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The concept of triangulation. The myth of the subjective and the source of objectivity in intersubjectivity. The essential role of language

There is a contrast between the difficulties that stand in the way of explaining in detail how we manage to find out what is in other people's minds and the relative ease with which we do it in practice. The first part of the article explores the obstacles that thwart theory, the second part describes features of our minds that work in our favor when it comes to practice. At the end it is suggested that the project of fully naturalizing our understanding of other minds — a project philosophers are bound to find enticing — is doomed. We understand others, but we cannot reduce this understanding to a branch of the natural sciences.

I know, for the most part, what I think, want, and intend, and what my sensations are. In addition, I know a great deal about the world around me. I also sometimes know what goes on in other people's minds. Each of these three kinds of empirical knowledge has its distinctive characteristics. What I know about the contents of my own mind I generally know without investigation or appeal to evidence. There are exceptions, but the primacy of unmediated self-knowledge is attested by the fact that we distrust the exceptions until they can be reconciled with the unmediated. My knowledge of the world outside of myself, on the other hand, depends on the functioning of my sense organs, and this causal dependence on the senses makes my beliefs about the world of nature open to a sort of uncertainty that arises only rarely in the case of beliefs about my own states of mind. Many of my simple perceptions of what is going on in the world are not based on further evidence; my perceptual beliefs are simply caused directly by the events and objects around me. But my knowledge of the propositional contents of other minds is never immediate in this sense; I would have no access to what others think and value if I could not note their behaviour.

The hepatopancreatic extract of M. mercenaria (hard shelled clam) was found to be a rich source for at least 16 different glycosidases. These glycosidases were successfully employed for the degradation of oligosaccharides, glycolipids, and glycoproteins at analytical as well as preparative levels. The identified glycosidases differ considerably in their stability profiles with respect to time and temperature of storage and presence of glycerol. However, most of the enzymes show higher activity at pH 4.5 than at pH 7.0, and could be bound on a DEAE CL-6B Sepharose anion-exchange column suggesting similar charge characteristics on the protein surface. A Gal beta 1, 3R linkage-specific beta-galactosidase activity has also been detected in the glycosidase-enriched fraction and has been utilized to obtain quantitative conversion of the ganglioside GM1 to GM2 on a preparative scale. The glycosidase-rich extract does not have detectable protease activity at the pH of optimal glycosidase activity (pH 4.5) and, hence, can be safely used for specific hydrolysis of carbohydrate moieties of glycoproteins and glycopeptides. This is the first report to characterize a repertoire of glycosidases from an inexpensive, dependable and convenient source that can be easily employed for compositional studies involving glycoconjugates.

Asks whether there could be a science of rationality, and proposes as an answer — Davidson's own Unified Theory of speech and action, drawing heavily on formal decision theories for explaining intentional action laid out by Ramsey and Jeffrey, but expanding their theories by adding a theory of meaning. This method of radical interpretation interprets this Unified Theory empirically, which justifies the label ‘science of rationality’. In the remainder of the chapter, the author answers the criticisms levelled by Fodor and Chomsky that target Davidson's particular way of interpreting the Unified Theory empirically.

This essay discusses Plato’s embrace of the Socratic elenchus, the inconclusive dialectic of conversational give and take wherein Socrates elicits a statement from his interlocutor, then sets out to show the statement’s inconsistency with other things the interlocutor believes. Someone who practices the elenchus can claim that he does not know what is true; it is enough that he has a method that leads to truth. It is only in the context of frank discussion, communication, and mutual exchange that trustworthy truths emerge.

This essay discusses the series of ‘Blind-Time Davidson’ drawings made by artist Robert Morris, which were inspired by Davidson’s Essays on Actions and Events. Each drawing contains a fragment from an essay by Davidson and a description of the artist’s intention in making the drawing (blindfolded). It argues that Morris depicted the essential element on which the concept of an autonomous object (and world) depends — an intersubjective measure of error and success, of truth and falsity. He has put his viewers in a position to triangulate with him the location of his creative acts.

This essay argues that the concept of truth as well as related subjects of philosophical inquiry such as knowledge, belief, intention, and memory cannot be reduced to more elementary concepts, since these are the most elementary ones available. Tarski’s truth theory is examined, and a radical alternative to the truth theories considered in the preceding essay is proposed to identify the empirical connections between the concept of truth and observable human behaviour. A methodological model for this project is Frank Ramsey’s decision theory for constructing subjective probability.

This essay explores the difficulty of reconciling Spinoza’s ontological monism; his thesis that mind and body, extension and thought, are two different and mutually irreducible way of describing the universe; his insistence on the reality of the mental; and his denial of mind-body interaction. According to Spinoza, while a particular event described in one vocabulary may cause a particular event described in the other, a fully adequate explanation of a mental event cannot be given in physical terms and vice versa. This thesis is what Spinoza had in mind in denying mind-body interaction.

This essay argues that semantics provides a method for metaphysics. If we have the semantics of a language right, the objects that we assign to the expressions of the language must exist. Two problems are explored. The first is the inscrutability of reference, the fact that there is an endless number of ways an interpreter can assign objects to the expressions of an interpretant’s language, all of which do equally well. The second problem is that in describing the semantics and hence the ontology of a language, we must appeal to the entities we think exist, which are just the entities that belong to the ontology of our language.

This book features a collection of essays by Donald Davidson that explore the relations between language and the world, speaker intention and linguistic meaning, language and mind, mind and body, mind and world, and mind and other minds. Davidson’s underlying thesis is that we are acquainted directly with the world, that thought emerges through interpersonal communication in a shared material world, and that language depends on communication. He also finds interconnections between his views and those of major philosophers of the past.

This essay explores the constraints on the interpretation of a literary text. The possibility of language, thought, and interpretation depends on the triangular situation which relates speaker and listener, and both to a shared object in the public world which they can observe together, and to which they can observe each other’s responses. Such a triangular situation exists in literature. Interpretations of a text will vary from person to person, culture to culture, and century to century. However, it does not follow that a text means whatever its readers take it to mean, since disagreements about the meaning of a text are only possible against a shared basis of agreement.

This essay explores the shift in Quine’s thinking about the relation between meaning and truth. Quine has long been a deflationist about truth. A deflationist is one who holds that to say of a sentence in one’s own language that it is true, is to say no more than one says by uttering that sentence. In Pursuit of Truth (1990), Quine takes shared external circumstances as the key to the correct interpretation of observation sentences rather than shared patterns of stimulation; this shift has saved the natural relation between meaning and truth.

This essay discusses Aristotle’s theory of action, and the changes in how philosophers think about action in the present and future. It highlights areas in which contemporary philosophy of action has moved to positions different from Aristotle. In the future, the study of action will continue to contribute to the breakdown of the administratively ordained boundaries between the various fields of philosophy.

This essay discusses a common criticism of the Davidson’s theory of Anomalous Monism, namely, that according to this theory the mental is causally inert. It is argued that this criticism stems from a misunderstanding of the use of the concept of supervenience, which implies ontological monism, but not definitional or nomological reductionism. The criticism also fails to appreciate that causal relations are extensional relations which hold between singular events no matter how they are described.

This essay argues that in linguistic communication, nothing corresponds to a linguistic competence as summarized by the three principles of first meaning in language: that first meaning is systematic, first meanings are shared, and first meanings are governed by learned conventions or regularities. There is no such a thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language users acquire and then apply to cases, as well as the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions.

Quine revolutionized the understanding of verbal communications by taking seriously the fact that there can be no more to meaning than an adequately equipped person can learn and observe. Thus, the interpreter’s point of view is the revealing one to bring to the subject. By espousing a distal rather than a proximal theory of meaning, he recognized and fully exploited the active role of the interpreter; a role that requires the interpreter to correlate his own responses and those of the speaker by reference to the mutually salient causes in the world of which they speak.

This essay explores the question of why Socrates practiced the elenctic method. It argues that the elenchus is a method that generally leads to truth, and suggests that Socrates was convinced that he himself would gain in wisdom and clarity from elenctic exchanges with others, even if they were not as wise as he. People mean what others can take them to mean; to learn what we mean is to learn what others we talk with mean. The understanding of others, agreeing with them on basic concepts, clarity about what we mean, come — to the extent that they do — together. The elenchus is a model of our only method for promoting these ends.

This essay clarifies the Davidson’s claim that “There is no such thing as language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed”. It agrees with Dummett that a theory of meaning requires the Wittgensteinian distinction between using words correctly and merely thinking one is, between following a rule and believing one is following a rule; and that a grasp of this distinction requires social interaction. Communication is successful if the speaker is taken to mean what he wants to be taken to mean. What is needed is not a set of shared rules but that speaker and listener be able to correlate the speaker’s responses with the occurrence of a shared stimulus in their common world.

This essay explores the tension between the idea that what the speaker intends by his words determines what he means, and the idea that what a speaker means depends on what he can expect the listener to understand. It is argued that this is a false choice. Meaning is a function of what the speaker intends, but this intention includes what the speaker expects his listener to understand. Thus, Humpty Dumpty’s theory of meaning, “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean”, omits the crucial interpersonal element. As Joyce himself thought, his daring use of words put him in a sense beyond his own language, society, and self.

This essay explores Quine’s concept of truth. Quine substitutes radical translation for translation which aims to preserve ‘meaning’. Although radical translation does not always preserve truth value, much less meaning, truth is nevertheless very much in view in the practice of radical translation. Meaning, as preserved by radical interpretation, is needed to apply our truth predicate to any speech but our own, and we need truth to understand meaning. Such basic relations between truth and meaning are incompatible with a deflationary attitude toward the concept of truth.

This essay focuses on the Gadamer’s discussions on Plato’s Philebus and the nature of understanding, truth, and language. Both Davidson and Gadamer agree that conversation is the route to share understanding, that conversation presumes a shared world, and that language has its true being only in conversation. However, against Gadamer, Davidson insists that conversation does not presuppose a common language.

This is the talk I gave when the City of Stuttgart did me the honour of awarding me the Hegel prize. Since I was the first non-European philosopher to receive this award, I interpreted the occasion as marking another step in the remarkable rapprochement that is now taking place between what for a time seemed two distinct, even hostile, philosophical methods, attitudes and traditions. What we are witnessing is, of course, really no more than the re-engagement of traditions that share a common heritage. But this makes it no less surprising, since as we know, it is those who are closest in their presuppositions who are most apt to exaggerate and dwell on their differences. To understand is not to forgive, and to half-understand is all too often to reject.

Applies Davidson's Unified Theory of thought, meaning, and action to three families of problems involving various aspects of rationality, some degree of which Davidson's theory of radical interpretation attributes to any creature, which can be said to have a mind. These problems are the nature and our understanding of value judgements, the adequacy conditions for attributing mental states to a being, and the problem of irrationality. The first four chapters apply Davidson's thesis that our interpretations of another person's mental states are a source of objectivity to value judgements: such judgements, Davidson argues in this section, are as objective as any judgement about the mind can be. Chs 5 to 10 develop Davidson's Unified Theory for interpreting thought, meaning, and action, the primary concern of this section being the specification of the minimal conditions for attributing mental states to an object or creature. Chs 11 to 14 deal primarily with the problems raised by those cognitive states and actions that seem to violate, in a fundamental way, the constraints of rationality. Since Davidson regards the constraints of rationality to be amongst the necessary conditions for both mind and interpretation, irrational thoughts, and actions pose a particular problem for his Unified Theory. The final four chapters attempt to remove the apparent contradiction.

Continues the theme of the preceding chapters, examining further the possibility of irrational thought and action, judged against a background that stipulates large‐scale rationality as a necessary condition for both interpretability and possession of a mind. Concentrates on the phenomenon of self‐deception, which the author holds to include ‘weakness of the warrant’, a phenomenon that violates what Hempel and Carnap have called ‘the requirement of total evidence for inductive reasoning’. The main tool to remove the paradox of self‐deception, according to the author, is the recognition of the idea that there can be boundaries between parts of the mind. Such boundaries, however, are not discovered by introspection, but are conceptual aids to the coherent description of genuine irrationalities.

Considers the question of the extent to which objective interpersonal value judgements are possible, i.e. to which extent it is possible to objectively judge a state of affairs that involves the interests of two or more people. The author's answer is not straightforward: the previous chapters have established that beliefs and desires are inextricably linked to value judgements, so that if an interpreter is to understand the propositional attitudes of a subject, she must fit them to some degree into her own scheme, which includes her own value judgements. Consequently, the basis for an interpersonal comparison of value judgements is inherent in the very activity of interpretation, which does not decide the question of, but gives content to the idea, of an objective comparison of interpersonal value judgements.

Continues the theme of the preceding chapter, inquiring further into the possibility of irrational thought and action, judged against a background that stipulates large‐scale rationality as a necessary condition for both interpretability and possession of a mind. Argues that, in order to remove the paradoxes of irrationality, it is not necessary to regard judgements of irrationality as subjective; rather, a more holistic approach, which holds that irrationality is made possible by the fact that agents cannot fail to comport most of the time with the basic norms of rationality, is required. Furthermore, the view of the mind that makes synchronic inconsistency seem paradoxical, namely, one that implies that all beliefs, desires, intentions, and principles of the agent that creates the inconsistency are present and in operation at once, does not seem to be tenable.

Works out the implications of the claims of Ch. 5. Concepts used to explain actions of thinking creatures are irreducibly causal: the explanatory causal vocabulary that we call upon to interpret the semantics of a thinking object or creature is normative, relying on the interpreter's own standards of rationality. Sciences like physics, on the other hand, seek explanations and laws in which causal concepts no longer figure. Neither knowledge of the syntactical program of a computer nor knowledge of the neurophysiology of an organism warrant our attributing to the object or creature a holistic normative network of concepts, acquired through its interactions with the surrounding world. Consequently, information, ends, or strategies can be represented in such a (syntactical or neurophysiological) system, but the system cannot be interpreted as having the information, ends, or strategies. Generally, then, the difference between mind and body is not an ontological difference between types of entities, but a difference between schemes of classificatory concepts.

Spells out in more detail Davidson's Unified Theory of thought, meaning, and action the implications of which have been the focal point of the preceding chapters. The main task is to illuminate the conditions under which an understanding of the norms for our theories of intensional attribution is possible. What makes the task practicable at all, according to the author, 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. Improving our understanding of the understanding of such norms requires improvement of the grasp of the standards of rationality implicit in all interpretation of thought and action.

The author believes the attitude of the interpreter plays a crucial role in the theory of meaning. ‘Expressing Evaluation’ extends this strategy to evaluative judgements: just as the questions of belief and meaning are entwined, so are belief, meaning, and evaluation, where evaluating includes attitudes such as desires. This does not conflict with Davidson's claim that interpretation is a holistic act, in the sense that an interpreter weighs the attitudes of a subject against each other so as to render them intelligible or rational by the interpreter's standards. Justifies the thesis that desire is the most basic attitude in this interpretive process and that understanding presumes a shared body of evaluations as well as desires.

‘The Problem of Objectivity’ challenges the Cartesian picture according to which there is a metaphysical distinction between the inner and the outer, knowledge of one's own mind is more fundamental and secure than knowledge of other minds, knowledge is based on data given to the individual mind, and acquisition of knowledge is based on a progression from the subjective to the objective. Proposes a complete revision of this picture, substituting the inner/outer framework with an epistemologically extensional framework with practical abilities and the concept of error, of one making a mistake by one's own lights, at its centre. The concepts of an objective reality and truth, and thereby of the ability to raise Cartesian‐style sceptical doubts, are presumptions of thought itself. All propositional thought, according to the author, requires the possession of the concept of objective truth, and this concept is accessible only to those creatures that are in communication with others. Concludes that general sceptical claims are plainly unintelligible and that knowledge, being interpersonal, emerges holistically.

The idea of an irrational action, belief, intention, inference or emotion is paradoxical. For the irrational is not merely the nonrational, which lies outside the ambit of the rational; irrationality is a failure within the house of reason. When Hobbes says only man has ‘the privilege of absurdity’ he suggests that only a rational creature can be irrational. Irrationality is a mental process or state – a rational process or state – gone wrong. How can this be? The paradox of irrationality is not as simple as the seeming paradox in the concept of an unsuccessful joke, or of a bad piece of art. The paradox of irrationality springs from what is involved in our most basic ways of describing, understanding, and explaining psychological states and events. Sophia is pleased that she can tie a bowline. Then her pleasure must be due to her belief that she can tie a bowline and her positive assessment of that accomplishment. Further, and doubtless more searching, explanations may be available, but they cannot displace this one, since this one flows from what it is to be pleased that something is the case. Or take Roger, who intends to pass an examination by memorizing the Koran. This intention must be explained by his desire to pass the examination and his belief that by memorizing the Koran he will enhance his chances of passing the examination.

Clarifies and defends a thesis that is implied by the conclusions of Ch. 2, namely, that values are as objective as propositional attitudes, since interpretation requires a shared framework of such attitudes and evaluations, which in turn constitutes a necessary condition for disagreement about values. Juxtaposes this thesis to two stances it should not be confused with, namely, relativism and realism about values. The author's claims do not amount to a value relativism, because the introduced relativisms to, e.g. time, place, and culture, merely stipulate what interpreters must come to understand in order to know whether they disagree or not; values themselves are as objective as the propositional attitudes that function in the processes of evaluation. Neither does objectivism about values amount to a value realism — the ontological position that values exist.

The last chapter is an interview Ernest Lepore, Director of the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science and a friend of the Davidson family, has conducted with the author in 1988. In this interview, the author speaks of his childhood, his student years at Harvard, and his service in the navy in the Second World War. He describes his academic career, which took him from Queens College to Stanford, Princeton, and Rockefeller University, and illuminates his personal and philosophical relationships with contemporary philosophers and logicians such as Quine, Dummett, Carnap, and Tarski. He finally clarifies Lepore's questions regarding the development of and relations between his philosophical programmes in the philosophy of action and the philosophy of language.

Takes up a number of problems that arise by attempts to explain actions, and defends the author's causal theory of action. In particular, the author defends the claims that, first, if a person is killed by being shot, the shooting and the killing are one and the same event; secondly, a desire (or propositional pro‐attitude) is always involved in the causality and explanation of an action; and thirdly, though reason explanations of actions cannot be backed by strict laws, this does not imply that reasons, conceived of as conjunctions of beliefs and desires, are causally ineffectual.

Finds fault with Turing's answer to the question, ‘Can a computer think’? Turing believed that if the answers given by a computer and a person leave an interpreter unable to discriminate between them, then computers must be said to be able to think. The author objects that in order for a computer to think, it must mean something by the answer it gives. Consequently, without evidence for the fact that a computer not merely possesses the syntax of the language it is responding in but also has a semantics, the findings of Turing's Test cannot be used as evidence for the claim that computers can, even in theory, think. Understanding the semantics of an object or creature requires that the interpreter be able to observe what in the world that is shared by interpreter and interpretant causes the latter's responses; having a semantics requires a history of engagement with others and with objects in the world. Turing's test for thought is inadequate, according to the author, not because it restricts the evidence to what can be observed about the computer from the outside, but because it does not allow enough of what is outside to be observed.