Davidson: What Is Present to the Mind

Posted on September 17, 2008
Filed Under Davidson, Philosophy | 1 Comment

I really am getting into Davidson as I read his latter works. It certainly at minimum gives a more nuanced view of his earlier works I was already familiar with. This paper continues the same topic as the prior one with a lot of overlap. The debate is over what identifies a thought with what constitutes an essential part of the psychology of thought. Davidson thinks a lot of philosophy equates the two while he thinks they are irreconcilable.

The quest is typically for some foundational object which is inerrantly known and constitutes a thought. (Say, in classic empiricism, the notion of “sense data”) Davidson in passing says that he thinks we think there are such objects since we talk as if there were such objects. How much philosophical error came about by taking too seriously what was an artifact of language? I’m not sure that’s the error in this case of genealogy. But it’s possible.

Davidson’s solution is relations. The subjective state of a thinker is specified by relating them to an object but the object need not be known by the thinker or otherwise be present to the mind. The objects are, in a real sense, absent.

One interesting implication of this (from Quine) is that you can have propositional attitudes without knowing propositions or language. Thus cats and dogs can have propositional attitudes. Some see this as a weakness but it seems fairly obvious to me. In other words belief sentences don’t relate believers to sentences (or other more ghostly senses of propositions) but rather believers to objects. We are back to Peirce’s concept of the sign as relating an object to an interpretant. (Although Davidson isn’t being that broad)

The success of this approach is to explain how thought is tied to causes (such as Putnam’s Twin Earth experiment does) It has the implication that while mental states specify physical states the physical states aren’t only brain states. (Since the objects are often outside the brain) Finally what individuates mental states, according to Davidson, is an utterance.

One has to be careful here since some will say that an utterance leads to a fixed proposition and that we have a difference without a difference relative to “ghostly propositions before the mind.” Davidson doesn’t think utterances (or sentences) have determinate meanings. That is they are general in a certain way. More importantly they can be translated (say from French to English). They have evidentiary support and entailment and so forth. What Davidson is doing is tying mental state differentiation to interpretation.

The implication (and this parallels Peirce as well) is that we know what we think by interpretation. By weighing evidence, forming hypothesis, making tests and so forth. There is no special inner knowledge.

(The last post was on The Myth of the Subjective)

Related posts:

  1. Davidson: Knowing Ones Own Mind 2
  2. Davidson and Mental Objects
  3. Davidson: The Myth of the Subjective 2
  4. Davidson and Derrida
  5. Davidson: Knowing Ones Own Mind
  6. Davidson: First Person Authority

Comments

One Response to “Davidson: What Is Present to the Mind”

I have a question with Davidson’s thoughts as you have presented them. E.g.

”Finally what individuates mental states, according to Davidson, is an utterance.”

Are you saying that mental states are not individual states but are created individual states through utterance? It seems to me that an individuated mental state is required to initiate the neural networks that govern the muscle movements required in order to have an utterace.

Rich

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