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Dialogues with Davidson

Dialogues with Davidson

Acting, Interpreting, Understanding

edited by Jeff Malpas

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2011 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dialogues with Davidson : acting, interpreting, understanding / edited by Jeff Malpas.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-262-01556-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Davidson, Donald, 1917–2003. I. Malpas, Jeff.

B945.D384D53 2011

191—dc22

2010049674

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The analytic method in philosophy . . . provokes argument and when

practiced with an open mind it engenders dialogue. At its best, dialogue

creates mutual understanding, fresh insights, sympathy with past think￾ers, and, occasionally, genuinely new ideas.

—Donald Davidson, “Foreword,” in Two Roads to Wisdom: Chinese and

Analytic Philosophical Traditions , edited by Bo Mou

Foreword ix

Dagfi nn Føllesdal

Acknowledgments xv

Introduction: Davidson and Contemporary Philosophy xvii

Jeff Malpas

I On Language, Mind, and World 1

1 Davidson versus Descartes 3

Richard Rorty

2 What Subjectivity Isn’t 7

David Couzens Hoy and Christoph Durt

3 Davidson, Derrida, and Differance 29

Samuel C. Wheeler III

4 Davidson, Kant, and Double-Aspect Ontologies 43

Gordon G. Brittan, Jr.

5 Interpretive Semantics and Ontological Commitment 61

Richard N. Manning

6 Davidson, Heidegger, and Truth 87

Mark Okrent

7 Davidson and the Demise of Representationalism 113

Giancarlo Marchetti

8 Method and Metaphysics: Pragmatist Doubts 129

Bjørn Ramberg

Contents

viii Contents

II On Interpretation and Understanding 147

9 Davidson’s Reading of Gadamer: Triangulation, Conversation, and the

Analytic–Continental Divide 149

Lee Braver

10 In Gadamer’s Neighborhood 167

Robert Dostal

11 The Relevance of Radical Interpretation to the Understanding of

Mind 191

Jonathan Ellis

12 Incommensurability in Davidson and Gadamer 219

Barbara Fultner

13 Davidson, Gadamer, Incommensurability, and the Third Dogma of

Empiricism 241

David Vessey

14 What Is Common to All: Davidson on Agreement and

Understanding 259

Jeff Malpas

III On Action, Reason, and Knowledge 281

15 Davidson and the Autonomy of the Human Sciences 283

Giuseppina D’Oro

16 Interpreting Davidson on Intentional Action 297

Frederick Stoutland

17 Evaluative Attitudes 325

Gerhard Preyer

18 Davidson’s Normativity 343

Stephen Turner

19 Davidson and the Source of Self-Knowledge 371

Louise Röska-Hardy

20 Radical Interpretation, Feminism, and Science 405

Sharyn Clough

Bibliography 427

Contributors 453

Index457

What struck me the most about Davidson when we became colleagues

at Stanford in 1966 was the wide scope of his interests and abilities. He

taught courses ranging from logic and decision theory to ethics, epistemol￾ogy, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, history of philosophy

(ancient, medieval, and modern), philosophy of music, and philosophy

and literature. And he enjoyed it. Anything he became interested in he

wanted to master, not just in philosophy but in very diverse fi elds, among

them music, where he experimented with various instruments and did

well enough on piano to play four-handed with Leonard Bernstein; sports,

where he enjoyed skiing, climbing, surfi ng, fl ying, and gliding; and practi￾cal matters, where he quickly saw how mechanical or electronic devices

functioned and could repair them.

It took him long to discover the point of publishing. His fi rst note￾worthy article, “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” came in 1963, when he was

46. It has been reprinted in close to thirty anthologies in nine languages

and continues to be reprinted and translated. In the following years it was

followed by an impressive sequence of highly infl uential articles. They

were collected into volumes, but not until he was 86 did he fi nish his fi rst

little book, Truth and Predication, which was published posthumously. (His

1949 dissertation on Plato’s Philebus was published in 1990.) There is prob￾ably no other philosopher who has been comparably infl uential just on the

basis of articles.

Davidson told me that a seminar he took with Quine as a fi rst year grad￾uate student changed his attitude to philosophy. Since then his general

outlook to philosophy was very close to Quine’s, but there are important

differences. I will mention the three I consider the most important.

First, Davidson made use of Tarski’s theory of truth to account for how

sentences are interconnected in our web of belief. Quine, in Word and Ob￾ject, especially in section 3, talks about our cutting sentences into words

Foreword

Dagfi nn Føllesdal

x Foreword

that can be combined in new ways to make sentences we have never heard

before. However, he does not take up the semantic nature of these inter￾connections between sentences. Davidson made use of Tarski’s theory of

truth for this purpose. Very many linguistic constructions, for example

adverbs, were not covered by Tarski’s theory, and Davidson initiated a

program to show how Tarski’s theory could be extended to these further

constructions.

Second, Davidson developed what he called “a unifi ed theory of thought

and action.” In his early work on decision making he noticed that a per￾son’s behavior can be explained by different combinations of beliefs and

values and that the behavior does not enable us to pin down one of these

combinations as the correct one. Quine’s “indeterminacy of translation”

similarly refl ects the fact that a person’s assent to or dissent from sentences

can be accounted for through different combinations of beliefs and mean￾ing. Both indeterminacies can be reduced by noticing that the two pairs,

beliefs/values and beliefs/meaning, have one component in common,

namely belief. Thereby observation of action can help us to narrow down

indeterminacy of translation, and observation of assent and dissent can

help constrain our explanations of action.

Third, Davidson objected to the role that perception plays in Quine’s

theory of translation. There are two stages here in Davidson’s opposition

to Quine.

The fi rst stage ran until 1973. Until then, Davidson argued that transla￾tion should aim solely at “maximizing agreement.” Quine had put forth

two kinds of constraints on translation, one based on stimulations of our

sensory receptors and one that he called “the principle of charity,” roughly:

never attribute to the other views that are obviously absurd. The fi rst of

these constraints leads to great diffi culties, and Davidson proposed to drop

it in favor of a strengthened principle of charity: translate the other in such

a way that you come out agreeing on as many points as possible. (Davidson

preferred focusing on interpretation, rather than translation, but that dif￾ference does not matter as far as these issues are concerned.)

In 1973, faced with the example of “the rabbit behind the tree,” David￾son admitted that perception has to play a role in translation and interpre￾tation. (Briefl y: if you have formed the hypothesis that ‘Gavagai’ should

be translated as ‘Rabbit’ and your native friend dissents when you utter

‘Gavagai’ in the neighborhood of a rabbit, you will not regard this as going

against your hypothesis if the rabbit is hidden to the native behind a big

tree.) Davidson never talked about maximizing agreement after 1973. After

some years of refl ection he came up with the idea of “triangulation,” which

Foreword xi

he discussed in several of his later articles. This idea was a major topic

of discussion between Davidson, Quine, Dreben, and myself in a fi ve-day

closed session at Stanford in 1986.

The fi rst two of these three differences between Quine and Davidson

are in my opinion valuable improvements of Quine’s view. The third dif￾ference, however, is more complicated. Clearly, the “maximize agreement”

thesis had to be given up. In view of the “rabbit behind the tree” example,

we should say “maximize agreement where you should expect agreement.”

That is, we have to ask: What beliefs would it be likely that the other person

has, given her present and past experiences, upbringing, and culture? This

means that meaning and communication presuppose epistemology. The

converse also holds; we have holism all the way down.

The difference between Davidson and Quine after Davidson turned to

triangulation is often labeled the “distal/proximal disagreement.” It is of￾ten said that Quine focused on the proximal, stimulations of our nerve

endings, whereas Davidson focused on the distal, the objects perceived.

However, things are not that simple. Already in the very opening sentences

of Word and Object Quine stated the distal view. He stressed how language

learning builds on distal objects, the objects that we perceive and talk

about:

Each of us learns his language from other people, through the observable mouth￾ing of words under conspicuously intersubjective circumstances. Linguistically,

and hence conceptually, the things in sharpest focus are the things that are public

enough to be talked of publicly, common and conspicuous enough to be talked of

often, and near enough to sense to be quickly identifi ed and learned by name; it is

to these that words apply fi rst and foremost. 1

Why, then, did Quine turn to stimuli? He saw, I think, clearer than it had

ever been seen before, how intricate the notion of an object is. We can￾not determine through observation which objects other people perceive;

what others perceive is dependent upon how they conceive of the world

and structure it, and that is just what we are trying to fi nd out. When we

study communication and understanding, we should not uncritically as￾sume that the other shares our conception of the world and our ontology.

If we do, we will not discover how we understand other people, and we will

not notice the important phenomena of indeterminacy of translation and

of reference. Already in chapter 3 of Word and Object, the chapter following

the one where he introduces stimuli, Quine discusses the ontogenesis of

reference, and the discussion of this topic takes up several of the following

chapters.

xii Foreword

Introducing epistemology is also needed in order to get beyond the

simple perceptual triangular situations; we may interpret sentences that

relate to situations and objects that we have not perceived and cannot per￾ceive, and sentences produced by people who are not around to triangulate

with us. As pointed out by Lee Braver in his contribution to this volume,

this enables us to bring in perspectives that are very alien to us, histori￾cally and/or culturally very distant. It also helps us to see why Quine in his

discussions with Davidson emphasized the possibility of radically different

perspectives.

What is needed for an adequate view on communication and under￾standing is therefore a satisfactory theory of perception, which takes prop￾erly into account the theory-ladenness of perception, including a theory of

reifi cation and the “constitution” of objects, to use a word from Husserl.

Quine saw this and devoted many of his later years to this topic.

This intricate nexus of issues is now receiving much attention following

Quine and Davidson’s work. Davidson, who as a student had concentrated

on literature and classics, applied these ideas to issues in the interpretation

of literature. He wrote on metaphors, on the role of speaker’s intention

and on “locating literary language,” and also on James Joyce and on the

minimalist artist Robert Morris. Also, where Quine discussed translation,

Davidson focused on interpretation. This made it easy to connect him with

the hermeneutic tradition, particularly the new hermeneutics, Heidegger

and Gadamer and their followers. Gadamer, in particular, was a natural

point of contact. His Truth and Method takes up many of the same issues

as are discussed by Davidson, and Davidson read Gadamer’s habilitation

thesis on Plato’s Philebus while he was writing his own dissertation on the

same topic. Davidson tells that when he wrote his dissertation, “the only

commentary that seemed to me to have any philosophical merit was Hans￾Georg Gadamer’s dissertation, written very much under the infl uence of

Heidegger.” 2 However, he also states that he “unfortunately learned very

little from Gadamer.” 3

Gadamer’s comments on Davidson made it clear that he had not read

him. The same holds for most of the other fi gures discussed in this volume,

such as Heidegger and Derrida. The similarities and differences that are dis￾cussed are therefore not due to infl uence, but rather result from the topics

that are discussed and the way they are interconnected: meaning, inter￾pretation, action, the mind, self-knowledge, subjectivity, intersubjectivity,

objectivity, relativism, representation, realism, externalism, certainty, and

truth. These are all interconnected in Davidson, and many of these inter￾connections are also found in some of these other philosophers.

Foreword xiii

These interconnections are especially prominent in Husserl. His studies

of subjectivity inspired much of what has been called “continental” philos￾ophy. However, many of his followers were extreme relativists and did not

note that Husserl went on to give one of the most careful and detailed stud￾ies of intersubjectivity and objectivity that has ever been given. For him,

as for Davidson, subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and objectivity were inti￾mately intertwined. Also, Davidson’s holism and his nonfoundationalism

have their parallels in Husserl. Many readers get misled by Husserl’s seem￾ingly foundationalist statements. However, he had a very carefully devel￾oped nonfoundationalist view, and he also saw an intimate connection

between scientifi c theory and what he called the lifeworld:

everything which contemporary natural science has furnished as determinations of

what exists also belong to us, to the world, as this world is pregiven to the adults of

our time. And even if we are not personally interested in natural science, and even

if we know nothing of its results, still, what exists is pregiven to us in advance as

determined in such a way that we at least grasp it as being in principle scientifi cally

determinable. 4

A detailed study of similarities and differences between Davidson and Hus￾serl would be interesting, especially since Husserl inspired so much of what

has been going on in continental philosophy. Thus, for example, many

of Gadamer’s points about interpretation, for which Gadamer gives credit

to Heidegger, are found with more richness and more precision in Hus￾serl, where they are set into a broader philosophical context that has many

striking similarities with what we fi nd in Davidson—but also many differ￾ences, which are well worth refl ection.

Notes

1. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960), p. 1.

2. Davidson, “Intellectual Autobiography,” in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed.

Lewis Edwin Hahn, Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 27 (Chicago: Open Court,

1999), p. 27.

3. See Robert Dostal’s essay in this volume for more on this issue.

4. Edmund Husserl, Erfahrung und Urteil, ed. Ludwig Landgrebe (Prag: Academia/

Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1939), section 10, p. 39; Experience and Judgment, trans.

J. Churchill and K. Ameriks (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973),

p. 42. For more on Husserl’s nonfoundationalism, see my “Husserl on Evidence

and Justifi cation,” in Edmund Husserl and the Phenomenological Tradition: Essays in

xiv Foreword

Phenomenology, ed. Robert Sokolowski (proceedings of a lecture series in the fall of

1985), Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, vol. 18 (Washington: The

Catholic University of America Press, 1988), pp. 107–129; see also my “Husserl and

Wittgenstein on Ultimate Justifi cation,” in Experience and Analysis. Erfahrung und

Analyze, ed. Johann Christian Marek and Maria Elisabeth Reicher, Proceedings of

the 27th International Wittgenstein Symposium, August 8–14, 2004 (Wien: hpt et

öbv, 2005), pp. 127–142.