Kathrin Glüer

This introductory chapter outlines the significant contributions of Donald Davidson in contemporary philosophy of mind and language. It provides a framework in understanding Davidson’s basic principles concerning general theory of meaning and content, formal semantics, the theories of truth, the logic of explanation and action, and metaphysics and epistemology. It looks into two questions that form the core of Davidson’s philosophy: (1) What determines meaning? (2) What form does a theory take that describes linguistic competence, and ultimately even the structure and contents of the mind? It describes key points in the Davidsonian structure of philosophy and semantics, emphasizing on the radical interpreter argument as a guide through the Davidsonian system of thought.

This chapter examines Donald Davidson’s take on material and physical issues, particularly substance dualism and eliminative materialism, and analyses them through Davidsonian philosophy. It looks into Davidson’s notion of anomalous monism, which allows the combination of the irreducibility of the mental with a peculiar version of the identity theory of mind and body. It discusses the intricacies and arguments supporting anomalous monism, and answers key critical questions. It highlights Davidson’s interest on the causal character of action explanation and the causal efficacy of the mental in general. It also emphasizes how anomalous monism, through the principle of charity, does not imply with epiphenomenalism as charity underwrites the very irreducibility of the mental, leading to the rejection of epiphenomenalism.

This chapter presents the basics of Donald Davidson’s philosophy of language. It explains the essential principles of truth-conditional semantics, and briefly looks into Alfred Tarski’s project of defining truth for formal languages through T-theories. It considers Davidson’s adoption and use of these theories as formal semantic theories for natural languages and enumerates some of the issues raised in using them. It then focuses on the radical interpretation argument by citing William Van Orman Quine’s _Word and Object_; uses the thought experiment of the linguist as an example of finding the correct T-theory based on the data collected; and discusses the indeterminacy of translation that emerges. It also investigates Davidson’s own approach of radical interpretation with his notion of anti-conventionalism.

This chapter explores some of the metaphysical and epistemological concerns Donald Davidson answers through his core ideas of philosophy concerning mind and world. It describes Davidson’s attack on the notion of radically different conceptual schemes or conceptual relativism. It looks into Davidson’s position against the matter where he argues that there cannot be languages encoding radically different conceptualizations of the world; rather, all rational creatures inhabit a single, shared world, and that there are no epistemic intermediaries that provide evidence or reasons for a person’s belief about the external world. It examines Davidson’s idea that empirical content requires situations of triangulation between two creatures and an object in the world.

This chapter outlines the notion of the principle of charity proposed by Donald Davidson, which considers the rationality and interpretation of a speaker’s statement. It looks into charity’s role as a principle governing not only the pursuit of knowledge about the meaning by the radical interpreter, but the justification of beliefs about meaning in general. It enumerates the aspects of the principle and analyses their role as counsel to the radical interpreter to interpret the alien speaker. It also discusses their limitations of assistance to the interpreter on the basis of observable behavior, and highlights the need to widen the notion of interpretation from the understanding of linguistic utterances to the understanding of whole persons.

This chapter considers Donald Davidson’s theory of action, which determines action as behavior caused by an agent in a particular situation. It emphasizes on the importance of understanding and interpreting the actions of a person as an integral part of the radical interpreter’s objective. It looks into Davidson’s defense of Aristotle’s position that rationalization is a species of causal explanation, and uses Aristotle’s practical syllogism which explains an action in terms of a belief and a desire. It also considers Davidson’s contribution to developing a model of practical reasoning—a model not only allowing for weighing conflicting reasons and desires, but also for countenancing practical irrationality, such as the weakness of the will.

According to Donald Davidson, “what a fully informed interpreter could learn about what a speaker means is all there is to learn; the same goes for what the speaker believes” (Davidson 1983, 148). This is a foundational claim about the nature of semantic properties: these are evidence-constituted properties. They are determined by the principle of charity on the basis of data about the behaviour of the speaker(s). But what exactly is the role of the interpreter in the Davidsonian account of meaning determination? Is she merely a dramatic device or an essential element of the metaphysical picture? In this paper, I investigate whether we can get help in answering these questions from David Lewis’s (1983) distinction between natural and unnatural properties.

One debate the Pyrrhonian skeptics had with the Epicureans concerned the relation between sense perceptions and beliefs. The debate centers on the Epicurean claim that all perceptions are true, a claim rejected by the Skeptics, who proceed on the assumption that there is no judgment component in perception, and it echoes widely through today’s philosophy of perception. In the past the author has defended a non-standard version of intentionalism, according to which (visual) experiences indeed are beliefs, but have contents—so-called looks-contents—that, if ever, very rarely are false. This chapter works out how this view can nevertheless account for non-veridical experience. It harnesses the rational role of experience to work out a precise way of characterizing non-veridical experience in terms of misleadingness.

According to the phenomenal belief account, perceptual experiences are a kind of belief. They have contents of a certain form: They ascribe ‘phenomenal’ properties to ordinary material objects, properties such as looking red or looking round. Such an account can easily accommodate the epistemic role of experience as a provider of defeasible reasons for (further) empirical belief—a central part of our pre-theoretic conception of experience. This chapter further develops this account by arguing, first, that there is a use of ‘looks’, the so-called phenomenal use, that is best interpreted as capturing part of the propositional content of experience—not as an attitude-operator used for reporting the attitude taken toward that content. And second, it argues that the intuitive inferential integration of experience into our system of beliefs provides one of the strongest motivations for construing experiences as having propositional content in the first place.

Empty names such as ‘Vulcan’ or ‘Sherlock Holmes’ have intrigued philosophers of language at least since Frege. They are clearly problematic for Millian accounts of the semantics of proper names, but also for certain recent versions of descriptivism trying to accommodate Kripkean intuitions regarding proper names. In ‘Proper Names and Relational Modality’ (2006), we suggest an alternative to such semantics: introducing the technique of semantic evaluation switching, we develop a semantics allowing (non-empty) proper names to have descriptive contents while accommodating Kripkean modal intuitions. This chapter extends the switcher semantics to empty names.

When you look at a circular plate at an angle, it looks circular. But there also is a certain sense in which its look can be described as oval. When you move, the plate’s look changes with your perspective on it—nevertheless, it continues to look circular. This chapter investigates whether these “constancy in variation” phenomena can be explained in terms of the representational content of visual experience, and whether constancy in variation provides special, phenomenological, reasons to construe experience as having centered contents. Concentrating on shape, it argues that due to warring phenomenological demands, all views construing constancy in variation as representation of both objective and perspectival properties or features have limited explanatory powers, and that centering does not provide any advantage. By contrast, adopting the non-standard intentionalism called phenomenal intentionalism, we get rather natural explanations of the phenomenology of constancy in variation.

When you look at a circular plate at an angle, it looks circular. But there also is a certain sense in which its look can be described as oval. When you move, the plate’s look changes with your perspective on it—nevertheless, it continues to look circular. This chapter investigates whether these “constancy in variation” phenomena can be explained in terms of the representational content of visual experience, and whether constancy in variation provides special, phenomenological, reasons to construe experience as having centered contents. Concentrating on shape, it argues that due to warring phenomenological demands, all views construing constancy in variation as representation of both objective and perspectival properties or features have limited explanatory powers, and that centering does not provide any advantage. By contrast, adopting the non-standard intentionalism called phenomenal intentionalism, we get rather natural explanations of the phenomenology of constancy in variation.

According to Donald Davidson, linguistic meaning is determined by the principle of charity. Because of Davidson’s semantic behaviourism, charity’s significance is both epistemic and metaphysical: charity not only provides the radical interpreter with a method for constructing a semantic theory on the basis of his data, but it does so because it is the principle metaphysically determining meaning. In this paper, I assume that charity does determine meaning. On this assumption, I investigate both its epistemic and metaphysical status: is charity a priori or a posteriori? And what kind of necessity does it have? According to Davidson himself, charity is an a priori truth and its necessity is conceptual: it is essential to, or constitutive of, our common concepts of meaning and belief. Not only does this generate tension within Davidson’s own, Quine‐inspired epistemology, but there is independent reason to think of charity as an empirical truth. Even so, charity might be essential to belief and meaning in the sense of being an a posteriori necessity. I conclude that our ordinary modal intuitions might well support charity’s psychological‐nomological necessity, but that they do not reach all the way to metaphysical necessity.

At present, there is an almost universal consensus that the linguistic doctrine of logical necessity is grotesque. This paper explores avenues for rehabilitating a limited version of the doctrine, according to which the special status of analytic statements like 'All vixens are female' is to be explained by reference to language. Far from being grotesque, this appeal to language has a respectable philosophical pedigree and chimes with common sense, as Quine came to realize. The problem lies in developing it in a way that avoids the powerful objections facing previous versions of the linguistic doctrine. I argue tentatively that this can be done by reconciling Wittgenstein's claim that such statements have a normative role with Carnap's concession that they are true.

When you look at a circular plate at an angle, it looks circular. But there also is a certain sense in which its look can be described as oval. When you move, the plate’s look changes with your perspective on it—nevertheless, it continues to look circular. This chapter investigates whether these “constancy in variation” phenomena can be explained in terms of the representational content of visual experience, and whether constancy in variation provides special, phenomenological, reasons to construe experience as having centered contents. Concentrating on shape, it argues that due to warring phenomenological demands, all views construing constancy in variation as representation of both objective and perspectival properties or features have limited explanatory powers, and that centering does not provide any advantage. By contrast, adopting the non-standard intentionalism called phenomenal intentionalism, we get rather natural explanations of the phenomenology of constancy in variation.

b> Some theories of linguistic meaning, such as those of Paul Grice and David Lewis, make appeal to higher order thoughts: thoughts about thoughts. Because of this, such theories run the risk of being empirically refuted by the existence of speakers who lack, completely or to a high degree, the capacity of thinking about thoughts. Research on autism during the past 15 years provides strong evidence for the existence of such speakers. Some persons with autism have linguistic abilities that qualify them as speakers, but manifest a severely impaired capacity to understand what it is to have beliefs.

In a series of very influential papers, Dan Kahan argues for “the identity protective cognition thesis”: the claim that politically motivated reasoning is a major factor explaining current levels of polarization over matters of fact, especially in the US. An important part of his case consists of experimental data supporting the claim that ideological polarization is more extreme amongst more numerate individuals. In this paper, we take a close look at how precisely this “numeracy effect” is supposed to come about. Working with Kahan’s own notion of motivated reasoning, we reconstruct the mechanism that according to him produces the effect. Surprisingly, it turns out to involve plenty of motivation to reason, but no motivated reasoning. This undermines the support he takes the numeracy effect to provide for the identity protective cognition hypothesis.

This book offers a truly interdisciplinary exploration of our patterns of engagement with politics, news, and information in current high-choice information environments. Putting forth the notion that high-choice information environments may contribute to increasing misperceptions and knowledge resistance rather than greater public knowledge, the book offers insights into the processes that influence the supply of misinformation and factors influencing how and why people expose themselves to and process information that may support or contradict their beliefs and attitudes. A team of authors from across a range of disciplines address the phenomena of knowledge resistance and its causes and consequences at the macro- as well as the micro-level. The chapters take a philosophical look at the notion of knowledge resistance, before moving on to discuss issues such as misinformation and fake news, psychological mechanisms such as motivated reasoning in processes of selective exposure and attention, how people respond to evidence and fact-checking, the role of political partisanship, political polarization over factual beliefs, and how knowledge resistance might be counteracted. This book will have a broad appeal to scholars and students interested in knowledge resistance, primarily within philosophy, psychology, media and communication, and political science, as well as journalists and policymakers. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Normativism in the theory of meaning and content is the view that linguistic meaning and/or intentional content are essentially normative. As both normativity and its essentiality to meaning/content can be interpreted in a number of different ways, there is now a whole family of views laying claim to the slogan “meaning/content is normative”. In this essay, we discuss a number of central normativist theses, and we begin by identifying different versions of meaning normativism, presenting the arguments that have been put forth for and against them.

W. V. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, first published in 1951, is one of the most influential articles in the history of analytic philosophy. It does not just question central semantic and epistemological views of logical positivism and early analytic philosophy, it also marks a momentous challenge to the ideas that conceptual analysis is a main task of philosophy and that philosophy is an a priori discipline which differs in principle from the empirical sciences. These ideas dominated early analytic philosophy, but similar views are to be found in the Kantian tradition, in phenomenology and in philosophical hermeneutics. In questioning this consensus from the perspective of a radical empiricism, Quine’s article has had a sustained and lasting impact across all these philosophical divisions. Quine himself moved from the abandonment of the analytic/synthetic distinction to a thoroughgoing naturalism, and many analytic philosophers have followed his lead. The current collection differs from other anthologies devoted to Quine in two respects. On the one hand, it focuses on his attack on analyticity, apriority and necessity; on the other, it considers implications of that attack that far transcend the limits of Quine scholarship, and lie at the heart of the current self-understanding of philosophy. The contributors include both opponents and proponents of the dichotomies attacked by Quine. Furthermore, they include both eminent figures such as Boghossian, Burge, and Davidson, and up and coming younger philosophers.

In a recent article in this journal, Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen criticizes an argument we have called the “no-guidance argument”. He claims that our argument fails because it “presupposes a much too narrow understanding of what it takes for a norm to influence behaviour” and “betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the point of the truth norm”. If these claims could be substantiated, the no-guidance argument would lose all interest. But Steglich-Petersen's attempt at substantiating them fails. The suggested sense in which the truth norm can guide behaviour turns out to be too wide to be recognizable as an intuitive notion of norm guidance. Moreover, it remains unclear how the truth norm could possibly provide an answer to the question whether it – rather than some other, possible norm for belief – is valid

We explore the possibility of characterizing belief wholly in terms of its first-order functional role, its input (evidence) and output (further beliefs and actions), by addressing some common challenges to the view. One challenge concerns the fact that not all belief is evidence-sensitive. In response to this, normativists and teleo-functionalists have concluded that something over and above functional role is needed, a norm or a telos. We argue that both allow for implausibly much divergence between belief and evidence. Others have suggested that belief should be saved as the evidence-sensitive attitude, by making it share its motivational role with an unrecognized state: alief. We argue that the appeal to alief faces a dilemma: Either explanation of intentional action by means of alief is a species of intentional explanation, in which case it becomes hard to distinguish alief from (irrational) belief, or alief is sufficiently different from belief, but then neither the explanation nor the explanandum (action) are recognizably intentional any longer. We conclude that the most promising way forward is an account of belief that makes use of the full functional role of belief, including its role in theoretical reasoning.