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Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective
Davidson, Donald
256 pages, Hardcover
First published September 1, 2001
13 people are currently reading
295 people want to read
About the author
Donald Davidson
119 books67 followersDonald 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...
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...
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August 23, 2024
Davidson is a remarkably clear and concise writer; it can even be overwhelming how densely thought-provoking his straightforward sentences are. No word is wasted here. Moreover, his ideas go deep; he is always sensitive to concerns about how intersubjectivity, culture, and history constrain what we can know (as “continental” philosophers are), but he believes in the power of logical and conceptual considerations in advancing thought, unlike “continental” philosophers.
Here are summaries of my favorite papers in this collection. In “Indeterminism and antirealism” Davidson examines antirealism regarding propositional attitudes. Antirealist approaches can be found relative to various philosophical problems; it is a matter of dismissing some philosophical problem by rejecting the phenomena it deals with as merely fictitious. Some philosophers have this attitude towards mental phenomena like belief, desire, and intention. Quine and Davidson both hold views on which any behavior is under-determined regarding the different beliefs that could be attributed to the subject for explaining that behavior (i.e., the “indeterminacy of translation”: there could be different internally coherent translation schemes which do equal justice to one of the same behavior). Davidson argues that this does not mean that beliefs are fictitious entities, but they are still psychologically real. Compare this to weight: there are different schemes for recording weight (e.g., pounds or kilos), but that doesn’t mean that weight isn’t real.
In “The second person” Davidson argues that semantic meaning necessary depends upon social practices. His thesis contrasts Kripke’s, which may at first seem similar. Kripke (in interpreting Wittgenstein) suggests that in order for a person’s utterance to have meaning, that person must grasp rules of their language, which are maintained and shared by other people (in other words, language cannot be private in the sense that grasp of rules that determine meaning cannot be achieved by activities done in private, like remembering one’s past experiences or extending new applications of a rule on the basis of previous applications). In brief, in order to speak a language, we must speak as other people speak.
Davidson argues that this is wrong. Language is not determined by rules as arithmetic is. Language may involve rules, but at most we can say that these rules are constructed by theorists and nicely model the language. When we speak, we intend for our listeners to interpret us in a certain way; successfully speaking consists in satisfying this intention (rather than following some rule of our language). Instead of conforming to how others use language as a precondition for language use, we rather need to be interpreted by others as the precondition. This is because any one utterance could be used to pick out many different patterns found in the situation it represents (cf. Quine on Gavagai). We can successfully make others interpret what we say in the way we intend only if how we see the world, or how we individuate objects, aligns with those of others. This intersubjective attunement or alignment leads to patterns in ways we see the world and how we speak, which may be neatly modeled by rules, and hence we get the illusion that rules determine semantic meaning.
How do we get intersubjectively attuned like this? Davidson proposes that at least two speakers are joined in a special social interaction which he calls “triangulation” (and which might be similar to joint attentional situations as studied by contemporary developmental psychologists—that’s another thought for another time, however). In triangulation, each person of a dyad is sensitive to how oneself is responding to the world, how the other is responding to the world, and how oneself and the other are each responding to the pattern of each’s responsiveness to the world. There is some common cause for both of their responses to the world (e.g., an apple as a food item, rather than other stimuli which suffice for the same effects upon one’s mind as an apple like a pattern of stimulation of light waves at the surface of one’s retina), and one learns to tell what that cause is through social interaction, through tracking one’s own responses to the world in relationship to these other patterns of response (i.e., the other’s responses to the world, and oneself and the other’s responses to each other).
An implication of this is that to have concepts of objects or kinds of objects in the first place requires social interaction. Without social interaction, there’s no way of being right or wrong about one’s conceptual categories; this right and wrongness is a property, ultimately, of one’s communicative intention. If one can successfully get another to see what oneself sees, one’s concept can be understood to be right or truthful; and if one cannot, then one’s concept can be understood to be wrong or false. So, for Davidson, truth is social in the sense that it enters the scene only once we socially interact with one another.
In “The emergence of thought” Davidson inquires after the necessary conditions for us to possess concepts and have thoughts about the world that could be true or false. He argues that we need to have many interconnected beliefs in order to have any one belief; the logical relations that a belief has to others gives that belief its content. Thus, this web of belief needs to be at least roughly coherent. Experiences are also a critical part of the picture; these are causally essential to belief’s having content, but experience alone is not the content of belief. We need to determine which worldly things of experience are those which cause a belief and are relevant to its content; in achieving this, we get a definitive feature of conceptual possession and thought, that a thought about the world could be true or false. According to Davidson, this epistemic normativity requires language use and intersubjectivity, namely triangulation (see above). So components of the story of how humans distinctively are capable of thought is that their holism of belief can be regulated by intersubjectivity and language use.
Here is some free-associating with ideas in the essays. The notion of holism is interesting. It raises for me the question of whether the following two are “holistic” in the same way, or in significantly different ways: the pre-reflective significance of our situation, which we encounter in absorbed, perceptual experience, on the one hand, and the semantic content of our beliefs, which we encounter when reflecting and reasoning, on the other hand. It is obvious that the latter must be coherent. We will permit ourselves to hold a belief only if it doesn’t contradict others. But what will our mind, irrespective of our deliberate choice and conscious awareness, permit regarding the pre-reflective significances that it presents to us? I suspect that this significance is indeterminate in character, relative to the conceptual determinacy we get with linguistic belief, and so assessing contradiction v coherence would be different. You cannot get a clear contradiction if nothing determinate is specified in the first place (e.g., the snake seen as threatening in some way or another cannot be said to contradict a belief that the snake is safe; there are ways for something to be threatening which may be compatible with its being safe; it all depends upon how the further details of the indeterminate significance are specified). But you can get tensions. I’d bet our minds don’t like such tensions and will be driven to resolve them, which comes out in terms of what we find ourselves thinking about, at the level of what we’re consciously aware of.
When Davidson talks about how the formation of new beliefs is constrained under the demand for coherency with the web of extant beliefs, this made me think of Freud’s concept of sublimation. It’s implied by Freud’s theorizing that the libido energy which gets sublimated under the guises of various particular desires is indeterminate in content, although not totally indeterminate; we’ll want to get pleasure and satisfy our fantasies, for example, and it’s just that there are many different actual happenings which could satisfy that (e.g., I can get pleasure from a hug or eating an apple alike). So when we form new particular desires (and on the flip-side of the same coin, new beliefs with evaluative content, or which attribute to an object some value), this will be constrained by something like coherency, but it is not coherency in the epistemic or logical sense. It’ll be constrained by at least extant general/formal/overall aims. This also opens the question of what further constraints guide sublimation (analogously to what further constraints guide the formation of beliefs other than coherency; we don’t find ourselves believing any random proposition as long as it’s coherent with our extant beliefs).
To riff a bit on Davidson’s triangulation: on the face of it, it looks like joint intentionality scenarios (cf. Michael Tomasello). A difference is that Davidson assumes the symmetry in the aim to align one’s own way of seeing the world with the other’s, between both agents. In contrast many accounts in developmental psychology assumes an asymmetry; the infant looks to the caretaker for how to see the world or what value to attribute to the object of joint attention. Also Davidson focuses on triangulation for the sake of solving the problem of how we individuate objects in the first place. The psychological literature, in contrast, doesn’t mention the question of how we carve up objects and form kinds in the first place, but rather usually emphasizes how we learn the social and practical uses to which objects are put. It could be interesting to think more about this comparison; I get the impression that Davidson’s account can add important detail to the developmental psychological account. At the least, Davidson's account introduces the issue of indeterminacy of thought and meaning as the problem for which joint attention may be seen as the solution, and I sense that this might be a good starting point for thinking further about indeterminacy of meaning.
Here are summaries of my favorite papers in this collection. In “Indeterminism and antirealism” Davidson examines antirealism regarding propositional attitudes. Antirealist approaches can be found relative to various philosophical problems; it is a matter of dismissing some philosophical problem by rejecting the phenomena it deals with as merely fictitious. Some philosophers have this attitude towards mental phenomena like belief, desire, and intention. Quine and Davidson both hold views on which any behavior is under-determined regarding the different beliefs that could be attributed to the subject for explaining that behavior (i.e., the “indeterminacy of translation”: there could be different internally coherent translation schemes which do equal justice to one of the same behavior). Davidson argues that this does not mean that beliefs are fictitious entities, but they are still psychologically real. Compare this to weight: there are different schemes for recording weight (e.g., pounds or kilos), but that doesn’t mean that weight isn’t real.
In “The second person” Davidson argues that semantic meaning necessary depends upon social practices. His thesis contrasts Kripke’s, which may at first seem similar. Kripke (in interpreting Wittgenstein) suggests that in order for a person’s utterance to have meaning, that person must grasp rules of their language, which are maintained and shared by other people (in other words, language cannot be private in the sense that grasp of rules that determine meaning cannot be achieved by activities done in private, like remembering one’s past experiences or extending new applications of a rule on the basis of previous applications). In brief, in order to speak a language, we must speak as other people speak.
Davidson argues that this is wrong. Language is not determined by rules as arithmetic is. Language may involve rules, but at most we can say that these rules are constructed by theorists and nicely model the language. When we speak, we intend for our listeners to interpret us in a certain way; successfully speaking consists in satisfying this intention (rather than following some rule of our language). Instead of conforming to how others use language as a precondition for language use, we rather need to be interpreted by others as the precondition. This is because any one utterance could be used to pick out many different patterns found in the situation it represents (cf. Quine on Gavagai). We can successfully make others interpret what we say in the way we intend only if how we see the world, or how we individuate objects, aligns with those of others. This intersubjective attunement or alignment leads to patterns in ways we see the world and how we speak, which may be neatly modeled by rules, and hence we get the illusion that rules determine semantic meaning.
How do we get intersubjectively attuned like this? Davidson proposes that at least two speakers are joined in a special social interaction which he calls “triangulation” (and which might be similar to joint attentional situations as studied by contemporary developmental psychologists—that’s another thought for another time, however). In triangulation, each person of a dyad is sensitive to how oneself is responding to the world, how the other is responding to the world, and how oneself and the other are each responding to the pattern of each’s responsiveness to the world. There is some common cause for both of their responses to the world (e.g., an apple as a food item, rather than other stimuli which suffice for the same effects upon one’s mind as an apple like a pattern of stimulation of light waves at the surface of one’s retina), and one learns to tell what that cause is through social interaction, through tracking one’s own responses to the world in relationship to these other patterns of response (i.e., the other’s responses to the world, and oneself and the other’s responses to each other).
An implication of this is that to have concepts of objects or kinds of objects in the first place requires social interaction. Without social interaction, there’s no way of being right or wrong about one’s conceptual categories; this right and wrongness is a property, ultimately, of one’s communicative intention. If one can successfully get another to see what oneself sees, one’s concept can be understood to be right or truthful; and if one cannot, then one’s concept can be understood to be wrong or false. So, for Davidson, truth is social in the sense that it enters the scene only once we socially interact with one another.
In “The emergence of thought” Davidson inquires after the necessary conditions for us to possess concepts and have thoughts about the world that could be true or false. He argues that we need to have many interconnected beliefs in order to have any one belief; the logical relations that a belief has to others gives that belief its content. Thus, this web of belief needs to be at least roughly coherent. Experiences are also a critical part of the picture; these are causally essential to belief’s having content, but experience alone is not the content of belief. We need to determine which worldly things of experience are those which cause a belief and are relevant to its content; in achieving this, we get a definitive feature of conceptual possession and thought, that a thought about the world could be true or false. According to Davidson, this epistemic normativity requires language use and intersubjectivity, namely triangulation (see above). So components of the story of how humans distinctively are capable of thought is that their holism of belief can be regulated by intersubjectivity and language use.
Here is some free-associating with ideas in the essays. The notion of holism is interesting. It raises for me the question of whether the following two are “holistic” in the same way, or in significantly different ways: the pre-reflective significance of our situation, which we encounter in absorbed, perceptual experience, on the one hand, and the semantic content of our beliefs, which we encounter when reflecting and reasoning, on the other hand. It is obvious that the latter must be coherent. We will permit ourselves to hold a belief only if it doesn’t contradict others. But what will our mind, irrespective of our deliberate choice and conscious awareness, permit regarding the pre-reflective significances that it presents to us? I suspect that this significance is indeterminate in character, relative to the conceptual determinacy we get with linguistic belief, and so assessing contradiction v coherence would be different. You cannot get a clear contradiction if nothing determinate is specified in the first place (e.g., the snake seen as threatening in some way or another cannot be said to contradict a belief that the snake is safe; there are ways for something to be threatening which may be compatible with its being safe; it all depends upon how the further details of the indeterminate significance are specified). But you can get tensions. I’d bet our minds don’t like such tensions and will be driven to resolve them, which comes out in terms of what we find ourselves thinking about, at the level of what we’re consciously aware of.
When Davidson talks about how the formation of new beliefs is constrained under the demand for coherency with the web of extant beliefs, this made me think of Freud’s concept of sublimation. It’s implied by Freud’s theorizing that the libido energy which gets sublimated under the guises of various particular desires is indeterminate in content, although not totally indeterminate; we’ll want to get pleasure and satisfy our fantasies, for example, and it’s just that there are many different actual happenings which could satisfy that (e.g., I can get pleasure from a hug or eating an apple alike). So when we form new particular desires (and on the flip-side of the same coin, new beliefs with evaluative content, or which attribute to an object some value), this will be constrained by something like coherency, but it is not coherency in the epistemic or logical sense. It’ll be constrained by at least extant general/formal/overall aims. This also opens the question of what further constraints guide sublimation (analogously to what further constraints guide the formation of beliefs other than coherency; we don’t find ourselves believing any random proposition as long as it’s coherent with our extant beliefs).
To riff a bit on Davidson’s triangulation: on the face of it, it looks like joint intentionality scenarios (cf. Michael Tomasello). A difference is that Davidson assumes the symmetry in the aim to align one’s own way of seeing the world with the other’s, between both agents. In contrast many accounts in developmental psychology assumes an asymmetry; the infant looks to the caretaker for how to see the world or what value to attribute to the object of joint attention. Also Davidson focuses on triangulation for the sake of solving the problem of how we individuate objects in the first place. The psychological literature, in contrast, doesn’t mention the question of how we carve up objects and form kinds in the first place, but rather usually emphasizes how we learn the social and practical uses to which objects are put. It could be interesting to think more about this comparison; I get the impression that Davidson’s account can add important detail to the developmental psychological account. At the least, Davidson's account introduces the issue of indeterminacy of thought and meaning as the problem for which joint attention may be seen as the solution, and I sense that this might be a good starting point for thinking further about indeterminacy of meaning.
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August 24, 2016Rigorous analytic epistemology, advocating a concept of truth that, while a bit more grounded in metaphysics than, for instance, Richard Rorty's approach, is a far cry from the logical positivists and their intellectual descendants. This is deep, subtle thinking, the sort of thing that requires heavy thought. I know I'm blown away. As for whether or not I agree with his theory, I know I do so at least partially, but I'll need a year or two before I really know.
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June 19, 2025Don't understand me wrong I love Davidson., but I am struggling since I am 16n or even 13n with whether I should accept the brain-in-the vat argument. With varying outcomes.
And the older I get the more I am disagree on the key ideas of the argument. However it is hard to find a good formulation and it is a Zweifrontenkrieg with both Putnam and Davison. Probably I will formulate my points one by one.
I think McDowell has a good footnote about the argument too, but I don't find it.
Here some first remarks:
-The notion of most of the beliefs is unclear, can't I use more structuralist approaches instead you can say something like that the structure of what he beliefs to be true in his vat is an largely correct description of what he is watching, there is only the systematic error in the center of his web of beliefs that he is not in a vat.
To check the facts individually is simply not obvious.
Although I not sure if you can avoid that by radical interpretation.
- In our daily experience some things are quite common, by example to learn something with pictures. It's non-obvious that the externality of the trees lies simply in the real trees that are represented by the machine. At least we commonly think that our experience of a tree is a sign itself.
-if you let the trees completely away it becomes apperend that somebody like Neo in the matrix makes simply the experience that we commonly make in science that what he calls a tree is really an emergent phenomena caused by something else, now he makes the same experience for vats. I take Putnams-Davidsons argument at best for an argument for the fact that for the brain in a vat what he calls a tree is indeed a tree in the vat and I completely agree with that one. If you accept the existence of trees from a naturalist perspective we may call the trees in the vat maybe another thing, but at least a thing. And we are tempted to say it's a tree if we were not externalist and would claim that a tree is made out of wood and plays from our perspective at our level. For the brain in the vat if it's awakening it's behaving in a similar way. It will maybe call a tree not a tree for a tree for him is as he now had discovered ultimately not out of wood. But this would certainly be no problem for radical translation since we just use the word tree differently. The word vat however it's a completely different word like tree, it's comes more from its practical role and it is as such not important from what it is made of and so on. The same thing is even more evidently true of something as the word computer, because the very idea of computer is the idea of a universal Turing machine.
So the vat has an idea of a vat, of Turing machines and so on, because they are de facto functionalist by definition and has an idea of something what behaves like a tree since in the matrix they are things there is this emergent structure that has a similar behavior to what we call a tree. We cannot reason that this is any different from our perspective and I take the argument simply as an illustration of this fact. It is certainly an answer for an sceptic that says that doubts representation and so Davisons argument succeeds in what he tries to make clear, but it clearly fails as a criticism of skepticism that is appearend from a functionalist viewpoint. I would strongly agree following Kant and Fichte that an external reality is needed to give meaning, but it's simply naive to assume that a simulated reality is no reality.
-Only a person with a philosophy degree clearly would if he is standing in front of a brain in a vat that I must interpreted it such that it must at least know it's in a vat for giving a interpretation. This is not how interpretation works. I already showed the analogy between discovering being a brain in a vat and discovering that we are made out of atoms. Alike it would be absurd to interpret Plato in a way that he is right about most things. It's completely the opposite, I know Platos epistemic situation and it would be completely absurd to think that Plato knows of quantum physics modern mathematics and so on. If I say Plato is right about most of what he thinks I mean his situation and so on about which he is as flawed than the brain in the vat since both only have knowledge about the emergent level that they can see. Plato doesn't know that what he calls tree is actually purely emergent from atoms and the brain in the vat is mostly right about what he calls trees although he doesn't know that it's emergent from digital structures. There is no actual difference between the situations.
-Davisons arguments against an epistemic viewing of meaning doesn't concern the more "ontological" component of it as people like Heidegger, Fichte, Cassirer and maybe Kant has described it. Their Dasein as brains in the vats, as greek philosophers.
-It may still be questionable what gives the "real world" a privilege in comparison to the brain in the vat. I want again answer that in analogy to the discovery of atoms: Atoms describe what it's emergent from it and not reversely. There might be a reality in which such a description is not possible, but if there is not a plausible surjective function from one to the other, we will not give the image more reality then the other. With other words we go trough supervience to reality.
Concerning my additional doubts regarding identity theory; I think a view like in Fichte were consciousness is a self-constituting activity, the most plausible thing to think about thought.
I would like to quote a passage out of the chapter about "die Utopie des Essayismus" from a "Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften":
"Die Übersetzung des Wortes Essay als Versuch, wie sie gegeben worden ist, enthält nur ungenau die wesentlichste Anspielung auf das literarische Vorbild; denn ein Essay ist nicht der vor- oder nebenläufige Ausdruck einer Überzeugung, die bei besserer Gelegenheit zur Wahrheit erhoben, ebensogut aber auch als Irrtum erkannt werden könnte (von solcher Art sind bloß die Aufsätze und Abhandlungen, die gelehrte Personen als «Abfälle ihrer Werkstätte» zum besten geben); sondern ein Essay ist die einmalige und unabänderliche Gestalt, die das innere Leben eines Menschen in einem entscheidenden Gedanken annimmt. Nichts ist dem fremder als die Unverantwortlichkeit und Halbfertigkeit der Einfälle, die man Subjektivität nennt, aber auch wahr und falsch, klug und unklug sind keine Begriffe, die sich auf solche Gedanken anwenden lassen, die dennoch Gesetzen unterstehn, die nicht weniger streng sind, als sie zart und unaussprechlich erscheinen. Es hat nicht wenige solcher Essayisten und Meister des innerlich schwebenden Lebens gegeben, aber es würde keinen Zweck haben, sie zu nennen; ihr Reich liegt zwischen Religion und Wissen, zwischen Beispiel und Lehre, zwischen amor intellectualis und Gedicht, sie sind Heilige mit und ohne Religion, und manchmal sind sie auch einfach Männer, die sich in einem Abenteuer verirrt haben."
„Ein Mann, der die Wahrheit will, wird Gelehrter; ein Mann, der seine Subjektivität spielen lassen will, wird vielleicht Schriftsteller; was aber soll ein Mann tun, der etwas will, das dazwischen liegt? Solche Beispiele, die «dazwischen» liegen, liefert aber jeder moralische Satz, etwa gleich der bekannte und einfache: Du sollst nicht töten. Man sieht auf den ersten Blick, daß er weder eine Wahrheit ist noch eine Subjektivität.“
Note two things additionally since they concern my EMP-Review: If you accept the argument, you will have to somehow accept that mental states are context dependent. However in this case it doesn't make that much sense to say they are identical with brain states. If you don't identify it a state with something more broad, like a state in a history. However that is usually not what we mean. Then we talk of being identical with a state. In this case we seem to have to talk more broadly of being identical with a more more broader physical state involving the environment. What brings use in trouble too if we keep the idea of identity theory since we would think we are both in the same ultimative environment. So our mental states would have to be identical. We might avoid that by stating they have different past light cones. What leads to interesting metaphysical consequences, since we had to claim that in a world without light cones panpsychists pantheists were broadly right, if there exist consciousness in the first place. For me that may be an illustration of what Nagel suspects that we need the subjective to understand the subjective. Wheres if you take this view it is not utterly clear how a situation with multiple agents arises. How the second person perspective that we need for ethics for example comes in.
And the older I get the more I am disagree on the key ideas of the argument. However it is hard to find a good formulation and it is a Zweifrontenkrieg with both Putnam and Davison. Probably I will formulate my points one by one.
I think McDowell has a good footnote about the argument too, but I don't find it.
Here some first remarks:
-The notion of most of the beliefs is unclear, can't I use more structuralist approaches instead you can say something like that the structure of what he beliefs to be true in his vat is an largely correct description of what he is watching, there is only the systematic error in the center of his web of beliefs that he is not in a vat.
To check the facts individually is simply not obvious.
Although I not sure if you can avoid that by radical interpretation.
- In our daily experience some things are quite common, by example to learn something with pictures. It's non-obvious that the externality of the trees lies simply in the real trees that are represented by the machine. At least we commonly think that our experience of a tree is a sign itself.
-if you let the trees completely away it becomes apperend that somebody like Neo in the matrix makes simply the experience that we commonly make in science that what he calls a tree is really an emergent phenomena caused by something else, now he makes the same experience for vats. I take Putnams-Davidsons argument at best for an argument for the fact that for the brain in a vat what he calls a tree is indeed a tree in the vat and I completely agree with that one. If you accept the existence of trees from a naturalist perspective we may call the trees in the vat maybe another thing, but at least a thing. And we are tempted to say it's a tree if we were not externalist and would claim that a tree is made out of wood and plays from our perspective at our level. For the brain in the vat if it's awakening it's behaving in a similar way. It will maybe call a tree not a tree for a tree for him is as he now had discovered ultimately not out of wood. But this would certainly be no problem for radical translation since we just use the word tree differently. The word vat however it's a completely different word like tree, it's comes more from its practical role and it is as such not important from what it is made of and so on. The same thing is even more evidently true of something as the word computer, because the very idea of computer is the idea of a universal Turing machine.
So the vat has an idea of a vat, of Turing machines and so on, because they are de facto functionalist by definition and has an idea of something what behaves like a tree since in the matrix they are things there is this emergent structure that has a similar behavior to what we call a tree. We cannot reason that this is any different from our perspective and I take the argument simply as an illustration of this fact. It is certainly an answer for an sceptic that says that doubts representation and so Davisons argument succeeds in what he tries to make clear, but it clearly fails as a criticism of skepticism that is appearend from a functionalist viewpoint. I would strongly agree following Kant and Fichte that an external reality is needed to give meaning, but it's simply naive to assume that a simulated reality is no reality.
-Only a person with a philosophy degree clearly would if he is standing in front of a brain in a vat that I must interpreted it such that it must at least know it's in a vat for giving a interpretation. This is not how interpretation works. I already showed the analogy between discovering being a brain in a vat and discovering that we are made out of atoms. Alike it would be absurd to interpret Plato in a way that he is right about most things. It's completely the opposite, I know Platos epistemic situation and it would be completely absurd to think that Plato knows of quantum physics modern mathematics and so on. If I say Plato is right about most of what he thinks I mean his situation and so on about which he is as flawed than the brain in the vat since both only have knowledge about the emergent level that they can see. Plato doesn't know that what he calls tree is actually purely emergent from atoms and the brain in the vat is mostly right about what he calls trees although he doesn't know that it's emergent from digital structures. There is no actual difference between the situations.
-Davisons arguments against an epistemic viewing of meaning doesn't concern the more "ontological" component of it as people like Heidegger, Fichte, Cassirer and maybe Kant has described it. Their Dasein as brains in the vats, as greek philosophers.
-It may still be questionable what gives the "real world" a privilege in comparison to the brain in the vat. I want again answer that in analogy to the discovery of atoms: Atoms describe what it's emergent from it and not reversely. There might be a reality in which such a description is not possible, but if there is not a plausible surjective function from one to the other, we will not give the image more reality then the other. With other words we go trough supervience to reality.
Concerning my additional doubts regarding identity theory; I think a view like in Fichte were consciousness is a self-constituting activity, the most plausible thing to think about thought.
I would like to quote a passage out of the chapter about "die Utopie des Essayismus" from a "Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften":
"Die Übersetzung des Wortes Essay als Versuch, wie sie gegeben worden ist, enthält nur ungenau die wesentlichste Anspielung auf das literarische Vorbild; denn ein Essay ist nicht der vor- oder nebenläufige Ausdruck einer Überzeugung, die bei besserer Gelegenheit zur Wahrheit erhoben, ebensogut aber auch als Irrtum erkannt werden könnte (von solcher Art sind bloß die Aufsätze und Abhandlungen, die gelehrte Personen als «Abfälle ihrer Werkstätte» zum besten geben); sondern ein Essay ist die einmalige und unabänderliche Gestalt, die das innere Leben eines Menschen in einem entscheidenden Gedanken annimmt. Nichts ist dem fremder als die Unverantwortlichkeit und Halbfertigkeit der Einfälle, die man Subjektivität nennt, aber auch wahr und falsch, klug und unklug sind keine Begriffe, die sich auf solche Gedanken anwenden lassen, die dennoch Gesetzen unterstehn, die nicht weniger streng sind, als sie zart und unaussprechlich erscheinen. Es hat nicht wenige solcher Essayisten und Meister des innerlich schwebenden Lebens gegeben, aber es würde keinen Zweck haben, sie zu nennen; ihr Reich liegt zwischen Religion und Wissen, zwischen Beispiel und Lehre, zwischen amor intellectualis und Gedicht, sie sind Heilige mit und ohne Religion, und manchmal sind sie auch einfach Männer, die sich in einem Abenteuer verirrt haben."
„Ein Mann, der die Wahrheit will, wird Gelehrter; ein Mann, der seine Subjektivität spielen lassen will, wird vielleicht Schriftsteller; was aber soll ein Mann tun, der etwas will, das dazwischen liegt? Solche Beispiele, die «dazwischen» liegen, liefert aber jeder moralische Satz, etwa gleich der bekannte und einfache: Du sollst nicht töten. Man sieht auf den ersten Blick, daß er weder eine Wahrheit ist noch eine Subjektivität.“
Note two things additionally since they concern my EMP-Review: If you accept the argument, you will have to somehow accept that mental states are context dependent. However in this case it doesn't make that much sense to say they are identical with brain states. If you don't identify it a state with something more broad, like a state in a history. However that is usually not what we mean. Then we talk of being identical with a state. In this case we seem to have to talk more broadly of being identical with a more more broader physical state involving the environment. What brings use in trouble too if we keep the idea of identity theory since we would think we are both in the same ultimative environment. So our mental states would have to be identical. We might avoid that by stating they have different past light cones. What leads to interesting metaphysical consequences, since we had to claim that in a world without light cones panpsychists pantheists were broadly right, if there exist consciousness in the first place. For me that may be an illustration of what Nagel suspects that we need the subjective to understand the subjective. Wheres if you take this view it is not utterly clear how a situation with multiple agents arises. How the second person perspective that we need for ethics for example comes in.
October 20, 2013
A solid collection of Davidson's work on subjectivity, knowledge, language, and truth. It's hard to get a grip on Davidson given the scope and range of his work; my interest in this volume was the collection of essays in the final section, which begin with his thoughts on the coherence theory of truth (and his later change of heart about coherentism).
The ideas Davidson sets out about truth, and its relation to knowledge, belief, and meaning, are complex and powerful. He is, unfairly I think, lumped in with Rorty (a thinker who is himself often misunderstood) as a "relativist", but reading Davidson's thoughts on what subjectivists about truth get right, I do not see this at all. Davidson's agreement with Rorty is in the denial of skepticism; they differ on the point of whether "what is truth?" is a question worth pursuing. Davidson thinks so, and in spelling out why, he arrives at a position which turns on the nature of mind and the very idea of a distinction between "knower" and "known".
There is a lot to digest here, and even more in the other collections in this series. Not for the philosophically-untrained, but there may be some value for those inclined to a challenge.
The ideas Davidson sets out about truth, and its relation to knowledge, belief, and meaning, are complex and powerful. He is, unfairly I think, lumped in with Rorty (a thinker who is himself often misunderstood) as a "relativist", but reading Davidson's thoughts on what subjectivists about truth get right, I do not see this at all. Davidson's agreement with Rorty is in the denial of skepticism; they differ on the point of whether "what is truth?" is a question worth pursuing. Davidson thinks so, and in spelling out why, he arrives at a position which turns on the nature of mind and the very idea of a distinction between "knower" and "known".
There is a lot to digest here, and even more in the other collections in this series. Not for the philosophically-untrained, but there may be some value for those inclined to a challenge.
July 1, 2025
Davidson's triangulation idea is so simple but profound, with great explanatory power. This book quite blew my mind.
September 16, 2024
The material in the first two volumes of the Davidson anthology series (on action and truth-and-interpretation, respectively) is what he is by far the best known for, but to me, this volume is the real juicy stuff. As always with Davidson, you find recurring themes meeting each other in natural ways on various occasions of emphasis, such as the conditions of the possibility of thought, the natural constraints of interpretation, and the social and other external dependences of content and meaning. Where almost every Davidsonian theme comes together in a natural confluence is in the extraordinarily powerful and far-reaching concept of "triangulation" - that for any of thought (subjective), language (intersubjective), and truth (objective) to exist for a creature, they must ALL exist for it. And I don't know why he never mentions it, but it occurs to me that the triangulation capacity is also the minimal requirement for the capacity for ostension (pointing). This suggests to me that once the capacity for ostension was in place in human prehistory, it was only a matter of course for language to eventually develop.
The originality of Davidson's thought is such that beyond the aforementioned much-discussed material, it seems like other philosophers scarcely know how to interact with it. And maybe this should be little wondered-at given that Davidson rejected both rationalism and empiricism (as traditionally construed), both realism and anti-realism, in favor of an outlook on the largest philosophical issues that was entirely his own and cut across and between all the traditional dug-in encampments like a scythe. His philosophy was so far-reaching and so original that one can't really do any part of it any justice without considering the whole thing at once. And who has time for that, when there are always more Gettierology papers to be written?
Davidson is always mentioned on book blurbs and such as being "one of the important and influential philosophers of the 20th century" and such, but it's hard for me to think of him as having really received his due when the official "The Essential Davidson" anthology contains none of his papers on triangulation (mainly found in the second and third sections of this book). It would have been a no-brainer to at least include "Three Varieties of Knowledge" (which, as Davidson points out, sums up quite nicely most of the rest of the essays in this volume).
A final point - "Empirical Content" is a kind of historical study, in light of Davidson's developed views on coherentism and holism, of the efforts expended by the Vienna Circle to get logical positivism off the ground. It seems they were frustrated at every turn, but they had pretty much started over from scratch and had little in the way of shoulders to stand on. It strikes me that as Carnap took over from the logical positivists and Quine's work was the successor of Carnap's, Davidson represents the most evolved state of 20th-century empiricism by actually improving on and superseding Quine in various ways. Sadly, though, I don't think this is generally recognized, and it's Quine who remains better known by some distance.
The originality of Davidson's thought is such that beyond the aforementioned much-discussed material, it seems like other philosophers scarcely know how to interact with it. And maybe this should be little wondered-at given that Davidson rejected both rationalism and empiricism (as traditionally construed), both realism and anti-realism, in favor of an outlook on the largest philosophical issues that was entirely his own and cut across and between all the traditional dug-in encampments like a scythe. His philosophy was so far-reaching and so original that one can't really do any part of it any justice without considering the whole thing at once. And who has time for that, when there are always more Gettierology papers to be written?
Davidson is always mentioned on book blurbs and such as being "one of the important and influential philosophers of the 20th century" and such, but it's hard for me to think of him as having really received his due when the official "The Essential Davidson" anthology contains none of his papers on triangulation (mainly found in the second and third sections of this book). It would have been a no-brainer to at least include "Three Varieties of Knowledge" (which, as Davidson points out, sums up quite nicely most of the rest of the essays in this volume).
A final point - "Empirical Content" is a kind of historical study, in light of Davidson's developed views on coherentism and holism, of the efforts expended by the Vienna Circle to get logical positivism off the ground. It seems they were frustrated at every turn, but they had pretty much started over from scratch and had little in the way of shoulders to stand on. It strikes me that as Carnap took over from the logical positivists and Quine's work was the successor of Carnap's, Davidson represents the most evolved state of 20th-century empiricism by actually improving on and superseding Quine in various ways. Sadly, though, I don't think this is generally recognized, and it's Quine who remains better known by some distance.
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