THE NORMS OF THE MENTAL
Pascal Engel
in The philosophy of Donald Davidson, Library of Living
Philosophers, ed. L. Hahn 1999, 447-459
A central tenet of
Davidson’s philosophy is that there is an “ irreducibly normative
character” in the concepts that we use
to describe and explain thought and meaning, in the sense that ascriptions of
intentional contents are governed by a “constitutive ideal of rationality”
which has no “echo” in the realm of natural and physical facts. [1]
This view plays a prominent role in his argument for anomalous monism. It is
also essential to his theory of the interpretation of speech and language.[2]
But what does it mean to say that “norms enter in the study of mental
phenomena”, that there is a “normative element” or that there are
“ normative properties” in mental concepts[3] ?
I would like to examine here what seems to be a striking feature of Davidson’s
account of such norms : that they are, in a certain sense, elusive, and
cannot be completely and precisely
spelled out. I shall try here to say what this normative features
consist in.
That there is a “normative character” to
thought and meaning, or that norms “enter” in our mental concepts is often
misunderstood, and has been for this reason a source of puzzlement : for in
what sense could thoughts and meaning imply any prescriptions about what we
ought to think or do, or about what it is valuable to think or do, as the word
“normative” seems to imply? But the “normativity” of meaning and thought does
not mean that there are norms of mental in the sense in which one can say that
there are rules of etiquette, social norms of even linguistic rules. Davidson
is quite clear on the fact that he rejects accounts of language and
communication which rely upon such notions as those of rule, convention, or
social norms in the sense that speakers would have, to make themselves
understood or to understand others, to grasp such rules or to follow them. So
“norm”, in his sense, is not to be understood as involving the existence particular rules attached either to words or to concepts which would
determine the correct use of these words or concepts. Meaning and thought are
not “normative” if this means that using a word is to follow a certain
prescription or rule.[4] Nor does it imply normativity in the sense
of giving a particular value to
rationality. The rational norms are there, whether we like them or not, and in
this sense they are not good or bad.
The normativity of meaning and thought pertains neither to particular
rules nor to particular values, but to general principles of the interpretation
of speech and thought. These are not, unlike particular rules, a matter of
choice: they are compulsory because they are a priori requirements of the very task of making sense
of others. Among these figure prominently the Principle of Charity - that one could not interpret someone else if
one did not suppose that most of the beliefs that we hold true by our lights
are true for him, and that one could not understand someone’s beliefs and
desires unless we could find in them an overall rational or coherent structure[5]
, and in general the holistic requirements about thought and language.
Davidson sometimes
talks as if these general norms of interpretative charity were codified in the
normative theories that we currently
use: logic, decision theory, or general principles or laws used by such
theories: the law of non contradiction, or the principle of maximizing expected
utility . Sometimes he also alludes to specific epistemic principles, such as
Carnap’s requirement of “total
evidence” for inductive reasoning (“give your credence to the hypothesis
supported by all available evidence”) or the counterpart principle for
practical reasoning (“perform the action judged best on the basis of all
available relevant reasons”).[6]
In such cases, these normative principles are indeed imperatives of a
particular form, or something like rules for guiding beliefs or actions. But it
is quite important here to see how general and unspecific such principles are
and why they have to be so, for a number of critics have complained that they
are too unspecific to serve as actual principles of interpretation: if most of someone’s beliefs are to be
true, it does not tell us, as interpreters, which, and if an agent is to
be by
and large rational does not tell us
how. But this is just as it should be:
“The issue is not
whether we all agree on exactly what the norms of rationality are; the point is
rather that we all have such norms, and that we cannot recognize as thought
phenomena that are too far out of the line. Better say: what is too far out of
line is not thought. It is only when we can see a creature (or ‘object’) as
largely rational by our own lights that we can intelligibly ascribe thought to
it at all, or explain its behaviour by reference to its ends and convictions.
Anyone¼ when he ascribes thoughts to others, necessarily employs his own norms
in making the ascriptions. There is no way he can check whether his norms are
shared by someone else without first assuming that in large part they are; to
the extent that he successfully interprets someone else, he will have
discovered his own norms (nearly enough) in that person.”[7]
In this sense, it wrong
to suppose that the general norms of interpretation can be transcendent norms which have a universal
validity, and which could be applied like models or idealized principles in
science. For to take them as such would be to mistake them for general laws or
regularities descriptive of phenomena. For instance it is often said
that the principles of rational choice making involved in Bayesian decision
theories
are “normative” in the sense that they give us a picture of the
perfectly rational agent, although they are not true of individual agents at
the “descriptive” level, because they are oversimplified. As Davidson points
out, this way of making the distinction between the normative and the
descriptive is largely illusory: “Until a detailed empirical interpretation is given
to a theory, it is impossible to tell whether or not an agent satisfies its
norms; indeed without a clear interpretation, it is hard to say what content
the theory, whether normative or descriptive, has.”[8]
If the rational norms governing our mental concepts had the form of specific, although in some sense idealized,
principles such as, for instance, the Bayesian principle of maximization of
expected utility, failures to apply these principles to human agents would
imply clear failures of rationality on their part. But Davidson is quite clear
that it is not easy to pin down empirically such failures, for rationality in general is a presupposition of any
interpretation of human behaviour, and so cannot be tested at a purely
descriptive level.
The point can be
illustrated though many examples of empirical work on the psychology of
decision, within the framework of research pioneered by Davidson and his
associates at Stanford during the fifties.[9]
Here is one example which, as far as I know, is not used by Davidson, but which
he could have used. Allais’ paradox seems to be a clear case where most agents
violate the Bayesian norm of maximizing expected utilities (or, for that matter
the “sure-thing principle”): where they are presented pairs of choices such that
they should - if they respected the principle - choose choice a over choice b , and
choice c over choice d , they
reverse their preference in the second case (choosing d over c). Discussing this
example, the statistician Leonard Savage does not conclude that agents are irrational. He tries to provide a
point of view from which their mistake is understandable, reformulating the
problem through a lottery with the choice between a corresponding number of
tickets, and looking for a perspective which, in his own terms, “has a claim to
universality”, where in the end the reversal of preferences disappears. This,
comments Savage, is just what happens when someone who buys a car for a large
sum of money is tempted to order it with a radio installed, finding the
difference trifling, but who, when he reflects that if he already had the car,
he would not spend the amount for a radio on it.[10]
Even if the agent violates the Bayesian norm, understanding him involves the
interpreter to find another universal and objective norm to which the agent can
be responsive. Here the interpreter does not presuppose any transcendent norm;
he tries to construct one by agreement with the agent. This emphasis on the
fact that the norms of the mental are primarily those of the interpreter also
explains why Davidson, after having formulated, in his first writings, the
Principle of Charity as a principle of maximization of agreement, has finally
preferred to talk of a maximization of understanding: the point is not to make
those that we interpret as intelligent and as correct in their beliefs as
possible, but to minimize unintelligible error.[11]
This point is clearly emphasized in “A Nice derangement of Epitaphs” about
“passing theories”, the theories that an interpreter formulates at a time for a
given speaker:
“ There are no rules
for arriving at passing theories, no rules in any strict sense, as opposed to
rough maxims and methodological generalities. A passing theory is like a theory
at least in this, that it is derived by wit, luck, and wisdom from a private
vocabulary and grammar, knowledge of the ways people get their points across,
and rules of thumb for figuring out what deviations from the dictionary are
most likely.”[12]
If the norms of
rationality which govern the interpretation of speech and action are so general
and have such a high profile that they cannot consist in particular specific
maxims, rules, or guides for actual interpretation, it seems to follow that the
very notion of rationality cannot be, in McDowell’s phrase, “codified” in any
formulas or set of principles from which one could derive strict prediction
about the behaviour or thought of agents. [13]
If there were such principles of formulas, they could be applied, like strict
laws, to any particular case, and they could tell us what to do or think in a
particular situation. But even the best entrenched logical or decision
theoretic principles do not tell us what we ought to believe or do in a particular
case, or whether it is rational or not to do something in a given situation.[14]
There is always a slack between the formulas and their application, which can
only be remedied by guesswork or by what Aristotle called phronèsis. The case can, once again, be illustrated with a decision
theoretic example. Bayesian Decision theorists claim that coherence in the
probabilistic sense – non violation of
the axioms of the probability calculus - is a necessary condition of
rationality; for otherwise a clever bookmaker could make a “Dutch book” against
one such that the agent would systematically loose money on bets involving his
beliefs. But it does not follow that an individual who is incoherent by this
criterion – whose degree of belief violate the axioms of the probability
calculus – is irrational. All that follows is that it is irrational to accept
bets at odds that reflect one’s degrees of beliefs when these degrees are
incoherent. An agent might have good reasons not to accept such bets, just as
he might have good reasons to accept them, without those reasons being
epistemic ones.[15]
This “uncodifiability
of rationality” can be evaluated also from other angles, which, according to
Davidson, are intrinsically tied to the normative character of our mental
concepts . One is the causal nature of these concepts, which
is “built into the concept of acting for a reason”: a reason is “a rational
cause”, which can be spelled out as “a belief and a desire in the light of
which the action is desirable”.[16] But, as Davidson notoriously pointed out
about examples of “deviant causal chains”, where an agent performs an act in
conformity with his intention, but not in the “right” way, there is no
automatic specification of the conditions in which the beliefs and the desires
are “appropriate” for making the action rational. “What I despair of spelling
out, says Davidson, is the way in which attitudes must cause actions if they
are to rationalize the action.” [17]
And he actually seems to imply that there is no such way. The second angle from
which the uncodifiable nature of the norms of rationality is the holistic character of the rational
patterns which must be presupposed to make an agent intelligible: the
open-ended nature of the intentional contents which must be attributed is the
mark of their rationality, but there is no clear limit to the extent of the
pattern in question. Finally the
normative character of mental concepts is closely tied to the externalist features of mental contents:
because contents cannot be individuated internally, but by reference to a
variety of causal factors which cannot be systematized under laws. As Davidson
says:
“What I think is
certain is that holism, externalism, and the normative feature of the mental
stand or fall together. ¼There
can be not serious science of the mental. I believe the normative, holistic,
and externalist elements in psychological concepts cannot be eliminated without
radically changing the subject.”[18]
The distinctive
character of our mental concepts is not simply that they are subject to norms.
For there are also norms for our physical concepts, such as length or
temperature, which Davidson once called
“constitutive or synthetic a
priori”.[19] In physics
too, there are norms of description and of explanation, for instance simplicity
or explanatory power. What makes the normative element in the mental domain
distinctive is that, unlike what happens in the physical case, where norms are
employed about something which is essentially non minded, in the mental case
“norms are being employed as standards of norms”.[20]
We use norms to interpret patterns which are essentially normative. What does
it mean? Here it seems to me that a comparison can be usefully made between
Davidson’s and Wittgenstein’s views. For Wittgenstein there are rules of
language, which record the use of words by speakers, and hence facts or
regularities about these speakers - for
instance that speakers of English usually mean cats by using the word cat. But
there are no further facts about what
makes the rules correct. There is a
correct application of the rules (Wittgenstein is not a “skeptic” about the
existence of rules), but what makes it correct is not a special kind of fact
(dispositional, psychological, or some platonistic super-fact). Davidson, as I pointed out above, feels no
attraction in talk of rules and of specific norms of language. But his view
about the status of norms of rationality with respect to facts is quite similar
to Wittgenstein’s. For Davidson, there is a correct way (in spite of the
unavoidable amount of indeterminacy) of interpreting a speaker and of making
what he thinks or does intelligible, but there is no fact about what makes this
interpretation correct, for there is no way of codifying the rational patterns
that one has to attribute to a speaker in a particular circumstance.
Wittgenstein and Davidson are, among the philosophers of this century, those
who have most insisted on the existence of a particular kind of norms, distinct
from the usual kinds of norms - practical, epistemic or aesthetic – the interpretative norms. They both hold
that such norms are distinctive, and that they cannot be reduced to facts.
If the foregoing
account of Davidson’s conception of the norms of rationality is correct, we
should not expect any definition, nor
any sort of specification of these norms. This is not, of course to deny that
there are such standards, and that we can formulate them, for instance as
principles of logic and of decision theory. The rules of logic are indeed those
on which a theory of truth in Tarski’s style must rely, and the standards of
Bayesian theory are those on which Davidson’s “unified theory” of meaning and
action rests. But they offer no definition
of rationality in general, just as
a Tarskian theory of truth offers no general definition of the concept of
truth. Just as we can think of truth as Ramsey thought about probability, by
setting up a testable method of measurement of degrees of beliefs, and by
defining the conditions under which a pattern
of preferences can be “rational”, we can think of the norms of
rationality themselves as the undefined structures which a theory of
interpretation must rely upon.[21]
Thus, although we cannot say what the norms are, we can say what they do.
I suscribe to
Davidson’s view about the necessary normative character of mental concepts, and
I agree with him that it is the feature which stands in the way of a complete
science of the mental as well as in the way of attempts to reduce what Sellars
calls the “space of reasons” to the space of natural laws and physical
concepts. But the thesis that these norms cannot be codified nor defined is not
unproblematic. I can see at least three kinds of difficulties (although they
are related). First, if the standards of rationality used by an interpreter to
make ascriptions of mental contents are not transcendent norms fixed in
advance, but his “own norms” which he can only supposed to be shared by others,
don’t we run the risk of a certain amount of subjectivism in the interpretation procedure? Davidson’s account of
interpretation certainly allows, and indeed requires, a large amount of
convergence at the end of the process just as at the beginning, but how is this
convergence acquired? Second, if we suppose that the interpreter is able, even
by his own lights, to discern successfully rational from irrational patterns of
thought or behaviour, where does he get this ability from? This problem is
similar to a problem which has often been raised about the knowledge of meaning
that the Davidsonian interpreter must have in order to frame his ascriptions of
held-true sentences to others. For a central feature of Davidson’s conception of interpretation is
that the interpreters-speakers must know what they mean by their words, without
interpreting themselves, in order to interpreter others and ascribe to them
thoughts and meanings which are true by their own lights. But how do speakers
know what they mean in the first place?[22]
Why do they (rightly) think themselves authoritative about their own norms of
rationality just as they (rightly) think themselves authoritative about the
meanings of their own words? Even if the interpreter’s ability for discerning
rational patterns is not strictly codified, it must come from somewhere, and it
must have a certain shape. It cannot have been acquired by magic.[23]
The third difficulty has to do with the move taken by Davidson from a
formulation of the Principle of Charity as a principle of maximization of truth
and rationality to a formulation in terms of a principle or minimization of
unintelligible error: if the rational and true beliefs and desires ascribed by
an interpreter must also be intelligible
or explainable (in the interpreter’s light) rational and
true beliefs (so that it would be pointless to ascribe a vast majority of
inexplicably correct beliefs), then it seems, if we do not want to say that
there are no constraints at all upon such ascriptions, that there must be more
particular constraints about what kind of contents are ascribable. When
Davidson talks about the holistic character of interpretation, he always seems
to have in mind very general (mostly logical) kinds of links within content,
and does not mention the more particular or more local links that some contents
might have; for instance, when a speaker can be interpreted as having thoughts
about colours, or about shapes of objects, it may be presumed that he has some
views about incompatibilities of colours, or about relationships between
observational concepts of shape and colour. Making an agent intelligible must,
at some point involve seeing the reasons why he holds a certain belief true, or
his justification for holding-true certain sentences. But Davidson’s
methodology of interpretation does not seem to give us more than a pattern of
sentences held-true, without any hint about what might justify a speaker to
hold certain kinds of sentences true. This is in perfect agreement with his
denial that truth could be equated with the grounds, or the warranted
assertability of sentences: what matters are the truth-conditions of sentences,
not their assertion conditions.[24]
Now, even if we grant that point, we might try to find less global constraints
than those that Davidson envisages.
Some writers, such as
McDowell, have be tempted into reading into Davidson’s position “the
irreducible subjectivity of propositional attitudes” and the impossibility of
“a distinction between what makes sense and what could come to make sense to
us”.[25]
But Davidson’s denial that rationality is codifiable need not imply that it is
not objective, and there cannot be a convergence in the norms that speakers use
to interpret each other. Indeed there must, on his view, be such a convergence,
since it there from the start. The way it is further reached is a matter of the
extension of what he calls the basic process of triangulation upon which
objective thought rests[26].
It is enough that the possibility of converge is not ruled out a
priori, and by definition it is not. So it seems to me to be a very
misleading way of interpreting his views to read them in the way McDowell does.
It does not seem to me,
however, that one can answer in the same way the second and the third worry
expressed above. The worry can be expressed again thus: given that the
rationality requirements on interpretation are so general, and the interpreter
has to rely upon his own sense of what is rational, how can he read the
rational patterns in a particular case?
This is tied to the problem of holism. There are two kinds of cases to
distinguish: holistic patterns within a particular attitude, say belief, and holistic
patterns between particular attitudes.[27]
I shall say more about the second than the first. The first kind of patterns
are patterns such as those: in order for one to have beliefs about rain, one
must have beliefs about clouds, about the condensation of drops in water
saturated air, about wetness, etc. If we set aside the problem posed by the
“etc.”, which has been at the center of many discussions about holism[28], the holistic pattern within these beliefs is
due to the way their components are related, and these components are concepts.
Davidson’s account of interpretation, as well as Quine’s, tells us that in
order to find basic rational patterns among beliefs, we shall have to rely on
basic logical concepts, such as those of negation, conjunction, quantifcation
and the like, but it tells us very little about other kinds of patterns within
various types of concepts, for instance observational concepts (“wet”) vs
theoretical concepts (“condensation”), demonstrative concepts (“this rain”) vs
general descriptive concepts (“rain”). It is, however, legitimate to suppose
that when an interpreter ascribes a particular kind of belief, involving a
particular kind of concept, say an observational one, he takes it that there
certain reasons which subjects
typically have for having beliefs of such a kind, and that these reasons enter
into what makes the ascription intelligible to the interpreter. In other words,
what I want to suggest is that an interpreter, if he must use his “own norms”
for ascribing contents, must not simply find a pattern of implications between
sentences held-true, but must have a certain conception of the conditions of
warrant or justification of such sentences, when they contain particular
concepts. In other terms, certain norms must be presupposed about what
justifies a certain kind of content, what justifies its rejection, or what
inferences can be made about it. This line of thought might lead us to try to
give accounts of particular concepts along the line of various forms of what is
called “conceptual role semantics” or theories of “possession conditions” of
concepts.[29] They might
also help us to answer the objection voiced above, that the abilities of
interpreters have to come from somewhere, for if mastery of a concept is a
certain kind of ability or aptitude, the spelling out of the conditions under
which the concepts are possessed should alos tell us what kind of abilities
they presuppose. Such accounts should be described much more precisely, but I
suspect that Davidson would find such them uncongenial for his own views, since
they would have to assume much more individuation of content than he wants to
assume in his theory of interpretation – the only kind of attitude assumed
being that of holding certain sentences true. I think, nevertheless, that an
account of the specific norms involved in the possession an the ascription of
certain concepts can be extracted from his views.
For that we can
consider the other kind of holism mentioned above, between attitudes. Beliefs
cannot be ascribed without ascribing other attitudes, such as desires and
intentions, and intentions themselves cannot be ascribed unless desires and
beliefs also ascribed. So an interpret must not simply have an idea of the
rational pattern within one kind of attitude, but must also have an idea of the
relationships between attitudes themselves. If the preceding line of thought is
correct, he must have some reasons to ascribe contents which are belief-like,
and be able to distinguish them from those which are desire-like, regret-like,
and so on. In his essays on animal thought, Davidson goes further: famously, he
holds that the very having of a belief must presuppose the having of the concept of belief.[30]
If we set aside the problem of animal thought, what does it mean to “have the
concept of belief”? In one sense of that term, it means being able to have beliefs about one’s beliefs, or to have
reflexive beliefs. But in another, and as important sense, it means being able
to identify a particular kind of state as being a belief. Now, the concept of
belief is the concept of a state which is apt
to be true or false, or, to use a familiar phrase, which “aims at truth”.
Nothing, in this sense, can be a belief if it is not supposed to be true.
According to this criterion, beliefs have a different “direction of fit” than
desires: beliefs are states such that they should fit the world, whereas
desires are such that the world should fit them. Now what I want to suggest is
that this internal feature of the concept of belief, the fact that our beliefs
“aim” at truth, is part of the “normative character” of this very concept. That
beliefs are true or false according to whether their contents are true or false
is part of why they are correct or not
. The other part is that beliefs are justified according to whether the reasons for holding them are good or
not. These are, indeed, platitudes, but they are integral to the concept of
belief. The concept of belief is normative because it involves these basic
norms of aiming at the truth and the justification of the contents of the corresponding
state. Now, when Davidson tells us that belief is “by its very nature
veridical” or that “most of the point of the concept of belief is the potential
gaps it introduces between what is held true and what is true”[31],
or that having the concept of belief is to have the contrast between subjective
and objective, or to have the idea of an independent reality which is
independent of my beliefs[32],
he seems to me to point just to this feature. This feature of beliefs is also
integral to the basic choice of Davidson’s interpretation procedure, to choose
a particular attitude of taking certain sentences as true. If this is correct,
then we have here an example of a particular kind of norm attached to a
particular kind of concept. Indeed, this is not any sort of concept, for belief is central to most attitudes and
concept formation. My suggestion is that we should try to give other similar
normative conditions for various concepts.
We could also express
the foregoing remarks thus: truth is the internal goal of belief. This, of course, does not mean that there is any
sort of intention or teleological character in this, but that truth is the
norm, or the standard of appraisal of belief. This conclusion will be unwelcome
by those who hold that the concept of truth is a concept which is necessarily
extremely thin and “minimal” in its content, and Davidson is certainly a member
of this family of theorists, although his views are specific. Davidson says
that, although he does not agree with a “deflationist “ reading of truth,
according to which there is nothing more to truth than the schema “ ‘p’ is true
if and only if p “, still it is a “folly” to try to define this concept. He
claims that the concept can be shown to be explanatory by the use to which it
can be but in a theory of interpretation.[33]
But nothing that he says seems to me to be inconsistent with the following.
Since aiming at truth is a norm of belief, the activities in which we are
engaged when we try to assess our beliefs, the activities of inquiring, justifying
and giving reasons for these beliefs, are regulated by this norm.
Interpretation would be impossible if it were not supposed that subject do not
recognize this norm, which is thus part of the concept of truth. It does not
follow that the norm is a convention of truthfullness, agreed to by the members
of a community either tacitly or explicitly.[34]
It is just that their attitudes could not be interpreted as attitudes of
beliefs if they did not have this internal goal. If belief is thus central to
our mental attitudes, then truth is indeed a norm of belief, and a norm – the
basic norm - of the mental.
It is sometimes said
that treating truth as a norm, as I suggest here, would imply some sort of
appraisal, or some commandment to seek the truth.[35]
It certainly implies no moral or ethical norm of the kind. Neither does it
imply that truth is an essentially epistemic concept . It only implies that the
norm of truth is among what I have called above interpretative norms. If to
understand others is also to make intelligible their false of irrational
beliefs, intelligibility requires grasp of the concept of truth. We can express
it in the manner of John Donne: “Though truth and falsehood bee neare twins, yet truth
a little older is.” (Satyre, II)
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[1]. Davidson 1990a p.25 , 1970, p. 223
[2]. See for instance Davidson 1990, p. 325 : What makes the task [ of
providing a unified theory of thought, desire, and speech] practiciable at all
is the structure the normative character of thought, desire, speech, and action
imposes on correct attributions of attitudes to others, and hence to
interpretations of attitudes to others, and hence on interpretations of speech
and explanations of their actions ” . See also Davidson 1995, chapter
5 : “ The entire structure of the theory depends on the standards and
norms of rationality ”
[3]. Davidson 1990 : 25 ; Davidson 1991 : 162
[4]. see in particular “Communication and Convention” in Davidson 1984, and
Davidson 1986. A. Bilgrami (1992) is quite clear on the distinction between a
“localist” and a “generalist” view of norms in their relevance to meaning and
intentionality.
[5]. The first principle is sometimes called by Davidson the principle of
Correspondence and the second the principle of Coherence (e.g. Davidson 1991 :
158)
[6]. “How is weakness of the Will
possible” (169) in Davidson 1980, p.41
[7]. Davidson 1990a, p.25
[8]. Davidson, 1985, p.89
[9]. see in particular his essays
“Hempel on Explaining Action”, and “Psychology as philosophy” in Davdison 1980.
[10]. Leonard J. Savage 1954: 103-104 (The relevance of this example for
considerations on normativity in
interpretation is pointed out by Skorupski 1990)
[11]. Davidson 1984 : xvii. Some writers have held that this amounts to a
redefinition of the Principle of Charity as a Principle of “Humanity”, but I
will not go into that.
[12]. Davidson 1986, p.446
[13]. Mc Dowell, 1979: 336 (repr. in Mc Dowell 1997:57-58). This view is well put by Child 1994: 57-68 to whom I
borrow the phrase “uncodifiability of rationality.”
[14]. This could be said to one of
the numerous lessons of Lewis Carroll’s tale of Achilles and the Tortoise:
Achilles tries to force the Tortoise to recognize the validity and
applicability of a logical principle (the moduls
ponens) to a particular case, but the Tortoise always refuses to see it
applied in this case.
[15]. See for instance, for further considerations on this point, Foley 1993
: 155-162
[16]. “Psychology as philosophy” (1974) , in Davidson 1980 : 233
[17]. “Freedom to Act”, in Davidson 1980 : 79
[18]. Nicod Lecture, lecture 5, see also Davidson 1996
[19]. Mental Events (1970), in Davidson 1980: 221
[20]. Nicod Lectures, V.; see also Davidson 1996.
[21]. Davidson 1996: 277-278
[22]. The feature is emphasized by Davidson 1987, and the problem well put by
Barry C. Smith 1998: 415
[23]. This point is pressed by F. Jackson and D. Braddon-Mitchell 1996:
155-156
[24]. See, for instance, Davidson 1990: 307-308
[25]. Mc Dowell 1986: 396.
[26]. see in particular Davidson
1991; 1995.
[27]. In his 1995 Nicod
Lectures(lecture 1) , Davidson calls them respectively “intra-attitudinal” and
“inter-attitudinal” aspects of holism. the example about rain below is his.
[28]. Davidson is obviously not committed to holding that the “etc” means
that all the other beliefs of a
person have to be related to a single one.
[29]. For account of the first kind ,
see R. Brandom 1994; for an account of the second kind, see Peacocke 1992
[30]. In particular “Thought and Talk” (1975) in Davidson 1984, and “Rational
Animals” (1982), repr. in Le Pore,
1985: 473-480
[31]. “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knoweldge”(1986), in Le Pore 1986: 308
[32]. “Rational Animals”, ibid.
p.480
[33]. Davidson 1996
[34]. David Lewis, in his theory of convention and of radical interpretation,
has invoked such a convention.
see his (1974). But there is no need
here to think of it as a convention.
[35][35]. Richard Rorty (1995) suggests that taking truth as a norm
implies this, and proposes his own deflationist version against Wright (1992)
who advocated, in the same sense as here, such a view. He believes that such a
view would imply what Davidson deplore, an attempt to “humanize” truth. My
point is simply that we would loose the point of the notion of truth if we
could not link it to the aims of our belief.