A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs

Posted on March 30, 2009
Filed Under Davidson | 1 Comment

OK, I love this paper of Davidson. I really liked Davidson before but this one completely made me rethink how I view him. Which is always nice. In a sense this brings Davidson a little closer to how I think. That’s sometimes a danger since I prefer something that challenges how I think. But in this case it’s good since it challenged how I was reading Davidson.

As some of you recall I’ve been (very slowly) working through the latter Davidson. What I really like about Davidson is frankly his very pragmatic (to me) approach to everything. It’s a very nice approach. However Davidson is always one of those authors where there’s more there than you first appreciate.

Part of the difficulty to me is that he using the language everyone else uses but sometimes means something quite different by it. So you think you’re disagreeing with him because you bring a bunch of assumptions in with regards to what he’s talking about. What I loved about this essay (and the followup “The Social Aspect of Language”) is that he explains two of the terms he so frequently uses.

First off he gets rid of the notion of language.

There is no such a thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed.

One of my (many) errors in reading Davidson was in assuming by language and communication he meant something roughly like Searle. That is there is something we call a “corporate language” which is the normed shared language trhough which we communicate. Our skill is in utilizing these corporate meanings to encode our intentions.

That’s not what Davidson is doing at all. Rather he is talking about interpretation and how we know someone has successfully made a correct interpretation. He talks about theories used for interpretation but he doesn’t mean by this that a particular agent has some theory in order to interpret language. Rather Davidson takes for granted that it’s mostly unconscious and doesn’t think we even need to know how the brain actually interprets language. A theory instead is how a third person can judge the person making an interpretation. Which is not to say Davidson thinks he can offer such a theory except for some very broad constraints.

What makes Davidson different from someone like Searle (or frankly most folks writing in philosophy of language I’ve encountered) is that he doesn’t talk about languages at all. Rather he talks about two classes of theories: a prior theory and a passing theory. A prior theory is simply how an interpreter is prepared in advance to make an interpretation. A passing theory is a more narrow theory created to interpret a given set of sentences at a given time and place.

Where Davidson is so correct is that he recognizes interpretation simply isn’t a matter of “language use.” We make all sorts of contextual judgments such that we can easily interpret sentences with poor grammer, incorrect words, words used ironically or new cointed words. (Davidson’s example is how everyone can understand Jabberwocky) We simply don’t apply a corporate language. There aren’t rules as such. Rather there are interpretive strategies which we then modify. Davidson recognizes that language use is more akin to solving a puzzle than something formal the way most philosophers discuss it. And we needn’t have a shared set of rules. What counts is simply if we can correctly interpret a sentence not whether we have a shared set of rules. Typically we don’t. Of course as a Peircean that’s exactly what I think is correct. I can’t believe I was reading Davidson incorrectly all these years. (I even remember reading this paper years ago but clearly the significance didn’t sink in)

The second big problem I’d had with Davidson was about intents. I kept thinking he had intents as a kind of ideal meaning related to actions the way propositions are related to sentences for many philosophers. This too was a huge error. I kept wanting to make the Derridean move of suggesting intents were more sentence like than proposition like.

However in his followup to “Epitaphs” he says,

I think someone acts intentionally when there is an answer to the question what his reasons in acting were, and one can often tell what an agent’s reasons were by asking whether he would have acted as he did if he had not had those reasons. I don’t think of consciously rehearsed beliefs or deliberately reasoned intentions as the only beliefs and intentions we have. (122)

Wow. Exactly right. It captures what I take to be the great innovation Peirce offered via his pragmatic maxim as well as the rejection of ideal objects. When we talk about intentions we are literally talking about reasons. It seems to me that Davidson rejects ideal intentions much like he rejects Fregean meanings.

Related posts:

  1. Davidson: Private Language
  2. What is a Concept?
  3. Davidson & Rational Animals
  4. Language, Externalism and Meaning
  5. Davidson and Derrida
  6. Davidson on Weakness of Will

Comments

One Response to “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs”

Part of the difficulty to me is that he using the language everyone else uses but sometimes means something quite different by it. So you think you

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