to include context-local word meaning alongside Gricean speaker's meaning. With respect to metaphor, he appears to have abandoned his previous noncognitivism for an analysis in terms of speaker's meaning, but it is not clear that this new view is justified by his new model of meaning. In Section 3, I articulate and evaluate a neo-Davidsonian view of metaphor, which retains as much as possible from both papers.

\section{1. “What Metaphors Mean”}


The central claim of “What Metaphors Mean” is clear: “Metaphors mean what the words, in their most literal interpretation, mean, and nothing more” (WWM 32). However, Davidson never makes explicit just what he means by “mean,” and the term is notoriously ambiguous in both ordinary and philosophical discourse. In this section, I work my way through a series of increasingly strong interpretations of what he might mean, ultimately arguing that the most radical view does the most justice to the largest proportion of what he says.


The weakest reading of the central thesis is simply the denial of the view that words themselves change meanings when used metaphorically. Depending on what one means by “semantics” and “pragmatics,” this weak reading is naturally captured in the relatively uncontroversial slogan that metaphor is pragmatic rather than semantic.\footnote{For recent dissension from pragmatic models, see Hills (1997) and Stern (2000).} And much of “What Metaphors Mean” does attack the idea of metaphorical word meanings by invoking the distinction between meaning and use:



\begin{quote}


I depend on the distinction between what words mean and what they are used to do. I think metaphor belongs exclusively to the domain of use. \dots{} It is no help in explaining how words work in metaphor to posit metaphorical or figurative meanings, or special kinds of poetic or metaphorical truth. These ideas don't explain metaphor, metaphor explains them. Once we understand a metaphor we can call what we grasp “the metaphorical truth” and (up to a point) say what the “metaphorical meaning” is. But simply to lodge this meaning in the metaphor is like explaining why a pill puts you to sleep by saying it has a dormative power. Literal sentences and literal truth conditions can be assigned to words and sentences apart from particular contexts of use. This is why adverting to them has genuine explanatory power.


(WWM 33)



\end{quote}


Similarly, he says:



\begin{quote}


The point of the concept of linguistic meaning is to explain what can be done with words. But the supposed figurative meaning of a simile [or a metaphor] explains nothing; it is not a feature of the word that the word has prior to and independent of the context of use, and it rests upon no linguistic customs except those that govern ordinary meaning.


(WWM 40)



\end{quote}


Because it is so uncontroversial to place metaphor in the domain of use, these passages are notable more because they articulate criteria for linguistic meaning – as something a word has “prior to and independent of” specific conversational contexts, in virtue of “linguistic customs” – that will become Davidson's target in “Nice Derangement.” The weak interpretation of the central thesis is weak in the sense that it holds that this criterion for \emph{word} or sentence meaning is compatible with allowing that metaphor exemplifies some other, more context-bound species of \emph{speaker's} meaning.


Davidson does appear to embrace metaphorical speaker's meaning at several points in “What Metaphors Mean.” For instance, he grants that metaphor “is effective in praise and abuse, prayer and promotion, description and prescription” (WWM 33). He also claims that metaphors can serve as assertions, lies, and promises:



\begin{quote}


What makes the difference between a lie and a metaphor is not a difference in the words used or what they mean (in any strict sense of meaning) but in how the words are used. Using a sentence to tell a lie and using it to make a metaphor are, of course, totally different uses, so different that they do not interfere with one another, as say, acting and lying do. \dots{} It can be an insult, and so an assertion, to say to a man “You are a pig”. \dots{} What distinguishes metaphor is not meaning but use – in this it is like assertion, hinting, lying, promising, or criticizing.


(WWM 43)



\end{quote}


On the weakest reading of the central thesis, the speaker of a metaphor exploits her words' standard meanings in order to say or assert something else. This is a view that various theorists, including myself endorse.\footnote{Bergman (1982) and Camp (2008).} However, it cannot be Davidson's view, because he repeatedly commits himself to a significantly stronger interpretation of the thesis. Perhaps most obviously, he continues the passage above by adding: “And the special use to which we put language in metaphor is not – cannot be – to ‘say something’ special, \emph{no matter how indirectly}. For a metaphor says only what it shows on its face” (WWM 43, emphasis added). Likewise, he writes that “[a] metaphor doesn't say anything beyond its literal meaning (\emph{nor does its maker say anything}, in using the metaphor, beyond the literal)” (WWM 32, emphasis added).\footnote{We could render Davidson's claims here consistent by assuming a distinction between what a speaker \emph{says} and what she \emph{asserts}. Again, this is a position I myself endorse (Camp 2007a). If so, however, one would expect him to note this explicitly. More importantly, it is incompatible with the arguments for noncognitivism offered below. Finally, we cannot take him to endorse an interpretation of the central thesis on which the sentence the speaker utters, as well as what if anything she \emph{says} and \emph{asserts}, all have only their ordinary literal meanings, but she still puts forward a nonliteral meaning in some other way, such as implicating, hinting, or insinuating. It is true that Davidson says he has “no quarrel” with a view of metaphor summarized by Heraclitus's statement about the Delphic oracle: “It does not say and it does not hide; it intimates” (WWM 46). And we might plausibly think of intimation as a form of Gricean implicature, as with Grice's (1989: 33) classic letter of recommendation. However, Davidson explicitly rejects intimation as a form of meaning: in discussing T.S. Eliot's poem “The Hippopotamus,” which consists of series of contrasts between the hippopotamus and the Church, he says, \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf Here we are neither told that the Church resembles a hippopotamus (as in simile) nor bullied into making this comparison (as in metaphor), but there can be no doubt the words are being used to direct our attention to similarities between the two. \dots{} The poem does, of course, intimate much that goes beyond the literal meaning of the words. But intimation is not meaning. \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf (WWM 41)}


Despite the talk about metaphors underwriting description and assertion, then, Davidson is committed to a strong version of the central thesis, one which denies that metaphors express cognitive contents in any way. To get clear on just how strong his noncognitivism is, and why he endorses it, we need to distinguish two intertwined but distinct arguments he offers in its favor. The first argument is that metaphors lack the right \emph{kind} of effects to count as meaning. Thus, he writes, “we must give up the idea that a metaphor carries a message, that it has a content or meaning (except, of course, its literal meaning)” (WWM 45).\footnote{Specifically, he resists any attempt to “shrug [ his arguments] off as no more than an insistence on restraint in using the word ‘meaning.’ This would be wrong. The central error about metaphor is most easily attacked when it takes the form of a theory of metaphorical meaning, but behind that theory, and statable independently, is the thesis that associated with a metaphor is a cognitive content that its author wishes to convey and that the interpreter must grasp if he is to get the message. This theory is false, whether or not we call the purported cognitive content a meaning” (WWM 46).} Similarly, he says, “metaphor” is not “a form of communication alongside ordinary communication [which] conveys truths or falsehoods about the world much as plainer language does”; it is not “a vehicle for conveying ideas” (WWM 32). Rather than telling us \emph{that} things are a certain way, Davidson suggests, metaphors make us \emph{see} things in a certain way:



\begin{quote}


If what the metaphor makes us notice were finite in scope and propositional in nature, this would not in itself make trouble; we would simply project the content the metaphor brought to mind onto the metaphor. But in fact there is no limit to what a metaphor calls to our attention, and much of what we are caused to notice is not propositional in character.


(WWM 46)



\end{quote}


And again:



\begin{quote}


[The problem with a paraphrase is] not only that we can't provide an exhaustive catalogue of what has been attended to when we are led to see something in a new light; the difficulty is more fundamental. \dots{} Seeing as is not seeing that.


(WWM 47)



\end{quote}


The “wrong kind” argument thus relies on the assumption, common among philosophers, that meaning is an exclusively propositional matter. One might well question this assumption – indeed, in his seminal article “Meaning,” Paul Grice only requires for an utterance-event to have nonnatural meaning that “some effect” be produced in the hearer in virtue of his recognition of the speaker's intention to produce that effect (Grice 1957: 385): he does not specify what form that effect must take, and even explicitly allows that “of course, it may not always be possible to get a straight answer involving a ‘that’ clause, for example, ‘a belief that \dots{}’ ” (Grice 1957: 385). More importantly, Davidson's positive point here – that metaphors (typically) produce a kind of nonpropositional insight through seeing-as – is compatible with the possibility that they might also, at least sometimes, express propositional contents which would qualify as meaning. (I'll argue in Section 3 that this is indeed the case.)


Davidson's second argument cuts against the possibility of treating metaphors' effects, propositional or not, as instances of meaning, by arguing that those effects are not connected in the right \emph{way} to the uttered sentence:



\begin{quote}


The various theories we have been considering mistake their goal. Where they think they provide a method for deciphering an encoded content, they actually tell us (or try to tell us) something about the \emph{effects} metaphors have on us. The common error is to fasten on the contents of the thoughts a metaphor provokes and to read these contents into the metaphor itself. No doubt metaphors often make us notice aspects of things we did not notice before. \dots{} The issue does not lie here but in the question of \emph{how} the metaphor is related to what it makes us see.


(WWM 45, emphasis added).



\end{quote}


To put the point in Gricean terms, it is generally assumed that in order to count as nonnatural meaning, an utterance's effects must be connected to the utterance in a rational way: that is, as Grice says, the production of the intended effect “must be something which in some sense is within the control of the audience, or [such] that in some sense of ‘reason’ the recognition of the intention behind \emph{x} is for the audience a reason and not merely a cause” (Grice 1957: 385). But with metaphor, Davidson seems to claim, the requisite rational structure is absent. Thus, at various points, he speaks of metaphors (along with similes and other analogical devices) as “inspiring” or “prompting” recognition of some fact or similarity (WWM 47), or as “inviting” or “bullying” hearers into drawing a comparison (WWM 40–41) – all verbs that suggest a causal rather than a rational mechanism of production. Similarly, he says that “Joke or dream or metaphor can, like a picture or a bump on the head, make us appreciate some fact – but not by standing for, or expressing, the fact” (WWM 46).\footnote{As Richard Rorty (1987: 290) says in elaborating Davidson, metaphors “do not (literally) tell us anything, but they do make us notice things. \dots{} They do not have cognitive content, but they are responsible for a lot of cognitions.”}


In all of these cases, Davidson thinks, the metaphor, or perhaps the speaker, does something more like showing or pointing the hearer toward a situation – something, in Grice's terms, more like “deliberately and openly letting someone know” or “getting someone to think” than like “telling” or claiming (Grice 1957: 382). And the problem with treating showing as a case of nonnatural meaning, according to Grice, is that the hearer's recognition of the speaker's intention fails to play an essential role in producing the effect: the speaker's utterance at most prompts or causes him to notice something that he could have noticed on his own.\footnote{Note, however, that Grice actually makes this condition fairly weak. He rejects the case of Herod showing Salome the head of St. John the Baptist on a charger as one of nonnatural meaning because it is Salome's appreciation of the situation itself – the natural connection between a severed head and the death of the person whose head it is – which produces the effect in her; Herod's role is merely one of staging. However, in cashing out this requirement, Grice says only that “the [hearer's] recognition [of the speaker's intention to produce a certain belief in him] is intended by [the speaker] to play its part in inducing the belief, and if it does not do so something will have gone wrong with the fulfillment of A's intentions. Moreover, A's intending that the recognition should play this part implies, I think, that \emph{he assumes that there is some chance} that it will in fact play this part, that he \emph{does not regard it as a foregone conclusion} that the belief will be induced in the audience whether or not the intention behind the utterance is recognized” (Grice 1957: 384, emphasis added). As I argue in Section 3, it is plausible that a speaker's communicative intentions do satisfy this condition in the case of seeing-as produced by metaphor.} Similarly, Davidson argues, with metaphor: any cognitive content a metaphor produces is something the hearer generates for himself, with the speaker merely exercising more or less force in aiding its production. This insistence on the hearer’s autonomous interpretive role is reflected in the very first sentences of “What Metaphors Mean,” where Davidson writes, “Metaphor is the dreamwork of language and, like all dreamwork, its interpretation reflects as much on the interpreter as on the originator \dots{} understanding a metaphor is as much a creative endeavor as making a metaphor, and as little guided by rules” (WWM 31).


Thus, while a metaphor's speaker might harbor certain hopes or expectations about the effects her utterance will have, these effects are not systematically predictable on the basis of the sentence uttered, because they depend too heavily on the particular hearer and the particular conversational situation. More importantly, on this view, those effects are not \emph{constrained} by the speaker's expectations: the hearer is free to make of the metaphor what he will, by noticing whatever similarities or facts happen to be most interesting and notable to him.\footnote{For a more recent defense of this view, see Lepore and Stone (2010). In effect, Davidson thinks of a metaphor as an object that is created by a speaker but then enters the world on its own. Davidson's stance here is strikingly similar to the New Critical view of poetry articulated by Wimsatt and Beardsley (1954): “The poem is not the critic's own and not the author's (it is detached from the author at birth and goes about the world beyond his power to intend about it or control it).” Along similar lines, Davidson says, \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf The critic is, so to speak, in benign competition with the metaphor maker. The critic tries to make his own art easier or more transparent in some respects than the original, but at the same time he tries to reproduce in others some of the same effects the original had on him. In doing this the critic also \dots{} calls attention to the beauty or aptness, the hidden power, of the metaphor itself. \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf (WWM 47)}


In effect, the “wrong kind” objection invokes at the level of speaker's meaning an analogous criterion to that for linguistic meaning cited earlier. For any species of meaning, Davidson assumes, we should only posit meanings that play a substantive explanatory role, and purported meanings that are neither systematically predictable nor rationally justifiable fail to meet this requirement. If this is right, then the only theoretically useful notion of “meaning” associated with metaphor is that of literal sentence meaning. At least we know that sentences \emph{have} these meanings, as a result of a compositional interpretive theory; further, we also know that we need to appeal to these meanings to explain metaphors' effects, since they, and not the uttered sentences' mere sounds or shapes, play a crucial role in causing those effects.


In Section 3, I'll challenge both Davidson's “wrong kind” and “wrong way” arguments. For now, by way of exegetical summary, I note that it doesn't appear possible to render all of Davidson's claims about metaphors and meaning in “What Metaphors Mean” consistent: in particular, the claim that metaphors can be assertions (WWM 43) appears to conflict directly with the central negative thesis. The most plausible overall reading, though, is a radically noncognitivist one, on which metaphorical utterances fail to have or otherwise express any (nonliteral) propositional, cognitive contents. Specifically, Davidson holds this because he assumes first, that speaker's meaning must be propositional, and must involve a rational, intentional relation between utterance and effect; second, that the primary, distinctive work of metaphors is to produce a state of seeing-as; and third, that seeing-as violates both these criteria for meaning.

\section{2. “A Nice Derangement of Metaphors”}


Turning now to Davidson's later paper, “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” we can frame the primary exegetical challenge much as in Section 1. Here again, it is clear that Davidson advocates a fairly radical negative conclusion, now extended from metaphor to linguistic meaning across the board: “I conclude,” he says, “that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed” (NDE 265). Again, though, this central claim might mean various things, depending on what Davidson means by “language” and “meaning.” Further, while his focus is not on metaphor per se, the discussion has direct, significant implications for the analysis of metaphor. As with “What Metaphors Mean,” I will work my way through a sequence of increasingly strong interpretations of the central negative thesis.


The weakest interpretation is that Davidson merely intends to claim that conventional meaning is not sufficient for communication, because all communication involves spontaneous, local, non-rule-governed coordination between speaker and hearer. In effect, on this interpretation, Davidson thinks there is no such thing as a language just because he takes Gricean interpretive processes to be so pervasive throughout the course of linguistic interpretation that we have “erased the boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally” (NDE 265).


Davidson illustrates the insufficiency of conventional meaning for successful communication by appealing to malapropisms, appropriations, and neologisms: for instance, Goodman Ace's sustained barrages of puns and twists, which Mark Singer describes as a “baffle of wits,” or Archie Bunker's invitation to “Lead the way and we'll precede” (NDE 251). In all of these cases, speaker and hearer converge on a common, nonconventional interpretation of the speaker's words, even when one or both parties is ignorant of, or ignores, the relevant expression's conventional meaning. As Davidson says:



\begin{quote}


What is interesting is the fact that in all these cases the hearer has no trouble understanding the speaker in the way the speaker intends. It is easy enough to explain this feat on the hearer's part: the hearer realizes that the “standard” interpretation cannot be the intended interpretation; through ignorance, inadvertence, or design the speaker has used a word similar in sound to the word that would have “correctly” expressed his meaning. \dots{} It seems unimportant, so far as understanding is concerned, who makes a mistake, or whether there is one.


(NDE 252)



\end{quote}


In this passage, we might say, Davidson invokes broadly Gricean reasoning to explain successful communication of nonconventional meaning, generalizing Grice's account to encompass, first, cases in which the speaker's departure from conventional meaning is unintentional, and second, cases where the departure involves the interpretation of specific uttered expressions rather than the generation of unsaid implicatures. The interpretive strategy in both cases is fundamentally the same as for classic Gricean implicature: the hearer assumes that the speaker is a basically rational agent who wants to produce some specific effect, and he puts what he knows about the utterance the speaker actually produced together with what he knows about the sort of person the speaker is, what she believes, and what her purposes might be, to identify her intended effect (Grice 1989).\footnote{Davidson might bolster the generality of the point that all communication involves broadly Gricean reasoning made earlier by noting, as Bach and Harnish (1979: 10) do, that even when an utterance's intended interpretation does fully coincide with its conventionally determined one, identifying this fact itself requires the hearer to employ the same nuanced, context-sensitive interpretive abilities as conversion and invention do.}


If the central negative claim of “Nice Derangement” was just that conventional meaning does not suffice for the successful assignment of values to a speaker's words because it must be embedded within a more general interpretive machinery, it would not be particularly radical. But Davidson claims, further, that conventional meaning is also not \emph{necessary} for successful communication, as illustrated by cases where the speaker invents an entirely new expression rather than “converting” an old word to a new use: “Sheer invention is equally possible, and we can be as good at interpreting it (say in Joyce or Lewis Carroll) as we are at interpreting the errors or twists of substitution” (NDE 259). Given this, Davidson concludes that conventions are altogether explanatorily otiose in a theory of communication:



\begin{quote}


what interpreter and speaker share, to the extent that communication succeeds, is not learned and so is not a language governed by rules or conventions known to speaker and interpreter in advance; but what the speaker and interpreter know in advance is not (necessarily) shared, and so is not a language governed by shared rules or conventions.


(NDE 264)



\end{quote}


Indeed, it seems we might use some of the arguments Davidson deployed in “What Metaphors Mean” against metaphorical meaning to go further: to undermine the very cases he invokes here as being instances of meaning at all. In “What Metaphors Mean,” Davidson argued that metaphorical meanings lacked “genuine explanatory power” because they could not “be assigned \dots{} apart from particular contexts of use” (WWM 33), and did not explain anything further that could be done with words. But if conventional semantics is now being ruled out as otiose, then, the only viable species of linguistic or word meaning that remains would seem to be context-local speaker's meaning.\footnote{Indeed, Davidson's skepticism about preestablished conventional meaning extends beyond semantics, to encompass syntax: thus, Davidson thinks we have good evidence that “internal grammars do differ among speakers of ‘the same language,’ ” for instance in their rules for pluralization (NDE 263).} Moreover, the way in which hearers arrive at these interpretations, Davidson now says, is nothing more than a “strategy,” a “mysterious” and highly context-dependent process (NDE 264): “there are no rules for arriving at passing theories, no rules in any strict sense, as opposed to rough maxims and methodological generalities” (NDE 265). But if genuine meaning must be predictive and rule governed, as assumed in “What Metaphors Mean,” then this criterion threatens to undermine all varieties of speaker's meaning – both intentional and unwitting, and both implicatures and word meanings.\footnote{One of Grice's key reasons for thinking that the connection between what is said and what is implicated is rational, and so counts as a case of nonnatural meaning, is that implicatures are “calculable” on the basis of what is said. In this sense, at least, Gricean implicatures are also classically assumed to be “rule-governed.”} We thus appear to have a truly radical meaning skepticism on our hands.


This is emphatically not the conclusion of “Nice Derangement,” however. On the contrary, Davidson says he “take[s] for granted \dots{} that nothing should be allowed to obliterate or even blur the distinction between speaker's meaning and literal meaning” (NDE 252). Indeed, he thinks we are driven to give up the very thing he once treated as explanatory bedrock – conventional, context-independent word meaning – precisely in order to preserve this distinction (NDE 252). So why, and how, does he stop short of wholesale skepticism? The answer, I think, is that where in “What Metaphors Mean” Davidson took conventional, context-independent word meaning as fundamental, and looked with suspicion on purported cases of meaning that failed to fit that model, by the time of “Nice Derangement,” he has come to think that merely “strategic,” broadly Gricean interpretive processes are sufficiently robust to provide an alternative theoretical groundwork. While the central negative thesis of “Nice Derangement” is that the pervasiveness of Gricean interpretive processes renders conventional meaning explanatorily otiose, this is complemented by a positive project of showing that a revised notion of compositional word meaning (of the sort Davidson himself spent much of his philosophical career developing) still plays a crucial role within the Gricean framework.


The crucial question, then, is how to understand this alternative, anticonventionalist notion of compositional word meaning. Davidson rejects talk of “literal meaning” as “too incrusted with philosophical and other extras to do much work,” and offers “first meaning” in its place. “The concept,” he says,



\begin{quote}


applies to words and sentences as uttered by a particular speaker on a particular occasion. But if the occasion, the speaker, and the audience are “normal” or “standard” (in a sense not to be further explained here), then the first meaning of an utterance will be what should be found by consulting a dictionary based on actual usage (such as \emph{Webster's Third}).


(NDE 252)



\end{quote}


So far, this just says that first meaning is a lot like conventional meaning, except in those cases when it's not. A more helpful understanding, he suggests, comes from thinking of first meaning as “first in the order of interpretation,” as determined by the speaker's communicative intentions: “The intentions with which an act is performed are usually unambiguously ordered by the relation of means to ends (where this relation may or may not be causal)” (NDE 253). As Davidson notes, “first meaning” is thus a species of Gricean nonnatural meaning. However, he also observes, as we noted in Section 1, that nonnatural meaning need not be distinctively linguistic:



\begin{quote}


Nothing said so far limits first meaning to language; what has been characterized is (roughly) Grice's non-natural meaning, which applies to any sign or signal with an intended interpretation. What should be added if we want to restrict first meaning to linguistic meaning?


(NDE 254)\footnote{Note that Gricean nonnatural meaning encompasses more than “first” meaning, contrary to what Davidson here appears to assume.}



\end{quote}


Davidson suggests two additional conditions to achieve linguistic meaning: first, the method for determining the intended interpretation must be \emph{systematic}. That is, this particular utterance meaning must be related in a rule-governed way to the meanings of other potential utterances, such that the interpreter's assignments of values to this utterance's parts and their mode of combination forms part of an overall theory that enables him to interpret a wide range of other utterances (NDE 254). Second, the operative theory must be \emph{shared} between the interlocutors: that is, they must converge upon a common understanding of the speaker's utterance using a sufficiently similar method (NDE 256). Davidson cautions, however, that this second requirement does not entail that the hearer would use the same theory either to produce his \emph{own} utterances or to understand a different speaker in another context: all that “must be shared” for successful communication “is the interpreter's and the speaker's understanding of the speaker's words” (NDE 257). Nor, of course, is it necessary that speaker and hearer share this interpretive theory of the speaker's words \emph{prior} to the conversation; this is the point of malapropisms and neologisms, and the central negative thesis. Perhaps we might sum up Davidson's view here in the slogan “All semantics (and syntax) is local.”\footnote{Note that Davidson's two conditions – or even all three, including conventionality – do not suffice to distinguish linguistic meaning from other forms of “first” meaning, as he claims. Many nonlinguistic representational systems, most notably cartographic and diagrammatic systems, are systematic, shared, and conventional (Camp 2007b, 2009).}


How does this context-local notion of “first meaning” avoid “obliterating” the distinction between word meaning and speaker's meaning? The answer should be intuitively obvious: given, for instance, that Archie Bunker's interpretive theory assigns as the semantic value for “precede” what I (and presumably you) would assign for “proceed,” and given that we realize this fact about him, Archie can successfully use the sentence “Lead the way and we'll precede” to \emph{implicate} something more to us – say, that it's time to go to the party. Further, we need to appeal to this context-local “first meaning” in order to explain Archie's overall speech act, including both the additional content that the hearer recognizes Archie intended for him to entertain, and the way in which Archie intended him to identify it.


While the basic distinction between first\Slash{}word meaning and speaker's meaning and its explanatory utility are intuitively obvious, spelling out the distinction in a principled way, and especially making sense of Davidson's specific cases, is rather more difficult. In particular, returning to our central topic, the status of metaphor becomes particularly vexed on this view. Davidson only mentions metaphor once in “Nice Derangement,” and only in passing, when he says that metaphor is an instance of something that is done “all the time,” where a speaker “has said something true by using a sentence that is false” (NDE 258). The first point to make here is obvious: this represents a dramatic shift from the staunch noncognitivism of “What Metaphors Mean.” Aside from the question of intertextual consistency, though, the remark raises a puzzle internal to “Nice Derangement”: what conception of “first meaning” entitles Davidson to treat metaphor in this way? In particular, why does metaphor not count as a form of first meaning?


To see the puzzle, we need to compare two cases, both originally from Keith Donnellan, that together illustrate how Davidson is drawing the distinction between word and speaker's meaning. The first is Donnellan's (1966) classic example motivating a distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions: Jones utters “Smith's murderer is insane” in order to talk about someone (say, George) who Jones believes falsely to have murdered Smith (perhaps George is on trial for the murder). Davidson here agrees with Donnellan that the speaker, Jones, successfully refers to George; but he insists, seemingly against Donnellan, that Jones's \emph{words} refer to the actual murderer:



\begin{quote}


\dots{} the reference is none the less achieved by way of the normal meanings of the words. The words therefore must have their usual reference. All that is needed, if we are to accept this way of describing the situation, is a firm sense of the difference between what \emph{words} mean or refer to and what \emph{speakers} mean or refer to. \dots{} Jones has said something true by using a sentence that is false. This is done intentionally all the time, for example in irony or metaphor. A coherent theory could not allow that under the circumstances Jones' sentence was true; nor would Jones think so if he knew the facts. Jones' belief about who murdered Smith cannot change the truth of the sentence he uses (and for the same reason cannot change the reference of the words in the sentence).


(NDE 258)



\end{quote}


Davidson's reasoning here is just an instance of the standard Gricean machinery, generalized as we saw earlier to include cases where the hearer realizes that the speaker doesn't realize something, either about her words (as in the case of Mrs. Malaprop) or about the world (as here).


The second case is one in which Donnellan (1968) responded to an accusation by Alfred McKay that his description of the previous case showed that Donnellan “shared Humpty Dumpty's theory of meaning: ‘When I use a word’, Humpty Dumpty said, \dots{} ‘it means just what I choose it to mean’” (NDE 257). (Earlier in his conversation with Alice, Humpty Dumpty had used the word “glory” to mean “a nice knockdown argument.”) In response to McKay's accusation, Donnellan says,



\begin{quote}


If I were to end this reply to MacKay with the sentence “There's glory for you” I would be guilty of arrogance and, no doubt, of overestimating the strength of what I have said, but given the background I do not think I could be accused of saying something unintelligible. I would be understood, and would I not have meant by “glory” “a nice knockdown argument”?


(Donnellan 1968: 213)



\end{quote}


Donnellan's main point here is that while Humpty Dumpty could not succeed in meaning “a nice knockdown argument” by “There's glory for you” just out of the blue, Donnellan \emph{can} successfully mean that in his current context, because the right sort of Gricean background is in place: specifically, Donnellan knows that McKay knows (that Donnellan knows, etc.) about Humpty Dumpty's failed attempt at meaning.


For Donnellan, then, the two examples, of Jones referring to George and of Donnellan saying he has a nice knockdown argument, are on a par: in both cases, the speaker succeeds in meaning or saying something even though he departs from his words' standard, conventional meanings. But Davidson treats the two cases very differently: in the case of “Smith's murderer,” he thinks the words \emph{retain} their standard meaning although the speaker uses them to refer to something else;\footnote{It is difficult to determine whether Donnellan himself really does think the \emph{words} change their meanings in either case; in particular, in his discussion of “glory,” Donnellan only claims that \emph{he} meant “a nice knock-down argument” by “glory.” See Kripke (1977) for an argument that Donnellan must be committed to a semantic analysis of the referential\Slash{}attributive distinction, and for a classic defense of the alternative pragmatic interpretation invoking the distinction between semantic and speaker's meaning.} while with “glory,” he thinks, the words themselves take on new meaning:



\begin{quote}


When Donnellan ends his reply to MacKay by saying “There's glory for you,” not only he, but his words, are correctly interpreted as meaning “There's a nice knock-down argument for you.” That's how he intends us to interpret his words, and we know this, since we have, and he knows we have, and we know he knows we have (etc.), the background needed to provide the interpretation.


(NDE 260)



\end{quote}


Given the structural similarity between Donnellan's use of “glory” and the intentional malaprops deployed by Goodman Ace, we can see why Davidson would want to treat Donnellan's “glory” as a case of context-local word meaning. However, recall that “first meaning” was also supposed to be literal meaning: it is \emph{the} meaning the words have in that context. And this seems like an odd thing to say about “glory” here. In particular, with cases of intentional twists and appropriations like Goodman Ace's and Donnellan's, we would miss out on an important part of what's funny – and thus an important part of the effect the speaker intends to produce – if we simply took the speaker's ultimately intended word meaning as the words' “first” meaning.


Putting aside brute intuitions about whether “glory” itself or only Donnellan as speaker means “a nice knockdown argument,” the more important question from a theoretical perspective is what differentiates “glory,” which Davidson does want to treat as a case of first, literal, albeit context-local word meaning, from metaphor, which he does not. For it is at least as plausible that the words take on a context-specific meaning in the case of metaphor, as it is with intentional twists like Donnellan's use of “glory.”\footnote{For advocacy of a word-based approach to metaphorical interpretation, whether semantic or pragmatic, see inter alia Bezuidenhout(2001), Carston (2002), Hills (1997), Levin (1977), Recanati (2001), Sperber and Wilson (1985), and Stern (2000). Further, note that some cases of sarcasm behave in much the same way (Camp 2012).} In particular, first, with metaphor as with “glory,” it is typically\footnote{The existence of phrasal and sentential metaphors, in which the entire unit serves as a vehicle for thinking about some other entity or situation, as in “I see storm clouds gathering over the hill,” said in the context of an increasingly hostile conversation, constitute an important, and I think theoretically revealing, exception to this claim.} possible to identify a specific word or phrase as metaphorical while the other terms in the uttered sentence are used literally. Moreover, unlike with “glory,” it is typically possible to extend that metaphorical interpretation to related expressions, for instance through tense, pluralization, adjectivalization, colligation, and so on. Second, metaphor, even more clearly than an intentional twist like “glory,” permits echoic speech and attitude reports, anaphoric reference and (dis)agreement (e.g. “That's true” or “She's not that way at all”), and embedding within complex constructions like conditionals and attitude reports. And third, with both intentional twists and metaphor, the speaker's contextually intended interpretation of her words can serve as input for implicature: for instance, by saying “She's the Taj Mahal,” a speaker might implicate that he would like to date the woman in question (Tsohatzidis 1994; cited in Bezuidenhout 2001).


But if metaphorical assignments of values to particular expressions contribute to the compositional determination of sentence meanings which in turn serve as inputs to implicature, then it seems fairly clear that metaphor falls squarely within the domain of what Davidson calls “first meaning” – even as he also equates this with literal meaning:



\begin{quote}


Every deviation from ordinary usage, as long as it is agreed on for the moment (knowingly deviant, or not, on one, or both, sides), is in the passing theory as a feature of what the words mean on that occasion. Such meanings, transient though they may be, are literal; they are what I have called first meanings.


(NDE 261; see also 252)



\end{quote}


Thus, unless he can identify a principled basis for distinguishing metaphor from intentional twists like “glory,” it appears that Davidson has not merely “blurred” but “obliterated” the distinction between literal and speaker's meaning after all. And in turn, it appears that he also lacks the resources to claim that in speaking metaphorically, a speaker “says something true by using a sentence that is false”: rather, it seems he should hold that when all goes well, the sentence uttered is itself true, on the contextually operative interpretation. This would take us far from the view in “What Metaphors Mean,” indeed.


Although I think this is a real problem for Davidson’s view here, I also think the best basis for distinguishing the two cases relies on a feature of metaphor that Davidson himself cited in “What Metaphors Mean.” There, he argued that in a metaphorical utterance, the words' literal meanings play a crucial role in producing the metaphor's effects in two related senses. First, unless a hearer appreciates the change from literal to metaphorical use, “most of what is thought to be interesting about metaphor is lost” (WWM 37). Second, in the case of metaphor, “our attention is directed \dots{} to what language is about” (WWM 37), rather than to the language itself: we notice new features of Juliet, or Louis XIV, or Richard III, by thinking about them in comparison to the sun, and not just as falling within the extension of “the sun.” That is, it is the normal semantic \emph{value} of the metaphorical expression, and not just the expression itself, which plays a central role in achieving the metaphors' effects. Both of these features are missing from a genuine malapropism: precisely because the speaker is confused about the expression's normal semantic value, she cannot intend for the hearer to play with that normal value in order to achieve some effect. In the case of Donnellan's “glory,” the first feature is present – the utterance is supposed to be interesting because we know Donnellan knows the normal meaning of “glory.” But the second feature is still absent: there is no interesting connection between the two phenomena of glory and a nice knockdown argument in themselves; there is only the arbitrary connection that Humpty Dumpty attempted to create between the two \emph{expressions} for them. Other cases, like Goodman Ace's intentional twists and many puns, fall somewhere in between “glory” and metaphor here.


What this shows, I think, is that if Davidson wants to retain “first meaning” as a form of meaning that is both context-local and literal, he needs to appeal to more varieties of meaning than simply “prior” and “passing” word meanings and propositional “speaker” meaning. At a minimum, he needs to acknowledge that distinct theoretically relevant roles are played first, by each interlocutor's “prior” lexical entry for a given expression (conventional or not); second, by the context-specific “passing” “first” word meaning, which both parties must converge on for successful communication; third, by any “secondary” context-specific expression-values which are parasitic on this initial passing meaning, such as metaphor and some sarcasm (and perhaps other phenomena like deferred reference); and finally, by classic Gricean implicatures. (Of course, in many cases two or even all of the first three species of meaning may coincide.) Only by taking seriously all of these varieties of word meaning can Davidson make good on his positive project of showing that an anticonventionalist theory can still reliably distinguish word from speaker's meaning.

\section{3. Evaluating a Hybrid Davidsonian View of Metaphor}


At this point, it is time to step back from the details of the two papers, to ask what form a broadly Davidsonian view of metaphor, one that preserves the most important aspects of both papers, should take. I think we can identify four central and independently plausible theses from each paper. From “What Metaphors Mean,” we get first, the claim that literal meaning plays a crucial role in the production of metaphor's effects:



\begin{quote}


Whether or not metaphor depends on new or extended meanings, it certainly depends in some way on the original meanings; an adequate account of metaphor must allow that the primary or original meanings of words remain active in their metaphorical setting.


(WWM 34)



\end{quote}


Second, there are no clear rules for getting from literal sentence meaning to a metaphor's effects: in this sense, metaphorical meaning is not strictly “calculable,” as Grice claimed implicatures to be. Third, meaning is propositional: it is a form of cognitive content, which is in turn analyzed in terms of conditions for truth or satisfaction. Finally, seeing-as constitutes an essential, inextricable aspect of what metaphors do, and is not itself reducible to seeing-that.


From “Nice Derangement,” we have the following claims. First, conventional meaning is neither necessary nor sufficient for successful communication. Second, the input to compositional construction (“word meaning”) is often context-local rather than conventional. Third, the process by which interlocutors develop “passing” interpretive theories from “prior” ones is highly context specific and strategic rather than strictly rule governed. Finally, accepting these three theses does not undermine the distinction between word and speaker's meaning.


We can incorporate all eight of these theses to produce the following broadly Davidsonian view of metaphor, one which is both noncognitivist and anticonventionalist. Literal word meaning, which may itself be context-local serves as the input to a compositional interpretive theory and delivers a “passing” meaning for the uttered sentence. This meaning then serves as a springboard, via mysterious, non-rule-governed “strategies,” for the hearer's seeing one thing in terms of another – in the simplest case, for seeing the object or situation denoted by the subject expression (e.g., Juliet) in the light of the object, situation, or quality denoted by the predicate (e.g., being the sun). This cognitive state is not itself a candidate for meaning because it is not propositional. It may, however, lead the hearer to notice that the two entities share interesting resemblances, and that the subject possesses heretofore unnoticed properties. Finally, a Davidsonian theory might perhaps allow that a speaker can exploit the anticipated-to-be-induced state of seeing-as to \emph{implicate} (but not to say or assert) that the subject possesses these properties.


What should we make of this view? I think it has three important theoretical merits. First, its emphasis on the continued contextual relevance of “first,” literal meaning serves as an important corrective to the view of many contextualists,\footnote{For example, Bezuidenhout (2001), Recanati (2001), and Sperber and Wilson (1985).} who argue that in metaphorical utterances, words take on \emph{ad hoc} meanings, which are the only relevant, operative meanings of those words in that context. As Davidson says on such a view “there is no difference between metaphor and the introduction of a new term into our vocabulary: to make a metaphor is to murder it” (WWM 34). Second, at the same time, it pushes us to acknowledge that the literal meaning which serves as input for generating metaphorical effects need not itself be conventional. Thus, if I say “George is a primate,” intending to suggest that he is territorial, prone to violence, and not too smart, then the relevant literal meaning of “primate” is one which has already been narrowed to exclude human beings as relevant instances (Camp 2008). Finally, Davidson's emphasis on the nonpropositional effects of metaphor, and specifically on the production of a rich, open-ended, often imagistic state of seeing-as, is a crucial corrective to the narrower, exclusively propositional focus of many philosophical discussions of metaphor and related uses of language.


However, what I think the contextualists get right, and what this Davidsonian view misses, is that metaphorical interpretation typically, perhaps always, also generates a speech act in which a proposition other than the uttered sentence's “passing” meaning is presented with assertoric or other illocutionary force. In this sense, I take metaphor to be importantly akin to “primary” propositional meaning (Recanati 2001), and distinct from implicatures. The speaker of metaphors like “She's the Taj Mahal,” “Her hair is burnished copper,” or even “Thou art a boil in my corrupted blood” has not merely intimated or suggested or pointed toward something: she has committed herself outright to some content, which can be false as well as true, and which can genuinely inform the hearer and not merely bring him to notice something he could have ascertained independently (Camp 2006b). Further, this content can itself in turn serve as the input for implicatures, or for sarcasm (Camp 2012). Finally, I take it that this content is identified by way of cultivating a state of seeing-as (Camp 2003, 2008).


Accepting these points would obviously involve abandoning Davidsonian noncognitivism – though as we saw, Davidson himself abandons that view in “Nice Derangement.” To adjudicate between the two positions, we need to evaluate Davidson's two strongest arguments for noncognitivism: that the effects produced by metaphor are of the wrong \emph{kind}, and are connected in the wrong \emph{way}, to count as meaning; I take the “wrong way” argument first.


The claim that neither seeing-as nor any propositions arrived at through it are governed by strict “rules” for metaphorical interpretation is certainly correct: as Davidson emphasizes in “What Metaphors Mean,” metaphorical interpretation requires imagination and intuition – though as he also points out in both papers, this is also true of all communication to some degree. Nor, at least by the time of “Nice Derangement,” does Davidson take a role for interpretive imagination to disqualify an effect as one of meaning. And this seems right: as many theorists have noted, the Gricean requirement of calculability needs to be construed quite loosely if it is to cover even canonical cases of implicature.


More importantly, in most if not all interpretive contexts, metaphorical interpretation is normatively constrained by the speaker's intentions in a manner characteristic of non-natural speaker's meaning. So, for instance, suppose a hearer interprets Romeo's utterance of “Juliet is the sun” in a way that employs the same perspective, and so attributes the same features, that he would have employed if he heard Achilles or Louis XIV described as the sun, or even as he would if he heard Romeo's friend Benvolio or his romantic rival Paris utter the very same sentence. I think it is intuitively clear that such a hearer would have \emph{mis}interpreted Romeo's metaphor, in virtue of failing to take Romeo's interpretive intentions into account (Camp 2008). The view that metaphors are self-sufficient objects of contemplation, which simply draw the hearer's attention to features that he could have noticed on his own, is dubious enough in the context of lyric poetry, but clearly false in the case of conversation.


The objection that seeing-as, and any further cognitive effects it produces, are the wrong \emph{kind} of entity to count as meaning is, I think, considerably more plausible. As I noted in Section 1, the assumption that speaker's meaning is inherently propositional is widespread, even if it is not part of Grice's influential definition. I myself am tempted by the thought that a nonpropositional perspective can be part of what a speaker means to communicate by her utterance, but I recognize that this is a controversial view. However, even if we reject seeing-as as a candidate for content, this does not establish that there are no other propositional candidates for illocutionary content in the offing. And it seems simply incredible to deny that speakers ever, or even often, commit themselves to contents by their metaphorical utterances. So, for instance, it seems clear that in the context of a conversation about who should be the next department chair, a speaker might utter “Sam is a bulldozer” and thereby claim, roughly, that Sam is forceful, determined, and not particularly considerate of others' feelings (Bezuidenhout 2001).


The natural response to this is to object, as Davidson does (echoing Max Black and Cleanth Brooks before him), that the effects produced by metaphor are still too indeterminate and open-ended to count as meaning: as he says, “When we try to say what a metaphor ‘means’ we soon realize there is no end to what we want to mention” (WMM, 46). Here again, I think Davidson's emphasis on indeterminacy and open-endedness is salutary. (Although it is also important to note that a speaker's metaphorical illocutionary content may be quite specific: for instance, when Ted Hughes writes in “Pike,” about a fish lying on shore, “The gills were kneading quietly,”\footnote{Ted Hughes, “Pike.”} the metaphorical verb describes a quite specific action; likewise, the description of Sam earlier is fairly limited in its intended effect.


Once again, though, I do not think indeterminacy or even open-endedness should disqualify propositions as being meant, so long as the requisite Gricean intentions are in place: that is, so long as the speaker intends for her hearer to take her to be committed to this rough body of propositions, and to other related ones, and for this commitment to be achieved by way of the hearer's recognition of this very intention. Indeed, as Grice (1989: 58) notes, indeterminacy is typical of pragmatic communication; among other factors, it is rhetorically useful to have communicative methods that preserve the indeterminacy of our corresponding mental states (Camp 2006a). The primary difference in the case of metaphor is that there is no determinate, literal, conventionally determined “core” which is asserted. As the later Davidson insists, however, it is not clear that such a core is always present even for cases of literal meaning. Thus, I conclude that neither the wrong way nor the wrong kind arguments for noncognitivism succeed; we should allow that in speaking metaphorically, speakers do indeed “say something [potentially] true by using a sentence that is [usually] false” (NDE 258).


Before closing, I want to step back from the specific topic of metaphor to the broader question of conventional meaning. I think we should grant that conventional meaning is neither necessary nor sufficient for successful communication. But I believe we should reject Davidson's inference to the conclusion that conventions have no theoretical role to play in an account of meaning and discourse. Davidson claims that “error or mistake,” in the sense of deviating from “what a good dictionary would say, or what would be found by polling a pod of experts whose taste or training I trust,” “is not philosophically interesting” (NDE 252). I disagree: in addition to accounting for cases where hearers are sufficiently cognitively agile and charitably motivated to figure out what nonstandard meaning or effects the speaker must have intended to achieve with her utterance, a theory of meaning should also explain cases of communicative failure: why and how interlocutors respond as they do when hearers are too uninformed, lazy, or stupid to go the extra mile required to reconstruct the speaker's communicative intentions, or when hearers do recognize what the speaker is trying to do, but refuse to let her “get away with it” (NDE 258). Speakers who diverge from conventional meaning do so “‘under license’ from other participants,” as Grice (1989: 45) says, and while hearers are typically willing to cooperate by “accommodating” a manifestly intended meaning (Lewis 1979: 340), this sort of charity goes above and beyond the minimal conditions on cooperative conversation.\footnote{For further discussion of interpretive antagonistic conversations and their implications for the theory of meaning, see Camp (2013).} What Davidson rightly emphasized in “What Metaphors Mean” is that literal, conventional meaning provides a stable, cross-contextual “least common denominator” for communication: a basis for constructing meaning that both speakers and hearers are entitled to assume their interlocutor acknowledges. This common basis rarely coincides with utterances' ultimate meanings, and speakers and hearers can indeed get along without it. And in any case, it needs to be embedded within a larger machinery of Gricean intention recognition. But if we ignore literal, conventional meaning altogether, we deprive ourselves of the resources to understand how speakers intentionally manipulate conventional meaning to nonconventional ends, for the sake of obfuscation, insight, or entertainment, and how hearers sometimes fight back against such manipulations.

\section{Acknowledgment}


The author would like to give thanks for discussion to Josh Armstrong, Endre Begby, Louise Daoust, Carlos Santana, and participants at the NEH Summer Seminar on Quine and Davidson.

% Notes
\section{References}


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Bezuidenhout, A. (2001). Metaphor and what is said: a defense of a direct expression view of metaphor. \emph{Midwest Studies in Philosophy} 25:156–186.


Camp, E.. (2003). Saying and seeing-as: the linguistic uses and cognitive effects of metaphor. Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley.


——— (2006a). Metaphor and that certain “je ne sais quoi.” \emph{Philosophical Studies} 129(1):1–25.


———. (2006b). Metaphor in the mind: the cognition of metaphor. \emph{Philosophy Compass} 1(2):154–170.


———. (2007a). Prudent semantics meets wanton speech act pluralism. In \emph{Context-Sensitivity and Semantic Minimalism: New Essays on Semantics and Pragmatics}, G. Preyer and G. Peter (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 194–213.


———. (2007b). Thinking with maps. In \emph{Philosophical Perspectives 21:1, Philosophy of Mind}, J. Hawthorne (ed.). Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 145–182.


———. (2008). Showing, telling, and seeing: metaphor and “poetic” language. In \emph{The Baltic International Yearbook of Cognition, Logic, and Communication} (Volume 3), \emph{A Figure of Speech: Metaphor}, E. Camp (ed.). Manhattan, KS: New Prairie Press, pp. 1–24.


———. (2009). A language of baboon thought? In \emph{Philosophy of Animal Minds}, R. Lurz (ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 108–127.


———. (2012). Sarcasm, pretense, and the semantics\Slash{}pragmatics distinction. \emph{Noûs} 46(4):587–634.


———. (2013). Working to conversational rule: deniability and pedantry in antagonistic conversational contexts.


\emph{Carston, R. (2002).} Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication\emph{. Oxford: Blackwell.}


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———. (1968). Putting Humpty Dumpty together again. \emph{The Philosophical Review} 77(2):203–215.


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———. (1989). Logic and conversation. \emph{In Studies in the Way of Words}. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 22–40.


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Recanati, F. (2001). Literal\Slash{}nonliteral. \emph{Midwest Studies in Philosophy} 25:264–274.


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Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1985). Loose talk. \emph{Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society} 86:153–171.


Stern, J. (2000). \emph{Metaphor in Context}. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.


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\chapter{22. Davidson and Literary Theory}


Samuel C. Wheeler III

\section{Davidson and Literary Theory}


One would expect that a philosophy of language as thorough and profound as Donald Davidson's would have a lot to say about the theory of literature. Davidson himself, though his examples in many essays reveal thorough knowledge of literature, wrote relatively little directly on the topic of literature. There is only one essay specifically about the application of his account of language and interpretation to literature (Davidson 1993). Davidson also wrote an essay on James Joyce (Davidson 1991) that illustrates and expands the views of language and convention expressed in Davidson (1986). His essay on metaphor (Davidson 1974a) is an important contribution to the theory of figurative language.


Section 1 of the present essay discusses that one essay on literature, which not only sketches the outlines of Davidson's conception of speech as action, but develops two ideas that are not found elsewhere in his writings. Section 2 discusses his anticonventionalism and his theory of metaphor. Section 3 discusses to what extent Davidson's views are taken into account by contemporary literary theory.


Section 4 discusses the nature of texts and presents some problem texts for Davidson's account of texts. Davidson's approach to language focuses on communication by speech. He treats literary language as speech acts performed in writing. Speech acts, particular utterances issued for a reason by particular individuals, communicate something to a hearer. Literary theory, on the other hand, is about texts. As we will see by looking at some Biblical texts, a text has a connection with an originating action that differs from the direct tie to an agent that characterizes a speech act. A given text can be cited and reused by other agents. The original intention of a text may not be the intention of the writer incorporating that text into another.


Section 5 discusses what Davidson could say about texts that have too many authors to be products of a unified meaning-giving intention.

\section{1. Locating Literary Language}

\subsection{1.1. Intention and language}


Davidson's “Locating Literary Language” (Davidson 1993) first sketches the outlines of his conception of action. Speech acts are a subclass of actions, and are to be understood in the intentional, teleological framework of beliefs and desires. A number of intentions are manifest in any given communicative utterance. Davidson distinguishes as central to his interests the linguistic intention, which is the intention to utter words that will be understood as having certain truth conditions.


For Davidson, intentions are not independent meaning-giving psychological states that assign meanings to words and speech acts. Rather, in interpreting speech actions, intentions are assigned holistically as part of assigning beliefs, desires, and truth conditions of sentences. That is, the intention of a particular utterance is conjectured from maximizing agreement in beliefs and desires, given that previous interpretation of speech acts has yielded some truth conditions for the utterance. As we will see below, this makes his intentionalism different from that of some literary theorists.

\subsection{1.2. The role of reference in “storytelling”}


Davidson comes to the topics special to literature that he has promised to discuss: “the role of reference in ‘storytelling’ and the changes that occur when we replace the triangle of speaker-hearer-world with the triangle of writer-reader-tradition” (Davidson 1993: 296). Davidson argues that fictional language cannot be pretend language: “\dots{} The fiction writer does not \dots{} pretend to use language. There are a few things I can pretend (e.g., that I can speak Tagalog) by pretending to use language; but I certainly cannot pretend, by only pretending to use language, that Oedipus killed Laius. \dots{} The storyteller \dots{} does not \emph{assert} that Oedipus killed Laius, he pretends to assert it” (Davidson 1993: 301).


This passage is a critique of Kripke's (2011: ch. 3) view (presented at a 1973 conference Davidson participated in) that fictional language is pretended language, and that fictional sentences with nonreferring names do not express propositions. “Is a pretence” is a characteristic of actions, of how they are intended. In this case, a speech act is a pretense. But that does not mean that the item with truth conditions that is presented in play, that is, with the intention of pretending to assert, is not genuine language.


Davidson next discusses whether we can even in general tell whether a text is fiction or history. Pseudonyms that may or may not refer to real people raise the question whether a work can be history if “the names are changed to protect the innocent.” That the answer is “yes,” shows that “\dots{} we must reject the popular view that proper names refer to a person only if their causal history ties them back to something like a christening” (Davidson 1993: 302).


Davidson goes on to muse about how proper names work. While it seems intuitive that a sentence containing a name without a referent “fails to say anything, fails to express a proposition, while when studied in the footlights of fiction we feel compelled to assign a full meaning to sentences with names of fictional characters as to any sentence. ‘Was Bloom married?’ Yes to Molly Bloom. ‘Was Bloom a real person?’ No of course not. Both answers cannot be true, but neither questions nor answers would make sense if non-referring names had no meaning” (Davidson 1993: 302).


Note that treating fictional language as pretend language accommodates direct reference, the idea that proper names directly refer to objects, that they contribute the object itself to the proposition. Fictional language as pretend language fits well with the idea that objects are given independently of conceptualization, a view Davidson argues against in Davidson (1974b). If there is no object contributed, there is no proposition. If names of fictional entities are real language, with sentences with truth-conditions being used, but nonassertively, then some other account of proper names is needed. Given the hopelessness of a cluster theory of the meaning of names, and given that Davidson rejects a direct reference, causal account, one wonders what Davidson would say about the meaning of proper names.


Davidson does not give an account. “This is not the place to propose a detailed theory of the semantics of proper names. \dots{} I do want to insist on a principle to which any correct theory must conform: a meaning which can be grasped without knowing whether it was generated in the context of history or of fiction cannot depend on that context. \dots{} I think we should reverse the usual strategy of making the ‘referring use’ of names primary and the ‘non-referring use’ a play or pretend use” (Davidson 1993: 302).


What kind of theory could Davidson have in mind? The difference between proper names used in fiction and proper names used to talk about real people cannot be semantic, so the difference must be in the action – what is done with the sentence with its truth conditions. The difference must also be that something about the writing or speech action is a pretense. An account that fits these desiderata is the following: What is pretended is the demonstration that accompanies the proper name. An intended fictional use of a name involves \emph{pretending} to demonstrate an object. It is not exactly a failed demonstration, any more than a hyperbole is a failed assertion. So, something like Burge's (1973) account of proper names seems to be what Davidson envisages. Proper names are general terms of a special sort whose use is accompanied by a demonstration.

\subsection{1.3. Triangulation in literary interpretation}


“Triangulation” is Davidson's (1992) term for the basic communication situation, in which speakers observe one another's responses to a common world. It allows Davidson to drop the idea that a public language is necessary for the possibility of any language, and so to deny any significant role for convention.


A conventionalist could argue that, since any psychologically possible pattern of a speaker's application of a predicate F is a possible extension of F, unconstrained maximization of truth telling by a speaker would make the speaker correct no matter what she said. But if no alternative utterance would have been false, an utterance cannot be true. Some constraint is required in order to allow the possibility of falsehood, and the rules of a common language must provide such a constraint.


Davidson, by invoking triangulation on a common world, denies that a public language is needed in order to distinguish true utterances from false ones. Davidson agrees that a constraint is needed, but holds that this constraint can be the objective world.


Davidson (1993) examines how triangulation can apply to written communication.


Since the audience is removed in space and time, so that ostension is not possible, the communication situation in writing for an audience is different from that in speech communication.


In writing, rather than a triangle consisting of a speaker, a hearer, and a common world, there is an author, a reader, and a world, in some sense of “world” to be discussed later. Rather than a hearer seeing the speaker respond to a world present to both of them, a reader sees the author's words and connects them to a common world by other devices. Since the reader is typically physically separated from the author, a common environment is not available to complete the triangle. Davidson mentions several factors that may help us to understand what another has written, but the one most relevant to literature are the cross references within the text. These are written demonstratives that connect parts of the text with other parts of the text, so that the text as a whole is a unified narrative or description.


In the case of nonfiction, we are triangulating on a common world, the actual world modified by our understanding of the perspective of the author. In the case of fiction, though, we are triangulating on the content of some kind of pretense. In reading a novel, fairy tale, or epic poem, the interpreter's task is to construct what is being pretended to be the case. How we triangulate on what we are expected to suppose in such pretenses is only hinted at in Davidson's essay.


Earlier in the essay, Davidson describes the triangle as among “writer-reader-tradition” (Davidson 1993: 296). What does “tradition” mean, as a component of a triangulation? Davidson notes that an important shared assumption of author and reader is that the reader is acquainted with books. I take this to be an allusion to genres and intertextuality.


We take into account genres in understanding fictions as guides to what we are expected to pretend. In reading fairy tales, we expect the narrative to affirm the efficacy of magic and the existence of elves. In reading science fiction, we pretend that we accept telepathy. We expect that the crime will be solved by the end of a murder mystery. The same is true of pretenses in general. In playing house or cowboys and Indians, or space patrol, there seem to be practices akin to genres. If you are playing house, spousal abuse departs from the conventions of the game. In cowboys and Indians, it is important to agree on what count as a fatality. Genre is one area where Davidson would admit that convention plays an essential part. He would also have noted the truism that (partial) violation of those conventions is part of interesting art.


Intertextuality is another aspect of “tradition” or acquaintance with books. Intertextuality is the author's dependence of our having read particular works, and makes possible successful allusion. Davidson illustrates intertextuality extensively in his discussion of Joyce in Davidson (1991). Acquaintance with books is essential to understanding Joyce. Joyce is the author such that a Martian with only a truth definition for the author's idiolect would have the most difficulty understanding it.

\section{2. Convention}


If linguistic interpretation is like action interpretation, then just as there is no algorithm for understanding what a person is doing generally, so there is no algorithm for interpreting what speech act a given utterance is. Davidson attacks the idea that language is conventional on two fronts.


First, Davidson (1984) argues that there can be no conventions determining which action a given utterance is. There can be no linguistic indicator of force. Second, Davidson (1986) argues that while there are in fact conventional truth-condition clauses, that is, conventional “meanings” for words, that fact is inessential to communication.


In Davidson (1984), the central argument against conventions determining which speech act is being performed is that if there were such conventional marks, they could be used on the stage or in a joking way. Force cannot be communicated by a kind of mark, since any kind of mark can be used in plays and jokes.


Davidson argues that conventional term meaning is inessential to communication in Davidson (1986), where he points out that we perfectly well understand people who misspeak. Davidson argues that the principles of radical interpretation, namely rationalizing speech acts in assigning predicate-clauses to words the other speaks, is always functioning, even when we are speaking with people who speak our native language. Davidson holds that while speaking in the same way is practically necessary and a very good strategy for understanding and being understood, two people could communicate in principle without any common language. Each person could have a non-homophonic theory of the other's words.


Unlike Fish (2008) Davidson does not mean that anyone can mean anything by speaking whatever words. Since language is attempted acts of communication, only if there is reason to think the hearer can interpret the utterance as true if and only if snow is white can an utterance mean that snow is white. So, one could characterize Davidson's theory as a kind of moderate intentionalism. The linguistic intention determines the truth conditions of the sentence uttered if there is a sentence with truth conditions uttered. Merely intending to mean “How do you do?” by uttering “Snow is white” does not make an utterance of “Snow is white” a greeting.


Davidson's applies his views on this matter in his essay on James Joyce (Davidson 1991). There he emphasizes the creative possibilities of language, the freedom of language and communication from any restraint by rules or conventions. The only requirement for linguistic actions is that they be communications that rely on truth conditions of utterances or inscriptions. For an action to be an attempted communication, the actor must have some reason to expect success in communication. In a difficult work of literature, such as \emph{Finnegan's Wake}, the author can expect the audience to be expecting interpretation to be difficult and to involve intertextuality. Joyce would write differently in his day job as a journalist for the Dublin Gazette. The only rules being followed by the author and the interpreter are the guidelines for performing or interpreting communicative behavior – figure out the actor's intention and make your action interpretable by the right kind of audience. On Davidson's view, then, while every idiolect at a time must be systematic in the sense that it has a recursive truth definition, there are no rules for communication or interpretation, any more than there are rules for interpreting actions.

\subsection{2.1. Metaphor and figuration}


Given Davidson's conception of speech acts as sentences with truth conditions presented for purposes, and given that a truth definition says all there is to say about meaning, it is natural that Davidson's account of metaphorical language will treat metaphor as a rhetorical rather than a semantic phenomenon. That is, a metaphorical utterance is a sentence with truth conditions presented with some other intention than to indicate that the truth conditions obtain. Just as one would not posit sarcastic meanings for sarcastic remarks to express nor hyperbolic meanings for hyperboles to express, one need not posit metaphorical meanings for metaphorical applications of words to express.


Davidson's conception of metaphor takes a metaphor to be the presentation of a sentence with a truth condition in order to illuminate some aspect of what is being discussed. Whereas uses of sentences that are commands, for instance, are relatively easy to explain, the metaphorical use of language is beyond simple characterization. In calling Celeste an eggplant, I am saying something that will get the listener to see my guinea pig's cute dumpiness in a new light.


Davidson's account of metaphor does not amount to a theory of metaphor in the sense of an account of what illumination exactly will go with what metaphorical application of a term. No rules determine which metaphors will be apt and which not. Following a tradition that metaphors cannot be paraphrased in an information-preserving way, Davidson resists metaphorical meaning as well as any attempt to explain metaphors by appeal to resemblances between the subject of an apt metaphor and what it would be for the term to apply literally.


Davidson's account of metaphor and his intentionalist account of what utterances mean accommodates the indeterminacy of when an utterance is metaphorical. In particular uses of sentences, the linguistic intention is not clear. When I gloat that the Patriots crushed the Jets, there seem to be two equally good assignments of linguistic intentions. On one assignment, “crush” is being used metaphorically, and the linguistic intention is to present a sentence that I take to be false to produce an insight into the way the Patriots defeated the Jets. On the other assignment, there are in fact two predicates “crush” in my idiolect, with two separate predicate clauses, and I am using the one that amounts to “thoroughly defeat” literally. These hypotheses come to the same thing, practically of course. It seems clear that I have no better idea than the hearer whether I have spoken metaphorically or not, and the matter has no practical consequences.

\section{3. Davidson's Influence on Literary Theory}


There are three topics where Davidson's thought seems to have had substantial actual influence on actual literary theory as practiced. Two interlinked topics are the role of intentions and the role of convention. Those views have been actively discussed by literary theorists. Also, Davidson's account of metaphor is widely recognized as a contender among theorists of figuration.

\subsection{3.1. Intentionalism and anticonventionalism}


Davidson's ideas about the role of intentions in determining meaning appear to coincide with a resurgence of intentionalism in literary theory. In the 1980s, a pair of literary theorists at Berkeley, Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels, having already come to think that the intentions of an author determine the meaning of a literary work, attended Davidson's lectures on the philosophy of language and took his work to be their philosophical authority. Their articles in \emph{Critical Inquiry} (Knapp and Michaels 1982, 1987) resulted in a firestorm of responses from nearly every quarter in literary theory. Knapp and Michaels continue to hold their brand of intentionalism.


Many intentionalists in literary theory, while perhaps encouraged by Davidson's work, may not actually agree with what I take to be Davidson's view of intentions. For Davidson, intentions are assigned in the process of interpretation, just as beliefs, desires, and the extensions of predicates are assigned. It is difficult to discern how exactly these theorists conceive of intentions, as is perhaps to be expected, since Davidson is concerned with connecting philosophy of language to philosophy of mind, and literary theorists do not feel impelled to delve into the nature of mental events and states. For many literary theorists, intentions seem to be a sort of magical source of meaning which can be attached to utterances. However, since there is no discussion of what exactly intentions are and how they “inform” utterances or texts among literary theorists, the central question is obscure.


Hirsch (1967) takes intentions to be meaning-investing mental states. Fish (2008) more recently seems to take intentions to be self-interpreting thought-tokens that can invest any words with any meaning whatsoever. “That is, an author who wishes to intend something need not bind herself to the word-meaning correlations found in the public language of the day, although she may choose to do so for political or sociological reasons. She can say ‘dogs’ and mean ‘dogs, lions, pigs and snakes;’ she can say ‘dogs’ and mean Newton's Third Law; she can say (or write) ‘dogs’ and mean anything she likes” (Fish 2008: 1123).


However, Walter Benn Michaels's (1989) recent writings on this topic can be understood as employing Davidson's notion of meaning as truth conditions, and intention as Davidsonian action characterization rather than meaning-investing thoughts the author has in mind. The standard example in this literature is the applicability of a statute prohibiting vehicles in a park to motor scooters. Michaels' view is that what the nineteenth-century statute writer intends is the meaning of “vehicle,” so that it is irrelevant that the writer could not have been not thinking of motor scooters. Thus, for Michaels, linguistic intentions of speech acts are given by the truth conditions of the predicate clauses in the writer's idiolect, which is entirely compatible with Davidson's conception of intentions as a part of the “intentional scheme” interpretation framework.


The majority view about the meaning of a text among literary theorists is some kind of conventionalism or other relativism. All such views oppose intentionalism. A conventionalist conception of the meaning of a text appeals to social norms, interpretive communities, or the like to determine the meaning of a text by the interpretive norms of the culture in which the text is read. Conventionalists, reader response theorists, and others who take the meaning of a text to be what the text means to some group are the relativist opponents of intentionalists. Since the norms may be different in different cultures or at different times, the text means different things in those cultures or times. Since readers are different, a text means something different for those readers. So, an author's intentions do not fix the meaning of a text.


Among literary theorists generally, acquaintance with and use of Davidson's writings relevant to these questions, not to mention understanding of them, is rare but not unknown. The contributions of Reed Dasenbrock, Thomas Kent, Stephen Cole, and Paisley Livingston in Dasenbrock (1993) and elsewhere are very knowledgeable direct applications of various writings of Davidson to the question of relativism. Kalle Puolakka (2006) shows a deep understanding of Davidson's variety of intentionalism and anticonventionalism and applies it to current debates in literary theory.

\subsection{3.2. Metaphor}


Davidson's account of metaphor as rhetorical rather than semantic has a great deal of similarity to influential views in literary theory. While neither scholar seems to have been aware of the other, Paul de Man (1979) argues for a similar account of metaphor as a matter of force rather than content, that is, as rhetorical. De Man also shares Davidson's view that there can be no force markers that can be put in words. Wheeler (1989) discusses the close relation of their views and reasons for their views. Words are repeatable, and so detached from the agent's intention. In contemporary literary theory writing, Davidson's account of metaphor is mentioned as among the competitors in general works (Ashton 2006) and occasionally discussed (Novitz 1985; Stroud-Drinkwater 2001).

\section{4. Texts}


Texts have features that are generally not found in speech. Briefly, because they are repeatable as the very same text, texts can be incorporated into other texts. Speech acts, as particular events, cannot be incorporated into other speech acts.


It is not clear, though, that the act–text distinction is the same as the speech–writing distinction. One bard can appropriate lines from another bard, since speech types can be parts of other speech types. Oral literature is text just as written literature is.


Furthermore, writing can be speech act like and speech can be text. Exchanging text messages with the person seated next to you, while it is written communication, has all the features of the speech triangle are present. Speech sampling, as in 2 Live Crew's “Me So Horny,” detaches the auditor from the original speech. Speech samples are texts that can be redone, and Papillon Soo Soo's speech is used with 2 Live Crew's intention.


The important distinction is between acts, which cannot be redone by someone else, and texts, oral or written, which can. When I copy your speech act, it is my speech act with my intention, not yours. The problem is that the intentions that determine meaning for speech acts are not so clear for texts that are repeated as parts, proper or not, of other texts.


Davidson's (1993) essay discussed in Section 1 presupposes that an appropriate model for literary texts and texts generally is an analogue of the speech act in communication by speech. In brief, the model of a literary text is a communication act that, rather than being produced by sounds in an environment, is conveyed by physical mark on paper or a computer screen.


What is a text? One view is inscriptionalism, that a text is a sequence of marks, considered as types of inscriptions (Goodman and Elgin 1986). But even “is an inscription of the letter A” requires appeal to intentions. Whether a physical mark is an inscription and what letter-sequence type it is an inscription of depends on the intention with which it was produced, as reflection on handwriting shows.


A different account of textual identity that comports with Davidson's conception of texts as speech acts would require a copy of a text to have the right kind of connection with an original. According to intentionalism about textual identity, a text is a sequence of marks connected in the right way with a particular writing or speaking act. This would allow that two computer programs written in different computer languages but consisting of the same sequence of characters would be different texts, and that the monkeys who make a sequence of marks that duplicate Shakespeare's \emph{Hamlet} according to some coding procedure have not produced the text of \emph{Hamlet}.


For Davidson, utterances themselves are true, not “true in L,” as would be the case for an inscriptionalist. For Davidson, the “L” is in the utterance itself. So, given Davidson's assimilation of texts to speech acts, he would have an intentionalist account of texts, making textual identity depend on the author's intention. Copies are copies of an original, only if they have the right sort of connection with that original. Tolhurst and Wheeler (1979) present a view of this kind.


As intentionalists emphasize, a sequence of marks is not a text at all unless there is a linguistic intention of which they are the (right kind of) product. Intentionality is part of what it is to be meaningful, in the linguistic sense. But the intentionalist makes the further claim that the intention with which the text is produced \emph{is the meaning of the text}. The difficulty with this second claim is with texts that become parts of other texts. Texts can be incorporated with other intentions into other texts.


To illustrate this phenomenon, I discuss three Biblical texts.


First, consider Deuteronomy 27:15–26. This is a list of 12 curses, the first 11 of which run: “A curse on him who [some sin] \dots{} and the congregation shall say: Amen.” The twelfth curse runs “A curse on him who does not maintain the words of this law [ha-torah hazzeh] by observing them. And all the people shall say: Amen.” The passage is a piece of liturgy being incorporated into Deuteronomy. In the context of this piece of liturgy, the twelfth curse is a meta-curse, and “ha-torah hazzeh,” “this Torah,” refers to the previous 11 curses. However, in verses 3 and 8 of the same chapter, the very same phrase is used to refer to the recapitulation of Mosaic Law, which is Deuteronomy 5–33: Deuteronomy 27:2–3, “\dots{} you are to set up tall stones and coat them with lime\Slash{}and write on them all the words of this law \dots{}”; Deuteronomy 27:8, “On these stones you must write all the words of this law; cut them carefully.” Most importantly, the very next sentence after the meta-curse, Deuteronomy 28:1 runs, “But if you obey the voice of Yahweh your God keeping and observing all those commandments of his that I enjoin on you today [that is, in Moses' speech running from \emph{Deuteronomy} 5–33] Yahweh your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. \dots{}”


In short, the intended reference of the demonstrative in the original liturgical text has, in the incorporation into the larger text by the Deuteronomic author, been understood differently. Since Deuteronomy is originally a separate text, though, the reference is not to the Mosaic Laws found in Exodus or Leviticus.


An even wider reference for “ha-torah hazzeh” is understood in a later text from another scripture. In Galatians 3:10, Paul quotes the same passage, in Greek, as “Accursed is everyone who doesn't follow the things written in the scroll of the law.” “The law” is now referring to the whole Torah, that is, the five Books of Moses, and not just to the commands Moses has transmitted in Deuteronomy, since the Torah scroll is the entire Pentateuch.


Second, consider a passage from Genesis 3: In Genesis 3:8, Adam and Eve hear God walking in the Garden of Eden in the cool of the day, and hide. It comes out that Adam and Eve have violated a prohibition against eating fruit from a particular tree. In 3:22, God observes that “the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to stretch his hand out next and pick from the tree of life also, and eat some and live forever.” The god being spoken of is a physical being with feet, is a member of a population of similar beings, and has to find out where his creatures are. In addition, people can become gods themselves by eating from a magic tree.


But Genesis 3 comes after Genesis 1, where God creates the world and other natural phenomena by ordering it into existence. Considering Genesis 1 and 2 together as a single text with a single author, the anthropomorphisms of Genesis 3 have to be read as figures of speech – God is present in the garden “walking,” so to speak. When God asks questions of humans, they are rhetorical questions. God knows what Adam and Eve have done and what happened to Abel.


According to modern scholarship, the text of Genesis is a compilation of several texts by different authors with (at least) two different characters of “God” with quite distinct natures. Kugel (2007), Chapter 19 discusses scholarly opinions on this topic. In the text, God is called “Elohim” in Genesis 1 and “Yahweh” in Genesis 3. Elohim is a creator by fiat, hovering over the deep; Yahweh is more or less like a human with superpowers. Many passages in the books of the Bible through 2 Kings presuppose a “God of old,” to use James Kugel's (2003) term. The God of old is not a mind reader, has more or less human size and form, can be safely looked upon, and is assumed to be one among several gods.


\emph{Genesis} as we have it is the result of successive compilation and editing over many centuries of multiple texts of various kinds. When this process is being completed, perhaps 450 BCE, the conception of God has evolved a great deal since the time when texts such as Genesis 3 were first written. The last compilers put Genesis 1 before Genesis 3 and understand Genesis 3 metaphorically, because their God has become transcendent, all-powerful, knowing the contents of peoples' minds, the only God there is, and so forth.


The third Biblical example examines some of the consequences of conceiving of the Pentateuch as the Word of God, which has come to be the common understanding by the time of Ezra. As God's word, it must make coherent sense. Genesis 6 and 7 describe the preparations for the great flood. In Genesis 6:19–20, a verse in which God is called “Elohim,” as in Genesis 1, Noah is instructed to take two of each kind of animal. In Genesis 7:2–3, God, now termed “Yahweh,” orders Noah to bring seven pairs of each kind of clean animal and one pair of each kind of unclean animal. So is Noah supposed to bring 14 sheep or two?


Modern scholarship takes these passages to be parts of two distinct narratives, put together by later editors. What this text meant to the last compilers, though, is something else. By 450 BC, the entire Pentateuch is taken to be the word of God. So the apparent inconsistencies, of which we have only given a very few, have to be reconciled. The eleventh-century commentator Rashi's (2001, Genesis 6 and 7) explanation, transmitting the traditional consistency-yielding understanding, is that Genesis 6:19 means “at least two,” so that the instruction in Genesis 7:2–3 is a further instruction about clean animals.

\section{5. Sketch of a Davidsonian Account of Texts}


The three examples of incorporation of texts into other texts illustrate three ways the intention of the original author of an incorporated text can differ from the intention of the author of the incorporating text. The reference of a demonstrative can change from incorporated text to incorporating text. A sentence intended literally in the incorporated text can be meant figuratively in the incorporating text. Two stories whose authors make incompatible claims can both be incorporated into a story making one claim.


The Bible is the text where the question of tracking authorial intention to determine meaning is especially complex. But the Bible is only the most famous example of a text that appropriates other texts. Committee documents, student papers that are pastiches of articles on Hume from the Internet, and many other texts challenge the idea that an authorial intention determines meaning. Consider a few pages of an old paper about whose topic I have changed my mind, which get inserted into my current work with the prefatory “It might be argued that \dots{} ,” and with a “\dots{} but consider the following \dots{}” at the end.


What should Davidson say about such texts? First, these examples are not examples of texts without intentions as their cause. These examples do not speak against a limited intentionalism that claims that nothing is meaningful unless there is an intention to communicate causally responsible for it in the right way. Rather, the example of the Pentateuch and its history and origins challenges the idea that the \emph{meaning} of a text is determined by authorial intention.


What makes the book of \emph{Genesis} a single text rather than several texts jumbled together? Intentionalism is surely right that without an intention behind a collection of marks, that collection cannot be a meaningful text. To view \emph{Genesis as a whole} as a meaningful text has to be to posit a single intention responsible for the text as a whole. A plausible way of making the distinction between a single text and a collection or jumble is the following: To understand a text as a single work is to \emph{ascribe} an intention to the text as a whole – to posit an author, in Foucault's (1979) terms.


Perhaps the right position is a moderate relativism. A given passage in itself means what its author intended. As a part of another author's text, it means what that other author intended. The user's understanding of the text becomes the meaning of the text \emph{as} an element of the user's text.


Suppose we posit a final compiler of the Pentateuch, call him Ezra. If, as in fact happened with the Pentateuch, Ezra's text is itself paraphrased, cited, and in other ways reused with basic linguistic intentions substantially the same as Ezra's, and this continues for 2300 years, it would make sense to say that, for the people understanding the text as Ezra did, the text means (roughly) what Ezra intended. We can ignore other kinds of meaning and intention than linguistic intention. While the Christians understood the Pentateuch's real message as prefiguring Jesus, they understand the events of the narrative as Ezra understood them. Likewise, the Cabalists, while they found further significance in details of the very letters of the text, agreed with Ezra about what the text said, at the linguistic level. We can also ignore the fact that the author posited by those millennia of readers for the Pentateuch was God.


On the other hand, there is reason to say that Genesis as a whole does not mean anything, because there \emph{is} no linguistic intention informing the text as a whole. From the point of view of modern scholarship, Ezra and other redactors misunderstood the texts they were incorporating into their compilations and redactions. So, an argument could be made that \emph{Genesis} as a whole does not mean anything, because it is \emph{not} a whole.


This would be what we might say about \emph{Philosophical Instigation}, a collection of paragraphs in the nachlass of an important philosopher that were taken to be paragraphs he wrote as expressions of a new philosophical theory, but which in fact were his files of student papers responding to the assignment, “Write something short and interesting about language.” Even though admirers of this philosopher have constructed interpretations of the collection that make it provocative and interesting, so that now there are specialists in the subject, one is tempted to say that the text as a whole has \emph{no} meaning. One would continue to say this even though a series of editors had corrected what they came to regard as typographical errors or misstatements, so that the text as it existed hundreds of years after the death of the philosopher was rather different from the original pile of student papers. Fishbane (1985) shows how scribal emendations and corrections changed the text of the Bible.


I do not know what to say, and I do not know what Davidson would say. I will report this: In the late 1980s, I asked Davidson what he would say about texts. He told me that he did not know what to say, because unlike the case with of speech acts, the close connection between intention and result was missing in the case of texts.

\section{References}


\emph{Ashton, J. (2006).} From Modernism to Postmodernism: American Poetry and Theory in the Twentieth Century\emph{. New York: Cambridge University Press.}


Burge, T. (1973). Reference and proper names. \emph{Journal of Philosophy} 70(14):425–439.


Dasenbrock, R.W. (ed.) (1993). \emph{Literary Theory After Davidson}. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.


Davidson, D. (1974a). What metaphors mean. \emph{Critical Inquiry} 5:31–47.


\emph{———. (1974b). On the very idea of a conceptual scheme.} Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association \emph{47:5–20.}


———. (1984). Communication and convention. \emph{Synthese} 59(1):3–17.


———. (1986). A nice derangement of epitaphs. In \emph{Philosophical Grounds of Rationality: Intentions, Categories, Ends}, R. Grandy and R. Warner (eds). Oxford: Clarenden Press, pp. 157–174.


———. (1991). James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty. \emph{Midwest Studies in Philosophy} 16:1–12.


———. (1992). The second person. \emph{Midwest Studies in Philosophy} 17(1):255–267.


———. (1993). Locating literary language. In Dasenbrock (1993): 295–308.


De Man, P. (1979). \emph{Allegories of Reading}. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.


Fish, S. (2008). Intention is all there is: a critical analysis of Aharon Barak's purposive interpretation in law. \emph{Cardozo Law Review} 29(3):1109–1146.


Fishbane, M. (1985). \emph{Biblical Interpretation in Ancient Israel}. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


Foucault, M. (1979). What is an author? In \emph{Textual Strategies}, J.V. Harari (ed.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 141–160.


Goodman, N.G. and Elgin, C.Z. (1986). Interpretation and identity: can the work survive the world? \emph{Critical Inquiry} 12(3):564–575.


Hirsch, E.D. (1967). \emph{Validity in Interpretation}. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.


Knapp, S. and Michaels, W.B. (1982). Against theory. \emph{Critical Inquiry} 8(4):723–742.


———. (1987). Against theory 2: hermeneutics and deconstruction. \emph{Critical Inquiry} 14(1):49–68.


Kripke, S. (2011). \emph{Philosophical Troubles: Collected Papers} (Volume 1). New York: Oxford University Press.


Kugel, J. (2003). \emph{The God of Old}. New York: The Free Press.


———. (2007). \emph{How to Read the Bible}. New York: The Free Press.


Michaels, W.B. (1989). Intentionalism, again. \emph{Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature} 1(1):89–96.


Novitz, D. (1985). Metaphor, Derrida, and Davidson. \emph{The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism} 44(2):101–114.


Puolakka, K. (2006). There's a nice knockdown argument for you: Donald Davidson and modest intentionalism. \emph{Postgraduate Journal of Aesthetics} 3(1):15–24.


Rashi[Shlomo Yitzhaki] (2001). Chabad.org. 2001. The complete Jewish Bible with Rashi commentary. \_\href{http://www.chabad.org/library/bible\_cdo/aid/8171/showrashi/true/jewish/\_}{www.chabad.org} (accessed March 3, 2013).


Stroud-Drinkwater, C. (2001). Stevens and Davidson's concept of metaphor. \emph{English Studies} 3:247–252.


Tolhurst, W. and Wheeler, S. (1979). On textual individuation. \emph{Philosophical Studies} 35:187–197.


Wheeler, S. (1989). Metaphor in Davidson and DeMan. In \emph{Redrawing the Lines}, R.W. Dasenbrock (ed.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 116–139.

\part{Part IV: Philosophy of Mind}

\chapter{23. The Larger Philosophical Significance of Holism}


Carol Rovane

\section{The Larger Philosophical Significance of Holism}


In the second half of “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Quine opposed an atomistic picture of confirmation, on which each sentence of a theory has a separate and unique confirmation condition in the light of which it can be confirmed on its own, independently of the rest of the theory.\footnote{W.V. Quine (1953), “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” in \emph{From a Logical Point of View}. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.} Quine's startling insight in that article was that this second dogma of empiricism is at bottom \emph{the same} as the one against which he had argued first, the analytic–synthetic distinction. According to him, the reason why there is no clear distinction between analytic sentences (sentences that are true solely by virtue of meaning) versus synthetic sentences (sentences that are true by virtue of extralinguistic facts) is that theories must meet the tribunal of experience \emph{as wholes}, and there are always multiple ways to adjust one's theory in response to unanticipated experiences. By linking the two dogmas of empiricism in this way, Quine developed what might be called \emph{confirmation holism} into a much more \emph{thoroughgoing holism}.


The emergent thoroughgoing holism is actually threefold. First, there is a holistic interdependence of belief and meaning, which is what speaks most directly against the two dogmas of empiricism. But this interdependence could not be a \emph{holistic} interdependence unless there were underlying holisms of each, of belief on the one hand and of meaning on the other. What this means in the case of belief is that the content of any particular belief is given by its place in a whole system of beliefs, whence Quine's metaphor of the \emph{web of belief}.\footnote{W.V. Quine and S. Ullian (1978), \emph{The Web of Belief}, New York: McGraw-Hill.} In his other work in philosophy of language, he explored what appeared to him to be problematic implications of thoroughgoing holism for the concept of meaning, by arguing for the indeterminacy of translation and the inscrutability of reference.\footnote{W.V. Quine (1960), \emph{Word and Object}, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.}


Davidson embraced Quine's holism without qualification, and indeed, he was able to do so much more wholeheartedly than Quine himself, who almost schizophrenically retained the second dogma of empiricism, the theory–observation distinction, in some of his writings by introducing such notions as \emph{stimulus-meaning} and \emph{empirically equivalent systems of the world} – notions that Davidson rejected as unintelligible. For him, the more important thing was to gain a proper appreciation of the larger significance of holism. Thus, in his view, if holism brings in train the indeterminacy of translation and the inscrutability of reference, these are not to be viewed as \emph{problems} for the theory of meaning but as \emph{insights} into the nature of meaning.\footnote{See his essays collected in D. Davidson (1984), \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}, Oxford: Oxford University Press.} He also saw the philosophical significance of holism as reaching beyond the theory of meaning – bringing it to bear, for example, in his much-discussed argument against relativism, which Richard Rorty described as “the transcendental argument to end all transcendental arguments.”\footnote{See his 1974 Presidential Address to the American Philosophical Association, reprinted in Davidson (1984).}


The role of holism in Davidson's argument against relativism sometimes goes unnoticed, and this is understandable since he did not make it entirely explicit. He made much more explicit use of the principle of charity, which is another commitment that he took over from Quine along with holism. Precisely because he viewed the principle of charity as holding a broad, and even momentous, philosophical significance, he showed much more concern than Quine ever did to establish \emph{why} it is warranted. The implicit role that holism played in his argument against relativism derives from the explicit role it played in his understanding of what warrants charity.


When we view Davidson's argument against relativism in the way I am proposing, it is tempting to cast his conclusion in terms that he rejected as mistaken, as follows: if there are not any \emph{alternative} conceptual schemes of the sort that relativists posit, then there is just \emph{one} such scheme. The mistake Davidson saw in this way of putting his conclusion is that it leaves an impression that there is a \emph{scheme–content distinction}, whereas he took the lesson of his argument to be that there is no such distinction. He cast that distinction as a third dogma of empiricism, to be set alongside the other two against which Quine had argued.


Davidson did not see the philosophical mistake of positing a scheme–content distinction as being confined to empiricism. He saw it as a mistake shared by all philosophers who portray our epistemic relation to the external world as \emph{mediated} in one way or another by “subjective” objects to which we have immediate access in thought, such as ideas, perceptions, theories, conceptual schemes, and so on.\footnote{See “The Myth of the Subjective,” in D. Davidson (2001), \emph{Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective}, Oxford: Oxford University Press.} When we see our epistemic contact with extramental reality as mediated in one or another of these ways, we are prone to see a threat of skepticism, and we may be tempted to try to avoid that threat via a retreat to idealism, of which radical empiricism is a variety. According to Davidson, no such threat of skepticism, or temptation to idealism, arises once we give up the scheme–content distinction, because then we can see ourselves as having \emph{unmediated} epistemic access to extramental reality.


Davidson clearly drew satisfaction from the thought that there is a single philosophical “mistake” that underlies both relativism and skepticism. But I have argued elsewhere that that thought is itself mistaken. The threat of relativism is \emph{not} one that can be laid to rest by refuting skepticism along Davidsonian lines: even if we accept his claim that skeptics are mistaken when they suppose that we have only mediated epistemic access to reality, we still have further work to do in order to refute relativism.\footnote{I clarify this point in C. Rovane (2010), “Why Scientific Realism May not Refute Relativism,” in M. De Caro and D. MacArthur (eds), \emph{Naturalism and Normativity}, New York: Columbia University Press, and also in Rovane (2013), \emph{The Metaphysics and Ethics of Relativism}, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.}


This is not an obvious point. One reason why is that the word “relativism” is often used to denote a general hostility to all forms of “objectivity,” and given this usage, it is bound to seem natural and fitting that a single argument might undermine both relativism and skepticism together. Yet surely there is little point in having the term “relativism” unless there is a definite philosophical doctrine that it might be used to denote, which is distinct from other philosophical doctrines that already go by other names, such as skepticism, idealism, nihilism, and so on. Until we formulate exactly what the relativist's distinctive commitment is supposed to be, we cannot be sure how it relates to skepticism, or whether it might be undermined by an antiskeptical argument.


The main twentieth-century debates about relativism generally proceeded without providing such a clear formulation. More recent discussions have tried to do better, by formulating relativism as arising with a special kind of relativism-inducing disagreement in which both parties are, or at least can be, right.\footnote{See S. Hales (2011), \emph{A Companion to Relativism}, Oxford: Basil Blackwell for a wide-ranging collection of recent articles.} Yet it is striking that the idea of a disagreement barely surfaced in the earlier debates, which tended to be framed in terms of a rather vague and underspecified idea, namely, the idea of an \emph{alternative}. That idea was certainly among Davidson's targets: along with the “very idea” of a conceptual scheme, it was \emph{alternative} conceptual schemes against which he was arguing.


Unlike his main interlocutors in the twentieth-century debates about relativism, Davidson made an effort to clarify the idea of an alternative, by offering the following explicit definition: alternative conceptual schemes are expressed in languages that are \emph{true but not translatable}. Although this definition is a good first step toward formulating the doctrine of relativism, it does not fully bring out what the distinctive philosophical commitment of the relativist is supposed to be. I shall take several further steps in that direction, so as to formulate the doctrine as carrying a distinctive philosophical commitment that is at once logical, metaphysical, and practical.\footnote{For a more sustained development and defense of this formulation, see Rovane (2013) and also Rovane (2008), “Did Williams Find the Truth in Relativism?” in D. Callcut (ed.), \emph{Reading Bernard Williams}, London: Routledge; Rovane (2011), “Relativism Requires Alternatives, not Disagreement or Relative Truth,” in Hales (2011); Rovane (2012), “How to Formulate Relativism,” in A. Coliva (ed.), \emph{Language, Meaning and Mind: Themes from the Philosophy of Crispin Wright}, Oxford: Oxford University Press.} Since my proposed formulation aims to capture the very same intuitive conception of relativism that Davidson aimed to capture, it should not be surprising if it can be resisted on Davidsonian grounds.


In Section 1, I will begin by spelling out Davidson's vision of holism and its relation to the principle of charity. Then I will briefly review some of the more familiar problems that holism generates and explain why he was not deterred by them – rightly so in my view.


In Section 2, I will turn to the issue of relativism. I will elaborate the idea of an alternative in such a way as to afford a crisp formulation of the issue that divides relativists from their opponents, and I will show that Davidson's proposed criterion of alternativeness tracks that issue.


In Section 3, I will review Davidson's argument against the possibility of alternative conceptual schemes, and show how his argumentative strategy can be brought to bear against relativism as I propose to formulate it – highlighting the central role of holism in both.


In Section 4, I will offer a brief, concluding discussion of two issues – how Davidson's argumentative strategy against relativism fares against Kuhn, and what it shows about Quine's metaphor of the web of belief.

\section{1. Holism and Charity Defended}


When Quine introduced the principle of charity, he did not link it with holism. He merely pointed out that we cannot translate the sentences that a person utters without also, at the same time, attributing beliefs to her. He also pointed out there is always more than one way to do this, and he counseled us to choose a “charitable” translation on which a person emerges as having true beliefs rather than false ones. For example, suppose that a person utters the sentence, “It is much better to travel by plane than by train.” As a natural first step in trying to understand this utterance, we might choose a homophonic translation that allows us to attribute to the subject the belief that it is better to travel by plane than by train. But suppose she goes on to utter the sentence, “The reason I prefer planes is that they run on tracks, and so they do not require good visibility to run and can still run even when it snows.” At that point, we must weigh the following options (I am mentioning only the most salient and obvious, but there are others we might also consider): we can suppose that she is using the word “planes” to refer to planes and attribute to her the false belief that planes run on tracks, or we can suppose that she is using the word “planes” to refer to trains and attribute to her the true belief that trains run on tracks. Charity instructs us to prefer the latter interpretation.


Of course, the “truths” that we charitably take others to believe are truths by our \emph{own} lights, and the question arises, why are we entitled to suppose that charity does not amount to an unwarranted \emph{projection} of our own worldview onto them? Davidson saw the force of this question, and worked out that holism provides a good answer to it. He maintained that the impression of an unwarranted projection recedes when we reflect on the fact that in addition to the holistic interdependence of beliefs and meanings, there are underlying holisms of beliefs and meanings themselves. Given these holisms, we cannot intelligibly attribute any false beliefs to someone, unless they are set against a background of true beliefs. It follows that a charitable approach to interpretation is indeed warranted, because there is no way we could possibly avoid it.


Take the belief, false by our lights, that trees grow on Mars. We could not possibly have grounds on which to attribute this false belief to someone unless we could also attribute a substantial background of true beliefs about trees and growing and Mars, such as: that a tree has a main trunk or shoot from which smaller branches grow, and that it has leaves or needles as well as roots, and so on; that when living things grow they generally increase in size, and this change is only one among many characteristic changes that take place in their life cycle from birth through maturation to death, and so on; that Mars is a planet and not a star, and so on. Absent these true background beliefs, we would have no grounds on which to suppose that it is really \emph{trees} that are at issue, or that trees are believed to be \emph{growing}, or that trees are believed to grow on \emph{Mars}.


If there is any residual worry that a charitable approach might somehow involve an unwarranted projection of our own beliefs onto others, it can be allayed by reflecting on the fact that when charity is driven by holism, it sometimes requires us to see ourselves in disagreement with others, because the nature of holistic constraints is such that we can sometimes improve overall intelligibility by attributing some false beliefs to them as well as true ones. Thus, if someone seems to have largely true beliefs about trees and growing and Mars, and seems to consistently use certain words to refer to trees and growing and Mars, and goes on to use those very words in order to say “Trees grow on Mars,” the most charitable interpretation will attribute the false belief that those words seem to express. For consider what would happen if we were determined to see that utterance as expressing a true belief. Not only would we would be deliberately ignoring the holistic constraints that invited the attribution of the false belief to begin with, but also, it would be completely unclear what true belief we could intelligibly attribute instead. If we believe that there is no life on Mars, then either we must suppose that the person is talking about Mars but not about trees and growing, or we must suppose that she is talking about trees and growing but not about Mars. Neither supposition would be warranted unless we could find a surround of true beliefs that would nail down what the person \emph{is} talking about, and as the case had been described, there simply is not any. We could imagine the case differently of course – we could imagine, for example, that there is a remote place on Earth that the person calls “Mars” and that trees grow there. But then the person would have to be prepared to affirm related true beliefs about the place on Earth called “Mars,” such as “Mars is not a planet,” “Mars is located at a particular latitude and longitude on Earth,” and so on, whereas we are envisaging a case in which the person's other claims about Mars express true beliefs about the fourth planet from the sun. To reiterate the point that the envisaged case helps to make vivid: charity cannot be an unwarranted projection of our own beliefs onto others if it actually requires us to attribute to them false beliefs as well.


Davidson did much more to show that the principle of charity is supported by holism than he did to show what supports holism itself. So let me briefly consider two important objections that have been raised against holism, and lay out what the Davidsonian defense of holism should be.\footnote{These and other problems for holism are documented in J. Fodor and E. Lepore (1992), \emph{Holism: A Shopper's Guide}, Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.}


The first objection is that there is no \emph{argument} for holism. If what is meant by “argument” is an a priori argument from first principles, then it seems to me that the contention of this objection is correct, for the only way I can see to become convinced of holism is through sustained empirical observation. We need to take up specific beliefs, and observe how their contents reflect their relations to other beliefs, and how the contents of those beliefs in turn reflect their relations to still further beliefs, and so on indefinitely. The correct Davidsonian response to this objection, then, is that the \emph{truth} of holism is not compromised by the fact that it can only be established on the basis of empirical observation and not through a priori argument.\footnote{If we accept the lessons of Quine's “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” we shall have to admit that nothing is purely a priori in the philosophers' preferred sense, because nothing in the web of belief is exempt from revision in the light of new information.}


Some philosophers are unconvinced by the empirical grounds for holism because they think there are a priori arguments against it, and this brings me to the second objection I want to consider: if the content of any particular belief is determined by its position within a web of interrelated beliefs, it appears to follow that two subjects cannot share \emph{any} beliefs unless they share \emph{all} of their beliefs – unless they agree about \emph{everything}; it also appears to follow that a single subject cannot think the same thought twice if she undergoes any changes of mind in the intervening time. This objection has been taken to show that holism precludes a science of the mind, because if beliefs generally cannot be shared across subjects, or across time within a single subject, then they cannot figure in psychological laws.\footnote{William James, perhaps the most radical holist ever, did not see this as ruling out a science of the mind. See W. James (1890), \emph{The Principles of Psychology}, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1981).} It has also been taken to show that holism makes the possibility of gradually acquiring beliefs unintelligible, since it entails that we cannot acquire any of them in advance of acquiring the whole to which they belong.


Rather than focus on the issue of whether subjects can share any beliefs at all, Davidson tended to emphasize that believers cannot \emph{fail} to agree with one another \emph{by and large}. The language of “by and large” indicates that he saw the sharing of beliefs (and correlatively, meanings) as a matter of degree; and when we view it this way, this second objection against holism is far less powerful, since something short of \emph{perfect} agreement about \emph{everything} can suffice for sharing particular agreements about this and that.\footnote{See A. Bilgrami (1992), \emph{Belief and Meaning}, Oxford: Basil Blackwell for an account of how we might incorporate these aspects of holism within the theory of meaning, including an account of how and when we may suppose that two subjects share psychological attitudes when they fall short of perfect agreement on everything.} Holism still does have an awkward implication, however: if we do not share \emph{enough} background beliefs with someone, then we cannot share \emph{any}. Davidson saw no reason to deny this, and in fact, it was on this basis that he denied that animals without language can think.\footnote{See “Rational Animals” in Davidson (2001).} He also openly declared a science of the mind to be impossible, and he simply set aside the problem of how we initially acquire beliefs as having no particular significance for a correct philosophical understanding of intentionality.\footnote{See essays under the heading of \emph{Philosophy of Psychology} in Davidson (1980).}

\section{2. How to Formulate Relativism}


In recent discussions of relativism, the central task has been to formulate the doctrine in a clear and coherent way. On the favored formulation, relativism arises with a certain kind of disagreement that is said to be irresoluble for an unusual reason, which is that both parties in the disagreement are actually \emph{right}. But this formulation has a serious drawback, which is that it saddles the relativist with a commitment to allowing violations of the law of noncontradiction. The usual response to this difficulty is to portray truth as relative to context, and it has two advantages: first, it removes the appearance of any outright contradiction, and second, it incorporates a very standard intuition about what relativism \emph{is} – namely, a metaphysical vision of truth as relative.\footnote{See Kolbel (2002), \emph{Truth Without Objectivity}, London: Routledge for a widely cited account of relative truth.} Yet despite this advantage, it simply is not plausible that the formulation of relativism in terms of disagreement can be saved in this way, because insofar as relativizing truth to context really does remove the appearance of a contradiction, it will remove the appearance of a disagreement as well.\footnote{See J. MacFarlane (2005), “Making Sense of Relative Truth,” \emph{Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society} 105:321–339 for an innovative attempt to get out of this difficulty. However, see chapter 1 of Rovane (2013) for a critical discussion.}


As I have said, when Davidson set out to refute relativism, he did not have in view the currently favored formulation. He had in view the main twentieth-century debates about relativism, which tended not to mention the idea of disagreement, but appealed to the much more obscure idea of an \emph{alternative}. Davidson sensibly tried to clarify the idea before arguing against it, by explicitly defining alternatives as arising when conceptual schemes are \emph{true but not translatable}. What I now want to do is to further develop his definition, with a view to capturing even better what I see as the distinctive philosophical commitment of the relativist.


It is an unstated presupposition of Davidson's definition that alternative conceptual schemes cannot be embraced together – after all, if they could, then they would be parts of a larger, more comprehensive scheme, and then we would not be faced with anything that deserves to be called \emph{alternative} conceptual schemes. I am going to take this presupposition as my own starting point. That is, I am going to begin by defining alternatives, as \emph{truths that cannot be embraced together}.\footnote{It might be objected that I have overstated my case for finding the seeds of my own definition of alternativeness in Davidson's definition of alternative conceptual schemes. He defines them as arising when languages are true but not translatable, and prima facie, it seems conceivable that two people might speak different languages that are not translatable into one another, and then subsequently each finds that she can acquire the other's language. In that case, their conceptual schemes could be embraced together, and so they would not satisfy my definition of alternativeness even though they are expressly being conceived as satisfying Davidson's definition. However, this “conception” clearly does not cohere with the intuitive notion of alternativeness that Davidson was trying to capture with his definition. He was trying to capture the notion of alternativeness that Whorf and others had in mind when they suggested that subjects from different cultures, communities, theoretical paradigms, and so on, speak different languages. \emph{They} did not think that all such subjects can learn from one another, so as to combine what they all respectively think and say into one grand, all-inclusive conceptual scheme. The whole point of introducing the idea of alternativeness was to signal a form of \emph{exclusion}, and \emph{that} is what my definition aims to capture. Another way to put my point, then, is that Davidson was implicitly operating with a notion of “language” on which genuinely \emph{distinct} languages are not combinable in the way that the objection being considered here supposes. I thank Kirk Ludwig for pressing me to clarify this point.}


My definition points to an immediate difficulty, which takes the form of the following \emph{dilemma for alternativeness}: any pair of truth-value-bearers are either inconsistent or consistent; if they are inconsistent, then they cannot be embraced together but they also cannot both be true; if they are consistent, then they can both be true but can also be embraced together; in neither case do we have alternatives as I have defined them, as truths that cannot be embraced together. In virtually any discussion of relativism, this dilemma is likely to be invoked against the very idea of an alternative – usually along the following (exasperated) lines: \emph{What makes conceptual schemes alternatives to one another? Is it that they logically conflict? If so, then we have just an ordinary case of disagreement. If not, then what could possibly make them competitors? There is no distinctively relativist position to be made out here!} I do not take this to show that my definition of alternatives is a poor starting point for trying to develop an adequate formulation of the doctrine of relativism. I take it rather to confirm that this idea of an alternative is central to our intuitive conception of the doctrine of relativism – the dilemma for alternativeness would not be so routinely invoked against the doctrine unless it were so.


The centrality of the idea of an alternative to our intuitive conception of relativism is further confirmed by the more recent discussions that have focused on the idea of a relativism-inducing disagreement. Advocates of that idea implicitly concede that relativism arises with alternatives in the sense that I have defined, and they also implicitly recognize that we cannot make sense of alternatives so defined without providing a direct response to the dilemma. Their own response is to flatly reject the dilemma's first horn. In other words, when they affirm the possibility of relativism-inducing disagreements in which both parties are right, they are affirming that some truths cannot be embraced together for the specific reason that they are inconsistent. When I objected earlier that this saddles the relativist with allowing violations of the law of noncontradiction, I was indicating that we should accept the first horn of the dilemma – inconsistent truth-value-bearers \emph{cannot} be equally true.


If we cannot save the idea of an alternative by rejecting the dilemma's first horn, we cannot save it by rejecting the second horn either – when consistent truth-value-bearers are true they can certainly be embraced together. So if there is room for the idea of an alternative, it must lie in a third possibility that the dilemma overlooks, and there is only one such possibility to consider, which is that in some cases truth-value-bearers are neither inconsistent nor consistent. These, then, are the terms in which I propose to formulate the doctrine of relativism. \emph{Relativism arises with alternatives, which are truths that cannot be embraced together for the specific reason that they are neither inconsistent nor consistent.}


There are three related ways to frame the issue that emerges as the real dividing issue between relativists and their opponents when we formulate relativism in the way I'm proposing – it is at once a logical issue, a metaphysical issue, and a practical issue.


The logical issue concerns whether logical relations run everywhere, among all truth-value-bearers, for if truth-value-bearers are neither inconsistent nor consistent, then they fail to stand in any logical relations at all. What I mean by a logical relation is a relation that licenses and prohibits inferences among truth-value-bearers. Thus, when two truth-value-bearers stand in the logical relation of inconsistency, we are licensed to infer from the truth of one the falsehood of the other, and also the falsehood of their conjunction; and when they are consistent, we are licensed to infer from their truth that their conjunction is also true. But when they are neither inconsistent nor consistent, no such inferences are licensed. So on my formulation, relativists hold that some truth-value-bearers are alternatives because they do not stand in any logical relations, while the opponents of relativism hold that this is never so – all truth-value-bearers stand in logical relations to one another.


The logical issue that divides relativists from their opponents carries the following metaphysical significance: if logical relations run everywhere among all truth-value-bearers, then all of the true ones are consistent and conjoinable, and in that case, they together constitute a single, comprehensive body of truths, all of which can in principle be embraced together. If we agree with the early Wittgenstein that the world is all that is the case, then to say that there is such a single, comprehensive body of truths, all of which can be embraced together, is to say that there is just \emph{one world}. When the relativist affirms that there are alternatives, she is affirming that there is not just one world in this sense, but rather \emph{many worlds}, each of which is constituted by a noncomprehensive body of truths that can be embraced together, where these different bodies of truths that cannot themselves be embraced together. This metaphysical issue that divides relativists from their opponents can be summed up as \emph{Multimundialism} versus \emph{Unimundialism}.


The practical issue that arises from these logical and metaphysical differences concerns the possibility of normative engagement. If logical relations run everywhere among all truth-value-bearers, as the Unimundialist opponents of relativism hold, then whenever we come across any truth-value-bearer we can never be wholly indifferent to it, because it is bound to be either inconsistent with what we already believe or consistent with it, and these logical relations always exert \emph{normative pressure} on us. When we come across inconsistent ones, we must respond in one of three ways: either we must reject them as false, or we must change our minds so as to accommodate their truth, or we must suspend belief on whether they are true (which also involves suspending our prior beliefs that are inconsistent with them). When we come across consistent ones, we are not bound to accept them as true, but nevertheless, we are bound to regard them as candidates for belief by us depending upon whether they satisfy relevant evidentiary requirements. In contrast, if logical relations do not run everywhere, as relativists hold when they are Multimundialists, then we may come across truth-value-bearers that exert no normative pressure on us at all. They cannot rule out our prior beliefs as false, and even when we allow that they are true, they are not candidates for belief by us either. Alternatives are, as I shall put it, \emph{normatively insulated} from one another, owing to the fact that they fail to stand in logical relations with one another.


This brings me to a point about the social significance of relativism. If we ever did allow that there are alternatives that are normatively insulated from our own beliefs, and recognized them as truths that cannot be embraced together with our own, we could not regard them as universal truths that hold for everyone; they would not be truths for us but truths for others who occupy different worlds from ours; and if we were to encounter such others, there would be no possibility of normative engagement with them concerning what is true – we would not have anything to teach them or to learn from them.


Davidson did not clearly recognize the possibility of normative insularity, and so he did not have the conceptual resources with which to formulate relativism as Multimundialism. Nevertheless, if there \emph{could} be alternative conceptual schemes as he defined them, as \emph{true but not translatable}, they would be normatively insulated from one another. For if such schemes were not normatively insulated from one another – if they stood in logical relations – then either they would be inconsistent or they would be consistent; if they were inconsistent, then they could not both be true; if they were consistent then they could be embraced together as part of a single, more comprehensive scheme; so in neither case would we have genuinely \emph{distinct} schemes that are true but not translatable.


What I have just done, of course, is show that unless alternative conceptual schemes as Davidson defined them were normatively insulated from one another, they would be logically ruled out by the dilemma for alternativeness. In my personal conversations with him, Davidson certainly indicated that he thought that they \emph{are} logically ruled out.\footnote{The logicians I have consulted do not see normative insularity as logically ruled out, but as calling for a specific kind of formal treatment.} But his anticonceptual schemes argument provides a much more interesting and deep response to the relativist, to which I now turn.

\section{3. The Davidsonian Strategy Against Relativism}


My discussion of holism and charity in Section 2 already laid down the main lines of Davidson's argument against the possibility of alternative conceptual schemes as he defined them, as \emph{true but not translatable}: given the interdependence of belief and meaning, and given the respective holisms of each, we cannot assign meanings to someone's words without finding that those words express beliefs that are, by and large, the same as ours; this guarantees that their language will express beliefs that are true by our lights, and hence be translatable into ours.


Before considering how this argument applies to the issue of relativism as I have formulated it, in terms of Multimundialism versus Unimundialism, I want first to acknowledge a fairly obvious limitation on its conclusion. We may accept Davidson's premises and the cogency of his reasoning, and yet doubt whether he succeeded in establishing a metaphysical conclusion to the effect that alternative conceptual schemes are \emph{impossible}, as opposed to a weaker epistemological conclusion that if there were any alternative conceptual schemes, they would be unknowable by us. All we need to do is to conceive a spectrum of subjects on which near neighbors have small differences in their beliefs but share enough to be mutually intelligible, and then imagine that as we move along the spectrum, these small differences accumulate so that very distant subjects do not share any beliefs at all. Davidson clearly aimed to rule out the possibility of this spectrum when he argued against the possibility of “partial” translatability. But he could not plausibly deny the possibility of \emph{very small} differences in beliefs and meanings, and that is all we need to get the spectrum argument going. So the better response on his part would have been to say that his argument against alternative conceptual schemes reduces them to an \emph{idle metaphysical possibility} that lies beyond the limits of our knowledge. This is still a significant antirelativist result because it shows that we could never \emph{encounter} an alternative conceptual scheme and, as a result, there is no scope for a \emph{lived} relativism.\footnote{That Davidson thought he could rule out the metaphysical possibility of alternative conceptual schemes shows a transcendental tendency – a tendency to conceive reality in terms that guarantee its knowability by us.}


Skeptical possibilities, such as that we might always be dreaming or might really be brains in vats, are similarly \emph{idle} – because if they were ever realized we would not know it. This is another reason, over and above the general impression that relativists are hostile to the very idea of “objectivity,” why it may seem plausible that a single argument should rule out both relativism and skepticism at once. However, there is a very important difference between the idle metaphysical possibility posited by the spectrum argument above and the various metaphysical possibilities raised by skeptics: the point of raising skeptical possibilities is to show that our current beliefs might be \emph{false}, whereas, even if there were alternative conceptual schemes of the sort posited by the spectrum argument, they would not pose any challenge to the truth of our current beliefs; to allow that they are possible would merely be to allow that there may be some matters about which we shall forever remain ignorant.\footnote{It may be that the possibility of alternatives unknowable by us is not \emph{entirely} idle. I have argued elsewhere (Rovane 2010, 2013) that Chomsky's vision of cognitive abilities as essentially limiting provides us with scientific grounds on which to take it seriously.}


Here is how Davidson's anticonceptual schemes argument might be tailored to address the possibility of alternatives as I have defined them, as \emph{truths that cannot be embraced together because they are normatively insulated from one another}: if beliefs and meanings are individuated by their places in a web of beliefs and meanings, then they are bound to stand in myriad logical relations, and they will never be normatively insulated from one another. I shall call this \emph{the argument from holism against normative insularity}.


This argument cannot succeed unless holism is \emph{so completely thoroughgoing} that it rules out the possibility of \emph{multiple} webs of belief and meaning, within which all truth-value-bearers stand in logical relations but across which no logical relations reach. Davidson clearly thought that holism \emph{is} completely thoroughgoing in this way. But the same spectrum argument that I offered above can be repeated, to show that he did not establish the metaphysical impossibility of normative insularity, but only its unknowability by us. In other words, what he showed (if his argument is sound) is that it is a condition on any belief being intelligible \emph{to us} that it have a definite logical relation to the rest of our web of beliefs, and this is so even when it is a belief that we do not ourselves endorse (as we saw in the case of the false belief that trees grow on Mars). Insofar as this really is so, we shall never encounter normative insularity, and we shall never have an occasion to adopt the normatively disengaged stance of the relativist. To put it another way, everyone whom we can understand is someone who occupies, and aims to know, the very same world that we do.

\section{4. Two Further Issues}


The Davidsonian argument against relativism I have offered – the argument from holism against normative insularity – is so broad and general that it is hard to evaluate. In closing, I want to briefly explore what the argument implies about relativism in the domain of natural facts open to scientific investigation, and how we need to reenvision Quine's metaphor of the web of belief in its light.\footnote{Davidson took it for granted that his anticonceptual schemes argument carries over straightforwardly to domains of value. But see chapter 4 of Rovane (2013) for a more cautious account of why normative insularity might not be ruled out in the domain of moral values.}

\subsection{4.1. Incommensurability in science}


When Kuhn argued for incommensurability in science, he claimed that holism is \emph{not entirely} thoroughgoing in the way Davidson contended – because different theoretical paradigms create separate webs of belief that do not share any meanings.\footnote{T.S. Kuhn (1962) \emph{The Structure of Scientific Revolutions}, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.} His claim is reminiscent of the second objection to holism that I considered earlier: if beliefs and meanings are individuated by their places in a whole system of beliefs and meanings, then no two people (and no single person at different times) can share any beliefs and meanings without sharing all of them. So in the context of science: if two scientific theories use what appear to be the same theoretical terms, but make substantially different claims about the nature of the theoretical entities denoted by those terms, then they cannot really be talking about the same thing. There is a corollary point that mattered most of all to Kuhn: given the absence of shared meanings between two rival scientific theories, there is no common, theory-neutral evidence base from which to comparatively evaluate them – hence his claim that such theories are \emph{incommensurable}.


Although Kuhn often described scientists who hold incommensurable theories as working in different “worlds,” his position fell short of relativism as I have formulated it, as Multimundialism, because he did not go so far as to argue that incommensurable theories are or can be \emph{equally true}. The issue that primarily concerned him was epistemological rather than metaphysical – that there is no theory-neutral basis on which to settle scientific differences. This may be so even if there is only \emph{one natural world} to inquire into rather than many – that is, even if there is a single, comprehensive body of scientific truths out there waiting to be discovered, all of which can in principle be embraced together.


All the same, Kuhn's position has often been regarded as carrying a threat of relativism, and Davidson intended his anticonceptual schemes argument to stave off that threat by establishing that scientists who hold different theories must agree \emph{by and large} about what the world is like. If he was right, then holism would indeed be thoroughgoing, and the argument from holism against normative insularity would be fully vindicated, at least in the domain of natural facts studied by science.


It would take much more sustained investigation to establish that Davidson was indeed right about this, but here is a rough indication of the sorts of agreement he thought \emph{are} in place across theoretical paradigms in science. He had in mind first of all a great many details that are so familiar and so banal that they might not seem philosophically significant – grass is green, the sky is blue, human beings walk on two feet, many other animals crawl on all fours, snakes slither, birds fly, and so on. He also had in mind some very basic and uncontroversial metaphysical distinctions – between living and nonliving things, animate and inanimate living things, minded and mindless things, and so on. To this we might add some obvious forms of order in nature – the locatedness of natural phenomena in a spatiotemporal framework, and the predictable patterns of change through which we track days, months, years, the life-cycles of living things, and so on (these are among the “regularities” that Hume argued are ubiquitous in our experience, and underlie all causal reasoning even outside science).


When Feyerabend argued against the scientific realist's picture of scientific knowledge as cumulative, he argued that if successive scientific theories can be portrayed as preserving the same inductive regularities, then likewise, successive scientific theories can be portrayed as preserving the same inductive regularities that are recognized by \emph{non}scientific theories as well (myths, folklore, religion).\footnote{P. Feyerabend (1965) in R.G. Colodny (1965) ed., \emph{Beyond the Edge of Certainty: Essays in Contemporary Science and Philosophy}, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.} He intended this as a negative point against the special epistemic status of science, but Davidson affirmed the same point in a completely positive spirit. Because the domain of natural facts is marked by a thoroughgoing holism, even the most radical scientific differences are best viewed as theoretical disagreements in which scientists offer rival explanations of a huge mass of interrelated matters of natural fact – numerous, detailed, banal, and inductively tractable in myriad ways – on which they by and large agree.

\subsection{4.2. Reenvisioning Quine's metaphor of the web of belief}


On Quine's picture, our system of beliefs is an interconnected whole in which every belief is answerable to experience and potentially revisable in response to it. Yet according to him, there is within this whole a distinction between what lies on the periphery and what lies at the center. He characterized this distinction in two different ways that he saw as going together. On one characterization, the beliefs that lie at the periphery are more observational, while the beliefs that lie at the center are more theoretical. On the other characterization, the beliefs that lie at the periphery are more easily revised without disturbing the rest of the web, whereas the beliefs that lie at the center are less easily revised because revising them would require extensive revisions throughout the rest of the web.


My discussion of Kuhn shows that these two distinctions do not line up in the way that Quine thought. If what lies at the center of the web of beliefs is what is less easily revised, then the center is not constituted by our most highly theoretical beliefs; it is constituted by a weighty and interconnected mass of agreed upon matters of natural fact that scientists continue to agree upon even as they offer up different theories about what else may exist aside from what is explicitly recognized in this mass. Correlatively, if what lies on the periphery of the web is what is more easily revised, then the periphery is not constituted by the beliefs that Quine alleged are somehow closer to experience; it is constituted by our more highly theoretical beliefs. This is not to say that scientists who work within any given scientific paradigm generally find it easy to revise or give up their theories. That may be extremely difficult for all sorts of reasons, including the ones that led Kuhn to suggest that major changes in science generally require nothing less than revolution. But the point is that such scientific revolutions are \emph{possible} nevertheless, whereas what is not possible is that scientists should overthrow the large mass of detailed and interconnected beliefs that they all share in common, concerning banal details, basic metaphysical distinctions and the more obvious forms of order in nature.


Neurath gave us the image of a boat that must remain afloat as we repair and rebuild it, in order to help us understand why, on a holistic picture, not everything can be revised all at once. There is no ready image for the web of belief as I am proposing to reconceive it. It seems not to float, but to be grounded by a central mass that is large and densely interconnected, though also patterned. Scientists work up from the edges of this mass in order to gain a perch from which to detect patterns and relationships that might afford new ways to predict and influence nature, and also new scientific questions and problems for them to tackle in their “normal” scientific investigations, which would be carried out some way up their perch. The common ground below is too extensive and too detailed and too interconnected to be substantially revised, and this is so even though it may take on a different significance when viewed from the perspective of one or another theoretical perch. In contrast, our theoretical aspirations tend by their very nature to be revisionist, and this goes together with my point that they are naturally located at the periphery of our web of beliefs, where there is more potential for revisions that leave the whole intact as the whole it is.


Davidson himself did not reenvision the web of belief along these lines. But the reenvisioning coheres well with his understanding of holism – which I have noted was much more wholehearted than Quine's because it left no room for any vestige of empiricism. When Quine said that a theory must meet the tribunal of experience as a whole, he did not give up the theory–observation distinction, but made it one of degree: the closer something is to the periphery, the more “observational” it is, and the less implicated it is in the whole, and the closer it is to being an “atom” of confirmation – and Quine seemed to think that this is where we make our closest contact with reality, unlike our theorizing, which is at a further remove. In contrast, when Davidson insisted that we enjoy direct epistemic touch with reality, he gave up this way of thinking entirely. All of our beliefs are on equal footing when they are \emph{true}, for to have a true belief is to know something about the world \emph{as it is}. That is direct as can be, regardless of where a true belief is located within our web of belief.


Davidson made a connection between truth and agreement – if we cannot fail to agree by and large about how the world is, our beliefs cannot fail to be true by and large. So if there is a point in drawing a distinction between the periphery of our web of beliefs and its interior, it is not to register where the web meets experience, but to register where the preponderance of our agreement is. That is what my reenvisioning of Quine's metaphor allows us to see; in doing so, it allows us to see what a thoroughgoing holism amounts to when we resolutely reject all of the dogmas of empiricism.


I have argued in this paper that holism has an important role to play in securing Davidson's intended antirelativist conclusion in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” He did not formulate relativism as Multimundialism, and so he could not have portrayed his antirelativist argument as an argument from holism against normative insularity. Nevertheless, I have shown that his view of holism provides for it. I am less clear about the proper role that holism has to play in the antiskeptical leg of his anticonceptual schemes argument. But I can say this much: If what it means to do away with the scheme–content distinction is to establish that we have unmediated access to extramental reality, that does not suffice to undermine the very idea of an alternative. To undermine that idea requires establishing the ubiquity of logical relations and an attendant universality of truth, in the light of which all of the truths can in principle be embraced together and are truths for everyone – and this is established by a truly thoroughgoing holism.

% Notes
\chapter{24. Anomalous Monism}


Brian P. McLaughlin

\section{1. Three Principles}


In “Mental Events” (Davidson 1970: 208), Davidson asks us to consider the following three principles:


The Principle of Causal Interaction: At least some mental events causally interact with physical events.


The Principle of the Nomological Character of Causality: Events related as cause and effect fall under strict laws.


The Anomalism of the Mental: There are no strict laws on the basis of which mental events can be explained and predicted.


He embraces all three principles and begins his discussion of them saying that they may be thought to be inconsistent, but that he will reconcile them, showing that they do not jointly lead to contradiction (Davidson 1970: 208).


In the principle of causal interaction, by “causally interact with,” he means “are causes and effects of.” So, the principle is that at least some mental events are causes and effects of physical events. Given that at least some mental events are effects of physical events, the three principles seem to be in tension.\footnote{If by “causally interact with,” he meant “are causes or effects of,” then there would be no tension at all. The reason is that, then, the principle of causal interaction would not imply that some mental event is caused by a physical event. In later writings, Davidson makes it explicit that he intended the “are causes and effects of” reading of “causally interact with” (see, e.g., Davidson 1995: 204).} Suppose that a mental event is caused by a physical event. According to The Principle of the Nomological Character of Causality, the events will fall under a strict law. Why, then, couldn't the mental event be explained or predicated on the basis of that strict law?


Davidson tries to remove this tension by maintaining that the strict laws that causally interacting mental and physical events fall under will be physical laws, rather than psychophysical laws. If such events fall under strict physical laws, then the principle of the nomological character of causality is respected. The principle of the anomalism of the mental is not violated, Davidson claims, because the mental events will not be explainable or predicable on the basis of strict physical laws.


But if a mental event is an effect of a physical event and the causal interaction is subsumed by a strict physical law, why would not the mental event be explainable and predictable on the basis of that strict law? Davidson tells us:



\begin{quote}


Causality and identity are relations between individual events no matter how described. But laws are linguistic; and so events can instantiate laws, and hence be explained or predicated by laws, only as those events are described in one or another way.


(Davidson 1970: 215)



\end{quote}


He maintains that laws are linguistic in that they are true, lawlike statements. And he says: “Lawlike statements are general statements that support counterfactual and subjunctive claims, and are supported by their positive instances” (Davidson 1970: 217). (What he means by a \emph{strict} law has been a topic of interpretation; we will turn to it later.) A true singular causal statement need not employ predicates that figure in a law (strict or otherwise). Singular causal statements do not imply laws. They imply only that there is some law that subsumes (instantiates) the events related as cause and effect (Davidson 1967: 160). An event is subsumed by a law only under a description containing an essential occurrence of a predicate that figures in the law. A physical law (strict or otherwise) will contain no mental predicates. So, Davidson maintains, no physical law will explain or predict a mental event.


But if there is some event e such that e is a mental event and e is subsumed under a physical description by a strict law, then e, that mental event, will be explainable and predictable on the basis of that strict physical law under that physical description. Davidson himself holds that mental events are explainable and predictable on the basis of strict laws under physical descriptions. Writing of mental events, he says, “these same events [i.e., mental events], described in appropriate physical terms, are amenable to prediction and explanation as any” (Davidson 1974: 230), by which it is clear in the context that he means amenable to prediction and explanation on the basis of strict physical laws. Why doesn't that violate the principle of the anomalism of the mental?


The answer is that what Davidson means when he says that mental events cannot be explained or predicted on the basis of strict laws is that mental events \emph{as such} cannot be explained or predicted on the basis of such laws. In his preferred terminology, mental events cannot be explained or predicted on the basis of strict laws under mental descriptions. Strict physical laws contain no mental predicates, and, so, cannot explain mental events as such – that is, under mental descriptions. The principle of the anomalism of the mental would thus be more perspicuously expressed as follows: There are no strict laws on the basis of which mental events as such can be explained and predicted.


There is a reason to think that we have not yet arrived at an adequate formulation of the principle that Davidson has in mind by “the anomalism of the mental.” He seems to understand the anomalism of the mental to imply that no mental predicate figures in a strict law. Thus, he says that it entails “that events do not fall under strict laws when described in psychological [mental\footnote{Davidson uses “psychological” and “mental” interchangeably; “psychological” means “folk psychological.” I will follow him here in this usage.} terms” (Davidson 1974: 231). But that is not entailed by the doctrine he labels “The Anomalism of the Mental” or by our more perspicacious formulation of it, for they don't imply that mental terms never figure in strict laws. It is compatible with the doctrine stated either way that a mental predicate figures in a strict law, but only in the antecedent of a conditional strict law. So long as mental predicates never figure in the consequent of a strict law, mental events as such will not be explainable and predictable on the basis of strict laws.


Although Davidson never says so explicitly, he in fact holds the following mental anomalism thesis: there are no strict laws on the basis of which mental events as such can be explained and predicted \emph{or explain and predict}.\footnote{Yalowitz (2008) also reads the principle as including “or explain and predict.”} If laws are true, lawlike sentences, this formulation rules out mental predicates figuring in strict laws on the basis of which mental events as such can be explained or predicated or explain and predict. But even so formulated, the principle still does not imply that no mental predicate figures in a strict law. It remains open whether there are strict laws containing mental predicates that cannot explain and predict, perhaps because they would be too complex for us to use them to explain and predict.\footnote{Macdonald and Macdonald (1986) appeal to this idea in order to argue that strong supervenience is compatible with the anomalism of the mental. I discuss supervenience in Section 7.} On fairly uncontroversial assumptions about in-principle explainability and predictability, however, the claim that there are no strict laws on the basis of which mental events as such can be explained and predicted or explain and predict is equivalent to the claim that mental predicates never figure in strict laws. I will thus characterize the anomalism of the mental simply as the doctrine that no mental predicate figures in a strict law. The anomalism of the mental, so understood, implies that events do not fall under strict laws under mental descriptions.


In the secondary literature, The Anomalism of the Mental is sometimes taken to be a yet stronger thesis. Davidson holds not only that no mental predicate figures in a strict law, but also that mental predicates do not reduce to physical predicates “by law or definition” (Davidson 1970: 221). That irreducibility claim is sometimes taken to be a conjunct of the anomalism of the mental. Whether to so count it is largely a verbal issue. What is important is that the following claims are independent:


\textbf{(a)} No mental predicate figures in a strict law.


\textbf{(b)} Mental predicates do not reduce to physical predicates by law or definition.


Claim (a) fails to imply (b), because mental predicates may reduce, by definition, to physical predicates that do not figure in strict laws. Claim (b) fails to imply claim (a), because mental predicates might figure in strict laws without reducing to physical predicates. I will thus treat the irreducibility claim as a separate thesis from the anomalism of the mental. (Hereafter, I will abbreviate “the anomalism of the mental” and “the irreducibility of the mental” as, respectively, “anomalism” and “irreducibility”; and I will use Davidson's later name for the principle of the nomological character of causality, namely “the cause-law principle.”)


We have seen that Davidson tries to square the principle of causal interaction, anomalism, and the cause-law principle by maintaining that causally interacting mental and physical events fall under strict physical laws. If an event satisfies an open sentence or falls under a description under which it is subsumed by a strict physical law, then the event is a physical event. Thus, whether Davidson's attempt to remove the tension succeeds turns, in part, on whether a mental event could be a physical event.


Mental events would be physical events if kinds of mental events were kinds of physical events. But Davidson emphatically rejects the claim that types of mental events are types of physical events. If, however, types of mental events are not types of physical events, how could a mental event token be a physical event token?

\section{2. Event Individuation}


It has been claimed that our mental taxonomy for events is too different from our physical taxonomy for events (in any sense of “physical” no matter how broad) for a mental event token to be a physical event token. Davidson himself insists that the taxonomies are disparate, but maintains that that is no block to mental event tokens being physical events tokens. He maintains that every event that falls under a mental classification also falls under a physical classification, and so that the disparate taxonomies cross-classify events. On his view, physical science aims to classify events in a way amenable to the formulation of strict laws, while our intentional mental vocabulary (“believes,” “desires,” “intends,” etc.) is used to classify events in a way amenable to the formulation of rational explanations. But could two such different classification schemes ever classify the same event?


The issue of event token individuation thus arises. In “The Individuation of Events,” Davidson in effect proposes the following nonduplication principle for events: no two events can have exactly the same causes and effects.\footnote{The notion of a nonduplication principle was proposed by David Lewis, though, I believe, he never expressed the idea in print. (A nonduplication principle for sets is: no two sets have exactly the same members.) Jonathan Bennett, giving Lewis full credit, employs it in Bennett (1988).} To my knowledge, no one has challenged the truth of that principle. But it has been charged that it is useless for settling disputes about event individuation since causes and effects are themselves events, and so to apply it, we have to determine how to individuate the events that are the causes and effects of an event (Bennett 1988). Those who deny that mental events are physical events will deny that any mental and physical event have exactly the same causes and effects, for the reason that some of the causes or effects of a mental event will be other mental events.


In “Reply to Quine on Events” (Davidson 1985a: 175), Davidson endorses a nonduplication principle for events that Quine (1985: 166–167) in effect proposed: no two events occur in exactly the same space-time region. Davidson had earlier considered a similar view proposed by Lemmon (1967),\footnote{Lemmon (1967), however, proposed to identify events with space–time regions. Quine does not do that. Events are not space–time regions; rather they occur in space–time regions.} but rejected it on the grounds that a ball's rotating and its heating up occur in the same space–time region, yet the events are distinct since the ball's heating up causes the surroundings to warm up and the ball's rotating does not (Davidson 1969: 178). Quine convinced Davidson that an adequate response is that the ball's spinning causes the surroundings to warm up after all. As Quine notes, that implies “no causal connection between warming and rotation in general” (Quine 1985: 167).


Quine's nonduplication principle for events would, if correct, make the case for (1), event monism, trivial, if, as no one nowadays would dispute, whenever an event occurs in a space-time region, some physical event occurs in that space–time region.\footnote{It will no doubt occur to the reader that it is a very vague matter where mental events occur, and that it is a much more precise matter where the physical events described by micro-physics occur. Some critics of the thesis of event monism appeal to vagueness to argue against it (see, e.g., Hornsby 1981). Quine (1985) and Davidson (1985a) are both alert to the concerns about vagueness here and claim that they can be handled. Unfortunately, they do not say how. I will follow them in this. I too think they can be handled, but for reasons that I cannot go into here. For my view of the issues concerning identity claims and vagueness, see McGee and McLaughlin (2000).} Davidson, however, nowhere appeals to the principle to argue for monism; no doubt because he recognizes that such an appeal would be uncompelling. Those who deny that mental events are physical events, and indeed even those who maintain that the ball's spinning and the ball's heating up are distinct events, will of course reject the nonduplication principle.


The leading alternative to Davidson's view of events is the property exemplification view. It comes in several versions. Jonathan Bennett (1988) has called attention to one extreme version, according to which no two events are the exemplification of exactly the same property in exactly the same space–time region. As we noted, on Quine's view, every mental event is a physical event if whenever a mental event occurs in a space–time region, some physical event occurs in exactly that space-time region. On the extreme property exemplification view, no mental event could be a physical event if no mental property is a physical property. Bennett (1988) says that Davidson (meaning the early Davidson) aims for a middle ground position between these two extreme poles, but that Davidson fails to articulate such a position.


Assessing that charge is tricky since Davidson rejects all versions of the property exemplification view of events, and the charge is made within that framework. Whether Davidson is right to eschew the property exemplification view of events is beyond the scope of this essay. But it should be noted that embracing the doctrine of anomalous monism does not require rejecting a property exemplification account of events. (The fact that Davidson himself rejects such an account is a different matter.) It is open to a proponent of anomalous monism to maintain that no two events can be the exemplification of the same strictly nomic property in exactly the same space–time region, where a strictly nomic property is a property cited in a strict law.


Indeed, anomalous monism is compatible with two of the leading property exemplification accounts of events: Kim's (1977) account and Lewis's (1986) account. Kim maintains that an event is an object's having a property at a time.\footnote{Actually, he holds this only for monadic events (Kim 1976). More generally, he holds that an event is a n-tuple of objects having an n-adic property or relation at a time or throughout an interval of time. (I should mention that I use “property” in a way that is intended to cover relations.)} He in effect proposes the following nonduplication principle: no two events have exactly the same constitutive object, constitutive property, and constitutive time. In defending the view, he motivates a distinction between properties that are constitutive of events and properties that are merely exemplified by events; though he acknowledges that he has no principled account of the distinction. A possible position is that the properties that are constitutive of events are those in virtue of which they fall under strict laws, and that mental properties are never cited in strict laws, and so are never constitutive properties of events.\footnote{Terence Horgan (1980) made this point.} An event is a physical event if its constitutive object is a physical object and its constitutive property is a physical property, though the event may count as a mental event too if it, the event itself, exemplifies a mental property. Lewis (1986) distinguishes event essences from their accidental properties, with event essences figuring in his counterfactual theory of causation, and laws figuring in his account of counterfactuals via his account of overall similarities among possible worlds.\footnote{Like Davidson, Lewis takes laws to be linguistic (Lewis 1985). But unlike Davidson, he does not appeal to counterfactuals (or confirmability by positive instances) in his account of laws. He holds the Mill–Ramsey view of laws, nowadays known as the Mill–Ramsey–Lewis view of laws.} On his view, events with physical essences are physical events, and every event has a physical essence, and so is a physical event. Some physical events are also mental events, because they have accidental mental properties, properties that are, on his view, functional properties (conditional causal role properties)\footnote{Lewis (1966) holds a filler-functionalist theory of mental properties.} that the physical essences have given the laws of nature of our world. A possible position (not Lewis's) is that event essences are the properties cited in strict laws, and that mental properties are never cited in strict laws, and so never event essences, only physical properties are. This position is an anomalous monism: every mental event is a physical event, but no mental predicate figures in a strict law.


There is, moreover, a way to try to square the three principles discussed in Section I without assuming, as Davidson does, that laws are linguistic. Suppose that (a) properties are universals and laws are certain singular relations between universals;\footnote{This view of laws is defended in Armstrong (1983), Dretske (1977), and Tooley (1977). On this nonlinguistic view of laws, anomalism is not equivalent to the claim that no mental predicate figures in a strict law. It would be understood as the claim that no mental property participates in a strict law.} that (b) only relations between certain physical universals are \emph{strict} law relations, and so strict laws;\footnote{Armstrong (1983) proposes a not unrelated distinction between iron and oaken laws.} that (c) the constitutive properties of events (or their essences) are physical universals,\footnote{Lewis does not think properties are universals; he takes them to be sets of possible individuals. But see Lewis (1985).} and so that all events are physical events;\footnote{This also requires the assumption that the constitutive objects of events are physical objects.} but that (d) an individual physical event can also be a mental event by instantiating a mental universal;\footnote{The individual event falls under the mental universal, rather than being partly constituted by it.} that (e) causal relations are (as Davidson points out) not description relative; and that (f) a mental event is explainable, predictable, or explains and predicts on the basis of a strict law only under descriptions that include an essential occurrence of a predicate that expresses a universal that participates in that strict law relation.\footnote{Even on this view, which appeals to universals, events will be explained and predicated only under descriptions. Anything, even a universal, can be described in no end of nonequivalent ways.} Given (a)–(f), the principle of causal interaction, the cause-law principle and anomalism can all be true. The independence of the last two principles from Davidson's linguistic notion of laws should, I believe, only heighten their interest.\footnote{Not all of Davidson's reasons for those principles, however, are independent of his linguistic conception of laws.}


That said, I will now return to framing the issues within Davidson's general metaphysical and semantic framework.

\section{3. An Argument for Monism}


In “Mental Events” (Davidson 1970: 224), Davidson offers an argument in support of (1) – the thesis that every mental event that causally interacts with a physical event is physical event – that makes no appeal to psychophysical correlations. The argument runs as follows:


Premise 1: Let \emph{m} be any mental event that causally interacts with some physical event \emph{p}.


Premise 2: When two events causally interact, there is some strict law that subsumes them.


Premise 3: All strict laws are physical laws.


Lemma: If a strict law subsumes \emph{m} and \emph{p}, that strict law is a physical law.


Premise 4: If a strict physical law subsumes two events, then the events are physical events.


Lemma: \emph{M} is a physical event.


Conclusion: Every mental event that causally interacts with a physical event is itself a physical event.


He notes that the argument could be made more general. Indeed, given the enormously plausible assumption that every event is either a cause or an effect of some other event, one can appeal to Premise 2, 3, and 4 to argue for the completely general conclusion that every event is a physical event. And that is a thesis Davidson in fact embraces. He holds that all events are physical events.


Premise 4 seems beyond reasonable dispute. Unsurprisingly, interest and controversy has centered on 2 and 3.


Premise 2 is just the cause-law principle. The relationship between singular causal relations and laws is a subject of much controversy. Moreover, the cause-law principle, with its appeal to strict laws, has been disputed even by some proponents of the nomic subsumption view of causation.\footnote{See, for example, Fodor (1989).} Davidson offers no argument for the principle in “Mental Events.” In a later paper, Davidson (1995), he makes an interesting case that there is a conceptual connection between the concept of causation and the concept of a law, but the papers do not establish that causation requires subsumption under a \emph{strict} law.


Premise 3 entails anomalism, given the assumptions that laws are linguistic and that no mental predicate is a physical predicate. On the assumption that the distinction between mental and physical predicates is exhaustive of predicates that can be contingently true of some event or other, anomalism entails Premise 3.\footnote{If there are no strict laws, Premise Three is of course vacuously true. But, then, Premise Two would be false.} Davidson seems to assume that that distinction is not merely exclusive, but also exhaustive (Davidson 1974: 231). But that is an assumption that a neutral monist or a proto-panychist\footnote{Proto-pansychism is discussed (though only in the case of consciousness) in Nagel (1979). Nagel uses “pansychism” rather than “protopanpsychism,” but uses the term “proto-mental.”} would reject. From the fact that there are strict laws and no mental predicate figures in one, it doesn't \emph{follow} that all strict laws are physical laws. The claim that all strict laws are physical laws requires an argument that there are no nonphysical, nonmental predicates contingently true of events that could figure in a strict law. In “Mental Events,” Davidson argues for Premise 3 by arguing that there are no strict psychological laws and no strict psychophysical laws. But even if he is correct on both points, it not only fails to follow that all strict laws are physical laws, it also fails to follow even that mental predicates cannot figure in strict laws. Perhaps mental predicates can join with (as yet untokened) neutral-monist predicates or proto-mental predicates in strict laws.\footnote{The point about proto-mental predicates is made in Stanton (1983), who maintained that the general idea of proto-mental properties is relevant for propositional attitudes.} Davidson nowhere addresses this issue. Later, I will state an empirical assumption that he seems to be tacitly making, one I myself regard as plausible, that would, if true, rule out the possibilities in question.


Some of Davidson's lines of argument for anomalism rely on epistemic features of laws, such as confirmability by positive instances. Requiring that laws have epistemic features may well help in making a case for that principle. But it makes a case for the cause-law principle more difficult. It is fairly widely held that if an event e is caused, then there is some event such that its occurrence will either causally determine e's occurrence or (if strict determinism is false) causally determines the objective probability of e's occurrence. That might be thought to offer support to the cause-law principle. If, however, laws must be (e.g.) confirmable by their positive instances, then even granting that caused events always have causes sufficient for their occurrence (or sufficient to determine their objective probability), the question would very much remain whether causally related events must be subsumed by a law, strict or otherwise. Why would it be required that there be a generalization that is confirmable by its positive instances that subsumes the events? Why think that causation requires the existence of something that meets this epistemic condition? Why, for that matter, think that causation requires the existence of a sentence, and so of a language? Perhaps these questions can be answered, but I won't try to answer them. Although I will recur later to the cause-law principle, a proper discussion of it is beyond the scope of this chapter. The point I want to underscore now is just that although appeals to epistemic or semantic conditions on strict laws may very well aid the defense of anomalism, it is also the case that they may make the defense of the cause-law principle more difficult.\footnote{I have been told that Zabludowski made this point. Unfortunately for me and for others who cannot read Polish, his paper on anomalous monism is in Polish (and unpublished). It would be a service to the non-Polish speaking philosophical community if someone translated his paper into English.} Still, though, such appeals do not, I think, make anomalism less interesting. Nor do appeals to epistemic or semantic conditions make the irreducibility claim less interesting. Reduction is a kind of explanation; it has an epistemic dimension.


There are lacunae in each of the lines of reasoning that Davidson suggests for the cause-law principle, anomalism, and irreducibility, and, as I have mentioned, one of his key terms, “strict laws,” requires interpretation. For these reasons, and because of the philosophical significance of the principles if they are true, a vast secondary literature has emerged. Anomalism and irreducibility are subjects of especially intense interest. Whether they are true is independent of whether the cause-law principle is true and whether a mental event could be a physical event. One could reject the latter two claims and yet hold both anomalism and irreducibility.\footnote{John McDowell (1985), for one, takes such a position.} Moreover, as I noted, one could hold either of the last two theses without holding the other.


I cannot begin to do justice here to the philosophically rich secondary literature, and so I would not even try. Nor can I examine all of the various lines of argument Davidson offers for his principles.\footnote{They are canvassed in Yalowitz (2008), \href{http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/anomalous-monism/}{\texttt{http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/anomalous-monism/}}.} What I will do in what remains is this. In Section 4, I will say what Davidson has in mind by a strict law. In Section 5, I will present what I take to be his most compelling argument for anomalism. In Section 6, I will raise what I take to be the toughest challenge to his irreducibility thesis and consider how he might respond to it. In Section 7 I will examine the charge that his appeal to supervenience fails to capture a sense in which mental properties are dependent upon and determined by physical properties. Finally, in Section 8, I will examine the claim that the cause-law principle and anomalism jointly entail type epiphenomenalism.

\section{4. Strict Laws}


There is an interpretative consensus that a law is a strict law \emph{only if} it is devoid of \emph{ceteris paribus} clauses (such as, for instance, “other things being equal”) and hedges (such as, for instance, “normally” or “for the most part”), and is as exceptionless as nature itself permits. If causal determinism is true, then strict laws will be deterministic. If causal determinism is false, then strict laws will cite objective probabilities (Davidson 1970: 219). A strict \emph{causal} law\footnote{It is not being assumed that all strict laws are causal laws.} will be devoid of \emph{ceteris paribus} clauses and other hedges and will cite an event type in its antecedent the instantiation of which would either causally determine the instantiation of an event of the type cited in its consequent or determine the objective probability of such an event occurring (where that is less than 1).


It is common to call laws devoid of \emph{ceteris paribus} clauses and other hedges, simply “\emph{non-ceteris paribus} laws.” If a law is a strict law, then it is a \emph{non-ceteris paribus} law. Some interpreters of Davidson write as if it is also the case that every \emph{non-ceteris paribus} law is a strict law. But that, I maintain, is not the case. “All human beings are mortal” is a \emph{non-ceteris paribus} law (in the above sense), but Davidson would not, I believe, count it as a strict law. Moreover, he would not count “All believers and desirers are mortal,” or “All believers have mass,” or “All believers have a lesser density than a black hole,” or “Every electron is such that it lacks desires,” as strict psychophysical laws. Nor would he count, say, “All believers perceive in some sense modality or other” as a strict psychological law. Yet these are, arguably, \emph{non-ceteris paribus} laws. Not all \emph{non-ceteris paribus} laws are strict laws.


In “Mental Events,” Davidson explicates the notion of a strict law by appeal to a distinction between two kinds of generalizations and the ideal of a closed, comprehensive theory. He says:



\begin{quote}


One the one hand, there are generalizations whose positive instances give us reason to believe the generalization itself could be improved upon by adding further provisos and conditions stated in the same general vocabulary as the original generalization. Such a vocabulary points to the form and vocabulary of the finished law: we may say that it is a \emph{homonomic} generalization. On the other hand there are generalizations which when instantiated give us reason to believe that there is a precise law at work, but one that can be stated only by shifting to a different vocabulary. We will call such generalizations \emph{heteronommic}.


I suppose that most of our practical lore (and science) is heteronomic. This is because a law can hope to be precise, explicit, and as exceptionless as possible only if it draws its concepts from a comprehensive closed theory. This ideal theory may or may not be deterministics, but it is if any theory is. Within the physical sciences we do find homonomic generalizations, generalizations such that if evidence supports them, we have reason to believe they may be sharpened indefinitely by drawing upon further physical concepts: there is a theoretical asymptote of perfect coherence with all the evidence, prefect predictability (under the terms of the system), total explanation (again under the terms of the system). Or perhaps the ultimate theory is probabilistic, and the asymptote less than perfection; but in that case there will be no better to be had.


(Davidson 1970: 219)



\end{quote}


A strict law must draw its concepts (or terms) from a closed comprehensive theory. In other words, it must be a true lawlike generalization couched in the vocabulary of such a theory.


The following seems to capture Davidson's notion of a closed theory: A theory is closed if and only if events within the domain of the theory causally interact only with other events in the domain of the theory. What he means by a comprehensive theory requires interpretation. But by a comprehensive theory, he seems to have in mind a theory that includes a system of theoretically well-integrated laws such that for any caused event e within the domain of the theory, there will be some other event e* within the domain of the theory such that its occurrence causally determines e's occurrence or (if causal determinism is false) the objective probability of e's occurrence, and e and e* will fall under unique descriptions under which their interaction is subsumed by a \emph{non-ceteris paribus} law of the theory. Events within the domain of the theory will be perfectly predictable (under the terms of the theory)\footnote{If the theory is indeterministic, then their objective probabilities can be predicted.} and completely explainable (again under the terms of the theory) on the basis of \emph{non-ceteris paribus} laws of the theory.\footnote{It is conceivable that there is more than one closed comprehensive theory true of our world, so long as events within the domains of each do not causally interact with events within the domain of any of the others. That point is noted in Stanton (1983).}


Davidson tells us that “physical theory promises to provide a comprehensive closed system guaranteed to yield a standardized unique description of every physical event couched in a vocabulary amenable to law” (Davidson 1970: 223). Indeed, he maintains that physics, and indeed only physics, promises to yield a closed, comprehensive theory. None of the special sciences promise to do so. That only physics promises to yield a closed, comprehensive theory suitable to the formulation of strict laws is a point Davidson makes repeatedly in his later work. (See, e.g., Davidson 1993: 191, 1995: 204.)


It would not do to define strict laws as \emph{non-ceteris paribus} laws couched in the vocabulary of a closed comprehensive theory. We can always conjoin a closed comprehensive theory T with another theory T*, thereby, cobbling together a composite theory T+. Assuming that an ideally completed physics would be a closed comprehensive theory, we could always conjoin it with, say, psychology, thereby, cobbling together a composite theory that includes psychology. So long as mental events causally interact only with events within the domain of physics and other mental events, the composite theory would be closed and comprehensive. In this way, mental predicates could count as predicates of a closed, comprehensive theory. So, if strict laws are simply \emph{non-ceteris paribus} laws couched in the vocabulary of a closed comprehensive theory, then mental predicates could figure in this way in strict laws. We thus need a further condition on what makes a strict law.


Let us say that a set of terms is a minimal vocabulary for a closed comprehensive theory if and only if it is a vocabulary that is sufficient to formulate a closed comprehensive theory, and no proper subset of it is.\footnote{Here I follow Stanton (1983).} Locutions such “other things being equal” and hedges such as “normally” will not be part of such a minimal vocabulary. Such a vocabulary would enable us to replace all such locutions with predicates that make explicit all of the relevant parameters. It would enable us to state explicitly the conditions that the normal conditions in question ultimately consist in, and to state explicitly what other factors must be equal. Thus, hedges and \emph{ceteris paribus} clauses could be completely unpacked in such a vocabulary. As a first pass, a strict law is a law couched solely in the minimal vocabulary of a closed, comprehensive theory.\footnote{In some papers (e.g., Davidson 1993), Davidson suggests a laxer notion of a strict law, allowing as strict laws, laws couched in terms that are reducible by definition to terms in the minimal vocabulary of a closed, comprehensive theory. I will work with the more restricted notion so as to keep the issue of anomalism separate from the issue of such reducibility. (See note 50.)}


Suppose that only an ideally completed physics will be a closed and comprehensive. Would it follow that all strict laws are physical? That would follow trivially if any predicate that is part of the minimal vocabulary of an ideally completed physics is \emph{ipso facto} a physical predicate. Recall, though, the issue I raised earlier about neutral monism and proto-pansychism. Suppose that neutral monists or proto-pansychists are correct, and so that the fundamental theory true of our world must employ (as yet untokened) neural-monist predicates or protomental predicates. Is that possibility being ruled out \emph{a priori} if we use “physical” in such a way that any predicate that is in the minimal vocabulary of an ideally completed physics is a physical predicate? In a word, “no.” The reason is that it could turn out that completed physics will have to include neutral-monist or proto-mental predicates. In the sense of “physical” in question, they would count as physical predicates. But neutral monists and proto-pansychists would have no quarrel with that. They maintain, respectively, that neutral-monist predicates and proto-mental predicates will be importantly different from the predicates employed in current (or past) physics and in any part of current physical theory, and that they will be importantly different from mental predicates. But in the sense of “physical” in question, they would insist that such predicates are physical predicates. Thus, proto-pansychists do not deny that an ideally completed physics would have to deploy proto-mental predicates. On the contrary, they insist that an ideally completed physics would have to employ such predicates; similarly for neutral monists. Notice also that if it turns out that an ideally completed physics has to posit certain mental properties, certain mental predicates would count as physical predicates in this sense.


Davidson, however, does not use “physical predicate” in a way that allows that neutral-monist predicates (if such there be) or proto-mental predicates (if such there be) or mental predicates could be physical predicates. He would no doubt readily acknowledge that current physics may be mistaken in various ways; we have yet, for instance, to reconcile quantum mechanics with general relativity. But he is, I believe, tacitly making the empirical assumption that ideally completed physics, that is to say, the physics that is in fact true of our world, will be a recognizable descendant of current physics.\footnote{I borrow the term “recognizable descendent” from Jackson (2007).} Indeed, the empirical assumption is not actually tacit since he says that some laws in current physical theory are homonomic (1970: 219). Neutral monist concepts and proto-mental concepts are supposed to be radically different from the concepts expressed anywhere in current (or past) physical theory. A theory of physics that deployed them would not be a recognizable descendant of current physics; likewise for a theory of physics that deployed mental concepts. Given the assumption that the physics true of our world will be a closed, comprehensive theory that is a recognizable descendant of current physics, strict laws will be physical laws in Davidson's intended sense of “physical.” Let us use “physical” in his sense.


We said that a law is a strict law just in case it is couched solely in the minimal vocabulary of a closed, comprehensive theory. A problem arises for Davidson, however, if the notion of a strict law is defined in part in terms of the notion of a closed theory. To see the problem, consider the following passage from “Mental Events”:



\begin{quote}


It is not plausible that mental concepts alone could provide such a framework [a closed comprehensive framework], simply because the mental does not, by our first principle [The Principle of Causal Interaction] constitute a closed system. Too much happens to affect the mental that is not itself a systematic part of the mental.


(Davidson 1970: 224)



\end{quote}


He takes that to establish that there are no strict psychological laws. Since psychology is not a closed theory, no strict law could be couched solely in a psychological vocabulary. Recall, however, that the principle of causal interaction is that at least some mental events causally interact with physical events. Why does it not follow by that principle, then, that physical theory is not closed? Of course, that does not follow if every mental event that causally interacts with a physical event is itself a physical event. But Davidson's argument for that claim includes, you will recall, Premise 3, the premise that all strict laws are physical laws. All strict laws are physical laws, however, only if physical theory is closed. It is question begging in the context of his defense of physical monism to appeal to the assumption that physical theory is closed. And it looks like any argument for Premise 3 itself will have to establish that physical theory is closed, and so to establish that any event that causally interacts with a physical event is itself a physical event.


Physics promises to provide a comprehensive theory, but it, arguably, does not promise to provide a close theory. Since it promises to provide a comprehensive theory, it follows that it promises to provide a theory that meets the following condition: for any caused physical event p, there will be some physical event p* such that its occurrence determines p's occurrence or the objective probability of p's occurrence. (As Davidson (1987b: 45) notes, such a p* will have to be some event involving an entire cross section of the backward light-cone of p – an area that in a time span of a second has a diameter of 186 000 mi.\footnote{See, also, Latham (1999) on this point.}) Let us call this condition D.\footnote{Yalowitz (2008) seems to count this condition as the closure of the physical. That, however, conflicts with Davidson's understanding of closure. Consider D is compatible with physical events causally interacting with events that are not in the domain of physics. \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf Yablo (1992) calls D “physical determination,” which he (correctly in my view) distinguishes from the condition of causal closure. Yablo's label is a good one, but his usage has not caught on. I will use the label for a different thesis, one I will discuss Section 7.} Suppose that some event of type ø, a type not posited by current physics, causes p, and that physics could meet D only if it posited events of type ø. Were that known, then physicists intent on meeting the aim of physics would posit events of type ø. Suppose instead that physics meets D, but that events of some type ψ, a type not posited by current physics and whose tokens are not in the domain of current physics, cause some physical events (we can even suppose every physical event is caused by a ψ-event), but when they do so, they do so only by causally overdetermining physical events in a way that makes no difference whatsoever to their exact time or exact physical manner of occurrence. In such a situation, would physics be committed to positing ψ-events? I think not. Physics aims to meet D. If physics meets D, but there happen to be other kinds of events that causally overdetermine some physical events (or even all physical events) in a way that makes no difference whatsoever to their time or physical manner of occurrence, then physics is not committed to taking those overdetermining events into account. Physics has no need of the hypothesis that there are such events; but physics does not entail that there are no such events. Whether there are such events is of interest to metaphysics, but not to physics. Consider, for instance, the claim that there is spiritual influence on the course of physical events, but that that influence is only of this bizarre type of causal overdetermination, and so makes no difference whatsoever to the time or manner of occurrence of physical events.\footnote{I call this kind of overdetermination “bizarre,” because in ordinary cases of causal overdetermination, an overdetermining event will make some difference to the time or manner of occurrence of the overdetermined event. (If the exact time and exact manner of occurrence of an event were essential to the event, and so events were “fragile” (to use Lewis's (1986) term), there would be no causal overdetermination of the ordinary sort. Lewis (1986) denies that events are fragile, and it is open to Kim to do so as well.)} Physics has no need of the hypothesis that there is such spiritual overdetermination, but it is not committed to denying it. Such bizarre over-determination is compatible with there being an ideally completed physics that is a recognizable descendent of current physics. On these grounds, I maintain that although physics promises to be comprehensive, it does not promise to be closed.


Physics promises to be comprehensive, but no special science does. I believe that it captures Davidson's main aims to define “strict law” as follows: a strict law is a law couched solely in the minimal vocabulary of a comprehensive theory.


Given that the physics true of our world will be comprehensive (and a recognizable descendant of current physics), mental events will cause events within its domain only if mental events are events within its domain (and so, physical events) or mental events merely causally overdetermine events within its domain in a way that makes no difference whatever to the exact time or physical manner of occurrence of the physical events in question. Such overdetermination is compatible with the claim that all strict laws are physical. Given that a strict law is a law couched solely in the minimal vocabulary of a comprehensive theory, a defense of the claim that all strict laws are physical laws, that is, of Premise 3, need not establish that physics is closed. The claim that all strict laws are physical laws and the cause-law principle (Premise 2), however, will jointly entail that if a mental event causally interacts with a physical event, then it is a physical event. (In Section 8, I will state a weaker claim than the cause-law principle that could replace Premise 2 in the argument for monism.)

\section{5. Anomalism}


Suppose that mental predicates will turn out to be part of the minimal vocabulary of the physics true of our world. Then, mental predicates can figure in strict laws, and so anomalism is false. How does Davidson rule out that possibility? I noted that he seems to make the empirical assumption that the physics true of our world will be a recognizable descendant of current physics. No physics that included mental predicates in its minimal vocabulary would be a recognizable descendant of current physics. But someone who held that mental predicates will have to be included in the minimal vocabulary of the physics true of our world would of course challenge the empirical assumption in question. It is hard to see how a credible challenge would go. But is there anything to say against it on \emph{a priori} grounds, or at least from the armchair, so to speak?


Davidson suggests several \emph{a priori} or at least armchair lines of argument that, if successful, would rule out the possibility of certain mental predicates figuring in the minimal vocabulary of completed physics. The lines of argument concern only mental predicates that contain essential occurrences of intentional verbs, such as “believes,” “desires,” “intends,” and the like. The arguments seem inapplicable to bodily sensations, such as aches, pains, itches, and tickles, and various other kinds of conscious mental states and events (Davidson 1970: 221). The relevant mental events are changes in propositional attitudes,\footnote{If, unlike Davidson, one takes states to be among the \emph{relata} of causal relations, the arguments extend to propositional attitude states as well, and so states such as believing that p, desiring to A, and intending to A. But see McLaughlin (2013).} and mental events that are manifestations of propositional attitudes and have propositional contents, for example, events such as occurrently thinking that p. Let us call such predicates “propositional attitude predicates.” Even restricting the kinds of mental predicates alluded to in anomalism to propositional attitude predicates, an adequate \emph{a priori} or even just an armchair defense of that principle would be of interest. Suppose that I want to cross the room, and, as a result, my body moves across the room, as do virtually all of the atoms that make my body up (I may lose a few in transition). Physics seeks a comprehensive theory of motion. Must, then, physics posit desires? Perhaps there is a defense of anomalism that would enable the physicist to see from the quiet of an armchair in her study that physics need not include propositional attitude predicates.


The armchair line of argument Davidson offers that I find most compelling does not appear in “Mental Events.” It appears only in his later, more mature writing.\footnote{But see also McLaughlin (1985).} It appeals, however, to a claim that he has made since “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” namely, that propositional attitude predicates are dispositional predicates (Davidson 1963: 12).


Dispositional predicates are functional predicates: they apply in virtue of types of patterns of causal dependencies under various conditions. What it is for something to be water-soluble, for instance, is just for it to be in some state that would appropriately cause it to dissolve were it immersed in water.\footnote{On the filler-functionalist view, the state that causes (or would cause) the dissolving is the state of water solubility in the kind of object in question. On the role-functionalist view, water solubility is the second-order state of being in some state or other that appropriately causes it to dissolve in water. On that view, the states that causes (or would cause) dissolving “realize” the second-order state by playing the causal role in question. The dispositional state of water-solubility can be multiply realized in this sense. Davidson (see Davidson 1974: 255–56) seems to presuppose a filler-functionalist view. But we need not decide here which functionalist view is correct.} Davidson takes our concepts of beliefs, desires, intentions, and the like, to be functional concepts, enormously complex ones. He notes: “Beliefs and desires are identified in part by the sorts of actions they are prone to cause \dots{}” (Davidson 1991: 162); and he holds, more generally, that propositional attitudes are individuated by their causal roles (Davidson 1987b: 41).\footnote{He would deny, however, that there is any causal role specifiable just in physical and topic neutral terms that is \emph{a priori} sufficient for having a type of propositional attitude. (In Section 6, I discuss the idea of reduction by Ramsification of folk psychology.)} He maintains as well the externalist view that what contents such states have depends on complex causal patterns involving the environment (Davidson 1987a: 444).


Davidson tells us: “Strict laws do not employ disposition terms nor do they employ causal concepts” (Davidson 1985b: 245–46). The reason is that strict laws will be couched solely in the minimal vocabulary of a comprehensive theory, and such a vocabulary would not include such predicates.\footnote{I should mention that it is a different issue altogether whether a term in the minimal vocabulary of a comprehensive theory can denote a property that endows its bearers with causal powers. That is not being ruled out.} Taking as an example of a causal concept, the concept of sunburn, a concept that applies to a state only if it was caused by sunlight, he says:



\begin{quote}


No completed physics would make use of the concept of sunburn, not only because part of the explanation is already built into the characterization of the state, but also because two states of the skin could be in every intrinsic way identical, and yet one be a case of sunburn and the other not.


(Davidson 1996: 4)



\end{quote}


As Rorty (1999: 581) correctly notes, Davidson 1996 seems to implicitly define a “completed physics,” in part, as a theory that contains no functional predicates. Completed physics would not contain functional predicates in that such predicates will not be in its minimal vocabulary. The reason is that a completed physics will contain predicates for the states that combine to make up the ultimate categorical bases of dispositions, or the ultimate realizers of functional states, and will contain predicates adequate to formulate maximally explicit laws that subsume each of the many and varied fundamental types of causal transactions in virtue of which functional predicates apply.\footnote{That dispositional and functional predicates will not be part of the minimal vocabulary of such a theory and, for that reason, will not figuring in strict laws is one that I underscored in McLaughlin (1985).}


Here, then, is the argument for anomalism that I regard as most compelling:


Premise 1: Strict laws are laws couched solely in a minimal vocabulary of a comprehensive theory.


Premise 2: The minimal vocabulary of a comprehensive theory will not include functional predicates.


Premise 3: Propositional attitude predicates are functional predicates.


Conclusion: Propositional attitude predicates do not figure in strict laws.

\section{6. Irreducibility}


Davidson maintains that mental predicates do not reduce to physical predicates (meaning physical predicates of any sort, not just those used in physics) either “by law or definition” (Davidson 1970: 214), but cautions: “nothing I can say about the irreducibility of the mental deserves to be called a proof” (Davidson 1970: 215).


By reduction by law, he has in mind reduction via bridge laws, a dominant view of theoretical reduction at the time of publication of “Mental Events.” Bridge laws are so called because they bridge two different theoretical vocabularies. They can be conditional or biconditional laws. And they are to be \emph{non-ceteris paribus} and exceptionless. They can also be contingent and \emph{a posteriori}.\footnote{See Ernest Nagel (1961: ch. 11).}


In “Mental Events,” Davidson seems to maintain that mental predicates do not reduce to physical predicates by law, because there are no strict psychophysical laws. But given that strict laws are couched solely in the minimal vocabulary of comprehensive theory, from the fact that there are no strict psychophysical laws, it does not follow that mental predicates fail to reduce by law to physical predicates. Moreover, in his effort to rebut the view that mental predicates fail to reduce to physical predicates by law, Davidson made some claims that he never adequately justified and that I doubt can be adequately justified.\footnote{Kim (1985) tried to develop a main line of argument suggested in “Mental Events,” namely that if there were psychophysical laws, mental and physical predicates would cease to have allegiance to their proper sources of evidence – in the case of the mental, considerations of rationality, in the case of the physical, the constitutive principles of physical theory. The idea is that that would amount to changing the subject, and so there could not be psychophysical laws, on pain of changing the subject. Kim tried to spell this out, claiming that laws transmit conditions of application for predicates. But Kim was mistaken. Contingent laws do not transmit conditions of application. Consider the Wiedeman–Fraz law, according to which electrical conductivity properties of metals vary proportionately with thermal conductivity properties at any given temperature. The set of principles governing our application of electrical conductivity predicates is distinct from the set of principles governing our application of thermal conductivity predicates. Relying on those principles, we could find that the two sorts of predicates fail to appropriately co-apply in the case of some metal. Were such a finding confirmed, we would reject the Wiedeman-Fraz law. It is just that as matters now stand, we take the law to be well confirmed.}


I won't pursue that point, however, since Davidson's efforts were misguided. The reason is that if bridge laws are (metaphysically) contingent,\footnote{Nagel (1961) took them to be contingent and \emph{a posteriori} (though he did not distinguish those two features).} then they do not themselves yield reduction. That point was recognized in the first third of the twentieth century by the British emergentists.\footnote{See McLaughlin (1992).} It is nowadays, again, fairly widely recognized.\footnote{See, for example, Causey (1977), Chalmers (1996), Jackson (1998), Kim (1996), McLaughlin (1992), and Schaffner (1967).} Contingent bridge laws do not guarantee reduction, because they may be fundamental, irreducible laws.\footnote{These are the very kinds of laws Feigl (1958) had in mind when he wrote of “nomological danglers.”} When they are so, they are not reductive. The laws of a theory T are not reduced to the laws of another theory T* if fundamental, contingent laws linking the predicates of each are required to deduce the laws of T from the laws of T*. For, then, it is metaphysically possible for the laws of T* to hold and the laws of T to fail to hold. If T* is concerned with phenomena at a more micro level than T, and the contingent bridge laws are fundamental laws, then there is \emph{emergence}, not reduction. If there were contingent, fundamental psychophysical laws, it would be the case that mental properties \emph{emerge} from the physical properties, not that they \emph{reduce} to them. There is no reduction by fundamental, contingent bridge laws.


As concerns reduction by definition, Davidson cites only the failure of analytical behaviorism (what he calls “definitional behaviorism”), correctly noting that it failed because of the holism of the mental (Davidson 1970: 217).\footnote{He cites Chisholm (1957: ch. 2).} He does not consider whether its progeny, analytical functionalism, which not only appeals to internal mental states and events that causally mediate stimuli and behavioral responses, but also attempts to accommodate holistic relations among mental states and events, could succeed in defining propositional attitude predicates via the method of Ramsification.\footnote{See Lewis (1966). (I should mention that I am here by no means restricting analytical functionalist accounts to narrow causal role accounts; they can appeal to wide roles, and so include distal environmental causes.)} It is unfortunate that he never discussed whether such definitional reduction, which was on the table before “Mental Events,” could succeed. This is the most serious omission in “Mental Events” and in Davidson's writing on anomalous monism over the course of the remainder of his career. The \emph{definiens} of such a functionalist reduction would not be terms in the minimal vocabulary of a comprehensive theory; they will include causal and dispositional locutions.\footnote{Terms such as “cause” are topic neutral.} Such definitions would thus pose no threat to anomalism.\footnote{Indeed, they pose no threat to anomalism, even if we use “strict laws” in a more relaxed sense than I have, to include laws that are couched solely in a vocabulary that can be defined just in terms of the minimal vocabulary of a comprehensive theory.} But they are incompatible with the irreducibility thesis.


Assuming there is nothing objectionable about the general method of reduction via Ramsification itself, Davidson must reject analytical functionalism if he is to consistently maintain irreducibility by definition. And to argue that analytical functionalism is false, he must argue that there is no body of psychological and\Slash{}or psychophysical generalizations that is adequate to enable the formulation of correct definitions of propositional attitude predicates using Ramsification. That would commit him to rejecting the view that our understanding of propositional attitude predicates \emph{just consists in} our explicit or implicit knowledge of a theory – of theoretical principles. He must do so since, if our understanding of propositional attitude predicates just consisted in our knowledge of a body of psychological and psychophysical generalizations, then there would be no stopping defining those predicates using the method of Ramification, and so no stopping reductively defining propositional attitude predicates in terms of physical and topic neutral predicates. All it would take is forming the conjunction of all of the relevant generalizations and then using second-order quantifiers. The definitions would then be deducible.


John McDowell (1985) has claimed that our understanding of propositional attitude terms does not just consist in explicit or implicit knowledge of a theory. In “Mental Events,” Davidson speaks of the role of the ideal of rationality in interpretation, and speaks of applying norms of rationality “by our own lights” (Davidson 1970: 227). (In later work, he says such thing as: “seeing rationality in others is a matter of recognizing our own norms of rationality in their speech and behavior” (Davidson 1999: 600).) Following Davidson, McDowell emphasizes the ideal of rationality in interpretation and that we appeal to it by our own lights, and claims its role cannot be understood on the model of explanation by theoretical reasoning from theoretical principles. He maintains that our conception of the ideal of rationality is evolving. Of course, our conceptions of physical phenomena are evolving too. But the crucial point is that our conception at a given time of the ideal of rationality cannot be exhaustively captured by principles. Child (1993) makes a related claim. He maintains that although there are psychological and psychophysical generations that function as “rules of thumb” in interpretation, the rationality considerations that bear on interpretation cannot be completely “codified.” McDowell and Child are thus committed to the view that our understanding of propositional attitude predicates does not just consist in knowledge of theoretical principles.\footnote{Good, short summaries of their views can be found online in Yalowitz (2008), \href{http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/anomalous-monism/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}plato.stanford.edu\Slash{}archives\Slash{}fall2008\Slash{}entries\Slash{}anomalous-monism\Slash{}}} The point I am underscoring is that Davidson must take this position about our understanding of propositional attitude predicates if he is to reject the possibility of reduction of propositional attitude predicates via Ramsification.


If our understanding of propositional attitudes does not just consist in knowledge of a theory, in what else, then, does it consist? Our understanding of propositional attitude predicates consists in our ability to use them in our own case and in interpreting others. Using them in our own present first-person case is special, as Davidson points out. He holds a thesis of first-person authority about our present propositional attitudes (Davidson 1984, 1987a). I cannot properly discuss his view about first-person authority here. I will focus only on third-person interpretation. Sometimes, in interpreting another, we reason from theoretical principles. But sometimes we interpret another person by imaginatively projecting ourselves into the other person's shoes and considering what we would do, or believe, or want, or decide, or intend, and so on. We project from our own perspective in order to try to make sense of the person's actions, beliefs, and so on. It might be held that this ability is essential to full understanding of propositional attitude predicates, and that this ability does not just consist in (explicit or implicit) knowledge of a theory. This know-how, it might be claimed, does not just consist in knowledge-that.\footnote{I should note that if Stanley (2011) is right that literally all know-how is knowledge-that, then the line of argument I am pursuing here could not possibly succeed. I am, however, skeptical that all know-how is knowledge-that.}


When we project ourselves into another person's shoes, we engage in what is nowadays called “simulation.” In the computer lingo of simulation theory: we run reasoning “offline.” There is presently a vast literature on the simulation\Slash{}theory-theory debate.\footnote{Two major works are Stich and Nichols (2003) and Goldman (2006). There is, to my knowledge, no literature connecting the Davidsonian issue of whether our conception of rationality is “codifiable” with the simulation theory\Slash{}theory-theory debate. That is unfortunate, since some of that the literature in that debate is highly relevant. I am here trying to begin to construct a bridge.} The divide that matters for our purposes is between theorists who maintain that our understanding of propositional attitude predicates just consists in knowledge of a theory, and theorists who deny that. The claim that our understanding of propositional attitude predicates just consists in knowledge of a theory obviously does not imply that we never run practical reasoning off line. Proponents of that claim about understanding thus need not claim we never engage in that procedure; they may readily agree with simulation theorists that we often do. The key disagreement that concerns us is, to repeat, whether understanding propositional attitude predicates just consists in knowing a theory. In opposition to analytical functionalism, and I believe the leading theory-theory theories, it might be held that understanding propositional attitude predicates does not just so consist since it consists, in part, in being able to run reasoning offline from our first-person perspective, and that ability, that know-how, does not just consist in knowledge-that. If so, then there is something essential to understanding or to full understanding of propositional attitude predicates that does not just consist in knowing a theory.


Here, then, is an argument that is, I believe, worthy of serious examination:


Premise I: Propositional attitude predicates can be reduced by definitions to physical and topic neutral predicates using Ramsification only if there is a body of generalizations that is adequate for the formulation of correct definitions of such predicates using Ramsification.


Premise II: There is a body of generalizations that is adequate for the formulation of correct definitions of propositional attitude predicates in terms of physical and topic neutral predicates using Ramsification only if our understanding of propositional attitude predicates just consists in our knowledge of generalizations.


Premise III: Our understanding of propositional attitude predicates does not just consist in our knowledge of generalizations.


Lemma: There is no body of generalizations that is adequate for the formulation of correct definitions of propositional attitude predicates in terms of physical and topic neutral predicates using Ramsification.


Conclusion: Propositional attitude predicates cannot be reduced by definitions to physical and topic neutral predicates using Ramsification.


I want to be clear that I am not endorsing this argument. Premise III is highly contentious. Perhaps, as the analytical functionalist maintains, our understanding of propositional attitude predicates just consists in our knowledge of generalizations. If so, the argument fails. But it should be noted that there is, at present, no adequate scientific psychological theory of predicate understanding, and so there is at present no such theory on the basis of which to justify the analytical functionalist's claim about our understanding of propositional attitude predicates.


Moreover, I maintain that the analytical functionalist's view of mental predicate understanding does not hold for certain mental predicates, namely those that express the phenomenal characters of states of phenomenal consciousness. Full understanding of “the feel of pain,” for instance, does not just consist in knowledge of a theory. It requires knowing what it is like to feel pain. And although that arguably essentially involves knowledge-that,\footnote{I reject Lewis's (1988) knowing-how account of such knowledge. But I cannot pause to discuss here what it is to know what it is like to have an experience.} it does not just consist in knowledge of theoretical generalizations. Analytical functionalism is false for phenomenal consciousness.\footnote{For the record, I am, however, a physicalist as concerns phenomenal consciousness.}


Of course, our present topic is whether it is true for propositional attitudes. Davidson is silent about phenomenal consciousness. Some of the leading opponents of the analytical functionalist view of phenomenal consciousness accept analytical functionalism for propositional attitude predicates.\footnote{It is sometimes claimed that our (alleged) zombie physical duplicates have propositional attitudes, even though (by stipulation) they lack phenomenal consciousness (see, e.g., Chalmers 1996).} There are, to be sure, arguments against the analytical functionalist account of phenomenal consciousness that seem to leave analytical functionalism for propositional attitudes untouched. But assuming there is nothing objectionable about the general method of reduction via Ramsification, the case against the analytical functionalist account of phenomenal consciousness must rely on the claim that full understanding of terms of phenomenal consciousness does not just consist in knowledge of a theory. And any case against analytical functionalism for propositional attitudes must rely on the analogous claim about full understanding of propositional attitude terms. If full understanding of propositional attitude predicates required full understanding of at least some terms of phenomenal consciousness, then the arguments could be linked. It is, of course, like something to consciously imaginatively project oneself into another's shoes and simulate the person's reasoning. Such a linkage argument, with its appeal to phenomenal consciousness, would of course take us far afield of Daivdson's texts. But there is no reason that theorists who embrace his irreducibility thesis have to limit themselves to arguments that are suggested in his texts. Moreover, even if there is no such linkage argument, it remains open whether there is an independent line of argument – one that makes no appeal to phenomenal consciousness – that full understanding of propositional attitude predicates does not just consist in knowledge of a theory.


Premise III is controversial; it cries out for a detailed defense. I do not claim to have provided such a defense. But I think that it is fair to say that it remains an open question whether Premise III is true, and an open question whether the irreducibility argument presented above can succeed.

\section{7. Supervenience}


In “Mental Events,” Davidson tells us that although mental characteristics cannot be reduced to physical characteristics, it is nevertheless the case that



\begin{quote}


mental characteristics are in some sense dependent, or supervenient, on physical characteristics. Such supervenience may be taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respect, or that an object cannot alter in some mental respect without altering in some physical respect. Dependence or supervenience of this kind does not entail reducibility through law or definition. \dots{}


(Davidson 1970: 214)



\end{quote}


This is the first explicit statement of a psychophysical supervenience thesis in the literature.\footnote{The term “supervenience” was used in the philosophy of mind in discussions of emergence in the first half of the twentieth century. But it was not used in those discussions in its contemporary philosophical sense. It was used in something like its vernacular sense of “coming upon something suddenly or unexpectedly.” Davidson was the first to use it in the philosophy of mind in its contemporary sense. But a closely related use of “supervenience” can be found (Hare 1952), where it was used in the context of moral theory. Davidson remarks: “I had probably found the word in (Hare 1952)” (Davidson1993: 186). For an extensive discussion of supervenience, see \href{http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/winter2011/entries/supervenience/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}plato.stanford.edu\Slash{}archives\Slash{}winter2011\Slash{}entries\Slash{}supervenience\Slash{}}} In “The Material Mind,” he says:



\begin{quote}


Although, as I am urging, psychological characteristics cannot be reduced to the others, nevertheless they may be (and I think are) strongly dependent on them. Indeed, there is a sense in which the physical characteristics of an event (or object or state) determine the psychological characteristics; in G.E. Moore's view, psychological concepts are supervenient on physical concepts.[\footnote{That is correct. But Moore never used the term “supervenience.” Davidson (1993: 186) acknowledges that.} Moore's way of explaining this relation (which he maintained held between evaluative and descriptive characteristics) is this: it is impossible for two events (objects, states) to agree in all their physical characteristics (or in Moore's case, their descriptive characteristics) and to differ in their psychological characteristics (evaluative).


(Davidson 1973a: 253)\footnote{In another place, Davidson says: \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf The notion of supervenience, as I have used it, is best thought of as a relation between a predicate and set of predicates in a language: a predicate p is supervenient on a set of predicates S if for every pair of objects such that p is true of one and not of the other there is a predicate of S that is true of one and not the other. \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf (Davidson 1985b: 242) \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf (He repeats this formulation in Davidson (1993: 187).) Notice that there is no modal term after “if”; indeed, this formulation, unlike his earlier ones, employs no modal term. Any two sets of predicates that merely happen by pure chance to be coextensive will supervene on each other in this sense. Supervenience, in this sense, is an uninteresting notion. I will thus restrict my discussion to his earlier formulations.}



\end{quote}


Kim (1984) has distinguished the following two notions of supervenience, where property supervenience is understood as a relation between nonempty sets of properties:



\begin{quote}


A set of properties A \emph{strongly supervenes} on a set of properties B just in case necessarily if something has some A-property (some property in set A), F, then it has some B-property, G, such that necessarily whatever has G has F.


(Kim 1984: 64)


A set of properties A \emph{weakly supervenes} on a set of properties B just in case necessarily if something has some A-property, F, then it has some B-property, G, such that whatever has G has F.


(Kim 1984: 65)



\end{quote}


The definitions differ only in that the first contains one more modal operator than the second. Thus, if a set of properties strongly supervenes on another set of properties, then it weakly supervenes as well, though not conversely; hence the names “strong” and “weak.” The strength of the modal operators might be that of metaphysical necessity or that of nomic necessity, and so there can be supervenience with metaphysical necessity or with only nomic necessity.


Kim (1984) has appealed to this distinction to pose a dilemma for Davidson. He argues that weak supervenience is too weak a relation to count as a dependency relation, and that strong psychophysical supervenience with even only nomic necessity entails the existence of psychophysical laws and, so, is incompatible with anomalism. On these grounds, he claims that neither kind of supervenience will serve Davidson's purpose of affirming a dependency relation between mental and physical characteristics that is compatible with anomalism.


In his discussion, Kim makes the assumption that the set of mental properties and the set of physical properties are closed under Boolean operations. I do not know whether Davidson would accept that assumption. But if it is granted, then the supervenience of mental properties on physical properties, in Davidson's (1970, 1973) sense, is equivalent to (what Kim calls) the weak supervenience of mental properties on physical properties, with the kind of necessity that corresponds to Davidson's use of “cannot.” I will assume here that the “cannot” Davidson had in mind is that of nomic impossibility.


It should be apparent what I take the response to the horn of the dilemma involving strong supervenience to be. Davidson is not committed to denying that there are psychophysical laws. He is committed to denying only that there are strict psychophysical laws. So long as the supervenience laws are not strict laws, there is no conflict with anomalism. Strong supervenience with nomic necessity is compatible with there being no strict psychophysical laws even if the supervenience base properties are expressed by Boolean combinations of terms that are part of a minimal vocabulary of the physics true of our world. For so long as mental predicates themselves are not part of that vocabulary, the psychophysical supervenience laws will not be strict laws. And we have already seen why propositional attitudes predicates would not be part of such a minimal vocabulary: they are functional predicates.\footnote{It should also be mentioned that in Davidson's sense of “law,” strong psychophysical supervenience with nomic necessity does not even entail that there are psychophysical laws. The reason is that he holds that a law must be confirmable by its positive instances, and that there is a psychophysical generalization that satisfies that epistemic condition is not guaranteed by strong supervenience with nomic necessity. Kim is tacitly assuming that laws are singular relations among properties.}


Let us consider the horn of the dilemma that concerns weak supervenience. In the passage from “Mental Events” quoted above, Davidson speaks of supervenience as a dependency relation, and in the passage from “The Material Mind” quoted earlier, he speaks of it as a determination relation. Perhaps the fact that weak psychophysical supervenience with nomic necessity entails that it is nomologically necessary that if something has a mental property then it has a physical property is enough to make it count as a dependency relation. But weak supervenience with only nomic necessity is not a determination relation. From the fact that mental properties weakly supervene on physical properties with nomic necessity, it does not follow that there are physical properties that nomically necessitate mental properties. All that follows is that in any nomically possible world, w, if something has a mental property M, then it has some physical property P such that whatever has P has M. It may be that no necessity attaches to the fact that whatever has P has M.


The real issue for Davidson is not whether the relation he labels “a dependency relation” in one place and “a determination relation” in another really deserves either label. The real issue is whether he is committed to denying that mental properties are dependent on and determined by physical properties in some sense that it is just not credible to deny. By Davidson's (1973b, 1975) own lights, the only individuals that undergo mental events (in the restricted sense) are individuals that hold-true sentences, and the only such individuals that we have encountered that do so are human beings, the most complex physical objects we know to exist. He (Davidson 1973a: 255) takes the language ability to be a dispositional or functional ability, an enormously complex one that only the most physically complex objects we have encountered have. (Many of us hold that higher-animals too have propositional attitudes, despite lacking language.\footnote{The same is true of our fellow human beings who were born deaf-mutes and never learned sign language. They are obvious counterexamples to the claim that having propositional attitudes requires having a natural language. (Of course, they may have a language of thought (Fodor 1975).)} But higher animals are nearly as physically complex as we are.) Mental events, by Davidson's own lights, occur only at the most complex levels of physical organization. They seem to require such physical complexity. Of course, weak psychophysical supervenience captures the fact that it is nomically necessary that if something has a mental property, then it has some physical property or other; perhaps it requires physical properties of enormous complexity. But it seems that mental properties are related to physical properties in a stronger sense than weak supervenience captures. Davidson (1987a) tells us that swamp-Davidson, a molecule-for-molecule duplicate of Davidson, has no propositional attitudes. But he would not, I believe, deny that a molecule-for-molecule duplicate of Davidson that has the same kind of physical causal history as Davidson would lack propositional attitudes. In any case, it would not be credible to deny that.


Davidson can allow stronger ways than weakly supervening in which mental characteristics are related to physical characteristics, so long as the relation is compatible with anomalism and irreducibility. And, as I noted, he can maintain that there is strong supervenience with nomic necessity of mental properties on physical properties. Such strong psychophysical supervenience is compatible with anomalism. It is also compatible with irreducibility by definition.


There is, however, a dilemma that Davidson faces, though not the one Kim states.


To see it, note first of all that if the supervenience laws are nonstrict and contingent (i.e., not metaphysically necessary), the issue remains whether they are fundamental laws. Broad (1925) maintained that every object is a physical object. But he also held psychophysical property dualism and that there are contingent fundamental laws connecting mental properties and physical properties, and, so, that mental properties are irreducible to, yet (ontologically) emergent from, physical properties. He aptly labeled the doctrine “Emergent Materialism.” It is a kind of nonreductive materialism or physicalism. Broad never states that every event is a physical event. He allows, however, that an event can be both a neurophysiological event and a mental event, even though no neurophysiological property is a mental property. It is compatible with emergent materialism, in his sense, that every mental event (token) is a physical event (token). Indeed, it is compatible with his emergent materialism that the physics of our world is comprehensive \emph{and closed}. Moreover, physics need not include the emergent psychophysical laws, even though they are fundamental laws, in order to be comprehensive. We would have to appeal to the emergent psychophysical laws only to explain and predict mental events \emph{as such} on the basis of physical conditions. But given event monism for token events, any causal interaction between a mental event and physical event will be covered by a physical law. And mental events are always explainable and predictable under physical descriptions on the basis of physical laws alone. The emergent laws would not be strict since physics does not need them to cover all causal interactions in its domain, and all events are within its domain. Psychophysical laws could thus be fundamental without being strict laws. Emergent materialism is compatible with anomalous monism, and it entails strong psychophysical supervenience with nomic necessity and the irreducibility thesis. It follows that strong psychophysical supervenience with nomic necessity and the irreducibility thesis are compatible with anomalous monism.


But Davidson faces a dilemma. It is not credible to deny that propositional attitudes supervene with nomic necessity on physical properties. It is, however, also not credible that psychophysical supervenience laws linking physical and propositional attitude predicates are fundamental laws. Emergent materialism may enjoy some credibility for states and events of phenomenal consciousness, but it is not credible for propositional attitudes. Can Davidson maintain that there is strong psychophysical supervenience with nomic necessity yet deny that the psychophysical supervenience laws are fundamental laws? He can do so while embracing anomalism. The question is whether he can do so while embracing irreducibility.


I think that he can. Consider the following global supervenience thesis:



\begin{quote}


\emph{Physical Determination}. Any minimal physical duplicate of our world is a duplicate \emph{simpliciter} of our world.


(Jackson 1998)\footnote{Jackson does no call this thesis “physical determination.” He bills it as a statement of physicalism. But it does not state a sufficient condition for physicalism since it is compatible with the existence of a necessary God. For a more interesting reason why it does not state a sufficient condition for physicalism, see Hawthorne (2002).}



\end{quote}


A physical duplicate of our world is any world that is exactly like our world in every physical respect, with respect to physical laws, what kinds of physical objects there are, how objects of those kinds are distributed in space-time, the patterns of distribution of physical properties over them and over physical fields, and so on. A minimal physical duplicate of our world is a physical duplicate of it that contains nothing other than what it must, as a matter of metaphysical necessity, contain to be a physical duplicate of our world. Our world is trivially a physical duplicate of itself. The physical determination thesis implies that our world is a minimal physical duplicate of itself. (I will assume that the physics that is in fact true of our world will be a recognizable descendant of current physics.) There is an issue whether physical determination implies that there are no fundamental, contingent psychophysical laws.\footnote{See Hawthorne (2002).} Suffice it to note that if it does not, we can add to the above statement of physicalism determinism that there are no fundamental, contingent psychophysical laws. Given that, physical determination of course implies that there are no such laws, and so that emergent materialism is false. Physical determination is, however, compatible with the existence of contingent psychophysical laws, and so with strong psychophysical supervenience with nomic necessity, so long as any minimal physical duplicate of our world includes those psychophysical laws and they are not fundamental. I won't consider here arguments that we should believe the Physical Determination thesis or how we might explain why it is true. I want to focus only on whether Davidson could accept it, given his relevant commitments (his abhorrence of possible-world talk aside!), in particular, given his commitments to anomalism and irreducibility. If he can, he avoids the dilemma that I raised.


The idea that our world is a minimal physical duplicate of itself seems like an idea Davidson should embrace. He tells us: “the ontology of any science that is not reducible to physics [nevertheless] shares its ontology with physics” (Davidson 1999: 619). His basic ontology is the ontology of physics. Although he avoided such metaphors, he should accept that all that Mother Nature would have to do in order to create an exact duplicate of our world is to create a world that is a physical duplicate of our world. If She created a physical duplicate of our world and then stopped, she'd thereby have created a duplicate \emph{simplicter} of our world.


The physical determination thesis does not entail that all properties are physical properties. It is compatible with the existence of mental properties that are not physical properties, so long as they are always realized by physical properties. Davidson holds that propositional attitudes are functional states with physical bases (realizers). Given that causal laws are contingent, the laws linking functional properties to their realizers will be contingent. Physical determination is compatible with anomalism and strong psychophysical supervenience with nomic necessity, and entails there are no fundamental psychophysical laws. The issue is whether it is compatible with irreducibility.


Does the physical determination thesis entail that mental properties can be definitionally reduced to physical properties or to physical and topic neutral one? The answer is: no. One reason is that definitions (in Davidson's intended sense) are \emph{a priori}.


Let us distinguish two kinds of implication.\footnote{Here I follow Chalmers and Jackson (2001).} S semantically implies S* if and only if the material conditional claim that if S then S* is necessarily true.\footnote{By “necessarily true” I mean here true in every possible world.} S epistemically implies S* if and only if the material conditional claim that if S then S* is \emph{a priori}. If the physical determination thesis is true, then (a) the conjunction of all physical truths, both singular and general, (b) the second-order claim that they are all the physical truths, and (c) the claim that the world is a minimal physical duplicate of itself jointly semantically imply every truth. That is, for any truth T, the material conditional if (a)–(c) then T is necessarily true. But the physical determination thesis does not require that (a)–(c) jointly epistemically imply every truth. It does not require that for every truth T, the material conditional if (a)–(c), then T is \emph{a priori}.\footnote{In connection with this discussion, see the exchange between McLaughlin (2007) and Jackson (2007) on \emph{a priori} versus \emph{a posteriori} physicalism.}


It is open to Davidson to maintain that the physical determination thesis is true, but that there is nevertheless an unbridgeable explanatory gap (to borrow a term from a different context in the philosophy of mind, viz. philosophy of consciousness (Levine 2001)) between physical and topic neutral truths, on the one hand, and truths concerning propositional attitudes on the other. He can maintain that the explanatory gap is the absence of any reductive explanation via a definition of propositional attitude predicates into any combination of physical and topic neutral predicates. Assuming there is nothing amiss in the general method of reduction via Ramsification, that requires, of course, the falsity of analytical functionalism for propositional attitudes. That is an issue I addressed earlier and left unresolved. I continue to leave it unresolved. The main point for present purposes is not that irreducibility is true (that is what I left open), but rather that irreducibility is compatible with physical determination. It is compatible with physical determination, because physical determination is compatible with the absence of any reductive explanation via a definition of propositional attitude predicates into any combination of physical and topic neutral predicates.\footnote{As Chalmers and Jackson (2001) point out, epistemic implication does not require \emph{a priori} definitions; \emph{a priori} conditionals with only physical or physical-functional predicates in their antecedent and only propositional attitude predicates in the consequent will do for epistemic entailment. So will contingent \emph{a priori} psychophysical reference-fixing claims for propositional attitude predicates. Davidson would, however, deny that there are any such \emph{a priori} psychophysical claims. My point is that he can nevertheless maintain that (a)–(c) semantically imply all propositional attitude truths.}


The physical determination thesis implies that there are no fundamental psychophysical laws. It thus implies the falsity of emergent materialism. And it is compatible with anomalism and irreducibility. Davidson, I maintain, can use this supervenience thesis to assert a strong determination relationship between the mental and the physical that is consistent with anomalism and irreducibility.

\section{8. Mental Causation}


Epiphenomenalism is often taken to be the view that physical events cause mental events, but mental events do not cause anything. Although this may be a coherent doctrine, it is surely absurd. This kind of epiphenomenalism poses no problem for Davidson, given his event monism. If a mental event m is some physical event p, then of course m will have whatever causal effects p has. At least since Broad (1925), however, a different kind of epiphenomenalism has from time to time been a topic of intense discussion. The kind of epiphenomenalism in question can be formulated this way: events have causal effects in virtue of falling under certain physical types (or having certain physical properties), but no event has causal effects in virtue of falling under a mental type (or having a mental property). Call the first version of epiphenomenalism, “token epiphenomenalism,” the second, “type (or property) epiphenomenalism.” Davidson avoids token epiphenomenalism. But it has been charged that he is committed to type epiphenomenalism.\footnote{See, for instance, Honderich (1982), Kim (1984, 1989), Sosa (1984).}


The charge is most compelling defended as follows. Given the cause-law principle, events are causally related in virtue of being subsumed by strict laws. Strict laws cite only physical event types (or properties), never mental event types (or properties). So, events are never causes in virtue of falling under mental types, only in virtue of falling under certain physical event types.\footnote{The literature on this charge is large; see, in addition to the papers referenced in note 68, Kim (1993), Lepore and Loewer (1987), McLaughlin (1989, 1993), and Sosa (1993).} Notice that given that all strict laws are laws of physics, this argument, if it works, could be recast to show, more generally, that events are never causally related in virtue of falling under special science event types.


It is sometimes responded that this charge takes types or properties too ontologically seriously. It is claimed in effect that Davidson holds that there are properties only in a pleonastic sense. The idea seems to be that he holds a redundancy theory of properties: to say that a has the property F is just to say that a is F. If there are properties only in a pleonastic sense, then events never causally interact in virtue of having properties. But note, first of all, that Davidson has certainly never espoused this view of property talk. Second, this response to the property epiphenomenalism charge would not of course satisfy anyone who thinks there are properties in an ontological sense. Third, it would be a shame if, to hold anomalous monism, one must hold there are no properties save in a pleonastic sense. That would, I believe, greatly diminish the interest of the doctrine. Fourth, Davidson addresses the charge that he is committed to property epiphenomenalism, and this is not his response to it. In fact, in his response, he tries to characterize a way in which properties make a difference to singular causal relations.


Davidson thus acknowledges that properties or event types make a difference to causal relations. But he denies that events are causally related \emph{in virtue of} having properties or falling under types (Davidson 1993: 195). On his view, properties can make a difference to causal relations, just not \emph{that} sort of difference. Why not that sort of difference? He maintains that the idea that events are causally related in virtue of having properties is incompatible with the fact that the causal relation is extensional, that is, with the fact that if events are causally related, they are so related however they are described.\footnote{Unfortunately, some writers made the case that Davidson is committed to type epiphenomenalism by appeal to the assumption that on his view, events are causally related only as described in terms that figure in strict laws (see Kim 1993 and Sosa 1984). But that assumption is mistaken. Davidson holds that causally related events are so related however they are described. Davidson successfully responds to that argument in Davidson (1993). But he fails to successfully respond to the argument that I stated above in the body of the text. Contra Davidson (1993: 195), the claim that events are causes in virtue of instantiating strict laws does not entail that events are causes “only as they instantiate strict laws” (Davidson 1993: 195).}


Davidson is mistaken in thinking that the claim that events are causally related in virtue of having properties is incompatible with the fact that the causal relation is extensional. The weighs-less-than relation is extensional. If an object a weighs less than an object b, then that is so however they are described. Still, if a weighs less than b, then that is so in virtue of a's having a certain weight w and b's having a certain weight w* and w's being less than w*. xxx\footnote{See McLaughlin (1993).} The claim that whenever two events are causally related, they are so in virtue of having certain properties (or falling under certain types) is perfectly compatible with the claim that the causal relation is extensional.


As I mentioned, Davidson tries to explain how a mental property could make a difference to causal relations in a way that is consistent with anomalism and the cause-law principle. He tells us: “properties are causally efficacious if they make a difference to what individual events cause, and supervenience ensures that mental properties do make a difference to what mental events cause” (Davidson 1993: 198). How so? He tells us:



\begin{quote}


if two events differ in their psychological properties, they differ in their physical properties (which we assume to be causally efficacious). If supervenience holds, psychological properties make a difference to the causal relations of an event, for they matter to the physical properties, and the physical properties matter to causal relations.


(Davidson 1993: 197)



\end{quote}


One might respond by rejecting the parenthetical assumption on the grounds that only those physical properties that figure in strict laws are causally efficacious. But this response is blocked by what Davidson says a few pages later:



\begin{quote}


it seems clear that to serve the purposes of my argument, mental properties need supervene only on those physical properties that are required for a complete causal account of the universe (i.e., that suffice for the formulation of a closed system of “strict” laws).


(Davidson 1993: 200)



\end{quote}


The supervenience claim is that if two events differ in their mental properties, then they differ in their strictly nomic physical properties.


Given that, how does the argument for “the causal efficaciousness” of the mental properties of individual events (event tokens) go? If I understand Davidson, it goes as follows. Suppose that an event e has a mental property M and that an event e* lacks M. Then, given supervenience, e and e* will differ in at least one strictly nomic property. If e and e* differ in that one has a strictly nomic property the other lacks, then they differ in at least one causal effect: one of them causes something the other does not. Thus, if events differ in what mental properties they have, then they will differ in what effects they have; and so, mental properties are causally efficacious. That mental properties are causally efficacious (or causally relevant) in this sense is compatible with the cause-law principle and anomalism.


Unlike the term “causation,” terms like “causally efficacious properties” and “causally relevant properties” are philosophical terms of art (like, e.g., the term “supervenience”). Philosophers who use them must tell us what they mean, and the definitions must be judged by their philosophical fruits. Davidson seems to maintain that a property F is causally efficacious if whenever events differ with respect to F, the events differ in their causal effects. Unfortunately, this notion of a causally efficacious (or causally relevant) property is extraordinarily weak, if, as I believe Davidson himself holds, all properties of events supervene on strictly nomic physical properties. For consider, then, any property F that some event e has and some event e* lacks. Given supervenience, e and e* will differ in their strictly nomic properties, and so in their causal effects. It follows that events that differ with respect to whether they have F will differ in their causal effects, and so that F is causally efficacious, whatever property F is. Indeed, we can get this result for any property that one event can have and another lack without assuming supervenience. No one, to my knowledge, save the token epiphenomenalist, disputes that no two events have exactly the same causal effects. Let us assume that nonduplication principle. Suppose that an event e has property F and that e* lacks F. Then, e ≠ e*. If no two events have exactly the same effects, then e will have some effect that e* lacks. So, if one event has F and another event does not, then the events will differ with respect to what effects they have, no matter what property F is. Davidson's notion of a causally efficacious property is simply too weak to be relevant to debate in question.\footnote{It is open to Davidson to accept the charge of type epiphenomenalism, but to try to take the bite out of it by pointing out that mental types figure in causal explanations, and so are in that sense causally relevant. As Davidson points out on a number of occasions, causal explanations need not appeal to laws, strict or otherwise. But I will consider below a way he might rebut the charge of type epiphenomenalism.}


A different response to the charge of type epiphenomenalism is to point out, first of all, that “in virtue of” does not entail “only in virtue of.” I live in New Jersey in virtue of living in Hampton, but I also live in New Jersey in virtue of living in Warren County, and one can live in Warren County without living in Hampton. Similarly, I am touching the keyboard in virtue of my left hand's touching it, but I am also touching it in virtue of my right hand's touching it, and either hand can touch the keyboard without the other doing so. From the fact (if it is one) that events are causally related in virtue of falling under strict laws, it, arguably, does not \emph{follow} that events are causally related \emph{only} in virtue of falling under strict laws. They may also be causally related in virtue of something else about them.\footnote{McLaughlin (1989).}


What else about them? Since Davidson allows that there are nonstrict psychological and psychophysical laws, one suggestion is that even though events are always causally related in virtue of falling under a strict law, a mental event can be a cause in virtue of falling under a nonstrict psychological law or a nonstrict psychophysical law, and so in virtue of falling under a mental type. This claim is compatible with the cause-law principle and anomalism. What follows given the cause-law principle is just that if two events are causally related in virtue of falling under a nonstrict law, then they are also causally related in virtue of falling under a strict one. The cause-law principle and anomalism do not jointly entail type epiphenomenalism.\footnote{McLaughlin (1989).}


Of course, the following question arises: if events can be causally related in virtue of falling under a nonstrict law, then why should we believe the cause-law principle? Davidson, however, faces the question of why we should believe that principle in any case. Few would deny that if events are causally related, they are so in virtue of something about them. But Davidson owes us a defense of the cause-law principle. Why must causally related events fall under a strict law? It remains to be seen whether the assumption that events can be causally related in virtue of nonstrict laws would make a defense of the cause-law principle more difficult than it otherwise would be. It might make it easier, allowing us to see that the cause-law principle does not rule out that events can be causally related in virtue of falling under nonstrict laws. Also, one might argue that any such nonstrict causal law will be heteronomic, and that heteronomic laws must be backed by homonmic laws, ultimately, strict laws. (The strict law might of course be different on different occasions in which the nonstrict law subsumes events.)


Consider, again, the conditional claim that if events are causally related in virtue of falling under a nonstrict law, then they are also causally related in virtue of falling under a strict law. A defense of that claim does not require a defense of the cause-law principle. That is, it does not require a defense of the claim that if two events are causally related, they fall under a strict law. One can hold that events can be causally related in virtue of falling under a law without holding that whenever events are causally related they are so in virtue of falling under a law (strict or otherwise). As I indicated, the conditional claim might be defended on the grounds that nonstrict laws are heteronomic, and so whenever a non-strict law subsumes causally related events, some or other strict laws subsumes them. I am not here endorsing such a defense. My point is just that such a defense does not require a defense of the cause-law principle.


I am skeptical that there is an adequate defense of the cause-law principle. If there is not, that may seem to be a serious problem for Davidson's defense of anomalous monism since that principle figured as Premise 2 in his argument for monism. But notice that the following weaker assumption could replace Premise 2 in that argument: whenever an event causally interacts with a physical event, there is some strict law that subsumes the events. Notice also that if by “a physical event” is meant an event within the domain of the physics true of our world, then to defend that weaker premise, it need only be argued that the physics true of our world will capture within its strict nomological net any causal interaction in which an event within its domain participates.

% Notes
\section{References}


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\chapter{25. Triangular Externalism}


Sven Bernecker

\section{1. Outlines of Triangular Externalism}


\emph{Content externalism} (also known as “semantic externalism”) is the thesis that the contents of an individual's thoughts and the meanings of his words depend on relations that the individual bears to aspects of his physical or social environment. Mental content and semantic meaning are not determined solely by internal properties of the individual's mind and brain. At least some properties of the content of thoughts and the meaning of words are external to the subject's skin, to the body or to the brain. Content externalism stands opposed to \emph{content internalism}, which holds that the contents of an individual's mental states can be individuated fully in ways that do not require reference to any particular objects or properties in the environment.\footnote{It is important not to confuse the internalism\Slash{}externalism distinction in philosophy of mind with the internalism\Slash{}externalism distinction in epistemology. Internalism about justification is the view that all the factors required for a belief to be justified must be cognitively accessible to the subject and thus internal to his mind. Something is internal to one's mind so long as one is aware of it or could be aware of it merely by reflecting. Externalism about justification is the denial of internalism, holding that some of the justifying factors may be external to the subject's cognitive perspective.}


Content externalism comes in many different flavors. First, we can distinguish between \emph{global} and \emph{local} externalism, where the former holds for all kinds of thoughts and all classes of expressions while the latter is restricted to certain expressions and thoughts (e.g., thoughts involving natural kind words, proper names, and indexicals). Davidson is clearly a global externalist (cf. Davidson 1988: 47–48).


Second, we can divide externalism into two varieties – physical and social – depending on the kind of environmental factors that figure in the determination of mental content (Davidson 2001b: 2). Davidson's externalism combines elements of physical and social externalism. To understand his externalism, it is useful to start with the physical aspect.


Davidson (2001b: 2) calls his version of physical externalism \emph{perceptual externalism}. The central tenet of perceptual externalism is the idea that “the contents of our thoughts and sayings are partly determined by the history of causal interactions with the environment” (Davidson 1990: 200); they are determined by “what has typically caused similar thoughts” and sayings (Davidson 1990: 201). Davidson declares:



\begin{quote}


\dots{} in the simplest cases the events and objects that cause a belief also determine the contents of that belief. Thus the belief that is differentially and under normal conditions caused by the evident presence of something yellow, one's mother, or a tomato is the belief that something yellow, one's mother, or a tomato is present.


(Davidson 1989: 195)



\end{quote}


Externalist theories can be either \emph{historical} or \emph{ahistorical} depending on whether thought contents are said to supervene on the present and past or just on the present relations the individual bears to aspects of his environment. Davidson's perceptual externalism is a kind of historical externalism, for it is the \emph{causal history} of the subject's relations with objects and events in the environment that is said to determine mental content (Davidson 1988: 44, 1990: 199–200). The main argument for historical externalism is the Swampman thought experiment. Davidson (1987: 19) invites us to imagine that lightning strikes a tree in the swamp and that, in the ensuing chemical reaction, something emerges from the swamp that is a molecule-by-molecule duplicate of some actual human being, for example, Donald Davidson. Let us call Davidson's tree twin \emph{Swampman}. Since Swampman is a physical duplicate of Davidson, it does everything (nonintentionally described) that Davidson would have done if the lightning had not killed him.\footnote{It is not clear that the Swampman story is coherent. If Swampman does everything, nonintentionally described, that Davidson would have done if the lightning had not killed him, we must assume that it is also a reliable indicator of intentional events. Swampman can reliably identify intentional and voluntary actions (e.g., first-degree murder) and distinguish them from unintentional and inadvertent actions (e.g., involuntary manslaughter). But how is that possible? The difference between these types of actions does not reveal itself in any physical differences. How can a mere indicator of physical properties discriminate between irreducibly intentional events?} Swampman's body describes the same motions through space that Davidson's would have, the same sounds issue from its mouth as would have issued from Davidson's. Although no one can tell the difference between the two, there is a difference. Swampman does not recognize anyone, know anyone's name, or remember anything before its creation. But this is not the only difference between Davidson and Swampman. Davidson claims that because Swampman has not learned words “in a context that would give [them] the right meaning – or any meaning at all,” it cannot “be said to mean anything by the sounds it makes, nor to have any thoughts” (Davidson 1987: 19). Since Swampman lacks the relevant past causal interactions with objects in its environment, its utterances and brain states do not bear meaning or mental content, respectively.


According to Davidson, the history of causal relations between the subject and features of his physical environment is not sufficient for the determination of thought content. It is not enough to say that the content of a thought is determined by what typically causes the thought. We also need a way of singling out the relevant cause of a thought among all the possible causes, which include both proximal and distal ones. We need some way of determining whether I am thinking about, to use Quine's example, the nearby rabbit, undetached rabbit parts, a rabbit-fusion, the rabbit-shaped stimulation of my retina, or something else altogether (cf. Davidson 1990: 201). This is the problem of the inscrutibility of reference.


Davidson's solution to the problem of the inscrutibility of reference turns on what may be called \emph{interpretationism}, that is, the view, roughly, that beliefs are not observable entities in themselves, but rather explanatory posits attributed to speakers to make sense of their behavior. According to Davidson, “[w]e have the idea of belief only from the role of belief in the interpretation of language, for as a private attitude it is not intelligible” (Davidson 1975: 170). Given the interpretationist view (which Davidson denies is an antirealist one – see Chapter 16 in this volume), there is no gap between an interpreter's best judgment of a subject's thought and the truth about the subject's thought. Under ideal conditions, one's thought contents are transparent to an interpreter. Davidson declares: “What a fully informed interpreter could know about what a speaker means is all there is to learn; the same goes for what the speaker believes” (Davidson 1983: 148). The problem of the inscrutibility of reference is solved by saying that the relevant cause of a speaker's thought is whatever is situated at the intersection of the two lines that can be drawn between the speaker, the interpreter, and the object or event in the world they are responding to and communicating about.


The interpretation process of identifying the particular thing that determines thought content Davidson calls \emph{triangulation}. Triangulation is a term used in navigation and refers to a method of determining a third point from two given points and a complex three-place relation holding between the three points. Davidson uses the term to describe the process by which the communication between two or more people determines the meanings of terms and the content of thoughts. Two people triangulate on a given object or event when both of them react to the object or event and then react in turn to each other's reactions.



\begin{quote}


We may think of it as a form of triangulation: each of two people is reacting differentially to sensory stimuli streaming in from a certain direction. If we project the incoming lines outward, their intersection is the common cause. If the two people note each other's reactions (in the case of language, verbal reactions), each can correlate these observed reactions with his or her stimuli from the world. The common cause can now determine the contents of an utterance and a thought. The triangle which gives content to thought and speech is complete. But it takes two to triangulate. Two or, of course, more.


(Davidson 1991: 213)



\end{quote}


Since, according to Davidson, thought content is determined by the triangular interaction involving two people and a shared public environment, his externalism may be called \emph{triangular externalism}. The social process of triangulation is needed to select the content-determining features in the environment. Without two people triangulating a common cause, it cannot be determined what each of them is thinking about. But triangulation is not only needed \emph{to know} what someone is thinking about. Davidson makes the stronger claim that the process of triangulation \emph{constitutes} thought content. There would be no thought content to know about unless triangulation took place.



\begin{quote}


[T]riangulation \dots{} is necessary if there is to be any answer to the question what [a creature's] concepts are concepts of. \dots{} the problem is not, I should stress, one of verifying what objects or events a creature is responding to; the point is that without a second creature responding to the first, there can be no answer to the question.


(Davidson 1992: 119, cf. Davidson 2006: 1059–1060)



\end{quote}


Triangular externalism has it that there would be no thought content in a solipsist world. Without an interpreter concretely triangulating with the speaker, there is no content and thus no thought and no language. The possibility of thought and language only emerges together with a community. “The possibility of thought \dots{} depends \dots{} on the fact that two or more creatures are responding \dots{} to input from a shared world, and from each other” (Davidson 1997b: 83, cf. Davidson 2001b: 7). Communication with people whose perceptual and concept-forming abilities and dispositions are similar to ours is constitutive of thought content.


Triangular externalism is of central importance for Davidson's overall philosophical position. Davidson uses triangular externalism to argue against epistemological foundationalism and external-world skepticism (see Chapter 32 in this volume). Granted that thought requires communication, as triangular externalism claims, it is not possible that I should know about my own thoughts but not know about other people's thoughts and the external world. None of the basic kinds of knowledge – knowledge of the external world, of our own mind, and of other minds – is reducible to one of the others, and none of them has a logical primacy over any other (cf. Davidson 1991). This conclusion speaks not only against foundationalism but also against external world skepticism. For if we know our own thoughts, then, given triangular externalism, we can infer that there is an external world and there are other like-minded creatures. In other words, if we know our own thoughts, triangular externalism allows us to recognize that we could never be in a position to doubt our knowledge of other minds or of an external world. “\dots{} [I]f we can think or question at all, we already know there are other people with minds like ours, and that we share a world with them” (Davidson 1990: 200–201, cf. Davidson 1999: 31).


Needless to say, the antiskeptical consequences of triangular externalism have met with criticism.\footnote{For further discussion of these issues, see Lepore and Ludwig (2005: 322–342), Ludwig (1992), Stroud (1999), and Verheggen (2011).}

\section{2. Externalism, Interpretation, and Holism}


We saw that Davidson uses the Swampman thought experiment to argue for historical externalism, that is, the view that “the correct interpretation of what the speaker means \dots{} depends on the \emph{natural history} of what is in the head” (Davidson 1988: 44, my emphasis). We also saw that Davidson embraces interpretationism, that is, the view that there is no gap between an interpreter's best judgment of a subject's thought and the truth about the subject's thought. Though not inconsistent, interpretationism does not seem to sit well with historical externalism. Given that Swampman is not any harder to interpret than the rest of us, why is it is supposed to lack thoughts?


The Swampman story can be made to fit the interpretationist view by supposing that the reason Swampman is thoughtless is that it has not been interpreted in the past. If repeated actual interpretations are constitutive of thoughts, the absence of history brings with it the absence of thought. Textual evidence, however, speaks against this reading of Davidson. Davidson claims that Swampman lacks thoughts not because it has not been interpreted in the past, but because it has not learned words “in a context that would given [them] the right meaning - or any meaning at all” (Davidson 1987: 19).


Another way to make the Swampman story fit interpretationism is to claim that the interpretability of a speaker depends on facts about how the speaker learned his words. Yet this claim does not square with our interpretative practice. First, we do not usually have to gather information about a speaker's language learning to be able to successfully interpret his utterances. Second, having this kind of information may have no bearing on the interpretation. Swampman is a case in point. Even when we know that Swampman is brand new, it is reasonable for us (the interpreters) to treat it as uttering sentences that are systematically translatable into our language, for this will give us good predictions and explanations of its behavior. Thus, it is not clear how facts about language learning are supposed to figure in the interpretative process in such a way that Swampman's utterances turn out to be uninterpretable.


The best way to reconcile historical externalism with interpretativism is to treat them as independently necessary and jointly sufficient conditions for having thoughts. Having thoughts requires not only that one is interpreted, but also that one learned words in the right sort of way (Hahn 2003: 45).\footnote{For further discussion of this issue, see De Caro (2011: 187–193), Hahn (2003: 40–45), and Lepore and Ludwig (2005: 338–339).}


Apart from the tension between historical externalism and interpretationism, there is a tension between triangular externalism and holism. Davidson is a holist in that he holds that the meanings of words and the contents of thoughts depend on the meanings of other words and the contents of other thoughts, respectively. He declares, for instance, that “we can give the meaning of any sentence (or word) only by giving the meaning of every sentence (and word) in the language” (Davidson 1967: 22). And regarding thought content, Davidson writes that “a belief is identified by its location in a pattern of beliefs; it is the pattern that determines the subject matter of the belief, what the belief is about” (Davidson 1975: 168). Now the problem with holism is that it does not sit well with triangular externalism. There is nothing about triangular externalism that speaks against the atomistic view whereby a belief can have content independently of the web in which it is embedded.


By and large, there are two ways of reconciling externalism with holism: one can weaken externalism or holism. The first option is to say that the triangular interaction between the subject, the interpreter, and the shared environment is not sufficient for content determination. Thought content is determined not only by the triangular interaction, but also by the explanatory and inferential relations that hold among the beliefs in a system. On this picture, there are two independent elements that are responsible for content determination: a referential element (introduced by the subject's causal history) and an inferential one (introduced by holistic constraints) (Amoretti 2007: 315–316). Maybe this is why Davidson insists that “the contents of our thoughts \dots{} are \emph{partly} determined by the history of causal interactions with the environment” (Davidson 1990: 200, my emphasis).


Another (and better) way of reconciling externalism with holism is to weaken the latter. To weaken holism means to regard it as nothing more than an extra constraint on interpretation (cf. De Rosa 1999: 204–205; Lepore and Ludwig 2005: 211–213, 339–340). Following this proposal, one could say that a speaker's sentence or thought must be interpreted in such a way that it is consistent with whatever interpretation have been given of the rest of his sentences or thoughts. Interpretative holism (as opposed to semantic holism) is perfectly compatible with triangular externalism.

\section{3. Davidson on Other Forms of Externalism}


Different kinds of externalism take different kinds of environmental facts as responsible for the determination of thought content. Two well-known kinds of externalism are due to Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge. Putnam holds a kind of physical externalism whereby the hidden (e.g., chemical) structure of objects determines the reference of natural kind terms. Burge argues for a version of social externalism (which he calls “anti-individualism”), whereby thought content is determined by the linguistic norms and practices of the language community. Understanding why Davidson rejects these kinds of externalism helps understanding his own externalism.


The main road leading to Putnam's version of physical externalism is Twin Earth thought experiments. Putnam (1975) asks us to imagine a world, Twin Earth, where everything is identical to Earth except the compound we call “water” (H\textsubscript{2}O) has a different atomic structure (XYZ). XYZ is wet, colorless, odorless, and has all the same sorts of macro-properties as H\textsubscript{2}O; nevertheless it has a different structure. Putnam claims that even though the residents of Twin Earth use the word “water” in all the same ways Earthlings do (because both are only familiar with macro-properties, let's say), the word “water” on Twin Earth refers to XYZ (and expresses the concept \emph{twater}) and not H\textsubscript{2}O. So Twin Earthlings only have thoughts about twater. Since the word “water” is used in all the same ways, and the Twin Earthlings are physiologically and psychologically identical to Earthlings, the only way to determine the content of their thoughts is through reference to the environment they are in (the one that has twater). Putnam concludes that the mental states involving natural kind terms don't supervene on physical states of our brains but on the physical states of our environment. In Putnam's famous phrase, “meanings ain't in the head” (Putnam 1975: 227).


Apart from rejecting realism (or essentialism) about natural kinds, Davidson criticizes Putnam for assuming that “[i]f a thought is identified by a relation to something outside the head, it isn't wholly in the head. (It ain't in the head.)” (Davidson 1987: 31). It is this assumption, Davidson argues, that gives rise to two mistaken views: first, that externalism poses a threat to first-person authority and, second, that externalism is incompatible with anomalous monism and the token-identity theory.


Anomalous monism is the view that although there are no strict laws to connect psychological types of events and physical types of events, any particular mental event is identical to some particular physical event. Claiming that there are no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained amounts to a rejection of local supervenience. Davidson points out that externalism and anomalous monism are both committed to the denial of local supervenience. Externalism denies local supervenience by arguing against the thesis that any two nonrelationally physically indistinguishable persons must also be indistinguishable with respect to their thought contents. At the same time, anomalous monism and externalism are both committed to global supervenience. Externalism is committed to global supervenience because Davidson maintains that in the case of physical duplicates with different thoughts “there is \emph{something} different about them, even in the physical world; their causal histories are different” (Davidson 1987: 33).\footnote{For further discussion of these issues, see De Caro (2008) and Seager (1992).}


Davidson argues that externalism is compatible not only with the token-identity theory, but also with first-person authority. The point is that “it doesn't follow, simply from the fact that meanings are identified in part by relations to objects outside the head, that meanings aren't in the head” (Davidson 1987: 31). To think otherwise, Davidson says, “would be as bad as to argue that because my being sunburned presupposes the existence of the sun, my sunburn isn't a condition of my skin” (Davidson 1987: 31). Just as sunburn has intrinsic properties that are located in the skin, thoughts (and meanings) have intrinsic (neurological) properties that are “in the head.” But if thoughts have intrinsic properties – if they are not entirely outside the head – then there is something about them that can be known in a privileged, that is, nonempirical way. Davidson concludes that externalism poses no threat to the first-person authority.


Externalism and first-person authority may very well be compatible, but the sunburn-argument fails to establish this. The crux with the sunburn argument is that given externalism, the intrinsic properties of our thoughts play no decisive role for the determination of their content; instead, what determines thought content are extrinsic properties. But the extrinsic properties of our thoughts are not knowable in any privileged way. Hence, pointing out that externalism is compatible with token-identity theory has no impact on the issue of whether externalism and first-person authority are compatible (Bernecker 1996: 122–127).


Besides Putnam, the chief proponent of orthodox externalism is Burge. Burge's anti-individualism is motivated by means of a thought experiment involving a doctor and a patient who believes that “arthritis” applies to a disease one can have in one's thigh as well as in one's joints (Burge 2007). Burge suggests that, even though the patient incompletely understands the meaning of the term “arthritis,” we should ascribe to him a belief about arthritis when he says, for example, “I have arthritis in my thigh.” The reason is that the meaning of a term (here “arthritis”) is determined by the extension it has for the members of the subject's linguistic community. Then Burge constructs a counterfactual world where “arthritis” refers not to arthritis, but to a variety of rheumatoid ailments that can occur in both muscles and joints. The idea is that when the identical twin of the patient says “I have arthritis in my thigh,” he is saying something true. According to Burge, the reason the truth conditions of the patient's belief is different from that of his twin is because the two individuals possess different concepts. The patient's twin does not possess the concept \emph{arthritis} because he inhabits a different linguistic environment. It is the linguistic community that determines the meanings of terms and the contents of thoughts.


Davidson is critical of the arthritis case in support of anti-individualism (cf. Davidson 1987: 25–29). First, he has “a general distrust of thought experiments that pretend to reveal what we should say under conditions that in fact never arise” and he credits his own externalism with relying on “what I think to be our actual practice” (Davidson 1990: 199). Ironically though Davidson himself makes use of thought experiments – Swampman and the Omniscient Interpreter – that are quite foreign to “our actual practice.” Second, Davidson finds it implausible to suppose that an incomplete understanding can be sufficient for concept possession. When a subject is seriously mistaken about the meaning of the words he is using, he must be described as using the words with a non-standard meaning (Davidson 1987: 25–28; cf. Nordby 2005). Third, Davidson rejects the idea that thought contents and word meanings can be determined by “the linguistic practices of the person's community, even in cases where the individual is mistaken about the relevant practices” (Davidson 1990: 198). By tying “a speaker's meaning to an élite usage he may be unaware of” (Davidson 1990: 199), anti-individualism violates the doctrine of first-person authority and misconstrues speaker's meaning. Davidson declares:



\begin{quote}


[U]nless there is a presumption that the speaker knows what she means, i.e. is getting her own language right, there would be nothing for an interpreter to interpret. \dots{} [N]othing could count as someone regularly misapplying her own words.


(Davidson 1987: 38)



\end{quote}


Fourth, Davidson rejects the idea that we can treat the particular sentence used by a speaker to express a belief as a transparent medium, through which the interpreter can simply gaze and read off its content. In working out what others think, we often need to translate their use of words into our idiolects. We cannot, as Burge urges we should, take utterances like “I have arthritis in my thigh” at face value, any more than we can take a speaker's sincere utterance of “I have a hippopotamus in my refrigerator” at face value (Davidson 1968: 100–101).


Burge is an externalist because he thinks that thought content is partly determined by linguistic norms and practices of the language community. By contrast, Davidson is an externalist because he thinks that without interpretation there is no thought content. Thought content is determined by the constraints on successful communication and interpretation. Notwithstanding the important differences between triangular externalism and anti-individualism, Davidson and Burge agree that there is a social element that enters into the causal process of content determination. Since Davidson claims that thought content presupposes interpretation and communication, triangular externalism can be regarded as a form of social externalism (cf. Hahn 2003: 52–55).

\section{4. Triangulation and the Determination of Thought Content}


Davidson provides two transcendental arguments for triangular externalism: an argument from content determination and an argument from objectivity. In this and the following section, I shall discuss these arguments in turn and suggest that both of them are circular.


Davidson holds that the content of a thought is determined by what typically causes it. “[A]n example is the way the fact that a certain mental state has been typically caused by seeing cows allows us to think ‘There's a cow' ” (Davidson 1990: 201). But interactions of a single person with his environment are not enough to determine what typical causes a particular thought of this person. As was explained in Section 1, Davidson argues that triangulation is needed to identify the typical causes that determine thought content. The argument for triangulation from content determination is summarized as follows:



\begin{quote}


Social interaction, triangulation \dots{} gives us the only account of how experience gives a specific content to our thoughts. Without other people with whom to share responses to a mutual environment, there is no answer to the question what it is in the world to which we are responding. The reason has to do with the ambiguity of the concept of cause. \dots{} In the present case, the cause is doubly indeterminate: with respect to width, and with respect to distance. The first ambiguity concerns how much of the total cause of a belief is relevant to content. The brief answer is that it is the part or aspect of the total cause that typically causes relevantly similar responses. What makes the responses relevantly similar in turn is the fact that others find those responses similar. \dots{} The second problem has to do with the ambiguity of the relevant stimulus, whether it is proximal (at the skin, say) or distal. What makes the distal stimulus the relevant determiner of content is again the social character; it is the cause that is shared. The stimulus is thus triangulated; it is where causes converge.


(Davidson 1997c: 129–130)



\end{quote}


The “second problem” is that of deciding whether the relevant cause of a thought is distal or proximal and of locating the relevant distal cause among the many elements in the causal chain. The first problem is that of establishing a standard of similarity for the similarity of responses to a given cause. Davidson maintains that triangulation offers a solution to both problems. The relevant cause is the shared public cause that lies at the intersection of the two lines one can draw from between the two interacting people and the objects or events in the environment they are responding to. In other words, the relevant cause is “the nearest mutual [typical] cause” (Davidson 1999: 41). And the similarity-standard for responses to a nearest mutual typical cause is that the interpreter judges the responses to be similar.\footnote{For a detailed reconstruction of the argument from content determination, see Bridges (2006: 296–313), Glüer (2006: 1008–1015), Ludwig (2011: 80–93), and Pagin (2001: 201–206).}


The argument from content determination is faced with a host of objections. Due to space restrictions, I will limit myself to discussing what strikes me as the most serious problem.


Triangulation is introduced by Davidson as a method of determining thought content by singling out the relevant cause of a thought among all the possible causes. Triangulation, we learned, relies on communication. And communication occurs when two or more people react to an object or event in the environment and then react in turn to each other's reactions. To be able to react to another person's reaction to an object in the environment the speaker has to conceive of himself and of the other person as thought-possessing beings and, furthermore, has to conceive of the object in the environment as an object one can think of. According to Davidson, “it is only when an observer \emph{consciously} correlates the responses of another creature with object and events in the observer's world that there is any basis for saying the creature is responding to those objects and events” (Davidson 1991: 212, my emphasis; cf. Davidson 1997b: 86). Sometimes, Davidson goes further and claims that we must not only be \emph{conscious} of the triangle but must \emph{know} of it. In any case, the point is that we already need to grasp what thoughts are in order to communicate. But if having thoughts and understanding what they are is a requirement on communication, and if communication, in turn, is a requirement for an account of thought content, then we are turning in circles. The argument from content determination seems to be circular in that it presupposes an answer to the very question it is supposed to be a response to – what determines thought content?\footnote{For further discussion of this issue, see Glüer (2006: 1012–1014) and Pagin (2001: 204–206).}

\section{5. Triangulation and the Objectivity of Thought}


Davidson argues that there is an intimate connection between the idea of epistemic error and the ability to have thoughts. The connection is roughly this. A necessary condition for having thoughts is that one has a conception of an objective, that is, mind-independent world. To be able to think a thought, one must understand that there are facts that obtain independently of one's thinking. The conception of a mind-independent world that is a precondition of thought, in turn, presupposes an appreciation of the appearance\Slash{}reality distinction. If one does not appreciate the difference between how things seem and how they are, one cannot understand objectivity and truth. But if one does not understand objectivity and truth, one cannot understand subjectivity and error either. For it is impossible to understand claims about how things seem to oneself, unless one appreciates that the \emph{percipi} can deviate from the \emph{esse}. Therefore, Davidson says: “Having a belief demands \dots{} appreciating the contrast between true belief and false, between appearance and reality, mere seeming and being” (Davidson 1991: 209).


Given the connection between the idea of epistemic error and the ability to have thoughts, Davidson raises the question of how we can acquire the concept of epistemic error. Learning the concept of epistemic error, Davidson argues, presupposes participation in instances of triangulation. The idea is that when, after having reacted similarly to a shared stimulus, one of the triangulating subjects all of a sudden reacts differently to the same stimulus, this provides an opportunity to grasp the idea of epistemic error. Davidson writes:



\begin{quote}


[T]he triangle does make room for the concept of error (and hence truth) in situations in which the correlation of reactions that have been repeatedly shared can be seen by the sharers to break down; one creature reacts in a way previously associated by both creatures with a certain sort of situation, but the other does not. This may simply alert the non-reactor to an unnoticed danger or opportunity, but if the anticipated danger or opportunity fails to materialize, a place exists for the notion of a mistake. We, looking on, will judge that the first creature erred. The creatures themselves are also in a position to come to the same conclusion. If they do, they have grasped the concept of objective truth.


(Davidson 1997a: 26–27)



\end{quote}


The argument that emerges runs something like this: We cannot have thought contents unless we have thoughts. To have thoughts, we need to grasp the idea of epistemic error. And to grasp the idea of epistemic error we have to observe the person we are communicating with react abnormally to a shared stimulus. The occurrence of an abnormal reaction indicates that the triangulating partner is making a mistake. Hence, the participation in instances of triangulation is a necessary condition for the possession of thought.\footnote{For a detailed reconstruction of the argument from objectivity see Bridges (2006: 292–295), Glüer (2006: 1008–1015), Ludwig (2011: 69–80), and Pagin (2001: 206–209).}


A critic might object that if learning the concept of epistemic error requires awareness of a deviant reaction to a stimulus, as Davidson maintains, the reference to a second person is superfluous. All that is needed for a subject to grasp the idea of epistemic error is that it realizes that it now reacts to a stimulus in a way that is different from the way it reacted to the same stimulus in the past. The critic concludes that the above argument fails to establish the intersubjective character of the concept of objectivity.\footnote{Among those who claim that a single creature comparing past and present stimulus responses is sufficient for the emergence of the concept of objectivity and truth are Bridges (2006: 294–295), Briscoe (2007), and Child (1996: 19).}


Even if it is empirically false that “[t]he source of the concept[s] of objective truth [and error] is interpersonal communication” (Davidson 1991: 209), the argument from objectivity is still a good one. It is a transcendental version of Wittgenstein's private language argument (Pagin 2001: 208–209). Wittgenstein famously argued that one person by himself cannot use language either correctly or incorrectly, since there is no independent standard of evaluation. The required independent standard is provided by the practice of the language community of which the person is a member. Similarly, Davidson maintains that the repeated stimulus responses of a person are the same or similar in virtue of being treated as such by other people. A second person is needed to provide a standard of similarity (or regularity) of the first person's responses. Davidson writes:



\begin{quote}


The criterion on the basis of which a creature can be said to be treating stimuli as similar \dots{} is the similarity of the creatures's responses to those stimuli; but what is the criterion of the similarity of the responses? \emph{This} criterion cannot be derived from the creatures's responses; it can come only from the responses of an observer to the responses of the creature.


(Davidson 1991: 212)



\end{quote}


So, according to Davidson, intersubjectivity is needed for establishing standards of similarity of stimulus responses which, in turn, are needed for acquiring the concept of epistemic error which, in turn, is needed for the possession of thought.


The problem with Davidson's argument from objectivity is that it runs in circles. The attempt to fix the standard of similarity of stimulus responses in terms of agreement within a language community presupposes the very thing it is supposed to explain – thoughts. For comparing and contrasting one's own stimulus responses to those of others people amounts to performing a mental operation; it is a kind of thinking. So we already need to possess thoughts to grasp the concepts of error and objectivity which, in turn, are said to be preconditions for the possession of thoughts. Since we could not triangulate unless we already had thoughts, triangulation does not seem to help us understand what it takes to have thoughts.

% Notes
\section{References}


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Bridges, J. (2006). Davidson's transcendental externalism. \emph{Philosophy and Phenomenological Research} 78:290–315.


Briscoe, R.E. (2007). Communication and rational responsiveness to the world. \emph{Pacific Philosophical Quarterly} 88:135–159.


Burge, T. (2007). Individualism and the mental. In his \emph{Foundations of the Mind: Philosophical Essays II}. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 100–150.


Child, W. (1996). \emph{Causality, Interpretation and the Mind}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Davidson, D. (1967). Truth and meaning. In Davidson (1984): 17–36.


———. (1968). On saying that. In Davidson (1984): 93–108.


———. (1975). Thought and talk. In Davidson (1984): 155–170.


———. (1983). A coherence theory of truth and knowledge. In Davidson (2001a): 137–153.


———. (1984). \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


———. (1987). Knowing one's own mind. In Davidson (2001a): 15–38.


———. (1988). The myth of the subjective. In Davidson (2001a): 39–52.


———. (1989). The conditions of thought. In \emph{The Mind of Donald Davidson}, J. Brandl and W.L. Gombocz (eds). Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. 193–200.


———. (1990). Epistemology externalized. In Davidson (2001a): 193–204.


———. (1991). Three varieties of knowledge. In Davidson (2001a): 205–220.


———. (1992). The second person. In Davidson (2001a): 107–122.


———. (1997a). Seeing through language. In \emph{Thought and Language: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 42}, J.M. Preston (ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 15–27.


———. (1997b). Indeterminism and antirealism. In Davidson (2001a): 69–84.


———. (1997c). The emergence of thought. In Davidson (2001a): 123–134.


———. (1999). Interpretation: hard in theory, easy in practice. In \emph{Interpretations and Causes: New Perspectives on Donald Davidson's Philosophy}, M. De Caro (ed.). Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 31–44.


———. (2001a). \emph{Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective}. Oxford: Clarendon Press.


———. (2001b). Externalisms. In \emph{Interpreting Davidson}, P. Kotatko, P. Pagin and G. Segal (eds). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, pp. 1–16.


———. (2006). The perils and pleasures of interpretation. In \emph{Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language}, E. Lepore and B.C. Smith (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1056–1068.


De Caro, M. (2008). Davidson's naturalism. In \emph{Knowledge, Language and Interpretation: On the Philosophy of Donald Davidson}, M.C. Amoretti and N. Vassallo (eds). Heusenstamm: Ontos, pp. 183–201.


———. (2011). The short and happy life of the Swampman: interpretation and social externalism. In \emph{Triangulation. From an Epistemological Point of View}, M.C. Amoretti and G. Preyer (eds). Heusenstamm: Ontos, pp. 179–195.


De Rosa, R. (1999). Is there a problem about Davidson's externalism vis-a-vis his holism? In \emph{Interpretations and Causes: New Perspectives on Donald Davidson's Philosophy}, M. De Caro (ed.). Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 201–215.


Glüer, K. (2006). Triangulation. In \emph{Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language}, E. LePore and B.C. Smith (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 1006–1019.


Hahn, M. (2003). When Swampman gets arthritis: externalism in Burge and Davidson. In \emph{Reflections and Replies: Essays on the Philosophy of Tyler Burge}, M. Hahn and B. Ramberg (eds). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 29–58.


Lepore, E. and Ludwig, K. (2005). \emph{Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Ludwig, K. (1992). Skepticism and interpretation. \emph{Philosophy and Phenomenological Research} 52:317–339.


———. (2011). Triangulation triangulated. In \emph{Triangulation. From an Epistemological Point of View}, M.C. Amoretti and G. Preyer (eds). Heusenstamm: Ontos, pp. 69–95.


Nordby, H. (2005). Davidson on social externalism. \emph{Pacific Philosophical Quarterly} 86:88–94.


Pagin, P. (2001). Semantic triangulation. In \emph{Interpreting Davidson}, P. Kotatko, P. Pagin and G. Segal (eds). Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications, pp. 199–212.


Putnam, H. (1975). The meaning of “meaning.” In his \emph{Philosophical Papers ii: Mind, Language and Reality}. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 215–271.


Seager, W. (1992). Externalism and token identity. \emph{Philosophical Quarterly} 42:439–448.


Stroud, B. (1999). Radical interpretation and philosophical skepticism. In \emph{The Philosophy of Donald Davidson}, L.E. Hahn (ed.). Chicago: Open Court, pp. 139–161.


Verheggen, C. (2011). Triangulation and philosophical skepticism. In \emph{Triangulation. From an Epistemological Point of View}, M.C. Amoretti and G. Preyer (eds). Heusenstamm: Ontos, pp. 31–46.

\chapter{26. Triangulation}


Claudine Verheggen


[Triangulation consists of] the mutual and simultaneous responses of two or more creatures to common distal stimuli and to one another's responses.



\begin{quote}


(Davidson 2001a: xv)



\end{quote}

\section{1. Introduction}


Donald Davidson first introduced the idea of triangulation in 1982\footnote{See Davidson (1982: 105).} in support of the claim that only in a social setting could one have the concept of objective truth and hence only in a social setting could one have a language and thoughts. This was the (admittedly tentative) last step in an argument meant to show that thought requires speech.\footnote{A conclusion already expressed, if not exactly argued for, in 1975. See Davidson (1975: 170).} Davidson took up the idea of triangulation again in a paper he delivered in 1989\footnote{At a conference on Wittgenstein in Paris, published as “The Second Person” in 1992. Throughout I shall refer to this as the initial article.} and from then on never left it aside, but kept refining and further defending it, and spelling out its consequences for various areas of philosophy. For Davidson thought that, if triangulation is required for the possession of language and thoughts, then there is no room for traditional forms of skepticism about other minds and about the external world.\footnote{See, for example, Ramberg (2001) and Verheggen (2011) for attempts to work out some of these consequences.} Moreover, his version of semantic externalism and his version of realism,\footnote{Which he eventually preferred not to call realism, but then not antirealism either. See Davidson (1988: 185; 1990: 309).} as well as his antifoundationalism and his antireductionism, all got reinforced as a consequence of his claims about triangulation. In short, it would be hard to overstate the importance and the significance of Davidson's idea of triangulation in his later philosophy. I believe that the idea can in fact also be seen as a continuation, indeed, a culmination, of the views he started developing in 1973 (Davidson 1973) about radical interpretation.\footnote{This is far from uncontroversial. See Goldberg (2008) and Ramberg (2001).}


Of course, the idea has at least as many detractors as it has adherents, and they have in the past few years made themselves heard more and more loudly. I am myself an advocate of the idea; indeed, I shall argue that many objections to Davidson's argument for the claim that triangulation is needed for the possession of language and thoughts – call this the triangulation argument – are based on a central misunderstanding of how the argument is supposed to work. But first things first. Thus I shall start by expounding the argument from a historical point of view, so to speak, tracing it back to the article in which it was first developed and following it through the main ensuing articles, for not all the ingredients were present in the initial piece. The second part of the chapter will be devoted to a discussion of the core objections that have been made to various facets of the argument. These are, first, that triangulation is not needed to fix the meanings (i.e., propositional contents) of one's thoughts and utterances; second, that triangulation is not needed to have the concept of objective truth; third, that one need not have the concept of objective truth in order to be a thinker and speaker. I shall end by addressing a more formal objection that has been made repeatedly to the argument, namely, that the account it gives of what makes thought and language possible is circular.

\section{2. The Triangulation Argument}


The first thing to note is that there are two kinds of triangulation that Davidson has in mind, one preconceptual and the other fully linguistic, between which he unfortunately does not always sharply distinguish. The first kind, which he often calls “primitive,”\footnote{See, for example, Davidson (1999c: 85, 2001c: 292, 2006: 1066). He sometimes also calls it “basic” (Davidson 1999a: 128) or “simple” (Davidson 2003: 697).} “does not require intensional attitudes” (Davidson 2001c: 292). “It is the result of a threefold interaction, an interaction which is twofold from the point of view of each of the two agents: each is interacting simultaneously with the world and the other agent” (Davidson 1999a: 128).\footnote{See also Davidson (1999a: 128; 1999b: 731).} It is the kind of triangulation in which nonlinguistic creatures can engage, as in Davidson's example of two lionesses trying to catch a gazelle and coordinating their behavior by watching each other and the gazelle and reacting to each other's reactions (Davidson 2001b: 7). The second kind of triangulation involves full-blown linguistic interaction. It is the kind of situation in which the learner of a first language eventually finds herself, once she has become aware of “the distinction between what is believed or seems to be the case and what is objectively so,” which is one of the ways Davidson spells out the concept of objective truth, a concept that he interchangeably refers to as the concept of belief, the concept of error, and the concept of objectivity. It is also the kind of situation in which the radical interpreter – in effect the learner of a second or additional language in situ – finds herself.\footnote{See Davidson (1998: 88, 2001c: 294, 2001d: 144).} We may add that it is the kind of situation in which we sometimes find ourselves, whenever ostension is needed to determine the cause, and hence the meaning, of a speaker's utterance. Both kinds of triangulation are supposed to be necessary for someone to be a thinker and speaker, but only the second kind is sufficient – indeed, one might say redundantly so; we shall come back to this in Section 3. For now, let us ask why the first kind is necessary to begin with. What first prompted Davidson's idea of triangulation?

\subsection{2.1. Primitive triangulation}


The triangulation argument is premised on Davidson's perceptual externalism, the view “that the contents of our thoughts and sayings are partly determined by the history of causal interactions with the environment” (Davidson 1991a: 200).\footnote{See also Davidson (1997a: 71). I think it is also premised on the idea that “it is understanding that gives life to meaning” (Davidson 1994: 121). As should become clear, however, contra Lepore and Ludwig, Davidson is not presupposing here “the primacy of the third person point of view” (Davidson 2005: 407).} Thus, take the thought, “there's a cow.” “What determines the content of such basic thoughts (and what we mean by the words we use to express them) is what typically caused similar thoughts” (Davidson 1991a: 201). The question is, though, what are the typical (or “normal” or “usual” (Davidson 2001b: 4) ) causes of our basic thoughts and sayings? Davidson claims that if we were to observe a person who had never interacted with another and the world they share – call this person a solitaire – we could not answer this question. And, crucially, neither could she, for the problem here is not that we could not verify what the causes of her thoughts and utterances are, but that such causes could not be uniquely determined (Davidson 1992: 119). Just as the stimulus causing the dog to salivate could be said to be the ringing of the bell or the vibration of the air close to its ears, and just as the stimulus causing the child to mouth “table” could be said to be a table in its vicinity or the pattern of stimulations at its surface (Davidson 1992: 118), so the stimulus causing the solitaire to produce a sound apparently in response to her environment could be said to be “anything from the stimulation of [her] nerve endings to the original big bang” (Davidson 2001b: 4).\footnote{See also Davidson (1991a: 202, 1991b: 212).} And of course, in the absence of any determinate answer to the question what caused someone's thoughts or utterances, given perceptual externalism, there could be no answer to the question what she is thinking or saying; indeed, no reason to believe that she is thinking or saying anything. Matters change dramatically if the solitaire interacts with another person. They change dramatically if, specifically, the (no longer) solitaire interacts with an interlocutor, as well as with objects or events in her environment with which her interlocutor is also interacting. Then it becomes possible to answer the question what the causes of her utterances are. For any such utterance, the cause is what can be found at the intersection of the two lines that may be drawn from each participant in the interaction, what is common to each respondent, “the nearest mutual cause of the joint reaction” (Davidson 1999c: 84).\footnote{See also Davidson (2003: 693).} Exactly what, however, is the difference between the solitaire, who after all does interact with her environment, and the triangulator, such that we (and the triangulator, too, eventually) can say what it is she is reacting to and thus what it is she is thinking and talking about?


Davidson states that it is when three similarity patterns are present that we can locate the relevant cause of the child's uttering “table”: the child's finding tables similar, our finding tables similar, and our finding the child's responses in the presence of tables similar. He stresses, though, that the kind of triangulation just described, while necessary, is “not sufficient to establish that a creature has a concept of a particular object or kind of object” (Davidson 1992: 119). Still, we may ask, at this stage, why the solitaire could not find, say, blackberries similar and her responses in the presence of blackberries similar. Indeed, Davidson also states that what prompts our saying that the dog is responding to the bell, or that the child is responding to tables, is our finding it natural so to classify their responses (Davidson 1992: 118).\footnote{See also Davidson (1991a: 202).} But then, again, why could the solitaire not find it natural to say that she is responding to blackberries? The only potentially significant difference between the solitaire and the triangulator is that, whereas for the latter there can be a \emph{common} cause of hers and her interlocutor's responses, since two persons may be reacting, simultaneously, to one common object when they interact with each other, for the former there can be only \emph{similar} causes of the responses she gives at different times, since the solitaire cannot interact with herself in the relevant sense, that is, while reacting to a common cause. But this difference fades on reflection. For scenarios can be found either that suggest that there can be no common cause even of triangulators’ responses, or that suggest that there is more than one common cause of their responses, or that suggest that single common causes of the solitaire's responses can also be found.


To begin with, it may be argued that even though two triangulators may be said in one sense to be reacting to a common cause, say, the table, they may also be said in another sense never to be reacting to the same cause, since they \emph{per force} have different perspectives on what they are reacting to and so are reacting to different things, say, different angles of the table. If so, why not say that triangulators too, just as the solitaire, are reacting to similar causes but not to common causes? It may be replied here that we are conceiving of the objects and events they are reacting to in too fine-grained a way and further that even though triangulators may have slightly different perspectives on what they are reacting to, there is a perfectly good sense in which it is the same common object or event to which they are reacting. But then the worry, and this is the second scenario, is that, as a result of our less fine-grained conception, we may have introduced the possibility that there are several common causes to which triangulators are reacting. Why say, for example, that they are reacting to the table rather than to the set of table and chairs around it? Unless we answer this question, we are in a predicament similar to that which motivated triangulation in the first place. Even if we are in a position to choose distal causes over proximal ones, these distal causes are still indeterminate. (I shall come back to this as we shall soon see that this is a kind of ambiguity that Davidson himself is aware of.)\footnote{I first made these objections in Verheggen (1997). Other versions have since been offered. See Lepore and Ludwig (2005: 408–411) and Ludwig (2011: 87–89). Jason Bridges has argued that the presumption that nonlinguistic animals respond to distal causes, that is, to middle-sized objects and events in the world surrounding them, “is essential to our ordinary understanding of animal life” (Davidson 2006: 307). Even if this is right, as we shall see below, it does not immediately follow from this that nonlinguistic animals can think.} Finally, and this is the third scenario, it may be argued that we could imagine situations in which a solitaire could be said literally to be reacting to a common cause, for example, when she is perceiving a stick that simultaneously feels straight and looks bent. In short, it is not clear in the end why triangulation is needed to fix the causes, and hence the meanings, of one's thoughts and utterances. Many aspects of the predicament the solitaire is in can be seen to affect the triangulator as well, and many of the ways the triangulator may have to fix the causes, and hence the meanings, of her responses seem to be available to the solitaire as well. Should we then conclude that the triangulation argument fails at least as a demonstration that triangulation is needed to fix the meanings of one's thoughts and utterances?


We should not. For there is much more to the triangulation argument than what has been said so far. Let us, to begin with, return to the problem left over even for triangulators, namely, that of isolating one and only one common cause of their responses. This is a problem which, though he did not mention it in the initial article, Davidson eventually made explicit. He writes:



\begin{quote}


[For a solitaire] the cause is doubly indeterminate: with respect to width, and with respect to distance. The first ambiguity concerns how much of the total cause of a belief [or utterance] is relevant to content. \dots{} The second problem has to do with the ambiguity of the relevant stimulus, whether it is proximal (at the skin, say) or distal.


(Davidson 1999a: 129–30)



\end{quote}


We saw above that triangulation helps to solve the second problem, though we also saw that it is not obvious that triangulation is needed to do so. More importantly, we saw that triangulation, at least of the primitive kind discussed so far, does not help to solve the first problem. This problem is made perhaps more perspicuous if we remind ourselves of Wittgenstein's discussion of ostensive definition and thus of the idea that mere association of utterances with items in the world is not enough to endow these utterances with meaning. And this is so no matter how repeated these associations may be and no matter how many people may participate in them. The problem always remains of specifying which aspect of the item designated – which aspect of the cause – is the relevant one in the determination of meaning. Is it, say, the surface of the table, its color, its shape, the table itself, the table and its surroundings?\footnote{See Wittgenstein (1958: 13–24, 28–30), and Verheggen (2006) for a comparison of Wittgenstein's and Davidson's views.} Davidson briefly addresses this (first) problem immediately after mentioning it by saying that the relevant part of the total cause is “the part or aspect of the total cause that typically causes relevantly similar responses. What makes the responses relevantly similar in turn is the fact that others find those responses similar; once more it is the social sharing that makes the objectivity of content available” (Davidson 1999a: 130). But sheer social sharing does not tell us in what respect shared responses are similar. Moreover, we are not told why a solitaire could not also find her responses similar, thereby putting herself in a position to fix their relevant causes.


The brief answer just adumbrated by Davidson is, as we shall soon see, slightly misleading, however, and needs to be unpacked. Not surprisingly, Davidson is aware of the problem left over when we appeal to social sharing. He writes: “This difficulty [of saying what is being meant] remains no matter how many people follow the same course of action” (Davidson 2001b: 8). This suggests that primitive triangulation is not supposed to provide the whole answer to the question how the meanings of one's thoughts and utterances are fixed. Though it may be seen as making room for there being determinate causes of one's thoughts and utterances, these causes are not yet fixed in such a way that those reacting to them can be said to be thinkers and speakers. Thus, though primitive triangulation may be seen as a necessary step toward possession of language and thoughts,\footnote{Precisely the way Davidson conceives of it – see (Davidson 1999a: 128–130).} reflecting on it also affords us a diagnosis of the extent of the problem facing the externalist view, according to which the meanings of one's thoughts and utterances are in part determined by what typically cause them. What the discussion of primitive triangulation brings to the fore is that the causes of one's responses to one's environment are ambiguous not just for the solitaire but for the triangulator as well. No matter how similar shared responses may seem, they may be responses to different aspects of what cause them, and so they remain ambiguous.\footnote{I first argued for this interpretation in Verheggen (2007).} If so, what the discussion of primitive triangulation brings to the fore, furthermore, is that the prospects of explaining meaning in nonintensional terms are rather dim. But what kind of explanation can we then hope for? Specifically, the question before us is: what does disambiguate the causes of one's responses to one's environment and thus put one in a position to think and speak? To answer this question, I turn to the second type, which is in effect the second stage, of triangulation, discussion of which may be construed as the second step of the triangulation argument, providing the solution to the problem uncovered in the first step.

\subsection{2.2. Linguistic triangulation}


The crude answer is that, since no nonintensional magical trick will do to fix the causes, and hence the meanings, of one's thoughts and utterances, only those producing the thoughts and utterances could achieve this feat. And they could achieve it only by having the concept of objective truth and triangulating \emph{linguistically} with others.


As I suggested earlier, Davidson does not think that for the meanings of one's thoughts and utterances to be fixed, it is enough that room be made, via primitive triangulation, for there being determinate causes. Already when he first introduced the triangulation argument, he stressed that one must also be in a position to recognize these causes as such. Thus, it is not enough that one interact with another; the interaction must also be one that “matters to the creatures involved.” For them to get the idea “that they are reacting to one thing rather than another,” they must take “cognitive advantage of the three-way relation,” and thus must “react to the interaction” (Davidson 1992: 120).\footnote{See also Davidson (2001b: 13).} But this, in effect, is to say that they must also have the concept of objective truth. For to recognize causes as such is to recognize that some causes are the same as others and that some are not, and it is to recognize that these causes occur independently of one's thinking or talking about them. To recognize causes as such is to recognize that one's words and concepts may be applied to them correctly or incorrectly. Let us leave aside, for a moment, the fact that this looks tantamount to saying that to have a language and thoughts, one must in effect have a language and thoughts, and focus first on the concept of objective truth. It might be protested that the concept of objective truth is something that the solitaire could be in a position to have; indeed, it might be protested that this is something a nonlinguistic creature could be in a position to have.\footnote{See, for example, Lepore and Ludwig (2005: 396).} Davidson's view, however, is that “unless the creatures can communicate, unless they can engage in the exchange of propositional contents, there is no way they can take cognitive advantage of their ability to triangulate their shared world” (Davidson 2001b: 13). This claim, for one thing, confirms the suspicion of circularity just broached. For another, it makes it clear that according to Davidson, neither nonlinguistic creatures nor solitaires could have thoughts since possession of these requires possession of the concept of objective truth, which in turn requires linguistic triangulation. The charge of circularity will be addressed below. But first, Davidson's reasons for maintaining that possession of the concept of truth requires a social setting must be examined. Before doing this, however, I wish to take stock and emphasize an aspect of the structure of the triangulation argument that has been missed by many commentators.


Many of them insist that there are two triangulation arguments that should be considered and assessed separately. One is the argument for what makes it possible for meanings to be fixed; the other is the argument for what makes it possible to have the concept of objective truth.\footnote{See Bridges (2006: 295), Glüer (2006: 1007), Lepore and Ludwig (2005: 408), Ludwig (2011: 69), Pagin (2001: 201), and Talmage (1997: 143–144). A notable exception is provided by Lasonen and Marvan (2004: 190–191).} Some do recognize (and complain) that Davidson often runs the arguments together or that he does not sharply distinguish between the questions they are meant to address. But it should be clear by now that this is how Davidson intended it to be. Triangulation is not supposed to answer, first, the question how meanings can be fixed and then, only afterwards, the question how one may possess the concept of objective truth. Rather, triangulation accomplishes both tasks at once, for possession of the concept of objective truth is required for the determination of meanings.


In fairness to his commentators, Davidson's contention that having the concept of objective truth is needed to have beliefs and hence language predates the fully developed triangulation argument. And the reasons he often states for this contention are not obviously connected to the triangulation argument. These reasons are simple: to conceptualize is to classify, and to classify is to be aware of the possibility of misclassification. As Davidson writes, “being able to discriminate cats is not the same thing as having the concept of a cat. You have the concept of a cat only if you can make sense of the idea of misapplying the concept, of believing or judging that something is a cat which is not a cat” (Davidson 1999a: 124).\footnote{See alsoDavidson (1995: 9–10, 2001d: 141, 2003: 698).} It may even be said that, in the initial article, the connection between fixing meanings and having the concept of objective truth is not made explicit, leaving the impression that the two tasks are to some extent independent. But the idea which, I think, was already present in the initial article became more and more obvious. This is that, to put it slightly differently from earlier, if thoughts and utterances are to be meaningful, the concepts and words they involve must be subject to conditions of correct application. And, if thinkers and speakers are to determine these conditions, they must be aware of the distinction between correct and incorrect applications of their words and concepts, and thus of the fact that what they apply them to is independent of what they take it to be, which is tantamount to saying that they must be aware of the concept of objective truth.\footnote{Cf. Lasonen and Marvan (2004: 190–191).} Now, why does Davidson think that possession of the concept of objective truth requires a social setting?


He writes: “by yourself you can't tell the difference between the situations seeming the same and being the same.” (Davidson 1994: 124)\footnote{See also Davidson (1991b: 209).} Whenever he makes this point, Davidson mentions Wittgenstein to back him up, but he never himself defends it in any detail. Why exactly, then, could the solitaire not be in a position to have the concept of objective truth? Recall the predicament she is in: no matter how regular her responses to the environment may be, they may still be responses of different kinds. Thus she must be the one to tell, objectively, at least for some of the causes of her responses, which causes are the same as which, which of her responses are correct. But how is she supposed to draw such an objective line between what seems to her to be the same cause, or the correct response, and what is in fact the same cause, or the correct response? Well, it may be replied, she might have the following kind of experience. As a result of regularly finding blackberries in some particular bush, she one day experiences frustration upon not finding any in that bush. And it may be argued that experiences of this kind put her in a position to have the concept of objective truth, since by hypothesis she realizes that her belief about what is in the bush is false and thus that there is a distinction between what she believes to be the case and what is the case.\footnote{Bridges presents a similar kind of scenario in Davidson (2006: 294).} The question is, however, what reason is there to think that she is having a “thought” about the same bush? Perhaps she is “thinking” that she passed the fruity bush, or that she took the wrong turn, or whatever. The point is that, whatever she is “thinking,” be it that it is the same bush or that it is not, will be correct, according to her. She does not have to draw one conclusion rather than another. However she draws the line between correct and incorrect responses will be right to her. There is no way she can do this objectively. But the situation changes dramatically if the solitaire starts triangulating. Thus, Davidson continues in the above quoted passage:



\begin{quote}


If you and I each correlate the other's responses with the occurrence of a shared stimulus, however, an entirely new element is introduced. Once the correlation is established it provides each of us with a ground for distinguishing the cases in which it fails.


(Davidson 1994: 124)


There is space for the concept of error, which appears when there is a divergence in normally similar reactions.


(Davidson 2001b: 12)\footnote{See also Davidson (1999a: 129, 1999c: 84).}



\end{quote}


Note, though, that there being space for the concept of error is not yet sufficient for someone to be in a position to have the concept of error. After all, one may again imagine a scenario where space for the concept of error could also be made by the solitaire. What changes dramatically for the triangulator is that she is interacting and so can settle with another person, rather than just with herself, the ways in which perspectives on a given event or state of affairs may diverge. As long as the responses of triangulators do not diverge, they presumably cannot yet objectively distinguish between what seem to them to be the same, or the correct, responses and what are the same, or the correct, responses to their environment. But if their responses diverge, the distinction is “forced” upon them, as Davidson once put it (Davidson 1975: 170). It is forced upon them because they have no choice but to negotiate, so to speak, the resolution of the divergence. This cannot be dependent on one or the other interlocutor but must be the result of genuine communication between them. Indeed, we might say that whereas the solitaire “communicates” with herself regardless of how she settles the matter, interpersonal communication could not succeed if it were left to one or the other interlocutor to decide which way to go. Communication requires them to agree, or at least to agree to disagree. It is important to note also that for the divergence of responses to put someone in a position to have the concept of objective truth, the matter must be settled linguistically. Someone who interacts with a nonlinguistic creature would be no better off than the solitaire, having the only say on the matter and thus no say at all.\footnote{Cf. Verheggen (1997: 368).}


Such is my unpacking of Davidson's claim that only triangulators can be in a position to draw objective lines between what seems to them to be the same and what is in fact the same, and thus only triangulators can be in a position to have the concept of objective truth. If Davidson's triangulation argument is unobjectionable, the conclusion we have reached is that only in a social setting could one have a language and thoughts, and there could not be thought without language. But is the argument unobjectionable?

\section{3. Objections to the Triangulation Argument}


That the argument is unobjectionable is certainly not what many commentators have concluded. To begin with, they have objected to some of the steps of the argument, specifically, to the claim that triangulation is needed to fix the meanings of thoughts and utterances, to the claim that triangulation is needed to have the concept of objective truth, and to the claim that possession of the concept of objective truth is needed to have a language and thoughts. More generally, they have objected to the triangulation argument on the grounds that it gives a circular account of what makes language and thought possible. I examine each objection in turn.

\subsection{3.1. Fixing meanings does not require triangulation}


I shall be brief here, as I already have, in the course of my presentation of primitive triangulation, discussed objections that may be made to the claim that this kind of triangulation is necessary to fix meanings. We saw that the primary purpose of primitive triangulation is to make room for there being determinate distal causes. But, as I argued, the primitive triangulator does not seem to be in a better position to do this than the solitaire. However, as we also saw, making room for there being determinate causes is not the same as there being meaning-fixing causes. What is needed for this, in addition, is linguistic triangulation. Many commentators recognize this – whether or not they also recognize the role played by the concept of objective truth – but go on to argue that the account then becomes circular, a charge I shall consider in Section 3.4. But there are also those who object to the claim that it is \emph{linguistic} triangulation that is needed to fix the meanings of one's thoughts. Thus, Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig ask “why the \emph{more} that is required in addition to having the same innate similarity responses is \emph{communication}” (Lepore and Ludwig 2005: 409). According to them, thought does not require language. Animals, at least those who engage in primitive triangulation, can think about the features of the world with which they interact. They can “recognize” that they are responding to the same features in similar ways. They can, in effect, have the concept of objective truth. However, Lepore and Ludwig do not explain how this is possible without engaging in linguistic triangulation, which leads to the next objection.

\subsection{3.2. Possessing the concept of objective truth does not require linguistic triangulation}


This objection has been made by numerous commentators.\footnote{In addition to those I discuss below, see Bridges (2006), Child (1996), Glock (2003), Heil (1992) (whose specific complaint I have noted in my presentation of the triangulation argument), Briscoe (2007), and Ludwig (2011).} They either maintain that the claim that possession of the concept of objective truth requires triangulation is “sheer empirical speculation” (Glüer 2006: 1017; Pagin 2001: 207). Or they tell us a story about how someone needs no other person's help in order to have the concept of objective truth. Thus Martin Montminy writes:



\begin{quote}


There are a least three ways in which \dots{} [a solitary creature] can come to understand that one of its beliefs is wrong. First \dots{} [it] can compare its current reaction to a past one \dots{} . A second method \dots{} is to try to see if her current reaction satisfies a generalization it has so far admitted \dots{} . Thirdly, the solitary creature can compare its actual reaction to one it would have if it observed the same situation from a different perspective.


(Montminy 2003: 38–39)



\end{quote}


The problem with all the ways that Montminy envisages for being in a position to have the concept of objective truth is that they assume that the solitary creature already has beliefs and so already is a thinker. But Davidson's argument, as I have construed it, is that a creature who does not have the concept of objective truth could not have thoughts because their meanings could be fixed only by someone who has the concept of objective truth. That is, possession of the concept and of thoughts, and of course of language, comes at once. Lepore and Ludwig give this story about what may put someone in a position to have the concept of objective truth:



\begin{quote}


Accustomed to the persistence of solid objects, one glances at a table and comes to believe there is a book lying there. Looking up moments later, one sees nothing there where one had thought there was a book. One may achieve a smaller adjustment of one's theory of the world by supposing that one was mistaken the first time around, rather than supposing solid objects go out of existence without explanation.


(Lepore and Ludwig 2005: 402)\footnote{See also Ludwig (2011: 78).}



\end{quote}


It is rather hard to see just what has been explained here. The question is not how someone can apply the concept of objective truth without communicating with another. If she has it and thus has beliefs, there is no reason to think she could not do that. But Davidson's question has been how someone who has never communicated with another could have both beliefs and the concept of objective truth. Lepore and Ludwig observe that “it could not be a request for a story about how a creature with beliefs could acquire the concept of error by engaging in certain sorts of activities” (Lepore and Ludwig 2005: 401). I think they are right in maintaining not only that, for Davidson, beliefs and the concept of objective truth come together, but also that Davidson is not trying to spell out the process through which they are acquired. As he writes: “Triangulation does not pretend to explain, explicate, or describe [the] process [through which] the learner, taking advantage of the space created by triangulation, becomes aware of the possibility of error” (Davidson 2001c: 294). He is trying, however, to discover what puts someone in a position to have beliefs and the concept of objective truth. Specifically, he is trying to articulate what he sees as the conceptual relations between the two achievements and between them and linguistic triangulation. And, whereas he sees linguistic triangulation as shedding light on our understanding of what makes having beliefs and the concept of objective truth possible, he finds that no such light is being shed, either if we consider a solitaire interacting with herself and her environment, or if we consider creatures engaging merely in primitive triangulation. This leads to the first complaint I mentioned against the claim that possession of the concept of objective truth requires triangulation, namely, that it is sheer empirical speculation.


In response, Davidson has happily admitted that it is speculation. But he has also indicated why he does not think that it is sheer speculation. Thus he writes:



\begin{quote}


There cannot be said to be proof of this claim [that aspects of our interactions with others and the world are partly constitutive of what we mean and think]. Its plausibility depends on a conviction which can seem either empirical or a priori; a conviction that this is a fact about what sort of creatures we are. Empirical if you think it just happens to be true of us that this is how we come to be able to speak and think about the world; a priori if you think, as I tend to, that this is part of what we mean when we talk of thinking and speaking. After all, the notions of speaking and thinking are ours.


(Davidson 2001c: 294)



\end{quote}


To repeat, Davidson tells us a conceptual story about the relations among the concepts of error, thought, speech, and linguistic triangulation, pointing out how conceiving of the possibility of the one is related to conceiving of the possibility of the others.\footnote{See Davidson (2006: 1065).} Now it may be observed that the story he tells is circular – a charge, again, I shall examine shortly. First, let us note that it would be hard, though, to come up with empirical evidence that thought, speech and linguistic triangulation are not interdependent (keeping in mind, of course, that it is exclusively propositional thought that we are investigating here). But empirical evidence against the claim that possession of the concept of objective truth is needed to be a thinker and speaker has allegedly been found. This leads to the third objection to the triangulation argument.

\subsection{3.3. Possession of a language and thoughts does not require possession of the concept of objective truth}


The main empirical evidence that has been used to support this claim comes from people who suffer from autism. There are some high-functioning autistic people who, we are told, are perfectly good speakers of a language even though they lack the concept of objective truth.\footnote{See Andrews and Radenovic (2006) and Gluer and Pagin (2003). The objection that having beliefs does not require having the concept of belief has also been made by Burge (2003) and Glock (2003).} Though they can engage in dialogue with other people, they cannot attribute to them beliefs and other propositional attitudes, which seems to be required in order to engage in linguistic triangulation. The evidence provided for this claim is twofold. First, autistic speakers allegedly fail false belief tests, which are designed to test their ability to attribute false beliefs to others.\footnote{See Baron-Cohen, Leslie, and Frith (1985).} Second, actual cases of autistic speakers not capable of attributing beliefs to others have reportedly been found. However, it is not that easy empirically to determine which speaker may or may not have the concept of objective truth. Passing a false belief test demonstrates possession of the concept. But failing the test does not demonstrate lack of the concept. Furthermore, that autistic speakers cannot attribute beliefs to others is at best underdetermined by the evidence. What some philosophers have considered the best example of an autistic speaker who lacks this ability has been, successfully to my mind, shown to support the opposite claim.\footnote{See Andrews and Radenovic (2006: 671–673), as challengers of Davidson, and Bouma (2006), as his defender.}


I realize that the foregoing is a rather rapid survey of a hot debate. But the fact is that Davidson never addressed these specific empirical worries, and there may be a reason for this. Given the quotation I cited earlier concerning the status of the claims he is making about triangulation, I suspect that the “evidence” provided by autistic speakers would not budge him and that he would insist that the burden of proof, or at least of convincing argument since there can be no proof, is on his opponents, who have to show two things. First, they have to show how to distinguish between genuine speaking and parroting, or, as he sometimes puts it, between conceptualizing and discriminating, or between following a rule and merely having a disposition (Davidson 2001b: 9), without invoking the concept of objective truth. Second, they have to show how the meanings of thoughts and utterances of those who lack the concept can still be fixed.\footnote{In Verheggen (2007), I suggested, tentatively, that room could be made for someone having a language without having the concept of objective truth in so far as the meanings of her utterances could be fixed by another person with whom she interacts and who has the concept of objective truth. I remain unconvinced by my suggestion. In any case, even if it could be made to work, it would not affect the claim that language and thought are essentially social.} This, as I have mentioned several times, is not a demand that is usually acknowledged by Davidson's opponents, especially not by those who make the objection under consideration. But, as I have argued, it is a central part of Davidson's triangulation argument. Indeed, I believe that the need for the connection between meaning determination and possession of the concept of objective truth is part and parcel of what makes the account of language and thought unavoidably circular. This is the topic of the next and last objection I examine.

\subsection{3.4. The account of what makes language and thought possible is circular}


I have at several points already alluded to the circularity of the account. The crudest way to expose it is this. Primitive triangulation, though it may make room for there being determinate causes, and hence determinate meanings, of one's thoughts and utterances, and thus though, as Davidson insists, it is necessary for thought itself to emerge, is nonetheless not sufficient. What must be added is linguistic communication. To say this, Davidson acknowledges, is “not very helpful [for] it assumes what was to be explained. Of course if there is language there is thought\dots{} . Nevertheless, it is useful to recognize the somewhat surprising fact that the social element that is essential to language is essential to thought itself” (Davidson 2001b: 13).\footnote{See also Davidson (1999a: 130).} Now, the circle seems to be shrinking when we next acknowledge that the social element that is essential to language is linguistic communication. “With the second, final, step we move in a circle, for we grasp the concept of truth only when we can communicate \dots{} the propositional contents of the shared experience, and this requires language” (Davidson 1997b: 141). The circle seems unavoidable, Davidson further insists, “for a non-circular answer would tell us how to account for intensionality in non-intensional terms” (Davidson 1997b: 139). And this reduction is “not to be expected” (Davidson 2001b: 13).\footnote{See also Davidson (1999c: 84, 2001c: 293, 2003: 697). Davidson has long argued for this, starting in 1970 (Davidson 1970). But, as I indicated earlier, and as should be clear by now, additional reasons can be found in the triangulation argument. Davidson has also repeatedly argued that the transition from the stage where there is no (as always, propositional) thought to the stage where there is thought cannot be explained (Davidson 1999a: 127). See Brink (2004) and Bar-On and Priselac (2011) for attempts to bridge the gap.} Those who underline the circular aspect of Davidson's account in fact realize that he thinks it is due to the failure of reduction. Still, this does not help, they contend, for there remains the question how the awareness or recognition that one is triangulating could “in any sense be part of the \emph{explanation} of the acquisition of the capacity for thought, given that it presupposes that capacity” (Bridges 2006: 301). In the end, Davidson's whole enterprise of trying to establish the essentially social character of language and thought simply collapses, or so Pagin maintains:



\begin{quote}


[I]f the interesting difference between being on one's own and being in a community cannot be stated without presupposing that the community members have the capacities that were considered problematic to begin with, we haven't even been given a reason for disbelieving that isolated individuals can have them, too.


(Pagin 2001: 209)\footnote{See also Glüer (2006) and Yalowitz (1999).}



\end{quote}


The question before us is whether, as Bridges puts it, the circle “being vanishingly small, is \dots{} vicious” (Bridges 2006: 302), or whether, as Dagfinn Follesdal puts it, “the circle is very large [and so] unobjectionable” (Follesdal 1999: 726).


To begin with, it must be stressed again that Davidson's goal is “not to explain in detail how the process [i.e., the first entry into thought and language] works \dots{} but to indicate how the triangular arrangement makes the process possible” (Davidson 2001c: 293). The question thus is whether Davidson has succeeded in doing the latter. Here, I believe that what needs emphasizing is the difference between the solitaire's and the triangulator's positions, a difference that is more interesting than Pagin makes it sound. And the only way to do this is to remind ourselves, once more, of what calls for a nonreductive, and thus circular, account to begin with. It is the appreciation that primitive triangulation leaves the causes, and hence the meanings, of triangulators’ responses to their environment indeterminate. Triangulators are no better off than solitaires at that stage. Hence the need for would-be thinkers and speakers to have the concept of objective truth and the leap into the intensional realm. It seems to me that the motivation for this need is unobjectionable if the verdict on primitive triangulation is right. Then the question becomes why triangulation is needed to have the concept of objective truth. Just as there might be room for there being determinate causes of her responses for the solitaire, so there might be room for her to become aware of the concept of objective truth. But, as we have seen, this is precisely what Davidson denies. And he does this, as I have tried to show, by articulating a significant difference between the solitaire and the triangulator, which is that only the triangulator is obliged to consider her interlocutor when settling a dispute about diverging responses.\footnote{Maria Lasonen and Tomas Marvan have argued in a similar vein that “the presence of the second person triggers some change in the first being \dots{} [which is] brought about when the second person applies these [existing similarity] standards in linguistic training by correcting the learner” (Lasonen and Marvan 2004: 189). They think this shows that Davidson's account is in fact noncircular. I think, rather, that it again articulates a significant difference between the solitaire and the triangulator. But it is taking place in the intensional realm and so can still be deemed to yield a circular account.} One is almost tempted to say, crudely, look, there is a difference between the solitaire and the triangulator: only the latter triangulates!


How large, then, is the circle, in the end?


It is obviously not just the narrow vicious circle that says that there is language and thought only when there is language and thought. It is rather the rich and complex circle that encompasses language, thought (each of which depending on there being fixed meanings), possession of the concept of objective truth, and linguistic triangulation. I should say it is an instructive circle, each part of which is such that, if it is absent, the whole circle breaks down. To some, it may in the end be a frustrating story, as nonreductive stories are ultimately bound to be. But it seems to me that the story is compelling and that within the intensional realm, progress has been made.\footnote{For a related discussion, see Sinclair (2005).}

\section{4. Conclusion}


I see the triangulation argument as a sustained attempt both to strengthen the claim that a reductive account of language and thought is not forthcoming and to develop a constructive theory of the nature of language and thought in light of that conclusion. If intensional concepts cannot be explained in a reductive way, it seems that one promising alternative explanation is in terms of the relations among them. This is what Davidson has accomplished, thereby reinforcing his version of semantic externalism and all the metaphysical and epistemological consequences it entails. Those who remain unconvinced by the argument should at least recognize the challenges it poses and the kind of work that needs to be done in order to meet them.

% Notes
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Verheggen, C. (1997). Davidson's second person. \emph{The Philosophical Quarterly} 47(188):361–369.


———. (2006). How social must language be? \emph{Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior} 36(2):203–219.


———. (2007). Triangulating with Davidson. \emph{The Philosophical Quarterly} 57(226):96–103.


———. (2011). Triangulation and philosophical skepticism. In Amoretti and Preyer (2011).


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\chapter{27. Rationality as a Constitutive Ideal}


Michael Rescorla


A striking thesis lies at the core of Davidson's philosophy: when we attribute intentional content to another creature's mental states and speech acts, we must treat the creature as largely conforming to our own rational norms. I will discuss how this thesis informs Davidson's treatment of rationality and intentionality. After reviewing some historical background (Section 1), I present basic aspects of Davidson's position (Section 2). I then examine various worries about the position (Sections 3–6). I conclude by highlighting some key Davidsonian insights into rationality (Section 7).

\section{1. Kant, Carnap, and Quine}


How does logic relate to thought? Three mutually consistent answers surface repeatedly in the philosophical tradition:


\begin{itemize}
\item\relax 
Logic is \emph{normative}, in that logical laws dictate how one should think.



\item\relax 
Logical laws \emph{describe} how people actually think, at least to a first approximation.



\item\relax 
Logic is \emph{constitutive} of thought, meaning roughly that conformity to logical laws fundamentally informs what it is to think.




\end{itemize}

Note that the third answer entails the second.


Kant regards logic as both normative and constitutive. He begins the \emph{Jäsche} \emph{Logic} by emphasizing normativity (Kant [1800] 1974: 16): “In logic, we do not want to know how the understanding is and thinks, and how it hitherto has proceeded in thinking, but how it ought to proceed in thinking.” But Kant also assigns logic a crucial descriptive role within his a priori theory of human mental faculties. He postulates faculties of \emph{understanding} and \emph{sensibility}. The understanding cannot deviate on its own from logical norms: “if we had no other power of cognition besides the understanding, we would never err” (Kant [1800] 1974: 59). Logical errors result from “the \emph{unnoticed influence of sensibility upon the understanding}” (Kant 1800] 1974: 59). Logic describes how the understanding operates when not illicitly disrupted by sensibility. Logic delineates “necessary laws of the understanding and reason in general,” without which “we could not think at all” (Kant [1800] 1974: 14–15). In that sense, logic is constitutive of thought.


In the early twentieth century, philosophers such as Wittgenstein and the logical positivists rejected Kant's approach as overly \emph{psychologistic}. Yet many of those same philosophers advanced \emph{depsychologized} versions of the Kantian thesis that logic plays a constitutive role within rational inquiry.


To illustrate, consider Carnap's \emph{The Logical Syntax of Language}. Carnap wants to replace traditional philosophy with \emph{rational reconstruction}. He urges us to render scientific discourse rigorous and precise by constructing \emph{linguistic frameworks}. In delineating a linguistic framework, we specify the logic governing inquiry within that framework. There is no meaningful question regarding which frameworks are correct or incorrect: “\emph{In logic, there are no morals}. Everyone is at liberty to build up his own logic, for example, his own language, as he wishes” (Carnap [1937] 2002: 52). We can offer \emph{pragmatic exhortations} regarding the merits of one framework over another. We can say that one framework is simpler, more elegant, and so on. But we cannot rationally assess frameworks, because our framework provides our only applicable standards of rational assessment. Carnap eschews all talk about mental faculties, mental processes, and the like. In that respect, he differs fundamentally from Kant. Nevertheless, Carnap pursues a \emph{linguified}, \emph{relativized} version of the Kantian thesis that logic plays a constitutive role within rational inquiry: \emph{linguified}, because logic now helps constitute a linguistic framework; and \emph{relativized}, because there are diverse equally legitimate frameworks.


In the 1950s, Quine launched a battery of arguments against Carnap's approach. Carnap sharply distinguishes \emph{change within a framework} (as when one revises an estimate of some object's mass) from \emph{change between frameworks} (as when one revises a logical law). According to Quine, Carnap has not provided any clear explanation of this difference. He has not isolated a clear sense in which certain doctrines play a constitutive role within one's current scientific theorizing. Quine sees no principled difference between revisions in logic and other revisions in our scientific theory (Quine [1953] 1980: 43). If we change our logic, we are not altering constitutive aspects of thought or discourse. We are merely altering particularly well-entrenched elements of our overall science. Thus, Carnap's picture does not describe even idealized scientific inquiry.


Quine concludes that Carnapian rational reconstruction lacks philosophical interest: “why all this creative reconstruction, all this make-believe? The stimulation of his sensory receptors is all the evidence anybody has had to go on, ultimately, in arriving at his picture of the world. Why not just see how this construction really proceeds? Why not settle for psychology?” (Quine 1969: 75). Quine advocates \emph{naturalized epistemology}: an abstract branch of scientific psychology. Naturalized epistemology studies how mental activity transforms sensory input into theories of the world. Rather than reconstruct human rationality within an artificial linguistic framework, we study actual human mental processes. “Better to discover how science is in fact developed and learned than to fabricate a fictitious structure to a similar effect” (Quine 1969: 78).


Quine's approach seems to jettison normativity from serious discourse. Naturalized epistemology describes \emph{actual} mental activity. What role can normative prescriptions occupy within this enterprise? As Kim (1988: 389) complains, “Quine is urging us to replace a normative theory of cognition with a descriptive science.” If we seek only to describe actual mental activity, then how can say that logic sets norms for \emph{correct} thinking? More generally, how can we normatively evaluate beliefs as \emph{justified} or \emph{unjustified}?


Another pressing worry concerns the relation between naturalized epistemology and the mind's representational capacity. Quine finds no place for representationality (or \emph{intentionality}) within his version of naturalized epistemology. In \emph{Word and Object} (Quine 1960: 26–79), he advances his \emph{radical translation} thought experiment. He imagines a linguist attempting to translate an unknown language by observing the linguistic behavior of native speakers. Quine contends that there are multiple incompatible translation manuals equally consistent with total observed linguistic behavior. Furthermore, he contends that there is \emph{no} \emph{fact of the matter} regarding which of these translation manuals is correct. On this basis, Quine urges us to jettison intentionality from scientific discourse (Quine 1960: 216–221), relying instead upon nonintentional explanations drawn from physics, biology, neuroscience, or Skinnerian behaviorist psychology.


Quine's view threatens to banish normativity and intentionality from our theorizing. This threat provides the immediate context for Davidson's work (Friedman 1996). Davidson accepts many aspects of Quine's approach, but he wants to secure a more robust role for normativity and intentionality. In particular, he seeks to preserve the traditional conception of humans as rational.

\section{2. Davidsonian Interpretation Theory}


Davidson emphasizes \emph{interpretation}: our practice of ascribing intentional content to one another's linguistic performances and mental states. Interpretation is central to daily human interaction. For example, we frequently explain someone's actions by attributing beliefs and desires to her. Davidson supplements Quine's austere naturalist picture with a systematic theory of intentional ascription.


Following Quine, Davidson (1984: 125–154) imagines a linguist studying an unfamiliar language. Davidson modifies Quine's thought experiment in two key respects:


\begin{itemize}
\item\relax 
Whereas Quine considers radical \emph{translation}, Davidson considers radical \emph{interpretation}. The goal is to \emph{interpret} sentences, rather than to translate them into one's own language (Davidson 1984: 128–129). More specifically, Davidson's radical interpreter seeks to construct a Tarski-style truth-theory for the native language (Davidson 1984: 130–131).



\item\relax 
Whereas Quine emphasizes \emph{language}, Davidson places equal emphasis upon \emph{mind}. As Davidson (1984: 142–145) notes, it is relatively straightforward to determine what someone believes and desires if we already know what her words mean, or to determine what her words mean if we already know what she believes and desires. The radical interpreter must solve for all three variables simultaneously: beliefs, desires, and meanings.




\end{itemize}

The centerpiece of Davidson's philosophy is an idealized model of radical interpretation.


Davidson grounds his model in \emph{Bayesian decision theory}, as developed by Ramsey ([1926] 1950) and refined by Jeffrey (1983). Bayesian decision theory is a mathematical model of decision-making under uncertainty. Bayesians codify belief through \emph{subjective probability} and desire through \emph{utility}. Probabilities and utilities determine \emph{expected utilities} for actions available to the agent. A Bayesian agent chooses actions that maximize expected utility. To render this mathematical apparatus more concrete, Bayesians typically prove a \emph{representation theorem}: if an agent's preferences satisfy certain constraints (such as transitivity), then there exist probabilities and utilities with respect to which her preferences maximize expected utility. In Ramsey's treatment, preferences determine unique probabilities, and they determine utilities uniquely up to linear transformation. In Jeffrey's treatment, preferences determine utilities only up to fractional linear transformation, and they determine probabilities only to within a certain quantization. Bayesian representation theorems show how to extract a semi-unique theory of mental states (probabilities and utilities) from a relatively observable evidentiary base (preferences). The theorems thereby illuminate how one can read a rational pattern into observed behavior.


Traditional Bayesian decision theory presupposes meaning-theoretic facts. For example, Jeffrey assumes that the agent has preferences over \emph{propositions}. Davidson complains that meaning-theoretic presuppositions are not available to a radical interpreter (Davidson 2004: 29, 160). Accordingly, he generalizes Jeffrey's model. In Davidson's later work, the radical interpreter takes as data \emph{whether} \emph{the subject prefers one sentence true over another} (Davidson 2004: 161). More precisely, the radical interpreter observes the distal conditions under which the native prefers one sentence true over another.\footnote{By emphasizing distal conditions, Davidson departs substantially from Quine, who instead emphasizes patterns of \emph{proximal} sensory stimulation. As Davidson stresses, the contrast has significant implications for epistemology and for the study of mental content (Davidson 1999: 82–84, 2001: 151, 2005: 47–62).} From that data, the radical interpreter must construct a unified theory that specifies probabilities, utilities, and a Tarski-style truth theory. In this way, radical interpretation grounds belief, desire, and meaning in observed behavior.


To develop his model, Davidson deploys Quine's \emph{Principle of Charity}: “assertions startlingly false on the face of them are likely to turn on hidden differences of language” (Quine 1960: 59). Citing charity, Quine urges that translation should not render speakers as denying basic logical truths (Quine 1960: 58–59). Davidson concurs, and he vastly generalizes the point. According to Davidson, radical interpretation should construe natives as conforming to basic logic, probability theory, and decision theory. Assuming that the agent conforms to basic axioms of probability and decision theory, the radical interpreter can identify which native locutions correspond to familiar truth-functional connectives (Davidson 1990: 326–328). Once we have identified truth-functional connectives, we can apply the Bayesian representation theorem to discern the agent's probabilities and utilities (Davidson 1990: 328). We then apply charity once more: we assume that the agent conforms to basic quantificational logic, and we thereby identify quantifiers, predicates, and singular terms as such (Davidson 1990: 319–320). The standard Tarskian apparatus determines how to interpret logical vocabulary. Thus, our only remaining task is to interpret primitive singular terms and predicates. Davidson's remarks regarding this crucial task are not as systematic as one might desire (Davidson 1984: 136–137, 151–152, 1990: 320–322, 1999: 82, 2001: 148–149, 2004: 126). The basic idea is to apply a form of charity. However, Davidson employs widely varying formulations to express the requisite kind of charity.\footnote{See Lepore and Ludwig (2005: 182–197, 258–259) for discussion.} A recurring theme is that if the native assigns high probability to a sentence, then we should take this as prima facie evidence that the sentence is true. Another recurring theme is that we should strive for an interpretation on which the native's conditional probabilities track genuine relations of evidential support.


Obviously, ordinary people do not execute anything resembling Davidsonian radical interpretation. But Davidson maintains that his model enshrines a \emph{constitutive ideal of rationality} underlying all interpretation, radical or otherwise (Davidson 1980: 222–223). The model makes explicit certain normative constraints that necessarily govern intentional ascription (Davidson 2004: 128). We can attribute intentionality to a creature only if we treat the creature as largely conforming to rational norms. \emph{Which} rational norms? Our own, because those are the only ones we have. We can describe a creature's intentional states \emph{as} intentional only if we postulate that the creature largely satisfies our own standards of rationality (Davidson 2005: 319):



\begin{quote}


Charity is a matter of finding enough rationality in those we would understand to make sense of what they say and do, for unless we succeed in this, we cannot identify the contents of their words and thoughts. Seeing rationality in others is a matter of recognizing our own norms in their speech and behavior. These norms include norms of logical consistency, of action in reasonable accord with essential or basic interests, and the acceptance of views that are sensible in the light of evidence.



\end{quote}


An agent need not always satisfy rational norms. However, any lapses are deviations from an overall rational pattern (Davidson 2004: 196):



\begin{quote}


[I]t does not make sense to ask, concerning a creature with propositional attitudes, whether that creature is \emph{in general} rational, whether its attitudes and intentional actions are in accord with the basic standards of rationality. Rationality, in this primitive sense, is a condition of having thoughts at all. The question whether a creature “subscribes” to the principle of continence, or to the logic of the sentential calculus, or to the principle of total evidence for inductive reasoning, is not an empirical question. \dots{} An agent cannot fail to comport most of the time with basic norms of rationality.



\end{quote}


Thus, intentional psychology is an inherently normative enterprise (Davidson 1980: 241):



\begin{quote}


[T]here is no way psychology can avoid consideration of the nature of rationality, of coherence and consistency. \dots{} Psychology, if it deals with propositional attitudes \dots{} cannot be divorced from such questions as what constitutes a good argument, a valid inference, a rational plan, or a good reason for acting.



\end{quote}


Intentional description and normative evaluation are inextricably entangled.


In this manner, Davidson revives the Kantian thesis that logical norms are constitutive of thought. As Davidson puts it, “I think of logic and decision theory as rough but essential laws of thinking and action,” in that they “delineate aspects of rationality which thinking creatures must to a considerable extent exemplify” (Davidson 1999b: 620). Davidson's distinctive twist on the Kantian thesis is that logical norms, along with other rational norms, are constitutive of \emph{interpretation}. For Kant, logical norms flow from Aristotelian logic. For Davidson, they flow from classical first-order logic with identity. Whereas Carnap countenances diverse legitimate linguistic frameworks, Davidson allows no such diversity: “all thinking creatures subscribe to \emph{my} basic standards or norms of rationality” (Davidson 2004: 195). Kant, Carnap, and Davidson all diverge from Quine by assigning a special constitutive status to logic.\footnote{Frege imagines discovering creatures “whose laws of thought flatly contradicted ours and therefore frequently led to contrary results even in practice” (Frege [1893] 1967: 14). Frege holds that such creatures would display “a hitherto unknown type of madness,” but he seems to think that such creatures are possible in principle. In contrast, Davidson would deny that Frege has denied a possible scenario. He would say that the creatures are not interpretable and that they do not have intentional mental states.}


The contrast between Quine and Davidson emerges in their differing treatments of the logical connectives. Quine holds that we should project our logic onto the natives, but he stresses that being “[b]eing thus built into translation is not an exclusive trait of logic. If the natives are not prepared to assent to a certain sentence in the rain, then equally we have reason not to translate the sentence as ‘It is raining’ ” (Quine [1970] 1986: 82). Quine's guiding maxim is that we should not render natives as denying obvious truths, whether those truths are logical, observational, or otherwise. By Gödel's completeness theorem, each logical truth is either obvious or derivable from obvious truths through individually obvious steps. Yet many nonlogical truths are also obvious, such as “1 + 1 = 2,” or “It is raining” uttered while it is raining. Quine denies that logic has any privileged status vis-à-vis other obvious truths.\footnote{Quine officially defines “obvious” in idiosyncratic behaviorist fashion: by calling a statement “obvious to a community,” he explains, “I mean only that everyone, nearly enough, will assent to it, for whatever reason” (Quine [1970] 1986: 82). This is not what “obvious” means in any ordinary usage. It is unclear why translation should try to preserve “obviousness” \emph{in Quine's official sense}. I think that Quine's rationale for charity trades upon the normal epistemological connotations of “obvious,” despite Quine's official behaviorist definition.}


Davidson does not ground charity in the “obviousness” of logic. Instead, he assigns logic a central role in \emph{constituting} mental content (Davidson 2004: 156–157):



\begin{quote}


We individuate and identify beliefs, as we do desires, intentions, and meanings in a great number of ways. But relations between beliefs play a decisive constitutive role; we cannot accept great or obvious deviations from rationality without threatening the intelligibility of our attributions. If we are going to understand the speech or actions of another person, we must suppose that their beliefs are incorporated in a pattern that is in essential respects like the pattern of our own beliefs. First, then, we have no choice but to project our own logic on to the beliefs of another.\footnote{What is it to “project” our logic onto the natives? In the ensuing text, Davidson glosses “projection” as follows: we assume that the native's beliefs are “logically consistent (up to a point at least)” (Davidson 2004: 157). Other passages suggest that interpretation requires a stronger kind of logical projection: namely, we assume a native tendency to reason in accord with certain basic deductive rules (Davidson 2004: 97, 138–139, 195–196).}



\end{quote}


It is not entirely clear how to interpret this passage, or other similar passages in Davidson's writings (Davidson 2004: 97–98, 138–139, 196). Evidently, though, Davidson wants to secure a distinctive constitutive status for logic. He holds that we can intelligibly impute propositional content to mental states only if we treat those states as largely conforming to our own logical norms. One might say that Davidson tries to sanitize constitutivity by subtly emending Quinean charity.\footnote{Quine sometimes appears to allow that an alien language could deviate radically from first-order quantificational logic, thereby rendering the language untranslatable by us. Davidson denies that any such language is possible (Davidson 1999a: 81–82). For discussion, see Pearson (2011).}

\section{3. Charity as a Constraint on Interpretation}


Davidson classifies several distinct interpretative constraints under the label “Principle of Charity,” including the following:


\textbf{(1)} Interpretation must ascribe a background of \emph{true} beliefs to the speaker: “it is impossible for the interpreter to understand a speaker and at the same time discover the speaker to be largely wrong about the world” (Davidson 2001: 150).


\textbf{(2)} Interpretation must depict the speaker as largely conforming to the interpreter's own rational norms, including norms given by logic, probability theory, and decision theory.


\textbf{(3)} Interpretation must depict the speaker as largely sharing the interpreter's own \emph{values}. For example, we must assume that the speaker “shares with us a desire to find warmth, love, security and success” (Davidson 2004: 183).


Commentators have criticized all three constraints. I focus upon (1) and (2).


A common objection to (1) is that it seems possible for a subject to be systematically mistaken about her surroundings (Burge 2003: 336–337; Goldman 1986: 175–176). As Lewis (1983: 112–113) observes, good interpretation must allow that experience can mislead. To take an extreme example, suppose we are interpreting a recently envatted brain trapped in a Matrix-style computer simulation. Quite plausibly, the best interpretation will construe her as massively deluded about her external environment. The brain's experiences are systematically misleading, so her beliefs about the external world are systematically mistaken.\footnote{Davidson (1974: 346) concedes to Lewis that good interpretation should allow for “explicable error.” I think that Davidson does not pursue this concession to its natural consequence: that “explicable errors” can be so massive and systematic as to undercut anything resembling (1). As Lepore and Ludwig (2005: 329–332) emphasize, Davidson presupposes something like (1) when deploying charity against skepticism (Davidson 2001: 150–153).}


To motivate (1), Davidson writes: “sentences that express \dots{} beliefs, and the beliefs themselves, are correctly understood to be about the public things and events that cause them, and so they must be mainly veridical” (Davidson 2001: 174). Similar passages recur frequently in his writings. Burge (2003) suggests that such passages overemphasize the role played by \emph{the subject's own current causal connections to the world} in fixing mental content. Quite plausibly, representational mental activity presupposes a baseline of accurate representation. Quite plausibly, representation of the distal environment arises only through representationally successful causal transactions with the environment. But those transactions might have occurred earlier in the subject's history, as with a recently envatted brain. Burge (2010: 69) suggests that the transactions might even have occurred much earlier in the subject's evolutionary history. There is no evident reason why good interpretation must regard \emph{the subject herself} as largely correct in her \emph{current} beliefs.\footnote{Burge (2010: 68) advances a deepistemologized, weakened variant of (1) that takes these points into account.}


Philosophers have also proposed various counterexamples to (2). Bortolloti (2005) suggests that delusional subjects routinely flout basic rational norms. Setting aside such extreme cases, it is unclear whether normal humans conform to rational norms as closely as Davidson suggests. Research by Tversky and Kahneman (1974) and many other psychologists indicates that normal human reasoning and decision-making display numerous deficiencies (Rysiew 2008): the gambler's fallacy, framing effects, the anchoring effect, and so on. Citing this research, Goldman (1989), Nozick (1993: 152–156), and Thagard and Nisbett (1983) argue that Davidson overstates the centrality of rational norms to intentional ascription. Some philosophers even question whether basic norms of consistency are as central to interpretation as Davidson intimates. Citing the paradox of the preface, Goldman (1989) denies that we should strive to interpret subjects as consistent.


How damning are these putative counterexamples to (2)? Davidson acknowledges that one can violate rational norms. Indeed, he carefully analyzes phenomena such as akrasia, inconsistent belief, and self-deception (Davidson 1980: 21–42, 2004: 167–230). He would surely urge that the putative counterexamples are \emph{deviations} from background conformity to rational norms (Ludwig 2004: 348–349). Unfortunately, Davidson never articulates his own position very precisely. He never states how closely a thinking creature must conform to rational norms.

\section{4. Realism, Instrumentalism, and Eliminativism}


Quine acknowledges that intentional locutions play a central role in daily interaction. He denies that they deserve any place in scientific discourse. He insists that we should eschew intentional talk when “limning the true and ultimate structure of reality” (Quine 1960: 221). In that sense, Quine is an \emph{eliminativist}. Churchland (1981) and Stich (1983) share Quine's eliminativism. Burge (2010) and Fodor (1987) endorse an opposing \emph{intentional realism}: intentional locutions denote genuine properties that we should cite within scientific psychology. Dennett (1987) occupies an intermediate instrumentalist position. He agrees that “the intentional stance” plays a useful predictive role in scientific theorizing, but he questions whether mental states \emph{really} have intentional properties.


How does Davidson's position relate to these debates? Davidson professes to be an intentional realist (Davidson 2001: 70–84). He writes that “propositional attitudes \dots{} are every bit as real as atoms and baseball bats, and the facts about them are as real as the facts about anything else” (Davidson 2005: 316). Nevertheless, readers often interpret Davidson as an intentional antirealist, albeit one exquisitely attuned to the central role that intentional attribution occupies within our lives. Williamson (2004: 137) discerns in Davidson's work an “ideal verificationism, on which agents have just the intentional states that a good interpreter with unlimited access to non-intentional data would ascribe to them.” Burge (2003: 359–360) attributes to Davidson “the view that an interpreter's interpretation helps constitute the linguistic and mental content of the creature being interpreted.” These readings suggest a less than fully realist posture toward intentionality and rationality. Intentional properties are tied to intentional ascription procedures, in a way that physical properties are not tied to procedures for ascribing physical properties. So intentional facts are somehow less “real” than nonintentional facts.


Several facets of Davidson's position suggest antirealist sympathies. Most notably, Davidson follows Quine in holding that radical interpretation is \emph{indeterminate}: the same linguistic data admit several equally good interpretations, between which “there may be no objective grounds for choice” (Davidson 1980: 222). As Davidson emphasizes, Jeffrey's decision theory mandates limited indeterminacy regarding the assignment of probabilities and utilities to sentences (Davidson 1990: 323–324, fn. 66). Davidson also foresees indeterminacy surrounding the interpretation of sentences. For example, he claims that one might build equally good interpretations around either of the two interpretation clauses (Davidson 2001: 78–79):



\begin{quote}


“Rome” denotes Rome


“Rome” denotes an area 100 miles to the south of Rome



\end{quote}


He even suggests that equally good interpretations may differ regarding the truth-values of certain utterances, such as borderline color ascriptions (Davidson 2001: 80–81). Davidson does not simply claim that the data \emph{underdetermine} intentional ascription (Davidson 2001: 75–76). Underdetermination of theory by evidence afflicts all scientific theorizing, not merely intentional psychology. Davidson furthermore claims that there is “no fact of the matter” regarding which interpretation is correct (Davidson 2001: 214). In that sense, intentional ascription is genuinely \emph{indeterminate}.\footnote{Davidson defends the indeterminacy thesis through several distinct arguments. One argument, exemplified by the “Rome” example, maintains that one can alter the satisfaction relation while holding truth-conditions constant (Davidson (1984: 227–241). Another argument claims that there are several alternative ways of solving simultaneously for beliefs and meanings. Radical interpretation “must separate meaning from opinion partly on normative grounds” by applying norms of rationality (Davidson 2001: 215); “various norms can suggest conflicting ways of interpreting an agent,” and “there may be no clear grounds for preferring one of these ways to others” (Davidson 2005: 319).}


Davidson insists that indeterminacy of interpretation is perfectly consistent with intentional realism. He repeatedly adduces an analogy with measurement (Davidson 2001: 75). We can measure weight using either pounds or kilograms. No one would deny on that basis that weight measurements describe real features of the world. Similarly, he says, the indeterminacy of interpretation should not lead us to deny the reality of intentional facts.


It seems to me that the measurement analogy undercuts rather than supports Davidson's professions of intentional realism. There is no conflict between saying that an object weighs 10 lbs and saying that it weighs 4.5 kg. These are simply two ways of describing the same fact. In contrast, there is a prima facie conflict between saying that “Rome” denotes Rome versus an area 100 mi south of Rome. There is a prima facie conflict between theories that assign different truth-values to the same utterance. Davidson claims that such prima facie conflicts are sometimes illusory. He claims that diverging interpretations are sometimes compatible (Davidson 2001: 76). But it is difficult to see how genuine intentional realists can agree. (Cf. Lepore and Ludwig 2005: 239–247, 382–386; Rawling 2001: 244–250.)


Another antirealist tendency in Davidson's writings is his steadfast focus upon intentional \emph{attribution}. Davidson emphasizes idealized procedures for \emph{discovering} mental content. His core methodology is to “adopt the stance of a radical interpreter when asking about the nature of belief” (Davidson 2001: 148). From an intentional realist perspective, this methodology is puzzling. According to intentional realism, mental states have their contents independently of any theorist's procedures for discovering those contents. Intentional phenomena no more depend upon our theorizing about intentionality than physical phenomena depend upon our theorizing about the physical. Fodor and Lepore (2007: 687) pointedly express this realist viewpoint:



\begin{quote}


Does anybody \emph{still} think that \dots{} a theory of (radical) translation\Slash{}interpretation \dots{} would illuminate questions in semantics or in the metaphysics of meaning? Interpretation and translation, as Davidson and Quine understood them, are to be construed in \emph{epistemological} terms. \dots{} What has the epistemology of interpretation got to do with the metaphysics of content?



\end{quote}


Davidson's persistent tendency to move between the metaphysics and the epistemology of intentionality strongly suggest a kind of intentional antirealism.\footnote{Lewis (1983) employs radical interpretation as a literary device for dramatizing a \emph{metaphysical} problem: reducing the intentional to the nonintentional. In Davidson's hands, the \emph{epistemological} aspects of radical interpretation seem far more crucial.}

\section{5. Cognitive Science and Radical Interpretation}


Let us now consider more carefully the scientific status of psychology. Davidson holds that intentional psychology differs from physics and biology in a crucial respect: intentional attribution is governed by the constitutive ideal of rationality. While cautioning that “it would be meretricious to summarize these points by saying that psychology \dots{} is not a science,” he insists that “psychology is set off from other sciences in an important and interesting way” (Davidson 1980: 241). He also urges that “[t]he propositional attitudes do not seem suited to incorporation into a unified scientific view of the world” (Davidson 2001: 71). After posing the question “Could there be a science of rationality?” (Davidson 2004: 117), he answers that he “does not know, nor much care” whether “a psychological theory is so different from a theory in the natural sciences as not to deserve to be called a science” (Davidson 2004: 134). Overall, these passages suggest a broadly Quinean picture: we delineate a \emph{first grade} theory, comprising physics, biology, and other “hard” sciences, and we also delineate a \emph{second grade} theory that includes intentional psychology (Quine 1969: 24). Davidson explores the second grade theory in much more detail than Quine. Ultimately, though, Davidson seems to share Quine's wariness toward the scientific credentials of intentionality.\footnote{In his first papers defending anomalous monism, Davidson (1980: 222–223) draws an invidious distinction between physics and intentional psychology. He argues that the former but not the latter can include strict (i.e., exceptionless) laws. He defends this conclusion by citing the constitutive ideal of rationality. Fodor (1987: 5–6) retorts that geology, biology, and other special sciences include nonstrict (i.e., ceteris paribus) rather than strict laws. Davidson eventually concedes the point (Davidson 2005: 191–193). Still, he insists that intentional psychology is distinguished from other sciences through its distinctive entanglement with normative evaluation (Davidson 2004: 114).}


A good illustration is Davidson's dismissive attitude toward cognitive science. A few exceptions aside, Davidson almost entirely ignores contemporary scientific research into intentional mental activity.\footnote{In the 1950s, Davidson conducted experimental research designed to test decision theory empirically. He ultimately concluded that decision theory was not subject to empirical test: intentional content is attributable to a subject's mental states only if we presuppose that the subject largely conforms to our own rational norms, including decision-theoretic norms (Davidson 1980: 236–239). On this basis, Davidson critiques some putative empirical counterexamples to decision theory (Davidson 1980: 270–273).} Rather than discuss the science of intentionality, Davidson emphasizes his own idealized armchair model of radical interpretation.


Why this make-believe? Why consider how an idealized radical interpreter might attribute intentional content to mental states? Why not simply study intentional mental activity from a scientific perspective? Few contemporary philosophers would suggest that we should study the physical world by reconstructing how one might come to know physical facts. Our best strategy for illuminating the physical is to analyze physics as it currently operates. Likewise, is not our best strategy for illuminating the mental to analyze our current best science of mental activity? Why study how an idealized theorist might discover intentional facts, rather than studying what current science tells us about intentional states and processes?


Cognitive science offers well-confirmed theories that explain various mental phenomena. Contrary to Quinean strictures, those theories assign intentionality a central role (Burge 2010; Fodor 1987). For example, perceptual psychology studies how the perceptual system transits from proximal sensory input to a percept that represents the distal environment as being a certain way (Burge 2010; Knill and Richards 1996). Similarly, empirical linguistics offers impressive theories of the semantic competence deployed during linguistic comprehension (Heim and Kratzer 1998); some of those theories even borrow Davidson's emphasis upon Tarski-style semantics (Larson and Segal 1995). Cognitive science routinely individuates mental states in representational terms. It thereby yields numerous insights into intentional mental activity. Why ignore those insights?


To develop this challenge, Fodor and Lepore (1994) emphasize a particularly important point: Davidsonian radical interpretation employs a severely impoverished evidentiary base. Radical interpretation takes as data \emph{only} the distal circumstances under which the speaker prefers one sentence true over another. No cognitive scientist would accept any such draconian evidentiary restriction. Depending on the explanatory context, cognitive scientists cite numerous additional evidentiary sources: intentional descriptions of speech acts; syntactic or semantic features of other human languages; discoveries about the mental activity of nonhuman species; neural facts; and so on. What interest attaches to a philosophical model that deliberately ignores so many potentially valuable sources of evidence?


Davidson responds that his project is orthogonal to scientific inquiry. His project is to elucidate “what it is about propositional thought – our beliefs, desires, intentions, and speech – that makes them intelligible to others” (Davidson 2004: 133). How is it possible to extract beliefs, desires, and meanings from observed linguistic behavior? To answer this question, Davidson reconstructs interpretive practice. His reconstruction highlights how “the normative character of thought, desire, speech, and action imposes [structure] on correct attributions of attitudes to others, and hence on interpretations of their speech and explanations of their actions” (Davidson 1990: 325).


In theory, Davidson's response sounds reasonable enough. Embracing an ecumenical spirit, one might pursue armchair analysis of radical interpretation \emph{in addition to} scientifically informed philosophizing about the mind. In practice, however, Davidson's prioritization of armchair reconstruction over empirical science arguably exerts a distorting influence upon his philosophy. I provide an example in the next section.

\section{6. Representation and Rationality in Nonlinguistic Creatures}


Radical interpretation applies only to creatures that speak a language. This restriction to linguistic creatures reflects broader Davidsonian commitments. Davidson repeatedly urges that nonlinguistic animals lack anything resembling the cognitive capacities displayed by linguistic creatures: “to be a thinking, rational creature, the creature must be able to express many thoughts, and above all, be able to interpret the speech and thoughts of others” (Davidson 2001: 100). Intentional content arises through a network of cognitive capacities available only to language-speakers (Davidson 2001: 100):



\begin{quote}


a very complex pattern of behavior must be observed to justify the attribution of a single thought. Or, more accurately, there has to be good reason to believe there is such a complex pattern of behavior. And unless there is actually such a complex pattern of behavior, there is no thought. I think there is such a pattern only if the agent has language.



\end{quote}


Thus, “rationality is a social trait. Only communicators have it” (Davidson 2001: 105).


Davidson offers several arguments for this assessment (Davidson (1984: 162–164, 167–170, 2001: 97–98, 102–105, 117–121, 128–134, 2004: 135–149). The arguments have gained few adherents. Burge (2010: 264–283) and Ludwig (2004) urge that the arguments are problematic. In my opinion, Davidson has provided no compelling reason to suspect that thought requires language.


Davidson claims that thought must have logical form: “language and thought require the structure provided by a logic of quantification” (Davidson 2004: 140). He also claims that logically structured mental states arise only when a creature can execute rudimentary logical inference. Even if we concede these two claims, there is no obvious reason to believe that thought requires language. There is no obvious reason why linguistic capacities are necessary for executing logical inferences over logically structured representational mental states. Despite millennia of discussion, no philosopher has yet provided a convincing argument that logical capacities presuppose mastery of a natural language.


Also problematic is Davidson's exclusive focus upon logically structured mental representation. Even if we grant that \emph{thought} requires logically structure, there is no obvious reason why \emph{mental representation} requires logical structure. Citing perceptual psychology, Burge (2010: 537–540) argues that \emph{perceptual states} have representational content but not logical structure. Similarly, many psychologists propose that animals navigate by exploiting \emph{cognitive maps}: mental representations that operate roughly like concrete maps (Gallistel 1990; Tolman 1948). On one plausible view, cognitive maps have compositionally significant \emph{geometric} structure but not \emph{logical} structure (Rescorla 2009a,b). Davidson says nothing to address, let alone rebut, the possibility of nonlogical mental representation.


Nor is there any obvious reason why \emph{rationality} requires logical capacities. Bayesian decision theory does not presuppose logically structured representations. Admittedly, Ramsey and Jeffrey formulate Bayesian decision theory over logically structured entities. But one can just as easily develop Bayesian decision theory over nonlogical representations. For example, Bayesian inference can operate over cognitive maps that lack logical structure (Rescorla 2009a,b). A hypothetical creature could navigate by executing Bayesian updating over these maps. Such a creature would conform to \emph{Bayesian} norms but not \emph{logical} norms. Actual nonhuman animals may well navigate in this way. Davidson provides no compelling argument that rational norms of probability and decision theory presuppose linguistic competence.


A basic problem facing Davidson is that cognitive science routinely attributes representational mental activity to nonlinguistic creatures, including not only prelinguistic infants and but also nonhuman animals. Many nonlinguistic creatures perceptually represent distal properties such as shapes, sizes, and colors (Burge 2010: 342–366, 419–430). Many nonlinguistic animals navigate by representing the surrounding spatial environment (Burge 2010: 492–518; Cheng \emph{et al.} 2007). Nonhuman primates display advanced cognitive capacities, including capacities to represent social dominance relations (Cheney and Seyfarth 2007) and to execute impressive spatial reasoning (Call 2006). The scientific literature amply supports these and numerous other representational attributions. Yet Davidson's position seemingly forbids representational attributions to nonlinguistic creatures. Davidson does not acknowledge, let alone try to resolve, the apparent conflict between his position and contemporary science.

\section{7. Davidson's Contributions to the Study of Rationality}


A venerable philosophical tradition seeks to conscript logic and probability theory into the service of psychological description. This tradition waned in the mid-twentieth century, partly due to prevailing behaviorist tendencies, partly because philosophers took so much to heart Frege's advice that we “always separate sharply the psychological from the logical” (Frege [1884] 1980: x). For example, Carnap systematically ignores actual human mental processes, instead focusing his energy upon rationally reconstructing deductive and inductive reasoning (Carnap 1950: 37–51, 576).\footnote{In posthumous work, Carnap countenances using probability theory as a tool for psychological description (Carnap 1971: 11–12). Even here, he devotes no serious attention to the descriptive import of normative modeling. In contrast, Davidson's philosophical system is an extended meditation on the relation between psychological description and normative evaluation.} Although Quine rejects Carnapian rational reconstruction, he inherits Carnap's distaste for rational modeling of mental processes. Quine, even more than Carnap, evinces strong behaviorist hostility to the mental.


Davidson helped revive the traditional emphasis upon rational modeling of mental activity. He sparked renewed philosophical research into the descriptive psychological import of logic and probability theory by placing the following proposal at center stage:



\begin{quote}


Logic, probability theory, and decision theory set norms for intentional mental activity. Those norms should guide systematic psychological description.



\end{quote}


Davidson develops the proposal primarily through armchair reconstruction of interpretive practice, rather than through detailed study of empirical psychology. But we can detach the proposal from Davidson's favored armchair methodology.


Particularly noteworthy is Davidson's prescient focus upon Bayesian decision theory as a descriptive paradigm. Over the past few decades, cognitive science has embraced the Bayesian paradigm. Perceptual psychology is an especially impressive illustration (Knill and Richards 1996). According to Bayesian perceptual psychology, the perceptual system estimates distal properties through a Bayesian inference prompted by proximal sensory input (Rescorla forthcoming). As this research program demonstrates, numerous perceptual illusions result from mental activity that conforms (at least approximately) to Bayesian norms. Cognitive scientists have successfully extended the Bayesian paradigm beyond perception to diverse phenomena, including \emph{sensorimotor control} (Bays and Wolpert 2007), \emph{language parsing} and \emph{acquisition} (Chater and Manning 2006), “central” cognitive processes, such as \emph{concept acquisition} and \emph{causal reasoning} (Chater and Oaksford 2008), and nonhuman \emph{navigation} (Cheng \emph{et al.} 2007). In each case, the Bayesian research program aims to establish that relevant mental activity conforms (at least approximately) to Bayesian norms.


Typical work within this research program features two main elements: a normative model of a mental task and empirical confirmation that the normative model approximately describes actual mental activity. For example, perceptual psychologists delineate how an ideal Bayesian agent would estimate an object's shape based upon proximal sensory input. Empirical investigation reveals that the resulting normative model approximately describes actual human shape perception. A similar template underlies Bayesian modeling of human cognition. In this spirit, Oaksford and Chater (2009) examine various apparent defects in human logical reasoning, and they argue that the apparent defects actually reflect the operation of near-optimal Bayesian inductive inference. The Bayesian research program embodies a broadly Davidsonian methodology: it seeks to match empirical mental phenomena as well as possible to normative models. Indeed, Oaksford and Chater (2009) cite Davidson as an antecedent.


I submit that Davidson isolates a scientifically fruitful explanatory strategy, even though he himself largely ignores cognitive science. The strategy remains controversial. Many cognitive scientists deny that psychological explanation should consult normative models (Elqayam and Evans 2011). Nevertheless, much of the best current psychological research embodies a broadly Davidsonian entanglement of normative evaluation and psychological description. If this research is on the right track, then intentionality and normativity should occupy a central role within any decent naturalized epistemology.


Davidson's work also advances several intriguing metaphysical doctrines that bear upon the putative entanglement of normative and descriptive factors:


\begin{itemize}
\item\relax 
Intentional mental states arise only through baseline conformity to elementary rational norms.



\item\relax 
Logically structured intentional mental states arise only through baseline conformity to elementary logical norms.




\end{itemize}

Both doctrines require careful formulation, so as to avoid possible counterexamples like those discussed in Section 3. But it seems plausible that doctrines along the foregoing lines are correct. Philosophers should continue to investigate these and similar doctrines. By doing so, we might elucidate the descriptive success of normative models within empirical psychology. We might also clarify what it is for mental states to have intentional content.

% Notes
\section{References}


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\chapter{28. Irrationality}


Sarah Stroud


It is not obvious how much, or even what, a philosophical treatment of irrationality can reasonably hope to provide. The question of what leads people to engage in irrational forms of thought or action is of course very interesting. It would also be fascinating to map the kinds of circumstances in which such lapses tend to occur. But questions concerning the causal or explanatory antecedents of these phenomena seem better left to the psychologists, or perhaps to the evolutionary biologists. A \emph{philosophical} account of (one type of) irrationality ought, it seems, to content itself with aims that at first glance appear more modest. One reasonable aspiration is to clarify what (a given form of) irrationality \emph{is}, by characterizing or delineating it with precision and rigor. A second is to \emph{leave space} for irrational phenomena. A third is to illuminate what is defective about them.


The aim of leaving space for irrational forms of thought and action is not as easy to achieve as it might seem, for irrational phenomena tax the capabilities of our general accounts of thought or action. On the one hand, as per the third aim, irrational forms of thought or action are in some way marginal or defective instances of the genus: they will therefore not match the standard template. But instances of irrational thought or action are still instances of thought or action; their peculiarities do not prevent them from counting as such at all. Philosophical writing on thought or action, then, can reasonably be expected at least to \emph{leave room} for irrational forms thereof. This means, among other things, not making out to be \emph{impossible} any form of irrationality that seems in fact to be \emph{actual} – unless one can mount a convincing argument (perhaps using the rigorous characterization already adverted to) that the phenomenon which is actual is crucially different from those for which one's theory leaves no place. The second aim also constrains our degrees of freedom in attaining the third. Since “irrational” is, after all, a term of condemnation, a philosophical treatment of an irrational phenomenon will illuminate if it clarifies in what way that kind of thought or action violates a norm or falls short of a standard or an ideal. However, in carrying out this last task, a philosophical account should take care not to characterize the phenomenon in question as so defective that it is cast out from the domain of thought or action entirely.


These aims may therefore seem comparatively modest, but they are not easy to achieve all at once. I think Donald Davidson was alert to all of these desiderata, and was striving to achieve all of these aims, in his justly famous writings on various irrational forms of thought and action. I want to document how both the general constraints on a philosophical treatment of irrationality, and commitments specific to Davidson, left Davidson little room to maneuver when theorizing about irrational forms of thought and conduct. Some of Davidson's deep-seated general convictions about thought and action made a task that was already not easy even more difficult for him in particular, and it is legitimate to ask whether his accounts fully succeed in making the right sort of place for these phenomena.


The best place to begin in considering these questions is Davidson's most celebrated treatment of irrationality, “How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?” (Davidson 1980). In that paper, Davidson conceives the task facing him as follows. Since Davidson is convinced that incontinent actions (as he calls them) exist, he wants to show how they are possible: a nontrivial task, however, given that highly plausible theses about practical reasoning and action appear to rule out their existence. Davidson first sets out the problem, by (i) offering a characterization of incontinent actions which has had a decisive influence on future treatments, and (ii) articulating the highly attractive theses in philosophy of action which seem to make incontinent actions impossible. He then sets out to solve the problem by showing that – and how – those highly attractive theses are in fact compatible with the existence of incontinent actions as he has characterized them. This second phase involves sketching an alternative – and also highly influential – model of practical reasoning.


An agent acts incontinently when she freely acts contrary to her own better judgment. Davidson unpacks the key notion of acting contrary to one's better judgment in the following way: the agent does A even though she judges that it would be better all things considered to do some other action B (which she believes to be open to her). Davidson's influential formulation decisively excised weakness of the will from the domain of ethics and placed it firmly in the lap of the philosophy of action. Incontinence, as Davidson called it, bears no necessary connection to wrongdoing, only a necessarily inverse relation to the agent's assessment of the all-things-considered desirability of her options. Weakness of the will is thus a problem for the philosophy of action to solve. But why is it a problem? Davidson's diagnosis of the difficulty we encounter in making room for such actions has also been enormously influential. Davidson elegantly formulated two highly plausible theses, expressive of a powerful general picture of intentional action and practical reasoning, which seem however to rule out the possibility of incontinent actions.


On the one hand, we have a principle that posits a link between evaluative judgment and wanting (Davidson 1980: 23):



\begin{quote}


If an agent judges that it would be better to do \emph{x} than to do \emph{y}, then he wants to do \emph{x} more than he wants to do \emph{y}.



\end{quote}


On the other hand, we can very plausibly suppose that there is also a close link between what a person \emph{wants} to do and what he \emph{will} do if he is free to make the choice (Davidson 1980: 23):



\begin{quote}


If an agent wants to do \emph{x} more than he wants to do \emph{y} and he believes himself free to do either \emph{x} or \emph{y}, then he will intentionally do \emph{x} if he does either \emph{x} or \emph{y} intentionally.



\end{quote}


But these two principles together imply that if an agent genuinely judges that it would be better to do B than to do A (and believes himself free to do either), he will \emph{not} do A. Incontinent actions seem then to be ruled out: if the agent does A, it must not after all be the case that he really judges that it would be better to do B.


We will look shortly at Davidson's solution to this difficulty. First, though, let us pause to observe that – as suggested above – a number of Davidson's commitments jointly constrain the space available to him in accounting for both the existence of weakness of the will and its irrationality. First, note that an action can be correctly described as incontinent or weak-willed only if a certain ensemble of propositional attitudes can be correctly attributed to the agent, namely, those mentioned in the characterization of incontinent action. Moreover, since weakness of the will is irrational, this must be an ensemble of propositional attitudes which it is in one way or another irrational for the agent to hold. Davidson's views about propositional attitude ascriptions, however, constrict the space for this possibility.


One implication of Davidson's interpretivist holism about propositional attitudes – one not itself terribly controversial – is that any irrationality correctly attributed to an agent can only be local or limited, not global or pervasive. If we interpret S as holding a massively irrational set of propositional attitudes, our interpretation is wrong. One could of course dispute the relevance of this to weakness of will, which does not involve attributing widespread irrationality. Even if we grant this, though, I think there is some residual difficulty for Davidson in making room even for local irrationality. For on Davidson's general view, an attitude is the propositional attitude it is in part because of its relation to many other propositional attitudes. So when an agent appears to hold a propositional attitude that does not bear the appropriate relations to his other propositional attitudes, this gives grounds for questioning the correctness of the attribution. If propositional attitude ascription were atomistic rather than holistic – if it were in principle possible to determine whether someone held an attitude A toward a proposition P in isolation, without considering the rest of his attitudes – then this worry would not arise. But because of Davidson's holism about the mental, it does arise for him. There is thus a built-in instability in classifying any action as incontinent, since the irrationality of incontinence tends to undercut the very grounds for the classification, namely the particular propositional attitudes the incontinent agent is alleged to possess.


The above worries about propositional attitude attributions will arise for all phenomena we deem irrational, not only weakness of the will. (As we shall see, Davidson elsewhere discusses wishful thinking and self-deception, for example, which are also typically viewed as irrational; the problems just noted will apply to those phenomena as well.) Further constraints apply to the specific case of weakness of the will, given its nature as Davidson sees it. As we emphasized at the outset, an incontinent and therefore irrational action is nonetheless an intentional action, and this means, given Davidson's understanding of intentional action, that it is performed for a reason.\footnote{Indeed, this understanding of intentional action in general means that Davidson will have difficulty allowing, not just for \emph{irrational} actions, but for what Rosalind Hursthouse calls \emph{arational} actions (Hursthouse 1991).} So in this sense, too, a weak-willed action necessarily exhibits at least a minimal form of rationality: there was \emph{something} to be said for the incontinent action from the agent's perspective, otherwise it would not have been an intentional action at all. This requirement puts Davidson in the somewhat awkward position of having to say that while S had a reason for doing A, S had no reason for doing A rather than B.\footnote{The first of these simply follows from the fact that S's doing A was an intentional action; I interpret Davidson as committing himself to the second at Davidson (1980: 42) (see fn. 25 and the text surrounding it).}


So far we have seen that Davidson thinks an adequate account of weakness of the will or incontinent action must be consistent, first of all, with the existence of such actions, but also with the following additional constraints:


\textbf{(1)} Incontinent actions are somehow irrational.


\textbf{(2)} Incontinent actions are intentional actions.


Davidson's insistence that incontinent actions exist, are irrational, but are still intentional actions clearly parallels a number of the desiderata for philosophical accounts of irrational phenomena that we articulated at the outset (and to which we shall return). We have discussed however how these parameters, together with some of his more general commitments, reduce Davidson's room for maneuver in constructing an account that he would consider acceptable. Let us now see how he tries to do this. How can Davidson demonstrate that the existence of incontinent actions is in fact compatible with the truth of the two general principles about action which he articulates?\footnote{I explain how at somewhat greater length in my \emph{Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy} entry on weakness of will (Stroud 2008), on which I have drawn in the next two paragraphs.}


The key to Davidson's demonstration is a distinction he introduces between two types of evaluative judgments, respectively conditional or prima facie and unconditional or \emph{sans phrase}. To judge one option to be better than another in the light of, or with respect to, a certain consideration is, for Davidson, to make a conditional or prima facie judgment that must be understood as relativized to the consideration in question. (So there is no contradiction, as indeed there should not be, in judging A to be better than B from a financial point of view while judging B to be better than A from an aesthetic point of view.) Conditional evaluative judgments can be understood as holding that a certain \emph{relation} holds between a consideration \emph{c} and a course of action A: for instance – in the simplest kind of conditional evaluative judgment – that \emph{c} favors A. (A comparative conditional evaluative judgment could be seen as asserting that \emph{c} more strongly favors A than it does B.) We cannot in general, as Davidson puts it, “detach” (Davidson 1980: 37) the conclusion of a conditional evaluative judgment, thereby convert it into an unconditional evaluative judgment in favor of A (or favoring A over B). Davidson masterfully brings out how failure to attend to this distinction among types of judgments will undermine one's general picture of practical reasoning even independently of the need to account for incontinence (see also Chapter 2 of this volume).


How though can we deploy this distinction in service of that aim? Davidson points out that a \emph{prima facie} evaluative judgment can be relativized, not just to a single consideration \emph{c}, but to an indefinitely large range of considerations \emph{c\textsubscript{1}} through \emph{c\textsubscript{n}.} Indeed, we could make an evaluative judgment in light of \emph{all} the considerations that we have considered and that we take to be relevant: that would be an all-things-considered evaluative judgment. The important thing to remember about a judgment which takes this form is that although it takes into account a broader range of considerations, \emph{it remains conditional}: it is \emph{not} the same thing as a logically unconditional judgment to the effect that A is better than B. That is the key to Davidson's solution to the puzzle of how weakness of the will is possible. The two general principles about action that he articulates rule out someone's doing B when he judges A to be better (and believes A to be open to him). But those principles do not rule out someone's doing B when he judges A to be better \emph{all things considered}; and that – as per Davidson's influential characterization of incontinence – is exactly what the incontinent agent does. Weakness of the will, then, has been shown to be possible even if Davidson's two general principles are true.


* * *


Let us pause to ask how Davidson's account fares with respect to the aims that we identified at the beginning of the paper as legitimate aspirations for a philosophical treatment of irrationality. With regard to the first aim I proposed, Davidson clearly gave an elegant, precise, and rigorous characterization of incontinence – one whose broad outlines have now become standard in philosophical discussions of the phenomenon.\footnote{Some writers suggest that the Davidsonian characterization captures only akrasia and not weakness of will, which they hold to be a distinct phenomenon. See Alison McIntyre (2006) and Richard Holton (2009).} With respect to the second aim, however, it can reasonably be questioned whether Davidson's treatment adequately accounts for the existence of genuinely weak-willed actions. We noted at the outset that it is desirable for one's view not to classify as impossible a phenomenon which seems plausibly to be actual; and Davidson's account has been charged with failing to meet that standard.


Consider the following example, from an important early criticism of Davidson's account by Michael Bratman. Sam, who is in a depressed state, is deep into a bottle of wine, even though he acknowledges that he needs to wake up early and with a clear head tomorrow. Sam's friend, stopping by, says:



\begin{quote}


“Look here. Your reasons for abstaining seem clearly stronger than your reasons for drinking. So how can you have thought that it would be best to drink?” To which Sam replies: “I don't think it would be best to drink. Do you think I'm stupid enough to think that, given how strong my reasons for abstaining are? I think it would be best to abstain. Still, I'm drinking.”


(Bratman 1979: 156)



\end{quote}


Sam's case certainly seems possible. Davidson's view, however, must reject it as impossible: despite the propositional attitude that he self-ascribes, it cannot be that Sam thinks it best to abstain. Given his conduct, Sam cannot think \emph{that}; he can at most think it all-things-considered best to abstain, which according to Davidson is a very different kettle of fish. Critics have charged that if Davidson's account leaves no room for doing B when you judge A better \emph{sans phrase}, then the two principles he endorses do not after all leave a sufficient place for weak-willed action.\footnote{For representative literature that understands weakness of will in this way, see for example the extensive writings of Alfred Mele on this subject, such as \emph{Irrationality: An Essay on Akrasia} (Mele 1987) and \emph{Backsliding: Understanding Weakness of Will} (Mele 2012).}


In response to this kind of criticism, Davidson would I think be unbothered by having to reject Sam's characterization of his own propositional attitudes. Davidson believes there are strong theoretical reasons to identify \emph{intentions} with unconditional evaluative judgments (this point emerges more clearly in Davidson (1978) than in Davidson (1980)); so unless Sam actually got as far as \emph{intending} to abstain, he did not after all judge it better \emph{sans phrase} to abstain. And given the subtlety of the logical distinction between all-things-considered conditional judgments and unconditional judgments, it is not surprising if Sam conflates the two (especially when drunk). So I do not think Davidson would be much swayed by this line of criticism. The post-Davidson literature on weakness of will, however, seems to have been. That literature has not followed Davidson in making the distinction between prima facie and logically unconditional judgments key to the possibility and explanation of weakness of will. Instead, it has generally assumed that weakness of will amounts to doing B when you judge A better \emph{tout court}.


* * *


We have discussed how well Davidson's treatment lives up to the first two desiderata on a philosophical treatment of irrationality which I identified at the outset. I want now to spend the rest of the chapter assessing his success with respect to the \emph{third} aim to which I said a philosophical treatment could reasonably aspire, namely clarifying what is defective in irrational thought or action. We saw in outlining Davidson's treatment of weakness of the will that he took the following to be constraints on an acceptable account:


\textbf{(1)} Incontinent actions are somehow irrational.


\textbf{(2)} Incontinent actions are intentional actions.


Let me now introduce a further point that is relevant to the third aim just mentioned. Davidson reduces the space available to him still further by inclining toward the following additional constraint on an adequate account of weakness of the will:


\textbf{(3)} Incontinence does not involve holding logically contradictory beliefs.


If (3) were false, it would be clear how (1) could be true. Holding logically contradictory beliefs is certainly irrational (if it is possible at all – we will return to this point). By affirming (3), however, Davidson reduces his room to maneuver in trying to develop an acceptable account. He also eliminates one possible answer to the question of what makes incontinent action defective. In light of (3), whatever the source of the irrationality in weak-willed action, it is not logical inconsistency among the agent's beliefs. What then is it?


Davidson's answer is that the incontinent agent's action and practical reasoning are irrational because they do not conform to what he calls the \emph{principle of continence} (Davidson 1980: 41). Since this failure of practical reasoning is structurally parallel to a failure of theoretical reasoning which Davidson calls “weakness of the warrant,” it will be useful to start by examining the latter. A believer manifests weakness of the warrant when “the person judges that relative to all the evidence available to him, [a certain] hypothesis is more probable than not; yet he does not accept the hypothesis (or the strength of his belief in the hypothesis is less than the strength of his belief in the negation of the hypothesis)” (Davidson 1986: 201). His degree of belief does not correspond to his own assessment of the evidence before him: he judges that evidence more strongly to support \emph{p} than –\emph{p}, but he nonetheless believes –\emph{p} more strongly than \emph{p}. Such a believer “sins against” (Davidson 1986: 201) Hempel and Carnap's \emph{requirement of total evidence for inductive reasoning}. Davidson's principle of continence, in similar fashion, enjoins us to “perform the action judged best on the basis of all available relevant reasons” (Davidson 1980: 41).\footnote{For strict parallelism, the principle should, more restrictedly, enjoin us \emph{not} to perform any action which is such that some other incompatible action was judged better in light of all available relevant reasons. It ought to be consistent with the principle of continence to do nothing, for instance. Davidson's later reformulation of the principle of continence (Davidson 1986: 201) seems to embrace this emendation.} It licenses and indeed directs a transition from an all-things-considered conditional evaluative judgment to an unconditional endorsement of the action in question.


Davidson's proposal, then, seems to be that (1) is true \emph{because} incontinent actions do not conform to the principle of continence. This sounds reasonable, but let us now ask a further question that will prove to give Davidson some difficulty. \emph{Why} is an action that does not conform to the principle of continence irrational? That is, what secures the \emph{because} link in the first sentence of this paragraph? Davidson seems to wobble on this topic in his various writings on irrationality.


One possible answer to the above question (an answer to which I confess I am attracted) is that the principle of continence simply articulates a basic rational norm governing practical reasoning and action. On this view, it is simply the case that nonconformity with the principle of continence instantiates irrationality: the only explanation for this is the principle's status as a basic norm of practical rationality. In order to point out the irrationality of an action that does not conform to the principle of continence, we need only point out that it does not so conform.


As I said, I myself find this simple answer quite attractive. Davidson, however, seems not to offer that answer, but a different, more complicated answer along the following lines:



\begin{quote}


An action which does not conform to the principle of continence is irrational because the agent in question \emph{accepts} the principle of continence. The incontinent agent manifests internal inconsistency or incoherence, since his action is inconsistent with a principle he accepts.



\end{quote}


Note that this answer is very different from the one previously mooted. Each answer appeals to a different feature of the principle of continence in accounting for the irrationality of acting against it – a feature that the other answer rejects or deems irrelevant.


For the first explanation, the crucial fact is that the principle of continence has a privileged rational status as a basic norm of practical rationality. It does not matter whether the agent accepts it. For the second explanation, by contrast, the key relevant fact about the principle of continence is precisely that the agent accepts it. Unlike the first, then, the second answer does not assign any privileged rational status to the principle of continence. The role of that principle in generating the irrationality in question is simply that of being a principle that the agent accepts but contrary to which he acts; it would seem to follow that an agent would be irrational in acting contrary to \emph{any} principle which he accepted, regardless of the content or even the plausibility of the principle in question. It would seem to follow from the first type of explanation, on the other hand, that any action that does not conform to a basic rational norm is irrational, even if the agent in question rejects the alleged rational norm at issue and indeed denies that it \emph{is} a basic norm of rationality. This makes the particular content of the principle that the agent contravenes crucial, for it is presumably the specific content of the principle that determines whether it is a genuine rational norm or not. (After all, there is nothing irrational about acting contrary to a bogus principle which does \emph{not} represent a genuine demand of rationality.)


In my book, the first, simpler explanation comes out better in this comparison. What then leads Davidson toward his alternative explanation of what is wrong with violating the principle of continence? I think his attraction to the following thesis is at work:


\textbf{(4)} Irrationality necessarily involves inconsistency or incoherence.


I will first say some things about this thesis itself, and then trace a path from this thesis to the explanation Davidson proffers as to why it is irrational to violate the principle of continence.


Davidson frequently suggests that he endorses (4), and indeed that he takes it to elucidate what irrationality essentially is (Davidson 1985: 194). What tempts Davidson toward this view? Davidson frequently emphasizes the distinctive character of a charge of irrationality. (In addition to the passages cited below, see Davidson 1985: 189f.) There are after all many standards which we might wish to criticize an agent for failing to meet. We might find him ill-dressed, impolite, or imprudent: that is, we might judge him unfavorably for failing to live up to our standards of sartorial appropriateness, minimal politeness, or self-care. But Davidson maintains that a charge of \emph{irrationality}, in the sense that is philosophically interesting, is different from these in not simply being the application of \emph{my} standards to \emph{you}. “The sort of irrationality that makes conceptual trouble is not the failure of someone else to believe or feel or do what \emph{we} deem reasonable” (Davidson 1985: 170; emphasis added).


It follows that irrationality, if indeed you exhibit it, must somehow be irrationality by your own lights – not by mine.\footnote{Given some of Davidson's other commitments, these two will not in fact contrast sharply. Davidson thinks that in order to interpret another I must find my own standards of rationality in him, to at least some degree. So my own standards will to that extent be internal standards for him as well.} After all, there is nothing particularly surprising when other people fail to live up to \emph{my} standards. But irrationality of the kind that has most exercised philosophers – the kind exhibited in akratic action, or self-deception, or wishful thinking – is not just that: it is somehow \emph{internal}, which is what makes it especially puzzling. Davidson moves quickly and naturally from the idea that a charge of irrationality is a species of \emph{internal} rather than \emph{external} criticism to the notion that irrationality essentially involves internal incoherence or inconsistency. The passage quoted in the last paragraph continues, “\dots{}but rather the failure, within a single person, of coherence or consistency in the pattern of beliefs, attitudes, emotions, intentions, and actions” (Davidson 1985: 170). The word “pattern” here is apt, for Davidson emphasizes that irrationality necessarily attaches to a set or combination of attitudes – not to a single one taken in isolation (Davidson 1985: 192f.).


Perhaps the foregoing sufficiently explains Davidson's attraction to (4). Still, accepting (4) makes life more difficult for Davidson. Notably, his seeming endorsement of thesis (4) together with (1)–(3) further constrains Davidson's room to maneuver in accounting for the possibility of weakness of will. By (1) and (4), incontinence somehow involves incoherence or inconsistency. But according to (3), it does not involve holding logically contradictory beliefs. It is easy to see how not only (1), but also (4), could be satisfied if (3) were false. Similarly, (1) and (3) taken together are inoffensive if (4) is false. But it is not at all easy to see how all three of these theses could hold together. By (1) and (4), Davidson is tasked with identifying a kind of incoherence or inconsistency present in incontinent action; but (3) eliminates perhaps the most obvious candidate.\footnote{The most obvious candidate for \emph{inconsistency}, at any rate. Kirk Ludwig has pointed out to me that Davidson is independently committed to the existence of forms of \emph{incoherence} that do not strictly amount to \emph{inconsistency}: see note 13.} How else, then, can Davidson establish a kind of incoherence or inconsistency in the incontinent agent? This question invites what I called the “more complicated” style of explanation of the irrationality of incontinent action. Let us complete Davidson's train of thought.


Recall that the incontinent agent judges that all things considered she ought to do A, but she does B. Davidson thinks (at least in Davidson 1982) that the foregoing facts do not by themselves suffice to establish any inconsistency, and thus any irrationality, in her decision:



\begin{quote}


Nor is the irrationality evident if we add that I judge that all things considered I ought to keep promise A, and yet I keep promise B. For the first judgement is merely conditional: in the light of all my evidence, I ought to do A; and this cannot contradict the unconditional judgement that I ought to do B. Pure internal inconsistency enters only if I also hold \dots{} that I ought to act on my own best judgement.


(Davidson 1985: 177)



\end{quote}


Davidson thinks here that in order to find the internal inconsistency that true irrationality involves, we must be able to say that the incontinent agent “holds” the principle of continence. “If the agent does not have the principle that he ought to act on what he holds to be best, everything considered, then though his action may be irrational from \emph{our} point of view, it need not be irrational from his point of view” (Davidson 1985: 177).


On this account, the incontinent agent's action is irrational because in so acting he contravenes a principle he accepts, thereby exhibiting inconsistency or incoherence. As we noted earlier, this style of explanation in effect attributes no special status to the principle of continence in particular in this regard: if the agent happened to hold a principle of always doing what it would be chic to do, and then failed to do something he thought chic, he would exhibit exactly the same failing as the incontinent agent who accepts the principle of continence. Conversely, on this account, someone who does \emph{not} accept or “hold” the principle of continence shows no irrationality in acting contrary to his better judgment, just as I exhibit no irrationality in failing to do what is chic (since I do not hold the principle mentioned above). This view both holds the irrationality of incontinence hostage to the agent's commitments, and assigns no special rational status to the principle of continence. But as Bratman (1979) incisively points out, it seems wrongheaded for a view to assign consideration of what it would be best to do only the same status within practical reasoning as consideration of what it would be chic to do.


That the consequences we have noted are regrettable emerges more clearly if we consider what Davidson presented as the analogue of the principle of continence in the theoretical domain, namely the Carnap–Hempel requirement of total evidence. On the present way of understanding irrationality, someone who exhibits what Davidson calls “weakness of the warrant,” giving his credence to a hypothesis that he takes to be less well supported by the evidence than some other hypothesis, need not exhibit any irrationality, or even any rationally criticizable flaw in his inductive reasoning. Whether he is open to rational criticism for reasoning in that way depends on whether he accepts the Carnap–Hempel requirement of total evidence for inductive reasoning. But it seems unfortunate to make the rationality or irrationality of certain processes in theoretical reasoning depend on the agent's particular commitments.\footnote{Davidson elsewhere took it to be a difficult issue whether we must say that the agent who exhibits weakness of the warrant is irrational only if he accepts the Carnap–Hempel requirement. See Davidson (1985: 190, 1986: 203).}


In fairness to Davidson, we should note that there is a way to assign a special rational status to the principle of continence (or to the requirement of total evidence) \emph{within} the confines of an account that makes the particular principles the agent accepts determinative of what is and is not irrational in his case. We can do this by saying that a rational agent, as such, \emph{will} in fact accept the principle of continence, or the requirement of total evidence. If this is the case, then it will always be true that a rational agent who exhibits weakness of the will or weakness of the warrant is acting contrary to a principle he accepts, and a charge of irrationality can thus always be sustained. (Recall that we can identify irrationality only against a background of general rationality, so the incontinent agent is guaranteed to be a rational agent.) Davidson does moreover sometimes talk as if he had this in mind. In introducing the two principles, Davidson describes the Carnap–Hempel requirement of total evidence as “a principle \dots{} the rational man will accept,” and the principle of continence as “an analogous principle the rational man will accept in applying practical reasoning” (Davidson 1980: 41). He later went even farther, saying that the principle of continence is “constitutive of the concept of a creature with propositional attitudes capable of practical reasoning,” and “is not just another premise to be accepted or rejected” (Davidson 1999a: 404).\footnote{See Stroud (2003) for a discussion suggesting, along similar lines, that the idea of \emph{global} akrasia is incoherent: not doing what you think you ought to do all things considered is necessarily a localized failure.} Everyone accepts (for example) the principles of decision theory: “if someone does go against those principles, he goes against his own principles” (Davidson 1985: 195; see further Davidson 1985: 196f. and Davidson 1986: 204).


Since the directive always to do what it would be chic to do is not one a rational agent will necessarily accept, and is certainly not constitutive of the concept of an agent capable of practical reasoning, this view succeeds in distinguishing the principle of continence from other, rationally arbitrary principles of that kind. But in \emph{guaranteeing} that an agent who acts incontinently thereby acts contrary to a principle he accepts, this view seems to give acceptance no real role to play. If acceptance is guaranteed, then its presence no longer strengthens the case for considering the agent to have exhibited irrationality.


Davidson would have been better advised, I think, to drop the requirement of acceptance and instead simply say that the principle of continence is a basic norm of practical rationality, any contravention of which ipso facto counts as a failure of rationality. Could he have said this while continuing to hold (4): that irrationality necessarily involves inconsistency or incoherence? I think he could have – I will explain why shortly. But as Davidson later recognized for other reasons, it is questionable whether he ought to have held (4) in the first place. We are strongly inclined to see the incontinent agent as somehow incoherent or inconsistent, and the same seems true of the agent who deceives herself. (On Davidson's account of self-deception, according to which it is the agent's very belief that \emph{p} that causes her to believe that \emph{–p}, it certainly does seem to involve inconsistency or incoherence. See Davidson (1986, 1997). But it is not at all clear that \emph{all} forms of irrationality involve inconsistency. Consider for instance wishful thinking, in which an agent's desire that \emph{p} be the case leads her to believe that \emph{p} is the case. Wishful thinking is normally considered irrational; but it is not at all obvious whether or how it involves inconsistency, and indeed Davidson later admitted that it need not. (“I was surely wrong in saying every form of irrationality involves an inner inconsistency (wishful thinking \dots{} does not)” (Davidson 1999a: 403).)


Davidson at times seems tempted, not just by (4), but by the stronger (4′):


\textbf{(4′)} Irrationality necessarily stems from inconsistency or incoherence.


On this view, not only is inconsistency or incoherence present whenever irrationality is; the former is the \emph{source} of the latter. The original (4) would be satisfied if a common cause – say, poor reasoning – always produced \emph{both} inconsistency or incoherence, \emph{and} irrationality. On that view, while inconsistency and irrationality would travel together, it is the agent's poor reasoning that is really responsible for both. (4′) rules that out: according to (4′), it is the inconsistency itself that is responsible for the presence of irrationality. It would seem therefore to follow that eliminating the former ought to suffice to eliminate the latter; but this raises a difficulty. For in getting rid of an inconsistency, any way is as good as any other. If you have two or more attitudes that amount to an inconsistent or incoherent combination, then dropping any one of them will suffice to remove the inconsistency. But we do not ordinarily think irrationality can be “cured” by indifferently dropping any one of the jointly offending attitudes.


Consider the person who holds that the totality of the evidence better supports \emph{p} than –\emph{p} (and who endorses the Carnap–Hempel requirement of total evidence, if you think that adds anything), but who believes that –\emph{p}. On Davidson's picture, that person is guilty of inconsistency and irrationality, since those attitudes constitute an inconsistent or incoherent combination. Imagine, though, that our person noticed this inconsistency among his attitudes, and thought to himself, “Oh my gosh – I am inconsistent! Quick – I had better revise my opinion as to which hypothesis is better supported by the totality of the evidence, so as to bring my set of attitudes into coherence.” Changing his opinion as to which hypothesis the evidence better supports is just as effective as changing his belief concerning \emph{p} in eliminating the conflict among his attitudes, but from the perspective of rationality the two “solutions” hardly seem equivalent (as the present view would predict). The perspective of rationality is not, it seems, indifferent among the various ways an inconsistency in one's attitudes can be eliminated: there seems to be a “directional” component to evaluations of rationality which a view centered simply on inconsistent \emph{combinations} of attitudes is ill pressed to capture.


In part to cover cases such as wishful thinking, which as we saw does not clearly involve inconsistency, Davidson in his later papers suggested a different, seemingly broader understanding of irrationality. “Many common examples of irrationality,” he proposed, “may be characterized by the fact that there is a mental cause that is not a reason [for what it causes]” (Davidson 1985: 179). This account nicely captures wishful thinking: one's desire that \emph{p} be the case is not, or is certainly not normally considered to be, a reason to believe that \emph{p} is the case, but that desire nonetheless leads the agent to have that belief. We shall explore some of the implications of this picture shortly, but let us just note for the moment that this characterization of irrationality seems to make no appeal to incoherence or inconsistency. So to the extent that this is his considered view, Davidson has already dropped (4).


I want to suggest another option: that Davidson could have held on to the idea that the irrationality manifested in incontinent action involves incoherence or inconsistency, \emph{without} being driven to the more complicated account involving acceptance that we have considered. For it is not transparent what constitutes inconsistency or lack of coherence; and a more expansive conception of such matters would allow incontinence and other practical defects to count as involving inconsistency or incoherence. A central or paradigm case of inconsistency is, of course, believing incompatible propositions, or a contradiction: if you believe incompatible propositions, or a contradiction, you are inconsistent.\footnote{Although cases like Pierre's complicate even this claim of sufficiency. See Saul Kripke (1979).} But it would be a mistake to think that inconsistency or incoherence is limited to that core case,\footnote{As Davidson seems to when he says “if someone has inconsistent beliefs or attitudes \dots{} then he must at times believe some proposition \emph{p} and also believe its negation” (Davidson 1985: 198). Ariela Lazar notes the implausibility of this strong claim and reports that Davidson later confirmed in personal communication that he no longer held it (Lazar 1999: 399, fn. 24).} or to think, more generally, that inconsistency or incoherence must fundamentally reside in logical incompatibility among the propositions toward which you bear propositional attitudes. While the boundaries of inconsistency and incoherence are not obvious, they seem to extend well beyond cases in which you have one and the same propositional attitude, namely belief, toward propositions that are logically incompatible. There are, rather, a rich variety of cases.\footnote{Davidson himself brings one such case to our attention when he characterizes intransitive preferences as irrational and in some sense incoherent, even though no inconsistent beliefs need be involved. See for instance Davidson (1976: 268).}


Let us consider cases in which you hold one and the same propositional attitude toward incompatible propositions, but without assuming this time that the propositional attitude in question is belief. For whether you are inconsistent in so doing depends on \emph{which} propositional attitude you hold toward these propositions. Belief, as we have seen, does not tolerate this: if you bear the belief relation to two incompatible propositions, you are inconsistent. However, you are not inconsistent if you \emph{want} both of two incompatible propositions to be true, or \emph{wish} that each of two incompatible propositions were true. Attention: the contrast here is not between cognitive and conative attitudes, because \emph{intention} resembles belief in not tolerating simultaneous direction toward incompatible contents. You can \emph{want} both to celebrate your next anniversary in Bali and to celebrate your next anniversary in Botswana, but you have fallen into a kind of inconsistency if you \emph{intend} both to celebrate your next anniversary in Bali and to celebrate it in Botswana.


Indeed, intention is generally thought to impose consistency and coherence requirements that go beyond a prohibition on (simultaneously) holding intentions with incompatible contents. Suppose you intend to φ and believe that ψing is the “indispensably necessary” means to your φing (and within your power).\footnote{This language of course echoes Kant – the allusion to what is sometimes called “the instrumental principle” is intended.} Yet you do not intend to ψ (or perhaps you even intend not to ψ). You surely therefore manifest a kind of inconsistency or incoherence\footnote{Christine Korsgaard (1986) calls this kind of state “true irrationality”: she takes it to be a distinctively practical type of irrationality that cannot be understood in terms of conflicting beliefs.} – even though we have identified no two logically contradictory propositions toward which you bear propositional attitudes. This case shows that our conception of inconsistency – or at least incoherence – embraces more than cases involving two or more propositional contents that are incompatible. If we consider cases in which you have two different propositional attitudes toward one and the same proposition, we will find further examples. As before, whether this is inconsistent seems to depend on which propositional attitudes are at issue: both hoping and fearing that \emph{p} (under the same aspect), for instance, seems to constitute an inconsistency, but both intending to φ and wanting to φ does not (nor, for that matter, does intending to φ and believing that you will φ).


Once we see that a combination of attitudes can count as manifesting inconsistency or incoherence in at least an intuitive sense even if it does not involve any logically contradictory propositional objects, we can appreciate the possibility that among such inconsistencies is the one exhibited by the incontinent agent. The agent who acts incontinently judges that it is best all things considered that he do A, but he nonetheless does (or intends to do) B. That is, he violates the principle of continence. Why not say that this very combination itself counts as inconsistent or incoherent? We certainly are strongly inclined to see a kind of incoherence in the incontinent agent's pattern of attitudes, and I see no real impediment to endorsing the verdict that acting contrary to what you deem it best (and within your power) to do amounts to a kind of inconsistency. If Davidson had allowed his conception of inconsistency to be driven by his convictions about irrationality, rather than construing inconsistency more narrowly in the way he seems to have done, then he could have held on to the idea that incontinence is irrational without positing a general principle purportedly “held” by the agent, but with which his action conflicts.


* * *


Davidson's insistence on the need to identify an “inner inconsistency or incoherence” (Davidson 1985: 189) in order to substantiate a charge of “objective” irrationality, and his alternative formulation of irrationality in terms of mental causes which are not reasons, converge in seeming to force him toward a second consequence which has been generally viewed as unfortunate by those who have come after him, namely the idea that irrationality typically requires a divided mind. Let us chart the path from the requirement of inconsistency to that idea.


We have seen that Davidson tends to construe inconsistency or incoherence narrowly, and even to equate them with belief in logically incompatible propositions. We have also noted how difficult it is for Davidson to make room for a phenomenon of this kind given his other commitments, notably his interpretivist holism about propositional attitudes. What makes a propositional attitude the attitude it is, with the content it has, is in part its logical relations to other propositional attitudes. So when an interpretation attributes to an agent propositional attitudes that do not match those logical relations – such as a belief that \emph{p} together with a belief that –\emph{p} – we have grounds to question whether the agent's propositional attitudes have been accurately captured. Since we cannot help but interpret agents as mostly rational and consistent, any departures from that model put pressure on the correctness of the interpretation. Davidson thinks this challenge becomes insurmountable in the case of attributing to an agent belief in a contradiction, that is, belief in a proposition of the form (\emph{p} ∧ –\emph{p}). Indeed, Davidson is strongly inclined to think that it is impossible for someone to hold, or to be correctly interpreted as holding, such a belief (at least if they realize their belief is of that form: see Davidson 1985: 198). How then are we to find the requisite inconsistency in the attitudes of an agent who manifests irrationality on a given occasion?


Davidson's answer starts by distinguishing between belief in a contradiction and belief in each of two contradictory propositions: it is easier to credit an agent with \emph{two} beliefs \emph{p} and –\emph{p} than a belief in the single conjunctive proposition (\emph{p} ∧ –\emph{p}) (Davidson 1999b: 444). Davidson's idea is that a person can have two beliefs that she fails to “put together”: in such a case, the agent may simply not realize that two things she believes contradict each other. What is impossible, for Davidson, is to believe a contradiction \emph{while seeing that it is a contradiction}; but that may never happen in a case like the one described. We have found, then, a thin wedge on which to hang the inconsistency which must be present in an agent who manifests irrationality. But there is still a puzzle about how and why the two beliefs that contradict each other are never “put together,” for if they were the contradiction would be revealed to the agent. “How can a person fail to put the inconsistent or incompatible beliefs together?” (Davidson 1986: 211)


Davidson thinks the best way to make sense of this possibility is to see the agent's mind as partitioned or divided into separate compartments without porous borders. Since each of these mini-minds possesses its own “constellation of beliefs, purposes, and affects” (Davidson 1985: 185), these compartments are able to operate at least semi-autonomously. If the belief that \emph{p} is in one of these compartments, and the belief that –\emph{p} is in another, the contradiction between them may not be apparent to the agent, for she does not “survey the whole” (Davidson 1986: 211). This is how contradictory beliefs can subsist in an agent without being brought together into an unacceptable conjunction, which could not be believed.


Davidson's alternative suggestion that what is characteristic of irrationality is a mental cause that is not a reason for what it causes also pushes him toward the hypothesis that in cases of irrationality the mind must be divided or partitioned. There is a difficulty with citing a mental cause that is not a reason for what it causes, namely that the cause seems to lose its character as mental when it is not individuated by its logical and rational connections to other propositional attitudes (Davidson 1985: 180). Insofar as we think of the mental cause in question as \emph{merely} “a force that works on the mind without being identified as part of it” (Davidson 1985: 180), we lose our handle on the charge of irrationality: there is after all nothing \emph{irrational} about one's attitudes changing because of a bump on the head. Even if there is nothing incoherent in the idea of a mental cause – and Davidson's causal theory of action of course reposes on the idea that there is not – it is difficult to see something as a truly \emph{mental} cause \emph{of something to which it does not bear rational relations}.


Davidson thinks we can elegantly sidestep this difficulty by reminding ourselves that in at least one special case there is no puzzle in one mental event causing another for which the first is not a reason. That is when the mental events occur in different persons. In his delightful example (Davidson 1985: 181), my desire that you enter my garden causes me to grow a lovely flower, which indeed attracts you into my garden. Here we have an instance of a mental cause – my desire – bringing about an effect – your coming into my garden – for which it is not a reason; but there is no difficulty and no mystery, nor any tendency to see the cause as nonmental. Davidson proposes that we understand irrationality using the same simple expedient. One mental event can cause another without being a reason for it when they are “housed” in separate compartments that operate independently. Hence we arrive once again at the idea of a partitioned or divided mind.



\begin{quote}


Mental phenomena may cause other mental phenomena without being reasons for them, then, and still keep their character as mental, provided cause and effect are adequately segregated. \dots{} I suggest that the idea can be applied to a single mind and person. Indeed, if we are going to explain irrationality at all, it seems we must assume that the mind can be partitioned into quasi-independent structures


(Davidson 1985: 181).



\end{quote}


Two routes, then, lead Davidson to the conclusion that irrationality requires a partitioned mind. But this seems a regrettable upshot. First, it is not clear whether this solution preserves the inconsistency that Davidson tasks himself with finding in all cases of irrationality. A belief in \emph{p} and a belief in –\emph{p} only make someone inconsistent when the two beliefs coexist within a \emph{single} mind. (No one comes out as inconsistent if I believe \emph{p} and you believe –\emph{p}.) To the extent that we now have partitioned modules operating autonomously, with no one “surveying the whole,” it is unclear whether the requirement of a single mind is still being met. To return to our original desiderata, it is also unclear whether this solution properly accounts for the phenomena Davidson sought to illuminate. Is it never the case that someone incontinently, wishfully, or via self-deception does A, or believes that \emph{p}, but nonetheless does so wholeheartedly (or rather wholemindedly)? If Davidson's theoretical commitments force him to rule out this possibility, one could justly accuse him of not being faithful to the irrational phenomena for whose existence he sought to make room.

% Notes
\section{References}


Bratman, M. (1979). Practical reasoning and weakness of Will. \emph{Nous} 13(2):153–171.


Davidson, D. (1976). Hempel on explaining action. In \emph{Essays on Actions and Events}, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2001), pp. 261–275.


———. (1978). Intending. In \emph{Essays on Actions and Events}, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2001), pp. 83–102.


———. (1980). How is weakness of the will possible? In \emph{Essays on Actions and Events}, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2001), pp. 21–42.


———. (1982). Paradoxes of irrationality. In \emph{Problems of Rationality}. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2004), pp. 169–187.


———. (1985). Incoherence and irrationality. In \emph{Problems of Rationality}. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2004), pp. 189–198.


———. (1986). Deception and division. In \emph{Problems of Rationality}. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2004), pp. 199–212.


———. (1997). Who is fooled? In \emph{Problems of Rationality}. Oxford: Oxford University Press (2004), pp. 213–230.


———. (1999a). Reply to Ariela Lazar. In \emph{The Philosophy of Donald Davidson}, L.E. Hahn (ed.). Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, pp. 402–406.


———. (1999b). Reply to Jon Elster. In \emph{The Philosophy of Donald Davidson}, L.E. Hahn (ed.). Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, pp. 443–446.


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\emph{Mele, A. (1987).} Irrationality: An Essay on Akrasia, Self-Deception, and Self-Control\emph{. Oxford: Oxford University Press.}


———. (2012). \emph{Backsliding: Understanding Weakness of Will}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Stroud, S. (2003). Weakness of will and practical judgement. In \emph{Weakness of Will and Practical Irrationality}, S. Stroud and C. Tappolet (eds). Oxford: Clarendon Press.


———. (2008). Weakness of will. In \emph{The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2012 Edition)}, E.N. Zalta (ed.). \href{http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2012/entries/weakness\%00\%2Dwill/}{http:\Slash{}\Slash{}plato.stanford.edu\Slash{}archives\Slash{}sum2012\Slash{}entries\Slash{}weakness-will\Slash{}} (accessed February 26, 2013).

\chapter{29. The Rationality of the Emotions}


Mitchell Green

\section{1. Introduction}


Many of Davidson's writings concerned with the emotions were completed before the dramatic expansion of research on that topic within cognitive science, particularly experimental psychology, in the last two decades. As such, it is unclear what he would say about the view that the “basic emotions” are associated with pan-cultural features, such as characteristic physiological signatures and facial expressions (Griffiths 1998). So too, it is unclear how Davidson would respond to the hypothesis that emotions are bearers of information (Clore and Tamir 2002). However, consistent with much contemporary thinking about the topic, Davidson sees many emotions not as upending reason, but as being inextricably bound up with behavior and thought that by his lights are necessarily on the whole rational. Davidson construes emotions as both subject to rational assessment and as committing their possessors to certain further attitudes. He also sees many emotions as being both caused by and rationalized by certain beliefs, which may have their causal and rationalizing power whether or not they are true or even justified. Further, we can only deem an emotion irrational if it is held by an agent who is in most respects rational. On such a view, emotions will presuppose a modicum of rationality rather than, as a longstanding tradition has it, being opposed to rationality.

\section{2. Emotions and Cognition}


In what follows, I shall use the term “affect” to include both emotions and moods. Moods will be affective states that do not require a belief or related cognitive state, whereas emotions do require such a state. Overindulgence in coffee may make one anxious; this anxiety is caused by the coffee, but one's anxiety is not about coffee or the fact that one has consumed too much of it. After all, in such a case, there will be no answer to the question, “What are you anxious about?” Accordingly, anxiety – or at least this sort of anxiety – is a mood rather than an emotion. By contrast, you cannot be in a state of hoping unless there is some object or state of affairs you are hopeful about, and you cannot be regretful unless there is some object or state of affairs toward which that emotion is directed (Gordon 1974). If this is correct, then on the present regimentation of terminology, hope and regret will be emotions rather than moods.


If emotions are directed toward objects, we might ask what sorts of objects they are directed toward. Different emotions may of course be directed toward different types of object, but in the interest of explanatory power, we might also seek a unified account. Two kinds of view immediately present themselves. According to the first, emotions are directed toward such objects as one's father-in-law, country, or dwindling checking account. According to the second view, emotions are always directed toward a proposition, such as that one's father-in-law is overbearing, that one's country is noble, or that one's checking account is nearly empty. Davidson suggests that any apparently “objectual” emotion can be recast as a propositional one: your resentment is not just of your father-in-law, but of him \emph{for} being a certain way, and this attitude is readily recast in propositional terms. In discussing David Hume's analysis of pride, Davidson writes,



\begin{quote}


Hume's account of pride is best suited to what may be called \emph{propositional pride} – pride described by sentences like, ‘She was proud that she had been elected president.' Hume more often speaks of being proud \emph{of} something – a son, a house, an ability, an accomplishment – but it is clear from his analysis that cases of being proud of something (or taking pride in something, or being proud to do something) reduce to, or are based on, propositional pride. If Hume's theory is to cope with the other indirect passions, a propositional form must be found for each of them.


(Davidson 1980: 277–278)



\end{quote}


It may be observed that “proud that” is a factive construction: a person cannot be proud that P unless P obtains. Yet we would want an account of pride to accommodate the possibility of being proud of something illusory. I can, apparently, be proud of what I take to be my victory in the marathon in spite of having come in third place. In addition to this challenge to Davidson's regimentation, we might also question it in light of such cases as love: when Mary loves Susan, one may wonder, as Páll Árdal does, what the propositional object of that emotion could be (Árdal 1989: 389–390). Yet presumably Mary loves something about Susan, such as her kindness or her wry humor. So perhaps we might characterize Mary as loving the fact that Susan is kind, and so on. Mindful of the need to accommodate the possibility of pride based in false beliefs, we might say that the marathoner is proud of what he takes to be the fact that he is victorious, and that Mary loves what she takes to be the fact that Susan is kind.


The view that emotions take propositional objects raises the further question how the bearer of an emotion must be related to those objects. It is not plausible that the propositional object need only be the object of some thought or other: my mere contemplation of the proposition that the house before me is beautiful will not make me proud of that house. Rather, Davidson suggests that this proposition must be something I believe, and in so doing he aligns himself with emotional cognitivism.


Emotional cognitivism comes in two primary forms. On the first, robust form, all emotions are a species of cognitive state, such as belief. Thus, for \emph{robust emotional cognitivism}, to be angry at George is to believe in a certain way that George has acted inappropriately. The challenge is to flesh out the way in question without circularity, or at least in a large enough circle to make the exercise illuminating. Rather than explore whether that challenge can be met, however, let us consider a more modest form of emotional cognitivism, according to which all emotions presuppose some belief or other cognitive state without being reducible thereto. As we have just seen, hope, pride, and regret take propositional objects. According to \emph{modest emotional cognitivism}, hope is only possible, not only if it takes a propositional object, but also if its possessor has a belief whose content is closely associated with that proposition. The bank clerk hoping for a promotion, for instance, is in an emotional state whose object is the proposition that he is promoted, and who also takes a pro-attitude toward that proposition. Likewise, regret not only takes a propositional object (that I was passed over for the promotion, say), but is only possible if its possessor believes the truth of that proposition to be in some respect undesirable – what Davidson might have called a “con-attitude” toward it. Robust emotional cognitivism analyzes emotions as species of belief, while modest emotional cognitivism takes beliefs to be necessary but not sufficient conditions for emotional states.


Davidson appears to hold at least modest emotional cognitivism. For instance, he argues that it is not possible to be surprised unless one has a belief that one takes to have been shown incorrect. He contends, for instance, that to be surprised that the dog is outside, I must have believed that the dog was not outside, and then come to realize, or at least think, that that belief was incorrect.\footnote{“To be surprised is to recognize the distinction between what we thought and what is the case. To have an expectation is to admit that it may be faulted” (Davidson 2004b: 7–8; see also Davidson 2001: 104).} As we will see in the next section, Davidson's account of pride need not take this emotion to be fully specifiable as a type of belief. As such, Davidson is most charitably seen as holding modest emotional cognitivism while rejecting robust emotional cognitivism.

\section{3. Emotions and their Causes}


Resentment does not just presuppose my belief that I have been ill-treated; it results from that belief. So too, my love for someone not only presupposes but also results from my belief that she possesses various good points. Davidson accordingly combines his modest emotional cognitivism with a view about the etiology and rational assessment of emotions. For he holds that the belief that is a logically necessary condition for an emotion is also what typically both causes and rationalizes it. Davidson takes inspiration from Hume's notion of “indirect passions,” which can only be explained by their causal relationship with beliefs. Examples are pride, humility, vanity, love, hatred, envy, pity, malice, esteem, benevolence, respect, and compassion. Elsewhere, Davidson finds himself in agreement with Spinoza, who characterizes self-esteem as arising from an appreciation of our actions or our capacities for action (Davidson 2005: 310–311).


Davidson articulates his view of the etiology and rational nature of emotions in light of a sympathetic reconstruction of Hume in “Hume's Cognitive Theory of Pride.” He first points out that for Hume, a man who is proud that he has a beautiful house is in a state that is caused by a belief, namely the belief that he has a beautiful house (Davidson 1980: 278). Davidson goes on to contend that for the case of pride, any such belief must at least in part be about the believer:



\begin{quote}


For a belief that a house is beautiful will not make a man proud unless he believes that it is his house (or is otherwise related to him). It is clear that the reference to self must be pronominal: Smith is not proud that Smith is president of the bank, but that \emph{she} is president of the bank.


(Davidson 1980: 279)



\end{quote}


Having a belief about oneself that one owns a beautiful house is not, however, enough to induce pride. What would be? It might be suggested that what is missing in the case of the house-proud person is the belief that beauty is good or in some other respect positive. Davidson resists this suggestion on the ground that a person might not value beauty at all. Instead, the house-proud man must have a positive attitude toward a property he believes himself to have, such as being the owner of a beautiful house, or for that matter, being the owner of an ugly house.\footnote{Martin writes, “According to Davidson, Hume takes a man proud of his house to judge himself praiseworthy in virtue of possessing a beautiful house” (Davidson 2006: 70). This characterization misleadingly suggests that anyone who takes himself to possess a beautiful house will judge himself praiseworthy. Instead, what matters is taking a positive attitude toward a characteristic you believe yourself to have, be it possession of a beautiful house, or even possession of any ugly one. (One might take a positive attitude toward this latter characteristic if one takes ownership of an ugly house to evince frugality, or the courage to buck trends in home fashion.)}


Davidson then expands on this notion of a positive attitude. He contends that rather than follow Hume in thinking of pride as rooted in pleasure, we construe it instead in terms of approval, or thinking well of. This approval implicitly commits its bearer to approving of others she takes to possess similar qualities. That is, Davidson tells us that a man who is proud of his beautiful house is bound to think well of others who are similarly endowed. He summarizes his view thus:



\begin{quote}


I shall interpret Hume, then, as maintaining that, if someone is proud that he exemplifies a certain property, then he approves of, or thinks well of, others for exemplifying the same property. This approval is not to be distinguished from holding that anyone who has that property is to that extent praiseworthy, estimable, or virtuous.


(Davidson 1980: 281)



\end{quote}


Davidson goes on to crystallize the view as follows:



\begin{quote}


\dots{} the basic structure of pride and its etiology as Hume saw them is clear: the cause consists, first, of a belief, concerning oneself, that one has a certain trait; and second of an attitude of approbation or esteem for anyone who has that trait.


(Davidson 1980: 284)



\end{quote}


Davidson is here describing the causes of pride rather than pride itself. He does not commit himself on the question whether the pride that results from the pair of self-directed belief and general attitude of approbation is itself a belief. Imputing such an unobvious view to Davidson would go beyond the evidence provided by his writings, and so would appear uncharitable. For this reason, I shall take Davidson to hold modest, rather than robust emotional cognitivism.


In a similar spirit, we do not need to take Davidson as holding that these two components, self-directed belief and general esteem, must occur in temporal order. Instead, the belief and esteem may occur simultaneously. Further, Davidson may clarify the other-directed approbation to which the house-proud person is committed in the following way. One is not committed to approving \emph{tout court} of anyone else who also owns a beautiful house, for of course many such homeowners may be vicious in other respects. Rather, one is committed to approving of them \emph{insofar} as they own a beautiful house. The same applies to approval of oneself.


The above account specifies two causes of pride – belief and esteem – and thereby characterizes that emotion indirectly. So too, Davidson tells us that someone who is proud is committed to approving of others with similar characteristics. My pride in my Craftsman house commits me, ceteris paribus, to approving of the Craftsman houses of others. As such, Davidson has offered an account of pride in terms of its “input” and “output” conditions, not unlike functionalist conceptions of other psychological states. One might be dissatisfied with Davidson's account of pride on the ground that he has specified its causes as well as the effects it is liable to produce, but not the emotion itself. However, he may reply that it is doubtful that there is more to pride than its role in a larger causal and rationalizing structure. One feature that is \emph{not} a component of all, or even paradigmatic cases of pride, for instance, is an experiential element. Thus, while we may agree that sometimes we do feel an exuberant, bursting pleasure in contemplating the object of our pride, neither this nor any other qualitative dimension is a mandatory element of all or all paradigmatic cases of pride.


By the time he has reconstructed Hume's position thus far, Davidson has arrived at a view of pride that he presents as correct, or at least defensible. In addition to the last two quotations and subsequent qualifications, Davidson also stresses that specifying a belief lying behind a particular case of pride both causally explains \emph{and} justifies the emotion. We have already discussed the causal component. Davidson's new point is that the belief in question shows the pride to be reasonable from the agent's point of view. This emerges from the way we treat challenges to the reasonableness of a person's pride: For instance, in reply to someone's question why he is proud of having got down (rather than up) Mt. Everest, someone might point out that he did it on skis. Again, a person may be challenged for being proud of the fact that he never laughs, but reply in such a way as to make it clear that he considers laughter a weakness rather than a pleasure or strength (Davidson 1980: 286).


As Davidson describes matters, the belief that one has a certain trait and attitude of esteem toward anyone having that trait are causes of pride rather than merely necessary conditions for it. In his account of the explanation of action, Davidson famously stresses that citing the cause of an action is compatible with holding that cause to rationalize it and thereby be conceptually related to it. A similar position informs his account of emotion. Davidson cites the phenomenon of snowblink as an illustration: snowblink is light on the underside of clouds that is reflected from snow on the ground. As a definition, it is necessarily true that snowblink behaves as thus described, but it is also the case that snowblink is a causal phenomenon. So too, Davidson argues that the cause of an emotion may also rationalize it and thereby be conceptually related to it. (Davidson 1980: 289)

\section{4. Objections}


Davidson sees all pride as in some sense directed toward the self. Even a father who is proud of his daughter has a positive attitude toward a property he believes himself to have, namely the property of being the father of a child who possesses or has accomplished something of value. In this light, we may account for the apparent unintelligibility of being proud of something to which one bears no discernible relation: one can be delighted with or mesmerized by the beauty of the Horsehead Nebula, but one cannot be proud of it unless one for some reason believes oneself to be responsible for its beauty. (We shall have reason to qualify this statement in a moment.) We should, however, note that George, a Westerner who publicly, and even sincerely abhors North Korea's nuclear ambitions, might also be secretly proud of North Korea for standing up to the West. It may not be immediately apparent how George's pride is either caused or rationalized by the belief that he or something nontrivially related to him has a certain trait.


Consider what one might think of as a vicarious emotion (Martin 2006: 93–94). In such a case, one identifies with an object and in light of that identification, feels emotion on that object's behalf. One might feel vicarious resentment on behalf of someone who has been wronged, and vicarious shame on behalf of someone who has been publicly embarrassed. Fiction provides rich sources of both kinds of example. In \emph{Jane Eyre}, for instance, it is natural to feel vicarious resentment toward Mr. Brocklehurst, the headmaster who unjustly accuses Jane of being a liar in front of her entire school. In the North Korea case, the agent in question sees that country as a pugnacious underdog standing up to a hegemonic West. This way of thinking of North Korea will not make him proud unless he sees something of himself in this country's attitude toward the West. (In the absence of this identification, he may admire this country but would not be proud of it.) But supposing that one does feel proud of this country, then Davidson may construe such a case of pride as consisting of a belief, concerning oneself, that one has the property of being brave and pugnacious, and an attitude of esteem for any entity (including a foreign country) sharing that trait. One virtue of this analysis is its ability to bring to the surface the subtle self-directedness of pride even in something so far flung as a foreign country. Without that element of the self, we would have a case of admiration rather than pride.\footnote{It should now also be clear how one might be proud of the Horsehead Nebula while realizing that it is not something for which one could bear any responsibility. For one may instead identify with it as, for instance, exemplifying beauty in a generally valueless universe.}


Another challenge to Davidson's analysis of emotions such as pride is to the idea that reasons, causes, and beliefs do not line up for emotions in as neat a way as he supposes. Solomon, for instance, writes:



\begin{quote}


Employing a time-tested formula from his other writings, Davidson says, “the cause of his pride rationalizes it,” (752), but here he confuses beliefs as causes and beliefs as components in a gross way. Consider the following example: a man tends to take considerable pride in his own slovenliness. A behavior-modification therapist a la \emph{Clockwork Orange} subjects him to a series of experiences in which sloppiness is accompanied by drug-induced nausea and neatness is rewarded with praise. After a few weeks, the man takes pride in his neatness. What is the reason? The series of artificially induced associations. Those are also the cause of his pride. To be sure, if he is truly proud, he must therefore have certain beliefs concerning his appearance as virtuous, but (1) those beliefs need have no role in the causal explanation of his pride; (2) the cause of his pride clearly does \emph{not} “rationalize it”; and (3) he need have no reasons for being proud, other than his beliefs which constitute pride. But as they constitute pride, they are hardly \emph{reasons for} the pride in any sense. In other words, someone who is proud need not “always have his reasons.” He need only have the requisite beliefs.


(Solomon 2003: 28)



\end{quote}


Let us pause over Solomon's claim that by the time the man has begun to take pride in his neatness, the reason for (and the cause of) his emotion is the series of artificially induced associations between neatness and praise. It appears more accurate to say that the events that have brought the man to start taking pride in his neatness are the series of induced associations. However, by the time he does take pride in that neatness, he is also able to offer us reasons for why being neat seems to him praiseworthy. (“So many new doors are open to me!”, and so on.) The artificially induced associations might cause the man to feel \emph{pleasure} in the contemplation of his neatness, but it is doubtful that we should call pleasure an emotion rather than a mood. For a drug might cause me to feel pleasure without there being any answer to the question what I am pleased about.


Solomon acknowledges that once the man becomes proud of his neat appearance, he will give reasons such as that one just mentioned. Solomon denies, however, that such reasons need have any role in the causal explanation of pride. We may reply on Davidson's behalf that the artificially induced associations Solomon imagines in his example will only produce pleasure; they cannot by themselves yield pride. Evidently, we can only get from a mood such as pleasure to an emotion like pride with the cooperation of belief. But if that is right, then Davidson may still claim with some plausibility that the man's beliefs are what cause him to be proud.


Whereas Solomon challenges Davidson's views of the etiology of pride, Árdal (1989) challenges Davidson's account of what pride commits us to. We have seen that my pride in my Craftsman house commits me to approbation or esteem for everyone who has a house in a similar style, all else being equal. Árdal worries that this implication is too strong as applied to those other homeowners whose possession of this sort of dwelling cannot redound to their credit. He gives the example of post-World War II Icelanders:



\begin{quote}


When Iceland gained complete independence from long colonial rule in the forties, the initial move towards independence took the form of young poets awakening the self-awareness of the people by inspiring pride in not only the cultural heritage of the country, but also the beauty of the scenery. As individuals, the citizens were not entitled to think of themselves as praiseworthy, although they were expected to gain in self-esteem from seeing themselves as specially related to something of value. Somehow, they were entitled to some of the value of the subject to which they were related without themselves having earned praise. They were entitled to be proud, they had nothing to be ashamed of, and they could hold their heads high. Pride is invigorating and may lead to praiseworthy activities; however, the value is allowed to rub off on the proud person prior to it being earned. Thus, the conditions for thinking oneself to be justly proud are different from the conditions for thinking oneself to be praiseworthy. It follows that thinking oneself to be praiseworthy is not part of what it is to be proud.


(Árdal 1989: 393)



\end{quote}


Ardal's point seems to be that one can only merit praise if one has done something to earn it. Yet many citizens of Iceland had not earned their citizenship but were instead born into it. They were nevertheless urged to be proud of their citizenship. It is true that on his first summing up of his reconstruction of Hume's view of pride (“I shall interpret Hume, then, as maintaining that \dots{}”), quoted earlier, Davidson does speak in terms of praiseworthiness. However, in his second summing up of that position, the notion of praiseworthiness has dropped out, and instead we have appeal to an attitude of approbation or esteem for anyone who has the pride-inducing trait. Can we intelligibly esteem or approve of an Icelander just in virtue of her birth? I suspect that we can, just as we can esteem or approve someone's high cheekbones even when that facial feature is not due to plastic surgery or any other voluntary intervention. The young Icelandic government may have been encouraging modesty among its citizenry, but the citizens could respect this injunction while feeling proud so long as they did not trumpet their newfound self-esteem too stentoriously.


Some commentators have criticized Davidson for analyzing emotions such as pride as tissues of propositions. Árdal writes,



\begin{quote}


Davidson thinks the logic of pride is a syllogism. “All who own a beautiful house are praiseworthy. I own a beautiful house, therefore I am praiseworthy.” He thinks the conclusion should be that “I am estimable as the owner of a beautiful house.”


(Árdal 1989: 391)



\end{quote}


Árdal does not quite go so far as to say that on Davidson's view a proud person literally engages in syllogistic reasoning of this kind, either consciously or unconsciously. However, Solomon does:



\begin{quote}


Much less is a proposition (or a set of propositions) ever tantamount to an emotion. Thus the absurdity of Donald Davidson's much heralded analysis of emotion (following Hume's example of pride) in terms of a syllogism of propositions in logical sequence.


(Solomon 2005: 138)



\end{quote}


We have seen that Davidson construes pride as being caused and rationalized by a belief. Beliefs relate believers to propositions but are not identical to them. Thus, the contention that Davidson construes emotions as propositions (or as sets thereof) depends on a misconstrual of his position. We have also seen that Davidson does not purport to give a reductive analysis of pride or, for that matter, of any other emotion. As a result, the contention that he analyzes pride as a syllogism cannot be correct. Further, even if it were claimed that on Davidson's view, all cases of pride presuppose the occurrence of a series of propositions, this would only make sense as a characterization of his view if it were rephrased as the idea that all cases of pride presuppose a series of beliefs that mimic the aforementioned syllogistic structure. However, nothing in Davidson's writings associated with emotion supports this strong, and on its face implausible, reading.

\section{5. Privileged Access to Emotions}


After refining and defending Hume's view of emotions, Davidson considers an objection concerned with our capacity to have privileged access to them. It would seem that my knowledge of my emotions is superior in kind to your knowledge of my emotions. Yet if emotions are causal concepts, we would not expect be in a specially advantageous position to ascribe them to ourselves. Rather, we would need to perform empirical investigation to determine their presence in us. A critic may feel that this conclusion fails to respect our privileged access to affect.


Davidson's reply begins with a return to the case of snowblink, which we have seen to be a causal concept. One cannot reasonably doubt whether a given instance of snowblink was caused by reflection from snow on the ground, since to do so would be to doubt a necessary truth. However, one can reasonably doubt whether what one is currently seeing is snowblink rather than some other phenomenon. So too, Davidson contends, one cannot doubt whether a given case of pride is the result of a pair consisting of a belief and an attitude of approbation. One can, however, reasonably harbor doubts about what one is proud of:



\begin{quote}


A person can easily be wrong about exactly what it is he is proud of; whether it is the cost or cut of his clothes, say, or his skill at tennis rather than his score. If we suppose he knows he is proud of something, and he knows (or has special authority with respect to) what he believes, the question which of several related beliefs was the cause can not only be troubling, but it also can be questioned by reference to parallel cases.


(Davidson 1980: 290)



\end{quote}


So Davidson will not agree that our privileged access to emotions extends so far as to guarantee our knowledge of their contents. He assumes without argument, however, that one can know which emotion is occurring within. To maintain a parallelism with the snowblink case, however, we would expect one to be able reasonably to doubt which emotional state one is in. One can coherently wonder whether what one is observing in the clouds is snowblink. But so too, it would seem to be possible reasonably to wonder whether what one is experiencing is pride rather than admiration, enthusiasm, or even schadenfreude. Recall that one's state of feeling is pride only if that state is caused by a pair consisting of a belief and an attitude of approval. A reasonable doubt as to the nature of one's feeling can, accordingly, be due to a reasonable doubt as to its source. If instead what causes this feeling is pleasure in others' inferiority to me, the feeling may instead be contempt or Schadenfreude.


Davidson has written at length on the significance of indeterminacy in the interpretation of the thought, speech, and nonverbal behavior of others. He has also argued that this indeterminacy extends to the first-person case as well: if one system for the interpretation of our own thought, action, and speech is adequate to the observable facts, then more than one will likely be. Yet Davidson himself and many writers who follow him limit this indeterminacy to the contents of our thoughts and utterances. I have argued elsewhere that if we are to take the full measure of indeterminacy, we should extend it to the modality of those attitudes and sayings as well (Green 1999, 2007; see also P. Rawlings, this volume). Thus, if there is no fact of the matter as to whether an agent believes that P or instead believes that Q, for nonidentical propositions P and Q, it is no less likely that we will find a case in which there is no fact of the matter whether she believes P or, instead, has some degree of belief that P. (We assume here, as is argued in Green 1999, that a degree of belief in a proposition is not a species of belief.) Extending the point to emotions, we may also find it likely that even after taking into consideration all the observable facts about her own feelings and behavior, an agent may still be unable to discern whether her feelings about a situation are enthusiasm rather than pride. Indeed, there need be no answer to the question what she \emph{really} feels. Instead, such objective facts as there are concerning her emotions are what are held in common among all empirically adequate systems of interpretation of her thought, action, and speech.

\section{6. Emotions and Irrationality}


In addition to a modest cognitivism about emotions, Davidson holds that we cannot make sense of an agent who by our lights holds massively irrational beliefs. Instead, irrationality is only intelligible against the background of a belief system that is largely coherent and reasonable by our own lights. This will have an implication for what emotions we can ascribe to an agent. A long tradition of thinking about emotions sees them as being in tension with reason. However, if we combine his modest cognitivism about emotions with Davidson's views about ascriptions of irrationality, the onus will always be on the interpreter to justify an ascription of an irrational emotion. Most emotions will presuppose beliefs that are comparatively reasonable.


Davidson will admit, though, that our emotions can in some instances be irrational. One way in which an emotion can be irrational emerges clearly from the view of emotions we have already developed. If I am proud of my Craftsman house, then I am committed to finding yours estimable unless it contains other features that counterbalance this virtue, say by blocking someone's view of the horizon or being built from environmentally damaging materials. Barring these mitigating factors, I am irrational if I do not find your Craftsman house admirable while taking pride in my own.


How might an agent arrive in such an irrational situation? Davidson hypothesizes that our minds often behave as if they are partitioned into semiautonomous regions, each behaving in relative independence of the others, in a way similar to what has been proposed by modularity theories (Davidson 2004a). One such “module” may be one in which I am bursting with pride at my beautiful Craftsman house; in another module, however, I have a set of beliefs that make me resentful of your opulent lifestyle. For your wealth was inherited, not earned, and my dim view of your moderate accomplishments makes me see all your possessions in a similar light. For this reason, I do not find your Craftsman house admirable in spite of being proud of my own.


Davidson presents his “partition” theory as a minimal concession to some of the claims of psychoanalysis. However, he departs from the mainstream of psychoanalytic theory in denying that any of the partitions need be unconscious. Rather, so long as the different partitions can operate in relative independence of the others, we will have enough to account for how a person could harbor irrational emotions. In the case of the house-proud man, the implications of his pride in his own house for the house of the man he resents will not be drawn. Instead, whenever he thinks about that object of his resentment, he is filled with an irritation that prevents him from drawing that approving conclusion.


It may be tempting to see Davidson's partitioning approach as ad hoc. However, this approach to irrationality is to some degree borne out by recent work in experimental psychology, particularly that flying under the banner of the “adaptive unconscious.” According to this line of research, we may discern a component of cognition and affect that is comparatively automatic, modular, and difficult to control via conscious introspection (Wilson 2004). This component shares some features of the unconscious mind as it is posited by psychoanalytic theory, but (a) we can establish the component's presence and features experimentally, and (b) it is much less bound up with infantile sexuality than it is construed as being on most psychoanalytic models, and is instead a great deal more attuned to our social status both within and without the family.


Davidson will deem irrational those emotions that result in some inconsistency among the commitments they engender and other emotions or beliefs we may have. As a result, Davidson will have no direct means to account for the way in which a mood such as anxiety may in some cases be inappropriate. Anxiety need not presuppose any beliefs, and yet if I find myself anxious in a crowded subway or while mounting a stepstool, we may with good reason call the reaction irrational.


Davidson would not be in a position to explain the irrationality of such moods directly as he could in the case of inconsistent pride. However, he might account for the irrationality, such as it is, of such moods as follows. These moods tend to bring about desires, such as an urge to flee the crowd or to get back onto the floor. But an urge to flee the crowd will, if acted on, tend to conflict with my need to get to work on time. So too, an urge to get back to terra firma will conflict with my desire to replace the light bulb in the living room fixture. On the assumption that employment and home maintenance are reasonable long-term goals, moods that spur us to behave in ways incompatible with them are justly ruled out of line.

\section{7. Animal Affects}


Davidson is notorious for denying that creatures without a language can have propositional attitudes. This is not the place either to rehearse or dispute the arguments for this claim. However, Davidson's position will have implications for his view about affective states of nonlinguistic creatures. For Davidson's modest affective cognitivism will deny to nonlinguistic creatures the capacity for emotions. The most they can possess are moods, such as anxiety, exuberance, and agitation.


Once we take the measure of the distinction between emotions and moods, the implausibility of this commitment may be lessened. It does seem that we are speaking metaphorically or floridly in describing the eagle as proud as it soars on the updrafts. (What would it be proud of, and why? After all, it is just hunting.) So too, it is difficult to imagine the grounds we might find for concluding that a nonhuman animal is embarrassed, regretful, or nostalgic. This leaves unsettled hard cases, such as anger and pain. One would expect anger to be an emotion rather than a mood since it would always seem possible to ask, of an angry creature, what it is angry at or about. Imagine a high-ranking male baboon flying into a rage as he observes one of the females with whom he regularly mates copulating with a lower-ranking rival of his. His anger seems to be directed toward a state of affairs, rather than just being a modality without an object or content. Can we make sense of this within the strict confines of Davidson's denial of propositional attitudes to creatures lacking a language?


Following the model of Davidson's construal of pride, anger at the rival mate would only be rational if the object of the dominant baboon's anger not only caused but also rationalized that emotion. The only way in which it could do this, however, is if it were in propositional form (such as that the rival male is consorting with his mate) and the content of his belief. Davidson rules this out. However, Davidson will not deny animals perceptual states and the capacity to attend to objects and states of affairs, and so long as we agree that the dominant male perceives and can attend to objects and their features, we may understand the dominant male as being in an affective state that is caused by but not rationalized by his perceptual state. We may reserve the term “anger” for those affective states that do presuppose beliefs, and as a result deny anger to the baboon. A more neutral term may instead be “proto-anger,” which marks an affinity with anger while suggesting that not all of anger's features need be present. We may hypothesize that proto-anger carries with it characteristic physiological responses (such as increased blood flow to the limbs use for attack), facial expressions, and other behavioral traits and dispositions, such as a direct gaze at an object of attention and a readiness to attack it. On such a hypothesis, it will still be empirically significant to describe the baboon as proto-angry at the sexual insubordination in his regime. So too, proto-fear will not require belief that something is dangerous. However, it will require a distinctive physiological response, such as increased blood flow to those parts of the body used for flight, a disposition for such flight, and in certain social species, distinctive alarm-calling behavior. Analogous strategies would seem to be available for other “basic” emotions, such as happiness, sadness, disgust, and surprise. Once we have a stable and testable conception of proto-emotions, we may even give substance to the idea of their being held irrationally. The chronically proto-angry baboon is more likely to meet his match against an upstart than the more impassive alpha who chooses his battles; so too, the compulsively alarm calling, proto-fearful vervet will be ignored by his conspecifics while, by his calling, making himself deliciously salient to predators.

\section{Acknowledgments}


Research for this chapter was supported in part by Grant No. 0925975 from the National Science Foundation. The conclusions reached and opinions expressed represent those of the author alone, and do not necessarily represent those of the National Science Foundation.

% Notes
\section{References}


Árdal, P. (1989). Hume and Davidson on pride. \emph{Hume Studies} 15:387–394.


Clore, G. and Tamir, M. (2002). Affect as embodied information. \emph{Psychological Inquiry} 13:37–45.


Davidson, D. (1980). \emph{Hume's cognitive theory of pride}. Reprinted in \emph{Essays on Actions and Events} (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 277–290.


———. (2001). \emph{Rational animals}. Reprinted in \emph{Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective} Oxford: Oxford University Press): 95–105.


———. (2004a). \emph{Paradoxes of irrationality}. Reprinted in \emph{Problems of Rationality} (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 179–187.


———. (2004b). \emph{The problem of objectivity}. Reprinted in \emph{Problems of Rationality} (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 3–18.


\emph{———. (2005).} Spinoza's causal theory of the affects\emph{. Reprinted in} Truth, Language, and History \emph{(Oxford: Oxford University Press).}


Gordon, R. (1974). The aboutness of emotions. \emph{American Philosophical Quarterly} 11:27–36.


Green, M. (1999). Attitude ascription's affinity to measurement. \emph{International Journal of Philosophical Studies} 7:323–348.


———. (2007). \emph{Self-Expression}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


\emph{Griffiths, P. (1998).} What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories\emph{. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.}


Martin, M. (2006). In praise of self: Hume's love of fame. \emph{European Journal of Analytic Philosophy} 2:69–100.


———. (2003). \emph{Nothing to be proud of}. Reprinted in his \emph{Not Passion's Slave: Emotions and Choice} (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 42–56.


———. (2005). Emotions, cognition, affect. \emph{Philosophical Studies} 108:13–42.


Wilson, T. (2004). \emph{Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious}. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

\part{Part V: Epistemology}

\chapter{30. Davidson and Radical Skepticism}


Duncan Pritchard

\section{1. Introduction}


Donald Davidson famously argued that “belief is in its nature veridical” (Davidson 1983: 314). If this were true, then it would have obvious ramifications for radical skepticism, at least insofar as it trades on the possibility of widespread error in our beliefs.


Consider, for example, the famous “brain-in-a-vat” (BIV) hypothesis that is often used to motivate radical skepticism. This is a person whose brain has been removed and placed in a vat, whereupon it is “fed” experiences by supercomputers that are subjectively indistinguishable from ordinary, nonenvatted, experiences. As a result, so the argument goes anyway, the BIV ends up having mostly false beliefs. The skeptical predicament then ensues, for if a BIV's experiences are subjectively indistinguishable from normal experiences, how could one know that one is not a BIV? That is, how could one know that one does not have beliefs that are massively false?


If Davidson is right that we can establish, on purely philosophical grounds, that belief is in its nature veridical, then we can stop this kind of argument for radical skepticism at its root. In particular, we can argue that while it might well be intuitive to suppose that we can imagine a person who, like the BIV, has beliefs that are mostly false, this possibility is in fact unavailable, and hence cannot be employed in an argument for radical skepticism.


Of course, it would not follow from the fact that belief is in its nature veridical that we necessarily have the widespread knowledge of the world that we tend to attribute to ourselves, something which Davidson freely admits. As he puts it, even though an agent's beliefs may be mostly true, it does not follow that they are all “justified enough, or in the right way, to constitute knowledge” (Davidson 1983: 438). Even so, if Davidson's argument at least demonstrates the impossibility of massive error, then one may well be willing to live with the much more restricted skeptical possibility that one's mostly true beliefs might not amount to knowledge. For one thing, one would at least know that one is not in the predicament of the BIV that was just described.


In Sections 2–4, I critically explore Davidson's motivation for his anti-skepticism, concluding that his view is best understood as a kind of transcendental argument. With his antiskepticism so understood, in Section 5, I consider some problems that this kind of approach to the skeptical problem faces.

\section{2. Davidson on Radical Interpretation and the Principle of Charity}


Key to Davidson's anti-skepticism is the notion of \emph{radical interpretation}. Building on earlier work on radical translation undertaken by W.V.O. Quine (1960), Davidson conceives of radical interpretation as taking place when one interprets a speaker without reliance on any prior knowledge of either the speaker's beliefs or the meanings of the speaker's utterances. The importance of radical interpretation for Davidson's work is that he holds that it is a necessary truth that any content-bearing sentence is interpretable under these epistemological conditions.


Radical interpretation faces a problem, however, which is that one cannot assign a meaning to a speaker's utterances without knowing what the speaker believes, and one cannot identify the speaker's beliefs without knowing what her utterances mean. So, for example, if one does not already have a purchase on a speaker's beliefs, then how is one to interpret an utterance of a sentence (in the vicinity of a rabbit, say) as being a sentence with a particular content (such as, “that's a rabbit”)? But if one cannot assign meanings to the speaker's utterances, then how is one to determine, in the conditions of radical interpretation, what the speaker's beliefs are? One is thus apparently stuck within an interpretative circle.


Davidson's resolution of this problem is to appeal to the principle of charity. While this is never given a particularly precise rendering, roughly, it instructs the interpreter to treat the speaker as having mostly true beliefs (by the interpreter's lights anyway). It is clear from how Davidson applies this principle that there are two key dimensions to applications of charity. On the one hand, interpreting a speaker as charity demands will tend to lead to an interpretation that treats the speaker as having a \emph{coherent} – or, at least, \emph{consistent} anyway – set of beliefs. On the other hand, charity will tend to lead to an interpretation that treats the speaker's beliefs as being correctly about the objects in the speaker's immediate environment that the speaker is interacting with.\footnote{In later work – for example, Davidson (2001: 211) – Davidson referred to these two elements of the principle of charity as, respectively, the principles of coherence and correspondence.}


By using the principle of charity in this fashion, we have a way out of the interpretative circle just noted. The radical interpreter is using her beliefs as a way of assigning beliefs to the speaker, and in doing so is able to assign meanings to her utterances. So, for example, if the speaker is observed uttering sentences in the vicinity of a certain object, such as a rabbit, then by treating the speaker as having mostly true beliefs (by the interpreter's lights anyway), one will have a way of ascribing a meaning to the speaker's utterances, such as “that's a rabbit.” Of course, the ascription will be defeasible, and in time, the radical interpreter may settle on a very different interpretation of the speaker's utterances. But at least this application of the principle of charity enables the radical interpreter to coherently \emph{begin} the project of radical interpretation.\footnote{One question we might raise at this juncture is whether it is the principle of charity, specifically, which is required for the project of radical interpretation, and not some weaker principle. One candidate in this regard, offered by Grandy (1973), is the “principle of humanity.” Very roughly, this directs us to interpret speakers in such a way as to make them intelligible, but does not (explicitly, anyway) demand that we interpret them in such a way as to maximize truth in their beliefs. See also McGinn (1986). For reasons of space, I set aside this question in what follows.}


On the face of it, the principle of charity offers us no particular respite from the radical skeptical challenge. That it may be methodologically necessary for the project of radical interpretation to treat a speaker's beliefs as mostly true by our lights does not in itself give us any more reason to think that the speaker's beliefs are in fact true than it does for thinking that our beliefs are true. Indeed, the radical skeptic might well concede the methodological necessity of the principle of charity to the project of radical interpretation while nonetheless insisting that, for all that, one's beliefs could be mostly false.

\section{3. Davidson's Route to Antiskepticism I: The Omniscient Interpreter}


Exactly how Davidson bridges the argumentative gap from a “subjective” application of the principle of charity in the project of radical interpretation to the claim that belief is in its nature veridical is controversial, as we will see. Nonetheless, it is clear that at one point in the development of his thinking, at least Davidson held that he could bridge this gap by appeal to what he refers to as an \emph{omniscient interpreter}. While the idea of an omniscient interpreter made brief appearances in earlier work – such as Davidson (1975, 1977) – let us focus on its clearest expression in Davidson (1983).


At one juncture in this text Davidson is occupied with the thought that a speaker and an interpreter could make sense of each other's utterances on the basis of shared, but false, beliefs. Clearly, Davidson cannot deny that this is a possibility. Nonetheless, he insists that this cannot be the norm, and to explain why in a famous passage he introduces the idea of an omniscient interpreter:



\begin{quote}


For imagine for a moment an interpreter who is omniscient about the world, and about what does and would cause a speaker to assent to any sentence in his (potentially unlimited) repertoire. The omniscient interpreter, using the same method as the fallible interpreter, finds that fallible interpreter largely consistent and correct. By his own standards, of course, but since they are objectively correct, the fallible interpreter is seen to be largely consistent and correct by objective standards.


(Davidson 1983: 317)



\end{quote}


Since the omniscient interpreter, whose beliefs are by definition true, would in interpreting us find most of our beliefs true as well, so we can be assured, goes the argument, that most of our beliefs are true too. Clearly, if this line of argument works, then Davidson has the argumentative bridge that he needs to go from the methodological necessity of the principle of charity in the project of radical interpretation to the antiskeptical claim that belief is in its nature veridical. But does it work?


The short answer is that it probably does not. One difficulty that has been raised is the very idea of an omniscient interpreter being bound to use the principle of charity in making sense of our utterances. For although we can understand why nonomniscient creatures such as ourselves might need to employ the principle of charity in interpreting the utterances of others, why would an omniscient creature be so restricted? In particular, why would a creature who is omniscient about “what does and would cause a speaker to assent to any sentence in his (potentially unlimited) repertoire” need to rely on a methodological principle like the principle of charity in making sense of a speaker's utterances? After all, a core part of the reason why we need to appeal to this principle is our supposed lack of epistemic access, in the context of radical interpretation anyway, to what is causing the speaker's utterances.\footnote{See Williams (1988: §5) for a pointed critical discussion of the notion of an omniscient interpreter along these lines. See also Klein (1986) for a related critical discussion about the very idea of an omniscient interpreter as Davidson's describes him engaging in a genuine project of interpretation. (Note that in the background here is the question of whether on Davidson's view there is any fact of the matter about someone's mental states, since if this is the case, then of course the omniscient interpreter will need to engage in a project of interpretation, even despite his epistemically privileged position. On this point, see Vermazen (1983: §2).)}


Moreover, even if we grant that the omniscient interpreter will ascribe mostly true beliefs to us, this still seems consistent with there being a significant mismatch in how we conceive of our own situation and how the omniscient interpreter, from its epistemically elevated viewpoint, conceives of it. In short, that our beliefs are mostly true does not in itself guarantee that we are not in some fundamental respect in error. Here is Michael Williams on this point:



\begin{quote}


[\dots{}] what possible reason do we have for supposing that the interpretation available to the omniscient interpreter, through his knowledge of the real causes of our beliefs, matches the self-understanding that we generate through exploring the inferential relationships between beliefs in our system from the ‘inside’. For example, if we were brains in vats, kept ignorant of our fate and hooked up to some kind of speaking apparatus, the omniscient interpreter would take our utterances to be about events in the computer that controls our stimulated sensory input, though presumably we would not.


(Williams 1988: 190)



\end{quote}


While, as noted above, Davidson's proposal is not meant to guarantee us widespread knowledge, it is meant to exclude the kind of fundamental error at issue in a BIV case. If it turns out that it does not even exclude this possibility, then its antiskeptical potential is severely blunted.


A third kind of worry about the appeal to the notion of an omniscient interpreter is that it is somehow question begging. One version of this charge is put forward by Kirk Ludwig (1992). He argues that insofar as we can make sense of the idea of an omniscient interpreter, then we should also be able to make sense of an “omnignorant” interpreter, where this is someone who is “mostly wrong about the world” (Ludwig 1992: 327). He writes:



\begin{quote}


Combining this assumption with the assumption that all language speakers must potentially be in communication with each other, and the impossibility of communication without massive agreement, we can conclude that most of our beliefs are false. As we might put it: true belief is possible only against a background of largely false belief.


(Ludwig 1992: 327)



\end{quote}


By appealing to the notion of an omnignorant interpreter rather than an omniscient interpreter, we can thus, by parity of reasoning, generate the exact opposite conclusion to the one that Davidson was trying to motivate. In order for the omniscient interpreter argument to work, it is thus essential that we have a basis for rejecting the possibility of an omnignorant interpreter. But as Ludwig points out, if we have such grounds, then there is no need for the appeal to an omniscient interpreter, since we had already have an assurance that we cannot be massively mistaken about the world.


Given how problematic Davidson's appeal to the notion of an omniscient interpreter is, we might reasonably ask whether he can do without it in his argument. In this regard, it is notable that where Davidson does appeal to this notion, it is usually as part of a dialectical move that does not seem to be significantly weight-bearing in terms of the argument as whole. In Davidson (1983), for example, the appeal to the idea of an omniscient interpreter comes after the main thread of argument, as if it is merely an illustration of that argument rather than an extension of it. Moreover, by Davidson (1999a), we have him saying that he regrets ever appealing to the notion of an omniscient interpreter and conceding that such an appeal “does not advance my case.” He goes on to remark that if “the case can be made with an omniscient interpreter, it can be made without, and better.” (Davidson 1999a: 192) Accordingly, our focus in understanding the motivation for Davidson's antiskepticism should not be sidetracked by the problems that face his appeal to an omniscient interpreter.\footnote{The three objections to Davidson's appeal to the notion of an omniscient interpreter offered here far from exhaust the critical literature in this regard. For example, one prominent critical line – offered by Foley and Fumerton (1985) – contends that Davidson is committed to the implausible conclusion that such an interpreter actually exists. For another important critical discussion of the notion of an omniscient interpreter, see Brueckner (1991). See also Brueckner (2010).}


But if the argumentative bridge needed to get from Davidson's use of the principle of charity to his antiskepticism does not come from the appeal to the omniscient interpreter, then where does it come from? The answer lies in Davidson's commitment to a form of content externalism.

\section{4. Davidson's Route to Antiskepticism II: Triangulation and Content Externalism}


In order to understand Davidson's particular variant of content externalism, we first need to say a little about his conception of \emph{triangulation}.\footnote{Davidson defends (versions of) triangulation in a number of places. For a particularly explicit discussion of this notion, see Davidson (1991b; cf. Davidson 1987, 1991a).} According to Davidson, triangulation involves a causal nexus involving two subjects and an object in a common physical environment. Triangulation occurs when both creatures react to that object and then react in turn to each other's reactions.\footnote{Note that the use of the, possibly intentional, notion of “reacting to” may be controversial in this context, though for our purposes I think we can reasonably bracket such concerns in what follows.} Crucially, according to Davidson, triangulation is essential to there being mental content in the first place, in the sense that it is a metaphysically necessary condition for the acquisition of (contentful) thought. Consider, for example, the following passage:



\begin{quote}


Without this sharing of reactions to common stimuli, thought and speech would have no particular content – that is, no content at all. It takes two points of view to give a location to the cause of a thought, and thus to define its content. We may think of it as a form of triangulation: each of two people is reacting differentially to sensory stimuli streaming in from a certain direction. If we project the incoming lines outward, their intersection is the common cause. If the two people now note each other's reactions [\dots{}] each can correlate these observed reactions with his or her stimuli from the world. The common cause can now determine the contents of an utterance and a thought. The triangle which gives content to thought and speech is complete. But it takes two to triangulate. Two, or, of course, more.


(Davidson 1991b: 159–160)



\end{quote}


The idea that triangulation is metaphysically necessary for the acquisition of thought makes Davidson's view a form of \emph{content externalism}, since it makes causal relationships to matters external to the subject necessary for thought. But this kind of content externalism is very different from the more familiar varieties defended in the literature. This is because the idea is not that particular kinds of contents, such as concerning a natural kind like water, should be conceived of along externalistic lines, but rather the more general thesis that there are external conditions for the acquisition of thought.\footnote{A useful contrast here is between Davidson and the kind of content externalism famously proposed by Putnam (e.g., Putnam 1975). For further discussion of content externalism, see Kallestrup (2011).}


In order to see how triangulation might be related to Davidson's views on radical interpretation and the principle of charity, consider this passage, which comes just after a discussion of how the principle of charity blocks radical skepticism:



\begin{quote}


What stands in the way of global skepticism of the senses is [\dots{}] the fact that we must, in the plainest and methodologically most basic cases, take the objects of a belief to be the causes of that belief. And what we, as interpreters, must take them to be is what they in fact are. Communication begins where causes converge: your belief means what mine does if belief in its truth is systematically caused by the same events and objects.


(Davidson 1983: 317–318)



\end{quote}


Here we can see how the principle of charity, \emph{qua} an indispensible ingredient in radical interpretation, is guiding an implicit commitment to triangulation. The connecting thought is that those cases where triangulation occurs are precisely the kind of “plainest and methodologically most basic cases” in which we are required, following the principle of charity, to interpret a speaker so that she ends up speaking truly.


Moreover, notice the remark that “what we, as interpreters, must take them [\emph{i.e., the objects of belief}] to be is what they in fact are.” As he puts it elsewhere, commenting on the previous passage:



\begin{quote}


If anything is systematically causing certain experiences (or verbal responses), that is what the thoughts and utterances are about. This rules out systematic error. If nothing is systematically causing the experiences, there is no content to be mistaken about. To quote myself: “What stands in the way of global skepticism of the senses is [\dots{}] the fact that we must, in the plainest and methodologically most basic cases, take the objects of a belief to be the causes of that belief.”


(Davidson 1991a: 199)



\end{quote}


That we must interpret these utterances in the plainest and most basic cases as true is thus more than a methodological constraint on radical interpretation. Instead, Davidson's point is that these most basic cases effectively determine the contents of the relevant beliefs, so that there is no logical gap between what we as interpreters take the objects of a belief to be and the causes of that belief which could allow for the possibility of massive falsehood in one's beliefs. Here is Davidson:



\begin{quote}


[\emph{I}]t cannot happen that most of our plainest beliefs about what exists in the world are false. The reason is that we do not first form concepts and then discover what they apply to; rather, in the basic cases the application determines the content of the concept.


(Davidson 1983: 436)



\end{quote}


Davidson is thus appealing to a form of externalism about mental content, whereby mental content can be determined, in part, by factors external to the subject. The idea is that the content of our thoughts and utterances is fixed, at least in part, by the social settings in which triangulation takes place. This is why the possibility of massive error in one's beliefs is impossible, \emph{contra} the skeptic, and thus why “belief is in its nature veridical.” For to suppose that this is possible is to suppose that the belief ascriptions offered in the “plainest and methodologically most basic” cases of triangulation could be systematically false, and that claim is incompatible with Davidson's content externalism.


There are two points to note about this way of describing Davidson's antiskepticism. The first is that at no point in setting out Davidson's position in this regard did we need to appeal to the notion of an omniscient interpreter. This reinforces the suggestion made earlier that it is really Davidson's content externalism, and his associated conception of triangulation, that is carrying the antiskeptical load.\footnote{I think it is telling that Davidson's most subtle critics in this regard do not put any significant weight on Davidson's appeal to the notion of an omniscient interpreter, preferring instead to focus on his content externalism and his associated appeal to triangulation and the principle of charity. Stroud (1999), for example, does not mention Davidson's appeal to the notion of an omniscient interpreter at all, while Williams (1988) effectively only discusses the notion of an omniscient interpreter as an appendix to his discussion of the main Davidsonian line on radical skepticism. For a defense of the opposing view that the appeal to the notion of an omniscient interpreter is key to Davidson's antiskepticism, see Carpenter (2003) and Genova (1999).}


The second point is that with Davidson's response to the radical skeptic set out this way, it becomes much clearer why some have referred to it as a kind of \emph{transcendental} argument. For the general style of the argument is to demonstrate on purely \emph{a priori} grounds that there is a necessary condition for one even thinking a contentful thought – namely, that most of one's beliefs must be true. Since even the skeptic is committed to the possibility of there being contentful thought (as otherwise we could not even make sense of the skeptical enterprise, still less the specific skeptical appeal to radical error-possibilities, such as the scenario that one might be a BIV), so even the skeptic must accept the anti-skeptical consequences of this transcendental argument if it is sound. Indeed, if this transcendental argument is sound, then one can never even coherently expound radical skepticism.\footnote{It is now quite common to interpret Davidson as offering a kind of transcendental argument against radical skepticism. See, for example, Bridges (2006), Carpenter (2003), Genova (1999), Lepore and Ludwig (2005: ch. 19), and Maker (1991). Davidson's antiskepticism is also described as an “exemplar” of a transcendental argument in Stern (2011: §1).}

\section{5. \emph{Contra} Davidson's Transcendental Antiskepticism}


Understanding that Davidson is offering a transcendental response to the problem of skepticism explains why certain objections that have been made against his proposal fail to hit their target. For example, Williams has argued that Davidson's response to the skeptical problem is in effect question begging in that it presupposes that we have a kind of knowledge of the world that the skeptic would dispute. In particular, Williams charges Davidson with a subtle sleight of hand in his argument, by moving from the use of the principle of charity in the context of radical interpretation to applying that same principle in the context of the problem of radical skepticism. After all, in the former context, we are using “our knowledge of the observable features of the world, taken as unproblematic, as the basis for determining referents for the alien speaker's terms” (Williams 1988: 188). But once we start to appeal to the principle of charity to deal with the problem of radical skepticism, this no longer makes sense, since none of our knowledge is in this context unproblematic. As Williams puts the point:



\begin{quote}


[\dots{}] the appeal to charity turns out to involve the idea of unproblematic access to certain causal relations between speakers and objects in the world. If, in the context of the sceptic's question, we grant ourselves this access, the game is over before it begins.


(Williams 1988: 188)



\end{quote}


It should be clear that this is not a fair criticism of Davidson's antiskepticism, at least once we understand that this antiskepticism is transcendental in form. To begin with, note that Davidson is not presupposing that we have any particular empirical knowledge of instances of triangulation as part of his argument against radical skepticism, but rather arguing, on \emph{entirely a priori} grounds, that such triangulation is metaphysically necessary for contentful thought. If one cannot appeal to \emph{a priori} considerations in dealing with the problem of radical skepticism, then obviously \emph{all} philosophical responses to this problem are excluded.


But the mistake in Williams's reasoning runs deeper. We have noted earlier that Davidson's style of argument is transcendental, in the sense that he is demonstrating that from commitments that even the skeptic has, we can derive antiskeptical conclusions. One of the commitments that even the skeptic has is the idea that we are able to think contentful thoughts, since otherwise the skeptical doubt would be itself without content. We have just noted that Davidson argues on purely \emph{a priori} grounds that triangulation is a metaphysically necessary condition for contentful thought. The upshot is that even the skeptic can be taken to be committed to triangulation, and all that comes with it, such as the instances of interpretation that occur in particular cases of triangulation. There is thus no begging of the question here. It is not as if Davidson is presupposing something contentious from the skeptic's point of view and then using it to undermine radical skepticism. Instead, the style of argument is simply to show that the skeptic herself has metaphysical commitments that are incompatible with her avowed skepticism.


The transcendental nature of Davidson's antiskepticism does, however, leave it open to variations of the familiar criticisms of transcendental arguments. In particular, there is the influential criticism of this style of argument, which is due to Barry Stroud (1968). Very roughly, Stroud's charge is that transcendental arguments demonstrate only what we are committed to thinking is the case, but fall short of actually showing what \emph{is} the case.


In terms of Davidson's transcendental treatment of radical skepticism, the point would be that all that follows is that we must think of belief as being in its nature veridical, but that it need not follow from this that belief \emph{is} in its nature veridical. We find a version of this critical line defended by A.C. Genova. He notes that the skeptic can respond by saying that what Davidson's transcendental argument establishes,



\begin{quote}


[\dots{}] is not that our coherent belief systems are mostly true, not that [\emph{massive falsity in our beliefs}] is unqualifiedly unintelligible; but rather that if we accept his premises, then it is \emph{necessary for us to think or believe} that coherent beliefs systems are massively true and that [\emph{massive falsity in our beliefs}] is unintelligible. But that doesn't demonstrate the truth of those claims, just the subjective necessity to think that they are true. What Davidson [\dots{}] needs is \emph{another} argument to show that what we must think is the case \emph{is} the case. He has merely offered us “a good reason” as to why we must \emph{believe} that a coherent, comprehensive belief system is true, but has not shown that such a system is in fact true.


(Genova 1999: 187)\footnote{Unsurprisingly, we also find Stroud advancing a version of this objection. See Stroud (1999). Interestingly, Stroud adds a further twist to this line of objection by suggesting that if Davidson had demonstrated the stronger conclusion, then this would have represented a kind of \emph{reductio} of his position. For example, he writes that to rule out the possibility of massive error in our beliefs threatens \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf [\dots{}] the objectivity of what we believe to be so. It would be to deny that, considered all together, the truth or falsity of the things we believe is independent of their being believed to be so. \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf (Stroud 1999: 155) \protect\endgraf \protect\endgraf The charge that Davidson's argument, if successful, proves too much, is also made by Nagel (1999).}



\end{quote}


That is, one can accept the Davidsonian line of argument and yet still resist the conclusion that belief is in its nature veridical. Sure, one is committed to accepting that one is committed to treating belief as if it were veridical, but that is a logical step away – and a philosophical world away – from agreeing that belief is in its nature veridical.


Still, one might wonder whether a criticism of this sort is entirely fair. If Davidson has provided us with a very plausible philosophical story on which everyone, even the skeptic, is committed to the skepticism-undermining claim that belief is in its nature veridical, should not this be enough to give us the intellectual comfort we seek from the skeptical threat? Remember, after all, that for all the talk of “skeptics” here, there are no real skeptics of the kind that Davidson is interested in. Skepticism of this sort is rather a philosophical conundrum which we seek a resolution of. Even if Genova is right that there is a sense in which we do not have a reassurance that our beliefs are mostly true, is it not enough to be offered a philosophical account of why we are rationally committed to doing what we do anyway, such that we regard most of our beliefs as true?


This relates to a broader metaphilosophical issue regarding what we should expect from a response to a deep philosophical problem like radical skepticism. At times, Davidson can seem as if he is offering a \emph{direct} response to the skeptic, one that confronts the skeptical problem head-on.\footnote{This is especially true of Davidson (1983).} I suspect that the kind of worry that Genova is directing toward Davidson essentially presupposes that Davidson's response to radical skepticism is of this kind. And yet in later work, Davidson is quite explicit that despite the earlier rhetoric, he is not aiming to offer a response to skepticism of this sort. Instead, he expresses his antiskepticism in \emph{therapeutic} terms, where this means, roughly, as providing us with a good reason for disregarding the skeptical problem and so no longer taking it seriously (i.e., he gives us a good reason for regarding it as a \emph{pseudo-problem}, one that does not require a direct philosophical response).\footnote{See especially Davidson (1990). See also Davidson (1999b).}


Here, for example, is Davidson in one of his later reflections on the nature of his antiskeptical argument:



\begin{quote}


Reflecting on the nature of thought and interpretation led me to a position which, if correct, entails that we have a basically sound view of the world around us. If so, there is no point in attempting, \emph{in addition}, to show the sceptic wrong.


(Davidson 1999b: 163)



\end{quote}


On this way of thinking about Davidson's antiskepticism, what he is offering us is a compelling philosophical position that generates welcome antiskeptical consequences, but what he is not offering us are philosophical considerations that would necessarily persuade someone who is already sold on the skeptical problem. This is the point of the second sentence. Once one has bought into the philosophical picture that Davidson presents, one which is for the most part at least not motivated in terms of the skeptical problem, then there is nothing to be gained by trying to in addition to resolve the skeptical problem, as on this picture it does not even arise. Conversely, however – although Davidson himself does not here extract this implication – if one does not accept the philosophical picture that Davidson presents (as presumably someone who is sold on the skeptical problem would not), then one would not be at all convinced by his response to the problem of radical skepticism, since without that picture he has no response to the problem of radical skepticism at all.


There are good reasons for thinking that the therapeutic route is the only way to deal with the problem of radical skepticism. For once one has conceded that one should answer this philosophical problem on terms that are acceptable even to the skeptic, then one seems to have given up any chance to adequately deal with the problem. The skeptic, after all, is in effect trading on a philosophical picture of their own – one that they claim we are rationally committed to, for sure, but still a picture – and with that picture in place the skeptical conclusion can seem irresistible. In terms of the Davidsonian response to radical skepticism, the salient ingredient of the skeptical philosophical picture is the claim that we can even make sense of the idea of beliefs as being genuinely contentful and yet massively false.


Whether one goes down the Davidsonian route or not, the key to responding to radical skepticism seems very much to be to show that what looks like a paradox that arises in a vacuum of philosophical theory is in fact a problem with philosophical presuppositions of its own, and contentious philosophical presuppositions at that.\footnote{The key text in the contemporary literature when it comes to the idea that the problem of radical skepticism should be understood as a paradox is Stroud (1984). For a seminal discussion of the skeptical problem so construed, see Williams (1991).} On the therapeutic reading of Davidson's antiskepticism, that is just what he is attempting to do: to show that the skeptic is in effect presupposing contentious theses about the way in which beliefs are contentful. On the alternative philosophical picture that he offers, in contrast, there is no skeptical problem.\footnote{These days, a therapeutic response to the problem of radical skepticism is most often associated with the work of McDowell (e.g., McDowell 1994, 1995), someone who offers a very different response to the problem of radical skepticism to Davidson (indeed, McDowell is someone who has been very critical of Davidson – see, especially, McDowell 1994, particularly part 1 of the afterword). I discuss this general line of response to radical skepticism, and in doing so explore some of the metaphilosophical issues raised (metaphilosophical issues which, as we have just seen, are also raised by Davidson's treatment of radical skepticism), in Pritchard (2012: part 3).}

\section{Acknowledgments}


I am grateful to Kirk Ludwig for detailed comments on an earlier version of this chapter. I wish to give thanks also to Chris Ranalli.

% Notes
\section{References}


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\chapter{31. First-Person Authority}


William Child


Donald Davidson's discussion of the phenomenon of first-person authority has two main strands. He aims to explain the phenomenon: in particular, to explain the asymmetry between our knowledge of our own minds and our knowledge of other minds (see Davidson 1984). And he aims to demonstrate that first-person authority is consistent with other elements of his philosophy with which it might seem to be incompatible: most notably, his externalism about content (see Davidson 1987).

\section{1. The Phenomenon of First-Person Authority}


Our beliefs about our own present attitudes, Davidson thinks, are distinguished from our beliefs about others' attitudes in two ways. In the first place:



\begin{quote}


When a speaker avers that he has a belief, hope, desire or intention, there is a presumption that he is not mistaken, a presumption that does not attach to his ascriptions of similar mental states to others


(Davidson 1984: 3).



\end{quote}


And second, “the self-attributer does not normally base his claims on evidence or observation”; attributions of attitudes to other people, by contrast, rest on the evidence of what they do and say.


That characterization of first-person authority focuses on a linguistic phenomenon: the asymmetry between \emph{statements} about one's own attitudes and statements about other people's. And it is that phenomenon – first-person authority in speech – that Davidson's explanation directly addresses. But his “main aim,” he says, is “to throw light on an epistemic problem, not a linguistic one” (Davidson 1993a: 211). His assumption is that “if first person authority in speech can be explained, we will have done much, if not all, of what needs to be done to characterize and account for the epistemological facts” (Davidson 1984: 3).


Davidson explicitly restricts the scope of his explanation of first-person authority to the case of a subject's knowledge of her own current propositional attitudes: states like belief, desire, and intention. He does not attempt to explain our knowledge of our past or future propositional attitudes. Nor does his account extend to attitudes that are directed at nonpropositional entities: admiring Cézanne, fearing death, and so forth. Nor does he try to explain our knowledge of our own sensations. “What holds for the propositional attitudes,” he writes, “ought, it seems, to be relevant to sensations and the rest, but I do not explore the connections here” (Davidson 1984: 3). And even for the case of propositional attitudes, Davidson further restricts his account to deal with just one kind of case: our knowledge of our own present beliefs (see Davidson 1984: 4). So, even if the explanation he gives is completely successful for the case he discusses, it will offer only a partial explanation of first-person authority as a whole. (We will return to this point later.)

\subsection{1.1. Davidson's critique of other accounts of self-knowledge}


Before developing his own explanation of first-person authority, Davidson considers and rejects two kinds of explanation that are common in the literature. There is the view that what explains a person's superior knowledge of her own beliefs is her access to a special sort of evidence: in particular, the evidence afforded by a faculty of introspection. And there is the view, which Davidson associates with Strawson and Wittgenstein, that it is just “an essential feature of our use of certain mental predicates that we apply them to others on the basis of behavioral evidence but to ourselves without benefit of such aid” (Davidson 1987: 16). Despite their differences, Davidson argues, these two traditional approaches face the same basic objections: they do not explain the asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of others, and they invite skepticism about whether the beliefs we ascribe to ourselves and the beliefs we ascribe to others are states of the same kind. We can take these points in turn.


Davidson agrees with the Strawson\Slash{}Wittgenstein claim that it is a feature of our mental predicates that they can be ascribed to others on the basis of observed behaviour and to ourselves without such a basis. But to say this, he thinks, is simply to \emph{describe} the asymmetry between first-person and third-person ascriptions of mental predicates; it does not \emph{explain} it (see Davidson 1984: 8). And the introspectionist view, he thinks, does no better. It tries to explain the first-person\Slash{}third-person asymmetry by appeal to the fact that we have direct introspective awareness of our own beliefs but are only indirectly aware of other people's beliefs. But to say that I am directly aware of my own beliefs, Davidson thinks, is to say no more than that I know them without needing to observe my own behaviour. As before, that is true: but it does not explain the phenomenon of first-person authority; it simply redescribes it.\footnote{This line of argument is most clearly spelled out in Davidson (1993b: 249).}


Why does Davidson think that the traditional explanations of first-person authority invite skepticism? His argument is this. Both views turn on the systematic difference between the basis on which the predicate “believes that” is ascribed to other people and the basis on which it is self-ascribed. That prompts the skeptical question, why we should think that the predicate means the same thing when applied to oneself and to others. And neither view says anything to address that question. So, Davidson thinks, they both leave it open that the property of belief one ascribes to oneself without evidence is different from the property of belief one ascribes to others on the basis of their behaviour. That is why both views “invite skepticism” (see Davidson 1984: 8,1987: 16–17).


Davidson's conclusion, then, is that an adequate account of first-person authority must improve on the traditional accounts in two ways: it must explain, and not simply describe, the asymmetry between knowledge of one's own beliefs and knowledge of other people's, and it must do so in a way that does not invite the kind of skepticism just discussed.

\section{2. Davidson's Explanation of First-Person Authority}

\subsection{2.1. The general strategy}


Suppose I utter the sentence “Wagner died happy,” thereby expressing a belief. If someone knows what I believe, Davidson thinks – what belief I express in uttering the sentence – then she knows two things: she knows that I hold the sentence true; and she knows what I mean by the sentence.\footnote{What Davidson actually says is this: “if you or I or anyone knows that I hold [the sentence “Wagner died happy”] to be true on this occasion of utterance, and she knows what I meant by this sentence on this occasion of utterance, then she knows what I believe – what belief I expressed” (Davidson 1984: 11). That states a sufficient condition for knowing what belief I expressed in uttering the sentence. But it is very plausible that Davidson endorses the corresponding necessary condition: if someone knows what belief I express when I say “Wagner died happy,” then she knows that I hold the sentence true, and she knows what I mean by the sentence.} Correspondingly, he thinks, we can regard the asymmetry between my knowledge of what I believe and your knowledge of what I believe as involving two asymmetries: there is an asymmetry between my knowledge that I hold the sentence “Wagner died happy” to be a true sentence and your knowledge that I hold it true; and there is an asymmetry between my knowledge of what the sentence means on my lips and your knowledge of what it means on my lips.\footnote{As Davidson puts it in a later comment: “As I said in [‘First Person Authority’], if there is asymmetry with respect to the content of the attitude, there is also asymmetry with respect to the claim that the attitude exists” (Davidson 1993b: 250).} It is natural to think that a full explanation of the asymmetry between knowledge of one's own beliefs and knowledge of others' beliefs would explain both these asymmetries.


Now Davidson's account does not address the first asymmetry at all. There is, he says, an asymmetry in our knowledge that I hold the sentence “Wagner died happy” to be true: your knowledge depends on observation or inference; mine does not. But he does not attempt to explain this asymmetry; nor does he appeal to it in his explanation of first-person authority (see Davidson 1984: 12).\footnote{Davidson holds that it would be “circular” to explain the asymmetry between knowledge of one's own beliefs and knowledge of others' beliefs by simply \emph{assuming}, without explaining, “an asymmetry in the assurance you and I have that I hold the sentence I have just uttered to be a true sentence” (Davidson 1984: 12). Since he has no explanation of this latter asymmetry to offer, he does not appeal to it in explaining the asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of others.} So his explanation of the asymmetry between my knowledge of my belief and your knowledge of my belief rests entirely on his account of the second asymmetry: the asymmetry between my knowledge of what my sentence “Wagner died happy” means and your knowledge of what it means. What explains this asymmetry?


Davidson's idea, in broadest outline, is that “there is a presumption – an unavoidable presumption built into the nature of interpretation – that the speaker usually knows what he means” (Davidson 1984: 14); there is no corresponding presumption that an interpreter usually knows what a speaker means. But what explains that presumption? What explains the fact that a speaker normally knows what her words mean without observation or inference? And what explains the asymmetry between the speaker's knowledge of the meanings of her words and the hearer's knowledge of their meanings? Davidson's answer to those questions involves two key ideas.


The first idea is that a speaker can state the meanings of her words in a specially error-free way that is not available to an interpreter:



\begin{quote}


The speaker, after bending whatever knowledge and craft he can to the task of saying what his words mean, cannot improve on the following sort of statement: “My utterance of ‘Wagner died happy’ is true if and only if Wagner died happy”. An interpreter has no reason to assume that this will be \emph{his} best way of stating the truth conditions of the speaker's utterance.


(Davidson 1984: 13. For other occurrences of the same point, see Davidson 1989: 66, 1991: 197–198)



\end{quote}


We can call this \emph{the disquotational point}.\footnote{The point of the term “disquotational” is that the right-hand side of a judgement like “My utterance of ‘Wagner died happy’ is true if and only if Wagner died happy” “disquotes” – that is, removes the quotation marks from – the sentence identified on its left-hand side.} Davidson's second key idea is that a speaker must in general be right about the meanings of her words because it is her own use of those words that determines what they mean; there is no similar reason why a hearer must in general be right about the meanings of a speaker's words:



\begin{quote}


The explanation [of first person authority] comes with the realization that what a person's words mean depends in the most basic cases on the kinds of objects and events that have caused the person to hold the words to be applicable; similarly for what the person's thoughts are about. An interpreter of another's words and thoughts must depend on scattered information, fortunate training, and imaginative surmise, in coming to understand the other. The agent herself is not in a position to wonder whether she is generally using her own words to apply to the right objects and events, since whatever she regularly does apply them to gives her words the meaning they have and her thoughts the contents they have.


(Davidson 1987: 37. For essentially the same idea, see Davidson 1984: 13–14)



\end{quote}


It is clear that these two ideas are central to Davidson's explanation of our knowledge of the meanings of our own words. It is less clear how they are related to each other, or to Davidson's overarching claim that the presumption that a speaker usually knows what her words mean is “essential to” or “built into” the nature of interpretation (Davidson 1984: 12, 14).


Many commentators treat the disquotational point either as carrying the whole weight of Davidson's explanation of a speaker's knowledge of the meanings of her words, or as being one of a number of distinct explanations he offers.\footnote{See for example, Bernecker (1996: 132), Hacker (1997: 299), Lepore and Ludwig (2005: 353, 361–364), Nguyen (2005: 459–462), Thöle (1993: 245), and Wright (2001: 348–349).} Few critics have put much stress on Davidson's idea that the meanings of a speaker's words are determined by her own use of those words.\footnote{An exception is Jacobsen (2009): who (rightly, in my view) makes this point central to Davidson's explanation. I take the same view in Child (2007). See also Lepore and Ludwig (2005: 364–369).} And some treat his claim about the presumption that is essential to interpretation as a further, and separate, argument. My own view is that the different strands in Davidson's discussion make up a single explanation of speakers' knowledge of the meanings of their words. The main substance of the explanation comes from the idea that the meanings of a speaker's words are determined by her own use of those words. That is what underpins the presumption that a speaker usually knows what her words mean. The disquotational point has an important role in Davidson's thinking; but it is not intended as a self-standing explanation of speakers' knowledge of meaning.


Before proceeding, it is worth addressing a potential objection to Davidson's strategy. In Davidson's view, if someone knows what belief I express when I say “Wagner died happy,” then she knows two things; she knows that I hold the sentence true, and she knows what I mean by the sentence. For analytical purposes, he thinks, it is helpful to see this structure in the phenomena. But Davidson's view does not imply that someone who knows that I believe that Wagner died happy reaches that knowledge by inferring it from two prior and independent pieces of knowledge: the knowledge that I hold the sentence “Wagner died happy” to be true, and the knowledge of what I mean by it. And he can perfectly well accept that we rarely if ever know our own beliefs via that sort of inference.\footnote{It seems \emph{possible} for someone to realize that she has a particular belief by reflecting on her own linguistic behaviour; just as it is \emph{possible} for someone to learn that she has a belief by reflecting on her nonlinguistic behaviour. But these are clearly abnormal cases.} (Compare. If someone knows that Sam is an actress, then she knows two facts: that Sam is in acting; and that Sam is female. It does not follow that she must reach the knowledge that Sam is an actress by inferring it from prior and independent knowledge of those two facts about Sam. If she is told that Sam is an actress, for instance, then she can learn both facts simultaneously.) So it would be a mistake to think that Davidson's strategy for explaining first-person authority builds in an assumption that our knowledge of our own beliefs is essentially inferential.\footnote{For an objection of this form, see Lepore and Ludwig (2005: 260).}

\subsection{2.2. Knowledge of meaning: Disquotation}


Suppose I want to say what the sentence “The plane will be landing momentarily” means in my language. Davidson says that I “cannot improve on” (Davidson 1984: 13) a statement of meaning like this:


\textbf{(1)} My sentence “The plane will be landing momentarily” is true if and only if the plane will be landing momentarily.


Or, more straightforwardly, this:


\textbf{(2)} My sentence “The plane will be landing momentarily” means that the plane will be landing momentarily.\footnote{For Davidson's approval, in the right kind of context, of the formulation “s means that p,” see Davidson (1976: 175).}


When I state the meaning of my sentence in that way, I am \emph{using} a sentence of my language to \emph{state the meaning of} that same sentence. So there is no chance that the sentence I use on the right-hand side of the words “means that” will mean something different from the sentence I mention on the left-hand side; it is the same sentence in the same language. When I state the meaning of one of my own sentences in this way, therefore, I cannot misrepresent its meaning. By contrast, Davidson points out, there is no way for me to state the meaning of someone else's words that is similarly immune from error. Suppose I say this:


\textbf{(3)} Your sentence “The plane will be landing momentarily” means that the plane will be landing momentarily.


What I say will only be true if the sentence “The plane will be landing momentarily” has the same meaning in your language as it has in mine. And there is no guarantee that it does. In my language, for example, the word “momentarily” means \emph{for a moment}. But suppose the same word in your language means \emph{in a moment}. In that case, my utterance of (3) will be false. The lesson is a general one: our judgments about the meanings of other people's words are vulnerable to a kind of error that cannot arise in disquotational judgments about the meanings of our own words. That is Davidson's point.


Some of Davidson's critics have interpreted him as holding that it is sufficient for knowing the meaning of a sentence that one can produce a sentence like (1) or (2). Against that view, they object that one can produce a sentence like (1) or (2), and know that it is a true sentence, without understanding the sentence embedded on its left-hand side.\footnote{For objections of this form, see the references to Hacker (1997) and Thöle (1993) in note 6.} Suppose I do not know the meaning of the English sentence, “I dehort a postprandial perambulation.”\footnote{The example is from Hacker (1997).} I can still know that (4) is a true sentence of English:


\textbf{(4)} “I dehort a postprandial perambulation” in English means that I dehort a postprandial perambulation.


So, it is said, Davidson's point about disquotation does not explain a speaker's knowledge of the meanings of her words.


The objection misunderstands Davidson's point. We need to distinguish two things: knowing that (4) is a true sentence; and knowing what it states – that is, knowing that the English sentence “I dehort a postprandial perambulation” means that I dehort a postprandial perambulation. Davidson would agree that someone can know that (4) is a true English sentence without understanding the embedded sentence “I dehort a postprandial perambulation” and, therefore, without knowing what (4) states. But he never suggests that the ability to produce a true disquotational sentence like (4), or the knowledge that it is a true sentence, is by itself sufficient for understanding the sentence embedded on its left hand side. His point about disquotation is just this. Suppose I do understand the sentence “I dehort a postprandial perambulation”; I know what it means. Then I can use that sentence to state its own meaning in a way that is proof against the kind of error to which I am vulnerable when I use my words to state the meanings of someone else's words.


Davidson's point is plainly correct. But the critic may now raise a new concern. As I have just explained it, the disquotational point simply takes it for granted that the speaker understands the sentence she uses to state its own meaning; it takes it for granted that she knows the meaning of the sentence. It does not explain that knowledge. Nor does it explain what ensures that a speaker generally knows the meanings of her own words. What, then, does explain these things? For Davidson's answer to those questions, we must turn to his second key idea: that the meanings of a speaker's words are determined by her own use of those words.

\subsection{2.3. Knowledge of meaning: The determination of meaning}


Davidson writes: “a person cannot generally misuse his own words, because it is that use which gives his words their meaning” (Davidson 1993b: 250). Or again: an agent “is not in a position to wonder whether she is generally using her own words to apply to the right objects and events, since whatever she regularly does apply them to gives her words the meaning they have” (Davidson 1987: 37). That claim is the key to his explanation of a speaker's knowledge of the meanings of her own words.


How, exactly, does a speaker's use of her words give those words their meaning? Davidson writes:



\begin{quote}


In the simplest and most basic cases, words and sentences derive their meanings from the objects and circumstances in whose presence they were learned. A sentence which one has been conditioned by the learning process to be caused to hold true by the presence of fires will (usually) be true when there is a fire present; a word one has been conditioned to hold applicable by the presence of snakes will refer to snakes. Of course very many words and sentences are not learned in this way; but it is those that are that anchor language to the world.


(Davidson 1988a: 44–45)



\end{quote}


In these “simplest and most basic cases,” Davidson thinks, my words get their meanings from the objects and events that “normally” (Davidson 1991: 197), “regularly,” or “generally” (Davidson 1987: 37) cause me to hold those words to be applicable.\footnote{In some of Davidson's formulations, including the passage just quoted in the text (Davidson 1988a: 44–45), the idea is that words get their meanings from the objects and events that normally caused me to hold the words applicable \emph{in the learning environment}. Other formulations (including those in Davidson's main discussions of first-person authority: Davidson (1984: 13–14, 1987: 37–38) ) suggest that the meaning-determining causes are the causes that are normal \emph{in the speaker's current environment}. The difference between these formulations is significant, and will affect our verdicts about particular cases. But for present purposes, we can gloss over it.} My word “fire,” for instance, refers to fires because it is normally fires, and only fires, that cause me to hold the word “fire” to be applicable. If it were something other than fires that normally caused me to hold the word “fire” to be applicable, then the word would refer to that other kind of thing instead.\footnote{Of course, Davidson thinks, this is only true in the simplest and most basic cases; it is not true that “all words and sentences are this directly conditioned to what they are about.” Indeed, someone “can perfectly well learn to use the word [‘fire’] without ever seeing [fire]” (Davidson 1987: 29); she can learn the word by seeing pictures of fires, or by being told what fire is, and so on. What Davidson insists, however, is that for each person, there must be many words and sentences that \emph{are} directly conditioned to what they are about. It is those words and sentences, he thinks, “that anchor language to the world” (Davidson 1988a: 45, 1991: 197).} Given that view of what determines the meanings of words, a speaker cannot generally misapply her own words; for (in the simplest and most basic cases, at least) what a speaker's words apply to is determined by whatever she generally does apply them to. (An analogy: a person cannot generally act out of character; for what her character is is determined by the way she generally acts.)


What exactly does this establish? The immediate point is that “nothing could count as someone regularly misapplying her own words” (Davidson 1987: 38). But what Davidson wanted to show seemed more ambitious than that. For he aimed to establish that a speaker “usually knows what he means” (Davidson 1984: 14). How do we get from the first of these things to the second: from the claim that a speaker cannot generally misapply her own words to the claim that she generally knows what her words mean? (In terms of our analogy: How do we get from the claim that a person cannot generally act out of character to the claim that a person generally knows what her character is?)


There is a broadly Wittgensteinian tradition in which knowing the meaning of a word just consists in the ability to use it correctly. If we hold this deflationary view, there will be no gap between the claim that a speaker cannot generally misapply her own words and the claim that she generally knows what her words mean. For, on the deflationary view, all there is to knowing what a word means is being able to use it correctly. A number of commentators have suggested that Davidson's explanation of a speaker's knowledge of the meanings of her words depends on this deflationary view.\footnote{See for example, Jacobsen (2009: 255), Lepore and Ludwig (2005: 355, 364–365), Nguyen (2005: 463), Smith (1998: 417), and Thöle (1993: 243–244).} And Davidson says things that certainly encourage that interpretation. For example:



\begin{quote}


The best [a] speaker can do is to be \emph{interpretable}, that is, to use a finite supply of distinguishable sounds applied consistently to objects and situations he believes are apparent to his hearer. Obviously the speaker may fail in this project from time to time; in that case we can say if we please that he does not know what his words mean.


(Davidson 1984: 13)



\end{quote}


“We can say that” a speaker who fails to be interpretable does not know what his words mean. That does not entail that a speaker who \emph{is} interpretable – who succeeds in applying his words consistently to objects and situations in his environment – \emph{does} know what his words mean. Still less does it entail that \emph{all there is to} knowing what one's words mean is applying them consistently. But Davidson's comment easily suggests that deflationary view. Or again:



\begin{quote}


What I claimed was that in any normal utterance there is a presumption that the speaker knows what he means, while there is no such presumption in our understanding of others. (The word “knows” here is not essential in making the point; it would do as well to say that the speaker is not misusing his own words, or that he means, in a literal sense, what he says.)


(Davidson 1993a: 211–112; see also Davidson 1993b: 249)



\end{quote}


That passage suggests that the sense in which a competent speaker must \emph{know} the meanings of her words is relatively thin. And, as before, that might encourage the deflationary view.


Nonetheless, it would be wrong to conclude that Davidson takes a speaker's knowledge of the meanings of her words to be simply equivalent to the capacity to use them correctly. A competent and reflective speaker, he insists, can say what her words mean. And when she does so, she “cannot improve on” statements like this: “My utterance of ‘Wagner died happy’ means that Wagner died happy.” In making a statement like that, the speaker is not simply exercising a first-order capacity to use her words appropriately; she is making a higher-order statement about her words. By the same token, she is not simply exhibiting a bit of practical knowledge: knowledge of how to use her words. She is expressing a piece of genuinely propositional knowledge: the knowledge that her words “Wagner died happy” mean that Wagner died happy. So for Davidson, I think, our knowledge of the meanings of our words is not merely a matter of being able to use them correctly; he thinks we have propositional knowledge of meaning.


However, even if knowing the meanings of one's words does not reduce to the ability generally to apply them correctly, the step from that ability to propositional knowledge of the meanings of one's words is relatively small. Suppose a speaker does use her words correctly. In order to have propositional knowledge of the meanings of those words, she needs only two things: first, the reflective abilities and basic linguistic concepts that are necessary for making higher-order judgments about the meanings of her words (“The word ‘red’ applies to red things,” “The word ‘red’ means \emph{that} color”); and second, the ability to move from a first-order application of a word to a simple higher-order judgment about it. Now on Davidson's picture of language and thought, it is a condition on someone's being a competent language user that she is sufficiently reflective to have higher-order thoughts about her own beliefs; for to count as having beliefs at all, he thinks, she must grasp the distinction between how things are and how she believes them to be.\footnote{For this claim see Davidson (1982).} And it is a condition on someone's being a competent language user that she is an interpreter of others' language, and that requires her to grasp at least some linguistic concepts.\footnote{See Davidson (1992).} It follows that for Davidson, if someone is a genuine language user, she must be capable of making higher-order judgments about the meanings of her words and sentences. And if someone is capable of making such judgments at all it is, as Davidson insists, a straightforward matter for her to make judgments about her own meanings that are by and large true.\footnote{For further discussion of disquotational knowledge of meaning, with competing proposals about what exactly is required for a speaker to qualify as having such knowledge, see Higginbotham (1992, 1998) and Richard (1992).}


To summarize: We can see Davidson's explanation of the fact that speakers generally know the meanings of their own words as having two parts. The first is the argument that a speaker cannot generally misapply her own words, because the meanings of those words are determined by the way she generally applies them. The second is the argument that the requirements for having propositional knowledge of the meanings of one's words are so basic and straightforward that they will be met by anyone who does generally apply her own words correctly.

\subsection{2.4. What Davidson's account does not explain}


On Davidson's view, as we have seen, what my words mean is a matter of what I am disposed to apply them to. So knowing what my words mean involves knowing what I am disposed to apply them to. Now it is not generally true that if I have a disposition, I can know that I have it without observation or inference. Selfishness, friendliness, and having perfect pitch, for instance, are dispositional properties. But I have no special, non-observational way of knowing whether I have any of those properties. To know whether I am selfish, or friendly, or have perfect pitch, I must observe my own reactions in appropriate situations. With linguistic dispositions, however, things are different. The meanings of my words are determined by my linguistic dispositions. But to know what my words mean, I do not generally need to observe my linguistic reactions: I do not normally need to find out what my words mean by seeing what prompts me to apply them in actual situations, or by contemplating imagined situations and considering what would prompt me to apply them.\footnote{We do sometimes proceed in that way. But the cases in which we do so are precisely those where we are not sure what our words mean; they are the abnormal cases where we \emph{do} have to observe our own use of our words in order to tell what we mean by them.} On the contrary, I know in advance what to apply my words to because I already know what they mean. That is a crucial feature of our relation to our own words. It is the feature that Wittgenstein identifies when he talks about grasping the meaning of a word in a flash: on the one hand, meaning something by a word is (or is related to) a disposition to use it in a particular way; on the other hand, when I come to understand a word, it does not take experience to know what I mean by it – I know it in a flash.\footnote{See for example, Wittgenstein (1958: §§139, 191, 197). Smith (1998: 427) also draws on Wittgenstein in characterizing what is missing from Davidson's account. For a different presentation of essentially the same point about the character of one's knowledge of one's own language, see Higginbotham (1998: 440).} But what accounts for this ability? How is it that we can know these dispositional facts about ourselves without observation?


There is nothing in Davidson's account of first-person authority to answer that question. As we have seen, Davidson's explanation appeals to two asymmetries between our knowledge of the meanings of our own words and our knowledge of the meanings of others' words: there is the fact that the meanings of my words are determined by my own use of those words, whereas they are not determined by other people's use of the same words; and there is the fact that, when I use one of my words to state its own meaning, I am immune to a kind of error to which I am vulnerable when I use a word of mine to state the meaning of someone else's word. But neither of those points explains the distinctive character of one's knowledge of the meanings of one's own words. For both points (or analogues of them) would apply equally well to dispositions that we had no distinctive, nonobservational way of knowing we possessed. Imagine someone – Jane – who has a series of blind dispositions to produce a range of sounds in regular ways in response to objects in her environment. Because these sounds are systematically correlated with particular kinds of environmental causes, they carry information about those causes: they have a “meaning,” in something like the sense of Grice's “natural meaning.”\footnote{See Grice (1989).} How can Jane know what her sounds “mean”? It is clear that her relation to the “meanings” of these sounds is fundamentally different from our relation to the meanings of our words. In the normal case, we know what our words mean without waiting to see how we use them. That is not true for Jane: in order to know what her sounds “mean,” she must observe her reactions and correlate each sound with its regular cause. Nonetheless, the two points that Davidson stresses (or analogues of those points) apply just as much in Jane's case as they do in the ordinary case. First, the “meanings” of Jane's sounds are determined by the objects that generally cause her to produce them; so there is no possibility of her generally producing those sounds in response to the wrong objects. Second, if Jane says “My sound ‘Φ’ ‘means’ Φ,” she cannot be mistaken; the “meanings” of the two instances of the sound “Φ” will necessarily be the same. But if Davidson's two points apply in the case of Jane's blind dispositions, where there is no distinctive first-person knowledge of meaning, they cannot explain what is most striking and most puzzling about the character of our knowledge of the meanings of our words: the fact that we generally know what our words mean without needing to observe how we use them.\footnote{For further discussion of this objection, see Child (2007: 171–173).}


Of course, it may be that no philosophical account can explain this feature of our knowledge of the meanings of our words; maybe we must simply accept it as a basic fact. In that case, it will not be a special shortcoming of Davidson's account that it fails to explain it. I suspect that that may in fact be Davidson's own assessment of the situation; he may think that the best we can hope for is an account that explains certain limited aspects of first-person authority, and that we must accept that some of the phenomenon's most distinctive and central features are not susceptible of philosophical explanation at all. If that is Davidson's view, however, it is not a view that he explicitly articulates.

\subsection{2.5. Davidson's dissatisfaction with his account}


Davidson himself has expressed dissatisfaction with his explanation of first-person authority. He writes:



\begin{quote}


I am by no means satisfied with my explanation of first person authority. More remains to be said in defence of my position, and indeed it may be that there are aspects of first person authority that cannot even be approached following the line I have suggested. It is clear, too, that my treatment of the topic is incomplete, because I have said nothing about knowledge of our own sensations.


(Davidson 1993b: 248)



\end{quote}


In a similar vein he says, of the account he offered in “First Person Authority,” that he “had the feeling that there had to be more to the story, something that would throw more light on the nature of self-knowledge” (Davidson 1999: 226). Critics have agreed with that assessment.


The most frequent criticism of Davidson's account is this. In order to explain a person's knowledge that she believes that Bamako is the capital of Mali, say, we must explain two aspects or dimensions of her knowledge: we must explain her knowledge that the proposition she believes is \emph{that Bamako is the capital of Mali} (rather than, say, \emph{that N'Djamena is the capital of Chad}), and we must explain her knowledge that she \emph{believes} that proposition (rather than, say, wanting it to be true, or intending to make it true). But Davidson's account focuses exclusively on the first task: on explaining our knowledge of the \emph{contents} of our beliefs. He says nothing at all to explain our knowledge \emph{that we believe} those contents. So his explanation of our knowledge of our own beliefs is at best radically incomplete.\footnote{For objections of this form, see Bernecker (1996: 136), Hacker (1997: 296), Lepore and Ludwig (2005: 359–360, 370–371), Nguyen (2005: 460), Thöle (1993: 242), and Wright (2001: 349).}


In fairness to Davidson, it should be said that he openly acknowledges this feature of his account. As we saw, he says explicitly that he is not explaining a speaker's knowledge that she holds a sentence true, but only her knowledge of what the sentence means. Nonetheless, the underlying point of the criticism is perfectly correct. A full account of our knowledge of our own beliefs should explain not only our knowledge of their contents but also our knowledge that we believe those contents. Davidson's account says nothing at all about the second. So even if it is successful on its own terms, it accounts for only part of what we want an account of first-person authority to explain.\footnote{For one suggestion about how we might use materials implicit in Davidson's own work to provide what he himself does not give – an account of how a person can know not only the content of her belief but also that she has that belief – see Jacobsen (2009).}


In a similar way, critics have complained that Davidson's explanation deals directly only with our knowledge of our \emph{current beliefs}. It does not explain our knowledge of our past beliefs; or our knowledge of our other propositional attitudes, like desire and intention; or our knowledge of attitudes that do not have propositional objects; or our knowledge of our own sensations. As we saw at the outset, Davidson himself is again quite explicit about these limits on the scope of his account. So pointing them out is not in itself an objection to anything he claims to have done. Nonetheless, critics have said, what we want from a philosophical account of first-person authority is an understanding of the phenomenon as a whole: an explanation that addresses every instance of first-person authority. By his own admission, Davidson's account does not give us that.


The point is a fair one, even if it only states what Davidson himself always acknowledged. On the other hand, we should not necessarily assume that first-person authority is a uniform phenomenon, susceptible of a uniform explanation. It seems plausible, on the contrary, that the source and extent of our authority about our own mental properties may be different in different cases. In that case, we should expect the explanation of first-person authority, too, to be different in different cases. And if that is right, then there is no objection in principle to the idea that there could be a successful explanation of one aspect of first-person authority that did not generalize to other aspects.

\section{3. First-Person Authority and Semantic Externalism}


Many have thought that the idea that we have first-person authority with respect to the contents of our thoughts is incompatible with \emph{semantic externalism}: the thesis that the meanings of words, and the contents of thoughts, are constitutively dependent on the nature of the things and kinds in one's environment. Against that challenge, Davidson argues not only that externalism does not threaten first-person authority, but that externalism is actually part of what explains it (for this latter claim, see Davidson 1987: 17–18, 37).


As we have seen, Davidson's own account of meaning and content has an important externalist element:



\begin{quote}


what a person's words mean depends in the most basic cases on the kinds of objects and events that have caused the person to hold the words to be applicable; similarly for what the person's thoughts are about.


(Davidson 1987: 37)



\end{quote}


And we have seen how this externalist account of meaning plays a central part in Davidson's explanation of a speaker's knowledge of the meanings of her own words. Davidson has his own arguments for externalism. But he also uses Putnam's Twin Earth thought experiment to illustrate the view\footnote{For the original thought experiment, see Putnam (1975).}:



\begin{quote}


[Putnam] asks us to imagine two people exactly alike physically and (therefore) alike with respect to all “narrow” psychological states. One of the two people, an inhabitant of Earth, has learned to use the word “water” by being shown water, reading and hearing about it, etc. The other, an inhabitant of Twin Earth, has learned to use the word “water” under conditions not observably different, but the substance to which she has been exposed is not water but a lookalike substance we may call “twater.” Under the circumstances, Putnam claims, the first speaker refers to water when she uses the word “water”; her twin refers to twater when \emph{she} uses the word “water.”


(Davidson 1987: 20–21)



\end{quote}


Davidson agrees. He continues:



\begin{quote}


How about the thoughts of these two speakers? The first says to herself, when facing a glass of water, “Here's a glass of water”; the second mutters exactly the same sounds to herself when facing a glass of twater. Each speaks the truth, since their words mean different things. And since each is sincere, it is natural to suppose that they believe different things, the first believing that there is a glass of water in front of her, the second believing that there is a glass of twater in front of \emph{her}.


(Davidson 1987: 21)



\end{quote}


But do our two speakers know what they believe? The challenge that externalism seems to pose to first-person authority is this. Consider the inhabitant of Earth. Her word “water” refers to water, and her thoughts are about water. But from the inside, as it were, there is no detectable difference between the way things actually are and the way they would be if she were an inhabitant of Twin Earth, her word “water” referred to twater, and her thoughts were about twater. So, it is tempting to conclude, she does not know that her word “water” refers to water and not twater; and she does not know that her thoughts are about water and not twater. It seems, in short, that she does not know the contents of her own thoughts.


Davidson disagrees. In his view, there is no reason to think that the speakers on Earth and Twin Earth do not know what their thoughts are about. Two ideas underlie, or inform, Davidson's view: one is that “what determines the contents of thoughts also determines what the thinker thinks the contents are” (Davidson 1988b: 664); the other is that knowing what one is thinking about does not require the ability to discriminate the object of one's thought from every possible alternative. We can expand on these points in turn.


Davidson summarizes the first idea like this:



\begin{quote}


An interpreter must discover, or correctly assume on the basis of indirect evidence, what the external factors are that determine the content of another's thought; but since these factors determine both the contents of one's thought and the contents of the thought one believes one has (these being one and the same thought), there is no room for error about the contents of one's own thought of the sort that can arise with respect to the thoughts of others.


(Davidson 1991: 197–198)



\end{quote}


That argument is an application to the case of externalism of the same line of thought we discussed earlier in connection with disquotational knowledge of the meanings of one's words.\footnote{Here I differ from Lepore and Ludwig (2005: 369–371), who hold that the quoted passage (Davidson 1991: 197–198) suggests a new explanation of our knowledge of our thoughts, different from that given in Davidson (1984).} Suppose I see someone looking at a glass of water and saying “Here's a glass of water.” I assume that her word “water” refers to water and that she is expressing the thought that there is a glass of water in front of her. I am probably right. But I could be wrong. For suppose she is an inhabitant of Twin Earth, recently transported to Earth without her (or my) knowledge. In that case, her word “water” will refer to twater, and she will be expressing the thought that there is a glass of twater in front of her; so my judgement that she is thinking that there is a glass of water in front of her will be false. But there can be no error of that kind when I ascribe a thought to myself. Suppose I say, “Here's a glass of water.” The thought I express is a thought about water. Then I say, “I have just expressed the thought that there's a glass of water here.” There is no possibility that the word “water” in my second utterance means something different from the word “water” in my first utterance. And there is no possibility that the associated thoughts are about different liquids. For the meaning of my word “water,” and the content of the associated thought, is determined by the same external factors on both occasions. I cannot, therefore, make the kind of mistake about the content of my own thought that I can make about the content of another person's.


In the literature, that point is now treated as the standard response to the threat to first-person authority that is allegedly posed by externalism.\footnote{For an independent statement of essentially the same response, see Burge (1988). Despite the similarity of Burge's and Davidson's responses, Davidson holds that Burge's brand of externalism really is incompatible with first-person authority, in a way that his own form of externalism is not. For Davidson, the meanings of my words are determined by my own applications of those words; that fact, he thinks, plays an important part in explaining why I generally know what my words mean. By contrast, Davidson thinks, “if what we mean and think is determined by the linguistic habits of those around us in the way Burge believes they are, then first-person authority is very seriously compromised” (Davidson 1987: 26–27; see also Davidson 1991: 199). Davidson would acknowledge that even on Burge's view of what determines the meanings of our words, a disquotational statement of the meaning of one's words is bound to be true. But, as we have seen, he does not think that the ability to produce a true disquotational statement of the meanings of one's words suffices for knowing what they mean.} But some commentators find the response unsatisfying. They agree with Davidson that the contents of my higher-order, self-ascriptive thoughts will always match the contents of the first-order thoughts they are about. So they agree that my beliefs about the contents of my thoughts will always be true. But, they say, that does not suffice for me to know what my thoughts are about. For I cannot tell the difference between water and twater. So I cannot tell the difference between a situation in which I am thinking about water and a situation in which I am thinking about twater. I therefore lack the kind of \emph{discriminative} knowledge that, according to the critics, is needed if I am to know that I am thinking about water. (For discussion of this criticism, and further references, see Brown 2009: 770–772.)


Davidson's response to the objection is straightforward: he denies that knowing the contents of one's thoughts requires the discriminative knowledge that the critic supposes. Part of the point of externalism is that, given appropriate facts about my environment and causal history, my thoughts can be thoughts about Fs rather than Gs even if I cannot discriminate Fs from Gs. We see that point in the Twin Earth thought experiment. And we see it in real-life cases too:



\begin{quote}


I may not know the difference between an echidna and a porcupine; as a result, I may call all echidnas I come across porcupines. Yet because of the environment in which I learned the word “porcupine,” my word “porcupine” refers to porcupines and not to echidnas.


(Davidson 1988a: 48–49)



\end{quote}


Similarly, even if I cannot distinguish porcupines from echidnas, the \emph{belief} I express when I say “That's a porcupine” is a belief about porcupines and not about echidnas. And by the same token, Davidson thinks, I can \emph{know} that I believe that the creature in front of me is a porcupine, without needing to be able to distinguish porcupines from echidnas. Davidson does not spell out detailed reasons for that view.\footnote{For more by way of argument, see Burge (1988) and Falvey and Owens (1994).} But we might defend it in the following way, which is consistent with the kind of externalism about knowledge that runs through Davidson's work.


To know that I am having the thought that a creature is a porcupine, I must be able to discriminate that thought from relevant alternative thoughts. And I can certainly do that; for I can discriminate the situation in which I am thinking that something is a porcupine from a situation in which I am thinking that it is an anteater, or a hedgehog, or a sea-urchin. It is true that I cannot discriminate porcupines from echidnas. So it is true that I cannot discriminate the actual situation (in which my word “porcupine” refers to porcupines, and the thoughts I express when I use the word are thoughts about porcupines) from a possible situation in which I learned the word “porcupine” in a different environment, the word refers to echidnas, and the associated thoughts are about echidnas. But that does not threaten my knowledge that I am thinking that the animal before me is a porcupine. For the possible situation just described (the situation in which my word “porcupine” refers to echidnas) is not a relevant alternative to my actual situation. Accordingly, I do not need to be able to discriminate my actual situation from that alternative in order to count as knowing that I am thinking that the animal is a porcupine.


A full defence of this view would plainly require more detail than that. (e.g., What determines which alternatives count as relevant alternatives?) But we have said enough to show why Davidson might take the view he does, and what makes that view a plausible one to take.

% Notes
\section{References}


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Brown, J. (2009). Semantic externalism and self-knowledge. In \emph{The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Mind}, B.P. McLaughlin, A. Beckermann and S. Walter (eds). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 767–780.


Burge, T. (1988). Individualism and self-knowledge. \emph{Journal of Philosophy} 85:649–663.


Child, W. (2007). Davidson on first person authority and knowledge of meaning. \emph{Nous (Detroit, Mich.)} 41:157–177.


Davidson, D. (1976). Reply to Foster. In \emph{Inquiries into Truth and} \emph{Interpretation}, Oxford: Oxford University Press (1984), pp. 171–179.


———. (1982). Rational animals. In Davidson (2001): 95–105.


———. (1984). First person authority. In Davidson (2001): 3–14.


———. (1987). Knowing one's own mind. In Davidson (2001): 15–38.


———. (1988a). The myth of the subjective. In Davidson (2001): 39–52.


———. (1988b). Reply to Burge. \emph{Journal of Philosophy} 85:664–665.


———. (1989). What is present to the mind? In Davidson (2001): 53–67.


———. (1991). Epistemology externalized. In Davidson (2001): 193–204.


———. (1992). The second person. In Davidson (2001): 107–121.


———. (1993a). Reply to Eva Picardi. In Stoecker (ed.) (1993): 210–212.


———. (1993b). Reply to Bernhard Thöle. In Stoecker (ed.) (1993): 248–250.


———. (1999). \emph{The Philosophy of Donald Davidson}, L. Hahn (ed.). Chicago: Open Court, pp. 225–227.


———. (2001). \emph{Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Falvey, K. and Owens, J. (1994). Externalism, self-knowledge, and skepticism. \emph{Philosophical Review} 103:107–137.


Grice, H.P. (1989). Meaning. In \emph{Studies in the Way of Words}, H.P. Grice (ed.). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.


Hacker, P.M.S. (1997). Davidson on first-person authority. \emph{Philosophical Quarterly} 47:285–304.


Higginbotham, J. (1992). Truth and understanding. \emph{Philosophical Studies} 65:3–16.


———. (1998). On knowing one's own language. In Wright, Smith, and Macdonald (1998): 429–441.


Jacobsen, R. (2009). Davidson and first-person authority: parataxis and self-expression. \emph{Pacific Philosophical Quarterly} 90:251–266.


Lepore, E. and Ludwig, K. (2005). \emph{Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality}. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Chapter 20 of this book reproduces and slightly expands an earlier paper: Kirk Ludwig, “First-person knowledge and authority,” in \emph{Language, Mind, and Epistemology: On Donald Davidson's Philosophy}, edited by Gerhard Preyer, Frank Siebelt, and Alexander Ulfig, 367–398, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994.)


Nguyen, A.M. (2005). Davidson on first-person authority. \emph{Journal of Value Inquiry} 38:457–472.


Putnam, H. (1975). The meaning of “meaning.” In \emph{Mind, Language and Reality}, Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 215–271.


Richard, M. (1992). Semantic competence and disquotational knowledge. \emph{Philosophical Studies} 65:37–52.


Smith, B.C. (1998). On knowing one's own language. In Wright, Smith, and Macdonald (1998): 391–428.


\emph{Stoecker, R. (ed.) (1993).} Reflecting Davidson: Donald Davidson Responding to an International Forum of Philosophers\emph{. Berlin: de Gruyter.}


Thöle, B. (1993). The explanation of first person authority. In Stoecker (ed.) (1993): 213–247.


Wittgenstein, L. (1958). \emph{Philosophical Investigations}, 2nd ed, G.E.M. Anscombe, R. Rhees and G.H. von Wright (eds), translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.


Wright, C. (2001). The problem of self-knowledge (II). In \emph{Rails to Infinity: Essays on Themes from Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations}. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 345.


Wright, C., Smith, B.C. and Macdonald, C. (eds) (1998). \emph{Knowing Our Own Minds}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

\chapter{32. Knowledge of Other Minds in Davidson's Philosophy}


Anita Avramides


It may be thought that knowledge of any thing – be it other minds or the external world – is a topic that is intimately connected with the question of skepticism. Does Davidson think so? It turns out that the answer to this is not entirely clear. In this chapter, I shall consider the question of Davidson's attitude toward the skeptic, and in particular toward the skeptic who raises questions concerning the mind of another. I shall suggest that Davidson's work should be read as turning us away from the traditional skeptical problem and toward another, newer, skeptical problem. To the question, “Does Davidson believe that there can be knowledge of the mind of another?,” there is a simple answer. We can and do have knowledge here, and Davidson offers an explanation of how it is that we come by this knowledge. It turns out, however, that to fully appreciate Davidson's explanation, we need to understand his conception of knowledge. Not only is Davidson largely concerned with a nontraditional skeptical problem, he also adopts a nontraditional conception of knowledge. Finally, I shall consider Davidson's attitude toward traditional attempts to account for our knowledge of other minds by appeal to argument – be it by analogy, or from best explanation. I shall also consider what he might say to an idea that has gained currency in recent times, that we gain knowledge of another mind through perception. I shall suggest that we read Davidson as offering a different way here.

\section{1. The Measure of All Things}


Our knowledge of other minds is connected to our knowledge of the world of bodies. If we think of the argument for how we come by our knowledge of the world of bodies as the Ur-argument, it is not unusual to find only a footnote indicating how the argument might be applied to the case of our knowledge of other minds. For some, the question how we know the mind of another is the wrong question to ask. Davidson, however, seems content to talk about of knowledge in this connection. His paper, “Three Varieties of Knowledge” (Davidson 1991, 2001a), is largely concerned with this issue, and he writes about our knowledge of other minds in many of his later papers. There is a sense in which knowledge of other minds can be taken to be the foundation of all of Davidson's work in the philosophy of mind and language.


Davidson's discussion of our knowledge of the minds of others is bound up with his discussion of our knowledge of the world of bodies. But Davidson does not suggest an Ur-argument. Rather, and importantly, he insists that one has to consider these two varieties of knowledge together. Actually, he insists that one has to consider, not just these two varieties, but three varieties of empirical knowledge in conjunction with one another: knowledge of the world, of other minds, and of one's own mind. He holds that “we need an overall picture which not only accommodates all three modes of knowing, but makes sense of their relations to one another” (Davidson 2001a: 208). The admission of this third variety of knowledge may strike some as odd. There has been a tendency in philosophy to accept this variety of knowledge as unproblematic, and to use it as the starting point for the pursuit of the other two varieties. One begins with a direct and certain knowledge of one's own mind, works one's way out to knowledge of the world of bodies, and then one reasons one's way to knowledge of another mind. Davidson's approach is not the traditional one. One might conclude from what Davidson says that no variety of knowledge should be taken to be more fundamental than any other. There is reason, however, to think that Davidson does give a certain preeminence to the connection of one mind to another (see Avramides 1999). Leaving this aside for the moment, Davidson's approach is one that aims to solve, as it were, a simultaneous equation with three variables. The failure to understand the way in which these three varieties of knowledge hang together results, says Davidson, in a variety of skepticisms (Davidson 2001a: 206). Furthermore and connected with this, Davidson points out that holding the problem of our knowledge of other minds apart from the problem of our knowledge of the external world has “the unfortunate effect of obscuring the fact that the two problems rest on a common assumption \dots{} that the truth of what a person believes about the world is logically independent of the truth of those beliefs” (Davidson 2001a: 206). Skepticism and shared common assumption apart, Davidson thinks there is yet another reason to find it odd to hold apart the problems associated with these two varieties of knowledge: the fact that knowledge of another mind only arises if “knowledge of behaviour, and hence the external world, is possible” (Davidson 2001a: 206). Davidson does not hold the problems of knowledge apart, and he believes by doing this he can avoid the common assumption.


Davidson thus approaches what some have called the “problem of other minds” through considerations of knowledge. There are those, however, who would insist that the real problem here is conceptual and not epistemological (see Avramides 2001). Davidson acknowledges and accepts the work of those who insist that mental concepts are importantly connected with outward, behavioral, signs, but points out that acknowledging this still leaves us with a problem (Davidson 2001a: 207). It leaves us without an explanation of the asymmetry that exists between the indirect knowledge we have of other minds and the direct knowledge we have of our own mind. This asymmetry leads to the question: Why do we take it that our mental states are anything like those of others? Davidson takes this to be a question about the legitimacy of our practice, and one that he believes merits a reply (Davidson 1989: 194).


In an earlier paper, I labeled the problem to which Davidson draws our attention here “the new sceptical problem” (Avramides 1999). As well as highlighting this problem, in that paper I also consider Davidson's attitude toward the skeptic and compare it with that of P.F. Strawson (1959). I suggest that not only are Davidson and Strawson both largely concerned with this new skeptical problem, but that they both pursue a similar line of reply to it. In his reply to my paper, Davidson points out that Strawson does not go far enough, and that the skeptic will continue to press the question how, given that “all we see is the behaviour of others,” we can be justified in attributing mental states to them of the very same sort that we attribute to ourselves without observing anything at all (Davidson 1999a: 156).


Davidson is determined to give this skeptic his or her argument. He wants to show that knowledge here is possible. But we must be careful to note that the skeptic Davidson is here so concerned to answer is the \emph{new} skeptic whose question is concerned with content, with the question of why I should think my mental states are anything like those of others.\footnote{What most concerns Davidson is contentful mental states, the propositional attitudes. He writes, “What holds for the propositional attitudes ought, it seems, to be relevant to sensations and the rest, but I do not explore the connections \dots{}” (Davidson 2001b: 3).} In his response to this question Davidson makes essential reference to others: “interaction with other people partly determines the contents of mental states” (Davidson 2001c: 203). He insists that we “cannot resolve the question of the contents of mental states from the point of view of a single creature” (Davidson 2001c: 202–203). This move from the individual to others is what Davidson thinks differentiates his externalism from that of, say, Tyler Burge.\footnote{Davidson (2001c) explains that while he accepts Burge's perceptual externalism, he thinks we need another understanding of his social externalism. It is this that differentiates Davidson's externalism from that of Burge.} What we need to understand, according to Davidson, is precisely \emph{how} the other plays a role in the determination of content. Understanding this will help us to see why Davidson thinks that his externalism is an answer to any kind of skepticism.


Davidson's explanation of how we achieve knowledge can be traced back to his early writings, where he defends the idea that in order for a creature to have belief, she\Slash{}he must have the concept of objective truth (Davidson 2001e). The line of thought here runs as follows: To have a belief, a creature must do more than discriminate between different aspects of the world – a creature must have the concept of belief. And to have the concept of belief, a creature must grasp the difference between true and false belief. It is only once a creature grasps this difference that it can be said to have the concept of objective truth.\footnote{“Thought \dots{} is objective in the sense that it has a content which is true or false independent (with rare exceptions) of the existence of the thought or the thinker” (Davidson 2001g: 129).} Davidson then explains that a creature comes to have this all-important concept of objective truth as the result of interpersonal communication. Thought depends on language; in particular, a thinking rational creature must be an interpreter of the speech of another (Davidson 2001e). In a later paper, Davidson explains that he became convinced that thought depends on social interaction before he was clear about exactly why this should be so; he also explains that he came to understand that the considerations that support this conclusion put “ the rejection of skepticism in a new light” (Davidson 1999c: 193). So why does Davidson think that thought depends upon the interpretation of the speech of another, and what new light does this shed on the rejection of skepticism? In response to the “why” question Davidson advances “considerations” that he admits do not amount to a proof (Davidson 2001e: 102–105). I shall simply call this “Davidson's story.” It may not be the only story that can be told, but it is the only story Davidson can think of (Davidson 2001e: 105) and it has the virtue of shedding new light on the rejection of skepticism. Davidson's story involves what he calls “triangulation” (Davidson 2001e: 105), involving (at least) two creatures and the world of objects with which they interact.\footnote{Ian Hacking (1986) has observed that what really matters to Davidson is not so much a community of others, but the presence of at least one other person; Davidson, he suggests, is a “duetist” (Hacking 1986: 458). In this connection, see also Davidson (2001d).}


Davidson explains that “what gives each [creature] the concept of the way things are objectively is the base line formed between the creatures by language” (Davidson 2001e: 105). In the elaboration of this story, what emerges is the importance of this base line. There are two ways we can tell this story. We can describe how one language user manages to communicate about the world with another, or we can tell a story about how one person learns a first language from the teachings of another. Both stories share the same essential elements. In both, we have the same basic triangulation of individuals in communication about the world. And it is a feature of both stories that the individuals on the base line must share a propensity to react to the world in a similar fashion. This shared propensity is an important element in the story. The propensity is entirely natural and is not the result of any prior learning. Without it, there can be no learning and no content.\footnote{“Communication depends, among other things, on the shared propensities of people to react in observably similar ways to their environment. Logic does not assure us of this: it is an empirical fact about people\dots{}” (Davidson 1999b: 165).} Why do individuals who share a common reaction to the world need to triangulate for there to be content? Because, says Davidson, without this, there is no way of determining what it is that is being reacted to. Without this shared reaction to a common cause, we would be unable to determine (a) what aspect of the total cause is relevant to content, and (b) whether it is the proximal or distal stimulus that is relevant (Davidson 2001g: 129–130). We say it is the \emph{table} that two individuals are responding to because each individual notes the other's reactions to the object that is causing this reaction. The triangle is formed when one individual looks in the direction of the table and also in the direction of the other.\footnote{Davidson (1989: 197) points out that this looking is not done to verify what the creature is responding to but to give content to the creature's thought about that object.} Forming this triangle is important, but it is not the end of the story.\footnote{Triangulation alone can be present in creatures who do not share a language.} What must be added is some further interaction between the individuals on the base line: “For two people to know of each that they are so related, that their thoughts are so related, requires that they be in communication. Each of them must speak to the other and be understood by the other” (Davidson 1989: 199). Thought depends on language.


With this story, Davidson takes it he has answered the new skeptical problem. He has taken this skeptic seriously and has produced an answer that should put an end to his question. Given the way content is determined, we can rest assured that the attributions we make of mental states to others are the same as those we attribute to ourselves. Communication between persons is the engine that drives the process. What the process results in, claims Davidson, is knowledge – of the world, of other minds, and of one's own mind: “It is true that I think interpersonal communication and understanding is the basis of our concept of objective truth, but I think that recognizing this is an essential element in appreciating how, from our provincial standpoints, we can attain knowledge of the world, and analyze what makes this possible” (Davidson 1999b: 164). On this story of how content is established, “knowledge of another mind is essential to all thought and all knowledge” (Davidson 2001a: 213), and this knowledge in its turn is dependent upon knowledge of the world. This is a story that makes clear the interdependence of all three varieties of empirical knowledge.


The story that Davidson tells by way of reply to the new skeptical problem turns out to be a very powerful one. It turns out that it has something to say not just to the new skeptic, but also to the skeptic of old. Although issues here are deeply entangled, it is useful to tease out the new skeptical problem from the old and to look separately at Davidson's attitude toward each in turn. The new skeptic asks a question about the content of another's mental states and, as we have just seen, Davidson answers this question with his story about content determination. As it turns out, this story also tells us something about the questions raised by the skeptic of old. The skeptic of old asks such questions as, How do I know that solipsism is false? This is not a question about content, but about the very being of others. Davidson's attitude to \emph{this} skeptical question is not entirely clear – not even to Davidson himself. Davidson admits that he has “vacillated” in his attitude: sometimes he thinks that his story shows that skepticism is false and sometimes that it “simply can't get off the ground” (Davidson 1999b: 163). He suggests a reconciliation between these attitudes is achieved when we appreciate that \emph{if} he is right about the nature of thought and interpretation, and \emph{if} he is right that the nature of thought and interpretation entails that we have “a basically sound view of the world,” then “there is no point in attempting, \emph{in addition,} to show the [old] sceptic wrong” (Davidson 1999b: 163). But I cannot see that Davidson has achieved his desired reconciliation. Either the skeptic has a point or he does not and if he does, then we do well to address the point – or accept it.\footnote{Davidson is, after all, very clear that in the case of what I am calling the \emph{new} skeptical problem, we must provide an answer that will satisfy that skeptic.}


As I mentioned earlier, Davidson first set out to explain the dependence of thought on social interaction and then came to appreciate that this explanation has repercussions for skepticism. The skepticism to which Davidson is here referring is the old, traditional, skepticism. This is clear if we recall the connection Davidson identifies between traditional approaches to knowledge and to what we might call “varieties of skepticism.” Traditional approaches to knowledge tend to hold the problem of the justification of our beliefs about the external world apart from the problem of the justification of our beliefs about other minds, and this obscures the fact that both problems rest on an assumption that the truth concerning what a person believes about the world is logically independent of the truth of those beliefs; this obscures the fact that there is a logical gap between a mind and a world. With this assumption in place, the subjective can be pried apart from the objective, which in turn gives rise to the question whether our beliefs about the world and about the minds of others can be massively in error. In the case of other minds, we are faced with the radical skeptical question: How do I know that other minds and the world exist? In contrast to traditional approaches to knowledge, Davidson aims to do without the assumption that drives asunder the subjective and the objective. Davidson's general picture of empirical knowledge is such that it helps us to see why each variety of knowledge is indispensable and why reduction of one variety to any other is not an option. But does this picture convince the skeptic of old that he is mistaken in his challenge? Has Davidson really showed, for example, that I can know that other minds exist and that solipsism is false? Many have failed to see how Davidson thinks he has answered this skeptical problem. What light does Davidson's story about content determination shed on this old skeptical problem?


Thomas Nagel has suggested that what Davidson's story tries to show is that the old skeptic's position is self-defeating. Nagel takes it that what Davidson wants to show is that there “is no place in the mind for [the sceptic] to retreat \emph{to} from the objective external world” (Nagel 1999: 200). The only way for there to be a place in the mind of the skeptic is if she\Slash{}he were to have thoughts whose content Davidson has explained to be determined though the communication of at least two persons interacting with a world. For there to be content – and, thereby, for the skeptic to have his\Slash{}her thoughts – other minds must already exist. In this way, Davidson wants to show that the very attempt of the skeptic of old to formulate a problem defeats that very skepticism. Nagel (1999: 196) points out that where Descartes draws attention to thought in order to derive his own existence (\emph{je pense donce je suis)}, Davidson draws attention to the content of thought to derive knowledge (\emph{je pense donce je sais)}.\footnote{In saying this, Nagel does not mean to overlook the differences between the work of these two philosophers. Davidson is content to accept Nagel's witty summary of his argument, claiming to prefer it to his own \emph{I think therefore you are} (Davidson 1999d: 207). Davidson's own summary, however, is more indicative of his thinking concerning the existence of others.}


When Nagel reflects on Davidson's argument, he concludes that “skepticism seems to have been rendered mute, rather than really refuted” (Nagel 1999: 203). Indeed, Nagel finds it “absolutely amazing that there should be an a priori argument which proves that \emph{this} set of propositions, which I believe, covering vast tracts of history, natural science, and ordinary lore about the world, is largely true” (Nagel 1999: 202). Presumably Nagel also finds it amazing that there should be such an argument to the conclusion that what I believe about other minds is largely true. Nagel proceeds to try to show how, albeit mute, the skeptic of old still stands.


Leaving to one side what amazes Nagel, let us concentrate on his interpretation of Davidson's attitude toward the skeptic. Is Nagel right to say that what Davidson shows is that this skeptic's position is self-defeating? I am not convinced. I want now to suggest another way of understanding Davidson's attitude toward the skeptic. My proposal is that we read Davidson's work here in the light of the work of another philosopher, one whose work in this connection shares many important features with Davidson's.


Wittgenstein is another philosopher whose attitude toward the skeptic of old has led to much discussion. Davidson often refers to Wittgenstein in his writing. For example, he writes that it is Wittgenstein who “put us on the track of the only possible answer” to the question concerning the source of objective truth (Davidson 2001a: 209). From time to time, Davidson makes explicit reference to the private language argument, but he nowhere makes to Wittgenstein's work in \emph{On Certainty}. I want to suggest that a particular interpretation of Wittgenstein's work here can help to understand Davidson's attitude to the problems raised by the skeptic of old.\footnote{I am not quite sure whether this will turn out to be how Davidson intended his attitude to be understood or what it should have been.}


As we have seen, although Davidson is clear what his response is to the new skeptical problem, he struggles with his response to the old skeptical problem. Interpreters of Wittgenstein's work have struggled to understand what attitude he adopts toward the skeptic of old. Some claim that he has refuted this skeptic by showing his argument to be self-defeating. (Moyal-Sharrock 2004; Stroll 1994). At least one philosopher has suggested that Wittgenstein reveals the truth about skepticism and offers accommodation within it (Wright 2004). Yet others hold that Wittgenstein aims to free us from the grip of this skepticism by diagnosing the misconceptions that underlie it.\footnote{For a good discussions of these options, see McGinn (2008). McGinn herself argues in favor of the last of these option, labeling this the “therapeutic approach” to the skeptical problem (McGinn 2008: 379).} I shall offer some considerations in favor of the last of these interpretations, and then suggest that we understand Davidson's work in relation to the skeptic of old in a similar manner.


In \emph{On Certainty} (\emph{OC}; Wittgenstein 1969), Wittgenstein is concerned with G.E. Moore's claim to know \emph{here is a hand} and thereby construct a proof of the external world (Moore 1993). Moore acknowledges the skeptic's problem and believes he can solve it, and his solution is intended to extend to other minds. Wittgenstein points out that a “reasonable man” will not doubt that he has a hand. He then acknowledges that it is not practical doubt but “a further doubt \emph{behind} that one” that Moore and others are attempting to address (\emph{OC} 19). In response to this further doubt, Wittgenstein writes, “That this is an \emph{illusion} has to be shewn in a different way” (\emph{OC 19}). The way Wittgenstein rejects is Moore's, a way that involves proof and a claim to know. The “different way” that Wittgenstein proposes involves bringing us to understand the way in which knowledge is grounded in action. Consider, for example, \emph{OC} 426 and 427:



\begin{quote}


But how can we \emph{show} someone that we \emph{know} truths, not only about sense-data but also about things? For after all it can't be enough for someone to assure us that \emph{he} knows this.


Well, what must our starting point be if we are to shew this?


We need to shew that even if he never uses the words “I know \dots{} ,” his conduct exhibits the thing we are concerned with.



\end{quote}


Wittgenstein insists that the point he is making here is to be understood as universal and not personal (\emph{OC} 440); it is not concerned with what an individual can know but with “the foundation” of knowledge (\emph{OC} 449); the point is of logical interest (cf. \emph{OC} 401, 341 \& 342).\footnote{It is always important to emphasize in connection with this remark that Wittgenstein is not advocating any kind of foundationalism. However, like Davidson, he believes there is a foundation – something \emph{au fond} – that we must recognize and to which he is trying to draw our attention.}


Time and again Wittgenstein returns us to consider the way a child is initiated into the learning process. Consider, for example, \emph{OC} 160: “The child learns by believing the adult.” What he is keen to draw attention \emph{to} is the way this process and its results are taken for granted by the child. What he wants to draw attention away \emph{from} is the idea that anything that happens in this process can be a matter of reason or subject to justification. Wittgenstein describes a process of learning that takes place – from the learning of one's first words to the learning of history – and shows how the learning subject accepts \emph{without doubt} what she is taught. There are two things to note about all this. First, doubt comes to have a place only once this process of acting in the world and with others (learning) has taken place.\footnote{Cf. here \emph{OC} 170: “I believe what people transmit to me in a certain manner. In this way I believe geographical, chemical, historical facts etc.”} As Wittgenstein sees it, doubt takes place against a certain background. The second thing to note is that, despite the fact that certain things are taken for granted in this learning process, no uncertainty or insecurity is associated with the outcome. Wittgenstein considers the boy who questions all the truths of history and everything connected with this and notes that this child's doubts are “hollow.” To the person who then asks, “But in that case – isn't \emph{belief} in history hollow too?”, he replies: “no; there is so much that this connects up with” (\emph{OC} 311). Wittgenstein is here responding to the person who thinks that unless we can offer guarantees for our beliefs, they are, in a sense, hollow. His point is that, in the place of guarantees, we have connections. He reminds us that “the end \dots{} is an ungrounded way of acting” (\emph{OC} 110).


Wittgenstein believes that understanding the way in which knowledge has its roots in “an ungrounded way of acting” should cure us of any temptation to engage with questions about the world and about other minds of the sort raised by the skeptic of old. That there is any “doubt \emph{behind}” our everyday practical doubt has been shown to be a kind of “illusion” – the illusion of thinking that one can carry on giving reasons for – keep on raising doubts about – what one does. “Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do’ ” (Wittgenstein 1958: 217).


Let us now turn to compare these brief remarks regarding Wittgenstein's work with what Davidson says about knowledge. First, like Wittgenstein, Davidson often asks us to consider the child's learning of its first language. It is true that Davidson writes of one person's interpretation of the speech of another, but he writes also of the situation of an adult teaching a child his\Slash{}her first language. Both Wittgenstein and Davidson draw lessons from reflection on this learning process. Wittgenstein's lesson is that knowledge is founded in activity; Davidson's lesson is that all three varieties of empirical knowledge is the upshot of the triangulation of (at least) two persons who share a similar nature reacting to each other and to a world. There are many points of overlap between these lessons.


A second point of comparison also emerges if we consider Wittgenstein's response to the person who asks whether our history must be taken as “hollow” if doubts about it are “hollow,” and Davidson's response to a certain point made by Barry Stroud. The point Stroud makes is not the same as that raised by Wittgenstein's interlocutor, but his challenge has the same import: that Davidson claims too much for his position. Stroud considers Davidson's claim that a community of minds is the basis of knowledge and provides the measure of all things, and that “it makes no sense to question the adequacy of this measure or to seek a more ultimate standard” (Davidson 2001a: 218). Stroud points out that, if it makes no sense to question the adequacy of this measure, it should equally make no sense to \emph{assert} the adequacy of that measure (Stroud 1999: 159). Davidson disagrees. He believes that once we appreciate the way that we come to have our concept of objective truth, we \emph{also} come to understand how we can attain knowledge (Davidson 1999b: 164).


Let us return to Nagel's objection to Davidson. Like Stroud, Nagel is not convinced that Davidson has succeeded in refuting the skeptic of old. But Nagel also takes it that what Davidson is aiming to do is show this skeptic's position to be self-defeating. I am not convinced that this is the right way to read Davidson. I suggest that we read Davidson along the same lines that I have suggested we read Wittgenstein. We should understand Davidson to be providing a “different way” with the skeptic of old. Like Wittgenstein, Davidson tells a background story. Wittgenstein's story shows how knowledge is grounded in the activity of individuals in the world and with others; Davidson's story shows how a certain activity between persons and a world gives rise to contentful thought. What is prominent in Davidson's story is the way it is designed to engage with the new skeptical problem; what is prominent in Wittgenstein's story is the way it is designed to engage with the skeptic of old. His, Wittgenstein's, idea is that once we see how things are for us, any further questions will be shown to be an illusion. It is in \emph{this} sense that I think we should understand Davidson when he writes in reply to Stroud that, if he is right in the description he gives about the nature of thought and interpretation, there “is no point in attempting, \emph{in addition}, to show the sceptic wrong” (Davidson 1999b: 163). The problem with Davidson's way of making the point is that it leaves us with a sense that there is something we \emph{could} show but that it would be pointless to show. If we follow Wittgenstein, we could simply say that the very thought that there is a further question here has been shown – by the explanation of how we come to have contentful thought – to be an illusion. Davidson comes closest to seeing this when he writes, “it dawned on me that if something like the way I saw things was right, various familiar forms of scepticism could never get off the ground, particularly scepticism about other minds, and general scepticism about the world” (Davidson 1999c: 192). Once we appreciate the overlap between Davidson's work and Wittgenstein's, we can use an interpretation of the latter to understand the former. We can understand Davidson and Wittgenstein as adopting a similar attitude toward the skeptic of old.


While I have been emphasizing the similarities in the work of Davidson and Wittgenstein, I have skated over an important point of difference: while Davidson believes we can have knowledge of other minds and of the world, Wittgenstein often writes that talk of knowledge in connection with ordinary empirical propositions is out of place. I want now to suggest that Wittgenstein's animadversions against knowledge may not apply to what Davidson has written in this connection.


I have suggested that we separate out the new skeptic from the old, and that we read Davidson as engaging with and replying to the former while adopting a “different way” with the latter. I want now to suggest that we should also separate out knowledge of what another is thinking from knowledge that solipsism is false, and that we see Davidson as only concerned to show that we have knowledge of the former. I shall then suggest that there may be nothing in Davidson's talk of knowledge that should bother Wittgenstein.


Let us return to Wittgenstein and his response to Moore's use of knowledge claims to prove the existence of the external world and other minds. Moore is aiming to reply to the skeptic who asks, \emph{inter alia}, how I can \emph{know} that solipsism is false and that there is an external world. Wittgenstein writes, “If you do know that \emph{here is a hand}, we'll grant you all the rest” (\emph{OC} 1). He then proceeds to consider what we would do or say if someone claimed not to know such a thing. He suggests that we might tell this person to “look closer,” and then he writes: “This possibility of satisfying oneself is part of the language game. Is one of its essential features” (\emph{OC} 3). Wittgenstein's aim here is to turn us away from thinking that we have knowledge that \emph{here is a hand} or \emph{my friend is in pain} in situations where I am looking at my hand or sitting by a friend who is bleeding and writhing. He insists that if we try to enumerate what we know in the way that Moore attempts to do “the expression ‘I know’ gets misused” (\emph{OC} 6). Moore claims to have knowledge and, so, an answer to the skeptic. Moore's appeal to knowledge is meant to provide a guarantee (\emph{OC} 12), to show no mistake is possible (\emph{OC} 16), to provide certainty. Wittgenstein points out that the guarantee Moore seeks here would require that “if I know something, then I also know that I know it, etc.” (\emph{OC} 16). He points outs that what Moore is after is not something that knowledge claims can provide. He thinks we need to appreciate the way “my life shews that I know or am certain that there is a chair over there, or a door, or so on. – I tell a friend for example, ‘Take a chair over there’ \dots{}” (\emph{OC} 7). There is a sureness – a certainty – in the way I act in the world and with others. There can be no other – no further – certainty. Talk of knowledge in connection with ordinary empirical propositions is out of place. Before there can be knowledge, there must be activity in the world and with others. But many have thought that Wittgenstein goes too far when he rejects knowledge claims here. Perhaps Wittgenstein would have been less concerned to reject knowledge – knowledge that \emph{here is a hand} or that \emph{my friend is in pain} – if it were possible to divorce knowledge from certainty, if we could think of knowledge \emph{not} as something that is designed to give us a guarantee that we cannot be wrong.


Davidson thinks of knowledge in just this way. Davidson says that the story he tells about how our beliefs come to have content is the basis of all three varieties of empirical knowledge but, importantly, he does not think that this story can explain how we come to know that we know such things: “To say we do not really know something unless we know that we know sounds like a request for a ‘guarantee’ that we are right, something we cannot reasonable expect to find” (Davidson 1999b: 163).\footnote{With this talk of knowledge in independence of knowing that one knows, Davidson may be thought to show leanings in the direction of an externalist account of knowledge. The question is an interesting one and raised by Sosa (2003).} It seems clear that Davidson is not thinking of knowledge in the same way as Moore. Davidson does not think one needs guarantees to have knowledge. I can know, among other things, that you believe that the cat is on the mat. Indeed, Davidson thinks we can know that the world is pretty much as you and I think it is (no guarantees, remember), and that the story he has outlined to show how our thoughts come by their content helps us to understand why this is so. He writes, “The nature of interpretation guarantees both that a large number of our simplest perceptual beliefs are true, and that the nature of these beliefs is known to others” (Davidson 2001a: 213). This is not to say that we cannot be wrong in our beliefs but, insists Davidson, “we can be massively wrong only about a world we have already experienced, the main and more or less lasting features of which we have right” (Davidson 1999b: 164). Davidson's use of the word “guarantee” here is misleading. A few years after writing this, we find Davidson explaining that he put his point in this way because he “was trying to fend off the criticism \dots{} that [he] might have shown that we do have a large supply of true beliefs, but not have shown that these constitute knowledge” (Davidson 1999d: 208). He also explains that he soon came to realize that it was a mistake to try and fend off this criticism. What he came to think he should have said is that “we are \emph{justified} in taking our perceptual beliefs to be true, even when they are not, and so when they are true, they constitute knowledge” (Davidson 1999d: 208).\footnote{Cf. also, “This is what I argued for when I said that perceptual beliefs are ‘veridical’, meaning not that they are always true, but that we are justified in taking them to be true until proven wrong” (Davidson 1999e: 254).} We are justified “not because [our beliefs] rest on something more fundamental, but because they are the kind of beliefs they are and because they are supported by other beliefs. This explains why we have knowledge of the world” (Davidson 1999b: 163). The basis of this knowledge is a community of minds that provides “the measure of all things” (Davidson 2001a: 218). Our standpoint may be “provincial” (Davidson 1999b: 164), but Davidson thinks that we can still attain knowledge – including knowledge of the thoughts and feelings of others. What we cannot have is knowledge that we know, and this means that cannot know that solipsism is false. Perhaps Wittgenstein would have been less hostile to talk of knowledge in connection with empirical propositions if he had thought of knowledge along the lines the same lines as Davidson.

\section{2. Understanding Others}


When Davidson writes of our knowledge of other minds he is, for the most part, concerned to show how this knowledge hangs together with knowledge of the world and one's own mind. Understanding how the three varieties of empirical knowledge hang together, however, should not blind us to some obvious differences in the ways in which we come by each variety of knowledge. In particular, we must not forget the observation that led Davidson to what I have been calling the new skeptical problem: that “the mental states of others are known only through their behavioural and other outward manifestations, while this is not true of our own mental states” (Davidson 2001a: 207). The observation that we know about the minds of others by noting their behavior has led to various suggestions about what we are doing when we do this. On the one hand, there is the suggestion that we are reasoning by analogy from the way things are for us to the way things are for another (Hyslop 1995; Mill 1892). There is also the suggestion that the attribution of mental states to others is the best explanation of the behavior we observe (Pargetter 1984). Both of these suggestions involve reasoning from the behavior to the mind of the other, and I shall refer to both under the heading of the inferential model. The inferential model has a long and distinguished history. Somewhat more recently, some have suggested that we perceive the mind of another (McDowell 1998; Dretske 1969). The perceptual model drops the thought that lies at the heart of the traditional model, that we use the behavior of the other to infer that another has a mind.\footnote{Although McDowell and Dretske develop their perceptual models in very different ways, both take this model to be an alternative to the inferential one. Both develop a \emph{direct} perception model of our knowledge of another mind.} According to this model, we simply see that, for example, our friend is in pain or is angry.\footnote{Those who propose the perceptual model tend to concentrate on this sort of example.} Davidson writes of how we assemble a “picture of a mind” and notes that, while we all know how to do this, few have any idea \emph{how} we do what we do (Davidson 2001f: 15). I want now to look at how we do what we do, and I want to consider whether Davidson would have any truck with either inferential or perceptual models of our knowledge of another's mind. To be clear, the question I am interested in here is how I know what another thinks and feels.\footnote{It is worth noting that these models have largely been designed also to answer the question: How do I know \emph{that} another has a mind? Dretske, however, does not think the perceptual model he proposes can address this question. I am taking it that given what I have written in the previous section, Davidson also would not expect his account of knowledge to provide an answer to this question.}


Again and again, Davidson contrasts our knowledge of our own mind with that of another by pointing out that I know the former without appeal to any evidence, while my knowledge of another mind is “indirect” and “behaviour is evidence for what is in a mind” (Davidson 2001a: 207). He also contrasts our knowledge of other minds with our knowledge of the world by pointing out that while my simple perceptions of the world are not based on evidence, “my knowledge of the propositional contents of other minds is never immediate in this sense” (Davidson 2001a: 205). Concerning the evidence we use to come by our knowledge of another mind, he writes, “There is no secret about the nature of the evidence we use to decide what other people think: we observe their acts, read their letters, study their expressions, listen to their words, learn their histories, and note their relations to society” (Davidson 2001f: 15).


Let us concentrate first on the distinction Davidson draws between our knowledge of the world of bodies and that of another mind. Knowledge of the mind of another is not “simply caused by the events and objects around me”; it is never immediate; it is always based on “further evidence” (Davidson 2001a: 205). While we may directly perceive the world of bodies, we do not directly perceive the mind of another. It looks like Davidson would not embrace a direct perception model of our knowledge of another mind. But if Davidson cannot accept the perceptual model here, must we conclude that he must accept an inferential one? Much of what he writes is suggestive of inferential knowledge of another mind. Consider, for example: “I would have no access to what others think and value if I could not note their behaviour” (Davidson 2001a: 205). The impression is confirmed when he writes that knowledge of another mind is “necessarily inferential” (Davidson 1991: 164), and that “all we see is the behaviour of others” (Davidson 1999a: 156).


Despite the impression one gets when reading much of what Davidson writes in this connection, it is not clear that he can accept the inferential model of our knowledge of another mind. This model works on the assumption that there is a logical distinction between the subjective and the objective, and this is something Davidson rejects. He often makes the point in connection with our knowledge of the external world, but the point holds equally when we consider our knowledge of the mind of another. This assumption not only gives rise to skepticism concerning the external world, it leads also to skepticism concerning other minds. Davidson acknowledges this when he writes, “If there is a logical or epistemic barrier between the mind and nature, it not only prevents us from seeing out; it also blocks a view from the outside in” (Davidson 2001a: 207). Davidson cannot accept an inferential model of our knowledge of another. We are, of course, left with the fact that Davidson has written that our knowledge of another mind is “necessarily inferential,” but it is notable that in the reprint of the paper in which he uses this phrase, these words do not appear. In their place, Davidson writes that the knowledge I have of another mind is “necessarily indirect, in that it depends, among other things, on observed correlations between the speech and other behaviour of the person, and of events in our communal environment” (Davidson 2001a: 217). Davidson holds that our knowledge of the mind of another is necessarily indirect yet noninferential.


On the one hand, it looks like Davidson would deny that knowledge of another mind is immediate and perceptual, and on the other, it looks like he cannot accept that it is inferential. How, then, does Davidson think we come by our knowledge of others? I want to suggest that we should read Davidson as providing us with a further option here, what I shall call the “understanding model” of another.


Davidson explains that we observe the actions of others, read what they write, study the expressions on their faces, and note their relations to others in our efforts to “assemble \dots{} a convincing picture of the mind of another” (Davidson 2001f: 15). There is something else we should note about our knowledge of another mind, something that further differentiates it both from knowledge of the world and from knowledge of our own minds. While Davidson observes that we must take our own beliefs at face value, and that we can take our perceptual beliefs for the most part to be veridical, he could have added that our beliefs about the minds of others, despite also being for the most part veridical, are open to greater uncertainty than either of the other two varieties of knowledge. This is due to the fact that others can deceive us in various ways.\footnote{For this reason, Stanley Cavell (1979) has suggested that skepticism about the minds of others can be made to feel more pressing than skepticism about the external world.} Of course, Davidson would no doubt remind us that before there can be deception, there must be trust. But in the case of knowledge of another mind, there is an interesting difference between the trust that must exist in the initial learning situation and the way in which we proceed once this initial period has lapsed. One of the things a child learns is that one can deceive or withhold information from others. Even assuming that most of what we believe about others in general must be correct, the margin for error in any given case is wide. We could also add that people often fail to do what they intend to do, they make mistakes (something Davidson often reminds us of in connection with language (Davidson 1986) ). And yet despite the possibility of error and deception, we can and do understand others. To do this, we must bring together everything we know, both about the situation we find ourselves in and about what we know more generally about the person with whom we are engaging, in order to assemble a convincing picture of their thoughts and feelings. It is in this sense that I think we should understand Davidson when he says that our knowledge of another mind is never immediate. Our beliefs about another's thoughts and feelings gain support from other things that we know about them and can observe about them. As our picture coheres, we begin to make sense of the other. We do not use the other's behavior to make an inference about what they think and feel, nor is our knowledge here immediate. Rather, we use what we observe to build a coherent picture of the other, we come to understand what the other thinks and feels. The way is paved for this understanding to take place by the learning process provided by others with whom we share a nature. And a sprinkling of luck also can help.\footnote{Recall in this connection what Davidson writes about our interpretation of the another's language where, he explains, we must proceed aided by “wit, luck, and wisdom” (Davidson 1986: 265).} Just how much is needed for this understanding to occur is summed up by Davidson when he writes, “The interpreter of another's words and thoughts must depend on scattered information, fortunate training, and imaginative surmise in coming to understand the other” (Davidson 2001f: 37).

% Notes
\section{References}



\begin{amusebiblio}


Avramides, A. (1999). Davidson and the new sceptical problem. In \emph{Donald Davidson: Truth, Meaning and Knowledge}, U.M. Zegleń (ed.). London and New York: Routledge, pp. 136–154.


———. (2001). \emph{Other Minds}. London and New York: Routledge.


\emph{Cavell, S. (1979).} The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy\emph{. Oxford: Oxford University Press.}


Dretske, F. (1969). \emph{Seeing and Knowing}. Chicago: Chicago University Press.


Davidson, D. (1986). A nice derangement of epitaphs. In \emph{Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson}, E. Lepore (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 251–265.


———. (1989). The conditions of thought. \emph{Grazer Philosophische} \emph{Studien} 36:193–200.


———. (1991). Three varieties of knowledge. In \emph{A.J. Ayer: Memorial Essays}, A.P. Griffiths (ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 153–167.


———. (1999a). Reply to Avramides. In \emph{Donald Davidson: Truth, Meaning and Knowledge}, U.M. Zegleń (ed.). London and New York: Routledge, pp. 154–157.


———. (1999b). Reply to Stroud. In \emph{The Philosophy of Donald Davidson}, L.E. Hahn (ed.). Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, pp. 162–167.


———. (1999c). Reply to A.C. Genova. In \emph{The Philosophy of Donald Davidson}, L.E. Hahn (ed.). Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, pp. 192–195.


———. (1999d). Reply to Nagel. In \emph{The Philosophy of Donald Davidson}, L.E. Hahn (ed.). Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, pp. 207–211.


———. (1999e). Reply to Burge. In \emph{The Philosophy of Donald Davidson}, L.E. Hahn (ed.). Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, pp. 251–254.


———. (2001a). Three varieties of knowledge. In \emph{Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective}. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 205–221.


———. (2001b). First person authority. In \emph{Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective}. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–15.


———. (2001c). Epistemology externalized. In \emph{Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective}. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 193–205.


———. (2001d). The second person. In \emph{Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective}. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 107–123.


———. (2001e). Rational animals. In \emph{Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective}. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 95–107.


———. (2001f). Knowing one's own mind. In \emph{Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective}. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 15–39.


———. (2001g). The emergence of thought. In \emph{Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective}. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 123–135.


Hacking, I. (1986). The parody of conversation. In \emph{Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson}, E. Lepore (ed.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 447–459.


Hyslop, A. (1995). \emph{Other Minds}. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Press.


McGinn, M. (2008). Wittgenstein on certainty. In \emph{The Oxford Handbook of Skepticism}, J. Greco (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 372–392.


McManus, D. (ed.) (2004). \emph{Wittgenstein and Scepticism}. London: Routledge.


Mill, J.S. (1892). \emph{An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy}, 4th ed. London: Longman, Green, Reader \& Dyer.


Moore, G.E. (1993). Proof of an external world. In \emph{G.E. Moore: Selected Writing}, T. Baldwin (ed.). London: Routledge, pp. 147–170.


Moyal-Sharrock, D. (2004). \emph{Understanding Wittgenstein's “On Certainty}.” New York: Palgrave Macmillan.


Nagel, T. (1999). Davidson's new \emph{Cogito}. In \emph{The Philosophy of Donald Davidson}, L.E. Hahn (ed.). Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, pp. 195–207.


Pargetter, R. (1984). The scientific hypothesis of other minds. \emph{Australian Journal of Philosophy} 62: 158–163.


McDowell, D. (1998). On the reality of the past. In \emph{Meaning, Knowledge and Reality}, Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, pp. 295–314.


Sosa, E. (2003). Davidson's epistemology. In \emph{Contemporary Philosophy in Focus: Donald Davidson}, K. Ludwig (ed.). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–24.


\emph{Strawson, P.F. (1959).} Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics\emph{. London: Methuen.}


Stroll, A. (1994). \emph{Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty}. Oxford: Oxford University Press.


Stroud, B. (1999). Radical interpretation and philosophical scepticism. In \emph{The Philosophy of Donald Davidson}, L.E. Hahn (ed.). Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company, pp. 139–162.


Wittgenstein, L. (1958). \emph{Philosophical Investigations}, 3rd ed. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, New York: The Macmillan Company.


———. (1969). \emph{On Certainty}, D. Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (eds). New York; London: Harper Row.


Wright, C. (2004). Wittgenstein's certainties. In McManus (2004): 22–55.



\end{amusebiblio}

\part{Part VI: Influences and Influence}

\chapter{33. Quine and Davidson}


Hans-Johann Glock


Davidson pursues a unified vision in a way that is both ingenious and novel. For all its originality, however, Davidson's philosophy was also shaped by several diverse influences over the course of his intellectual development. With the possible exception of Tarski, however, these influences pale by comparison to that of his erstwhile teacher W.V. Quine. My contribution charts the interaction between these two giants of post-positivist analytic philosophy in a historical and exegetical vein. But it also assesses the emerging common ground and the differences from a substantive point of view.


Our two protagonists first met at Harvard in 1939–1940. Quine was a Junior Fellow, quickly establishing himself as a shooting star in both formal logic and philosophy. Davidson had just finished his B.A. in English, classics and philosophy. During his first year in graduate school, he attended two of Quine's courses, one on formal logic and one on logical positivism, and they quickly became friends. The encounter had a gradual but momentous impact on Davidson. He had initially pursued literary and historical interests and had been influenced by Whitehead and C.I. Lewis. Due to Quine, he began to adopt a more analytic approach. A late echo of this change may be detected in his emphatic expression of gratitude in 1984.



\begin{quote}


W.V. Quine was my teacher at a crucial stage in my life. He not only started me thinking about language, but he was the first to give me the idea that there is such a thing as being right, or at least wrong, in philosophy, and that it matters which.


(Davidson 1984: xx; see also Lepore 2004: 239)



\end{quote}


On returning to Harvard after five years in the Navy, Davidson assisted Quine with his logic course in 1946. Nevertheless, he took his PhD in classical philosophy. And at Stanford he initially concentrated on decision and action theory. Reading the manuscript of \emph{Word and Object} 1958–1959 constituted another turning point in his development (Davidson 1999b: 40–41). The eventual result was his seminal work on the theory of meaning collected in \emph{Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation}. Fittingly, that book is dedicated “To W.V. Quine without whom not.”


Quine and Davidson can profitably be compared with respect to areas in metaphysics. But I shall confine my “compare and contrast” exercise to the philosophy of language and connected parts of the philosophy of mind, where it is almost imperative to view their contributions in conjunction. Quine provides the acknowledged starting point for Davidson (1985: 172, [1983] 2001: 144; but cf. Lepore 2004: 258), and Quine views matters in much the same way (Quine 1990a: 80). Davidson is also the pupil in whose work Quine took the keenest interest (Føllesdal and Quine 2008: 55, 339).


From the 1980s onwards, our two protagonists frequently discussed the relationship between their philosophies, often in publications arising from joint appearances at conferences. However, in some of these exchanges, the two tiptoe around the really divisive issues. This reflects less a one-sided deference on Davidson's part, than a case of two long-standing friends and philosophical elder statesmen agreeing to agree, contrary evidence notwithstanding. Be that as it may, in the sequel, I shall not shy away from accentuating some of the contrasts, especially where it seems to me that either one of the two was clearly closer to “being right, or at least wrong”; for “it matters which”!


The first section contends that at the grand-strategic level Quine and Davidson are united by a “logical pragmatism.” The next section considers their contrasting relations to naturalism. I then turn to more detailed comparisons concerning the philosophy of language. The final section discusses the extent to which Davidson has abandoned empiricism.

\section{1. Logical Pragmatism}


Quine came to fame through his attack on the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions and the project of reductive analysis. As a result, he is often seen as a relentless critic of logical positivism. Nevertheless, logical positivism provided the springboard for Quine's ideas. What is more, he agreed with many of its fundamental tenets:


(i) Quine is an empiricist in both epistemology and semantics: sensory experience provides not just the evidence on which our beliefs rest, it also endows our language with meaning (Quine 1969: 75, 1981a: ch. 7). (ii) Quine does not accept the positivists' principle of verification, according to which the meaning of a sentence is determined by the method of confirming or infirming it. However, this is merely because of his epistemic holism: confirming or infirming evidence can be specified not for individual statements, but only for larger “blocks of theory.” Subject to this caveat, Quine accepts that meaning is determined by empirical evidence. (iii) Quine repudiates reductionism, the idea that individual propositions are synonymous with constructions from basic “protocol-sentences” about what is immediately “given” in experience. Yet he retains the idea that “observation sentences” – reports of direct observations on a particular occasion, such as “This is red” – provide the foundations of both knowledge and linguistic meaning (Quine 1969: 87–88, 1992: 4–5). (iv) Quine shared the positivists' nominalism. Although he came to accept the existence of sets, he remained adamant in his rejection of abstract entities that are “intensional,” that is, concern the meaning of expressions – rather than “extensional” – which concern their reference. (v) Quine espouses a form of scientism. The mathematical and natural sciences not only yield our best explanation of physical reality; they comprise all of human knowledge, including philosophy.


By the 1940s, the views of the positivist immigrants into the United States had achieved the status of orthodoxy. It is probably no more than mild hyperbole when Davidson states that he got through graduate school by reading Feigl's and Sellars' anthology of positivist writings (Davidson [1976a] 1980: 261). Logical positivism provides the essential background to Davidson's philosophical endeavors, but by way of opposition as much as inspiration. While his style and the analytical tools he employs are indebted to logical positivism, he does not subscribe to any of the positivistic articles of faith mentioned above.


As regards content, Davidson has distanced himself not just from logical positivism but from empiricism altogether. He also rejects scientism. Logical positivism propagated the “unity of science”: all scientific disciplines, including the social and historical sciences, were to be unified in a single system with physics as foundation. Mental statements were analyzed into physical statements about behavior or neurophysiological events. Both claims are vigorously attacked in Davidson's philosophy of mind (Borradori 1994: 54).


Nevertheless, some points of doctrinal contact remain. Davidson follows logical positivism and Quine in his predilection for purely extensional languages like the first-order predicate calculus (Davidson 2005: 142). Furthermore, his philosophy of mind combines a conceptual dualism with a monistic physicalist ontology. Although we \emph{talk about} mental events and human actions in terms that cannot be reduced to physics, these events and actions \emph{are} ultimately physical events.


The impact on Quine and Davidson of American pragmatism is more diffuse. Quine described his position as pragmatist in \emph{From a Logical Point of View} (Quine [1953] 1980: 16–19, 20, 44–46, 79), but the term all but disappears in subsequent writings. He later characterized pragmatism simply as a strand of empiricism, and stated that he had not read widely in pragmatism before giving his Dewey Lectures in 1969 (Quine 1981b: 23, 1990b: 292).


Yet Quine did not have to read widely to be influenced by ideas that are distinctly pragmatist rather than generally empiricist. For such ideas were transmitted by a teacher that he shared with Davidson, but whose influence has been underrated by everyone except Davidson: C.I. Lewis (Borradori 1994: 43; Lepore 2004: 237). Mimicking Lewis' combination of Kantianism and pragmatism, Quine stresses that our beliefs are shaped primarily not by brute facts or experience, but by “pragmatic” considerations of predictive power and cognitive efficacy. Our theories “are almost completely a matter of human creativity – creativity to the purpose, however, of matching up with the neural input” (Føllesdal and Quine 2008: 49).


“Owing something to pragmatism is not one of my obsessions,” Davidson quips. At the same time, he recognizes a debt to the pragmatism of Quine and Lewis (Borradori 1994: 49, 43). James (1978: 238), in particular, anticipated Quine's and Davidson's holistic credo that our beliefs cannot be assessed individually, but only as part of a web of other beliefs.


Rorty (1986, 1990) associates Quine and Davidson with the pragmatist denial that our beliefs represent reality and that notions like reality or truth have an absolute sense independent of human purposes and interests. However, both Quine and Davidson reject pragmatist theories of truth. Davidson has also politely declined Rorty's invitation to share with pragmatism a deflationary attitude toward truth (see later). Ironically, it is precisely because \emph{neither} the pragmatists \emph{nor} Davidson are deflationists that Rorty's characterization contains a kernel of truth. On an explicitly pragmatist note, Davidson insists that “access to truth could not be a special prerogative of philosophy, and that truth must have essential connections with human interests” (Davidson 2005: 7).


This agreement is part of a more fundamental consensus. Like pragmatism, the philosophies of Quine and Davidson evolve around striking conceptions of human behavior. Furthermore, these conceptions share with pragmatism a rejection of mentalism in favor of a third-person perspective on mind and meaning. As Davidson himself recognizes, he further shares with pragmatism the idea that rationality and with it language are essential to human action, which implies skepticism concerning the possibility of animal minds (Glock 2003: ch. 9). Unlike Quine, whose epistemology starts out from the experiences of individuals, Davidson also follows pragmatism by regarding knowledge as an essentially social phenomenon arising out of linguistic communication. Finally, like Quine and Davidson, the American pragmatists are famous for their “debunking of dualisms,” like the Cartesian dualism of mind and matter, the positivists' analytic\Slash{}synthetic dichotomy or the Kantian distinction between conceptual scheme and empirical content (Rorty 1986: 333, 339).


Admittedly, our protagonists diverge from pragmatism on important issues. Thus their work is not infused with moral and political ambitions. Most importantly, Quine and Davidson did not pick up ready-made pragmatist doctrines, but developed similar ideas independently. Their philosophical styles, agendas, and methods owe much more to analytic philosophy. Quine and Davidson can be characterized as \emph{logical pragmatists}, because their relation to American pragmatism is analogous to that of the logical empiricists to classical empiricism. They develop \emph{some}, but not all, of the fundamental ideas of pragmatism, and they do so in a clearer and more cogent way, thanks to their magisterial use of logico-linguistic analysis and their semantic sophistication. Finally, the way in which Davidson uses the ideas of Quine, the arch-empiricist, to undermine certain tenets of empiricism is an impressive execution of James' admirable ambition (James 1978: 13–24, 127–129): to defend the values of the tender-hearted rationalists by the methods of the tough-minded empiricists.

\section{2. Naturalism}


Quine is famous for his naturalism, an idea he traces back to Peirce and Dewey (Quine 1969: 26–29, 1981b: 35–37). Naturalism can take three different forms. Metaphilosophical naturalism claims that philosophy is a branch of, or continuous with, natural science; epistemological naturalism (scientism) insists that there is no genuine knowledge outside natural science; ontological naturalism denies that there is any realm other than the natural world of matter, energy, and spatiotemporal objects or events.


Quine defines naturalism in metaphilosophical terms, as the abandonment of “first philosophy.” Proper “scientific philosophy” is “continuous with,” and in fact \emph{part} of science (Quine 1970b: 2, 1981a: 72; Føllesdal and Quine 2008: 45–55). Quine's metaphilosophical naturalism is reinforced by epistemological naturalism. Forms of discourse other than science are disparaged as “second-rate” (Quine 1969: 24). There is no genuine \emph{knowledge} outside natural science. This epistemological naturalism in turn spawns a “naturalized epistemology.” This discipline investigates the relationship between theory (beliefs) and empirical evidence; yet it does so through empirical science (psychology, neurophysiology), rather than a priori reflection (Quine 1969: ch. 3, 1981a: ch. 2). Quine's ontology is \emph{physicalist} (Quine 1979: 162, 1986: 430). The only things that exist are those which feature in the explanations of the most fundamental science, namely physics. Finally, his naturalism is eliminative rather than reductionist. Statements that Quine repudiates as incompatible with naturalism are not \emph{analyzed} into statements of the kind he condones; they are \emph{replaced} by such statements in his “canonical notation.”


Because of Quine, most American philosophers these days profess allegiance to some type of naturalism. It is just conceivable, however, that Davidson might be a heretical exception. His work has been viewed as a novel rationalist metaphysics (Evnine 1991), a new kind of hermeneutics (Malpas 1992; Ramberg 1989), or even a form of “humanism” (Pearson 2011), all positions alien to Quine. A diametrically opposed interpretation has it that Quine and Davidson are closely connected through a shared commitment to naturalism (Ramberg 2001; Sinclair 2006). I shall steer a middle course between these extremes. While Davidson frequently modifies Quinean ideas in significant and original ways, he does so without compromising the naturalistic framework or abandoning empiricism altogether.


Davidson accepts many of Quine's fundamental claims: there is no difference between analytic and synthetic propositions, truth is a property of token sentences, translation is indeterminate, and intensional notions are suspect. And right at the end of his life, he defended Quine's syncategorematic account of predication (Davidson 2005: chs. 4–7). More generally, Davidson has developed Quinean themes in powerful ways, which often make them more palatable to those with reservations about Quine's austere naturalism.


For it is equally undeniable that Davidson's philosophical outlook is less harsh. Although he accepts that there is no clear line between philosophy and science on account of rejecting the analytic\Slash{}synthetic distinction, he does not advance a scientistic metaphilosophy. If anything, he regards the blurring of this line as a license to put in perspective the relevance of neurophysiological findings to problems in the philosophy of mind (Davidson [1970a] 1980: 216). On occasion, Davidson calls himself a naturalized epistemologist. But what he underwrites is only a “resolutely third person approach to epistemology” (Davidson [1982a] 2001: 159, [1990] 2001: 194). Such an approach is not tied to Quine's transformation of epistemology into physiological psychology. In fact, Davidson complains that the latter is inimical to a third-person perspective and that it runs together the physiological causes of our beliefs with their epistemic grounds (see last section).


This contrast is part and parcel of Davidson's general move away from important aspects of Quine's eliminativism, behaviorism, and neural empiricism. Davidson's ([1970a] 1980) anomalous monism is remote from Quine's outlook, even though Quine paid lip service to it in later writings. Anomalous monism is “ontological monism coupled with conceptual dualism.” It tries to reconcile the naturalistic claim that there is no realm beyond the physical with a recognition that mental and semantic discourse is neither reducible to nor replaceable by the idiom of natural science (Davidson 1994: 231).


The key to Davidson's position is his ontology of events. Events are dated occurrences with definite durations, like Brutus' stabbing of Caesar. They can be described in fundamentally different ways. \emph{Some} events have true descriptions in psychological terms and are hence mental. But \emph{all} events, including mental ones, also have true physical descriptions and are hence physical. Every particular mental event is identical with a particular physical event. But although there is \emph{token-token} identity between mental and physical events, there can be no \emph{type-type} identity: there are no psychophysical laws that correlate mental events under their mental description with physical events under their physical description. The principal purpose of mental discourse is to explain behavior by reference to propositional attitudes, such as believing that \emph{p}, desiring \emph{x} and intending to \emph{Φ}. And such explanations are characterized by two features that are absent from physical discourse – normativity and holism (Davidson [1974b] 1980, [1987] 2001).


Davidson combines the hermeneutic idea that actions are explained by the reasons for which agents perform them with a causal theory, according to which actions are caused by those reasons (Davidson [1963] 1980). Both actions and the reasons that explain them are among those events that have both a physical \emph{and} a mental description. Under their physical descriptions, the action can be seen to be \emph{caused by its reason}. At the same time, there is \emph{no} strict causal law that relates action and reason as described in mental terms. For which mental descriptions hold of these events depends on considerations of rationality that are qualitatively distinct from the physical descriptions that hold of them.


Linguistic utterances are actions, and hence physical events. But they can be described as meaningful on the presumption of the same kind of rational (normative and holistic) constraints that guide the interpretation of other actions. Like the mental (Davidson [1987] 2001: 114), the semantic is a conceptual rather than ontological category. Human beings, their actions and their utterances are physical phenomena; yet they cannot be properly understood by physics, but only by reference to reasons. Davidson shares Quine's predilection for a \emph{monistic ontology}, yet not for a \emph{scientistic epistemology}. He seeks to pay the homage that philosophy owes to science, without denying the distinctive character of human beings. The naturalism he embraces is \emph{anthropological} rather than \emph{scientific}.

\section{3. Language, Meaning, and Use}


The label “logical pragmatism” is particularly apt for Quine's and Davidson's approach to language. Both \emph{combine} logical analysis and formal semantics with the pragmatist idea that language is a form of human behavior.


Davidson's theory of action features acute observations about established use in the vein of “ordinary language philosophy.” In the main, however, he follows Quine, by tackling philosophically troublesome constructions through analyzing them in the idiom of formal logic. Nevertheless, his \emph{attitude} toward formal logic is significantly different. Quine is an exponent of “ideal language philosophy.” This tradition holds that natural languages suffer from various logical defects, and that they must therefore be replaced by an ideal language – an interpreted logical calculus, such as Quine's “canonical notation” – for the purposes of philosophical and scientific inquiry.


Davidson, by contrast, has been the most eminent champion of a theory of meaning for natural languages. The immediate roots of this project lie in the logical semantics of Tarski. However, the languages Davidson is interested in are natural rather than artificial. In this respect, he stands in the tradition not of Tarski and Quine, but of Wittgenstein's \emph{Tractatus} (Baker and Hacker 1984: ch. 1, 140–153; Smart 1986). Formal logic does not furnish an ideal language that avoids the shortcomings of ordinary language; it serves to indicate the \emph{underlying logical form} that sentences in the vernacular possessed \emph{all along}.


Contrary to received wisdom, therefore, Davidson is not an ideal language philosopher. Whereas Quine's naturalism lays claim to constituting the metaphysics of modern science, Davidson aims to bring out the “metaphysics implicit in natural language.” He is interested not in “improving on natural language, but in understanding it.” Alluding to a simile of Wittgenstein, he describes “the language of science not as a substitute for our present language, but as a suburb of it” (Davidson [1977a] 1984: 203, 1985: 172, 176).


Differences concerning revisionism also shape Quine's and Davidson's respective treatments of semantic notions. Both happily accept extensional concepts, which concern what expressions stand for or apply to. They are equally united in being suspicious of intensional notions, which concern meaning or sense. Nevertheless, their attitudes toward linguistic meaning differ subtly.


For Quine, meaning as standardly conceived is indeterminate, and hence, given the dictum “no entity without identity,” unreal. He therefore replaces it by a behaviorist \emph{ersatz} – “stimulus meaning” (Quine 1960: 66, 1969: 140–141). Davidson, by contrast, thinks that it is possible to account for \emph{meaning proper}, yet \emph{without} intensional notions, namely by combining a truth-conditional conception of sentence meaning with Tarskian truth theories and a theory of “radical interpretation.” Such a theory specifies how one could empirically verify whether a Tarskian theory captures a specific language \emph{L}, without assuming any prior knowledge of \emph{L}. Though extensionalist, Davidson's treatment is \emph{neither} elimination \emph{nor} reduction but \emph{approximation}: although meaning is not the same as truth conditions, a Tarskian theory of truth conditions for \emph{L} can do service as a theory of meaning, in so far as knowing it will enable someone to interpret the utterances of \emph{L} under conditions of radical interpretation (Davidson [1970b] 1984: 56n, [1976b] 1984: 175–179, [1977b]: 219; Glock 2003: 148, 168–183; Lepore and Ludwig 2003: 48–50).


At the same time, Davidson fully endorses the third-person perspective on linguistic meaning from which Quine repudiates the standard notion. “Perhaps the most important thing [Quine] taught me is that there could be no more to the communicative content of words than is conveyed by verbal behavior” (Davidson 1999b: 80; see Quine 1969: 26–27, 1992: 37–38). Linguistic expressions do not have a meaning independently of being \emph{employed} and \emph{understood} within a process of communication. Certain forms of externalism notwithstanding, therefore, the idea of a \emph{Bedeutung an sich} inaccessible to competent speakers is nonsense on stilts. But Davidson champions this third-person perspective \emph{without} committing himself to Quine's \emph{behaviorism}.



\begin{quote}


\dots{} language is intrinsically social. This does not entail that truth and meaning are defined in terms of observable behavior, or that it is “nothing but” observable behavior; but it does imply that meaning is entirely determined by observable behavior, even readily observable behavior. That meanings are decipherable is not a matter of luck; public availability is a constitutive aspect of language.


(Davidson 2005: 56)



\end{quote}


Insofar as the notion of meaning is legitimate, it must be explained by reference to verbal behavior and thus by reference to \emph{linguistic use} rather than mental processes or abstract entities (Davidson 1999a: 41, 1999b: 80, 1993: 170–171; Quine 1969: 26–28, 1981a: 192).


Which aspects of use are pertinent to meaning? Here both protagonists invoke the notion of truth. To keep meaning free of irrelevant motives of language use, Quine focuses on the “cognitive meaning” of a sentence. His first explanation of that notion is verificationist: the cognitive meaning of a (cluster of) sentence(s) is determined by “what would count as evidence for its truth” (Quine 1969: 80–81). Quine's second explanation was, with one exception (Quine 1976: 89), formulated partly in reaction to Davidson. The meanings of sentences are determined by their \emph{truth conditions}, and those of words are abstractions from the truth-conditions of sentences that contain them (Quine 1975a: 87–88, 1981a: 38, 47–48, 69).


Davidson transforms a truth-conditional conception of meaning into an elaborate research program. He maintains that the best way of clarifying the notion of meaning is to contemplate “what form” a theory of meaning for a specific natural language \emph{L} should take (Davidson [1970b] 1984: 55, 1984: xiii–xiv; see Glock 2012). Such a theory must generate for each sentence \emph{s} of \emph{L} a theorem that “ ‘gives the meaning’ of \emph{s},” and it displays how that meaning depends on that of the components of \emph{s}. Davidson's central thesis is that “we know of no other way” of satisfying this requirement than constructing a Tarskian truth-theory for \emph{L} (Davidson [1969] 1984: 23–24, 1999a: 36). A Tarskian theory permits for each sentence \emph{s} of \emph{L} the derivation of a T-sentence of the form ‘\emph{s} is true if and only if \emph{p}’, where \emph{s} is the name of a sentence of \emph{L} and \emph{p} the translation of that sentence into the metalanguage of the theory.

\section{4. Truth}


Because they feel queasy about intensional notions, Quine and Davidson concur that truth and falsehood attach primarily to \emph{sentences} rather than propositions. For related reasons, they follow Tarski in regarding truth as relative to a \emph{language}. A Tarskian truth theory defines a predicate “true-in-\emph{L}” for a specific \emph{L} and delivers as theorems “T-sentences” such as:


\textbf{(1)} “Snow is white” is true-in-English iff snow is white.


Now, for sentences involving indexicals, truth and falsity are not properties of \emph{type} sentences. For tokens of one and the same type can be used to express either a truth or a falsehood, depending on who uses it, where and when. Quine and Davidson have toyed with two ways of fixing truth values (Glock 2003: 118–26).


The first is to treat “truth as a relation between a sentence, a person, and a time” (Davidson [1967] 1984: 34; see Quine 1960: 191–192, 1992: 3). Accordingly, the theorems of a truth-theory à la Davidson are relativized T-sentences, such as


\textbf{(2)} “Ich bin glücklich” is true in German as spoken by \emph{x} at \emph{t} iff \emph{x} is happy at \emph{t}


The second is to claim that it is \emph{token} sentences or the events of their utterances that are true or false (Davidson [1977a] 1984: 201, [1979b] 1984: 118, 2005: 49–50; Quine 1970a: 13). Both options ultimately come to the same. That a sentence is true “as (potentially) spoken” by a person at a time is tantamount to the (potential) utterance – or token uttered – being true.


Although Davidson's view of truth has shifted over the years (Davidson 1984: xiv–xv, 1993: 36–37, 2005: 16n, 39–42; see Glanzberg, this volume), several ideas remain constant throughout. First, like Quine (1987a: 213), he rejects the traditional correspondence theory – “the strategy of facts” – according to which truth is a relation of correspondence between thoughts or sentences and facts, items which make them true. For it is “difficult to describe the fact that verifies a sentence except by using that sentence itself” (Davidson [1969] 1984: 49). Second, he is equally adamant in rejecting “antirealist” or “epistemic” accounts that reduce truth to what we are justified in believing or capable of learning. Third, Davidson resists deflationary theories according to which there is nothing more to truth than what is captured by T-sentences like (1). Truth is not redundant; it is a substantive notion with important connections to other concepts. Tarski's account should be enriched by linking truth to meaning and thereby to propositional attitudes and human activities. The connection is forged by a theory of meaning for natural languages that turns Tarski's T-sentences into empirical claims about the truth-conditions of the sentences of a particular language. Finally, Davidson regards truth as “beautifully transparent” and “primitive” compared to other philosophically contested concepts (Davidson [1983] 2001: 139; 2005: 37). This is why he takes the notion for granted, and uses it to explicate meaning.


Among the antirealist views Davidson attacks is Quine's claim “that truth is internal to a theory of the world and so to that extent is dependent on our epistemological stance” (Davidson 2005: 33, see 43–44). Davidson bases this allegation on Quine's slogan that “truth is immanent” (Quine 1981a: 21–22). For Quine, “there is no extra-theoretic truth, no higher truth than the truth we are claiming or aspiring to as we continue to tinker with our system of the world [our global scientific theory] from within” (Quine 1975b: 327).


Quine further contends that two systems of the world “can be logically incompatible and empirically equivalent” (Quine 1970c: 179). Whatever experience – past, present and future – counts for or against one system also counts for or against the other; yet the truth of the one entails the falsehood of the other and vice versa. This thesis of the \emph{underdetermination of theory by evidence} creates a problem. How are we to characterize the truth-values of two empirically equivalent global theories? Quine has oscillated between two replies (Quine 1992: 98–101). The first is “sectarian”: “one of two systems of the world must be deemed false” (Quine 1986: 156–157). The second is “ecumenical” and reckons both theories true, on the grounds that to do otherwise would be contrary to empiricism (Quine 1981a: 29).


Davidson characterizes sectarianism as the view that a speaker “at a given time operates with one theory and, for him at that time, the theory he is using is true and the other theory false. If he shifts to the alternative theory, then \emph{it} becomes true and the previously accepted theory false” (Davidson 2005: 44). Davidson points that one and the same nonindexical sentence cannot be true at one time or for one person, but not at another time or for another person. However, Quine maintains only that we must “deem” or “recognize as” true whatever theory we currently occupy, not that this theory \emph{is} true. There is no “tribunal” of truth other than our best scientific theory (Quine 1960: 24–25, 1994b: 497–498, 1995: 353).


Although this defuses the charge of relativism, it reduces immanentism to a point about \emph{justification}. It turns into a point about \emph{truth} only through Quine's conviction that the world cannot “deviate” from a theory that conforms to all possible observations (Quine 1981a: 22). That conviction implies an untenable ecumenical position: two logically global theories \emph{T}\textsubscript{1} and \emph{T}\textsubscript{2} which conform to all conceivable evidence are not just equally warranted, they must both be deemed faithful to the world and hence true.


Ironically, Quine for his part imputes to Davidson precisely such an ecumenical position (Quine 1986: 157, 1992: 97–100). But while Davidson accepts that two empirically equivalent theories should be true or false together, he only maintains that such theories can be \emph{mutually irreducible}, not that they are \emph{logically incompatible} (Davidson 2005: 43–44). Still, this whole debate appears predicated on a misguided assumption, namely that truth is a matter of fitting the evidence. We cannot transcend our best evidence in deciding what to accept as true. But one role of “true” is precisely to indicate the \emph{potential gap} between what we have evidence for and what is actually the case. When they are not sidetracked by empiricist hangovers, Davidson (2005: 44–47, 1999b: 107–108) and Quine (1994b: 496–497) acknowledge this “realist” insight.

\section{5. Meaning and Radical Interpretation}


Quine's “radical translation” refers to the translation of a completely unknown language (“Jungle”) with no historical or cultural links to familiar languages. Radical translation can neither assume any prior understanding of the language in question nor resort to a bilingual interpreter. The evidence is exhausted by the \emph{conditions} that prompt the native to \emph{assent to} or \emph{dissent from} a queried sentence. Quine further reasons that it is “stimulations” or “stimulatory circumstances” rather than macroscopic objects that prompt assent. Consequently, the conditions of assent\Slash{}dissent are patterns of neurophysiological events, “physical irritations of the subject's surfaces” (Quine 1960: 31, 235, 1981a: 48). Quine's master problem is: “how much of language can be made sense of in terms of stimulus conditions?” His answer: very little. We can translate the observation sentences and truth-functional connectives of Jungle (Quine 1960: 57–58). Beyond these limits, radical translation involves a “systematic indeterminacy” (Quine 1960: 23–26). For any language \emph{L}, there are at least two translation manuals M\textsubscript{1} and M\textsubscript{2} that (i) fit the facts about the linguistic behavior of speakers of \emph{L} equally, and optimally, well; (ii) are semantically incompatible in that the English sentences that they assign to a given sentence do not intuitively speaking mean the same, and hence are not interchangeable in English contexts.


This indeterminacy has two roots. The first is holism. In translating Jungle sentences – other than observation sentences immediately cued to empirical data – we have a choice that mirrors the choice the natives have in adjusting their beliefs to the empirical evidence. We may translate a given utterance differently by making compensating adjustments in the translation of other utterances. The second root is the “inscrutability of reference” (Quine 1960: section 12). Even in the case of observation \emph{sentences} to which we can assign an objective (stimulus) \emph{meaning}, we cannot establish what their constituent \emph{terms} \emph{refer to}, since that depends on how we translate other Jungle expressions, notably the apparatus of individuation.


Davidson's “radical interpretation” is the attempt to understand an alien community without the benefit of any prior knowledge of what its members think or their utterances mean. When he coined the label, he paid tribute to Quine. But he also declared that the two ideas serve different purposes (Davidson [1973] 1984: 126n, 129n; see Quine 1995: 80–81). Radical translation is part of Quine's “flight from intensions.” Its purpose is to establish that the objective behavioral facts are insufficient to underpin genuine meaning. Davidson's radical interpretation is a continuation of truth-conditional semantics. It is meant to demonstrate that even for a completely unknown language \emph{L}, one can construct a Tarskian truth theory that captures the meaning of the sentences of \emph{L} in that knowing the theory would enable the interpreter to understand its speakers. The radical interpreter seeks to provide not just a translation manual that correlates Jungle and English sentences, but an axiomatic theory that delivers theorems about what the former mean by specifying under what conditions they are true.


Radical interpretation and radical translation are different yet compatible – that is the official line. In fact, they are both closer in ambition and wider apart in execution. Although the projects are distinct, they are in turn fuelled by a common aim. Neither Quine nor Davidson is interested in actual field-linguistic translation. They use the idea of anthropological encounters as a “thought experiment” (Quine 1979: 167, 1987b: 5) or “conceptual exercise” (Davidson ([1980] 2004: 166, 2005: 73–74). The goal is to enforce the austere approach to meaning they deem proper. Such an approach does not rely on prior knowledge involving concepts that are semantic and\Slash{}or intensional, but it does take into account all the physical and behavioral facts which, according to them, underlie linguistic communication and \emph{constitute} meaning \emph{properly conceived}.


Quine and Davidson want to accommodate semantic and psychological notions within a naturalistic framework. This program is more strident in Quine, yet equally important to Davidson. While Quine seeks to \emph{eliminate} \emph{intensional} notions from science, Davidson seeks to \emph{extract} \emph{semantic} concepts and statements from evidence that he considers to be more basic, because it can be stated in nonsemantic terms. His project is not one of definition, analysis or reduction. Instead, the ambition is to elucidate and tame the concept of meaning by showing how a “specifically semantical” theory can be derived from “nonsemantical evidence” about linguistic behavior (Davidson [1974a] 1984: 142).


Quine and Davidson regard the exotic situation of radical translation\Slash{}interpretation as characteristic of linguistic understanding in general: “radical translation begins at home” (Quine 1969: 46); “all understanding of the speech of another involves radical interpretation” (Davidson [1973] 1984: 125, see Glock 2003: 201–207). They are not impervious to the indisputable differences between “domestic” communication within a linguistic community, normal translation and translation from scratch. But they are convinced that only the latter reveals the philosophically respectable facts about meaning.


At the same time, there are notable contrasts between radical interpretation and radical translation that arise from \emph{incompatible} views about mind and language. Unlike Quine, Davidson does not reject our ordinary psychological concepts. Consequently, the task of interpretation is one of assigning meaning to the natives' utterances, attributing mental states to them, and understanding their actions. These tasks hang together holistically (Davidson [1967] 1984: 27, [1973] 1984: 127, [1979a] 1984: 240, [1983] 2001: 146–147, 2005: 58–61). We could translate Jungle sentences if we knew what thoughts (beliefs and desires) they express, and we could ascribe thoughts to the natives if we could interpret their sincere utterances. Alas, at the start of radical interpretation, we know neither what they think nor what they mean.


This leads to further differences concerning the famous “principle of charity.” Both entreat the anthropologist to avoid the ascription of false or inconsistent beliefs to the natives. According to Quine, our translation manuals should minimize the ascription of false beliefs. For it is “less likely” that the interpretees hold obviously silly beliefs, such as patent empirical falsehoods or contradictions, than that our translation is wrong (Quine 1960: 59, 1969: 46). Davidson, by contrast, treats charity not as a heuristic maxim that enhances the prospects of interpretation, but as a principle which is \emph{essential} to its \emph{correctness}. An interpretation that fails to make the natives' beliefs come out as largely true, and their desires as largely intelligible, is not just “less likely” to be adequate, it \emph{must be} inadequate. Davidson's main argument for this claim trades on the interplay of meaning and belief in the explanation of assent. Assuming that the native believes what we do, is the only way of solving this equation with two unknowns (Davidson [1973] 1984: 137, [1974a] 1984: 197, [1975]: 167–169; for complications concerning Davidson's unified theory of mind and action, see Glock 2003: 191–194).


A second difference is that Davidson initially required the interpreter to “maximize agreement” with the natives (Davidson [1967] 1984: 27, [1968] 1984: 101). Even after abandoning this “confused ideal,” he continued to counsel applying charity “across the board,” that is, indiscriminately to \emph{all types of belief} (Davidson 1984: xvii, see Davidson 1999b: 82). As Quine (1999: 76) among others pointed out, however, it would be wrong to ascribe to the natives beliefs we take to be correct even in cases in which there is no explanation of how they could have acquired these beliefs. Regarding charity as a precondition for treating the natives as rational is plausible only when one restricts it the way Quine does, namely to fundamental beliefs concerning the immediately perceptible environment or basic logical truths (Glock 2003: 194–199).


Davidson's more generous dispensation of charity leads him to maintain that the indeterminacy of translation\Slash{}interpretation is \emph{less pronounced} than Quine concludes. To be sure, for any natural language \emph{L}, “a number of significantly different theories of truth will fit the evidence equally well” (Davidson [1970b] 1984: 62). Moreover, this indeterminacy is not just an epistemological hurdle; “there is no fact of the matter as to what someone means by his or her words” (Davidson [1982b] 2004: 169).


Davidson detects two sources of indeterminacy. The first is the inscrutability of reference. The second is the “blurring of the distinction between the analytic and the synthetic” (Davidson 1999a: 6) that results from the fact that we can alter translations through “trade-offs between the beliefs we attribute to a speaker and the interpretations we give to his words” (Davidson [1973] 1984: 139). As regards the inextricability of linguistic understanding and factual knowledge, applying charity “across the board” reduces our leeway in translating even \emph{theoretical} sentences: it makes the natives sensible and rational by our lights as far as possible (Davidson [1979b] 1984: 228). Furthermore, while inscrutability is complete with respect to assigning reference to material sentence components, it does not extend to \emph{logical form}: “correct theories will agree on the whole about the quantificational structure to be assigned to a given sentence.” One reason for this optimism is the existence of “semantic constraints” on interpretation, namely that it must take the form of a “Tarski-style theory of truth,” thus forcing Jungle into the “procrustean bed of quantification theory” (Davidson [1973] 1984: 136n, [1974a] 1984: 151, [1979b] 1984: 228).


But \emph{if} Quine's case for inscrutability stands, then by imposing logical form, a Tarskian theory of meaning will simply exceed both the available evidence and the facts of the matter. Perhaps that case can be resisted because it relies on behaviorist strictures that are inapposite with respect to the established notion of meaning Davidson seeks to capture. And perhaps it can be weakened by treating charity as a precondition of interpretation (Davidson 1999a: 5, 1999b: 81–82, [1979a] 1984: 228–229; Glock 2003: 214–216). Davidson makes standards of rationality, including standards of quantificational inference, \emph{constitutive} not just of the concept of (correct) interpretation, but also of concepts like language, thought and intentional action. Forms of behavior that cannot be interpreted as by-and-large rational by these standards simply do not \emph{count as} linguistic or as manifesting beliefs and desires.


Some readers have complained that treating the requirement of charity as constitutive rather than a matter of empirical psychology distances Davidson from Quine's naturalism (Sinclair 2006: 120–121). It certainly undermines Davidson's insistence that Quine's rejection of the analytic\Slash{}synthetic distinction “has saved the philosophy of language as a serious subject” (Davidson [1983] 2001: 145). Indeed, Davidson was forced to concede that it “cannot be a factual question” whether a creature with thoughts is approximately rational (Davidson 1985: 245).


Neither Quine nor Davidson denies that real-life translation from scratch relies on empirical assumptions about human behavior. But for the most part, they forsake such anthropological resources (\emph{pace} Sinclair 2006: 118: see Davidson [1979a] 1984: 230). Rightly so, since the purpose of their heuristic exercise is to enforce an approach to interpretation that is as unassuming as possible. If anthropological assumptions can be taken for granted, their arguments for meaning being indeterminate – even to the extent acknowledged by Davidson – collapse. And if they cannot, there is no alternative to charity in solving the interpretative equation with two unknowns – meaning and belief. Moreover, Davidson is right to insist that behavior that is \emph{ab initio} uninterpretable cannot count as language (Glock 2007). Therefore, the moral should not be “So much the worse for treating charity as a conceptual requirement!” but rather “So much the better for the distinction between the conceptual and the factual!”

\section{6. Assent, Distal versus Proximal Meaning, and the “Third Dogma”}


The evidence for radical interpretation concerns what sentences the natives “hold true” under what circumstances. This in turn is manifest in their “prompted assent” (Davidson [1973] 1984: 135, [1983] 2001: 147), which is Quine's suggestion. But Davidson disowns Quine's behaviorism: “where [Quine] likes assent and dissent because they suggest a behaviourist test, I despair of behaviourism and accept frankly intensional attitudes towards sentences, such as holding true” (Davidson [1979b] 1984: 230–231). At the same time, Davidson states that holding true and prompted assent are intentional \emph{without} being intensional, in that they relate an agent to an uninterpreted sentence. The truth of “\emph{A} assents to utterance \emph{u}” does not depend on how \emph{A} and \emph{u} are described (Davidson [1991] 2001: 211, 2003: 285–286, 2005: 66–67; George 2004: 12n; Sinclair 2006: 115).


Now, an extensional analysis \emph{does} capture Quine's behaviorist conception. He is talking not of assent in the ordinary sense, but of “surface assent,” a mere noise or bodily movement which is neither intensional nor intentional (Quine 1975a: 91, 1986: 564). For that very reason, however, it cannot fulfill the role assigned to it in radical translation\Slash{}interpretation. Even Quine grants that to assent to a sentence is to pass a \emph{verdict on its truth}, and that the subject \emph{believes} what is uttered (Quine 1981a: 48). This in turn implies that assent and dissent are not mechanical reactions, but responses to something the native has \emph{understood} – the anthropologist's utterance. Consequently, the concept of assent that Quine actually deploys is intimately interwoven with epistemic and intensional notions. Furthermore, he could not settle for a behaviorist \emph{ersatz} like surface assent. Unless it expresses what the native \emph{believes to be true}, assent (and the notion of stimulus-meaning defined by reference to it) becomes irrelevant not just to meaning but also to \emph{epistemology}.


This holds with a vengeance for the notion of holding true that a Davidsonian interpreter requires. Holding true is based on reasons. Admittedly, on the assumption that holding true is an attitude towards \emph{sentences} rather than to \emph{what is said} by their utterance, it does \emph{not} create an intensional context. But that assumption is dubious (Hacker 1998). Even if that qualm is waived, the sentences to which holding true relates a speaker are \emph{uninterpreted} only by the radical interpreter, \emph{not by the speaker herself}. The interpreter must acknowledge that the speaker's attitude \emph{is} intensional, and he can do so \emph{without} presuming a prior understanding of the sentence the speaker holds true. That is why Davidson emphasizes that there is an “irreducibly intensional element” to radical interpretation. We can neither avoid intensional notions nor reduce them to something more “scientific,” “behaviouristic, neurological, or physiological” (Davidson [1980] 2004: 155, [1997] 2005: 139, 2005: 56–57). What Davidson eschews are notions that are \emph{both} intensional \emph{and} too close to the notion of meaning which the theory elucidates (Davidson [1973] 1984: 128, [1976b] 1984: 175–176; [1977a] 1984: 205–206, [1977b] 1984: 219).


For both Quine and Davidson, conditions of assent determine sentence meaning, and hence constitute the evidence for radical translation\Slash{}interpretation. But their accounts of these conditions differ sharply. Quine's “proximal” theory describes them in terms of neural stimulations on the subject's surface. Davidson's “distal” theory describes them in terms of macroscopic objects and events. The “locus of shared meaning” are external phenomena rather than neural firings (Davidson 1999a: 41).


For Quine, the conditions that prompt assent to an observation sentence determine its meaning, because they constitute the sensory evidence on which the assent rests. Unlike previous empiricists, he does not equate this evidence with ideas or sense data. The empirical foundations of knowledge and meaning must be intersubjectively accessible and hence physical rather than mental (Quine 1960: 234–235, 1969: 87, 1981a: 39–40). Quine grants that observation sentences are, by-and-large, \emph{about} macroscopic objects (Quine 1974: 40, 1981a: 40, 1999: 74). At the same time, he insists that the evidence on which speakers assent to observation sentences consists of neural triggerings. The native might continue to assent to “Gavagai” even if the animal were replaced by a counterfeit; conversely, she might dissent even in the presence of an animal, pending her sensory stimulations.


According to Davidson, this theory of meaning and evidence is based on a “third dogma of empiricism,” the dualism of conceptual scheme and empirical content; it implies that “epistemic intermediaries” intervene between the world and our beliefs and utterances (Davidson [1973] 1984, [1974c] 1984, [1983] 2001, [1990] 2001). He accuses Quine of succumbing to the empiricist “myth of the given,” the idea that pre-conceptual sensory stimulations provide the foundations of knowledge and of meaning.


Several commentators have rushed to Quine's defense. They point out that he protested against the allegation of treating translation as a matter of “neurologizing” (Quine 1994: 502, 1996: 159). Neural triggerings, he avers, concern not the evidence radical translation is based on, “but why it works” (Quine 1999: 74). Knowledge of patterns of triggered receptors is not the translator's, but that of the theorist approaching matters from a scientific perspective. And such knowledge would not provide the natives with \emph{evidence} in the ordinary, epistemic sense (Marvan 2007: 108–109; Sinclair 2007). This defense founders. In spite of later protestations, Quine originally treated translation as a matter of “neurologizing”: “In experimentally equating the uses of ‘Gavagai’ and ‘Rabbit’ it is stimulations that must be made to match, not animals” (Quine 1960: 31). This is why he \emph{defined} both stimulus-meaning and observation sentences in \emph{neural} terms. Second, the radical translator is supposed to have access to all and only the evidence that is \emph{legitimately available} according to the \emph{theorist of radical translation}. Finally, stimulus meaning is defined in neural terms precisely because neural triggerings are supposed to provide the evidence on which the native assents to a sentence, and \emph{thereby} to constitute its stimulus meaning. After all, Quine's notion of meaning is verificationist (Quine 1969: 78, 81, 1986: 459). Unless neural triggerings were the translator's evidence for ascribing stimulus conditions, they would be irrelevant to stimulus meaning.


Quine for his part has accused Davidson of confusing truth and belief. While intermediaries between world and language are superfluous in accounting for truth, they are essential to the evidence on which our beliefs rest (Quine 1981a: 39, 1990b: 3; Lauener 1990: 223–224). In response, Davidson denies that neural stimulations can play either the epistemic role of providing the evidence for our beliefs or the semantic role of determining the meaning of our sentences. Neural firings feature in the causal chain between objects and events on the one hand, beliefs and assent on the other. But to think of them as evidence is to confuse the causes of our beliefs with the “reasons” or “justification” on which they rest. Neural events cannot stand in relations of either logical or probabilistic support (Davidson [1983] 2001: 141–144, [1982b] 2004: 69–70).


\emph{Prima facie}, this line of criticism is compatible with Davidson's thesis that reasons are causes. The latter only implies that all reasons are causes, \emph{not} that all causes are reasons, thereby allowing that neural stimulations can be causes without being reasons. However, Davidson's central tenet is that events can be described in different idioms. He also insists that logical relations are \emph{de dicto}, that is, due to the way we describe things, whereas causal relations hold between events no matter how described. Therefore Davidson must allow that there are descriptions of neural events under which they stand in logical or probabilistic relations to beliefs. The retina stimulation that causes me to see a sign-post ahead marks the onslaught of my belief that there is a sign-post ahead, yet it also stands in a logical relation to that belief. An obvious remedy is to distinguish between the neural cause of my believing and the reason, which is neither the mental state of believing nor its neural cause, but rather \emph{what is believed} – an objective state of affairs, namely that there is a sign-post ahead. This remedy is suggested by some of Davidson's own remarks (e.g., Davidson 1980: xi). But it implies that there is a difference between the item that causes the believing – the neural event – and the item that justifies it – its content. Assuming a strict identity of reasons and causes, Davidson is at best entitled to insist against Quine on a distinction between \emph{causal explanation} and \emph{epistemic justification}, as when he writes “a causal explanation of a belief does not show how or why the belief is justified.” He is not entitled to invoke an \emph{ontological} distinction, for example, when he inveighs against “transmuting a cause into a reason” or writes “even if our \emph{reasons} for our beliefs are always other beliefs, the \emph{causes} sometimes lie elsewhere” (Davidson [1983] 2001: 143, 169).


Finally, Davidson has charged Quine's proximal theory with being unduly “Cartesian in spirit and consequence” (Davidson [1990] 2001: 76), because it makes conditions of assent and hence meaning \emph{private}. Quine admitted to problems on this score, and he has shifted position over the years (Quine 1990b: 2–3; 1992: 40–44, 1996). The root difficulty is that patterns of neural firings, though \emph{intersubjectively accessible}, are not necessarily \emph{shared} between different speakers. Davidson mentions the case of native and linguist confronting a warthog. The native is prompted to assent to “Gavagai.” But because of suffering from astigmatism, he has the same pattern of neural triggerings which the linguist has when confronting a rabbit. Going by stimulus meaning, the linguist would have to translate “Lo, a rabbit,” even if the native knew from past experience that no rabbit is in sight (Davidson [1990] 2001: 74).


Quine cannot have it both ways: if he is immune to worries about the third dogma because his “evidence,” so-called, is a purely causal feature, it can no longer sustain a (normative) epistemology (\emph{pace} Sinclair 2007: 464–465). Nor can it serve any semantic function in determining content, at least on an empiricist understanding of meaning. On the other hand, if his notion of evidence is to retain epistemological and semantic clout, it is subject to Davidson's worries.

\section{7. Farewell to Empiricism?}


Unfortunately, Davidson move away from Quine's neural empiricism is halfhearted. He accepts that “linguistic phenomena are nothing but behavioural, biological or physical phenomena,” while insisting that the “exotic” semantic vocabulary in which we describe these phenomena cannot be reduced to the vocabulary of physics. The task, therefore, is “bridging the gap” between the semantic and the intentional on the one hand, and the physical on which it supervenes on the other (Davidson [1973] 1984: 126–127; 2005: 56). Radical interpretation is supposed to show how theories of meaning can be derived from “more primitive data,” purely physical descriptions of human behavior.


“Everyday linguistic and semantic concepts are part of an intuitive theory for organizing more primitive data, so only confusion can result from treating these concepts and their supposed objects as having a life of their own.” The starting point of this “theory-construction” is “nonsemantical evidence” “that can be stated without essential use of such linguistic concepts as meaning, interpretation, synonymy, and the like” (Davidson [1974a] 1984: 142–143, 1984: xx). The “interpreter has nothing to go on but the pattern of the sounds the speaker exhibits” or “nonlinguistic goings on” like “movements of the lips and larynx” (Davidson [1984] 2001: 13–14, [1973] 1984: 126).


In such passages, Davidson himself succumbs to the myth of the given. Even interpretation from scratch cannot be a matter of inferring meanings and beliefs from a physical description of mere sounds and bodily movements, no matter whether macroscopic or neural. While we find it easy to describe human behavior, that of aliens included, in “rich” mental terms, we are ignorant of the physical descriptions that radical interpretation treats as evidence. We can describe a person's features as “sad,” “radiant” or “bored,” yet do not know how to describe his face in purely physical terms (Wittgenstein 1967: sec. 225). And even a complex philosophy lecture is easier to understand than to describe in terms of its physical or phonetic features. In other words, we are able to state the conclusions of the alleged inferences, without even being able to understand either the premises or the inference ticket.


One might reply that the inferences are unconscious in the demanding sense that we can never become aware of them. Now, human thought and speech depends on complex causal processes that are unconscious in this way. But these neurophysiological causes are not pieces of evidence from which we derive, for example, beliefs about the meaning of what someone else has said. As Davidson himself urges against Quine, subjects cannot be entirely ignorant of the evidence and the inferences on which their beliefs rest.


We no more infer what people say from mere sound patterns or their physical descriptions than we infer what is before our eyes from mere shapes and patches of color. The capacities to perceive objects, to discriminate human speech, and to acquire linguistic competence given suitable training are simply part of our innate cognitive capacities. They are \emph{not mysterious}, since social and linguistic primates like ourselves could not survive without them. On occasion, Davidson recognizes such points (e.g., Davidson 1999b: 330). Furthermore, his general line on empiricism is eminently sapient. He accepts it on a “pallid” construal, according to which without perception we would have neither knowledge of the world nor communication. He rejects it on a traditional construal, according to which our beliefs are justified by something that happens to us (Davidson [1990] 2001: 68). Whether this combination is compatible with other aspects of his work – notably his attempt to accommodate externalism by introducing causal elements into his theory of meaning – is once more a moot question (Glock 2003: 259–262). But in comparison with Quine, it is an important step in the right direction.

\section{References}



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\chapter{34. Davidson and Contemporary Philosophy}


Pascal Engel

\section{1. Introduction}


For several decades, Donald Davidson has set the agenda for contemporary philosophy. His views on meaning, truth, mind, and action have provoked the reactions of at least three generations of philosophers. His most central theses, such as his causal account of reasons, his analysis of actions in terms of events, his truth-theoretic conception of meaning and his non-reductive physicalism, are still widely influential. Nevertheless, it is fair to say that much of contemporary philosophy has drifted away from Davidson's views. Philosophy, and especially analytic philosophy, being a \emph{Kampfplatz}, this is hardly surprising. But the battle is dubious. There are no clear winners, and when a camp seems to occupy the center of the field, there is still fighting on other fronts. The center of the field itself has shifted. In the 1970s, the philosophy of language was widely considered to be the first philosophy. Two decades later, its place was taken by the philosophy of mind, and since then the focus has moved toward ontology and epistemology. In what follows, I would like to sketch a map of some of these fronts, by confronting Davidson's views with some other trends in contemporary philosophy on four main themes: meaning and truth theories, action and mind, truth, knowledge and reality, rationality, and normativity. I shall try to point out that although Davidson's views have often been rejected, his influence is actually stronger than it seems. By “contemporary philosophy,” I shall mean contemporary analytic philosophy, the tradition to which Davidson belongs, although I shall mention potential points of contact with other traditions, such as that of hermeneutics, Kantianism, and pragmatism, with which Davidson's work as often been compared.

\section{2. Meaning and Truth Conditions}


Let us begin with what is perhaps Davidson's most well-known contribution to contemporary philosophy, his conception of a theory of meaning and interpretation for a language. It aims at accounting for meaning neither in terms of abstract entities, such as senses, nor in terms of mental entities, such as intentions, but in terms of truth conditions formulated in a quasi-Tarskian style. The project has two main objectives: first to articulate – although along distinctive lines – Quine's conception of radical translation, and second to give an account of the meanings of a number of fragments of natural languages in terms of their logical form. The project has been well received at a time when many philosophers agreed with David Lewis that “there is no semantics without truth-conditions” and when generative semantics aimed at identifying the deep structures of sentences of a natural language with their logical forms. Davidson offered an elegant way of using a Tarski-style theory of truth as a theory of meaning and a tractable conception of logical form. The program was twofold: in its properly semantic part, it aimed at analyzing various natural language constructions in extensional terms, and in its philosophical part, it aimed at analyzing meaning in terms of truth. It is easy to miss the originality of the project: after all, what have most analytic philosophers since Frege and Russell done, if not giving analyses of meaning in terms of truth conditions? But Davidson was not simply equating meaning and truth conditions. He meant to do it without using any notions, such as those of meaning, intensions, or translation, only by presupposing the concept of truth as already understood by speakers. This form of minimalism was not without precedents within previous analytic philosophy, and it has obvious roots in the work of F.P. Ramsey, with whom Davidson was acquainted very early on in his career (Davidson 1999a: 26).


Davidson's most successful piece of semantic analysis is undoubtedly his treatment of action sentences and adverbs. Much has been done since about the semantics of adverbs and about actions verbs, but most analyses still accept that they involve quantifying over events (Higginbotham 2009). Philosophers, however, have found less convincing his paratactic account of indirect discourse, of quotation and of moods, which are attempts to recast, in extensional terms, various intensional constructions. Formal semanticists today do not necessarily accept possible world semantics in the style of Montague and Lewis, but they have definitely accepted the intensionalist framework. Davidson kept a suspicion toward modal logic and semantics that he inherited from Quine and which is part and parcel of his minimalist program, whereas the growing consensus has been that the main philosophical tool is quantified modal logic and not the austere extensional idiom. Moreover, it was not clear how Davidsonian truth theories were compatible with theories of direct reference and demonstratives. To Field (1972), who had argued that a Tarskian truth-theory does not provide any account of reference, Davidson (1977) replied that he had no need for it. Moreover, a number of developments in the semantics of counterfactuals, of plurals, and other constructions have convinced a number of philosophers and linguists that Davidson's austere extensional diet was difficult to follow. If one compares the present landscape with the one that emerged from Davidson and Harman's collection \emph{Semantics for Natural Languages} (Davidson and Harman 1972), it seems clear that we have entered an age of logical and semantic pluralism. But probably no other research program in formal semantics has been so consciously philosophical than Davidson's, and a number of Davidsonian theses still inspire active research in this field (Lepore and Ludwig 2007).


Dummett (1975) and others have objected to Tarskian theories in Davidson's style that they could at best represent, or give an ideal description of, what speakers are supposed to know, but that they cannot actually explain their actual understanding of the contents of utterances.\footnote{Dummett later retracted from his earlier diagnosis that a Davidsonian theory had to be such an ideal description. See the appendix of Dummett (1975, 1991: 108–110, 1996: 27–28). McDowell (1987), however, takes this feature of Davidsonian theories of meaning – modesty – to be actually a positive and unavoidable one.} A symmetric objection, although from the side of philosophers inspired by Chomskyan linguistics, has been that truth conditions do not tell us anything about speakers' competence in the psychological sense. To that, Davidson has always replied that his project had never been to give an account of meaning from outside language, but to represent how an interpreter could use, together with various empirical and normative constraints, his own basic knowledge of meaning to make his way into what others mean. To use Dummett's phrase, a theory of meaning in this sense was intended to be “modest” and not “full-blooded”: it has to be formulated from within the language and from the interpreter's own privileged knowledge of what he means by his words. This interpretational stance was inspired by Quine, but it also derived from an analogy, which Davidson's later work was to make explicit, between a theory of meaning and Ramsey's decision theory: just as the principles of decision theory allow us to ascribe beliefs and desires to agents on the basis of their choices and of the framework of subjective probability, the assignment of truth conditions on the basis of the attitude of holding sentences true and of a theory of truth allows us to ascribe meanings and beliefs to speakers. This gave a strong instrumentalist and antirealist twist to Davidson's proposal, which he accentuated in talking of a theory of meaning and interpretation as providing us with a measure of the mental. Meaning is but a construct out of a theory aimed at measuring meaning. There are no meanings independently from the theories that are aimed at measuring them (Davidson 1993; Rawling 2003).


Davidson's interpretational stance stands opposed to the intentional realism of most naturalist conceptions of meaning, according to which linguistic meaning is either constituted or determined by mental contents, such as representations and intentions, and to the view that these mental contents can be explained in terms of causal facts. Davidson's holistic conception of meaning stands strongly in opposition to the atomism of many naturalistic views, such as Fodor's (1983) asymmetric dependence theory, Dretske's (1981) informational semantics, Millikan's (1984) teleosemantics, and most psychologistic versions of conceptual role semantics (Block 1986). Davidson takes meaning to be a function of propositional attitudes, essentially beliefs, desires, and preferences, and of the basic attitude of holding-true a sentence. The concept of meaning is part of an overall account of speakers as rational agents whose beliefs about their environment are largely true and whose concepts get their content from the way they help organize more primitive data, so that the evidence for a theory of meaning must not presuppose assignments of contents. Thus, perceptual contents are seen as mere causal intermediaries between our sensory stimuli and the world, and not as genuinely constitutive of content and reference. In this sense, writers like Evans (1982) or Peacocke (1992) who postulate a fundamental level of thought prior to language and analyze the reference of demonstratives in terms of basic thought contents, or Perry (2001), who analyses the meaning of “I” in terms of “egocentric” mental files, follow very un-Davidsonian path. Here, as elsewhere, it seems clear that for many contemporary philosophers a theory of linguistic meaning has to be derived from an independent and prior theory of thought, whereas for Davidson, no such dependence or reduction is possible. Although he sometimes seems ready to concede some forms of proto-thoughts in animals, departing from his official line in essays such as “Thought and talk” (1975) and “Rational animals” (Davidson 1983), he holds that thought essentially depends upon the possibility of communication and not conversely. Contrary to thinkers like John Searle (1983), he refuses to rest his conception of speech upon a conception of intentionality. Peter Strawson (1970) once described contemporary philosophy as a fight of Titans between theories of meaning in terms of intention and theories of meaning in terms of truth. The fight has not ended since, and presumably will never end, for it is one of the fundamental oppositions in philosophy.\footnote{This does not mean that Davidson cannot avail himself of the notion of speaker's intentions in Grice's sense (and he actually did in a number of his articles such as Davidson (1986b)) but only that he cannot these intentions as a prior basis for a theory of meaning.} Davidson inherited from Quine not only the view that a theory of meaning had to be empirical, but also the thesis that mental and linguistic contents are indeterminate. This constitutes part of Davidson’ reason to claim that one cannot give a naturalistic account of intentionality and meaning. But whether or not one accepts the indeterminacy thesis, Davidson's skepticism about naturalistic theories and content has not yet been proved wrong. Reductionist programs in semantics, such as informational semantics or teleosemantics, which hope to derive the contents of beliefs and desires and the meaning of expression types from biological functions, have remained highly programmatic (Loewer 1997). Such theories may give us a number of determinants of meaning, but they cannot eliminate indeterminacy. For instance, what is perhaps one of the most promising versions of teleosemantics, “success semantics” – the view that the truth conditions of our beliefs are those that guarantee the success of our actions – can be true only if the success conditions of our actions are not identified with the biological functions of our beliefs and of our desires. This places serious limitations to the reduction of mental content to teleology (Dokic and Engel 2002).


Davidson held meaning to be essentially indeterminate, and his instrumentalism entails that meaning is relative to a theory, but he never thought that this entailed any kind of skepticism or nihilism about meaning. On the contrary, he always took a truth-conditional semantics capturing the logical form of natural language sentences as giving us genuine information about the their meaning, and he took an interpretive theory to be able to determine meaning (although with always a residue of indeterminacy). A number of readers have been impressed by his famous declaration in “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs” (Davidson 1986b) that “there is no such thing as a language” and with the doubts he expressed there about the possibility of a theory of meaning. But he was mostly arguing about the irrelevance of the notion of convention, and he was not denying the existence of meanings. A number of philosophers, however, have come close to nihilism or skepticism about meaning. Thus, Stephen Schiffer (1987) has argued that whether one takes meaning as based on intentions \emph{à la} Grice or as based on truth conditions \emph{à la} Davidson, the project is doomed to failure, and that this leads us to a “no-theory theory of meaning.” Kripke's (1981) reading of Wittgenstein has made skepticism about an account of meaning at least plausible. Other philosophers have taken what has been called a “quietist” line about a theory of meaning, also inspired by Wittgensteinian considerations, but also by a certain reading of Davidson. These are “modest” theories of meaning, in Dummett's sense: one can never give any account of meaning for a language from outside the language, and, hence, that any account of truth conditions has to \emph{presuppose} knowledge of meaning, and can never explain it. Other philosophers like Paul Horwich (1998) have defended a “deflationary” conception of meaning, according to which meaning cannot consist in truth conditions, but only in rules of use. Some of these views, in their minimalistic spirit, resemble Davidson's, especially on the following point. According to Davidson, when an interpreter tries to determine the truth conditions of the language of a given speaker on the basis of what this speaker holds true, he issues (T) sentences of the form “ ‘Lilacs smell’ is true if and only if lilac smells,” and cannot use such sentences to interpret the language without already knowing the meaning of their right-hand sides. The interpreter has to know the meanings of the sentences of his own language, and he has indeed, through the principle of charity, to presuppose that most of the speaker's beliefs are true. Some of Davidson's readers, and sometimes Davidson himself, have suggested here an analogy with what is known, in the hermeneutic tradition of Heidegger and Gadamer, as the “hermeneutic circle”: interpretation cannot start if there is not a large amount of prior agreement based on a “fusion of horizons” (Malpas 1992; Ramberg 1989). Others have suggested analogies with Derrida's nihilism about meaning (Wheeler 2000). These analogies have been heartening for those who despaired of “analytic\Slash{}continental” divide in contemporary philosophy and hoped for reconciliation, although they are at odds with Davidson's insistence, until his very last essays, on the fact that he intended to have provide an informative \emph{theory} of meaning, conceived in analogy with Ramsey's decision theory, and aimed at being tested against empirical evidence. He actually thought that he had given a positive contribution to the study of meaning, and not a form of deflation of that very notion.


Davidson's version of the indeterminacy thesis can be confronted with those of contextualists about meaning who hold that the compositional features of a sentence and its truth conditions underdetermine its overall meaning and what is said by it (Recanati 2004; Sperber and Wilson 1986). On this view, the truth conditions are determined at least as much, and sometimes more, by extralinguistic features of the context in which the sentence is uttered, and these contextual factors are unpredictable. According to semantic contextualism, there is no proposition expressed by a sentence in a context, but only a kind of frame or propositional matrix unconstrained syntactically that is freely enriched by contextual elements and speakers' intentions. On some accounts of this kind, such as the one given by relevance theorists, almost all of meaning is the result of a process of interpretation and pragmatics that takes precedence fully over semantics. Contextualism is often presented by its advocates as a refutation of the truth-conditional conception of meaning. But it is not clear that it refutes it at all, for at least three reasons. First, contextualists have to accept that not everything that belongs to meaning is derived from contextual factors: there must at least be some modicum of syntax and structure on which to hook these factors (Stanley 2007). Contextualists typically deny that there can be any “minimal” proposition that is invariant across contexts, but it is not clear that they do not need any such minimal propositions (Cappelen and Lepore 2004). Second, the fact that quite a number of expressions manifest an “open texture” does not entail that these expressions do not have correctness conditions. Third, it is not clear that contextualists get rid of truth conditions, rather than relativize truth conditions to a number of parameters. So it is hard to see how pragmatics could at the same time be “truth conditional” (Recanati 2010) and keep the requirement of compositionality of meaning if it does not retain a semantically evaluable core in sentences.

\section{3. Mind and Action}


Many philosophers have found Davidson's views on action and mind attractive because they seemed to combine three widely held views with a more original one. The first was the causal character of reasons (Davidson 1963). The second was the ontological identity of mind and brain, in its token-token version, or at least the principle of supervenience of mental properties upon physical properties. The third was that mind–body identity is compatible with the impossibility of type-type reduction of the one to the other, as the argument from the multiple realizability of mental states seems to imply. If Davidson had held only these three views, he could have been a functionalist in the philosophy of mind, and he would have stayed in company with the nonreductionist orthodoxy. But he also held the thesis of the “anomalous” character of the mental: there are no strict psychophysical laws and no strict psychological laws. His argument in “Mental Events” (1970a) is based on his theory of individual events as distinct from their descriptions which allows the combination of ontological monism with explanatory dualism: although individual mental events are identical with physical events, the descriptions which explain the respective events cannot be reduced to each other. Nonreductive monism has sometimes been considered as belonging to the family of views known as “emergentism,” which was defended by British philosophers, such as Broad and Alexander. Davidson prefers to compare it with Spinoza's substance monism combined with property dualism (Davidson 1995a). Many contemporary philosophers have doubted that Davidson could maintain the compatibility of all the principles that constitute his anomalous monism.


Davidson's thesis of the causal character of reasons is closely associated with what is often called the Humean theory of motivation, according to which actions are caused by beliefs and desires: without desires, beliefs cannot cause us to act. Indeed, Wittgensteinian opponents to both views have not been silent (Alvarez 2010). But the main opposition came from moral philosophy. Although Davidson has always insisted that reasons are \emph{rational} causes, and, hence, that they are also normative, he clearly took reasons to be mental states and to be “internal” in Bernard Williams' (1979) sense. Many philosophers disagree: they take reasons to be “external” and to be objective facts, and they consider that the normativity of reasons has to go with a form of moral realism (Parfit 2011). Davidson, however, claims to be a moral realist (Davidson 1995b). So Davidson faces a challenge – trying to combine an internalist conception of motivational reasons with an objectivist conception of values – which is still with us (Skorupski 2011).


Jaegwon Kim (1993, 1998) has done much to convince philosophers that anomalous monism is unable to deal with mental causation and that it entails epiphenomenalism about the mental: how could he maintain that the mental is causally efficacious if the causal relation between a mental and a physical event is only due to the fact that they instantiate a physical law? Kim argues that Davidson's version of the supervenience of the mental on the physical is too weak, and that reductive physicalism is still a live option. The multiple realizability thesis has also come under fire, and the antireductionist consensus has been shattered (Bickle 2003; Gillett 2007; Sober 1999). Davidson's view of the mental, in spite of his commitment to ontological monism, is still perceived as strongly antinaturalist and as hostile to the idea that there could be a science of the mind. This has attracted to him some sympathy in hermeneutics circles, and some hostility among philosophers inspired by cognitive science.


Are Davidson's views really incompatible with the pursuits of cognitive psychology and other scientific studies of the mind? Indeed, they stand against the most “ruthless” versions of it. But they are also incompatible with much work in cognitive psychology if one understands them as involving the complete autonomy of our common sense talk about the mental from any kind of subpersonal level of psychological explanation. Some philosophers even reject Davidson's weak version of the identity theory. They hold that any kind of explanation of mental events in cognitive or in neuropsychological terms is actually about something that \emph{cannot} be mental, since the mental is identified only at the personal and rational level of our ordinary propositional attitudes (Hornsby 1997; McDowell 1985). If the autonomy of the mental is understood in this strong sense, it seems clear that anomalous monism has no traffic with cognitive science or even with scientific psychology. Davidson, however, although he always rejected the possibility of strict psychological and psychophysical laws, did not deny the existence of nonstrict laws. The anomalism of the mental does not prevent the existence of explanatory levels intermediate between physical and psychological explanations, as is common in the current methodology of cognitive neuroscience.


If we move to the other end, are the claims of \emph{non}autonomy of the mental that are associated with what is often called “new wave reductionism” fully justified? Not if they amount to versions of eliminativism, which tell us that mental properties are mere fictions. Sometimes, however, Davidson's views have been understood as implying a form of eliminativism, and this charge is often associated with that of epiphenomenalism and with his analogy of interpretation with measurement. But this reading of his views is wrong. That there may be indeterminacy in our “measure of the mind” does not imply that there is nothing to be measured. Anomalous monism is committed to the existence of mental events, and the causal theory of action implies that there are such things as mental causes. Similarly, there would be no actions if there were no intentions. Davidson's realism about the mental will of course always seem shallow to those who reject the indeterminacy thesis.

\section{4. Truth, Knowledge, and Reality}


Although he defends ontological views, Davidson has never taken ontology as first philosophy. He graduated during the heyday of logical positivism when metaphysics was more or less ostracized from philosophy, but he followed Quine in taking metaphysics to be a respectable subject, provided that it describes the commitments of the language of science and of natural language. He agreed with Dummett on the role of the philosophy of language as primary philosophy, and that metaphysical distinctions and theses have to been approached through investigating the structure of our language (Davidson 1977). Thus, a central part of his argument in favor of an ontology of events or on the nature of causal relations is semantic: given that semantic structure and logical form reveals our ontological commitments and that our view of the world cannot but be massively true, we can read off the ontology from the semantics of our language. The view that the ontological structure of the world could be \emph{prior} to our understanding of it through language seems alien to him. The same is true when he discusses epistemological issues. As he once said, “Radical interpretation is epistemology seen in the mirror of meaning” (Davidson 1975). This is in sharp contrast with much of contemporary analytic philosophy, where not only ontology has regained its precedence over the philosophy of language (Lowe 1998), but also where various versions of metaphysical realism are flourishing.


Actually Davidson's interpretationist stance has been understood as implying some form of idealism, and especially of the transcendental kind. Two of his most famous arguments suggest this reading. The first is the argument against conceptual schemes (Davidson 1969): there cannot be completely incommensurable conceptual schemes since any attempt to establish their existence would have to presuppose the possibility of translation, which in turn presupposes that we share, in large part, a large body of truths.


The second is the argument against the possibility of massive error (Davidson 1986a), which he derives from the indispensability of the principle of charity, which has the consequence that skepticism is ruled out \emph{a priori} and that knowledge of the world can be vindicated on the basis of the coherence of our beliefs, as an indicator of their truth. These arguments fail to convince when they are considered in isolation (Sosa 2003). But they gain more plausibility if they are understood as transcendental arguments about the \emph{possibility} of knowledge. This seems to put squarely Davidson within the Kantian camp, along with Strawson and Sellars in the Anglophone world, and along with a long lineage of German idealist philosophers, from Kant to Cohen, Cassirer, and Habermas. Davidson has indeed on several occasions invoked transcendental arguments in his work, the latest being his triangulation argument according to which the possibility of thought about an objective world requires the presence of two creatures and of a shared environment, and which for this reason can be called a an argument for transcendental externalism about thought (Bridges 2006). Davidson's Kantianism, if such there be, is rather far from Kant. Although he holds that knowledge of our own minds, knowledge of others and knowledge of an objective world are interconnected (Davidson 1991), he does so in a very un-Kantian fashion. As another contemporary philosopher also attracted by Kantianism, McDowell (1994) has remarked, Davidson does not have the equivalent of what Kant calls “intuitions,” since he holds that sensations are only causal intermediaries between our minds and the world. Since he considers that “only beliefs can justify beliefs,” he does not have the notion of what Kant calls the conditions of the possibility of experience. Neither does he have the Kantian concept of “spontaneity,” nor the notion of the synthetic character of judgment. Can he, while he officially rejects the analytic\Slash{}synthetic distinction, countenance the very idea of \emph{a priori} knowledge without which there cannot be any form of transcendental philosophy? He certainly accepts that the conditions of interpretation and the use of the principle of charity yield a form of \emph{a priori} knowledge of the proposition that thinkers have knowledge of their own mind and of the truth of other people's beliefs. He also takes the principles of rationality that we need to presuppose in interpretation to have an \emph{a priori} status. But he does not have a substantive conception of the \emph{a priori,} as with Kant's notion grounded in the categories of the understanding and of the forms of sensible intuition. Indeed, he cannot have such a conception, if he rejects the very idea of a conceptual scheme that would organize the world from the point of view of a transcendental subject. So his Kantianism has to be, like many contemporary versions of Kantianism, rather mild. It can actually be combined with a much more realistic outlook in epistemology. Williamson (2007: 247–277) suggests that if we take the principle of charity not as the presupposition that most of our belief are true, but as the presupposition that we have \emph{knowledge} of a lot of truths, not only radical interpretation can proceed as a method of knowledge maximization, but also we can answer the skeptic along externalist lines that are much more consonant to Davidson's externalism about the mental.


Other readers of Davidson, such as Rorty (1986), have taken him to be a kind of pragmatist, and some volumes have appeared classifying him among pragmatists within American philosophy (Murphy and Murphy 1990). It is clear, however, that Davidson can neither be a pragmatist in the classical Peircean sense (since he strongly denies that truth is the ideal limit of inquiry), nor in the Jamesian sense (since he does not equate truth with utility). According to Rorty, pragmatism amounts to a rejection of the correspondence conception of truth and of the dualism of scheme and content. Pragmatism, for him, involves a commitment to antifoundationalism about knowledge and a deflationary view about truth and all matters ontological. There is no doubt that some of these negative theses have some echoes within Davidson's philosophy, and that in some cases, he has met with approval some of Rorty's suggestions (Davidson 1987, 2000). But the analogies stop here. For not only would it be strange to say that a philosopher who insists on the idea that events are ontologically fundamental entities has no interest for ontology whatsoever, but also there are no traces, in Davidson's philosophy, of the basic tenet of pragmatism: the idea that theoretical reasons are ultimately practical reasons. Davidson certainly shared with Ramsey and Quine the idea that thought is closely associated with action, and he held that beliefs are related in complex ways to dispositions to act and to attitudes of holding sentences true. The connexion between belief, desire and action has, since Peirce, been consubstantial with many forms of pragmatism. But Davidson never held a simple dispositional theory of belief and he did not subscribe to the pragmatist thesis that the ultimate source of epistemic justification lies in our actions.


The exact nature of Davidson's position with respect to the metaphysical issue of realism and antirealism has to be evaluated against his conception of truth. It is clear, from his discussions with Dummett, that he intended to eschew any form of verificationism about truth. It is also clear that he rejected what Putnam calls “external realism.” It is clear too from his long-standing acceptance of the Frege–Church “slingshot” argument that he held that the conception of truth as correspondence with facts is hopeless. For many contemporary defenders of realist conceptions of truth, however, a correspondence view that would reject the very idea that facts or states of affairs as the basic “truthmakers” would seem to be a kind of philosophical solecism (Armstrong 2003). Talking, as Davidson sometimes does of, “correspondence without confrontation,” does not bring us closer a “realist” a conception of truth in the usual sense. So given that he is not a realist about facts, does it follow that is Davidson a neutralist or a deflationist about truth? His long-time acceptance of Tarski's conception of truth suggests such an interpretation, if one reads, as is often done, into Tarski's views on truth a form of deflationism. But Davidson is clear that he rejects deflationism in the sense in which it has been defended, in particular, by writers like Paul Horwich (1991), mostly for two reasons. The first is that Horwich's version of deflationism rests on the equivalence “the proposition that P is true iff P,” which presupposes that we know the content of the sentence “P” and that we predicate truth of propositions. This, Davidson tells us, cannot suit the purposes of a theory of interpretation, which is precisely supposed to deal with sentences held true but uninterpreted in order to get access to their meaning. In this respect, Davidson is closer to disquotationalism, which is most of the time construed as taking truth to be a predicate of sentences. The second is that, unlike the deflationist, Davidson takes the notion of truth to do substantial work within a theory of interpretation. Unlike the deflationist, but also unlike classical theories, Davidson does not try to \emph{define} truth or to eliminate it (Davidson 1996). Does that leave us with the kind of quietism that has been expressed by McDowell as a mere truism about truth: “There is no ontological gap between the sort of thing one can mean, or generally the sort of thing one can think, and the sort of thing that can be the case. When one thinks truly, what one thinks \emph{is} the case” (McDowell 1994: 27)? There are undoubtedly sometimes such quietist accents in Davidson. But his last word seems to me to consist again in his instrumentalistic idea that truth, understood in Tarski's sense but also taken as a primitive for a theory of meaning, is an irreducible posit within a theory of meaning, action and belief. It seems to me that it still leaves us with a form of realism, not as a substantive and explanatory thesis, as it is often defended within contemporary philosophy (Fine 2001), but with a form of indispensability thesis about our ways of thinking, in the sense that Stroud (2011) has proposed. Reality, truth, knowledge are basic concepts which we cannot further define, but which are indispensable to our thought in general. I concur with Stroud that this is a very Kantian way of thinking, which puts philosophers like him and Davidson at some distance from those contemporary views that hope to give to metaphysics a grounding status.

\section{5. Normativity and Rationality}


There is one theme in Davidson's thought that more than any other is still of relevance within contemporary philosophy. It is the idea that thought, language, and action have an irreducibly normative dimension. Although this is a long-standing Kantian theme (Engel 2009), it has featured prominently within contemporary philosophy, at least since Kripke's emphasis on this theme in his reading of Wittgenstein's views on rule following. There are, however, many strands in these debates, and Davidson stands apart from most of the most common ones.


Many philosophers, starting from Wittgenstein (Kripke 1981), have held that meaning is normative, in the sense that the meanings of expressions is governed by rules, which express normative prescriptions to the effect that we ought to follow them. The claim can be extended to concepts and to the content of thoughts: to each kind of concept, and to each type of thought content composed out of these concepts, are associated some normative conditions for their application (Brandom 1994; Burge 1986; Peacocke 1992). Davidson never subscribed to such views about meaning and content normativity. He strongly opposes analyses of meaning in terms of rules, and \emph{a fortiori} rejects normative accounts of concepts. For him, the normativity that may affect content does not lie within meanings or concepts, but pertains only to the role of the “normative” principles of rationality that are constitutive of our understanding of thought and action. What are these principles? These are the “high-profile” (Bilgrami 1992) principles of logic involved within truth theories for the interpretation of meaning, the principles of probability and of decision theory, and some even more general principles that make interpretation possible, such as the principle of charity, in its two sides: the principle “of correspondence” that most of our beliefs are true, and the principle of “coherence,” that our beliefs are, by and large rational. Indeed, Davidson sometimes says that because these rational constraints are constitutive of interpretation, “thought” itself is “normative,” and this is one of his major reasons for the anomalousness of the mental, which unlike the physical realm, is governed by such rational principles. But if Davidson defends a normativity thesis about meaning and thought here, the normativity cannot be \emph{intrinsic} to meaning and thought, but only extrinsic, through the constraints of interpretation. Moreover, this “normativity” is not normativity at all, if by this term one means that normativity implies normative force – norms entail prescriptions about what one ought to do or think, and must be able to \emph{motivate} us – and normative freedom – norms are subject to exceptions, and one may choose not to be governed by them (Railton 2003). Davidson's notion of the normativity of thought satisfies neither of these conditions. The normative rationality constraints that weigh on our interpretation of mind and action are not normative, but \emph{descriptive} of ideal agents and thinkers. They are better called \emph{ideals}. And these “norms” are inescapable: they are the very conditions of thought, and in this sense, do not involve any normative freedom. In this sense, Davidson's conception of mind is not normative at all (Engel 2009; Glüer and Wifforss 2009; Schroeder 2003).


Normativity, however, may be an intrinsic feature not of meanings and of mental contents, but of \emph{attitudes}. In this sense, normativity pertains not to thoughts or to the concepts that feature in them, but to our beliefs, desires, hopes, or judgments. We could say that insofar as beliefs are subject to rationality constraints, they have normative essences or obey to constitutive norms. Thus, belief is governed by a norm of truth: a belief is correct if and only if it is true and it is constrained by evidential norms (Boghossian 2003; Engel 2000). Could Davidson accept such a weaker version of the view that thought is normative? It is dubious: the normativity that is attached to thought does not pertain to belief and to other attitudes, but to thinking in general or to our very understanding of what thinking is.


Davidson rejection of a substantive analysis of the normativity of thought brings his views closer to the deflationist accounts of this normativity that take it as an extrinsic feature of content and attitudes. In the same spirit, he rejects strongly the suggestion that there might be an intrinsic connection between the norm of truth for belief and the idea that truth might be a goal of inquiry (Davidson 1999b; Engel 1999). It would seem, however, that if one wants to do justice to the normativity of belief, of justification, and of knowledge, one will need a stronger notion of epistemic normativity than the one that Davidson admits (Engel 2008; Sosa 2010). Many epistemologists and philosophers of mind today try to find a path between the Charybdis of inflating the notion of thought with normative implications and the Scylla of deflating the normative implications of thought to mere ideal principles of rationality.


Davidson's reluctance to accept the idea that we could codify our epistemic and practical norms stems in part from his holistic conception of the mental (Child 1994). If rationality where codifiable, we could formulate a set of rules and principles, and a set of circumstances, from which we could deduce, on a particular occasion, how they can be applied. But there is no such recipe. In so far as the norms of rationality are those of interpretation, there is no definite set of principles that could tell us in advance what is the best possible interpretation of an agent. General epistemological principles like Carnap's principle of total evidence, or the principles of decision theory, such as the principle of maximization of expected utility, frame our conceptions of beliefs and desires, but they cannot be expected to be exceptionless. The uncodifiability of rationality is a lesson that Davidson draws in his analysis of practical reasoning (Davidson 1970b) in his criticism of psychology (Davidson 1974b) and in his analysis of communication (Davidson 1986b). A natural question to raise for his position is: where do the principles of interpretation come from (Braddon-Mitchell and Jackson 1998)? Is there no hope to understand their natural basis in the human mind? Philosophers and psychologists have investigated the nature of our commonsense understanding of the mind, and discussed whether this understanding could be based upon a capacity of simulation or upon a tacit knowledge of basic principles. Both approaches are compatible with readings of the principle of charity as a principle of “humanity,” according to which one should not simply maximize not only truth but comprehension, through a form of empathy or simulation of other people's minds (Grandy 1973).


Here again we can interpret Davidson's thought in two opposite directions. On the one hand, his strong opposition to the idea of a science of rationality (at least insofar as that requires strict laws) and to cognitive science (in its reductive mood) in general puts him closer to the hermeneutical tradition of philosophers like Dilthey, Weber, Collingwood, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, and in general to philosophers inspired by Wittgenstein, like Anscombe, McDowell, and Rorty. On the other hand, it is not clear that Davidson, for all his opposition to reductive naturalism and to scientific psychology, would be opposed to attempts to give appropriate empirical bases to decision theory while being conscious of the limits of its application. The fact that rationality is uncodifiable does not mean it is not codified: we have principles of logic and of decision-making, and we can learn where they come from, although we can never apply these in a deductive manner. His discussion of the uncodifiability of reasons anticipates much of recent debates about whether rationality is normative or is a matter of appropriate reasons (Kolodny 2005, Broome 2007).

\section{6. Conclusion}


I have tried to suggest that although a number of Davidson's views have been subject to criticism or strongly rejected by many in contemporary philosophy, the basic set of issues that he has contributed to putting into place is still with us. A philosophy, however, is not only a set of theses and a configuration of problems. It is also a way of approaching these problems, a style, and an attitude. Davidson's style of philosophizing exhibits the same kind of duality that one can notice in his main theses. On the one hand, it is the style of analytic philosophy, with its use of definitions, of examples and counterexamples, and its attempt to propose positive programs for explicating basic philosophical notions, such as those of truth, belief, knowledge, action, or reason in precise terms that borrow from the methods of logic and probability theory. In this respect Davidson is an heir of the logical positivism of the twentieth century. On the other hand, Davidson expressed doubts about whether philosophy could ever find complete and satisfactory definitions of the main philosophical notions or subject them to any naturalistic or scientific treatment. In this respect, he takes philosophy to be a humanistic discipline. He was a reader of Ramsey, Carnap, and Quine, but also of Dante, Joyce, and indeed of Plato and the classics, as it is obvious to readers of his work on practical reasoning, on desire or knowledge. He sometimes says that his basic concerns in philosophy are ethical. To many of his early followers who saw his work as an inspiration for linguistic theory and formal semantics, this might come as a surprise. It also contrasts strongly with views of many contemporary analytic philosophers, who look to merge their enterprise with science. But for those who attend to the whole corpus of his writings, it is not a surprise. One of the reasons why one can predict that his work will stand as a major source of inspiration for future philosophy is the way he managed to strike a balance between these fundamental orientations of philosophy.

% Notes
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\end{amusebiblio}

\chapter{Name Index}



\begin{amusebiblio}


Anscombe, G.E.M


Árdal, P


Aristotle


Austin, J.L.


Ayer, A.J.


Becker, E


Bennett, Jonathan


Bishop, John


Block, N


Boghossian, P


Boisvert, D


Bradley


Bratman, M


Broad, C.D.


Bunker, Archie


Burge, T


Cappelen, H


Carnap


Castañeda, H


Child, T.W.


Chisholm, R


Church, A


Dasenbrock, R


de Man, P


Descartes


Dewey, J


Donnellan, K


Dray, W.


Dretske, Fred


Dummett, M


Edwards, J


Elugardo, R


Evans, Gareth


Feinberg, J


Feyerabend, P


Field, H


Fish, S


Fodor, J.


Føllesdal, D


Foster


Foucalt, M


Frankfurt, Harry


Frege


Gallistel, R


Genova, A.C.


Gödel, K


Goldman, Alvin


Grice, H.P.


Groenendijk, J.A.G


Hacking, I


Hampshire, S.


Hand, M


Hare, R.M.


Harman, G


Hart, H.L.A


Hawthorne, J


Hempel, Carl


Hirsch, E.D.


Hoeltje, M


Honoré, A.M.


Horwich, P


Hume


Jackson, Frank


James, William


Jeffrey


Kahneman, D


Kalish, D


Kamerling, A


Kant


Karttunen, L


Kenny, A.


Kim, Jaegwon


King, J


Klein, P


Knapp, Steven


Kölbel, M


Kratzer, A


Kripke


Kugel, J


Kuhn, T


Lance, M


Larson, D


Lehrer, Keith


Lemmon, J


Lepore, E.


Leslie, S.J.


Leśniewski, S


Levine, J


Lewis, C.I.


Lewis, D


Ludwig, K.


Lycan, W


Mackie, J


Malcolm, N


McDowell, J


McGinn, C


McKay, A


McLaughlin, B.


Mead, G.H.


Melden, A.I.


Michaels, Walter Benn


Millikan, R


Montague, R.


Montminy, M


Moore, G.E.


Myers, R.H.


Nagel, T


Nozick, R


Pagin, P


Partee, B


Peacocke, C


Peirce, C.S.


Perry, J


Philebus


Pietroski, P


Plato


Puolakka, K


Putnam, H


Quine, W.V.O


Ramsey


Rashi


Recanati, F


Reimer, M


Rorty


Russell, B.


Ryle, G.


Sainsbury, M


Schein, B.


Schiffer, S


Searle, J


Segal, G


Seymour, M


Shoemaker, S.


Smith, Michael


Soames, S


Solomon, R


Speas, M


Spinoza


Sreenivasan, G


Stainton, R.J.


Stanley, J


Stevenson, C.L.


Stokhof, M


Strawson, P.F.


Stroud, Barry


Stroud, Sarah


Szabó, Z


Tarski


Talmage, Catherine


Tolman, E.C.


Tomasello


Tversky, A


van Inwagen, P


Varzi, A


Velleman, David


Whitehead, A


Whorf, B


Williams, G.


Williams, Meredith


Williams, Michael


Williamson, T


Wilson, George


Wittgenstein


Wright, C



\end{amusebiblio}

\chapter{General Index}



\begin{amusebiblio}


accordion effect


action explanation


\emph{see also} primary reason


action explanations


\emph{see also} primary reason


action individuation


action sentences


\emph{see also} event semantics


adverbial phrases


\emph{see also} event semantics


adverbial modifiers


\emph{see also} event semantics


adverbial modification


\emph{see also} event semantics


adverbs


\emph{see also} event semantics


agency


\emph{see also} action explanation(s)


akrasia


\emph{see also} weakness of will, incontinence


all–out judgment


\emph{see also} unconditional judgment


allusion


analytic–synthetic distinction


anomalism of the mental


\emph{see also} mental anomalism, psychological laws, psychophysical laws


anomalous monism


\emph{see also} mental anomalism, psychological laws, psychophysical laws, mental autonomy


Anscombe


anti–individualism


\emph{see also} social externalism


anti–realism


antirealism


axiomatic truth theory


\emph{see also} truth, truth–theoretic semantics


basic events


\emph{see also} event individuation, event semantics


basic actions


\emph{see also} event individuation, event semantics


behavior


behaviorism


behaviorist


bridge laws


\emph{see also} psychophysical laws


canonical theorem


\emph{see also} axiomatic truth theory


canonical proofs


\emph{see also} axiomatic truth theory


causal relevance


causal concepts


causal deviance


causal explanation


causation


causatives


ceteris paribus laws


\emph{see also} strict deterministic laws


charity


\emph{see also} Principle of Charity, correspondence (principle of), Principle of Coherence


coherence theory


\emph{see also} correspondence (theory of truth)


communication


compositional semantics


\emph{see also} truth–theoretic semantics


compositional meaning theory


\emph{see also} truth–theoretic semantics


compositional


compositionality


concept of meaning


concepts


conceptual relativism


conceptual scheme


consciousness


constitutive principles


constructive theory


content externalism


context sensitive


convention


Convention T


\emph{see also} semantic concept of truth


correspondence (principle of)


\emph{see also} charity, Principle of Coherence


correspondence (theory of truth)


\emph{see also} truth, coherence theory


decision theory


see also \emph{Jeffrey}


deflationary theory


degree of belief


\emph{see also} subjective probability


demonstratives


desire


\emph{see also} pro attitude


determinism


deviant causal chains


eliminativism


empirical belief


empirical content


empiricism


emotion


epiphenomenalism


epistemology


\emph{see also} justification of beliefs, naturalized epistemology


error


\emph{see also} surprise


event semantics


event individuation


evidence transcendence


expected utility


\emph{see also} decision theory


externalism


\emph{see also} internalism


facts


\emph{see also} perceptual externalism


figuration


first person knowledge


\emph{see also} first person authority, knowledge of one's own mind


first meaning


\emph{see also} literal meaning


first person authority


\emph{see also} first person knowledge, knowledge of one's own mind


folk psychology


force


\emph{see also} speech act


foundationalism


free action


free will


freedom


functionalism


genre


hold–true attitude


holism


holistic constraint


identity theory


\emph{see also} type–type connections, token–token identity theory


idiolect


imperatives


\emph{see also} sentential moods


incontinence


\emph{see also} akrasia, weakness of will


indeterminacy of interpretation


indeterminacy of translation


indexicals


indirect discourse


inscrutability of reference


instrumentalism


intending


intensionality


intentional action


intentionally


internalism


\emph{see also} externalism


interpretive truth theory


interrogatives


\emph{see also} sentential moods


intersubjectivity


intertextuality


introspectibility


irony


\emph{see also} metaphor


irrational


\emph{see also} rationality


judgment


\emph{see also} all–out judgment, unconditional judgment


justification of beliefs


\emph{see also} epistemology


knowledge of the external world


\emph{see also} epistemology, problem of the external world


knowledge of one's own mind


\emph{see also} first person knowledge, first person authority


knowledge of other minds


\emph{see also} skepticism about other minds


lawlike


laws


\emph{see also} bridge laws, psychophysical laws, psychological laws


learnability argument


learnable languages


literal meaning


\emph{see also} first meaning


literary interpretation


literature


logical form


\emph{see also} semantic form


logical positivism


\emph{see also} verificationism


logically equivalent singular terms


malapropism


massive error


\emph{see also} skepticism


materialism


\emph{see also} physicalism, nonreductive physicalism, nonreductive materialism


meaning skepticism


meanings


meanings as entities


measurement


measurement analogy


mental autonomy


\emph{see also} mental anomalism


mental causation


mental anomalism


\emph{see also} anomalous monism, mental autonomy


mental events


mental content


\emph{see also} though content, content externalism


metalanguage


\emph{see also} object language


metaphor


see also \emph{irony}


mind–body problem


\emph{see also} anomalous monism


mood markers


\emph{see also} sentential moods


moods


\emph{see also} sentential moods


multiple realization


\emph{see also} physical realizers


natural language semantics


naturalism


naturalized epistemology


neutral monism


nomological character of causality


nonliteral


nonreductive physicalism


\emph{see also} anomolous monism


nonreductive materialism


\emph{see also} anomolous monism


normative principles


normativity


norms of rationality


\emph{see also} irrational


object language


\emph{see also} metalanguage


objective truth


objective


\emph{see also} subjective


observation sentence


\emph{see also} stimulus meanings


Omniscient Interpreter argument


\emph{see also} massive error, skepticism


ontological commitment


ontology


ostension


parallelism


paratactic account


parataxis


passing theory


\emph{see also} prior theory


perceptual externalism


\emph{see also} externalism


performatives


philosophical psychology


physical realizers


\emph{see also} basic events


multiple realization


physicalism


\emph{see also} materialism, nonreductive physicalism, nonreductive materialism


plural object


practical reason


practical reasoning


pragmatism


pragmatists


predication


preference ranking


Principle of Charity


\emph{see also} charity, Principle of Coherence, correspondence (principle of)


primary reason


\emph{see also} action explanation(s)


principle of continence


\emph{see also} incontinence, akrasia, weakness of will


Principle of Coherence


\emph{see also} charity, correspondence (principle of)


prior theory


\emph{see also} passing theory


private language argument


privileged access


\emph{see also} first–person authority, first–person knowledge


pro attitude


\emph{see also} desire, intention


problem of the external world


\emph{see also} skepticism


property dualism


propositional attitudes


psychological laws


\emph{see also} anomalism of the mental


psychophysical supervenience


psychophysical laws


public language


qualia


quantification


quantifiers


quotation


radical interpretation


radical interpreter


radical translator


rational pattern


rationality


realism


reasons


recursive definition


reductionism


redundancy theory


see also \emph{truth}


reference


\emph{see also} inscrutability of reference


relativism


replacement


representation theorem


representation


samesays


sarcasm


\emph{see also} irony, metaphor


satisfaction


scheme–content dualism


second–order predicates


semantic concept of truth


\emph{see also} axiomatic truth theory, Convention T


semantic paradoxes


semantic innocence


semantic form


\emph{see also} logical form


semantical primitives


semantics


sensations


sentential moods


\emph{see also} mood markers, moods, interrogative, imperatives


skepticism


\emph{see also} justification of beliefs, knowledge of other minds, problem of the external world


skepticism about other minds


\emph{see also} knowledge of other minds


slingshot


social externalism


\emph{see also} anti–individualism


speech act


see also \emph{force}


stimulus meanings


strict deterministic laws


\emph{see also} ceteris paribus laws


subjective probability


\emph{see also} decision theory, degree of belief


subjective


\emph{see also} objective


substitutional quantification


supervenience


\emph{see also} pyschophysical supervenience


surprise


see also \emph{error}


Swampman


T–sentence


\emph{see also} truth–theoretic semantics, axiomatic truth theory. Convention T


tense


thematic roles


thought content


\emph{see also} mental content, content externalism


thought and language


token–token identity theory


\emph{see also} type–type connections, identity theory


transcendental argument


translation


triangulation


truth


\emph{see also} axiomatic truth theory, correspondence (theory of truth), objective truth, redundancy theory


truth bearer


truth–theoretic semantics


Twin Earth


type–type connections


\emph{see also} identity theory, token–token identity theory


unconditional judgment


\emph{see also} all–out judgment


vagueness


value


verificationism


\emph{see also} logical positivism


weakness of will


\emph{see also} akrasia, incontinence


Word and Object



\end{amusebiblio}









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The Ted K Archive





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Ernest Lepore \& Kirk Ludwig

A Companion to Donald Davidson

Blackwell companions to philosophy \#53

2013


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<\href{https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/book/10.1002/9781118328408}{www.onlinelibrary.wiley.com\Slash{}doi\Slash{}book\Slash{}10.1002\Slash{}9781118328408}>
   

       

       

       

       
         ISBN 1118328337, 9781118328330
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         Wiley-Blackwell
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\textbf{www.thetedkarchive.com}


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