## 1. Biographical Sketch



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 several 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
several awards and fellowships and was a visitor at many universities
around the world. He was married three times, to the artist Virginia
Davidson, from whom he was divorced but with whom he had his only
child, then to the psychologist Nancy Hirschberg, who died in 1979,
and finally, in 1984, to Marcia Cavell. Davidson's posthumously
published essays are edited by Cavell, and she was also an important
influence on Davidson as well as drawing on Davidson's thinking
in her own work (see esp. Cavell 1993). For more on Davidson's
biography, including reminiscences from those who knew him, see
Baghramian 2013. The Donald Davidson papers, which include course
notes, professional correspondence, administrative materials, and
academic writings, are held in the Bancroft Library at the University
of California, Berkeley. In the late 1990s, under the auspices of the
Centre for Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences, at the
London School of Economics, Davidson participated in a series of
recorded one-on-one conversations with many of the leading figures in
philosophy at the time - including, among others, Quine, Nancy
Cartwright, Richard Rorty, Peter Strawson, and Michael Dummett
(Davidson, 1997). These recordings, now available online and
elsewhere, provide valuable additional insight into both the style and
content of Davidson's thought.


## 2. Action and Mind


### 2.1 Reasons as Causes



Much of Davidson's early work was in decision theory (see
*Decision-Making: An Experimental Approach* [1957]), and it was
not until the early 1960s that the work for which he is best known
began to appear in print. Indeed, Davidson's first major
philosophical publication was the seminal paper 'Actions,
Reasons and Causes' (1963). In that paper Davidson sets out to
defend the view that the explanation of action by reference to reasons
(something we do, for instance, when we refer to an agent's
intentions or motives in acting) is also a form of causal explanation.
Indeed, he argues that reasons explain actions just inasmuch as they
are the causes of those actions. This approach was in clear opposition
to the Wittgensteinian orthodoxy of the time. On this latter account
causal explanation was viewed as essentially a matter of showing the
event to be explained as an instance of some law-like regularity (as
we might explain the whistling of a kettle by reference to certain
laws involving, among other things, the behaviour of gases under
pressure). Since rational explanation was held, in general, not to
involve any such reference to laws, but rather required showing how
the action fitted into some larger pattern of rational behaviour,
explanation by reference to reasons was held to be distinct from and
independent of explanation by reference to causes.



Although directed against the Wittgensteinian-inspired view that
reasons cannot be causes, Davidson's argument nevertheless
effectively redeploys several Wittgensteinian ideas (see Stoutland, in
Malpas 2011: 297-324, for a sympathetic, but not uncritical,
examination of the Davidsonian view of action from a largely
Wittgensteinian perspective). Two ideas play an especially significant
role in the Davidsonian account - ideas that are also, in one
form or another, important in Davidson's thinking elsewhere. The
first of these ideas is the notion of a 'primary reason'
- the pairing of a belief and a desire (or
'pro-attitude') in the light of which an action is
explained. Thus, my action of flipping the light switch can be
explained by reference to my having the *belief* that flipping
the switch turns on the light in combination with my having the
*desire* to turn on the light (for most explanations explicit
reference to both the belief and the desire is unnecessary). An action
is thereby rendered intelligible through being embedded in a broader
system of attitudes attributable to the agent - through being
embedded, that is, in a broader framework of *rationality*. The
second idea is that of action 'under a description' (a
phrase originally appearing in G. E. M. Anscombe's
*Intention*, published in 1959). As with the concept of a
primary reason, the idea here is simple enough: one and the same
action is always amenable to more than one correct description. This
idea is especially important, however, as it provides a means by which
the same item of behaviour can be understood as intentional under some
descriptions but not under others. Thus, my action of flipping the
light switch can be redescribed as the act of turning on the light
(under which it is intentional) and also as the act of alerting the
prowler who, unbeknown to me, is lurking in the bushes outside (under
which it is unintentional). Generalising this point, we can say that
the same event can be referred to under quite disparate descriptions:
the event of alerting the prowler is the same event as my flipping the
light switch which is the same event as my moving of my body (or a
part of my body) in a certain way.



Davidson treats the connection between reason and action (where the
reason is indeed *the* reason for the action) as a connection
that obtains between two events (the agent's believing and
desiring on the one hand and her acting on the other) that can be
variously described. The connection is both rational, inasmuch as the
belief-desire pair (the 'primary reason') specifies the
reason for the action, but it is also causal, inasmuch as the one
event causes the other if it is indeed the reason for it. It is
precisely because the reason is causally related to the action that
the action can be explained by reference to the reason. Indeed, where
an agent has several reasons for acting, and yet acts on the basis of
one reason in particular, there is no way to pick out just that reason
on which the agent acts other than by saying that it is the reason
that *caused* her action.



Understood as rational, the connection between reason and action
cannot be described in terms of any strict law. Yet inasmuch as the
connection is also a causal connection, so there must exist some
law-like regularity, though not describable in the language of
rationality, under which the events in question fall (an explanation
can be causal, then, even though it does not specify any strict law).
Davidson is thus able to maintain that rational explanation need not
involve explicit reference to any law-like regularity, while
nevertheless also holding that there must be some such regularity that
underlies the rational connection just inasmuch as it is causal.
Moreover, since Davidson resists the idea that rational explanations
can be formulated in the terms of a predictive science, so he seems
committed to denying that there can be any reduction of rational to
non-rational explanation.


### 2.2 The Anomalism of the Mental



The more developed argument for this latter claim, and for the more
general position in the philosophy of mind, of which it forms a part,
appears at several places in Davidson's work. The first and
best-known presentation is that of 'Mental Events' (1970b)
in which Davidson argues for the compatibility of three principles
(all three of which are adumbrated in various ways in the argument of
'Actions, Reasons and Causes'): (i) that at least some
mental events interact causally with physical events - *The
Principle of Causal Interaction*; (ii) that events related as
cause and effect fall under strict laws (that is, laws that are
'precise, explicit and as exceptionless as possible')
- *The Principle of the Nomological Character of
Causality*; and (iii) that there are no strict laws (as opposed to
mere generalisations) relating mental and physical events -
*The Anomalism of the Mental*. Of these principles the first
two would ordinarily be held to be incompatible with the third, and to
imply, not the 'anomalism' of the mental, but rather, in
the case of mental and physical events related as cause and effect,
the existence of strict laws relating those events. To argue, as does
Davidson, for the compatibility of the original principles is thus
also to argue for the truth of the third, that is, for the truth of
anomalous monism.



Davidson holds that events are particulars such that the same event
can be referred to under more than one description. He also holds that
events that are causally related must be related under some strict
law. However, since Davidson takes laws to be linguistic entities, so
they can relate events only as those events are given under specific
descriptions. Thus, as was already evident in Davidson's
approach to the theory of action, the same pair of events may
instantiate a law under one description, but not under others. There
is, for example, no strict law that relates, under just those
descriptions, the formation of ice on the surface of a road to the
skidding of a car on that road, and yet, under a different description
(a description that will employ a completely different set of
concepts), the events at issue will indeed be covered by some strict
law or set of laws. But while nomological relations between events
(relations involving laws) depend on the descriptions under which the
events are given, relations of causality and identity obtain
irrespective of descriptions - if the icing-up of the road did
indeed cause the skid, then it did so no matter how the events at
issue are described (the form of description, whether mental or
physical, is thus irrelevant to the fact that a particular causal
relation obtains). It follows that the same pair of events may be
related causally, and yet, under certain descriptions (though not
under all), there be no strict law under which those events fall. In
particular, it is possible that a mental event (an event given under
some mental description) will be causally related to some physical
event (an event given under a physical description) and yet there will
be no strict law covering those events *under just those
descriptions*. My wanting to read Tolstoy may lead me to take
*War and Peace* from the shelf, and so my wanting may cause a
change in the physical arrangement of a certain region of space-time,
but there is no strict law that would relate my wanting to the
physical change. Similarly, while any mental event will be identical
with some physical event - it will indeed be one and the same
event under two descriptions - it is possible that there will be
no strict law relating the event as described in mentalistic terms
with the event as physically described. In fact, Davidson is explicit
in claiming that there can be *no* strict laws that relate the
mental and the physical in this way. Thus, in the example just cited,
there is no strict law that relates wanting to read with a particular
kind of brain activity.



Davidson's denial of the existence of any strict
'psycho-physical' laws follows from his view of the mental
as constrained by quite general principles of rationality that do not
apply, at least not in the same way, to physical descriptions:
normative considerations of overall consistency and coherence, for
instance, constrain our own thinking about events as physically
described, but they have no purchase on physical events as such. This
does not mean, of course, that there are no correlations whatsoever to
be discerned between the mental and the physical, but it does mean
that the correlations that can be discerned cannot be rendered in the
precise, explicit and exceptionless form - in the form, that is,
of strict laws - that would be required in order to achieve any
reduction of mental to physical descriptions. The lack of strict laws
covering events under mental descriptions is thus an insuperable
barrier to any attempt to bring the mental within the framework of
unified physical science. However, while the mental is not reducible
to the physical, every mental event can be paired with some physical
event - that is, every mental description of an event can be
paired with a physical description of the very same event. This leads
Davidson to speak of the mental as 'supervening' on the
physical in a way that implies a certain dependence of mental
predicates on physical predicates: predicate *p* supervenes on
a set of predicates *S* 'if and only if *p* does
not distinguish any entities that cannot be distinguished by
*S*' (see 'Thinking Causes' [1993]). Put more
simply, events that cannot be distinguished under some physical
description cannot be distinguished under a mental description
either.



On the face of it, anomalous monism appears a highly attractive way to
think about the relation between the mental and the physical -
inasmuch as it combines 'monism' with
'anomalism' so it seems to preserve what is important
about physicalism while nevertheless retaining the ordinary language
of so-called 'folk-psychology' (the language of beliefs
and desires, actions and reasons). Yet anomalous monism has proved to
be a highly contentious position drawing criticism from both
physicalists and non-physicalists alike. The nomological conception of
causality (the second of the three principles defended in
'Mental Events') has often been seen as something for
which Davidson fails to supply any real argument (a criticism he has
attempted to address in 'Laws and Cause' [1995]); the
Davidsonian account of supervenience has been viewed as incompatible
with other aspects of his position and sometimes as simply mistaken or
confused (the idea of supervenience is itself the focus for what is
now a very large body of discussion); and, perhaps the most serious
and widespread criticism, anomalous monism has been seen as making the
mental causally inert. These criticisms have not, however, gone
unanswered (see especially 'Thinking Causes'), and
although Davidson modified aspects of his position over the years, he
continued to hold to, and to defend, the basic theses first made
explicit in 'Mental Events'.


### 2.3 Problems of Irrationality



Davidson's commitment to the rationality of the mental as one of
the cornerstones of anomalous monism (as well as to the account of
'radical interpretation' [see 'Meaning and
Truth' below]) led him to take a special interest in the problem
of apparently irrational belief and action - something first
addressed in 'How is Weakness of the Will
Possible?'(1970a). While Davidson treats irrationality as a real
feature of our mental lives, he offers a way of dealing with it that
aims at preserving, in some sense, the overall rationality of the mind
(see especially 'Two Paradoxes of Irrationality' [1982b]).
A belief or desire in the mind of one person can cause a belief or
desire in the mind of another without this compromising the
rationality of the mental. (Davidson's example is my growing of
a beautiful flower because I desire you to enter my garden - you
develop a craving to see the flower as a result of my desire and my
desire has thereby caused, without being a reason for, your craving).
Davidson suggests that we should view the same sort of relation as
sometimes holding within a single mind. To this end we should view the
mind as weakly 'partitioned' so that different attitudes
may be located within different 'territories' and need
not, therefore, be taken to come into direct conflict.



Davidson's thinking about irrationality was increasingly
influenced by an engagement with psychoanalytic thinking. Marcia
Cavell had strong psychoanalytic interests, and in *The
Psychoanalytic Mind* (Cavell 1993), she connects Davidson's
thought directly with that of Freud.


### 2.4 Ontology and Logical Form



Davidson's accounts of action and of mind call upon a
well-developed set of analyses concerning psychological concepts such
as belief, desire and intention - concepts whose analysis is
taken further in a number of papers that follow on from, and develop
or modify, the ideas first set out in 'Actions, Reasons and
Causes' (papers such as 'Agency' (1971) and
'Intending' [1978a]) as well as in Davidson's
discussions of epistemological and semantic issues (see below). But
Davidson 's work in this area is also dependent on his account
of the notions of cause, event, and law and, in particular, on his
defence of the view that events are particulars and so constitute a
fundamental ontological category. If events are indeed particulars,
then an important question concerns the conditions of identity for
events. In 'The Individuation of Events' [1969a] Davidson
argues that events are identical if and only if they have identical
causes and effects. In 'Reply to Quine on Events' [1985b]
he abandons this criterion in favour of the Quinean suggestion that
events are identical if and only if they occupy exactly the same
location in space and time.



A characteristic feature of Davidson's approach to such
ontological questions has been to focus on the logical structure of
sentences about the entities at issue rather than on those entities as
such. Davidson's approach to events, for instance, is grounded
in an analysis of the underlying logical form of sentences about
events; in the case of causal relations, in an analysis of the logical
form of sentences that express such relations (see 'Causal
Relations' [1967a]); and in his approach to action also,
Davidson's approach involves an analysis of the logical form of
sentences about actions (see 'The Logical Form of Action
Sentences' [1967b]). This reflects a more general commitment on
Davidson's part to the inseparability of questions of ontology
from questions of logic. This commitment is spelt out explicitly in
'The Method of Truth in Metaphysics' (1977) and it
provides a further point of connection between Davidson's work
in the philosophy of action, event and mind and his work on questions
of meaning and language.


## 3. Meaning and Truth


### 3.1 The Structure of a Semantic Theory



Although Davidson wrote on a wide range of topics, a great deal of his
work, particularly during the late 1960s and early 1970s, is focussed
on the problem of developing an approach to the theory of meaning that
would be adequate to natural language. The characteristic feature of
Davidson's approach to this problem is his proposal that meaning
is best understood via the concept of truth, and, more particularly,
that the basic structure for any adequate theory of meaning is that
given in a formal theory of truth.



Davidson's thinking about semantic theory develops on the basis
of a holistic conception of linguistic understanding (see 'Truth
and Meaning' [1967c]). Providing a theory of meaning for a
language is thus a matter of developing a theory that will enable us
to generate, for every actual and potential sentence of the language
in question, a theorem that specifies what each sentence means. On
this basis a theory of meaning for German that was given in English
might be expected to generate theorems that would explicate the German
sentence 'Schnee ist weiss' as meaning that snow is white.
Since the number of potential sentences in any natural language is
infinite, a theory of meaning for a language that is to be of use to
creatures with finite powers such as ourselves, must be a theory that
can generate an infinity of theorems (one for each sentence) on the
basis of a finite set of axioms. Indeed, any language that is to be
learnable by creatures such as ourselves must possess a structure that
is amenable to such an approach. Consequently, the commitment to
*holism* also entails a commitment to a *compositional*
approach according to which the meanings of sentences are seen to
depend upon the meanings of their parts, that is, upon the meanings of
the words that form the finite base of the language and out of which
sentences are composed. Compositionality does not compromise holism,
since not only does it follow from it, but, on the Davidsonian
approach, it is only as they play a role in whole sentences that
individual words can be viewed as meaningful. It is sentences, and not
words, that are thus the primary focus for a Davidsonian theory of
meaning. Developing a theory for a language is a matter of developing
a systematic account of the finite structure of the language that
enables the user of the theory to understand any and every sentence of
the language.



A Davidsonian theory of meaning explicates the meanings of expressions
holistically through the interconnection that obtains among
expressions within the structure of the language as a whole.
Consequently, although it is indeed a theory *of* meaning, a
theory of the sort Davidson proposes will have no use for a concept of
meaning understood as some discrete entity (whether a determinate
mental state or an abstract 'idea') to which meaningful
expressions refer. One important implication of this is that the
theorems that are generated by such a theory of meaning cannot be
understood as theorems that relate expressions and
'meanings'. Instead such theorems will relate sentences to
other sentences. More particularly, they will relate sentences in the
language to which the theory applies (the
'object-language') to sentences in the language in which
the theory of meaning is itself couched (the
'meta-language') in such a way that the latter effectively
'give the meanings of' or translate the former. It might
be thought that the way to arrive at theorems of this sort is to take
as the general form of such theorems '*s* means that
*p*' where *s* names an object-language sentence
and *p* is a sentence in the meta-language. But this would be
already to assume that we could give a formal account of the
connecting phrase 'means that', and not only does this
seem unlikely, but it also appears to assume a concept of meaning when
it is precisely that concept (at least as it applies within a
particular language) that the theory aims to elucidate. It is at this
point that Davidson turns to the concept of truth. Truth, he argues,
is a less opaque concept than that of meaning. Moreover, to specify
the conditions under which a sentence is true is also a way of
specifying the meaning of a sentence. Thus, rather than
'*s* means that *p*', Davidson proposes, as
the model for theorems of an adequate theory of meaning,
'*s* is true if and only if *p*' (the use of
the biconditional 'if and only if' is crucial here as it
ensures the truth-functional equivalence of the sentences *s*
and *p*, that is, it ensures they will have identical
truth-values). The theorems of a Davidsonian theory of meaning for
German couched in English would thus take the form of sentences such
as "'Schnee ist weiss' is true if and only if snow
is white."


### 3.2 Tarski and 'Convention T'



One of the great advantages of this proposal is that it enables
Davidson to connect his account of a theory of meaning with an already
existing approach to the theory of truth, namely that developed by
Alfred Tarski (in his seminal work 'The Concept of Truth in
Formalised Languages', first published in Polish in 1933 and in
English translation in 1956). Tarski's theory of truth was
originally intended, not as a general account of the nature of truth,
but rather as a way of defining the truth-predicate as it applies
within a formal language. Tarski suggests that we arrive at a formal
definition of the predicate 'is true' by providing, for
every sentence *s* in the object language, a matching sentence
*p* in the meta-language that is a translation of *s*
(here, in his use of the idea of translational synonymy, Tarski relies
upon the concept of meaning in order to get at a theory of truth
- Davidson reverses this approach). The resulting
'T-sentences' will have the form '*s* is true
in language *L* if and only if *p*'. That an
adequate theory should indeed be capable of generating a T-sentence
for every sentence in the object-language is the essence of
Tarski's 'Convention T' - a requirement that
clearly matches the holistic requirement Davidson also specifies for
an adequate theory of meaning. And just as a Davidsonian theory of
meaning treats the meaning of whole sentences as dependent on the
components of those sentences, so a Tarskian theory of truth also
operates *recursively* by means of the technical notion of
*satisfaction* - a notion that stands to open sentences
(expressions containing unbound variables) as does truth to closed
sentences (expressions that contain no variables other than bound
variables) - such that the satisfaction conditions of more
complex sentences are seen to depend on the satisfaction conditions of
simpler sentences.



The formal structure that Tarski articulates in his
'semantic' account of truth is identical to that which
Davidson explicates as the basis for a theory of meaning: a Tarskian
truth theory can generate, for every sentence of the object-language,
a T-sentence that specifies the meaning of each sentence in the sense
of specifying the conditions under which it is true. What
Davidson's work shows, then, is that meeting the requirement of
Tarski's Convention T can be seen as the basic requirement for
an adequate theory of meaning.



A Tarskian truth theory defines truth using a logical apparatus that
requires little more than the resources provided within first-order
quantificational logic as supplemented by set theory. Moreover, it
also operates to deliver a definition of truth that is purely
'extensional', that is, it defines truth by specifying
just those instances to which the truth-predicate properly applies
without any reference to 'meanings',
'thoughts' or other 'intensional' entities.
Both these features represent important advantages for the Davidsonian
approach (Davidson's rejection of determinate meanings as having
a significant role to play in a theory of meaning already involves a
commitment to an extensional approach to language). However, these
features also present certain problems. Davidson wishes to apply the
Tarskian model as the basis for a theory of meaning for natural
languages, but such languages are far richer than the well-defined
formal systems to which Tarski had directed his attention. In
particular natural languages contain features that seem to require
resources beyond those of first-order logic or of any purely
extensional analysis. Examples of such features include indirect or
reported speech ('Galileo said that the earth moves'),
adverbial expressions ('Flora swam slowly' where
'slowly' modifies 'Flora swam') and
non-indicative sentences such as imperatives ('Eat your
eggplant!'). An important part of Davidson's work in the
philosophy of language has been to show how such apparently
recalcitrant features of natural language can indeed be analysed so as
to make them amenable to a Tarskian treatment. In 'On Saying
That' (1968) and 'Quotation' (1979b) he addresses
the question of indirect speech; in 'Moods and
Performances' (1979a) he deals with non-indicative utterances;
and in 'Adverbs of Action' (1985a) he takes up the problem
of adverbial modification. As in Davidson's analysis of actions
and events, the notion of logical form plays an important part in his
approach here - the problem of how to apply a Tarskian truth
theory to natural language is shown to depend on providing an analysis
of the underlying logical form of natural language expressions which
renders them in such a way that they fall under the scope of a purely
extensional approach employing only minimal logical resources.



There is, however, another more general problem that affects
Davidson's appropriation of Tarski. Whilst Tarski uses the
notion of sameness of meaning, through the notion of translation, as
the means to provide a definition of truth (one of the requirements of
Convention T is that the sentence on the right-hand side of a Tarskian
T-sentence be a translation of the sentence on the left), Davidson
aims to use truth to provide an account of meaning. But in that case,
it seems that Davidson needs some other way to constrain the formation
of T-sentences so as to ensure that they do indeed deliver correct
specifications of what sentences mean. This problem is readily
illustrated by the question of how we are to rule out T-sentences of
the form "'Schnee ist weiss' is true if and only if
grass is green." Since the biconditional 'if and only
if' ensures only that the sentence named on the left will have
the same truth value as the sentence on the right, so it would seem to
allow us to make any substitution of sentences on the right so long as
their truth value is identical to that on the left. In one respect
this problem is met by simply insisting on the way in which
T-sentences must be seen as theorems generated by a theory of meaning
that is adequate to the language in question as a whole (see
'Truth and Meaning'). Since the meaning of particular
expressions will not be independent of the meaning of other
expressions (in virtue of the commitment to compositionality the
meanings of all sentences must be generated on the same finite base),
so a theory that generates problematic results in respect of one
expression can be expected to generate problematic results elsewhere,
and, in particular, to also generate results that do not meet the
requirements of Convention T. This problem can also be seen, however,
as closely related to another important point of difference between a
Tarskian truth theory and a Davidsonian theory of meaning: a theory of
meaning for a natural language must be an empirical theory (it is,
indeed, a theory that ought to apply to actual linguistic behaviour)
and as such it ought to be empirically verifiable. Satisfaction of the
requirement that a theory of meaning be adequate as an empirical
theory, and so that it be adequate to the actual behaviour of
speakers, will also ensure tighter constraints, if such are needed, on
the formation of T-sentences. Indeed, Davidson is not only quite
explicit in emphasising the empirical character of a theory of
meaning, but he also offers a detailed account that both explains how
such a theory might be developed and specifies the nature of the
evidence on which it must be based.


### 3.3 Radical Interpretation



Davidson's strategy is to embed the formal structure for a
theory of meaning (the structure he finds in a Tarskian truth theory)
within a more general theory of interpretation the broad outlines of
which he draws from Quine's discussion in *Word and
Object* (first published in 1960). 'Radical
translation' is intended by Quine as an idealisation of the
project of translation that will exhibit that project in its purest
form. Normally the task of the translator is aided by prior linguistic
knowledge - either of the actual language to be translated or of
some related language. Quine envisages a case in which translation of
a language must proceed without any prior linguistic knowledge and
solely on the basis of the observed behaviour of the speakers of the
language in conjunction with observation of the basic perceptual
stimulations that give rise to that behaviour. Davidson has a broader
conception of the behavioural evidence available than does Quine (he
allows that we may, for instance, identify speakers as having the
attitude of 'holding true' with respect to sentences) and,
in addition, rejects the Quinean insistence on a special role being
given to simple perceptual stimulations. Moreover, since
Davidson's interest is more properly semantic than Quine's
(Quine sees radical translation as part of a primarily epistemological
inquiry), while Davidson also views a theory of translation alone as
insufficient to ensure understanding of the language it translates
(the translation may be into a language we do not understand), so the
notion of 'translation' is replaced in the Davidsonian
account with that of 'interpretation'. *Radical
interpretation* is a matter of interpreting the linguistic
behaviour of a speaker 'from scratch' and so without
reliance on any prior knowledge either of the speaker's beliefs
or the meanings of the speaker's utterances. It is intended to
lay bare the knowledge that is required if linguistic understanding is
to be possible, but it involves no claims about the possible
instantiation of that knowledge in the minds of interpreters (Davidson
thus makes no commitments about the underlying psychological reality
of the knowledge that a theory of interpretation makes explicit).



The basic problem that radical interpretation must address is that one
cannot assign meanings to a speaker's utterances without knowing
what the speaker believes, while one cannot identify beliefs without
knowing what the speaker's utterances mean. It seems that we
must provide both a theory of belief and a theory of meaning at one
and the same time. Davidson claims that the way to achieve this is
through the application of the so-called 'principle of
charity' (he refers to it briefly elsewhere as the principle of
'rational accommodation'), a version of which is also to
be found in Quine. In Davidson's work this principle, which
admits of various formulations and cannot be rendered in any
completely precise form, often appears in terms of the injunction to
optimise agreement between ourselves and those we interpret, that is,
it counsels us to interpret speakers as holding true beliefs (true by
our lights at least) wherever it is plausible to do (see
'Radical Interpretation' [1973]). In fact the principle
can be seen as combining two notions: a holistic assumption of
rationality in belief ('coherence') and an assumption of
causal relatedness between beliefs, especially perceptual beliefs, and
the objects of belief ('correspondence') (see 'Three
Varieties of Knowledge' [1991]). The process of interpretation
turns out to depend on both aspects of the principle. Attributions of
belief and assignments of meaning must be consistent with one another
and with the speaker's overall behaviour; they must also be
consistent with the evidence afforded by our knowledge of the
speaker's environment, since it is the worldly causes of beliefs
that must, in the 'most basic cases', be taken to be the
objects of belief (see 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and
Knowledge' [1983]). Inasmuch as charity is taken to generate
particular attributions of belief, so those attributions are, of
course, always defeasible. The principle itself is not so, however,
since it remains, on the Davidsonian account, a presupposition of any
interpretation whatsoever. Charity is, in this respect, both a
constraint and an enabling principle in all interpretation. It is more
than just a heuristic device to be employed in the opening stages of
interpretative engagement.



If we assume that the speaker's beliefs, at least in the
simplest and most basic cases, are largely in agreement with our own,
and so, by our account, are largely true, then we can use our own
beliefs about the world as a guide to the speaker's beliefs.
And, provided that we can identify simple assertoric utterances on the
part of a speaker (that is, provided we can identify the attitude of
holding true), then the interconnection between belief and meaning
enables us to use our *beliefs* as a guide to the
*meanings* of the speaker's utterances, thereby providing
the basis for both a rudimentary theory of belief and a rudimentary
account of meaning. So, for example, when the speaker with whom we are
engaged uses a certain sequence of sounds repeatedly in the presence
of what we believe to be a rabbit, we can, as a preliminary
hypothesis, interpret those sounds as utterances about rabbits or
about some particular rabbit. Once we have arrived at a preliminary
assignment of meanings for a significant body of utterances, we can
test our assignments against further linguistic behaviour on the part
of the speaker, modifying those assignments in accordance with the
results. Using our developing theory of meaning we are then able to
test the initial attributions of belief that were generated through
the application of charity, and, where necessary, modify those
attributions also. This enables us, in turn, to further adjust our
assignments of meaning, which enables further adjustment in the
attribution of beliefs, ... and so the process continues until
some sort of equilibrium is reached. The development of a more finely
tuned theory of belief thus allows us to better adjust our theory of
meaning, while the adjustment of our theory of meaning in turn enables
us to better tune our theory of belief. Through balancing attributions
of belief against assignments of meaning, we are able to move towards
an overall theory of behaviour for a speaker or speakers that combines
both a theory of meaning and of belief within a single theory of
interpretation.


### 3.4 Holism and Indeterminacy



Since it is indeed a single, combined theory that is the aim here, so
the adequacy of any such theory must be measured in terms of the
extent to which the theory does indeed provide a unified view of the
totality of behavioural evidence available to us (taken in conjunction
with our own beliefs about the world) rather than by reference to any
single item of behaviour. This can be viewed as a more general version
of the same requirement, made in relation to a formal theory of
meaning, that a theory of meaning for a language address the totality
of utterances for that language, although, in the context of radical
interpretation, this requirement must be understood as also closely
tied to the need to attend to normative considerations of overall
rationality. A direct consequence of this holistic approach is that
there will always be more than one theory of interpretation that will
be adequate to any particular body of evidence since theories may
differ in particular attributions of belief or assignments of meaning
while nevertheless providing an equally satisfactory account of the
speaker's overall behaviour. It is this failure of uniqueness
that Davidson terms the 'indeterminacy' of interpretation
and which provides a counterpart to the 'indeterminacy of
translation' that also appears, though it has a more limited
application, in Quine. On the Davidsonian account, such indeterminacy
often goes unnoticed and is indeed rather less for Davidson than for
Quine (partly as a consequence of Davidson's employment of
Tarski and so of the need to read the structure of first-order logic
into the language interpreted). It nevertheless remains an
ineliminable feature of all interpretation. Moreover, such
indeterminacy is not to be viewed merely as reflecting some
epistemological limitation on interpretation, but rather derives from
the holistic character of meaning and of belief. Such concepts refer
us to overall patterns in the behaviour of speakers rather than to
discrete, entities to which interpretation must somehow gain access.
Indeed, holism of this sort applies, not only to meanings and beliefs,
but also to the so-called 'propositional attitudes' in
general. The latter are most simply characterised as attitudes
specifiable by reference to a proposition (believing that there is
eggplant for dinner is a matter of holding true the proposition that
there is eggplant for dinner; desiring that there be eggplant for
dinner is a matter of wanting it to be true that there be eggplant for
dinner) and so the *contents* of attitudes of this sort are
always *propositional*. Davidsonian holism is thus a holism
that applies to meanings, to attitudes, and, thereby, to the content
of attitudes. Indeed, we can speak of the Davidsonian account of
interpretation as providing a quite general account of how mental
content is determined (such content being understood as the content of
propositional mental states such as belief): through the causal
relation between speakers and objects in the world and through the
rational integration of speakers' behaviour. Thus, as
Davidson's approach to the theory of meaning turns out to imply
a more general theory of interpretation, so his holistic view of
meaning implies a holistic view of the mental, and of mental content,
in general.



Davidson's commitment to the indeterminacy that follows from his
holistic approach has led some to view his position as involving a
form of anti-realism about the mind and about beliefs, desires and so
forth. Davidson argues, however, that the indeterminacy of
interpretation should be understood analogously with the indeterminacy
that attaches to measurement. Such theories assign numerical values to
objects on the basis of empirically observable phenomena and in
accordance with certain formal theoretical constraints. Where there
exist different theories that address the same phenomena, each theory
may assign different numerical values to the objects at issue (as do
Celsius and Fahrenheit in the measurement of temperature), and yet
there need be no difference in the empirical adequacy of those
theories, since what is significant is the overall pattern of
assignments rather than the value assigned in any particular case.
Similarly in interpretation, it is the overall pattern that a theory
finds in behaviour that is significant and that remains invariant
between different, but equally adequate, theories. An account of
meaning for a language is an account of just this pattern.



Although the indeterminacy thesis has sometimes been a focus for
objections to Davidson's approach, it is the more basic thesis
of holism as developed in its full-blown form in the account of
radical interpretation (and particularly as it relates to meaning)
that has often attracted the most direct and trenchant criticism.
Michael Dummett has been one of the most important critics of the
Davidsonian position (see especially Dummett 1975). Dummett argues
that Davidson's commitment to holism not only gives rise to
problems concerning, for instance, how a language can be learnt (since
it seems to require that one come to understand the whole of the
language at one go, whereas learning is always piecemeal), but that it
also restricts Davidson from being able to give what Dummett views as
a properly full-blooded account of the nature of linguistic
understanding (since it means that Davidson cannot provide an account
that explicates the semantic in terms of the non-semantic). Criticism
has also come from Jerry Fodor, amongst others, whose opposition to
holism (not only in Davidson, but in Quine, Dennett and elsewhere) is
largely motivated by a desire to defend the possibility of a certain
scientific approach to the mind (see especially, Fodor and Lepore
1992).


### 3.5 Language and Convention



The heart of a Davidsonian theory of interpretation is, of course, a
Tarskian truth theory. But a truth theory provides only the formal
structure on which linguistic interpretation is based: such a theory
needs to be embedded within a broader approach that looks to the
interconnections between utterances, other behaviour and attitudes; in
addition, the application of such a theory to actual linguistic
behaviour must also take account of the dynamic and shifting character
of such behaviour. This latter point is easily overlooked, but it
leads Davidson to some important conclusions. Ordinary speech is full
of ungrammatical constructions (constructions that may even be
acknowledged to be ungrammatical by the speaker herself), incomplete
sentences or phrases, metaphors, neologisms, jokes, puns and all
manner of phenomena that cannot be met simply by the application to
utterances of a pre-existing theory for the language being spoken.
Linguistic understanding cannot, then, be a matter simply of the
mechanical application of a Tarski-like theory (although this is just
what Davidson might be taken to suggest in the early essays). In
papers such as 'A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs' (1986),
Davidson addresses just this point, arguing that while linguistic
understanding does indeed depend upon a grasp of the formal structure
of a language, that structure always stands in need of modification in
the light of actual linguistic behaviour. Understanding a language is
a matter of continually adjusting interpretative presuppositions
(presuppositions that are often not explicit) in accord with the
utterances to be interpreted. Furthermore, this calls upon skills and
knowledge (imagination, attentiveness to the attitudes and behaviour
of others, knowledge of the world) that are not specifically
linguistic and that are part of a more general ability to get on in
the world and in relation to others - an ability that also
resists any formal explication. In 'A Nice Derangement of
Epitaphs', Davidson puts this point, in provocative fashion, by
claiming that 'there is no such thing as a language'
(adding the immediate qualification 'not if a language is
anything like what many philosophers and linguists have
supposed'). Put less provocatively, the essential point is that
linguistic conventions (and in particular linguistic conventions that
take the form of agreement over the employment of shared syntactic and
semantic rules), while they may well facilitate understanding, cannot
be the basis for such understanding.



Davidson's denial of rule-based conventions as having a founding
role in linguistic understanding, together with his emphasis on the
way in which the capacity for linguistic understanding must be seen as
part as part of a more general set of capacities for getting on in the
world, underlie Davidson's much-discussed account of metaphor
and related features of language (see 'What Metaphors
Mean' [1978b]). Davidson rejects the idea that metaphorical
language can be explained by reference to any set of rules that govern
such meaning. Instead it depends on using sentences with their
'literal' or standard meanings in ways that give rise to
new or unexpected insights, and just as there are no rules by which we
can work out what a speaker means when she utters an ungrammatical
sentence, makes a pun or otherwise uses language in a way that
diverges from the norm, so there are no rules that govern the grasp of
metaphor.


## 4. Knowledge and Belief


### 4.1 'Three Varieties of Knowledge'



In Davidson's work the question 'what is meaning?'
is replaced by the question 'What would a speaker need to know
to understand the utterances of another?' The result is an
account that treats the theory of meaning as necessarily part of a
much broader theory of interpretation and, indeed, of a much broader
approach to the mental as such. This account is holistic inasmuch as
it requires that any adequate theory must address linguistic and
non-linguistic behaviour in its entirety. As we have already seen,
this means that a theory of interpretation must adopt a compositional
approach to the analysis of meaning; it must recognise the
interconnected character of attitudes and of attitudes and behaviour;
and it must also attribute attitudes and interpret behaviour in a way
constrained by normative principles of rationality. Rationality is
not, however, the only principle on which Davidson's account of
radical interpretation depends. It involves, in fact, a marriage of
both holistic and 'externalist' considerations:
considerations concerning the dependence of attitudinal content on the
rational connections between attitudes ('holism') and
concerning the dependence of such content on the causal connections
between attitudes and objects in the world
('externalism'). Indeed, this marriage is evident, as we
saw earlier, in the principle of charity itself and its combination of
considerations of both 'coherence' and
'correspondence'. Davidson holds, in fact, that attitudes
can be attributed, and so attitudinal content determined, only on the
basis of a triangular structure that requires interaction between at
least two creatures as well as interaction between each creature and a
set of common objects in the world.



Identifying the content of attitudes is a matter of identifying the
objects of those attitudes, and, in the most basic cases, the objects
of attitudes are identical with the causes of those same attitudes (as
the cause of my belief that there is a bird outside my window is the
bird outside my window). Identifying beliefs involves a process
analogous to that of 'triangulation' (as employed in
topographical surveying and in the fixing of location) whereby the
position of an object (or some location or topographical feature) is
determined by taking a line from each of two already known locations
to the object in question - the intersection of the lines fixes
the position of the object (this idea first appears in 'Rational
Animals [1982]). Similarly, the objects of propositional attitudes are
fixed by looking to find objects that are the common causes, and so
the common objects, of the attitudes of two or more speakers who can
observe and respond to one another's behaviour. In 'Three
Varieties of Knowledge', Davidson develops the idea of
triangulation as a means to elaborate the three-way conceptual
interdependence that he argues obtains between knowledge of oneself,
knowledge of others and knowledge of the world. Just as knowledge of
language cannot be separated from our more general knowledge of the
world, so Davidson argues that knowledge of oneself, knowledge of
other persons and knowledge of a common, 'objective' world
form an interdependent set of concepts no one of which is possible in
the absence of the others.



The idea of triangulation has important implications that go far
beyond questions of knowledge alone, and the idea is one of the most
important and enduring, but also controversial elements in
Davidson's later thinking (see Myers and Verheggen, 2016).
Moreover, although the idea may appear at first sight to be intended
purely as a metaphor, the structure of triangulation seems actually to
direct attention to the way in which knowledge, action, and content
are fundamentally dependent on the genuinely embodied and located
character of speakers and agents. As Davidson presents matters, it is
only through their concrete engagement in the world, in relation both
to objects and to other speakers or agents, that a putative speaker or
agent can be capable of genuine speaking or agency; only then can they
speak, act, *or think*.



The emphasis on the holistic and externalist character of knowledge
and of content that is so central to triangulation is also expressed
in Davidson's well-known 'Swampman' example (in
'Knowing One's own Mind', Davidson 1987:
443-4) Here we are asked to imagine a situation in which a
lightning strike in a swamp reduces Davidson's body to its basic
elements, while simultaneously transforming a nearby dead tree into an
exact replica of him. Although the resulting 'Swampman'
behaves exactly like the original author of 'Radical
Interpretation', Davidson denies that the 'Swampman'
could properly be said to have thoughts or its words have meaning
- and the reason is simply that the Swampman would lack the sort
of causal history that is required in order to establish the right
connections between itself, others and the world that underpin the
attribution of thought and meaning. For all its notoriety, however,
the Swampman example is not elaborated upon by Davidson, and the
example has a very limited usefulness. In this respect, the attention
Swampman has generated is quite disproportionate to his extremely
brief appearance in Davidson's writing.


### 4.2 Against Relativism and Scepticism



Although it is not simply an epistemological notion, the way Davidson
presents the idea of triangulation tends to be such as to bring its
epistemological implications to the fore. This is especially true of
the way Davidson develops the idea in 'Three Varieties of
Knowledge'. Since our knowledge of our own minds is not
independent of our knowledge of the world nor of our knowledge of
others, so we cannot treat self-knowledge as a matter of our having
access to some set of private 'mental' objects. Our
knowledge of ourselves arises only in relation to our involvement with
others and with respect to a publicly accessible world - as well
as a history of such involvement (this is indeed part of the point of
the Swampman example). Even so, we retain a certain authority over our
own attitudes and utterances simply in virtue of the fact that those
attitudes and utterances are indeed our own (see 'First-Person
Authority', [1984]). Moreover, because our knowledge of the
world is inseparable from other forms of knowledge, global
epistemological scepticism (the view that all or most of our beliefs
about the world could be false) turns out to be committed to much more
than is usually supposed. Should it indeed turn out that our beliefs
about the world were all, or for the most part, false, then this would
not only imply the falsity of most of our beliefs about others, but it
would also have the peculiar consequence of making false most of our
beliefs about ourselves - including the supposition that we do
indeed hold those particular false beliefs. Although this may fall
short of demonstrating the falsity of such scepticism, it surely
demonstrates it to be deeply problematic.



The way in which the Davidsonian rejection of scepticism does indeed
derive quite directly from Davidson's adoption of a holistic,
externalist approach to knowledge, and to attitudinal content in
general, has sometimes been obscured by Davidson's presentation
of his argument against scepticism through the employment (for the
first time in 'Thought and Talk'[1975]) of the rather
problematic notion of an 'omniscient interpreter' (the
idea echoes one deployed by Wilfrid Sellars in an essay with which
Davidson was certainly familiar [Sellars, 1948]). Such an interpreter
would attribute beliefs to others and assign meanings to their
utterances but would nevertheless do so on the basis of her own (true)
beliefs. The omniscient interpreter would therefore have to find a
large amount of agreement between her own beliefs and the beliefs of
those she interprets, and what was agreed would also, by hypothesis,
be true. Like the Swampman example, however, the omniscient
interpreter example has given rise to a number of complications and
misunderstandings (so much so that Davidson has expressed regret at
ever having deployed those examples in the first place), and although
the omniscient interpreter appears at several places in
Davidson's writings, the idea disappears from his later
discussions, and does not play a crucial role in his thinking.



A feature of both the triangulation argument, and the Davidsonian
account of radical interpretation, is that the attribution of
attitudes must always proceed in tandem with the interpretation of
utterances - identifying content, whether of utterances or of
attitudes, is indeed a single project. An inability to interpret
utterances (that is, an inability to assign meanings to instances of
putative linguistic behaviour) will thereby imply an inability to
attribute attitudes (and vice versa). A creature that we cannot
interpret as capable of meaningful speech will thus also be a creature
that we cannot interpret as capable of possessing contentful
attitudes. Such considerations lead Davidson to deny that
non-linguistic animals are capable of thought - where thought
involves the possession of propositional attitudes such as beliefs or
desires (see especially 'Thought and Talk'). This does not
mean that such animals have no mental life at all, nor does it mean
that we cannot usefully use mental concepts in explaining and
predicting the behaviour of such creatures. What it does mean,
however, is that the extent to which we can think of such creatures as
having attitudes and a mental life like our own is measured by the
extent to which we can assign determinate propositional content to the
attitudes we would ascribe to those creatures. A further consequence
of this view is that the idea of an untranslatable language - an
notion often found in association with the thesis of conceptual
relativism - cannot be given any coherent formulation
(Davidson's argument here is suggestive, as Davidson notes, of a
form of transcendental argumentation; see Davidson, 2001b: 72; but
also Davidson, in Hahn, 1999: 342-4). Inability to translate
counts as evidence, not of the existence of an untranslatable
language, but of the absence of a language of any sort (see 'On
the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme' [1974])


### 4.3 The 'Third Dogma' of Empiricism



Davidson's rejection of the idea of an untranslatable language
(and the associated idea, also common to many forms of conceptual
relativism, of a radically different, and so
'incommensurable' system of belief) is part of a more
general argument that he advances (notably in 'On the Very Idea
of a Conceptual Scheme') against the so-called 'third
dogma' of empiricism. The first two dogmas are those famously
identified by Quine in 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' (first
published in the *Philosophical Review*, in 1951). The first is
that of reductionism (the idea that, for any meaningful statement, it
can be recast in the language of pure sensory experience, or, at
least, in terms of a set of confirmatory instances), while the second
is the analytic-synthetic distinction (the idea that, with respect to
all meaningful statements, one can distinguish between statements that
are true in virtue of their meaning and those that are true in virtue
of both their meanings and some fact or facts about the world). The
rejection of both these dogmas can be seen as an important element
throughout Davidson's thinking. The third dogma, which Davidson
claims can still be discerned in Quine's work (and so can
survive the rejection even of the analytic-synthetic distinction),
consists in the idea that one can distinguish within knowledge or
experience between a conceptual component (the 'conceptual
scheme') and an empirical component (the 'empirical
content') - the former is often taken to derive from
language and the later from experience, nature or some form of
'sensory input'. While there are difficulties in even
arriving at a clear formulation of this distinction (particularly so
far as the nature of the relation between the two components is
concerned), such a distinction depends on being able to distinguish,
at some basic level, between a 'subjective' contribution
to knowledge that comes from us and an 'objective'
contribution that comes from the world. What the Davidsonian account
of knowledge and interpretation demonstrates, however, is that no such
distinction can be drawn. Attitudes are already interconnected with
objects and events in the world (causally, semantically and
epistemically), whilst knowledge of self and others already
presupposes knowledge of the world. The very idea of a conceptual
scheme is thus rejected by Davidson along with the idea of any strong
form of conceptual relativism. To possess attitudes and be capable of
speech is already to be capable of interpreting others and to be open
to interpretation by them.


### 4.4 Truth, Predication, and Realism/Anti-Realism



Davidson emphasizes the holistic character of the mental (both in
terms of the interdependence that obtains between various forms of
knowledge as well as the interconnected character of attitudes and of
attitudes and behaviour). He has, at times, also referred to his
position as involving a 'coherence' theory of truth and of
knowledge (in 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge'
[1983]). Nevertheless, Davidson is not a coherentist, in any standard
sense, about either truth or knowledge. Nor, for all that he adopts a
Tarskian approach to meaning, does he espouse a correspondence theory
of truth (in fact, he denies that a Tarskian truth theory is a
correspondence theory in any conventional sense). In general, Davidson
eschews the attempt to provide an account of the nature of truth,
maintaining that truth is a central concept that cannot be reduced to
or replaced by any other notion (see [Davidson 1990a] and [Davidson
2005b]). Since he takes truth to belong to sentences or statements,
and not to 'propositions' in any philosophically
significant sense (in *Truth and Predication* [2005b], he is
particularly emphatic in rejecting the idea of the proposition as a
theoretical or explanatory concept), Davidson denies that truths can
be understood as timeless or eternal (or at least they are no more so
than are languages or sentences themselves). The only way of defining
truth, as Davidson sees it, is by means of a Tarskian truth theory and
such a theory is not a definition of truth in any unqualified sense,
but only a definition of the truth predicate as it applies within a
particular language.



Davidson's employment of the notion of coherence is best viewed,
not as a way of understanding truth, but rather as reflecting his
commitment to the fundamentally rational and holistic character of the
mind. It also connects with Davidson's rejection of those forms
of epistemological foundationalism that would attempt to ground
knowledge or belief in the sensory causes of belief - beliefs,
as one might expect given Davidson's holistic approach, can find
evidential support only in other beliefs. Similarly, Davidson's
sometime employment of the notion of correspondence is best
understood, not as providing, any direct elucidation of the nature of
truth, but rather as deriving from his externalist commitment to the
idea that the content of belief is dependent upon the worldly causes
of belief. In 'True to the Facts' (1969b) Davidson does
defend what he there presents as a form of correspondence theory of
truth. However, not only does Davidson later relinquish the claim that
his is a 'correspondence' view of truth (this is already
evident in 'The Structure and Content of Truth' [1990a],
much of the material from which was later incorporated into *Truth
and Predication* [2005b]), but the account set out in 'True
to the Facts' is, in any case, far removed from what is usually
taken to be involved in any correspondence theory.



The strategy that Davidson employs in relation to the concept of truth
reflects a more general approach that runs throughout his thinking.
Rather than trying to reduce key concepts, like truth, to something
else, his tendency is to retain the primitive character of those
concepts and instead to look to how they are worked out within the
larger structure to which they belong (in this respect, Davidson is a
moderate 'deflationist' about most of his key concepts).
The strategy Davidson adopts in respect of truth is therefore much the
same strategy as that which he adopts with respect to meaning (which
should not surprise us given the role Tarski plays): meaning belongs
primarily to sentences, it is not reducible to any other notion, and
it is explicated only by reference to a larger linguistic structure.
Moreover, this strategy is also one Davidson applies to the topic that
occupies a large part of his last work - his inquiry into the
problem of the problem of predication or of the unity of the
proposition (2005b). How are we to elucidate the relation between a
subject and that which is predicated of it in a standard predicative
sentence such as 'Socrates is mortal'? The problem, like
the problem that arises when one tries to use the truth predicate
reflexively, is that any attempt to explicate the predicative relation
seems to give rise to circularity or regress. Davidson's
solution is to deny that predication can be explained by resort to any
prior notion of propositionality. Instead, Davidson takes predication
as basic, irreducible, and able to be explicated only through the sort
of structure that is revealed by a Tarski-style theory of meaning.



The question of truth lies at the heart of the realist/anti-realist
controversy that was once a major concern of many Anglo-American
philosophers. Despite his insistence on the indispensability of an
irreducibly basic concept of objective truth, and his rejection of
both sceptical and relativist positions, Davidson has been variously
assimilated, at different times and by different critics, to both the
realist and the anti-realist camps. Yet realism and anti-realism are
equally unsatisfactory from a Davidsonian point of view, since neither
is compatible with the holistic and externalist character of knowledge
and belief. Realism makes truth inaccessible (inasmuch as it admits
the sceptical possibility that even our best-confirmed theories about
the world could all be false), while anti-realism makes truth too
epistemic (inasmuch as it rejects the idea of truth as objective). In
this respect, and as he himself makes clear (see 1990a, 2005b),
Davidson does not merely reject the specific premises that underlie
the realist and anti-realist positions but views the very dispute
between them as essentially misconceived. This reflects a
characteristic feature of Davidson's thinking in general (and
not just as it relates to realism and anti-realism), namely its
resistance to any simple classification using the standard
philosophical categories of the day.