Donald Herbert Davidson (March 6, 1917 – August 30, 2003) was an American philosopher. He served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at theUniversity of California, Berkeley, from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments atStanford University,Rockefeller University,Princeton University, and theUniversity of Chicago. Davidson was known for his charismatic personality and difficult writing style, as well as the systematic nature of his philosophy.[2] His work exerted considerable influence in many areas of philosophy from the 1960s onward, particularly inphilosophy of mind,philosophy of language, andaction theory. While Davidson was ananalytic philosopher, with most of his influence lying in that tradition, his work has attracted attention incontinental philosophy as well, particularly inliterary theory and related areas.[3]
Donald Herbert Davidson was born on March 6, 1917 inSpringfield, Massachusetts to Grace Cordelia (née Anthony) and Clarence "Davie" Herbert Davidson.[4] His family moved around frequently during his childhood; they lived in thePhilippines until he was four, and then in various cities in theNortheastern United States before finally settling inStaten Island when he was nine. He briefly attended a public school in Staten Island before receiving a scholarship to study atStaten Island Academy.[4] He first became interested in philosophy while in high school, where he read works byNietzsche as well asPlato'sParmenides andKant'sCritique of Pure Reason.[4]
After graduating from high school in 1935, he enrolled atHarvard on an English major before switching toclassics and earning his BA in 1939. It was at Harvard that he came to know many important philosophers of the time, includingC. I. Lewis,Alfred North Whitehead,Raphael Demos, and especiallyW. V. O. Quine, who went on to become a lifelong friend and major philosophical influence. He also befriended the future conductorLeonard Bernstein while at Harvard.[4]
Soon after earning his BA, he was awarded a Teschemacher Scholarship to pursue graduate studies in classical philosophy at Harvard. As a graduate student, he took courses on logic taught by Quine and was classmates withRoderick Chisholm andRoderick Firth. Quine's seminars onlogical positivism greatly influenced his view of philosophy, as they made him realize that "it was possible to be serious about getting things right in philosophy, or at least not getting things wrong." He graduated with an MA in classical philosophy in 1941.[4]
While pursuing a PhD at Harvard, he concurrently enrolled atHarvard Business School, but he ended up leaving a few weeks before graduating in 1942 so that he could volunteer for theU.S. Navy. DuringWorld War II, he taught spotters how to distinguish enemy planes from allied planes and also participated in the ground invasions ofSicily,Salerno, andAnzio.[4] After returning from the war in 1945, he completed his PhD dissertation on Plato'sPhilebus under the supervision ofRaphael Demos andD. C. Williams, and it was eventually accepted in 1949, earning him his PhD in philosophy.[4]
Anomalous monism is a philosophical thesis about themind–body relationship first proposed by Davidson in his 1970 paper "Mental Events".[5] The theory is twofold and states thatmental events are identical with physical events, and that the mental is anomalous, i.e. under their mental descriptions, causal relations between these mental events are not describable by strictphysical laws. Hence, Davidson proposes an identity theory of mind without the reductive bridge laws associated with thetype-identity theory.
Since in this theory every mental event is some physical event or other, the idea is that someone's thinking at a certain time, for example, that snow is white, is a certain pattern of neural firing in their brain at that time, an event which can be characterized as both a thinking that snow is white (a type of mental event) and a pattern of neural firing (a type of physical event). There is just one event that can be characterized both in mental terms and in physical terms. If mental events are physical events, they can at least in principle be explained and predicted, like all physical events, on the basis of laws of physical science. However, according to anomalous monism, events cannot be so explained or predicted as described in mental terms (such as "thinking", "desiring", etc.), but only as described in physical terms: this is the distinctive feature of the thesis as a brand ofphysicalism.
Davidson's argument for anomalous monism relies on the following three principles:
See the main article for an explanation of his argument as well as objections.
In his 1974 essayOn the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,[6] Davidson critiques what he calls the "third dogma of empiricism". The term is a reference to the famous 1951 essayTwo Dogmas of Empiricism by his graduate teacher,W. V. O. Quine, in which he critiques two central tenets, or "dogmas", oflogical positivism: theanalytic–synthetic distinction andreductionism. Davidson identifies an additional third dogma present in logical positivism and even in Quine's own work, as well as the work ofThomas Kuhn,Benjamin Lee Whorf, and others, and he argues that it is as untenable as the first two dogmas.
Davidson's third dogma refers toscheme–content dualism, which is the idea that all knowledge is the result of one's conceptual scheme being put to work on raw data from the world. The content is objective because it is what is given by the world, whereas the scheme is subjective because it is the contribution of one's mind or language to knowledge. One consequence of scheme–content dualism is conceptual relativism, which is the idea that two different people or communities could have radically different,incommensurable (Kuhn's term for untranslatable) ways of making sense of the world. On this view, truth is relative to a conceptual scheme rather than objective.[6]
In the essay, Davidson argues that scheme–content dualism is incoherent because it implies that the conceptual and empirical components of knowledge are separable, and thus that one could meaningfully talk about a schemeless content (raw data) and a contentless scheme (an alternative conceptual scheme). This dualistic picture would suggest that an alternative conceptual scheme is one which is incommensurable with one's own, but which shares a common relation with the empirical content. Davidson fundamentally disagrees with this picture, stating that "a form of activity that cannot be interpreted as language in our language is not speech behavior." He presents several arguments for this thesis, and all of them essentially show that it is not possible to separate the notions of truth and meaning in such a way as to allow for incommensurable conceptual schemes. This means that using language, having beliefs, and being generally rational are all a matter of being in contact with a mind-independent, objective world.[6]
The upshot of Davidson's argument is that there is no strict boundary between the subjective and objective, as rational behaviour is necessarily tied to the world which causes such behaviour. This also undermines conceptual relativism, as there is no such thing as a conceptual scheme which stands between one's beliefs about the world and the world itself, so truth is not relative to a scheme, but is rather objective.[6]
Unlike the first two dogmas, which can be rejected by empiricists, Davidson claims that the third dogma of empiricism is "perhaps the last, for if we give it up it is not clear that there is anything distinctive left to call empiricism."[6]Richard Rorty andMichael Williams have even said that the third dogma is necessary for any study ofepistemology.[7] Rorty in particular uses Davidson's work to lend support to hisneopragmatism.
Swampman is the subject of athought experiment introduced by Davidson in his 1987 paperKnowing One's Own Mind. In the experiment, Davidson is struck by lightning in a swamp and disintegrated, but at the same exact moment, an identical copy of Davidson, the Swampman, is made from a nearby tree and proceeds through life exactly as Davidson would have, indistinguishable from him. The experiment is used by Davidson to claim that thought and meaning cannot exist in a vacuum; they are dependent on their interconnections to the world. Therefore, despite being physically identical to himself, Davidson states that the Swampman does not have thoughts nor meaningful language, as it has no causal history to base them on.
The experiment runs as follows:[8]
Suppose lightning strikes a dead tree in a swamp; I am standing nearby. My body is reduced to its elements, while entirely by coincidence (and out of different molecules) the tree is turned into my physical replica. My replica, The Swampman, moves exactly as I did; according to its nature it departs the swamp, encounters and seems to recognize my friends, and appears to return their greetings in English. It moves into my house and seems to write articles on radical interpretation. No one can tell the difference.But thereis a difference. My replica can't recognize my friends; it can'trecognize anything, since it never cognized anything in the first place. It can't know my friends' names (though of course it seems to), it can't remember my house. It can't mean what I do by the word 'house', for example, since the sound 'house' it makes was not learned in a context that would give it the right meaning—or any meaning at all. Indeed, I don't see how my replica can be said to mean anything by the sounds it makes, nor to have any thoughts.
— Donald Davidson,Knowing One's Own Mind
This experiment is nearly identical to the central plot ofAlan Moore’s earlier 1980’s comic seriesSwamp Thing.[9]
Davidson was married three times. He married his first wife, artist Virginia Bolton, in 1941 and had his only child with her, Elizabeth Boyer (née Davidson).[10] Following his divorce from Bolton, he married for the second time to Nancy Hirschberg, Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and later at Chicago Circle. She died in 1979.[11] In 1984, Davidson married for the third and last time to philosopher and psychoanalyst Marcia Cavell.[12] He corresponded with Catholic nun, literary critic and poetM. Bernetta Quinn.[13][14][15]
Davidson was a lifelong atheist; he believed thatmany of the claims made by religions are not even truth-apt.[16]
On August 27, 2003, Davidson underwent knee replacement surgery atAlta Bates Summit Medical Center inOakland, California, but he went intocardiac arrest shortly after the operation. He died three days later on August 30, 2003 at the age of 86.[17]
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