Olivia Sultanescu

Wilfrid Sellars’ image of the space of reasons provides a valuable way of envisioning agency, and particularly, of envisioning the special way that agency can be interpreted and explained. This paper seeks to determine what sort of reason constitutes the space of reasons, that is, what sort of reason makes this special form of interpretation and explanation possible. Because the space of reasons enables us to explain agents’ errors, we would seem to need reasons that obtain even when agents are mistaken about their normative situations. This points in the direction of reasons that are subjective, in the sense that they arise within agents’ minds. But by drawing on Donald Davidson’s principle of charity, which governs the interpretation and explanation of agency, we can show that the space of reasons is constituted by mind-independent normative reasons. Moreover, by drawing on Davidson’s externalism, we can show that normative reasons are real and that they command causal power.

The principle of charity was first introduced by Donald Davidson as an essential ingredient of radical interpretation, that is, as a principle that needs to be followed in order to interpret from scratch the speech and thoughts of alien speakers and thinkers. Did Davidson intend it also to be an essential ingredient of meaning itself, that is, a principle whose demands must be satisfied by speakers and thinkers? And did he intend it to apply to evaluative contents as well as to non-evaluative ones? This paper defends affirmative answers to these questions, first by showing how Davidson’s reflections on triangulation both corroborate his account of interpretation and vindicate its essential premise concerning the publicness of meaning, then by showing how these reflections on triangulation apply equally to questions about the nature of evaluative properties and their role in fixing the contents of evaluative attitudes.