Truth, Language, and History

by Donald Davidson

Truth, Language, and History is the much-anticipated final volume of Donald Davidson's philosophical writings. In four groups of essays, Davidson continues to explore the themes that occupied him for more than fifty years: the relations between language and the world; speaker intention and linguistic meaning; language and mind; mind and body; mind and world; mind and other minds. He asks: what is the role of the concept of truth in these explorations? And, can a scientific world view make room for human thought without reducing it to something material and mechanistic? Including a new introduction by his widow, Marcia Cavell, this volume completes Donald Davidson's colossal intellectual legacy.

Genres: Philosophy, Linguistics

372 pages, Paperback

First published February 17, 2005

About the author

Donald Davidson was one of the most important philosophers of the latter half of the twentieth century. His ideas, presented in a series of essays from the 1960's onwards, have been influential across a range of areas from semantic theory through to epistemology and ethics. Davidson's work exhibits a breadth of approach, as well as a unitary and systematic character, which is unusual within twentieth century analytic philosophy. Thus, although he acknowledged an important debt to W. V. O. Quine, Davidson's thought amalgamates influences (though these are not always explicit) from a variety of sources, including Quine, C. I. Lewis, Frank Ramsey, Immanuel Kant and the later Wittgenstein. And while often developed separately, Davidson's ideas nevertheless combine in such a way as to provide a single integrated approach to the problems of knowledge, action, language and mind. The breadth and unity of his thought, in combination with the sometimes-terse character of his prose, means that Davidson is not an easy writer to approach. Yet however demanding his work might sometimes appear, this in no way detracts from either the significance of that work or the influence it has exercised and will undoubtedly continue to exercise. Indeed, in the hands of Richard Rorty and others, and through the widespread translation of his writings, Davidson's ideas have reached an audience that extends far beyond the confines of English-speaking analytic philosophy. Of late twentieth century American philosophers, perhaps only Quine has had a similar reception and influence.

Donald Herbert Davidson was born on March 6th, 1917, in Springfield, Massachusetts, USA. He died suddenly, as a consequence of cardiac arrest following knee surgery, on Aug. 30, 2003, in Berkeley, California. Remaining both physically and philosophically active up until his death, Davidson left behind behind a number of important and unfinished projects including a major book on the nature of predication. The latter volume was published posthumously (see Davidson, 2005b), together with two additional volumes of collected essays (Davidson 2004, 2005a), under the guidance of Marcia Cavell.

Davidson completed his undergraduate study at Harvard, graduating in 1939. His early interests were in literature and classics and, as an undergraduate, Davidson was strongly influenced by A. N. Whitehead. After starting graduate work in classical philosophy (completing a Master's degree in 1941), Davidson's studies were interrupted by service with the US Navy in the Mediterranean from 1942-45. He continued work in classical philosophy after the war, graduating from Harvard in 1949 with a dissertation on Plato's ‘Philebus’ (1990b). By this time, however, the direction of Davidson's thinking had already, under Quine's influence, changed quite dramatically (the two having first met at Harvard in 1939-40) and he had begun to move away from the largely literary and historical concerns that had preoccupied him as an undergraduate towards a more strongly analytical approach.

While his first position was at Queen's College in New York, Davidson spent much of the early part of his career (1951-1967) at Stanford University. He subsequently held positions at Princeton (1967-1970), Rockefeller (1970-1976), and the University of Chicago (1976-1981). From 1981 until his death he worked at the University of California, Berkeley. Davidson was the recipient of a number of award and fellowships and was a visitor at many universities around the world. Davidson was twice married, with his second marriage, in 1984, being to Marcia Cavell.

-http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dav...

Reviews

[Micah Newman · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you've read Davidson's essay collections up to here, then you'd better complete the series! This final compendium of essays is a bit of a grab bag, but all of it has interesting further developments of themes already well-explored in the previous volumes.

The first portion of essays, under the heading "Truth," starts with "Truth Rehabilitated," a good summation of Davidson's views on the philosophical importance of truth. The rest is mainly analyses of Quine's views on truth and friendly advice to Quine on his empiricist/naturalistic project. It strikes me that Davidson's insights complete much of what Quine set out to do, and with more imagination and depth than Quine himself was able to muster on his own behalf (IMO). The last two essays in this section mostly repeat what was said in the previous essays; in fact, whole pages of material are repeated verbatim. Essays 5 and 6 could thus actually be skipped without loss.

The next section, "Language," centers around "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs," in which Davidson challenges many central assumptions philosophers have carried with them about language and language users. With a variety of piquant examples, he argues that what is necessary for successful communication is far more minimal than anyone thus far has supposed (yes, this is another of Davidson's totally unique views), offering a rather revisionist view of language that goes so far as to say that "there is no such thing as what most philosophers have called a 'language'." In a way, it's an extension of the "autonomy of meaning" doctrine that had been established in the essays of volume 2 and a continuation of the project of showing the considerable extent to which language use outstrips literal meaning (here, "first meaning"). "The Social Aspect of Language" defends this view against some criticisms from Dummett. The approach finds further application in "James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty," which reads like a piece of straight-up literary criticism. Wrapping up the theme is "Locating Literary Language," which originally appeared in an edited volume entitled _Literary Theory After Davidson_.

"Seeing Through Language" is one of my favorites of Davidson's essays, a furtherance of the "Third Dogma" theme that started with "The Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" (itself one of my favorite Davidsonian themes), exploding "scheme-content dualism" in favor of a startlingly simple and straightforward direct(!) access to the world through language. Davidson favors an analogy with the senses: that we don't see "through" language as through a window or filter or other medium, but rather just as we don't see "through" our eyes but *with* them, likewise we see *with* language.

Something that comes to the fore in a lot of these papers (and many in the previous volumes as well) is how richly Davidson applies and grounds his positions in a variety of other fields, notably literature, as already described, but also science, psychology, and linguistics. Many philosophers treat of issues in a sort of rarefied, blown-dry, detached way, as though, for example, philosophy of language can be done independently of literary study or metaphysical issues like causality and law can be studied without reference to their roles in science. In the two very helpful essays in defense of anomalous monism here, Davidson gives other philosophers who have doggedly misunderstood anomalous monism a veritable clinic on how laws and the concept of causation are actually used in science, all toward explaining just what "strict law" actually means and why it is consistent for mental events to cause physical events and for the former to supervene on the latter even though physical events must instance a physical law while mental events never do so. This Davidsonian is silently cheering him on all the way. It's invigorating stuff.

The final section, "Historical Thoughts," has a lot interesting to say about Plato. One of the main ideas treated in various ways is Davidson's explication, inspired by another scholar's interpretation, of the significance of the Socratic elenchus partially in light of an aspect of his own philosophy of language, according to which coming to understand one another in dialogue is an indispensable way of coming to know what oneself thinks. The essay on Spinoza is also interesting, as he explains Spinoza's quixotic views on the mental and the physical as being essentially a form of anomalous monism, albeit turned on its head.

[Joana · Rating 3 out of 5]

Li apenas o capítulo XV intitulado "A nice Derangement of Epitaphs".
Se fosse pelo conteúdo e pelas questões levantadas daria umas belas quatro estrelas. Contudo, Donald Davidson é muito repetitivo na sua escrita tornando os seus argumentos (que são pioneiros no campo da literatura e filosofia) massudos e difíceis de acompanhar.
Apesar de difícil leitura, Davidson é bem sucedido naquilo que é o desconstruir da "standard poetic theory". Ao contrário do que nos é dito ao longo da vida, o autor mostra-nos que a poesia é algo com palavras "engraçadas". Palavras estas que muitas das vezes não entendemos. Desconstrói a nossa visão poética mostrando-nos que não precisamos de dominar a linguagem nem saber convenções de modo a entender o que a poesia nos diz.
Um levantar de questões literárias e filosóficas que nos deixam a pensar na nossa abordagem à poesia.
Um livro para mais tarde pegar, sem dúvida, e quem sabe dar as tão merecidas quatro estrelas.