Davidson: Knowing Ones Own Mind

Posted on July 9, 2008
Filed Under Davidson, Philosophy | 3 Comments

Mind MobiusSorry, I fell behind on my Davidson. This is my reading through Davidson’s Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. My last post was on the first essay, “First Person Authority” where Davidson argued that due to the way we interpret there is a presumption that an other persons beliefs are largely correct and thus their first person accounts (which are reflections of their beliefs) are largely correct. Thus there is an authority to first person that we don’t have elsewhere. It wasn’t ultimately satisfactory to me but I understand why Davidson would arrive at that conclusion.

This time we’re doing “Knowing Ones Own Mind” which is a pretty similar essay focusing on criticisms to the first essay. I’ll avoid what is largely repetition and focus on what I find interesting and different. Let me start with his thesis though.

It is seldom the case that I need or appeal to evidence or observation in order to find out what I believe; normally I know what I think before I speak or act. Even when I have evidence, I seldom make use of it. I can be wrong about my own thoughts, and so the appeal to what can be publicly determined is not irrelevant. But the possibility that one may be mistaken about one’s own thoughts cannot defeat the overriding presumption that a person knows what he or she believes; in general, the belief that one has a thought is enough to justify that belief. (15)

Davidson raises a big problem. Those following Wittgenstein say we can apply mental predicates to others with evidence but to ourselves without it simply because that is essential for the use of those predicate terms. That is it’s a feature of linguistic “rules.” Davidson notes that if two concepts depend upon different ranges of criteria or support then we say they are different concepts. (That is a difference makes a difference) Therefore Wittgenstein’s solution to other minds creates a problem with our own mind. Put an other way, Wittgenstein ends up allowing we can attribute thoughts to others but not ourselves. (The inverse of the traditional problem)

Now Davidson avoids this. That’s because the meaning of an utterance is wrapped up with interpreting it. The speaker (ourselves) can interpret ourselves better than we can someone else. That is we generally know what we mean when we speak whereas others don’t.

One must include in this that we aren’t talking about meaning as purely representations. That is we aren’t talking purely about the part of meaning that is “all in ones head” or what Putnam calls narrow content. Rather meanings for Davidson (and Putnam) are generally external and tied up with the world around the speaker and interpreter. I think this is generally correct. Some of Davidson’s arguments are pretty weak though, such as the swampman argument introduced in this essay. This was the thought experiment where completely from chance an exact double was created of me. Since it didn’t have my history it couldn’t have the same beliefs even if it had the same brain states and thus same narrow content. The beliefs clearly aren’t related to the experiences I had and thus weren’t the same. It’s one of those arguments like Chalmer’s zombies that’s great for illustrative purposes but tends to only be persuasive to those who already agree with you to some level. Davidson later said he wished he’d never brought it up.

I think though that what Putnam’s twin-earth example and Davidson’s swamp-man illustrate is that when describing beliefs of others we aren’t just concerned with their inner states but their relation to their context. Thus meaning and interpretation is wrapped up with a discussion of context. That seems undeniable. When I say I think I don’t care for Obama or McCain in normal interpretation it’s hard to miss that what counts isn’t just what’s in my mind but my relationship to politics, acts of voting and then the figures themselves. Communication is largely about my environment. Thus I think on a certain level it’s undeniable that externalism is important even if perhaps narrow content is more important for certain psychological or cognitive questions.

The problem for first person authority though is that if the content of my thoughts has this essential relationship to external context then people other than myself may be better placed to judge the content. We may not know what we believe.

Davidson’s reply is (following Dennett) that to function we have to be very acquainted with our world which entails I do know my beliefs – even if a philosopher can find cases where we aren’t sufficiently acquainted with our world and thus don’t know our beliefs. That is Davidson is dealing with the general case so finding places where we are fallible is rather beside the point. What Davidson can argue is that these cases of fallibilism are rare or at least infrequent.

It is interesting though that Davidson’s own swampman thought experiment raises an obvious rejoinder. The swampman may have different thoughts than I do. But the swampman can function quite well in the world simply because he has the replica of my experiences. Given that isn’t Davidson committed to saying that one needn’t have experience with the world to function in the world and that thus I can radically not know my beliefs? Perhaps this is partially why Davidson came to regret the swampman. However there’s an obvious reply. Swampmen are very rare cases and thus not relevant to the general case with humans.

This is why arguments to chance or arguments where something can be phenomenally equivalent to water but not water are so unpersuasive. It seems very hard to believe they could actually happen. (This applies to Tanasije’s inversion of the swampman as well) If it’s not by chance then there’s an agent who is making the mental state which implies a kind of communication and the arguments fall apart.

An other argument against Davidson is the problem of being wrong in some properties of content or having vague content. So say I have cancer and think that illness is produced by demons and not cell mutations and unlimited growth. I talk to my doctor who says I have cancer. Do we mean the same thing? (This is common to varying degrees in all language – as I touched upon last week) Davidson’s counter-argument is quite right. We are vague with language. We use the same words to cover many different things. If we recognize that someone has a slightly different meaning then in continued communication we may choose to use different words to highlight those differences. But often we’re focused on just one aspect of the words rather than the entire range of meaning.

So the doctor and the patient who have different understandings of cancer in the communication are focused on just one aspect. The other aspects where they differ are irrelevant.

This is quite important as it commits Davidson to a thoroughgoing use of vagueness. And he is right that this avoids a lot of problems and clarifies a lot of confusions. This response by Davidson also implies a contextualism and holism which is also important. Thoughts aren’t atoms, as he puts it. Their meaning is related to other meanings. I think that this has as an implication vagueness. That’s because if one embracing a thoroughgoing contextualism or kind of holism then communication will always be communicating only a part. Otherwise every communication would be a communication of every belief and in a sense the entire universe since beliefs are tied to external contexts.

I’ll finish up the paper in a subsequent post.

Related posts:

  1. Davidson: Knowing Ones Own Mind 2
  2. Davidson: What Is Present to the Mind
  3. Davidson on Weakness of Will
  4. Davidson & Rational Animals
  5. Davidson, Gadamer and Derrida
  6. Davidson: Private Language

Comments

3 Responses to “Davidson: Knowing Ones Own Mind”

I don’t know what I think about this post. But I believe I think I like it. I look forward to the second part (At least I think I do).

2 john c. halasz on July 9th, 2008 2:02 pm

The attribution to Wittgenstein is not quite right. In the first place, Wittgenstein offers no account of what language is, “language-games” denoting a method of approach and not a doctrine about language, and he always examines language-use in its intrications with practices, experiences, relationships, and the like. He’s fundamentally inquiring into the “nature” of understanding, what it means to understand, (redoing and transforming Kant, though that relation is a whole ‘nother complicated can of worms), and, if language is a conventional system of rules, then such convention strikes deeply into our “natures”, (though he doesn’t actually make any claim for the sheerly conventional status of language, nor draw any clear line between nature and convention, since that is precisely what can not be done). At any rate, what the so-called “private language argument” that is attributed to him, (which is not exactly an argument, nor about “private language”), would show, stated as a thesis, is that, if we were to start from the “inside” and attempt to build up a language from some sort of inner promptings or proto-intentions, then not only would we be unable to build up the full external structure of our language, but we wouldn’t even be able to build up an “inside”. In other words, we are always already intricated with others in our possibilities of understanding and self-understanding, so that I could not even make attributions to myself with respect to my own experience without making use of the same differential “grammar” by which I make attributions to others, except perhaps as a sheer inarticulate expression. It’s definitely not a claim that I could make sense of the thoughts of others, but could not make sense of the attribution of my own thoughts, since, its sheer implausibility aside, Wittgenstein does not think that I can know the thoughts of others in any strong sense, and he’s criticizing the purported need for such a strong sense to knowledge of others. Rather it’s that I can not know or express my own “mind” without the “grammar” which intricates it with those of others, and provides for a differential structure and criteria of attributions, by which any mental states of my own or others are correlated.

Wittgenstein does not deny first-person experience, nor our ability to identify and express it. But what he does deny to it is precisely any self-sufficient incorrigibility, since what he’s interested in is the ways in which we can be deeply mistaken about ourselves precisely through being self-seduced and misled by the misapplications of philosophical abstractions and their reification. It’s such “higher” forms of self-deception and self-misunderstandings, from without the commonplaces by which we express and understand our experiences, that is the main object of Wittgenstein’s criticism. The “problem of other minds” is not whether they at all exist or whether we can have any knowledge of them, as the radical philosophical skeptic and his adversaries both would have it, (since we do have such knowledge in quite ordinary ways, though such ordinary knowledge does not satisfy the perfectionist demand of the skeptic), but rather the misunderstandings, miscommunications, confusions and misapprehensions of needs and desires that riddle our relations with others. It’s bringing about that reorientation of our understanding of the “problem”, partly through unraveling the confusions that underpin the skeptical/perfectionist demand, and understanding the misplaced need that the “problem” at once derives from and obscures that Wittgenstein is aiming at. The work of such philosophical elucidation does not by any means immunize us from falling into confusion, to which we remain susceptible in our relations with others, but it can prevent us from following out false leads in our confusion and perplexities, motivated by a desire to secure just such an immunity.

Note that the reference to Wittgenstein was Davidson’s. Although I think his point was just the idea that there are correct and incorrect uses according to Wittgenstein. Thus it’s appropriate to make mental predications of others because that’s what we do. But of course we do this to both others and ourselves. I think Davidson would simply say that if we apply this to saying knowledge of others is unproblematic then our own self-knowledge becomes problematic.

Not knowing Wittgenstein terribly well (about on par with my knowledge of the process thinkers) I make no claims about how correct Davidson is in this. Although I’m not sure he means to refer to a particular position of Wittgenstein as much as a strategy Wittgensteinians might take. It’s not clear from the text though.

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