Now some have actually suggested that Davidson in these articles on first person authority himself falls prey to the myth of the given by seeing language as a sign that is interpreted. i.e. we have first person authority because we know our own beliefs the way we know others and this entails we know our own beliefs in a certain way.

I think this line of attack against Davidson is misplaced, but I’ll discuss that hopefully soon.

The myth of the given I seem to remember Davidson mentioning. I need to look that up, but as I mentioned don’t have the book handy right now. (If I was wise I’d probably hold off replying for an other day – but these will do as preliminary) The issue of Greek thought though I’m much more confident on. This was actually a big deal back when I was studying Stoic philosophy. I know that this notion directly entered the Enlightenment by Locke who explicitly mentions it. I’m reasonably confident Descartes got it from the Stoics as well. While I’m not an expert in the least on Aristotle I’m quite sure the idea is in his thought fairly extensively as well.

What is common to all the main Greek philosophers is phantasia being what appears – especially to the eyes. For the Stoics it is the image or impression presented by an object to the mind. In Aristotle, as I recall, it is more a capacity of the mind. (Although I believe this is disputed by some mainly on the basis that there’s never a complete act that images something) However I was more thinking of the Stoic and Epicurean views. I do agree that, from what I recall of it, Aristotle’s view might be more similar to Davidson’s. That is as a rough capacity to present things to other cognitive processes.

Back to Sellars I’ll have to reread the passage I was thinking of. I have a copy of Sellars at home and will see what I think rereading it. My own comments were more thinking of presence in Derridean/Heideggarian terms and the relation of the object to the sign in Peircean terms. The way I was reading Davidson was that he was arguing not for a kind of presence but rather a relation to absent things. But what was important was not the things (as it was for Putnam) but the relationship. What then gets replicated and repeated is a relationship. This ties into my continuing interest in the issue of reproduction and icons in Derrida and Peirce.

To the question of the argument. Certainly he suggests we can identify thought content without reference to internal objects. However that wasn’t what I was referring to. Rather he made a stronger claim. That is that no object before the mind could function the way either internalists or externalists like Putnam wanted it to. He said nothing would work but gave no reason. Merely presenting an alternative view isn’t really an argument for the absence of possibility in the opposing view. At least I’d have a hard time seeing that as much of an argument.

So to say something is not needed is a different issue from saying something is impossible. Certainly the weaker claim is more interesting though.

As to totally knowing ones thoughts. If there’s nothing present then I don’t see how foundationalism is possible. Davidson presents our generally being correct but I think he’s fairly explicit that there’s a strong fallibilism. I don’t recall him arguing for such a fallibilism. You’ve got me curious. The way he speaks appears, to me, to take for granted that his externalism makes foundationalism impossible. It seems to me we have to distinguish between fallibilism (which entails I think no totality of knowledge of our thoughts) from skepticism. They are, as I see it, quite different issues.

The issue of “language doesn’t work that way” is probably the best argument. But that, to me, is simply the ultimate argument against foundationalism.

How so? Sellars says that experiences “as it were, contain claims”, claims which the apperceptive subject can endorse, reject, or withhold judgement on. It seems that the idea of “impressions on the mind” “that we accept or reject” is not to be identified with the mythical Given, for Sellars is keen to defend a concept of experience which answers to this description, and it is Sellars to whom we owe the very notion of a mythical Given.

I’m also not sure that your “Greek” notion is really Greek, rather than Cartesian (and thus modern). Ancient & modern skepticisms are rather more different than similar. Burnyeat & Frede’s “The Original Skeptics” is good on this topic, as on many others.

“While Davidson doesn’t really give an argument he asserts that there are no objects like this.”

I’m not sure why you think he doesn’t have an argument here. We can identify the contents of thoughts without reference to any objects other than “external” ones, and so other objects simply drop out as needless posits — they don’t do any work for us. And since the seeming need for them was what originally motivated their positing, removing this apparent need also removes the justification for thinking there are objects “present to the mind”.

I also think it’s wrong to say that Davidson’s externalism presents a problem for a subject’s ability to “totally know their thoughts”. There is no fact of the matter about the content of any one thought, taken in isolation, due to the indeterminacy of translation, but this means there’s not something we can fail to know here. (And neither is there a fact of the matter about what a body of thoughts each singularly refers to; there is no way to “disambiguate” away indeterminacy by appealing to context etc. For it is not a case of ambiguity; the indeterminate translations get things right, in the only sense in which it makes sense to speak of “getting things right” here.)

Skepticism (and its metaphysical counterpart, antirealism) gain no traction from the indeterminacy of translation. (See essay 5 in ISO, “Indeterminism and Antirealism”.) I think that this also undermines the connections you see between Davidson on the one hand and Peirce and many Continentals on the other — word-world relations are subject to the indeterminacy of translation and the inscrutability of reference, so it doesn’t make sense, on Davidson’s account, to try to handle them one at a time — such as treating of a sign or an object. One has to treat of many signs and many objects simultaneously, and there is no one “right” way of e.g. setting up a satisfaction relation for the T-theory of a language, of connecting signs and objects, signifiers and signifieds. Which is not an epistemic or pragmatic inability on our part, but something inherent in the matter itself: not that we cannot know What A Word Refers To (What A Sign Hints At, What Is Signified By A Signifier), but that there isn’t anything like that to be known. Language just does not work that way. (Which does not entail anything radical about our everyday knowledge; it is only philosophy’s castles in the air that are laid siege to.)