Donald Davidson: Philosophy, Quotes & Legacy

Biography

Donald Herbert Davidson was born on March 6, 1917, in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Clarence Herbert Davidson and Grace Cordelia Anthony. His father was a lumber company executive whose work took the family to the Philippines and back, and Davidson grew up in a household that combined an American Protestant upbringing with an unusually cosmopolitan childhood. He would later describe his early years as shaped by travel, by the Depression, and by a fierce family argument about religion that ended with his father's formal conversion to Episcopalianism — a quarrel that, by Davidson's own account, taught him early that people can hold radically different beliefs with equal sincerity.

He studied at Harvard, where he arrived in 1935 with ambitions in English literature before philosophy claimed him. At Harvard he worked with Alfred North Whitehead, the co-author of Principia Mathematica, whose lectures on process philosophy and logic left a permanent mark. Davidson graduated in 1939, and after a period of uncertainty and travel — including a year in California and work in war-related industries during the Second World War — he returned to academic life. He taught at Queens College in New York, then at Stanford University from 1951, where he worked alongside the logician and philosopher of language John Wallace and, crucially, formed a long friendship with W.V.O. Quine, who arrived at Harvard in the 1950s and whose naturalism would shape Davidson's entire approach.

In 1967 Davidson moved to Princeton, and in 1970 to Rockefeller University in New York, where he remained until 1976. From 1976 to 1981 he taught at the University of Chicago, and in 1981 he moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he held the Willis S. and Marion Slusser Chair of Philosophy until his retirement in 2002. He died in Berkeley on August 30, 2003, at the age of eighty-six, having been widely regarded as one of the most important American philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century.

Historical Context

Davidson's career unfolded against the background of two great transformations in Anglo-American philosophy. The first was the movement away from the logical positivism that had dominated the 1930s and 1940s. Positivism had insisted that meaningful statements must be empirically verifiable, and it had been deeply suspicious of traditional metaphysics and of any talk of meaning that could not be reduced to observation. By the 1950s, however, positivism had collapsed under the weight of its own internal difficulties — the verification principle could not verify itself — and philosophers were searching for new foundations. Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1951) had delivered a decisive blow to the positivist distinction between analytic and synthetic truths, and Davidson absorbed and extended this critique.

The second transformation was the emergence of a distinctively American form of analytic philosophy, one more naturalistic and more attentive to language than the British variety. Where Russell and the early Wittgenstein had tried to build meaning from the bottom up, atom by atom, Davidson argued that meaning is holistic: a sentence means what it does because of its place in a whole network of sentences. He combined Quine's naturalism with the resources of Tarski's truth theory to produce a philosophical account of meaning that could explain how finite creatures manage an infinite capacity for understanding new sentences.

Core Ideas

Davidson's philosophy is a tightly connected system, and his most famous doctrines are best understood as answers to a single question: how is it possible for speakers to understand one another at all?

Truth-Conditional Semantics

The first pillar is the theory of meaning Davidson developed in the late 1960s, most fully in "Truth and Meaning" (1967). He proposed that a theory of meaning for a language can be given by a truth theory of the kind Alfred Tarski constructed for formal languages. Tarski had shown how to define truth recursively for a formal language, generating for every sentence a theorem of the form "S is true iff p." Davidson's insight was that such a theory, applied to a natural language, could serve as a theory of meaning: to know the meaning of a sentence is to know its truth conditions. The theory does not reduce meaning to something else — Davidson was not a verificationist — but it shows how the meaning of complex expressions is a function of the meaning of their parts, and it explains the systematic, compositional character of language.

Radical Interpretation and the Principle of Charity

The second pillar is the theory of radical interpretation, set out in essays such as "Radical Interpretation" (1973) and "Belief and the Basis of Meaning" (1974). Radical interpretation is the task of interpreting a speaker from scratch, with no prior knowledge of what their words mean. Davidson argued that the interpreter must simultaneously assign beliefs and meanings, since the evidence — the speaker's assent to sentences in observable circumstances — underdetermines both. The way out is the principle of charity: interpret the speaker as mostly right about the world and as largely coherent in their beliefs. Without such charity, interpretation is impossible, because there is no way to separate a disagreement in belief from a difference in meaning. Charity is therefore not a moral virtue but a condition of interpretation itself.

Anomalous Monism

The third pillar is Davidson's philosophy of mind. In "Mental Events" (1970) he defended anomalous monism, the view that mental events are identical with physical events — hence monism — but that there are no strict lawlike connections between the mental and the physical — hence anomalous. Davidson argued that the mental is supervenient on the physical: two events cannot differ in all their mental properties without differing in some physical property. Yet because mental concepts are normative, holistic, and shot through with rationality, they cannot be captured by the strict laws of physics. The result is a position that is simultaneously physicalist and anti-reductionist: the mind is the brain, but it cannot be reduced to the brain. Anomalous monism became one of the most discussed theories in the philosophy of mind of the 1970s and 1980s, and it remains a benchmark for debates about mental causation and reduction.

Triangulation

Later in his career Davidson developed the idea of triangulation, an account of how thought and language are possible at all. Two creatures and a shared world form a triangle: each reacts to the other's reactions to a common object. Only within such a triangle, Davidson argued, can the distinction between objective truth and mere appearance arise, because only then can error be recognized — when one creature's response diverges from the other's. Triangulation grounds objectivity in communication, and it gives Davidson's philosophy a strongly social and anti-solipsistic flavor that connects his work to themes in philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind.

Philosophy

Davidson is often described as a philosopher of meaning, but his real subject was the interconnection of mind, language, and world. His work is unified by a rejection of the three dualisms he identified as the legacy of empiricism: the dualism of scheme and content, of subjective and objective, and of conceptual and empirical. In "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" (1974), he attacked the notion that different cultures or paradigms might inhabit incommensurable conceptual schemes. The idea of a scheme, he argued, makes no sense without a contrast between scheme and content, and that contrast cannot be drawn coherently. Different languages can always in principle be translated, because interpretation presupposes massive agreement; the very notion of an untranslatable language is incoherent.

This is also why Davidson rejected the traditional distinction between knowledge of our own minds, knowledge of other minds, and knowledge of the external world. In essays such as "Three Varieties of Knowledge" (1991), he argued that these three kinds of knowledge are mutually dependent. You cannot have self-knowledge without language, and you cannot have language without a community of speakers who interpret you and whom you interpret. There is no privileged starting point: knowledge is holistic through and through.

The principle of charity has been the object of much debate. Critics have asked whether charity does not collapse into a mere refusal to disagree, and whether it can be squared with the obvious fact that people do sometimes hold deeply mistaken beliefs. Davidson's answer is that charity is a constraint on the very possibility of interpretation, not an empirical hypothesis about how often people are right. To interpret someone at all, we must assume they are by and large rational and right; wholesale error is not a possibility for a thinking, speaking creature, because it would leave nothing for error to be about.

Major Works

Davidson was primarily an essayist, and his most important contributions are collected in four volumes. Essays on Actions and Events (1980) gathers his work on action theory, causation, and the philosophy of mind, including "Actions, Reasons, and Causes" (1963), which argued that reasons are causes and thereby helped revive the causal theory of action. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984) collects the essays on meaning, truth, and interpretation that established his philosophy of language. Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (2001) brings together the later essays on knowledge and self-knowledge. Problems of Rationality (2004) and Truth and Predication (2005) appeared near the end of his life, the latter expanding on his long-standing interest in the concept of truth.

Famous Quotes

Davidson was not a writer of aphorisms, but several passages from his essays are widely quoted. The most famous is his remark in "Mental Events" that "mental events such as perceivings, rememberings, decisions, and actions resist capture in the nomological net of physical theory." Equally influential is his statement, in "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," that the idea of radically different conceptual schemes is "a dogma of empiricism" — a third dogma, to be added to Quine's famous two. His account of charity is often condensed in the slogan that "charity is forced on us; whether we like it or not, if we want to understand others, we must count them right in most matters."

Related Thinkers

Davidson's closest philosophical ally was W.V.O. Quine, whose naturalism, holism, and skepticism about the analytic-synthetic distinction he extended and refined. He was also deeply engaged with Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose later philosophy of language he both admired and criticized. His philosophy of mind stands in a productive opposition to the reductionist programs of the same era, and his work on interpretation continues to inform debates in the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and the theory of meaning.

Sources

• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Donald Davidson" (plato.stanford.edu/entries/davidson)
• Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Donald Davidson" (iep.utm.edu/donald-davidson)
• Davidson, Donald. Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984.
• Davidson, Donald. Essays on Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980.