Abstract
In “Knowing One’s Own Mind” (1987a) Donald Davidson maintains that there is no reason to suppose that mental states like belief and knowing the meaning of a word, ordinarily construed, do not satisfy two controversial conditions:
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(I)
They are ‘inner’ in the sense that they do not presuppose the existence of any individual other than the subject to whom the state is ascribed; and
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(II)
They are the very states which we normally identify and individuate as we do beliefs and other propositional attitudes (1987a: 444).
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Notes
Putnam H. “The Meaning of `Meaning’ ”, in K. Gunderson (ed.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 7, 131–193, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1975. Reprinted in: H. Putnam Mind, Language and Reality, Philosophical Papers vol. 2, 215–271, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1975.
Burge, T. “Individualism and the Mental”, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 4, 73–121, 1979; “Other Bodies”, in A. Woodfield (ed.), Thought and Object, pp. 97–120 Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982a; “Two Thought Experiments Reviewed”, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 23, 284–293, 1982b; “Individualism and Psychology”, Philosophical Review 95, 3–46, 1986a; “Cartesian Error and the Objectivity of Perception”, in P. Pettit and J. McDowell (eds.), Subject, Thought and Context, pp. 117–136, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986b; “Intellectual Norms and the Foundations of Mind”, Journal of Philosophy 83, 697–720, 1986c; “Individualism and Self-Knowledge”, Journal of Philosophy 85, 649–665, 1988; “Wherein is Language Social?”, in: A. George (ed.), Reflections on Chomsky, pp. 175–191, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1989a; “Individuation and Causation in Psychology”, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 70, 303–322, 1989b.
Fodor, J. “Cognitive Science and the Twin Earth Problem”, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic 23, 98–118, 1982; Psychosemantics, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1987; Stich, S. From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science, MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1983.
Davidson, D. “Mental Events”, 1970a; “Events as Particulars”, 1970b; “The Material Mind”, 1973a; “Psychology as Philosophy”, 1973b; all reprinted in Essays on Actions and Events, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1980; “Problems in the Explanation of Action”, in P. Pettit, R. Sylvan and J. Norman (eds.), Metaphysics and Morality, Blackwell, Oxford, 1987b; “Thinking Causes”, Report No. 67/1991, Research Group on Mind and Brain, Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), Bielefeld University, 1990e.
Davidson “Knowing One’s Own Mind”, in: Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association,pp. 441–458, 1987a; “The Myth of the Subjective”, in M. Benedikt and R. Burger (eds.), Bewußtsein, Sprache and die Kunst,Edition S, Verlag der Österreichischen Staatsdrückerei, 1988; reprinted in M. Krausz (ed.), Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation,pp. 159–172, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 1989; “What is Present to the Mind?”, in Grazer Philosophische Studien 36, 3–18, 1989a; “The Conditions of Thought”, in Grazer Philosophische Studien 36, 193–200, 1989b; “Representation and Interpretation”, in W.H. Newton-Smith and K.V. Wilkes (eds.), Modelling the Mind,pp. 13–26, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1990a; “Meaning, Truth and Evidence”, in R. Barrett and R. Gibson (eds.), Perspectives on Quine,pp. 68–79, Blackwell, Oxford, 1990b; “Epistemology Externalized”, in Dialectica 45, 191–202, 1990c; “Turing’s Test”, in Modelling the Mind,pp. 1–11, 1990d; “Three Varieties of Knowledge”, in A.P. Griffith (ed.), A.J. Ayer: Memorial Essays,pp. 153–166, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991.
Fodor’s methodological solipsism (1980) or individualism (1987) and Stich’s individualistic syntactic theory of the mind (1983) are among the most prominent forms of internalism. Internalism is often characterized as the negation of externalism or vice versa. This characterization is problematic, because there are different forms of externalism and internalism and they are motivated by different arguments. For example, some externalist arguments focus on the contribution of the physical environment to an individual’s thoughts, e.g., by considering the consequences of causal theories of reference (Putnam, 1975) or by considering the contribution of particular objects to an individual’s (singular) thoughts (Evans, G. The Varieties of Reference Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1982; or McDowell, J. “De Re Senses”, Philosophical Quarterly 63, 281–294, 1984; “Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space”, in J. McDowell and P. Pettit (eds.), Subject, Thought and Context,Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1986; or by considering the causal relations in perceptual experience (Burge, 1986a). These arguments support varieties of non-social externalism and usually concern de re attitudes or attributions. Other externalist arguments emphasize the contribution of the social and linguistic community to an individual’s de dicto thoughts (Burge, 1979) and still other arguments base externalism on the history of causal relations between speakers, other speakers and objects and events (Davidson, cf. note 5). These arguments support forms of social externalism.
This assumption is crucial for Putnam’s argument against the thesis that being in a psychological state determines the meaning and consequently the reference of a word (1975: 222). For Putnam’s Twin Earth thought experiment only establishes its conclusion, i.e., that the meanings of natural kind terms are not determined by the psychological state of the speaker, if I and my Doppelgänger on Twin Earth are in the same narrow psychological states, i.e., mental or psychological state types, which are not affected by whether the nature of `water’ is H2O or XYZ.
Davidson was the first to apply the concept of supervenience to the mind—body problem (1970a). There are different, non-equivalent formulations of the supervenience relation (cf. Kim, J. “Concepts of Supervenience”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 45, 153–176, 1984; “Supervenience as a Philosophical Concept”, Metaphilosophy 21, 1–27, 1990). Accounts of the supervenience relation can be classified as narrow or individualistic (Fodor, J. “Individualism and Supervenience”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society supp. vol. LX, 235–262, 1986) or global (Hellman G. and Thompson, F. “Physicalism, Ontology, Determination and Reduction”, Journal of Philosophy 72, 551–564, 1982; Haugueland, J. “Weak Supervenience”, American Philosophical Quarterly 19, 93–103, 1982 ).
Autonomous Psychology and the Belief—Desire Thesis“, The Monist 61, 573–591, 1978; From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science,pp. 160ff. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 1983.
Russell at one time analysed belief as a binary relation between a subject and a proposition, which can be expressed by means of a sentence, and then later as a multiple relation between a subject and a denoting complex, a structured content. The proposition or complex, which is the object of the attitude, constitutes the content of the mental state in question.
Frege, G. “Über Sinn and Bedeutung”, in Frege Funktion, Begriff Bedeutung, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen, 1975; Quine, W. V. “Quantifiers and Propositional Attitudes”, in Quine The Ways of Paradox and other Essays Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1966; Kaplan, D. “Quantifying In”, in D. Davidson and J. Hintikka (eds.), Words and Objections, Reidel, Dordrecht, 1969.
Burge holds that de dicto beliefs are those which are ascribable using terms which occur in oblique position (1979, 1982a, 1982b), whereas de re beliefs are those which involve placing “the believer in an appropriate non-conceptual, contextual relation to the objects the belief is about” (“Belief De Re”, Journal of Philosophy 74, 338–62, 1977). The de re/de dicto distinction is usually made with reference to logical features, e.g., whether operations like existential generalization, exportation or the substitution of co-referential terms salve veritate hold. It can be interpreted either ontologically as a distinction between kinds of beliefs or attributively as a distinction between kinds of belief attributions. On the former, ontological view, a belief is intrinsically either de re or de dicto as a consequence of its structure. On the latter view, beliefs are intrinsically neither. Rather, it is the ascriptions or reports used to characterize beliefs which are classifiable as de re or de dicto
In characterizing states of mind like beliefs, Davidson writes, “We say things like ”Paul believes the Koh-i-noor diamond is one of the crown jewels.“ The words ”believes that the Koh-i-noor diamond is one of the crown jewels“ characterize Paul’s state of mind. The relational word is ”believes“, and what follows names the object — not of thought… — but the object which in some regular way indicates Paul’s state of mind”, e.g., a demonstratively indicated utterance (1989a: 14, cf. “On Saying That” (1968–1969) “Radical Interpretation” (1973) “Belief and the Basis of Meaning” (1974) “Thought and Talk”, (1975) in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984). Davidson elaborates, “Aside from complications due to indexical elements, we identify a belief by uttering a sentence that has the same truth conditions as the belief it is used to identify. Nor is any of this surprising since we often express our beliefs by uttering sentences with the truth conditions of the belief we are expressing ” (1989a: 15) In interpreting the utterances of a speaker, i.e., in assigning propositional content to them, an interpreter assigns a sentence of his own to each of the sentences of the speaker. Davidson writes, “To the extent that he gets things right, the interpreter’s sentences provide the truth conditions of the speaker’s sentences, and hence supply the basis for an interpretation of the speaker’s utterances ( 1991: 157 ).
A history of causal interactions with objects and events is necessary in order to have thoughts, e.g., about stars or fires (1990a: 14–15; 1990d: 9–10).
Davidson advances a distal theory of meaning and evidence. It contrasts with a proximal, empiricist theory like W. V. Quine’s, which accords the senses and their deliverances a central theoretical importance in accounting for belief, meaning and knowledge (1990b). Davidson claims that the exact details of the mechanism which constitute the causal chains from speaker to speaker and spoken-of object to speaker and language learner do not matter to meaning and reference (1988: 164). He writes, “The causal connections between thought and objects and events in the world could have been established in entirely different ways without this making any difference to the contexts or veridicality of belief” (1988: 165). It is the shared causes which are salient for speaker and interpreter, learner and teacher that matter on the distal theory (1990b, 1990c, 1991).
Davidson “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge”, in E. Lepore (ed.), Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of,Donald Davidson,Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1986.
Davidson claims, “It is here that the ties between language and the world are established and that central constraints on meaning are fixed; and given the close connections between thought and language, analogous remarks go for the contents of the attitudes (1990c: 198).
The history of causal relations is only `partly constitutive’ due to the holistic nature of the mental, e.g., the fact that the identity of a belief or thought also depends on relations of logical entailment and evidential support with respect to other beliefs and thoughts (1991, 1989a). Many beliefs are given their content not directly, but by their relations to further beliefs (1991: 160; 1990a: 21–22). As Davidson notes, “… because beliefs (and other attitudes) are largely identified by their logical and other relations to each other; change the relations, and you change the identity of the thought” (1990a: 24).
As Davidson points out, one can describe triangulation without using the notion of cause at all. Person A correlates the things that person B does with things in the world with what he, A, does with things in the world and vice versa; how the two interact is central for triangulation (cf. 1991 ).
The evidence for interpretation lies in assent to sentences as caused by events in the world and is holistically constrained by charity, coherence and consistency (1973, 1974, 1980 “Toward a Unified Theory of Meaning and Action”, Grazer Philosophische Studien, 11, 1–12, 1990b). As principles of charity, the process of interpretation invokes the `Principle of Coherence’, which prompts the interpreter to discover a degree of logical consistency in the thought of the speaker, and the `Principle of Correspondence’, which prompts the interpreter to take the speaker to be responding to the same features of the world that he (the interpreter) would be responding to under similar circumstances. According to Davidson, the former endows the speaker “with a modicum of logical truth”, while the latter endows him with a degree of true belief about the world ( 1991: 158 ).
Davidson writes, “The criterion on the basis of which a creature can be said to be treating stimuli as similar, as belonging to a class, is the similarity of the creature’s response to those stimuli; but what is the criterion of the similarity of responses? This criterion cannot be derived from the creature’s responses; it can only come from the responses of an observer to the responses of the creature. And it is only when an observer consciously correlates the responses of another creature with objects and events in the observer’s world that there is any basis for saying the creature is responding to those objects and events (rather than any other source of the creature’s stimuli)… If we discover kinds of objects and events in the world that we can correlate with the utterances of a speaker, we are on the way to interpreting the simplest linguistic behaviour… Without this sharing of reactions to common stimuli, thought and speech would have no particular content — that is, no content at all” (1991: 159).
Davidson writes, “The reason mental concepts cannot be reduced to physical concepts is the normative character of mental concepts. Beliefs, desires, intentions and intentional actions must… be identified by their semantic contents in reason explanations. The semantic contents of attitudes and beliefs determine their relations to one another and to the world in ways that meet at least rough standards of consistency and correctness. Unless such standards are met to an adequate degree, nothing can count as being a belief, a pro-attitude, or an intention. But these standards are norms — our norms — there being no others” (1987b: 46).
Davidson claims that his version of the token identity theory follows from three premises: (1) the Principle of Causal Interaction: mental events are causally related to physical events, i.e., mental and physical events interact causally, (2) the Principle of the Nomological Character of Causality: singular causal relations are backed by strict deterministic laws, i.e., where there is a true singular causal statement, there is some strict law which it instantiates, and (3) the Anomalism of the Mental: there are no strict psycho-physical laws (1970a, 1990e). Davidson argues from assumptions (1) and (2) to the conclusion that mental events are identical with physical events, and then argues for (3) in order to block the reduction of the mental to the physical. If Davidson’s argument establishes that there are no psycho-physical laws, i.e., there are no laws which relate mental and physical events causally, then his token identity of the mental and the physical follows. Davidson claims that there can be no strict psycho-physical laws due to the normative and holistic constraints which are constitutive of the mental (1970a: 224, 1973b: 223, 1985b “Replies to Essays” in: B. Vermazen and M. Hintikka (eds.), Essays on Davidson: Actions and Events, p. 245, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1985 ).
The type-identity theory asserts that mental types, concepts or kinds are strictly identical to physical types, concepts or kinds and claims generally that mental types, e.g. psychological predicates, can be reduced via laws or definitions to physical types, e.g., to the predicates of physics. The mental can thus be reduced to the physical and eliminated.
Originally Davidson wrote, “Such supervenience might be taken to mean that there cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respect, or that an object cannot alter in some mental respect without altering in some physical respect” (1970a: 214). In (1990e: 16, note 5) Davidson comments that he intended his original formulation of the relation to be equivalent to the one given in the text; this formulation corresponds to the one given in (1985b: 242): “a predicate p is supervenient on a set of predicates S if for every pair of objects such that p is true of one and not of the other there is a predicate of S that is true of one and not of the other”. For debates on supervenience, cf. Kim, J. op. cit, and “The Myth of Non-reductive Materialism”, in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, LXIII, 31–47, 1989.
The doctrine of the `anomalousness of the mental’ denies that mental states or events are subject to strict, scientific laws the way that physical states or events are. It involves two claims, that there are no strict psycho-physical laws and that there are no psychological laws.
Davidson “Causal Relations”, 1967; “The Individuation of Events”, 1969; “Mental Events”, 1970b; all reprinted in Davidson, 1980.
On Davidson’s view of events and causality, “it makes no more sense to say event c caused event e as instantiating law I than it makes to say a weighs less than b as belonging to sort s. If causality is a relation between events, it holds between them no matter how they are described. So there can be descriptions of two events (physical descriptions) which allow us to deduce from a law that if the first event occurred the second would occur, and other descriptions (mental descriptions) of the same event which invite no such inference” ( 1990e: 4 ).
Davidson does not distinguish between `events’, in the sense in which the occurrence of an event entails a change, and `states’, which do not entail a change. Thus he uses the terms `event’ and `state’ interchangeably. Davidson’s category of events includes, for example, states and dispositions (cf. 1970a: 210).
Mental verbs are verbs that express propositional attitudes, i.e., of the form `s 4-s that p’ Such verbs are usually completed by embedded sentences, in which the regular rules of substitution appear to break down, e.g., substitution of co-referential terms salve veritate,existential generalization and exportation (1970a: 210–211).
c) “Replies to Quine on Events”, in E. Lepore and B. McLaughlin (eds.), Actions and Events, Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson,p. 175, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1985).
In a suggestive passage Davidson writes, “If we consider an event that is a ”full, sufficient“ cause of another event, it must, as Mill pointed out long ago, include everything in the universe preceding the effect that has a causal bearing on it,… (1990e: 14).
Davidson remarks, “An event, mental or physical, by any other name smells just as strong” and continues, “Suppose Magellan notices that there are rocks ahead, an event that, through the intervening events of his uttering orders to the helmsman, etc., causes the ship to alter course. Magellan’s noticing is a mental event, and it is causally efficacious. The event is also a physical event, a change in Magellan’s body, and describable in the vocabulary of physics” ( 1990e: 10 ).
Davidson discusses his views on the interdependence of language and thought in “Thought and Talk” (1975), in Davidson Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation,Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984, and in “Rational Animals” in Dialectica 36, 318–27, 1982.
Although `physicalism’ is often used interchangeably with `materialism’, the two positions differ with regard to ontological commitment. Physicalism claims that everything that exists is composed of or ultimately reducible to the states, objects and events of physics; non-material states, objects and events, e.g., electromagnetic energy, may play a role in a physicalist ontology of the world. Whereas, materialism claims that everything that exists is material
Davidson discusses specific reasons for introducing events into our ontology in: “The Logical Form of Action Sentences” (1967); in 1980, 105–148; and in “Reply to Quine on Events”, 173, 1985c.
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Röska-Hardy, L. (1994). Internalism, Externalism, and Davidson’s Conception of the Mental. In: Preyer, G., Siebelt, F., Ulfig, A. (eds) Language, Mind and Epistemology. Synthese Library, vol 241. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2041-0_12
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