Davidson: First Person Authority

Posted on June 16, 2008
Filed Under Davidson, Philosophy |

E9943906-ED9A-452A-840E-6FF175B7A287.jpgI’m slowly going through some of my Davidson texts. I’m starting with Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. This is a procession through roughly the first person perspective to the shared perspective to the objective.

So the first obvious question is why we should assume that first person introspection is so trustworthy. Or, as Davidson puts it, “why we should see any better when we inspect our own minds than when we inspect the minds of others?” (”First Person Authority,” 5) As Davidson notes we don’t usually make claims about our own mind in terms of evidence. Yet I’d add that even if we did unless that evidence is external we’re left with the question of how we came to know the evidence. To take the old workhorse of philosophers in these sorts of things, it seems obvious that I know I am in pain in a special way quite different from how I know someone else is in pain.

Davidson appears to accept a view of Rorty that this privilege of the first person probably arose because people as a practical matter did make personal ascriptions of their mental states without reference to some behavior. So it’s simply a fact of the matter that people say they are in pain without looking at whether their face is scrunched up, whether they are moaning, or otherwise acting peculiar.

Where Davidson takes an interesting approach is to move towards treating self-ascriptions of mental states in terms of language use. One has to be careful though lest one end up in circular logic. (i.e. proper use entails truth which begs the question of why we treat self-ascriptions as true)

The move Davidson makes is based upon the presumption that a speaker (but not necessarily an interpreter) knows the content of their utterance. Put in terms of his principle of charity, we assume a language user is communicating truth and knows the truth. This may not always be right but we must presume it is right. This is true when interpreting regular statements about the world but it thereby follows for first person accounts as well.

Davidson suggests that there is an asymmetry because of the evidence that a listener must use to interpret the utterance.

…what his words mean depends in part on the clues to interpretation he has given the interpreter, or other evidence he justifiably believes the interpreter has. The speaker can be wrong about what his own words mean. This is one of the reasons first person authority is not infallible. But the possibility of error does not eliminate the asymmetry. The asymmetry rests on the fact that the interpreter must, while the speaker doesn’t, rely on what, if it were made explicit, would be a difficult inference in interpreting the speaker. (13)

So to Davidson (at least in this paper) the whole issue of first person authority is primarily an effect of how we interpret. There must be a presumption that if a speaker knows what they mean they know what they believe.

Is this ultimately satisfactory? I don’t think so. It may well explain the linguistic situation of why we trust people’s first person accounts. I’m not sure it really tells us much about first person accounts. That is why I am able to know my pain in a way I can’t know your pain. Likewise it doesn’t address the question of whether I have special access to say knowledge of my pain that a third party couldn’t. (Say someone doing an fMRI of my brain)

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6 Responses to “Davidson: First Person Authority”

“Davidson appears to accept a view of Rorty that this privilege of the first person probably arose because people as a practical matter did make personal ascriptions of their mental states without reference to some behavior.”

The “Myth of Jones” from the latter part of Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” is relevant here; it’s not Rorty’s views that Davidson is drawing from. Both are drawing from Sellars’s tale of “our Rylean ancestors”.

“That is why I am able to know my pain in a way I can’t know your pain.”

I sense an equivocation on “able to know”.

I can know that I am in pain in a way that I cannot know that you are in pain. This scenario strikes me as adequately explained by Davidson’s account of first-person authority: First-person attributions are distinctive in that they are authoritative and need not be based on evidence, for the reasons Davidson lays out.

I know my pain, am acquainted with my pain, in a way that no one else can be — if someone else has this pain, then it is not my pain, but their’s. This strikes me as not explained by Davidson’s account of first-person authority, but it doesn’t need to be. It is not a type of knowledge, but is a homonym, as in “carnal knowledge”.

“Likewise it doesn’t address the question of whether I have special access to say knowledge of my pain that a third party couldn’t. (Say someone doing an fMRI of my brain)”

Unless the MRI tech is somehow able to say whether you’re in pain without appealing to evidence (such as what the MRI machine displays), then: Yes it does. Evidence that involves fancy neuroscience is not different in kind from evidence that involves just looking at a body with the unaided eye.

Yes, there is an equivocation on “know” but I sense that is present in Davidson. (Maybe I’m wrong there) I think Davidson really dodged the whole issue of why people attribute statements about their first person experiences versus their ascriptions of statements about what’s “out there.”

I confess I find Davidson very unpersuasive here since I’m not at all sure that in principle this authority is justified. Certainly we treat it as authoritative (as Rorty noted) and I think Davidson got us a little further along from that as to why we treat it as authoritative. But not necessarily getting that much farther.

As to the evidence question, I’ll get to that in a subsequent post. I think this assymetry breaks down since there are performances where we ascribe authority independent of evidence. What I think is going on is that some processes are seen as reliable and so we don’t demand evidence. I think first person authority is an example of this reliabilism.

Now I reject the Alston style of reliabilism but I think that Davidson’s logic appears to be moving in that direction even if he’s avoiding that discussion by focusing on radical interpretation and its implications.

I know this is an exposition on the writing of Davidson. However, I have a problem with Davidson’s principle of charity.

Put in terms of his principle of charity, we assume a language user is communicating truth and knows the truth.

I don’t think we do assume the user is communicating truth. If someone walks up to you with a smile on his face and bouncing along looking happy as can be and says with a huge smile “I have a terrific pain in my head” we don’t automatically assume what he is saying is true. In fact, we don’t trust the utterance at all. It sets up a feeling of dissonance. We don’t know what to believe. If someone talks to us with a dead pan expression, no movement of the body, no inflection we become irritated.

The reason this happens is due to mirror neurons. They mirror the somatic language of others internally. Smile at a new born and it will smile back. This is no conscious act on the part of the baby. It’s mirror neurons detect the smile and directs neural networks in the baby’s cerebellum to mirror the action that is seen. Next, stick your tongue out. Yep, the baby will stick his tongue out.

One of the functions of mirror neurons is to allow us to internally replicate the somatic language of others. In the brain there is a part which holds a somatic map of the body. If you were to see these parts they would not look like a body. The hand section may be next to the foot section, etc., but all parts of the body which contain sense neurons, are there. So, internally we feel a replication of what we see projected by the somatic language of the other. In a sense, we can feel the pain of others, or at least what we project to be the pain of others. This allows us, at a non-conscious level, to asses the what is being said. If you have ever said, “I heard him but I’m just not convinced he is telling the truth.” In all probability there is dissonance between his verbal language and his somatic language.

Philosophers of language seem to study verbal language as if it was an isolated phenomenon. Which it is not. Verbal language is always (unless over ridden) connected with somatic language. When one is complaining of pain, we expect to see the outward somatic signs of one in pain. This, rather than charity, helps us to accept what is said is true. Verbal language was never meant to convey information as an isolated phenomenon. Thus interpersonal communication is the result of both verbal language and somatic language.

This presents a problem for the philosopher of language and the issue of meaning. If meaning is to be found in verbal language, how is it that the same meaning is found in somatic language. For utterances to occur neural networks in the cerebellum must be triggered in order for the muscles required for verbal expression must be triggered. This same mechanism must be triggered for the muscles required for somatic language. It cannot be the triggering of semantic neural networks which initiates somatic neural networks. Somatic language is like firmware that comes with each individual. We know that because somatic language can be read by everyone regardless of the language they use. Also, somatic language pre-dates verbal language by millions of years. All animals use somatic language in some form or other. Most likely, verbal language and somatic language are triggered by a third element (meaning?). This would imply that meaning resides outside of language. It also implies that meaning resides in the non-conscious.

Rich

Note that Davidson’s view is what is generally the case. So for language to function as a necessity there has to be the assumption that we can communicate.

It seems assumption of communication is established long before we aquire verbal language. It is established while still a young child through somatic language. My son was born deaf. At a year and a half was fitted with a hearing aid. The next morning when we entered his bedroom he was standing in his crib pointing to his hearing aid and then pointing to his ears. There was already the assumption of communication. Verbal language only builds upon that already established assumption.

Rich

I agree that linguists often define language too narrowly. I’m not sure that relates to Davidson’s point that communication for it to be communication demands that it generally be successful which presupposes we generally understand one an other. What’s so interesting about Davidson is how much he is able to get from that observation.

The trick to reading Davidson, I’ve found, is that we have to keep in mind that we are always talking about the general case. He acknowledges fallibilism of course but he’s found an interesting way to avoid the skeptic’s dilemma.

The issue of “where” meaning resides Davidson has an answer for as well. Indeed that’s the main theme of these essays I’ve been commenting on. It doesn’t reside anywhere since it is a kind of relation. It is the attempt to seek “where” it is that is one of the big errors of philosophy.

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