Davidson’s Holism: Epistemology in the Mirror of Meaning Jeff Malpas 1 To Margaret 2 The methodology of interpretation is... nothing but epistemology seen in the mirror of meaning. – Donald Davidson, ‘Thought and Talk’ 3 Table of Contents Foreword to the new edition Acknowledgements Introduction: radically interpreting Davidson I. From translation to interpretation 1. The Quinean background 1.1 Radical translation and naturalized epistemology 1.2 Meaning and indeterminacy 1.3 Analytical hypotheses and charity 2. The Davidsonian project 2.1 The development of a theory of meaning 2.2 The project of radical interpretation 2.3 From charity to triangulation II. Holism and interpretation 3. The idea of psychological holism 3.1 Holism and the psychological 3.2 Holism and anti-holism 3.3 Holism and rationality 3.4 The nature and extent of psychological holism 4. Indeterminacy and psychological structure 4.1 The indeterminacy and incompleteness of interpretation 4.2 The intentional-horizonal structure of the psychological 4.3 Dialogue, unity and world 5. Charity and understanding 4 5.1 The nature and role of charity 5.2 Charity, error and reference 5.3 The presupposition of agreement 5.4 The nature of understanding 5.5 Charity and morality III. Reality, knowledge and truth 6 A holistic ‘theory’ of knowledge 6.1 ‘The third dogma’ 6.2 Relativism, horizonality and psychological unity 6.3 Holism and skeptical doubt 7 Truth and the world 7.1 Skepticism, realism and anti-realism 7.2 Realism, anti-realism and truth 7.3 The centrality of truth 7.4 A horizonal account of truth Epilogue: Davidson, Brandom, and McDowell Bibliography Index 5 Foreword Although extensively revised during 2002, and again in 2010, the core of this book, originally published as Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning , was written between 1987 and 1991. Davidson read the original typescript after attending the NEH seminar on ‘Heidegger and Davidson: Critics of Cartesianism’ organized by Hubert Dreyfus at Santa Cruz in 1990, sending me a faxed message shortly after the seminar that read: ‘Am chagrined to have to admit that I have only just read your book. Would have learned more by staying home and reading it than by attending the recent seminar. Do you have a publisher?’ As it happened, the book had at that stage already been accepted for publication by Cambridge University Press. It appeared in print at the same time as Jerry Fodor and Ernest LePore’s, Holism: A Shopper’s Guide , as well as Akeel Bilgrami’s, Belief and Meaning . Bilgrami’s book shared some similar themes with The Mirror of Meaning , particularly the idea that holism requires a principle of ‘localism’ or what I term ‘horizonality’. 1 Fodor and LePore’s volume, on the other, represented quite a different and rather less sympathetic approach, taking issue with arguments for holism as they were supposed to appear in a number of different writers including Davidson. 2 In the decade or so since, holism itself has received some, but not a great deal of more extensive elaboration. The main reason for this, it seems to me, is simply that holism, particularly in the form that it is developed in Davidson’s or in my own work, is not well understood. Not only that, but holism, or ‘contextualism’ as it is sometimes also called, has increasingly been seen as a threat to most standard theories of language and meaning, and so when it is discussed it is usually in a manner that is concerned to dismiss rather than to understand.. For these reasons alone, a new edition of this book seems worthwhile. Moreover, recent years have also seen a great deal of additional interest in possible convergence between ‘analytic’ and so-called ‘continental’ philosophy and the exploration of such convergence that appears in these pages remains extremely relevant – perhaps even more so than when it first appeared – while the appearance of the new and revised editions of Davidson’s essays make it possible to read the development of his thinking, and the role of holism in that thinking, with greater clarity. Although the text published here is indeed a revised, and, in some cases, expanded, the main lines of argument have been left unchanged (although the account of indeterminacy, of the treatment of the role 6 of propositionality, and the discussion of truth have been substantially modified in ways that reflect what I hope is my own better understanding of the issues at stake – the title has also been returned to something closer to that which I originally envisaged). Indeed, I take the fact that I have been able to leave so much the argument here in a relatively unaltered form to be an indication that the ideas as originally set out were quite faithful to the direction of Davidson’s own thinking – even if the exact manner in which those ideas are developed here, particularly the use of notions taken from phenomenology, hermeneutics and semiotics, is rather different from anything to be found in Davidson. This seems to me to be confirmed by the way in which the holism that is the central focus for my account became an increasingly important, if sometimes still under-developed, theme in Davidson’s own writing over the last fifteen years or so. The idea of triangulation, in particular, which can itself be seen as a development out of the notion of charity, and the associated idea of the indispensability of a notion of objectivity in understanding, is particularly significant in this regard. In triangulation, arguably the central idea in Davidson’s later writing, the idea of what I here termed ‘psychological holism’ (which on my account is seen as itself incorporating an externalist commitment) can be seen as being developed through the notion of the interdependence, not only of the attitudes and behavior of individual agents and speakers, but also of the concepts of the subjective, the objective and the intersubjective. It remains the case, however, that the account I offer here goes far beyond anything that is made explicit in Davidson’s own published work. Indeed, while Davidson has acknowledged his commitment to a form of holism, he also sometimes seems to present a much narrower view of holism than I do here, commenting, at one point, that ‘My form of holism is mainly a logical constraint.’ 3 Similarly Davidson often seems to have viewed holism in a way that keeps it relatively distinct in relation to other elements in his position, notably from his externalist commitments and from the indeterminacy thesis. In contrast, my account is explicit in pushing for a view of holism as quite radical and far-reaching, and as actually encompassing, in one way or another, both indeterminacy and externalism. Indeed, in my view, it is holism that drives most of the other ideas that are at issue here. In this respect, and although I was more hesitant on this point when the book was first published (see the comments in the ‘Introduction’ below), I would now say that the book should be read not merely as an attempt at exegesis and defense of the underlying Davidsonian position, but also as a development of that position in a way that can also be seen as 7 something of a challenge to Davidson’s own elaboration of his ideas – whether Davidson was himself able or willing to travel all the way in this direction or not, it is the direction in which I believe many of his core ideas naturally lead. In addition, of course, the book continues to present a way of approaching Davidson that enables his work, and certain aspects of the analytic tradition more broadly, to be seen, not as apart from and opposed to the European tradition, especially the tradition of hermeneutic thought, but in many important ways convergent with it. One might argue that this is something already evident in Rorty’s work, but although his writing provided an important part of the context in which this book was written, Rorty’s approach is very different from that elaborated here. One of the reasons, therefore, for thinking that a new edition of this book is warranted is not only to update some of its ideas in the light of the work Davidson produced from 1992-2003, nor because it remains the only systematic study of Davidsonian holism – a holism that often seems to be dealt with in all too summary a fashion within the narrowly analytic re- appropriation of Davidson being led by such as LePore and Ludwig – but also because it seems timely once again to reassert the claim concerning the continuity of Davidsonian with hermeneutic thinking. Thus one of the key claims of this book is that Davidson’s work represents perhaps the most important point within the analytic tradition from which it connects with hermeneutic thinking – and this remains so, in my view, in spite of the work more recently undertaken by such as Brandom and McDowell (work that is arguably itself dependent on the work of Davidson). I had not expected, when I began the revisions of the volume, that Davidson would not himself be around to see the new edition when it appeared – he had promised to write something for the new edition and I had sent him a copy of the revised typescript not long before his unexpected death (the sudden turn of events also meant that I put the project to one side and only recently returned to it). His intellectual vitality, to say nothing of the very full and active nature of his life, makes it all the harder to accept the fact of his passing.