Interpretations and Causes: New Perspectives on Donald Davidson’s Philosophy

269 Pages·1999·7.826 MB·English

by  Mario De Caro (auth.), Mario de Caro (eds.)

INTERPRETATIONS AND CAUSES
SYNTHESE LIBRARY
STUDIES IN EPISTEMOLOGY,
LOGIC, METHODOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Managing Editor:
JAAKKO HINTIKKA, Boston University
Editors:
DIRK VAN DALEN, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
DONALD DAVIDSON, University of California, Berkeley
THEO A.F. KUIPERS, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
PATRICK SUPPES, Stanford University, California
JAN WOLENSKI, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland
VOLUME 285
INTERPRETATIONS
AND
CAUSES
New Perspectives on Donald Davidson's Philosophy
Edited by
MARIO DE CARO
Universita Roma Tre.
Italy
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
A C.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-5283-4 ISBN 978-94-015-9227-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-9227-7
Printed Oil acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 1999 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 1999
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover 1st edition 1999
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface vii
MARIO DE CARO I Davidson in Focus
DONALD DAVIDSON I Interpretation: Hard in Theory,
Easy in Practice 31
PART I. LANGUAGE, METAPHYSICS, AND MIND
ERNEST LEPORE I Davidson and Understanding Language 47
NEIL TENNANT I Radical Interpretation, Logic, and Conceptual Schemes 71
TED A. WARFIELD I Donald Davidson's Freedom 95
SANDRO NANNINI I Physicalism and the Anomalism of the Mental 101
PAOLO LEONARDI I Anomalous Monism 117
ANTONIO RAINONE I Thirty-five Years after" Actions, Reasons, and
Causes": What Has Become of Davidson's Causal Theory of Action? 125
SIMONE GOZZANO I Davidson on Rationality and Irrationality 137
PART II. EXTERNALISM
ROSARIA EGIDI I "Cred'io ch'ei credette ch'io credesse ... ". What basis
for belief? 153
PETER LUDLOW I First Person Authority and Memory 159
EV A PICARDI I Sensory Evidence and Shared Interests 171
MARCIA CAVELL I Owning One's Mind 187
v
VI TABLE OF CONTENTS
RAFFAELLA DE ROSA / Is There a Problem about Davidson's Externalism
vis a-vis His Holism? 201
AKEEL BILGRAMI / Internalism and Scepticism 217
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 251
INDEX OF NAMES 253
INDEX OF SUBJECTS 257
PREFACE
This volume traces its origins to spring, 1992, when Donald Davidson delivered a
series of lectures in Rome, and a conference dedicated to his philosophy was
organized by Rosaria Egidi at the Department of Philosophy of the Universita Roma
Tre. Originally, this book was to consist of the proceedings of that conference; for
several reasons, however, some years passed before the project was actually started.
As a consequence, the list of the contributors of the present volume only partially
resembles the list of speakers attending the Rome conference - and, of course, the
essays published here are different from the ones that were read on that occasion.
I wish to thank Rosaria Egidi for her helpful suggestions and constant support on
this project. I am particularly grateful to Cesare Cozzo, for his valuable comments
on the introductory essay I wrote for this volume, and I would also like to thank Ned
Block, Francesco Ferretti, Ernie Lepore, Giacomo Marramao, Eva Picardi, Roberto
Pujia, Hilary Putnam, Patricia Sayre, and Ted (Fritz) Warfield, for the profitable
talks concerning one or other of the issues I have discussed in that essay. To Portia
Prebys and Gus Rancatore I am grateful for having patiently edited the texts.
Finally, I am happy to specially thank Donald Davidson, both for his generous
support during the whole period in which this volume was prepared, and for the
enlightening conversations I had with him when I was working on his philosophy
for my doctoral dissertation.
My introductory essay was written during summer, 1998, while I was spending
an academic year at Harvard University, as a Fulbright Visiting Scholar. My stay
there was made possible by two fellowships, granted by the Fulbright Commission
for Cultural Exchange and by the Universita Roma Tre. For this, I am most grateful
to both these institutions.
MARIO DE CARO
vii
MARIO DE CARO
DAVIDSON IN FOCUS
Insofar as the notion of systematic philosophy can make sense in the analytic world,
Donald Davidson is a systematic philosopher. While he has never directly written
about some of the most fundamental branches of philosophy, as the classic
systematic philosophers used to do (he has never discussed ethical or political
issues, for example), Davidson's fundamental contributions to many fields, such as
the philosophy of language and metaphysics, epistemology and the theory of action,
the philosophy of mind and the theory of explanation form a complex, integrated
whole in which any single part is interdependent on the others. This holistic feature
of Davidson's philosophy gives us clear evidence of its systematic character -
besides being a major source of its notorious difficulty. However, in his quite
formidable, but remarkably original philosophical system, two notions play a
fundamental role: interpretation and causation.
Over the years, Davidson's philosophy has more and more assumed the form of
an investigation of the possibility, the modalities, the requisites and the import of
interpretation. At the beginning, Davidson only considered the adoption of the
interpretative stance as a promising methodological prospect for the philosophy of
language:
Like many others. I wanted answers to such questions as "What is meaning?" and
became frustrated by the fatuity of the attempts at answers I found in Ogden and
Richard. Charles Morris. Skinner and others. So I substituted another question which I
thought might be less intractable: What would it suffice an interpreter to know in order
to understand the speaker of an alien language. and how could he come to know it?
(Davidson I 994a. p. 126).
Over the last three decades, however, the relevance of interpretation for
Davidson's philosophy became much greater. In this light, it can now be said.
without exaggerating, that Davidson's philosophy as such has assumed a third
person point of view, that it has become nothing less than a philosophy ex parte
interpretis (so that today Davidson is the philosopher of interpretation in the analytic
world, in the same sense in which Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur are the
philosophers of interpretation in the contemporary Continental philosophy). In
particular, Davidson has unceasingly reflected on the so-called radical interpretation
(the situation in which the interpreter does not have any previous knowledge of the
speaker's language and mental states). How important radical interpretation has
become in Davidson's view is shown by the following quotation.
2 MARIO DE CARO
This is the process of radical interpretation. There is no further court of appeal, no
impersonal objective standard against which to measure our own best judgement of the
rational and the true. (Davidson 1994b, p. 232).
In a nutshell, Davidson has come to the conclusion that mutual interpretation is an
indispensable requisite for language and thought, and a necessary condition for
acquiring the concepts of truth, objectivity, reality.
Davidsonian analyses have also shown that in the accounts of (radical)
interpretation another theoretical notion plays an essential role: the notion of
causality. As interpreters, in fact, we cannot
in general fix what someone means independently of what he bel ieves and
independently of what caused the belief... [W]e can't in general first identify beliefs
and meanings and then ask what caused them. The causality plays an indispensable
role in determining the content of what we say and believe. (Davidson 1993, p. 317).
This shows that causality plays a fundamental role in Davidson's conception of
language and thought. But causality is not a neutral notion. Philosophers have held
many different opinions about it, and Davidson himself, for many years, has
reflected deeply on causality and connected issues. However, to be exact, he has
never cared much about the most typical philosophical questions regarding this topic
(can one give an analysis of this notion in terms of necessary and/or sufficient
conditions? Could the reference to counterfactual conditionals help in finding such
an analysis? Is there such a thing as "backward causation"?). Even so, Davidson has
done much to clarify this concept. He has presented a classic analysis of the logical
form of singular causal statements (Davidson 1967); advocated a sharp distinction
between causal relations, concerning events, and causal explanations, concerning
sentences (Davidson 1963); expounded on a very influential causal conception of
action (Davidson 1963, 1987); defended the so-called "nomological conception of
causality", according to which every singular true causal statement relating two
events is backed by a strict (i. e., physical) law that covers those events, when they
are adequately described (Davidson 1967, 1995); supported the thesis that while
psychology and the other "special sciences" cannot help referring to causal
concepts,1 mature physics eliminates the causal notions from its vocabulary
(Davidson 1987).
In short, the notions of interpretation and causality have played a pivotal role in
the development and the achievements of Davidsonian reflection. Most of the essays
in this volume will discuss these two notions at length, with the aim of contributing
to their clarification - both from a general point of view and as regards the
philosophy of Donald Davidson.
DA VIDSON IN Focus 3
I. LANGUAGE AND INTERPRETABILITY
Many of Davidson's greatest contributions to the philosophical debate of the last
decades are connected with the philosophy of language. He introduced the seminal
notion of "theory of meaning" for a language;2 proposed an influential model for
such a theory in the shape of a Tarskian theory of truth for L that an interpreter
could use to understand the utterances of a speaker of that language;] argued that the
notion of language (as it has been traditionally meant) is conceptually subordinated
to the notion of idiolect;4 offered enlightening analyses of fundamental linguistic
notions, such as those of truth, reference, meaning, metaphor.5
In his paper in this volume ("Davidson and Understanding Language"), Ernest
Lepore discusses two very basic questions that concern a fundamental assumption of
Davidson's philosophy of language, i.e., the idea that by developing an adequate
semantic theory we could obtain a satisfying (philosophical) account of linguistic
comprehension. More specifically, these two questions come to mind:
(I) Are semantic theories for natural languages (or for the idiolects spoken by
particular speakers) adequate models of linguistic comprehension?
(2) If the semantic theories merely model linguistic comprehension (assuming
they do), what can we learn from them?
Even if some philosophers are skeptical, if not utterly pessimistic about the
possibility of answering "yes" to the first query, many authors - most of whom have
been directly inspired by Davidson -, think that semantic theories (that specify truth
conditions or satisfaction conditions for a language L) can correctly describe (or
model) the linguistic competence of an interpreter, i.e., the interpreter's ability to
understand the utterances of another speaker. However, arguably the second query is
philosophically more basic. In fact, most of the authors believe that in understanding
language, ordinary speakers do not use any metalinguistic (semantic) theory; in this
view, linguistic comprehension does not amount to any propositional knowledge at
all (Fodor 1987; Schiffer 1987).
Davidson himself is very careful in saying that his theory of meaning only aims
at modeling the competence of the real interpreter, without claiming anything about
the empirical modalities of interpretation. Thus, to Dummett, who accused him of
having inappropriately attributed the (propositional) knowledge of a theory of
meaning to empirical interpreters, Davidson replies:
I do not think I have ever conflated the (empirical) question how we actually go about
understanding a speaker with the (philosophical) question what is necessary and
sufficient for such understanding. I have focused on the latter question not because I
think it brings us close to the psychology of language learning and use, but because I
think it brings out the philosophically important aspects of communication while the
former tempts us to speculate about arcane empirical matters that neither philosophers
nor psychologist know much about... I don't think we normally understand what others
say by consciously reflecting on the question what they mean, by appealing to some
theory of interpretation, or by summoning up what we take to be the relevant evidence.
(Davidson I 994c, p. 3 [my italics])."