Table Of ContentTHE ESSENTIAL DAVIDSON
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The Essential Davidson
DONALD DAVIDSON
with an introduction by
ERNIE LEPORE and KIRK LUDWIG
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Contents
Introduction 1
Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig
PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION AND PSYCHOLOGY
1. Actions, Reasons, and Causes (1963) 23
2. The Logical Form of Action Sentences 37
with Criticism, Comment, and Defence (1967) 50
3. How is Weakness of the Will Possible? (1969) 72
4. The Individuation of Events (1969) 90
5. Mental Events (1970) 105
Appendix: Emeroses by Other Names (1966) 119
6. Intending (1978) 122
7. Paradoxes of Irrationality (1982) 138
TRUTH, MEANING, AND INTERPRETATION
8. Truth and Meaning (1967) 155
9. On Saying That (1968) 171
10. Radical Interpretation (1973) 184
11. On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme (1974) 196
12. What Metaphors Mean (1978) 209
13. A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge (1983) 225
Appendix: Afterthoughts (1987) 238
14. First Person Authority (1984) 242
15. A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs (1986) 251
Contents List of Volumes of Essays by Donald Davidson 267
Bibliography 272
Index 278
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Introduction
Ernie Lepore and Kirk Ludwig
Donald Davidson’s philosophical program, one of the most influential of the
second half of the twentieth century, can be seen as organized around two
connected projects. The first is that of understanding the nature of human
agency.Thesecondisthatofunderstandingthenatureandfunctionoflanguage,
anditsrelationtothoughtandtheworld.AfterabriefoverviewofDavidson’slife
andtheintellectualbackgroundofhiswork,wewilldevelopthesetwothemesin
the context of the present selection of essential papers from Davidson’s corpus.
LIFE AND INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND
Born on 6 March 1917, in Springfield, Massachusetts, Davidson attended
Harvard University in 1935, studying English literature for two years before
turning to classics and comparative literature. On graduating in 1939, he was
awarded a fellowship to pursue graduate studies in classical philosophy at
Harvard.DuringhisfirstyearhetookacoursefromW.V.Quineonthelogical
positivists. He reported later that it changed his view of philosophy. ‘‘What
mattered to me,’’ Davidson said, ‘‘was not so much Quine’s conclusions (I
assumed he was right) as the realization that it was possible to be serious about
getting things right in philosophy—or at least not getting things wrong’’
(Davidson 1999: 23). Quine was to remain a central influence on Davidson’s
work.Davidson’s graduatestudies wereinterrupted bythe SecondWorld War.
Davidsonvolunteeredforthenavy,andreturnedtograduateworkatHarvardin
1946afterbeingdischarged.HetookupateachingpositionatQueensCollege
inNewYorkthefollowingyear,andafterayearonagrantfromtheRockefeller
Foundation, completed his dissertation on Plato’s Philebus in 1949 (Davidson
1990). He left Queens for Stanford University in 1951 where he taught for
sixteen years before moving to Princeton University in 1967. Subsequently,
DavidsontaughtatRockefellerUniversityfrom1970untilthephilosophyunit
atRockefellerwasdisbanded,atwhichpointhemovedin1976totheUniversity
ofChicago.In1981,hemovedtothephilosophydepartmentattheUniversity
of California at Berkeley. He died on 30 August 2003.
TheyearsatStanford,duringwhichhetaughtawiderangeofsubjects,from
logic,ancientandmodernphilosophy,epistemology,philosophyofscience,and
2 The Essential Davidson
philosophy of language, to ethics,music theory,and ideasin literature, laidthe
foundationsforhissubsequentwork.Therewerefourmainsourcesofinfluence.
ThefirstwasexperimentalworkonformaldecisiontheorywithPatrickSuppes
and J. J. C. McKinsey (Davidson and Suppes 1957). This had an important
influenceonhisviewsinthephilosophyoflanguage,particularlyinthetheoryof
radicalinterpretation.Davidsonderivedtwomoralsfromit.Thefirstwasthatin
‘puttingformalconditionsonsimpleconceptsandtheirrelationstooneanother,a
powerfulstructurecouldbedefined.’Thesecondwasthattheformaltheoryitself
‘saysnothingabouttheworld’andthatitscontentisgivenbyhowitisinterpreted
inrelationtothedatatowhichitisapplied(Davidson1999:32).
The second was an invitation to co-author a contribution to the Library of
Living Philosophers on Carnap with J. J. C. McKinsey. When McKinsey died,
Davidson took up the task alone. This led him to Carnap’s work on attitude
sentences.WhenhegaveatalkatBerkeleyonCarnap’smethodofintensionand
extension, AlfredTarskiwasintheaudience. TarskigaveDavidsona reprintof
‘TheSemanticConceptionofTruthandtheFoundationsofSemantics’(Tarski
1944). This led him to Tarski’s more technical ‘The Concept of Truth in For-
malized Languages’ (Tarski 1934). Tarski’s work struck Davidson as providing
an answer to a question that had puzzled him about accounts of the semantic
form of indirect discourse and belief sentences: how does one tell when an
account is correct? The answer, Davidson suggested, was that an account was
correct if it could be incorporated into a truth definition for the language in
roughlythestyleoutlinedbyTarski,or,atleast,clearlyincorrectifitcouldnot.
Thiswouldtellone,inthecontextofatheoryforthelanguageasawhole,what
contributioneachexpressionineachsentenceinthelanguagemakestofixingthe
sentence’s truth conditions. In addition, a theory of this sort would show how
finite beings can understand an infinity of nonsynonymous sentences. These
insights were the genesis of two foundational papers in Davidson’s work on
natural language semantics, ‘Theories of Meaning and Learnable Languages’
(Davidson 1965) and ‘Truth and Meaning’ (1967, reprinted as Essay 8, this
volume).IntheformerDavidsonproposedasacriterionfortheadequacyofan
analysis of the logical form of a sentence or complex expression in a natural
languagethatitwouldnotmakeitimpossibleforafinitebeingtothelearnthe
language of which it was a part. In the latter, he proposed that a Tarski-style
axiomatictruththeory,modifiedforanaturallanguage,couldservethepurpose
ofameaningtheoryforthelanguage,withoutappealtomeanings,intensions,or
the like.
The third influence was an invitation from W. V. Quine to read the manu-
scriptofWordandObjectwhileQuinewasafellowattheCenterforAdvanced
StudyintheBehavioralSciencesatStanfordinthe1958–9academicyear.Word
and Object casts the project of understanding linguistic communication in the
form of an examination of the task of radical translation. This conception of
thebasicapproachtotheproblemhadatremendousinfluenceonDavidson.The
Introduction 3
radicaltranslatorconstructsatranslationmanualforanotherspeaker’slanguage
solelyonthebasisofthespeaker’sdispositionstoverbalbehaviorinresponseto
sensorystimulus.Thecentralidea,thatthereisnomoretomeaningthancanbe
gleaned from the standpoint of an interpreter of another speaker, is a central
theme of Davidson’s philosophy.
Thefourthinfluencewastheworkonthephilosophyofactionbeingdonein
Oxford in the 1950s, which was transmitted through Davidson’s student Dan
Bennett, who spent a year at Oxford and wrote a dissertation on action theory
inspired by discussions that weregoing on there.The prevailing orthodoxywas
the neo-Wittgensteinian view that action explanation was not causal but func-
tioned rather by redescribing an action in a way that places it in a larger social,
linguistic, economic, or evaluative pattern. Davidson famously argued against
thisorthodoxyin‘Actions,ReasonsandCauses’(1963,reprintedasEssay1,this
volume), so successfully as to establish the new orthodoxy that action explana-
tions were both rational and causal explanations.
TheseinfluencesgaverisetothetwomainstreamsinDavidson’sphilosophy,
which were mutually supporting, and interconnected. The first flows from the
workondecisiontheoryandthephilosophyofaction,andisrepresentedbythe
essays in the first section of this collection on Philosophy of Action and Psy-
chology. The second flows from the work on semantics, and combines the
influencesofQuineandTarski,andisrepresentedbythesecondsectioninthis
collection on Truth, Meaning, and Interpretation.
PHILOSOPHY OF ACTION
Davidson’sviewofthenatureofactioncombinestwoelementswhichhadbeen
thought to be incompatible, on the one hand the view that action explanations
arecausalexplanationsofthemovementsofourbodiesandthingsthatthesein
turn cause, and on the other hand the view that action explanations have a
justifying function, that is, that they show the action to have been done for
reasons. In ‘Actions, Reasons and Causes’, Davidson argued that to explain an
action we must cite or indicate a primary reason for it, an appropriately related
pair of belief and desire (or ‘pro attitude’) explained as follows:
C1. R is a primary reason why an agent performed the action A under the
description d only if R consists of a pro-attitude of the agent towards
actionswithacertainproperty,andabeliefoftheagentthatA,underthe
description d, has that property. (p. 25)
The primary reason provides the materials to construct a practical syllogism in
favoroftheaction,whichshowswhatwastobesaidforitfromthepointofview
of the agent. Thus, if A waves his hand because he wanted thereby to signal a
friendBandthoughtthatwavinghishandwouldbeasignalingofhisfriend,the
