DONALD DAVIDSON UC BERKELEY NEWSCENTER WEB SITE and KELLY WISE 6 March 1917

DONALD DAVIDSON UC BERKELEY NEWSCENTER WEB SITE AND KELLY WISE 6 march 1917 . 31 august 2003

PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY VOL. 150, NO. 2, JUNE 2006

biographical memoirs

ONALD DAVIDSON was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century. He made fundamental contributions for more than half a century, starting with his Dearly work in decision theory, but exemplified most completely in the five volumes of his papers published over the years by Oxford University Press. This stream of important work in analytic philosophy began with the classic 1963 paper, “Action, Reasons and Causes,” which has been reprinted or translated numerous times. Most of the important topics in analytic philosophy have been the subject of at least one of David- son’s seminal contributions. This list ranges from the theory of action, philosophical psychology, philosophy of language, and theory of meaning to ethics and value theory. Like another influential philosopher of the twentieth century, Paul Grice, Davidson did not during his lifetime produce a large systematic work pulling together these many strains of thought. Rather, Davidson wrote a large number of shorter, elegant, and, at the same time, difficult analyses of philosophical problems. Awkwardness of expression is not uncommon, even in great philosophers. Kant and Dewey are prime examples. Stylistic elegance is not always present. Among well-known philosophers of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell and Davidson share first place in my ranking of philosophers as writers. Donald Davidson was born on 6 March 1917 in Springfield, Mas- sachusetts. From the age of nine until graduation from high school, he lived with his family on Staten Island, New York, and attended the Staten Island Academy, a private school modeled on the progressive ideas of John Dewey. Encouraged by one of his high-school teachers, he began reading Plato and Kant in these early years, but by his own account was probably drawn even more to English literature. (I am here and in paragraphs that follow drawing on Davidson’s intellectual autobiography [1999a].) Upon graduation, he got a scholarship to Harvard, receiving a B.A. degree in 1939. Worth recording, from a historical standpoint, is that as a sophomore he was a student in the last year of Alfred North White- head’s teaching at Harvard, even though he was majoring in English. He switched to comparative literature at the end of his sophomore year. Soon he was introduced to Joyce and Proust by the well-known Harvard Joyce scholar, Harry Levin. Not surprisingly, Davidson wrote about Joyce years later. In his senior year, he devoted much of his time to classical philosophy as well as Greek and Roman literature. The next step was a crucial one. He was offered, and accepted, a graduate scholarship in classics and philosophy at Harvard. In this set- ting he took his first course in logic with Quine. From this encounter there developed what many think of as the strongest intellectual bond

[354]

donald davidson 355 between any two major philosophers of the twentieth century, a topic I return to. (Both were members of this society.) Davidson went on to write a dissertation on Plato’s Philebus, but its completion was delayed by the war. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1942 to 1945. His first teaching position was as an instructor at Queens College, New York, 1947–51, during which time he finished his dissertation in 1949. From 1951 to 1967, he was at Stanford, then Princeton 1967– 70, Rockefeller University 1970–76, the University of Chicago 1976– 81, and finally the University of California, Berkeley, from 1981 until his death; in 1986 he was appointed as Willis S. and Marion Slusser Professor of Philosophy at Berkeley. Davidson received many fellowships and prizes, as well as honorary degrees from the University of Oxford and Stockholm University. He was much in demand and he loved to travel, so the list of his visit- ing professorships and lectureships is extraordinarily long, as is the list of honorary societies to which he was elected. I mention just a few: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Institut International de Phi- losophie, British Academy, Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He was president, at different times, of both the Eastern and Pacific Divisions of the American Philosophical Association. I knew him best during our first years at Stanford together, so I will be more detailed about it than about his later work, which was, certainly, the more important part of his career. In his intellectual autobiography, he does stress the significance of these earlier years, spent on decision theory and experiments measuring subjective probability and utility. They formed a foundation for developing his later influential views on the close connections between belief, desire, truth, and meaning. I arrived at Stanford in August 1950, having just finished my Ph.D. at Columbia University. Don arrived just a few months later, in January 1951. Our arrival just about doubled the number of full-time instruc- tors in philosophy at Stanford. For reasons I can’t remember in detail now, the logician J.C.C. McKinsey, who had also joined the department in 1951, Don, and I began discussing the theory of value in philosophy, concurrently with studying the theory of expected utility in game theory and economics. This led to our first joint publication (1955). Certainly no later than the fall of 1953 or the winter term of 1954, Don and I focused on experimentally measuring expected utility. We were, at that time, both naïve about running experiments. Neither of us had done so before, and neither of us had taken the kind of graduate courses that teach students how to do it. So we got the cooperation of Sidney Siegel, who was at that time a graduate student in psychology at Stanford, to join us in designing and carrying out some experimental studies. Don and I also spent time on the theory of measurement, a special interest

356 biographical memoirs of mine, needed as a background for empirical analysis of utility and subjective probability. This theoretical work led to our 1956 joint paper. The intuitive ideas were close to those set forth much earlier by Frank Ramsey (1931). But the details were different, because of the finitistic requirements of experimentation. A full report on our experimental work was given in our last collaborative effort, the 1957 book with Siegel, Decision Making: An Experimental Approach. I end this account with some remarks on our collaboration. The first, and perhaps most important, one is that by and large we worked in a very congenial and easy way. I think it is fair to say that many people thought, perhaps correctly, that Don had a rather prickly per- sonality. But at least not so in those early years. The collaboration with me was the most extensive in terms of published research of any such efforts during his long academic career, and so I can speak with some authority about what it was like to work with him. We argued a lot, but in the intellectual spirit of clarifying things that initially neither one of us understood well. We were exploring territory new to both of us, and we instinctively recognized that we ourselves had different intellectual backgrounds, which enabled us to make separate but essential contributions to the research under way. Don’s thinking about our experiments was as careful and systematic as those who knew him would expect. Just a few years later, Davidson collaborated with the economist Jacob Marschak on further experimental work testing a stochastic decision theory (1959). An important influence on Davidson during the years at Stanford was his interactions with Carnap at UCLA. McKinsey had agreed to write an article on Carnap’s semantics for the Library of Liv- ing Philosophers volume on Carnap. He asked Don to join him. After McKinsey’s death, Don took it over and subsequently discussed the work extensively with Carnap. An even bigger influence on Don was Alfred Tarski, the Polish logician, who was at Berkeley. Tarski encouraged Don’s application of his logical results on the definition of truth to problems in analytic philosophy. Davidson’s use of Tarski’s work was probably the most famous work on truth in the philosophy of language in the twentieth century, not universally accepted by analytic philosophers, but known and discussed by all and sundry. Carnap and especially Tarski were important to the development of Davidson’s thought, but, as I have already remarked, by far the strongest influence was that of Quine, originally his teacher and later his close friend and colleague. I have abstracted from Don’s intellectual autobiography a partial chronology of their many interactions after Harvard. In 1950 Don read in manuscript Quine’s celebrated article “Two

donald davidson 357

Dogmas of Empiricism.” He much agreed with Quine’s arguments against reductionism and the analytic/synthetic distinction, so prominent since Kant. But he did not accept Quine’s implicit empiricist dualism of experi- ence and conceptual schemes (Davidson 1999b, 729). Years later, Quine asked in the summer of 1997, “What is this third dogma of empiricism you accuse me of?” This dialogue of agreement and disagreement fruit- fully continued over nearly half a century. So back to the chronology. Quine spent the academic year 1958–59 at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, located at Stanford, and he invited Don to read the manuscript of Word and Object, in many ways his most important book. Here is Don’s reaction: “I found this new work difficult to take in. When I finally began to get the central idea, I was immensely impressed; it changed my life. What I had found so hard to take in was the idea that there could be no more to meaning than could be learned by being exposed to the linguistic behavior of speakers” (p. 41). Don worked closely with Quine during that entire year. But, as he said, he differed from Quine in how to account for the content of sentences closely connected with perception. On the eve of giving his Carus Lectures in 1980, Don remarked that “following Quine, I had given up the analytic/synthetic distinction and a foundationalism based on sense data” (p. 56). The next year, 1981, Davidson gave at a meeting of Germany’s Hegel Society a paper entitled “A Coherent Theory of Truth and Knowledge.” Quine was one of the commentators. This is Davidson’s description of the encounter (pp. 58–59): For me the most interesting moment came when I argued for an exter- nalist account of the contents of perceptual beliefs. Quine commented that it should make no difference whether we took the content to be determined by patterns of sensory stimulation or by the external object, since they were simply at different points in a single causal chain. I claimed it did make a difference. I agreed that taking the proximal stimulus (Quine’s “stimulus meaning”) made error easier to explain, but it failed to anchor words and thoughts to the right objects. Quine (incredulous): “What someone believes is not [wholly] determined by the physical state which is, you agree, the belief?” Davidson: “That’s right!” (I have a transcript of the exchange someone made from a tape recording.) The question whether the meaning of a perceptual sentence is fixed by the distal or the proximal stimulus was one on which we had long disagreed, but this was the first time the issue had been raised so clearly. Commenting on this exchange in his autobiography, Quine pays me a compliment he deserves far more than I: “We pursue any initial differences with an eye on the problem and an interest in solving it, as scientists might, rather than with the dismal games- manship so common in philosophy.” (Quine 1985, 454)

358 biographical memoirs

Six years later, at Stanford in 1987, Davidson again tried to persuade Quine about the virtues of the distal as opposed to the proximal stimulus. Don summarized the outcome in these words (p. 59): “Quine records the failure of my attempt to persuade him: ‘I remain unswerved in locating stimulation at the neural input. . . . Unlike Davidson I still locate the stimulations at the subject’s surface, and private stimulus meanings with them’” (Quine 1990, 41, 44). And this continued, almost without intellectual interruption, at a conference at Washington University in St. Louis the next year (p. 59): I read a paper plumping for my point once more, though also emphasiz- ing the many passages in Van’s work that seemed to foreshadow my view. . . . Quine, in reply, and generous as always, “moved to an inter- mediate point between Don’s distal and my old proximal position.” . . . The new position abandoned stimulus meaning, but retained the prior- ity of the neural stimulations. Only thus, Quine argued, could one keep track of the “ﬂow of evidence from the triggering of the senses to the pro- nouncements of science” and give an account of how we arrive at the “reiﬁcation of rabbits and the like.” An emphasis on empathy emerged, to be further developed in Quine’s reactions to the papers (among them one of mine [Davidson 1995]) read at a conference in San Marino 1990. Davidson recorded that, writing six years later, Quine adopted a position even closer to his: “. . . what two observers agree on is the shared distal subject matter and not the unshared proximal stimulations” (Quine 1996, 161). This covers most of what Davidson had to say about these remark- able exchanges continuing over many years in a cordial atmosphere of mutual inquiry. For a detailed sense of what Quine thought in these last years about the similarities and differences of their views, a nice review is given in the same volume in a short article, “Where do we disagree?” (Quine 1999). On more than one occasion Davidson acknowl- edged the gracious way in which Quine accepted his criticisms on their points of disagreement. Quine died in 2000, Davidson three years later. Their friendship of more than half a century, and their many shared views of important conceptual issues will be recognized for years to come in the history of philosophy. Independent of Quine, Davidson’s prominent place in that history is assured.

Elected 1985

Patrick Suppes Lucie Stern Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus Stanford University

donald davidson 359

References

Davidson, Donald. 1999a. Intellectual autobiography. In The philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. L. E. Hahn, 3–70. Illinois: Open Court Publishing. ———. 1999b. Reply to Dagﬁn Føllesdal. In The philosophy of Donald Davidson, 729–32. Quine, Willard V. O. 1985. The time of my life: An autobiography. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ———. 1990. Pursuit of truth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. ———. 1996. Progress on two fronts. Journal of Philosophy 93: 159–63. ———. 1999. Where do we disagree? In The philosophy of Donald Davidson, 73–79.