D. Davidson

L’idea che vi sia una netta dicotomia tra fatti e valori è uno dei dogmi dell’empirismo. Secondo questa concezione, i giudizi fattuali, in quanto verificabili o falsificabili empiricamente, riguardano le aree di razionalità «pura» e omogenea e sono ancorati naturalisticamente al mondo. Gli enunciati di valore, invece, sarebbero da relegare nella sfera di ciò che è semplicemente «soggettivo», emotivo, irrazionale. Questo assunto, che ha dominato per molto tempo le scienze e la filosofia, è stato messo in dubbio dai pragmatisti e da alcuni dei più influenti pensatori contemporanei, che, intervenendo al dibattito sull’oggettività dell’etica, hanno mostrato come la presunta eterogeneità tra giudizi descrittivi e giudizi valutativi sia ormai insostenibile. Sulla scia della prospettiva inaugurata da questi pensatori, gli autori di questo libro mostrano come la dicotomia fatto/valore abbia corrotto il nostro pensiero, impedendoci di rivolgere l’attenzione alle intersezioni, le sinergie e le relazioni che esistono tra processi cognitivi e coefficienti valutativi, tra scienza e etica. Con saggi di S. Clough, D. Copp, D. Davidson, G. Marchetti, H. Putnam, R. A. Putnam B. Stroud, K. A. Taylor, V. Walsh

In the United States sexual harassment is widely perceived by managers of large corporations as an issue of considerable importance. In the European Community nations, however, with their wide diversity of history and culture, there is no similar concurrence among corporate managers about the issue. Indeed, there is little acknowledgement that it is a significant issue at all. Paradoxically, as explained below, sexual harassment has become a topic of some concem and interest in the European Parliament, the European Council of Communities, and the European Commission.This raises interesting and difficult questions for managers of U.S. multinationals operating throughout Europe. What responsibility does a multinational corporation have to put in place specific anti-discrimination policies prohibiting sexual harassment when there is no great clamor for them firom employees or their advocates, yet research evidence shows that such harassment is common? Should the policies and practices of the home country be "exported" to a company's overseas operations, or should the company elect to operate within the accepted cultural patterns of the host country?

There is a contrast between the difficulties that stand in the way of explaining in detail how we manage to find out what is in other people's minds and the relative ease with which we do it in practice. The first part of the article explores the obstacles that thwart theory, the second part describes features of our minds that work in our favor when it comes to practice. At the end it is suggested that the project of fully naturalizing our understanding of other minds — a project philosophers are bound to find enticing — is doomed. We understand others, but we cannot reduce this understanding to a branch of the natural sciences.

In this paper we bring a psychiatrist’s expertise – specifically using the concept of complementarity – to bear on the many seemingly irreconcilable contentious issues in the Business and Society field. Such issues are prevalent at all levels of inquiry and study in the managerial domain: for individual managers, for firms, for entire industries, and even for the capitalistic system itself. They are prevalent also for scholars in the related fields of corporate social responsibility and business ethics. An appreciation for complementarity in the study of managerial decision-making -- and here we use the word to mean the existence of two (or more) ways of perceiving a particular set of circumstances, both of which are valid, both of which are legitimate – leads to a richer and more complete under-standing of the problems facing managers and scholars. It results in less confrontation and better decision-making.

This volume collects Davidson's seminal contributions to the philosophy of language. Its key insight is that the concept of truth can shed light on various issues connected to meaning: Davidson, who assumes a partial and primitive understanding of the truth predicate, reverses Tarski who had succeeded in elucidating the concept of truth by taking the notion of ‘translation’ (preservation of meaning) for granted. In the first of five subsections into which the papers are thematically organized, Davidson develops the systematic constraints a theory of meaning has to meet and shows how an approach to semantics based on the concept of truth meets these demands better than any rival approach. Sect. 2 explores whether one can give semantic analyses of quotation, intensional contexts, and force within the extensional limitations of the truth‐theoretic framework. Viewing the theories of meaning developed in the first section as empirical, Sect. 3 inquires into their testability: can we verify these theories without presupposing concepts too closely aligned to that of meaning, interpretation, and synonymy? Davidson develops constitutive constraints on applying truth theories to interpret the speech behaviour of others: we have to view utterances for the most part as assertions of the speaker's beliefs and those beliefs as largely true and consistent (he terms this the ‘Principle of Charity’). Sect. 4 combines these interpretative constraints with the semantic concept of truth developed in Sect. 1 to tackle metaphysical issues. Davidson claims that truth is not relative to conceptual schemes but only to languages that can be shown to be largely correct about the world; consequently, by studying those languages via the semantic concept of truth we can derive ontological conclusions. Sect. 5 explores aspects of linguistic usage that form a particular threat to theories of meaning (such as Davidson's) that focus on the literal meaning of sentences: for truth theory to be adequate as a general theory of language, it must give valid accounts of sentence mood, illocutionary force, and metaphorical meaning.