Davidson: The Myth of the Subjective 1

Posted on August 15, 2008
Filed Under Davidson, Philosophy |

All the World's a StageSorry for falling behind in the more general philosophy posts. It’s been a very busy summer and will continue to be a busy fall. I really did want to get back to Davidson. As you recall I’m going through the collections of Davidson’s more recent works starting with Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. I’d long had his earlier stuff but just wasn’t as versed with his stuff from the late 80’s onward. I’m really enjoying it. This week’s post is on an essay composed around the same time as last week’s “Knowing Ones Own Mind.” That dealt with Davidson’s view that we privilege fist person accounts simply because it is necessary that a person’s beliefs generally be true. To me it leaves unresolved why a person’s first person beliefs are generally true. For instance we recognize that people’s beliefs about physics are generally false. And we can explain why. I don’t think Davidson gets at that to the degree he ought. Where that essay got interesting though was in the move towards analyzing philosophical metaphor.

It really is quite interesting to me how much focus Davidson puts on metaphors. The metaphor in “Knowing Your Own Mind” was the old one of a stage where a performance is going on. Davidson felt that the philosophy was caught up in this metaphor and the debate was only about whether the stage was in the mind (Internalists) or outside of the mind (Externalists) whereas Davidson felt the stage metaphor itself ought be abandoned. (I tied this back to the old Greek metaphor of the mind being like a sphere where impressions are made on the surface as if in wax)

In “The Myth of the Subjective” we start off with the metaphor of relativism tied to a space. That is position is relative to some fixed places so concepts ought be relative to other concepts or concept-like entities. Yet in conceptual relativism does this metaphor work? Now I admit I find this metaphor less compelling than his previous one. But it does raise obvious issues tied to his kind of Externalism. (He ultimately wants to make things relative to external causes)

I want to just note that how Davidson approaches the question of metaphor appears (at least at this stage) different from their use in a lot of Continental philosophy. There metaphor seems used simply because what we are talking about exceeds our conception. It is a strategy to deal with excess rhetorically. Yet where there are parallels is the idea that there are “founding” metaphors that philosophy keeps using. By noticing these metaphors we can make fruitful progress in problems either by tracing through the metaphor or arguing for its abandonment.

Davidson does, of course, adopt a more analytic rhetorical style. (And as much as a I like a lot of Continental philosophy I have to admit I prefer the analytic style of explaining and arguing)

The problem with an appeal to metaphor is that not everyone will agree that this foundational metaphor really is foundational. Typically people appealing to such metaphors see them as simply obvious. While a few examples are given you don’t usually see a lot of argument for the structure itself. (In either tradition) It’s like phenomenology in that sense. You conduct the analysis yourself and either agree with the philosopher or disagree. However sometimes one wishes more hints along the way were given…

Getting back to Davidson’s essay. The basic attack in the early part is over the notion of a conceptual scheme. As Davidson notes a common way to deal with the idea of a foundational scheme that allows a relativism is to say that some concepts are themselves foundational. This might be via Kantian intuitions, empirical “sense data”, and so on through the common arsenal in philosophical history. Davidson turns to Quine’s discussion of evidence to note that really what is being sought isn’t the quest for theory free concepts. (Which is how the problem is sometimes cast) but rather just to find evidence which doesn’t depend upon what it is evidence for. That is to avoid a scheme which is teleologically tied to content.

That’s a big issue I’ll return to via a more Peircean critique. But it is a big problem. Often when we discuss evidence the evidence is contaminated by being tied to what we want to argue for. In effect we invert the argument to develop our premises and then move from premise to conclusion without acknowledging that earlier move. Many appeals to evidence have a degree of circularity to them that we can miss. (Of course some would say this is the hermeneutic circle and we shouldn’t worry about this too much so long as we make the circle large enough)

Anyway, Davidson notes that this evidence - for duality or scheme - content duality really end up resting on an objective - subjective duality. That is the questions are all arising out of a foundational metaphor.

This is, I think, quite correct. There is a very natural tendency towards this metaphor as a way of thinking. I think Davidson ends up making a move akin to some who went before such as Peirce.

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