Donald Herbert Davidson (1917-2003)
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born in Springfield, Massachusetts, on March 6, 1917
was an American philosopher who served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the
University of California, Berkeley, from 1981 to 2003.
On his college years, He switched his major from English and comparative literature to
classics and philosophy at Harvard university.
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.
His work has exerted considerable influence in nearly all areas of philosophy from the
1960s onward, but particularly in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language.
A bit of a fun fact: His family lived in the Philippines from shortly after Davidson's birth
until he was about four.
Davidson only wrote short papers that were collected in five volumes of philosophical essays.
Philosophers and linguists consider his “inquiries into truth and interpretation (published in
1984)” as one of his significant work.
His philosophy is somewhat a mixture of logical empiricism and quine’s philosophy.
Now onto some of his significant contributions in Philosophy of Language.
Beginning with his updated verification theory of meaning. According to Davidson, understanding
the meaning of a sentence is understanding its truth conditions.
Here, Davidson’s account is a bit updated mainly through Quine’s theory of radical translation (that
was mentioned earlier by andrea).
Davidson takes the notion of a theory of meaning as central, so it is important to be clear at
the outset what he means by the term.
it is no part of his project to define the concept of meaning in the sense in which Socrates
asks Euthyphro to define piety.
Davidson, therefore, pursues neither a theory of what meaning is, nor a theory of what
meanings are. Rather, for Davidson a theory of meaning is a descriptive semantics that
shows how to pair a speaker’s statements with their meanings. In short, it shows how to
construct the meanings of a speaker’s sentences out of the meanings of their parts and how
those parts are assembled.
In his 1967 article, truth and meaning, Davidson is interested in the compositional structure of natural
languages.
According to compositionality principle, “meaning of sentences depend upon the meanings of words”
In davidson’s approach, we understand meaning through truth.
As He rejects the ff. proposals
t=stands for the structural description of the sentence whose meaning we are interested in
x=its meaning
(1) t refers to x
s=structural description….
m=that sentence itself, meaning
(2) s means m
(3) s means that p [do not assign any entity]
he came up with this instead, Davidson’s own theory:
s
s
(there’s must be something in between these two)
is T if and only if
p
p
there’s still a need for this T, &the best candidate for T for Davidson is this predicate “is true”
this notion of conventional T, is borrowed from Alfred Tarski, a mathematician and logician.
Davidson’s claim is not that a Tarski-style theory of truth in itself is a theory of meaning; in
particular, he remarks that a T-sentence cannot be equated with a statement of a sentence’s
meaning. At best, a Tarski-style theory of truth is a part of a theory of meaning, with additional
resources being brought into play.
Additionally, for Tarski, “truth is not defined for natural languages.”
THIS is important because, again, Davidson borrows this notion from Tarski. But he said, you cannot
define truth for natural languages.
Therefore, this is a problem because the aim of Davidson is to understand meaning in natural languages
and in order to understand meaning in nature languages, he appeals to the notion of truth.
Considering na naging student siya ni Quine, It is safe to say that Davidson just reviewed Quine’s
theory of RT.
And so become what he calls, Radical Interpretation.
And the reason for this is that Quine usually talked about translation between two completely
unrelated languages. For example, between English and a non-existent Indian language and that
included for example the term “gavagai”. But in 1968, quine wrote quite important article called
ontological relativity, and in there he started to explain that “RT begins at home.” According to quine,
we use RT even in cases when we talk with speakers of the same language as we do.
Davidson in 1973, put it in a better way. According to him, “all understanding of the speech of
another involves RI.”
As you can see here Davidson uses interpretation instead of translation. The term translation might
be a counter intuitive.
So, Davidson said which is also Quine’s idea, “we have to use RT even when speakers use the same
language; then came his account of radical interpretation.”
According to Davidson, “the aim of any conversation is understanding [this is why we talk, this is why
we write and read, we want to understand others. And to do this]: we must try to understand
others, and we must try to be understood by others. To achieve this aim, we have to use radical
interpretation.
[the most important term of Davidson’s theory of language and theory of communication is the
Principle of Charity.]
Principle of Charity
“maximize agreement, or risk not making sense of what the alien is talking about” p.313
“maximize the self-consistency we attribute to him, on pain of not understanding him”
And so, whenever we are talking, reading, listening we have to keep in mind of this. That we must be
charitable to others. This just means na kailangan nating maging generous and open-minded when
we try to understand others and also when we’re trying to communicate what we mean to others.
So then, there’s this meaning – belief relation that we use in ordinary communication as well
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We do not know what someone means unless we know what he believes
in the the same way
We do not know what someone believes unless we know what he means
So there is a circularity here. These two here, can be attributed to Quine’s RT
To which Davidson adds that “we are able to break into this circle if only incompletely, because
we can sometimes tell that a person accedes to a sentence we do not understand” – p. 313
To better understand this principle of charity, here is a quote from Davidson’s 1974 essay “on the
very idea of a conceptual scheme”.
So, for context muna, ketch and yawl ay two types ng yate/sailboat. The only difference of these two
is the position of the jigger. Jigger, yun ay yung naka-attach sa dulo. Here are the pictures.
ketch
yawl
“If you see a ketch sailing by and your companion says, ‘Look at that handsome yawl,’ you may be
faced with a problem of interpretation. One natural possibility is that your friend has mistaken a
ketch for a yawl and has formed a false belief. But if his vision is good and his line of sight favorable it
is even more plausible that he does not use the word ‘yawl’ quite as you do and has made no
mistake at all about the position of the jigger on the passing yacht. We do this sort of off the cuff
interpretation all the time, deciding in favor of reinterpretation of words in order to preserve a
reasonable theory of belief.”
Which means that, according to Davidson, we have to do the smaller trade-offs between what a
person means by his or her words, and what a person tries to communicate using his or her words.
Sometimes there might be a mismatch between these two but we have to use, again, the principle
of charity to understand what’s going on.
The Radical interpretation of Davidson, along with Quine’s RT, are much more advanced and precise
theories of communication than the older ones. Moreover, using Davidson’s account of RI, we can
deal with such strange phenomena as metaphors in the natural language.
so dito na pumapasok ang metaphors. Davidson wrote on the account of metaphors this,
“Metaphor is the dreamwork of language and, like all dreamwork, its interpretation reflects as much
on the interpreter as on the originator. The interpretation of dreams requires collaboration between
a dreamer and a waker, even if they be the same person; and the act of interpretation is itself a work
of the imagination. So too, understanding a metaphor is as much a creative endeavor as making a
metaphor, and as little guided by rules.” – “what metaphors mean”, 1978
This approach is strongly against language games. Wittgenstein, in this regard, thought that
communication is ruled by precise rules. To which Davidson was against to, because he understands
that understanding is very creative. Para raw sakanya, dapat creative ka sa pag-iintindi. One should
invest a lot of cognitive work when dealing with language. Kapag nakikipag-communicate, dapat
malawak kang umintindi, para talagang maintindihan mo kung ano ba yung gustong sabihin ng
kausap mo or ng iba kasi hindi naman pwede na nakakulong or narerestrict ka ng certain rule when
trying to understand or comprehend something that is being expressed to you. So one must really
have to be creative kagaya nga ng sabi ni Davidson.
Following this, Davidson in his writings invented a very famous example of creative usage of
language and these are malapropisms.
Malapropisms
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Mrs. Malaprop from Richard Sheridan’s play The Rivals (1775) wants to sound intelligent and
well-educated, but unfortunately, hindi siya fluent sa paggamit ng English. I feel like we met or
know someone like her, someone who wants to sound intelligent but unfortunately is not able to
do that.
One example from the play is her statement, “He will dissolve my mystery!”
What she wanted to say was of course something else.
When understanding malapropisms like this you have to be creative. Eto yung mga statement na
kapag narinig mo, mapapakunot ka ng noo, “ha ano raw?” ganon kasi hindi clear yung message.
Kapag ganto, walang rules rules it’s just you. in a way, para kang nagsosolve ng puzzle na tapos
naman na, only that something is off, may parang pinilit na isingit. but just like in a mismatched
puzzle, sometimes the wrong words are placed in sentences too, in this case yung word na
dissolve.
Another example: “she’s as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of nile.”
Here, this is a metaphor, specifically, a simile.
But then again, it sounds strange kasi may mali na naman.
What she really wanted to say is that ““she’s as headstrong as an alligator on the banks of nile.”
The point here, is we can understand these sentences even in cases when they include a
mistake. The reason for it is that we are using the principle of charity in our radical interpretation
of the thoughts of others, which is the whole idea of the davidsonian and quinian theory of
meaning.
Further, meaning is objective in the sense that most of what speakers say about the
world is true of the world. Some critics object that this statement rests on an optimistic
assessment of human capacities for judgment;
however, Davidson’s point is not an empirical claim that could turn out to be mistaken.
Rather, it is a statement of the methodology of radical interpretation, an assumption an
interpreter makes to gain access to her subject’s language. END.
Her only path into his language is by way of the world they share since she makes sense
of his sentences by discerning patterns in the relations between those sentences and the
objects and events in the world that cause him to hold those sentences true. If too many
of his utterances are false, then the link between what he says and thinks, on the one
hand, and the world, on the other, is severed; and the enterprise of interpretation halts.
Finding too much unexplainable error in his statements about the world, therefore, is
not an option, if she is going to interpret him.
Davidson’s contribution to the philosophy of language
was one of the most influential analytic philosophers of language during the second half of the
twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first century. An attraction of Davidson’s
philosophy of language is the set of conceptual connections he draws between traditional
questions about language and issues that arise in other fields of philosophy, including especially
the philosophy of mind, action theory, epistemology, and metaphysics.
It is useful to think of Davidson’s project in the philosophy of language as cleaving into two
parts. The first, which commences with his earliest publications in the field (Davidson 1965 and
1967), explores and defends his claim that a Tarski-style theory of truth for a language L,
modified and supplemented in important ways, suffices to explain how the meanings of the
sentences of a language L depend upon the meanings of words of L, and thus models a
significant part of the knowledge someone possesses when she understands L. In other words,
Davidson claims that we can adapt a Tarski-style theory of truth to do duty for a theory of
meaning. This claim, which is stronger and more complex than it appears at first reading, is
examined in section 1.
The second part of Davidson’s work on language (in articles beginning with Davidson 1973 and
1974) addresses issues associated with constructing the sort of meaning theory he proposes in
the first part of his project. A Davidsonian theory of meaning is an empirical theory that one
constructs to interpret─that is, to describe, systematize, and explain─the linguistic behavior of
speakers one encounters in the field or, simply, in line at the supermarket. Again, this problem
turns out to be more complex and more interesting than it first appears. This set of issues is
examined in section 2.
1. Davidson’s Theory of Meaning
Davidson takes the notion of a theory of meaning as central, so it is important to be clear
at the outset what he means by the term. Starting with what he does not mean, it is no part of
his project to define the concept of meaning, rather he writes that it is folly to try to define the
concept of truth (Davidson, 1996).
Locke, who says that meanings of a speaker’s words are ideas in her mind, has a theory of meaning
in this sense, as do contemporary philosophers of language who identify meanings with the
contents of certain beliefs or intentions of the speaker.
I.
Brief Biography
- A colleague and a student of Quine
- Introduced the Radical Interpretation from Quine’s Radical Translation
II.
Notable Ideas
- Truth and Meaning - 1967 (essay) his updated verification theory of meaning
In theory of meaning, under truth conditions, Donald Davidson argued that we will get where we
want to be if we replace the positivist’s notion of a sentence’s verification condition with that of
the sentence’s truth condition.
On this view, to know a sentence’s meaning is to know the conditions under which that sentence
would be true rather than to know how to tell whether the sentence is actually true.
He begins with two ideas that prove to be related:
(1) that a theory of meaning should afford guidance on what determines the meaning
of a particular sentence
(2) is that of giving central importance to the wondrous phenomenon
davidson: meaning = truth conditions
davidson’s idea to equate meanings with truth conditions is undeniably clever. It
provides, however, a suitable basis for a theory of meaning only if a number of tricky
conditions turn out to be fulfilled.
Among these conditions are:
Names the core idea of davidson’s truth conditional approach to semantics
(1) “to know the semantic concept of truth for a language is to know what it is
for a sentence, any sentence [of a specific language], to be true and this
amounts in one good sense we can give to the phrase, to understanding the
language” – Davidson, p.24
The davidsonian assumption has however ‘prima facie plausibility’, since we can
judge a sentence’s truth or falsity only under the condition that we know what
the sentence happens to mean.
(2) Is that every sentence of a language has to be such that it possesses (or
might be analyzed as possessing) a particular set of truth conditions.
However, the existence of sentences without truth conditions would, thus, prove
the inadequacy of this approach. Speculations about the existence of such
sentences are not baseless questions and commands.
(3) Asks for a suitable conception of truth.
Davidson claims that a suitably modified version of Alfred tarski’s semantic
conception of truth is capable to fulfill these conditions.
Tarski, thus, defines the truth predicates in terms of linguistic meaning. Linguistic
meaning is however always linguistic meaning of particular language.
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Radical interpretation
Principle of Charity
Metaphors
Malapropisms
Additional fun fact - Xenolinguistics
Davidsonian events
Can there be thought without words? – Donald Davidson on Language and Animal Minds, holds that
a creature cannot think unless it is the interpreter of the speech of another.
Speaking a language → thought (speaking a language is, therefore, a necessary condition for
thought.)
He actually never meant to argue that languageless creatures do not think. Instead, the only thing
his arguments purport to show is that one will never be in a position to confrm that they do.
Name: Donald Herbert Davidson
Birth: March 6, 1917
(Springfield, Massachusetts, USA)
Death: August 30, 2003
(Berkeley, California, USA)
Main Interests
Language, Action, Mind, Epistemology, Events
Influences
Influenced
Quine, Tarski, Ramsey,
Wittgenstein,
Dummett, Kant, Spinoza
Richard Rorty, Robert Brandom,
John McDowell, Gareth Evans,
Ernest Lepore, Kirk Ludwig