Davidson Quote on Truth: Coherence and Interpretation

Quote

"Truth is not a property, truth is not a relation, truth is not a behavior. What then is truth? Coherence is the key." — Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984)

Historical Context

Donald Davidson (1917-2003) was one of the most influential philosophers of the late twentieth century, a figure who stood at the intersection of analytic philosophy, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind. A student of W.V.O. Quine at Harvard, Davidson absorbed Quine's naturalism and his holism — the view that our beliefs face the tribunal of experience not individually but as a corporate body — and carried these ideas in directions that Quine himself had not anticipated. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984) collected the essays that established Davidson's reputation: papers on the theory of meaning, radical interpretation, and the nature of truth that together constituted one of the most ambitious philosophical programs of the century.

The quote captures the spirit of Davidson's approach to truth, which drew on several intellectual currents. The first was Alfred Tarski's semantic theory of truth, which defined truth for a formal language in terms of satisfaction and which generated the so-called T-sentences ("'snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white"). Davidson took Tarski's work as a model for a theory of meaning: to understand a language, we need a theory that tells us, for every sentence, the conditions under which it is true. The second current was the coherence theory associated with Quine's holism and with the work of the German philosopher Donald Davidson's own predecessor in this tradition. The third was Davidson's distinctive view that the mental and the physical are related in a way that resists reduction — a position known as anomalous monism. The quote weaves these threads together into a compressed statement about what truth is not, and what it might be.

The claim that truth is "not a property" and "not a relation" is a rejection of two of the dominant theories in the history of philosophy. The correspondence theory, going back to Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, holds that truth is a relation between a belief or statement and the way the world is — a belief is true when it corresponds to reality. The claim that truth is "not a behavior" rejects pragmatic theories, associated with William James and John Dewey, which hold that truth is what works, what is useful, or what guides successful action. By eliminating these options, Davidson narrows the field and points toward coherence as the organizing principle of truth and knowledge.

Meaning and Interpretation

The quote works by a process of elimination. Truth is not a property — it is not a simple attribute that sentences possess in the way that they possess length or grammatical structure. Truth is not a relation — it is not a correspondence between words and world that could be checked by comparing our beliefs with raw, uninterpreted reality. Truth is not a behavior — it is not the practical success of our actions or the utility of our beliefs. Having ruled out these candidates, Davidson asks what remains, and his answer is coherence: the mutual support and consistency of beliefs within a system.

To understand what Davidson means by coherence, it helps to see how it fits into his broader philosophy. In his celebrated essay "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge" (originally presented in 1983 and later collected in his writings), Davidson argued that what makes a belief true is not its correspondence to an independent reality but its coherence with the rest of our beliefs. We cannot step outside our belief system and compare our beliefs with reality "as it really is," because any such comparison would itself be just another belief. The only standard available to us is the internal standard of coherence — the degree to which our beliefs fit together, support one another, and form a consistent system.

This position has a startling consequence. Davidson argued that a belief cannot be false if it coheres with the rest of one's beliefs, because there is no standpoint outside the system from which to judge it. But he also argued — and this is crucial — that total error is impossible. For a creature to have beliefs at all, most of its beliefs must be true. This is the principle of charity: to interpret another speaker, we must attribute mostly true beliefs to them, because if we attributed mostly false beliefs, we would have no way of identifying what their words mean in the first place. Meaning and truth are thus interdependent: to understand what someone says, we must assume that most of what they believe is true, and this assumption is not optional but constitutive of interpretation itself.

The connection to radical interpretation is essential. Davidson asked: how could we understand the utterances of a speaker whose language we do not yet know? We would have to observe the speaker's behavior and the circumstances in which they speak, and then construct a theory of meaning — a systematic account that assigns truth conditions to their sentences. But to do this, we must assume that the speaker's beliefs are by and large correct, that they hold true what we would hold true in the same circumstances. Without this assumption, the project of interpretation could not even get started. Coherence, then, is not just a property of an individual's belief system; it is the bridge that connects one mind to another, and that makes communication possible.

Philosophical Significance

The quote also resonates with Davidson's work in epistemology and the philosophy of mind, particularly his doctrine of anomalous monism. Davidson argued that mental events are identical to physical events — every mental event is some physical event — but that there are no strict laws connecting the mental and the physical. The mental is "anomalous": it resists the kind of lawlike description that characterizes the physical sciences. This means that the mental cannot be reduced to the physical, even though every mental event is a physical event. The connection to truth and coherence is subtle but real: just as the mental cannot be captured by physical laws, truth cannot be captured by a simple property, relation, or behavioral disposition. In both cases, Davidson resists reduction. Truth, like the mental, is real but irreducible — it cannot be identified with any single feature of the world.

This anti-reductionist stance places Davidson in tension with several traditions. Against the correspondence theorists, he denies that truth can be analyzed as a relation between beliefs and mind-independent facts. Against the logical positivists, he denies that meaning can be reduced to verification. Against the deflationists, who hold that truth is not a substantive notion at all but merely a logical device for generalization, he insists that truth is connected to meaning and interpretation in ways that demand serious philosophical attention. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy describes Davidson as a philosopher who resisted every attempt to reduce truth, meaning, or the mental to something simpler, and who insisted that these notions form an interconnected web that must be understood as a whole.

Legacy

Davidson's work on truth and coherence provoked intense debate. Critics argued that a pure coherence theory cannot distinguish truth from mere consistency — a perfectly consistent fairy tale coheres with itself but is not true. Davidson's response was that coherence is not mere logical consistency but the kind of mutual support that comes from a belief system shaped by causal interaction with the world. Our beliefs are caused by the world, and this causal connection ensures that a coherent belief system is by and large accurate. Whether this response succeeds remains a matter of controversy.

Davidson himself later revised his position. He came to feel that the title "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge" had been misleading, and that his view was better described as a coherence theory of knowledge rather than a theory of truth. He never abandoned the idea that coherence is central to justification and interpretation, but he became more cautious about claiming that coherence constitutes truth. This revision reflects the intellectual honesty that characterized Davidson's career: he was willing to follow the arguments where they led, even when they took him away from his earlier formulations. The quote, read in this light, is not a final answer but a provocation — a distillation of Davidson's insistence that truth cannot be reduced to property, relation, or behavior, and that understanding what truth is requires understanding how beliefs cohere, how speakers interpret one another, and how mind and world are related. As the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, Davidson's philosophy represents one of the most sustained attempts in the analytic tradition to think through the connections between language, mind, and reality without reducing any of them to the others.