Davidson

Donald Herbert Davidson

How do you understand another person? It seems like the most natural thing in the world, you just listen, you hear their words, you grasp their meaning. But Donald Davidson asked you to imagine a harder case, and it exposes a deep puzzle. Suppose you are dropped among people whose language you do not share at all, with no dictionary, no translator, no common ground, and you must work out, from scratch, what their words mean and what they believe, using only what you can observe: the sounds they make and the situations in which they make them. This is what Davidson called "radical interpretation," and he used it as a laboratory for the deepest questions about meaning and mind. For the problem is genuinely circular. To know what someone's words mean, you need to know what they believe; but to know what they believe, you need to know what their words mean. A person points at the sky and makes a sound. Are they saying "blue" and believing it is blue, or saying "cloud" and believing it is clear, or asking a question, or making a joke? Meaning and belief are tangled together, and the same behavior fits endlessly many combinations of the two. How, then, does understanding ever get off the ground? Davidson's answer turned out to be one of the most illuminating ideas in modern philosophy, with consequences reaching all the way to the nature of truth, mind, and reality itself.

You have to assume they're right. Davidson's solution begins with a principle that sounds, at first, almost too generous to be true: that to understand anyone at all, you must assume, going in, that they are largely rational and that most of their beliefs are true. He called it the principle of charity, and it is not a polite suggestion but a hard logical necessity. For suppose you tried to interpret someone on the opposite assumption, that they are mostly wrong, that most of what they believe is false and most of their reasoning incoherent. You would find you could not interpret them at all, because you would have no way to connect their words to the world or to one another. The only way to crack the code of another mind is to assume that, when they are looking at something blue and making a sound, they probably believe it is blue, that their beliefs mostly track the way things are, and that they reason, by and large, the way a rational creature would. Disagreement and error, Davidson saw, are only intelligible against a vast background of agreement. You can recognize that someone holds a false belief only because you share with them an enormous stock of true ones, the framework against which the single error stands out; a being who was wrong about everything would not be a thinker in error but simply an unintelligible noise. This is a humbling and clarifying thought. It means that mutual understanding is not something we achieve by luck after starting from suspicion; it is the very precondition of taking each other as minds at all. To interpret is already to trust.

No alien worlds. From this modest-seeming principle Davidson drew a startling and powerful conclusion, one that cuts against a fashionable idea of his time and ours. It is often said, in an age fond of relativism, that different cultures, or different languages, or different historical epochs live in fundamentally different worlds, that they possess radically incommensurable "conceptual schemes," carving up reality in ways so alien to one another that genuine understanding across the divide is impossible, that we are each sealed inside our own bubble of meaning. Davidson argued that this seductive picture is, on close inspection, incoherent. For consider what it would take even to recognize another conceptual scheme as a scheme, as a way of organizing a world. You would have to be able to interpret it, at least enough to tell that it was a system of thought rather than mere noise. But interpretation, as we have seen, requires charity, requires finding massive agreement and shared truth. So the very act of identifying something as another "worldview" already proves that it is largely translatable, largely shares our beliefs and our world. A scheme so alien that we genuinely could not understand it at all could not even be recognized by us as a scheme; it would just be silence. There is, Davidson concluded, no coherent idea of a radically other conceptual scheme, no wholly alien world we are forever cut off from. Beneath all our real and important differences, we share a single world and a vast common stock of truths about it, which is precisely why we can argue, translate, and disagree across every cultural and linguistic divide. The relativist's sealed bubbles are a myth.

Reasons that move us. Davidson brought the same rigor to a question about ourselves: what is it to act for a reason? When you explain why you did something, "I opened the window because I wanted fresh air," you give the reason that lay behind the deed. The reigning view in Davidson's youth, inherited from Wittgenstein, held that giving such a reason is something completely different from giving a cause, that reasons and causes belong to separate logical worlds, that a reason merely makes an action intelligible without making it happen. Davidson argued, in one of the most influential papers of modern philosophy, that this was a mistake, and that the plain common-sense view is right: your reasons for acting genuinely cause your actions. The desire for fresh air did not merely make sense of your opening the window; it is what actually moved your hand. This may sound obvious, but its consequences are large, for it restores to the mind a real causal grip on the physical world. Your beliefs and desires are not idle commentary running alongside your behavior; they are among the causes of what your body does. What we think genuinely makes a difference to what we do, and the reasons we act on are not stories we tell ourselves afterward but forces that actually push the world around.

Physical, and irreducible. But this raised a hard problem that has tormented philosophy since Descartes: how can the mind, the realm of thought and meaning, fit into a physical world governed by the iron laws of cause and effect? If my desire for fresh air physically causes my hand to move, must my mind not then be just another part of the physical machinery, fully governed by the laws of physics, reducible to mere matter? Davidson's answer is an elegant balancing act he called anomalous monism, and it threads a needle that had defeated others. He is a monist: there is only one kind of stuff in the world, the physical, and every mental event, every thought and desire and decision, simply is some physical event in the brain. There is no ghostly mind-substance hovering apart from matter. And yet, he insists, the mental is anomalous: it can never be reduced to the physical, never captured by strict scientific laws connecting brain-states to thoughts, because the mental is held together by something physics knows nothing about, the norms of rationality. To call something a "belief" at all is to fit it into a web of other beliefs and desires that make rational sense together; and this requirement of coherence, of fitting a rational pattern, is utterly foreign to the blind mechanism of physical law. You will never find a law of physics that reads "this brain-state is the belief that it is raining," because identifying a belief means placing it in a rational order that physics cannot see. So the mind is fully physical and forever irreducible, real matter, but matter that can only be understood by the wholly different standards of reason. It is one of the most satisfying resolutions anyone has offered to the old war between mind and body.

We are not alone. The room reads Davidson from the wider record, since his work, a series of dense, interlocking philosophical papers rather than big books, remains under copyright, and the chat says so; he is a philosopher's philosopher, admired for the rigor and economy with which a few principles are made to illuminate action, mind, meaning, and truth all at once. Late in his life he drew his ideas together into a single image he called triangulation. Meaning, thought, and objectivity, he proposed, can arise only in a triangle: two creatures, each reacting to a shared object in the world and to each other's reactions to it. It takes, on this view, at least two minds and a common world for there to be such a thing as meaning or truth at all; objectivity is not something a solitary mind achieves by itself, but something that emerges between communicating creatures triangulating on a shared reality. There is no purely private meaning, no lone Cartesian thinker spinning a world out of itself; to think and to mean is already to be in contact with others and with a world held in common. It is a quietly profound vision, and a hopeful one. Where so much modern thought had emphasized the isolation of the mind, the prison of language, the gulfs between cultures, Davidson's careful arguments kept arriving at connection: that to be a mind at all is to share a world and a fund of truths with other minds, that understanding across every apparent divide is not a miracle but the normal condition of thought, and that beneath our differences we are, all of us, already triangulating together on the one reality we hold in common. He gave the most rigorous philosophy of his century a surprisingly generous conclusion: that we are not, and could not be, alone.