Roger Clough], [[email protected]] <mailto:[email protected]]>
12/16/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
----- Receiving the following content -----
*From:* Roger Clough <mailto:[email protected]>
*Receiver:* everything-list <mailto:[email protected]>
*Time:* 2012-12-16, 08:17:27
*Subject:* Davidson on truth
**
*Donald Davidson on truth *
I don't think you can do any better on understanding truth than
studying Donald Davidson.
As I understand him, in
1) he justifies comp (the use of tokens, because they are
nonreductive) as long as we allow for
(a) mental causation of physical events; (b) that there is a
strict exceptionless relation
(iff) between the events; (c) that we use tokens and not types to
relate mental to
physical events
2) He narrows down what form of language can be used.
Not sure but this seems to allow only finite, learnable
context-free expressions only
3) He clarifies the meaning and use of 1p vs 3p. Observed that
Hume accepted only 1p
knowledege, the logical positivists accepted only 3p knowledge,
where 1p is knowledge by
acquaintance and 3p is knowledge by description. I might add that
IMHO 1p is Kierkegaard's
view that truth is subjective, so K is close to Hume.
_http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davidson_%28philosopher%29#Mental_events_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Davidson_%28philosopher%29/lMental_events>
*"1. Token Mental events ( A justification of token physicalism:
these being comp and purely token functionalism)*
In "Mental Events" (1970) Davidson advanced a form of token
_identity theory_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_theory>about the mind:
token _mental events_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_event>are identical to token
physical events. One previous difficulty with such a view was that
it did not seem feasible to provide laws relating mental
states—for example, believing that the sky is blue, or wanting a
hamburger—to physical states, such as patterns of neural activity
in the brain. Davidson argued that such a reduction would not be
necessary to a token identity thesis: it is possible that each
individual mental event just is the corresponding physical event,
without there being laws relating /types/ (as opposed to tokens)
of mental events to /types/ of physical events. But, Davidson
argued, the fact that we could not have such a reduction does not
entail that the mind is anything /more/ than the brain. Hence,
Davidson called his position _anomalous monism_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomalous_monism>: monism, because
it claims that only one thing is at issue in questions of mental
and physical events; anomalous (from /a-/, "not," and /omalos/,
"regular") because mental and physical event /types/ could not be
connected by strict laws (laws without exceptions).
Davidson argued that anomalous monism _follows from_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_consequence>three plausible
theses. First, he assumes the /denial of //_epiphenomenalism_/
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epiphenomenalism>—that is, the
denial of the view that mental events do not cause physical
events. Second, he assumes a /nomological view of causation/,
according to which one event causes another if (and only if) there
is a strict, exceptionless law governing the relation between the
events. Third, he assumes the principle of the /anomalism of the
mental/, according to which there are no strict laws that govern
the relationship between mental event types and physical event
types. By these three theses, Davidson argued, it follows that the
causal relations between the mental and the physical hold only
between mental event tokens, but that mental events as types are
anomalous. This ultimately secures token physicalism and a
_supervenience_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supervenience>relation between the
mental and the physical, while respecting the autonomy of the
mental (Malpas, 2005, §2).
*2. Truth and meaning (A justification of the use of certain types
of language--- I think this might mean context-free (finite)
language)*
In 1967 Davidson published "Truth and Meaning," in which he argued
that any /learnable/ language must be statable in a finite form,
even if it is capable of a theoretically infinite number of
expressions—as we may assume that natural human languages are, at
least in principle. If it could not be stated in a finite way then
it could not be learned through a finite, empirical method such as
the way humans learn their languages. It follows that it must be
possible to give a theoretical semantics for any natural language
which could give the meanings of an infinite number of sentences
on the basis of a finite system of axioms. Following, among
others, Rudolf Carnap (/Introduction to Semantics/, Harvard 1942,
22) Davidson also argued that "giving the meaning of a sentence"
was equivalent to stating its truth conditions, so stimulating the
modern work on _truth-conditional semantics_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth-conditional_semantics>. In
sum, he proposed that it must be possible to distinguish a finite
number of distinct grammatical features of a language, and for
each of them explain its workings in such a way as to generate
trivial (obviously correct) statements of the truth conditions of
all the (infinitely many) sentences making use of that feature.
That is, we can give a finite theory of meaning for a natural
language; the test of its correctness is that it would generate
(if applied to the language in which it was formulated) all the
sentences of the form "'p' is true if and only if p" ("'Snow is
white' is true if and only if snow is white"). (These are called
T-sentences: Davidson derives the idea from _Alfred Tarski_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Tarski>.)
This work was originally delivered in his _John Locke Lectures_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Locke_Lectures>at Oxford, and
launched a large endeavor by many philosophers to develop
Davidsonian semantical theories for natural language. Davidson
himself contributed many details to such a theory, in essays on
quotation, indirect discourse, and descriptions of action.
*3. Knowledge and belief (The difference between 1p and 3p. Also,
a triangulation position on solipsism)*
After the 1970s Davidson's philosophy of mind picked up influences
from the work of _Saul Kripke_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Kripke>, _Hilary Putnam_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Putnam>, and _Keith
Donnellan_ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Donnellan>, all of
whom had proposed a number of troubling counter-examples to what
can be generally described as "descriptivist" theories of content.
These views, which roughly originate in _Bertrand Russell_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertrand_Russell>'s _Theory of
Descriptions_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Descriptions>, held that
the referent of a name—which object or person that name refers
to—is determined by the beliefs a person holds about that object.
Suppose I believe "Aristotle founded the Lyceum" and "Aristotle
taught Alexander the Great." Whom are my beliefs /about/?
Aristotle, obviously. But why? Russell would say that my beliefs
are about whatever object makes the greatest number of them true.
If two people taught Alexander, but only one founded the Lyceum,
then my beliefs are about the one who did both. Kripke et al.
argued that this was not a tenable theory, and that in fact whom
or what a person's beliefs were about was in large part (or
entirely) a matter of how they had acquired those beliefs, and
those names, and how if at all the use of those names could be
traced "causally" from their original referents to the current
speaker.
Davidson picked up this theory, and his work in the 1980s dealt
with the problems in relating first-person beliefs to second- and
third-person beliefs. It seems that first person beliefs ("I am
hungry") are acquired in very different ways from third person
beliefs (someone else's belief, of me, that "He is hungry") How
can it be that they have the same content?
Davidson approached this question by connecting it with another
one: how can two people have beliefs about the same external
object? He offers, in answer, a picture of triangulation: Beliefs
about oneself, beliefs about other people, and beliefs about the
world come into existence jointly.
Many philosophers throughout history had, arguably, been tempted
to reduce two of these kinds of belief and knowledge to the other
one: _Descartes_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes>and _Hume_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hume>thought that the only
knowledge we start with is self-knowledge. Some of the _logical
positivists_ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_positivism>,
(and some would say Wittgenstein, or _Wilfrid Sellars_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfrid_Sellars>), held that we
start with beliefs only about the external world. (And arguably
_Friedrich Schelling_
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Schelling>and _Emmanuel
Levinas_ <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Levinas>held that
we start with beliefs only about other people). It is not
possible, on Davidson's view, for a person to have only one of
these three kinds of mental content; anyone who has beliefs of one
of the kinds must have beliefs of the other two kinds."
[Roger Clough], [[email protected]]
12/16/2012
"Forever is a long time, especially near the end." -Woody Allen
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