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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
To approach the philosophical anthropology (p. 4) of Donald Davidson is to get ready for an unusually high number of laps around the hermeneutic circle. Apparently a problem-oriented philosopher, Davidson presents his views in a continuing series of dense, tightly focussed papers on narrowly circumscribed topics. The lines of the big picture are mostly implicit. Yet it is the scope and the power of this picture that has made Davidson one of the most significant philosophers of this century. Naturally, this makes Davidson's work an extremely tempting—and extremely treacherous—target for the exegete with synthesizing tendencies. Until now, the sense of danger seems to have won out; secondary expositions have largely confined themselves to particular aspects of his thought. For those seeking to appreciate the cohesion and comprehensiveness of Davidson's vision, there has been no alternative but, as Ted Honderich says, to “struggle and learn,” working their way through Davidson's papers, continually calibrating and recalibrating interpretations of Davidson's detailed philosophical proposals with the emerging pattern of their interrelationships.
1 Ted Honderich's review in New Statesman is quoted on the back cover of Davidson, 's Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).Google Scholar
2 Evnine does not believe one can give an account of irrationality without compromising the principle of charity (pp. 169–73). But why should this be so? It is the principle of charity that forces Evnine's strategy here, and, by his account, there certainly is irrationality (inconsistencies, tensions) in the overlap between the two projects. What locates two particular attitudes in different partitions of the mind is not just “their standing in the relation of non-rational causation” (p. 172) to one another, but that they figure in webs to which at least some attitude uniquely belongs. Non-rational mental causation here is subservient to the principle of charity. Attribution of irrationality is directed at the natural person, not at either cluster of belief. In general, we seek to fit as much of a person's behaviour as we can into one system. When the stress of conflicting evidence becomes too great, there will be many different ways of describing this, but I am not convinced that this requires us—as Evnine says, endorsing Dennett—to “descend to a nonrational level … to explain, or even describe, what happens” (p. 173). A certain amount of noise in the intentional system, whether described as tensions within a web of attitudes extended to cover the entire locus of interpretation, or in the form of non-rational relations between distinct webs within a system, is the price we pay for construing as much behaviour as we do as the intentional behaviour of a single agent.
3 These are: (1) Mental events and physical events causally interact. (2) Causal relations are backed by strict laws. (3) There are no psycho-physical laws.
4 Davidson, Donald, “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” in Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, edited by LePore, Ernest (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 307–19.Google Scholar
5 Ibid., pp. 317–18.
6 Davidson, Donald, “Thinking Causes,” in Mental Causation, edited by Heil, John and Mele, Alfred (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 3–17.Google Scholar
7 Ibid., p. 7.
8 Ibid., p. 13.
9 Evnine provides another example in his discussion of Hornsby, Jennifer's “Physicalism, Events, and Part-Whole Relations,” in Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, edited by LePore, Ernest and McLaughlin, Brian (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), pp. 444–58Google Scholar. Hornsby finds that Davidson fails to provide support for a monistic account of events, since he nowhere argues for the principle of the nomological character of causality. But, of course, Davidson does not preclude you from pursuing event dualism, should you find this principle insupportable. He shows us, rather, that there is a way to be a monist about causality and events without being a reductivist.