Donald Herbert Davidson (March 6, 1917 – August 30, 2003) was an American philosopher, who served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1981 to 2003, after having also held substantive teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton University and the University of Chicago. His work has exerted considerable influence in many areas of philosophy from the 1960s onward, but particularly in the philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and action theory. Although published mostly in the form of short essays which do not explicitly rely on any overriding theory, his work is nonetheless noted for a strongly unified character—the same methods and ideas are brought to bear on a host of apparently unrelated problems—and for synthesizing the work of a great number of other philosophers, including Aristotle, Kant, Wittgenstein, Frank P. Ramsey, W.V. Quine, and G. E. M. Anscombe. Western philosophy is a modern claim that there is a line of related philosophical thinking, beginning in ancient Greece (Greek philosophy) and the ancient Near East (the Abrahamic religions), that continues to this day. ... It has been suggested that Contemporary philosophy be merged into this article or section. ... is the 65th day of the year (66th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1917 (MCMXVII) was a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar (see link for calendar) or a common year starting on Tuesday of the 13-day slower Julian calendar (see: 1917 Julian calendar). ... Nickname: Location in Hampden County in Massachusetts Coordinates: , Country State County Hampden Settled 1636 Incorporated 1852 Government  - Type Mayor-council city  - Mayor Domenic J Sarno (D) Area  - City 33. ... This article is about the U.S. state. ... is the 273rd day of the year (274th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Berkeley is a city on the east shore of San Francisco Bay in Northern California, in the United States. ... This article is about the U.S state. ... Analytic philosophy (sometimes, analytical philosophy) is a generic term for a style of philosophy that came to dominate English-speaking countries in the 20th century. ... Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. ... Philosophy of action is chiefly concerned with human action, intending to distinguish between activity and passivity, voluntary, intentional, culpable and involuntary actions, and related question. ... For other uses, see Mind (disambiguation). ... Theory of knowledge redirects here: for other uses, see theory of knowledge (disambiguation) Epistemology (from Greek επιστήμη - episteme, knowledge + λόγος, logos) or theory of knowledge is a branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge. ... This page is a candidate for speedy deletion because: this page is a test If you disagree with its speedy deletion, please explain why on its talk page or at Wikipedia:Speedy deletions. ... Radical interpretation in philosophy means working out the meaning of words, sentences and whole languages from scratch, by observing how they are used. ... Anomalous Monism is a philosophical thesis about the mind-body relationship. ... Truth-conditional semantics is the name for an approach to semantics of natural language that sees the meaning of a sentence being the same as, or reducible to, the truth conditions of that sentence. ... For people named Quine, see Quine (surname). ... // Alfred Tarski (January 14, 1902, Warsaw, Russian-ruled Poland – October 26, 1983, Berkeley, California) was a logician and mathematician who spent four decades as a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. ... Herbert Paul Grice (1913 - 1988), usually publishing under the name Paul Grice, was a British educated philosopher of language, who spent the last two decades of his career in the U.S. // Life Born and raised in the United Kingdom, Grice was educated first at Clifton College and then at... Frank Plumpton Ramsey (February 22, 1903 – January 19, 1930) was a British mathematician who, in addition to mathematics, made significant contributions in philosophy and economics. ... Wittgenstein redirects here. ... Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett F.B.A., D. Litt, (born 1925) is a leading British philosopher. ... Kant redirects here. ... Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970), was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, advocate for social reform, and pacifist. ... Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 - June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher. ... Robert Brandom (1950- ), nicknamed the Iron City Kant, is American philosopher who teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. ... John Henry McDowell (born 1942) is a contemporary philosopher, formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford and now University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. ... Gareth Evans (12 May 1946 – 10 August 1980) was a British philosopher at Oxford University during the 1970s. ... Ernest LePore (born in New Jersey) is an American philosopher and cognitive scientist. ... is the 65th day of the year (66th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... 1917 (MCMXVII) was a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar (see link for calendar) or a common year starting on Tuesday of the 13-day slower Julian calendar (see: 1917 Julian calendar). ... is the 242nd day of the year (243rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. ... Year 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... A philosopher is a person who thinks deeply regarding people, society, the world, and/or the universe. ... Sather Tower (the Campanile) looking out over the San Francisco Bay and Mount Tamalpais. ... Stanford redirects here. ... Founders Hall Rockefeller University is a private university focusing primarily on graduate and postgraduate education research in the biomedical fields, located between 63rd and 68th Streets along York Avenue, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan island in New York City, New York. ... Princeton University is a private coeducational research university located in Princeton, New Jersey. ... For other uses, see University of Chicago (disambiguation). ... A phrenological mapping of the brain. ... Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. ... Philosophical action theory is concerned with conjectures about the processes causing intentional (wilful) human bodily movements of more or less complex kind. ... For other uses, see Aristotle (disambiguation). ... Kant redirects here. ... Wittgenstein redirects here. ... Frank Plumpton Ramsey (February 22, 1903 – January 19, 1930) was a British mathematician who, in addition to mathematics, made significant contributions in philosophy and economics. ... For people named Quine, see Quine (surname). ... Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (March 18, 1919 – January 5, 2001) (known as Elizabeth Anscombe, published as G. E. M. Anscombe) was a British analytic philosopher, a theologian and a pupil of Ludwig Wittgenstein. ...

Life

Davidson was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on March 6, 1917 to Clarence ("Davie") Herbert Davidson and Grace Cordelia Anthony. The family lived in the Philippines from shortly after Davidson's birth until he was about four. Then, having lived in Amherst and Philadelphia, the family finally settled on Staten Island when Davidson was nine or ten. From this time he began to attend public school, having to begin in first grade with much younger children. He then attended the Staten Island Academy, starting in fourth grade. Nickname: Location in Hampden County in Massachusetts Coordinates: , Country State County Hampden Settled 1636 Incorporated 1852 Government  - Type Mayor-council city  - Mayor Domenic J Sarno (D) Area  - City 33. ... Nickname: Location in Hampshire County in Massachusetts Coordinates: , Country State County Hampshire Settled 1703 Incorporated 1775 Government  - Type Representative town meeting Area  - Total 27. ... For other uses, see Philadelphia (disambiguation) and Philly. ... This article is about the borough in New York City. ... // Staten Island Academy is a coeducational, college-preparatory day school located on a 12 acre campus in Staten Island in New York City, USA. Founded in 1884 by Anton Methfessel, it is the oldest private school on Staten Island, and is the only independent school (non-public, non-religious) in...

At Harvard University he switched his major from English and comparative literature (Theodore Spencer on Shakespeare and the Bible, Harry Levin on Joyce) to classics and philosophy. Harvard redirects here. ... Wikipedia does not yet have an article with this exact name. ... For other uses, see Bible (disambiguation). ... Harry Tuchman Levin (July 18, 1912 – May 29, 1994) was an American literary critic and scholar of modernism and comparative literature. ...

Davidson was a fine pianist and always had a deep interest in music, later teaching philosophy of music at Stanford. At Harvard, he was in the same class as the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, with whom Davidson played piano four hands. Bernstein wrote and conducted the musical score for the production which Davidson mounted of Aristophanes' play The Birds in the original Greek. Some of this music was later to be reused in Bernstein's ballet Fancy Free. Leonard Bernstein in 1971 Leonard Bernstein (IPA pronunciation: )[1] (August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, and pianist. ...

After graduation he went to California, where he wrote radio scripts for the private-eye drama, "Big Town," starring Edward G. Robinson. He returned to Harvard on a scholarship in classical philosophy, teaching philosophy and concurrently undergoing the intensive training of Harvard Business School. Before having the opportunity to graduate from Harvard Business School, Davidson was called up by the Navy, for which he had volunteered. He trained pilots to recognize enemy planes and participated in the invasions of Sicily, Salerno, and Enzio. After three and a half years in the Navy, he tried unsuccessfully to write a novel before returning to his philosophy studies and earning his doctorate in philosophy in 1949. Davidson wrote his dissertation, which he considered dull, on Plato's Philebus. Edward Goldenberg Robinson (born Emanuel Goldenberg, Yiddish: עמנואל גולדנברג; December 12, 1893 – January 26, 1973) was an American stage and film actor of Romanian origin. ... Harvard Business School, officially named the Harvard Business School: George F. Baker Foundation, and also known as HBS, is one of the graduate schools of Harvard University. ... The United States Navy (USN) is the branch of the United States armed forces responsible for naval operations. ... Philebus is among the last of the late Socratic dialogues of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. ...

Under the influence of W. V. O. Quine, whom he often credits as his mentor, he began to gradually turn toward the more rigorous methods and precise problems characteristic of analytic philosophy. W. V. Quine Willard Van Orman Quine (June 25, 1908 - December 25, 2000) was one of the most influential American philosophers and logicians of the 20th century. ...

During the 1950s Davidson worked with Patrick Suppes on developing an experimental approach to Decision Theory. They concluded that it was not possible to isolate a subject's beliefs and preferences independently of one another, meaning there would always be multiple ways to analyze a person's actions in terms of what they wanted, or were trying to do, or valued. This result is comparable to Quine's thesis on the indeterminacy of translation, and figures significantly in much of Davidson's later work on philosophy of mind. Patrick Colonel Suppes (b. ... Decision theory is an area of study of discrete mathematics that models human decision-making in science, engineering and indeed all human social activities. ... The indeterminacy of translation is a thesis propounded by Willard Van Orman Quine, perhaps the most famous analytic philosopher of the 20th century. ...

His most noted work (see below) was published in a series of essays from the 1960s onward, moving successively through philosophy of action into philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, and dabbling occasionally in aesthetics, philosophical psychology, and the history of philosophy.

Davidson was widely traveled, and had a great range of interests he pursued with enormous energy. Apart from playing the piano, he had a pilot's license, built radios, and was fond of mountain climbing and surfing. He was married three times (the last time to the philosopher Marcia Cavell). Thomas Nagel elliptically eulogized him as "deeply erotic". Thomas Nagel (born July 4, 1937, in Belgrade, Serbia) is University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University and member of the Board of Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica. ...

He served terms as president of both the Eastern and Western Divisions of the American Philosophical Association, and held various professional positions at Queens College (now part of CUNY), Stanford, Princeton, Rockefeller University, Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Chicago. From 1981 until his death he was at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor of Philosophy. In 1995 he was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize. Queens College, Queens College or Queens College is the name of more than one institution, see: Queens College, Cambridge Queens College, Charlotte Queens College, Hong Kong Queens College, London Queens College, New York Queens College, Nassau The Queens College, Oxford Queens College was the... Stanford redirects here. ... Princeton University is a private coeducational research university located in Princeton, New Jersey. ... Harvard redirects here. ... The University of Oxford, located in the city of Oxford in England, is the oldest university in the English-speaking world. ... For other uses, see University of Chicago (disambiguation). ... Sather Tower (the Campanile) looking out over the San Francisco Bay and Mount Tamalpais. ... The Jean Nicod Prize is awarded annually in Paris to a leading philosopher of mind or philosophically oriented cognitive scientist. ...

Work

Actions, reasons, and causes

Davidson's most noted work began in 1963 with an essay, "Actions, Reasons, and Causes," which attempted to refute the prevailing orthodox view, widely attributed to Wittgenstein, that an agent's reasons for acting cannot be the causes of his action (Malpas, 2005, §2). Instead, Davidson argued that "rationalization [the providing of reasons to explain an agent's actions] is a species of ordinary causal explanation" (1963, p. 685). In particular, an action A is explained by what Davidson called a primary reason, which involves a pro-attitude (roughly, a desire) toward some goal G and an instrumental belief that performing action A is a means to attaining G. For example, someone's primary reason for taking an umbrella with her outside on a rainy day might be that she wants to stay dry and believes that taking an umbrella is a means to stay dry today. Wittgenstein redirects here. ...

This view, which largely conforms to common-sense folk psychology, was held in part on the ground that while causal laws must be precise and mechanistic, explanation in terms of reasons need not. Davidson argued that the fact that the expression of a reason was not so precise, did not mean that the having of a reason could not itself be a state capable of causally influencing behavior. Several other essays pursue consequences of this view, and elaborate Davidson's theory of actions.

Mental events

In "Mental Events" (1970) Davidson advanced a form of token identity theory about the mind: token mental events are identical to token physical events. One previous difficulty with such a view was that it did not seem feasible to provide laws relating mental states—for example, believing that the sky is blue, or wanting a hamburger—to physical states, such as patterns of neural activity in the brain. Davidson argued that such a reduction would not be necessary to a token identity thesis: it is possible that each individual mental event just is the corresponding physical event, without there being laws relating types (as opposed to tokens) of mental events to types of physical events. But, Davidson argued, the fact that we could not have such a reduction does not entail that the mind is anything more than the brain. Hence, Davidson called his position anomalous monism: monism, because it claims that only one thing is at issue in questions of mental and physical events; anomalous (from a-, not, and nomos, law) because mental and physical event types could not be connected by strict laws (laws without exceptions). identity theory is a regularly published, webzine of literature and culture edited by Matt Borondy from Austin, TX, established in 2000. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Anomalous Monism is a philosophical thesis about the mind-body relationship. ...

Davidson argued that anomalous monism follows from three plausible theses. First, he assumes the denial of epiphenomenalism--that is, the denial of the view that mental events do not cause physical events. Second, he assumes a nomological view of causation, according to which one event causes another if (and only if) there is a strict, exceptionless law governing the relation between the events. Third, he assumes the principle of the anomalism of the mental, according to which there are no strict laws that govern mental and physical event types. By these three theses, Davidson argued, it follows that the causal relations between the mental and the physical hold only between mental event tokens, but that mental events as types are anomalous. This ultimately secures token physicalism and a supervenience relation between the mental and the physical, while respecting the autonomy of the mental (Malpas, 2005, §2). Epiphenomenalism is a view in philosophy of mind according to which some or all mental states are mere epiphenomena (side-effects or by-products) of physical states of the world. ... In philosophy, supervenience is a well-defined dependency relation between higher-level (. mental) and lower-level (. physical) properties. ...

Truth and meaning

In 1967 Davidson published "Truth and Meaning," in which he argued that any learnable language must be statable in a finite form, even if it is capable of a theoretically infinite number of expressions—as we may assume that natural human languages are, at least in principle. If it could not be stated in a finite way then it could not be learned through a finite, empirical method such as the way humans learn their languages. It follows that it must be possible to give a theoretical semantics for any natural language which could give the meanings of an infinite number of sentences on the basis of a finite system of axioms. Following, among others, Rudolf Carnap (Introduction to Semantics, Harvard 1942, 22) Davidson also argued that "giving the meaning of a sentence" was equivalent to stating its truth conditions, so stimulating the modern work on truth-conditional semantics. In sum, he proposed that it must be possible to distinguish a finite number of distinct grammatical features of a language, and for each of them explain its workings in such a way as to generate trivial (obviously correct) statements of the truth conditions of all the (infinitely many) sentences making use of that feature. That is, we can give a finite theory of meaning for a natural language; the test of its correctness is that it would generate (if applied to the language in which it was formulated) all the sentences of the form "'p' is true if and only if p" ("'Snow is white' is true if and only if snow is white). (These are called T-sentences: Davidson derives the idea from Alfred Tarski.) Truth-conditional semantics is the name for an approach to semantics of natural language that sees the meaning of a sentence being the same as, or reducible to, the truth conditions of that sentence. ... // Alfred Tarski (January 14, 1902, Warsaw, Russian-ruled Poland – October 26, 1983, Berkeley, California) was a logician and mathematician who spent four decades as a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. ...

This work was originally delivered in his John Locke Lectures at Oxford, and launched a large endeavor by many philosophers to develop Davidsonian semantical theories for natural language. Davidson himself contributed many details to such a theory, in essays on quotation, indirect discourse, and descriptions of action. The John Locke lectures are a series of annual lectures in philosophy given at the University of Oxford. ...

Knowledge and belief

After the 1970s Davidson's philosophy of mind picked up influences from the work of Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, and Keith Donnellan, all of whom had proposed a number of troubling counter-examples to what can be generally described as "descriptivist" theories of content. These views, which roughly originate in Bertrand Russell's Theory of Descriptions (and perhaps in the younger Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) held that the referent of a name—which object or person that name refers to—is determined by the beliefs a person holds about that object. Suppose I believe "Aristotle founded the Lyceum" and "Aristotle taught Alexander the Great." Whom are my beliefs about? Aristotle, obviously. But why? Russell would say that my beliefs are about whatever object makes the greatest number of them true. If two people taught Alexander, but only one founded the Lyceum, then my beliefs are about the one who did both. Kripke et al. argued that this was not a tenable theory, and that in fact whom or what a person's beliefs were about was in large part (or entirely) a matter of how they had acquired those beliefs, and those names, and how if at all the use of those names could be traced "causally" from their original referents to the current speaker. Saul Aaron Kripke (born in November 13, 1940 in Bay Shore, New York) is an American philosopher and logician now emeritus from Princeton and teaches as distinguished professor of philosophy at CUNY Graduate Center. ... Hilary Whitehall Putnam (born July 31, 1926) is an American philosopher who has been a central figure in Western philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and philosophy of science. ... Keith Donnellan (born 1931) is a contemporary philosopher and Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles. ... Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS, (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970), was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, advocate for social reform, and pacifist. ... The theory of descriptions is one of the philosopher Bertrand Russells most significant contributions to the philosophy of language. ... Wittgenstein redirects here. ... Book cover of the Dover edition of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Ogden translation) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the only book-length work published by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in his lifetime. ...

Davidson picked up this theory, and his work in the 1980s dealt with the problems in relating first-person beliefs to second- and third-person beliefs. It seems that first person beliefs ("I am hungry") are acquired in very different ways from third person beliefs (someone else's belief, of me, that "He is hungry") How can it be that they have the same content?

Davidson approached this question by connecting it with another one: how can two people have beliefs about the same external object? He offers, in answer, a picture of triangulation: Beliefs about oneself, beliefs about other people, and beliefs about the world come into existence jointly.

Many philosophers throughout history had, arguably, been tempted to reduce two of these kinds of belief and knowledge to the other one: Descartes and Hume thought that the only knowledge we start with is self-knowledge. Some of the logical positivists, (and some would say Wittgenstein, or Wilfrid Sellars), held that we start with beliefs only about the external world. (And arguably Friedrich Schelling and Emmanuel Levinas held that we start with beliefs only about other people). It is not possible, on Davidson's view, for a person to have only one of these three kinds of mental content; anyone who has beliefs of one of the kinds must have beliefs of the other two kinds. René Descartes (French IPA:  Latin:Renatus Cartesius) (March 31, 1596 – February 11, 1650), also known as Renatus Cartesius (latinized form), was a highly influential French philosopher, mathematician, scientist, and writer. ... For other persons named David Hume, see David Hume (disambiguation). ... Logical positivism grew from the discussions of Moritz Schlicks Vienna Circle and Hans Reichenbachs Berlin Circle in the 1920s and 1930s. ... Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (May 20, 1912 - July 2, 1989) was an American philosopher. ... Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (January 27, 1775 - August 20, 1854) was a German philosopher. ... Emmanuel Levinas (January 12, 1906 - December 25, 1995) was a Jewish philosopher originally from Kaunas in Lithuania, who moved to France where he wrote most of his works in French. ...

Radical interpretation

Davidson's work is well noted for its unity, as he has brought a similar approach to a wide variety of philosophical problems. Radical interpretation is a hypothetical standpoint which Davidson regards as basic to the investigation of language, mind, action, and knowledge. Radical interpretation involves imagining that you are placed into a community which speaks a language you do not understand at all. How could you come to understand the language? One suggestion is that you know a theory that generates a theorem of the form 's means that p' for every sentence of the object language (i.e. the language of the community), where s is the name of a sentence in the object language, and p is that sentence, or a translation of it, in the metalanguage in which the theory is expressed. However, Davidson rejects this suggestion on the grounds that the sentential operator 'means that' is sensitive not only to the extensions of the terms that follow it, but also to their intensions. Hence, Davidson replaces 'means that' with a connective that is only sensitive to the extensions of sentences; since the extension of a sentence is its truth value, this is a truth functional connective. Davidson elects the biconditional - if and only if - as the connective needed in a theory of meaning. This is the obvious choice because we are aiming at equivalence of meaning between s and p. But now we have a problem: 's if and only if p' is an ungrammatical sentence because the connective must link two propositions, but s is the name of a proposition, and not a proposition itself. In order to render s a proposition we need to supply it with a predicate. Which predicate is satisfied by s if and only if the sentence named by s, or a translation of it, is the case? In other words, which predicate is satisfied by "bananas are yellow" if and only if bananas are yellow? The answer is the predicate truth. Thus, Davidson is led to the conclusion that a theory of meaning must be such that for each sentence of the object language it generates a theorem of the form 's is true if and only if p'. A theory of truth for a language can serve as a theory of meaning. Radical interpretation in philosophy means working out the meaning of words, sentences and whole languages from scratch, by observing how they are used. ...

The significance of this conclusion is that it allows Davidson to draw on the work of Alfred Tarski in giving the nature of a theory of meaning. Tarski showed how we can give a compositional theory of truth for artificial languages. Thus, Davidson takes three questions to be central to radical interpretation. Firstly, can a theory of truth be given for a natural language? Secondly, given the evidence plausibly available for the radical interpreter, can they construct and verify a theory of truth for the language they wish to interpret? Thirdly, will having a theory of truth suffice for allowing the radical interpreter to understand the language? Davidson has shown, using the work of Tarski, that the first question can be answered affirmatively. // Alfred Tarski (January 14, 1902, Warsaw, Russian-ruled Poland – October 26, 1983, Berkeley, California) was a logician and mathematician who spent four decades as a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. ...

What evidence is plausibly available to the radical interpreter? Davidson points out that beliefs and meanings are inseparable. A person holds a sentence true based on what he believes and what he takes the sentence to mean. If the interpreter knew what a person believed when that person held a sentence to be true, the meaning of the sentence could then be inferred. Vice versa, if the interpreter knew what a person took a sentence to mean when that person held it to be true, the belief of the speaker could be inferred. So Davidson doesn't allow the interpreter to have access to beliefs as evidence, since the interpreter would then be begging the question. Instead, Davidson allows that the interpreter can reasonably ascertain when a speaker holds a sentence true, without knowing anything about a particular belief or meaning. This will then allow the interpreter to construct hypotheses relating a speaker and an utterance to a particular state of affairs at a particular time. The example Davidson gives is of a German speaker who utters “Es regnet” when it is raining. State of affairs has some technical usages in philosophy, as well as being a phrase in everyday speech in English. ...

Davidson claims that even though in isolated cases a speaker might be mistaken about the state of objective reality (for example, the German speaker might utter “Es regnet” even though it is not raining), this doesn’t undermine the entire project. This is because a speaker’s beliefs must be mostly correct and coherent. If they weren’t, we wouldn’t even identify the speaker as a speaker. This is Davidson’s famous principle of charity and it is what enables an interpreter to be confident that the evidence he gathers will allow him to verify a theory of truth for the language. In philosophy, the principle of charity is an approach to understanding a logical argument where you render the best, strongest possible interpretation of an arguments meaning. ...

On first glance, it might seem that a theory of truth is not enough to interpret a language. After all, if truth-conditions are all that matters, then how can anomalous sentences such as ‘“Schnee ist weiss” is true if and only if snow is white and grass is green’ be verified as false? Davidson argues that because the language is compositional, it is also holistic: sentences are based on the meanings of words, but the meaning of a word depends on the totality of sentences in which it appears. This holistic constraint, along with the requirement that the theory of truth is law-like, suffices to minimize indeterminacy just enough for successful communication to occur. Semantic holism is a doctrine in the philosophy of language to the effect that a certain part of language, be it a term or a complete sentence, can only be understood through its relations to a (previously understood) larger segment of language. ...

In summary, then, what radical interpretation highlights is what is necessary and sufficient for communication to occur. These conditions are: that in order to recognize a speaker as a speaker, their beliefs must be mostly coherent and correct; indeterminacy of meaning doesn’t undermine communication, but it must be constrained just enough.

I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases. And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in language; or, as I think, we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions.

– "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs," Truth and Interpretation, 446

Alfred North Whitehead, OM (February 15, 1861, Ramsgate, Kent, England – December 30, 1947, Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S.) was an English-born mathematician who became a philosopher. ... W. V. Quine Willard Van Orman Quine (June 25, 1908 - December 25, 2000) was one of the most influential American philosophers and logicians of the 20th century. ... Michael Bratman is Durfee Professor in the School of Humanities & Sciences and Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University. ... Big John Wallace was a bassist and backup singer with Harry Chapin starting in 1971. ...

References

Work by Donald Davidson

• "Actions, Reasons, and Causes," Journal of Philosophy, 60, 1963. (Reprinted in Davidson, 2001a.)
• "Truth and Meaning," Synthese, 17, 1967. (Reprinted in Davidson, 2001b.)
• "Mental Events," in Experience and Theory, Foster and Swanson (eds.). London: Duckworth. 1970. (Reprinted in Davidson, 2001a).
• "Agency," in Agent, Action, and Reason, Binkley, Bronaugh, and Marras (eds.), Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1971. (Reprinted in Davidson, 2001a.)
• "Radical Interpretation," Dialectica, 27, 1973. (Reprinted in Davidson, 2001b.)
• Semantics of Natural Languages, Davidson, Donald and Gilbert Harman (eds.), 2nd ed. New York: Springer. 1973.
• Decision-Making: An Experimental Approach, co-authored with Patrick Suppes and Sydney Siegel. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1957.
• Plato's ‘Philebus’, New York: Garland Publishing. 1990.
• Essays on Actions and Events, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2001a.
• Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2001b.
• Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2001c.
• Problems of Rationality, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2004.
• Truth, Language, and History: Philosophical Essays, Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005.
• Truth and Predication. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2005. ISBN 978-0-674-01525-8
• The Essential Davidson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006.

The Stanford University Press is a publishing house, a division of Stanford University, that is highly respected in academic publishing. ... Oxford University Press (OUP) is a highly-respected publishing house and a department of the University of Oxford in England. ... The Harvard University Press is a publishing house, a division of Harvard University, that is highly respected in academic publishing. ...

Secondary literature

• Dasenbrock, Reed Way (ed.). Literary Theory After Davidson. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press. 1993.
• Hahn, Lewis Edwin (ed.). The Philosophy of Donald Davidson, Library of Living Philosophers XXVII. Chicago: Open Court. 1999.
• Kotatko, Petr, Peter Pagin and Gabriel Segal (eds.). Interpreting Davidson. Stanford: CSLI Publications. 2001.
• Evnine, Simon. Donald Davidson. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1991.
• Kalugin, Vladimir. "Donald Davidson (1917-2003)," Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2006. (link)
• Lepore, Ernest and Brian McLaughlin (eds.). Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1985.
• Lepore, Ernest (ed.). Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1986.
• Lepore, Ernest and Kirk Ludwig. "Donald Davidson," Midwest Studies in Philosophy, September 2004, vol. 28, pp. 309-333.
• Lepore, Ernest and Kirk Ludwig. Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005.
• Lepore, Ernest and Kirk Ludwig. Donald Davidson's Truth-Theoretic Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2007.
• Ludwig, Kirk (ed.). Donald Davidson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003.
• Ludwig, Kirk. "Donald Davidson: Essays on Actions and Events." In Classics of Western Philosophy: The Twentieth Century: Quine and After, vol. 5., John Shand (ed.), Acumen Press, 2006, pp. 146-165.
• Malpas, Jeffrey. Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning: Holism, Truth, Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1992.
• Malpas, Jeffrey. "Donald Davidson," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2005. (link)
• Preyer, Gerhard, Frank Siebelt, and Alexander Ulfig (eds.). Language, Mind and Epistemology: On Donald Davidson's Philosophy. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1994.
• Ramberg, Bjorn. Donald Davidson's Philosophy of Language: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1989.
• Romaneczko, Marta E. The Role of Metalanguage in Radical Interpretation. Journal of Consciousness Studies. 2007.
• Stoecker, Ralf (ed.). Reflecting Davidson. Berlin: W. de Gruyter. 1993.
• Vermazen, B., and Hintikka, M. Essays on Davidson: Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1985.
• Zeglen, Ursula M. (ed.). Donald Davidson: Truth, Meaning and Knowledge. London: Routledge. 1991.

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy is an online encyclopedia on philosophical topics and philosophers founded by James Fieser in 1995. ... The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (hereafter SEP) is a free online encyclopedia of philosophy run and maintained by Stanford University. ...

See also

• List of Jean Nicod Prize laureates
• Swampman

The Jean Nicod Prize is awarded annually in Paris to a leading philosopher of mind or philosophically oriented cognitive scientist. ... Swampman is the subject of a philosophical thought experiment introduced by Donald Davidson, in his 1987 paper Knowing Ones Own Mind. The experiment runs as follows: Suppose Davidson goes hiking in the swamp and is struck and killed by a lightning bolt. ...

External links

• "Donald Davidson" - by Jeff Malpas, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2005.
• "Donald Davidson (1917-2003)" - by Vladimir Kalugin, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2006.