Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective Other volumes of collected essays by Donald Davidson Essays on Actions and Events Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation Problems of Rationality (forthcoming) Truth, Language, and History (forthcoming) Subjective, Intersubjectivey Objective DONALD DAVIDSON CLARENDON PRESS • OXFORD 2001 This book has been printed digitally and produced in a standard specification in order to ensure its continuing availability OXPORD UNIVERSITY PRESS Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Sao Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © In this collection Donald Davidson 2001 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) Reprinted 2004 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover And you must impose this same condition on any acquirer ISBN 0-19-823752-9 Cover design: Simon Levy Author photography: Ena Bodin To Marcia Cavell This page intentionally left blank Contents Provenance of the Essays and Acknowledgements ix Introduction xiii Subjective 1 1. First Person Authority (1984) 3 2. Knowing One's Own Mind (1987) 15 3. The Myth of the Subjective (1988) 39 4. What is Present to the Mind? (1989) 53 5. Indeterminism and Antirealism (1997) 69 6. The Irreducibility of the Concept of the Self (1998) 85 Intersubjective 93 7. Rational Animals (1982) 95 8. The Second Person (1992) 107 9. The Emergence of Thought (1997) 123 Objective 135 10. A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge (1983) 137 Afterthoughts (1987) 154 11. Empirical Content (1982) 159 12. Epistemology and Truth (1988) 177 13. Epistemology Externalized (1990) 193 14. Three Varieties of Knowledge (1991) 205 Contents List of Volumes of Essays by Donald Davidson 221 Bibliographical References 227 Index 233 This page intentionally left blank Provenance of the Essays and Acknowledgements Essay 1, 'First Person Authority', was read at a conference on inten- tionality organized by Henri Lauener and held in Biel, Switzerland, in 1983. Earlier versions had been read at the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, Stanford University, and the University of Colorado. It was first published in Dialectica, 38 (1984), 101-11. 'Knowing One's Own Mind', Essay 2, was delivered as the Presidential Address at the Sixtieth Annual Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Los Angeles on March 28, 1986, and published in Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association (1987), 441-58. It is reprinted here by permission of the American Philosophical Association. I am greatly indebted to Akeel Bilgrami and Ernie Lepore for criticism and advice, and to Tyler Burge, who generously tried to correct my understanding of his work. Essay 3, 'The Myth of the Subjective', was read at a conference on Consciousness, Language, and Art in Vienna in 1986, and was published in the proceedings Bewusstsein, Sprache und die Kunsl, edited by Michael Benedikt and Rudolf Berger, by Edition S. Verlag der Osterreichischen Staatsdruckerei, 1988. Essay 4, 'What is Present to the Mind?', was delivered at the Second International France Veber Colloquium, held in Bad Radkersburg, Austria, and Gornja Radgona, in what was then Yugoslavia and is now Slovenia. It was published in a book of essays on my work, most of them delivered at that conference. The editors of the book were Johannes Brandl and Wolfgang Gombocz, and it appeared as a special volume of Grazer Philosophische Studien (vol. 36, 1989) titled The Mind of Donald Davidson (Amsterdam: Rodopi). x Provenance of the Essays 'Indeterminism and Antirealism', Essay 5, was read at a confer- ence on realism and antirealism at Santa Clara University in early 1992. It was published in Realism/Antirealism and Epistemology, edited by C. B. Kulp (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997). Essay 6, The Irreducibility of the Concept of the Self, was writ- ten with the help and advice of Marcia Cavell for a book designed to honor the work of Dieter Henrich. The book, Philosophic in synthetischer Absicht, was edited by Marcelo Stamm (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1998). Essay 7, 'Rational Animals', was delivered at a conference orga- nized by Henri Lauener which took place in Biel, Switzerland, in 1981. It was first published in Dialectica, 36 (1982), 317-27. 'The Second Person', which is Essay 8, was given as a talk at a conference on Wittgenstein in Paris in 1989. It was published under the title 'Jusqu'ou va le caractere public d'une langue?' in Wittgenstein et la philosophic aujourd'hui, edited and translated into French by J. Sebestik and A. Soulez (Paris: Meridiens Klincksieck, 1992). In the same year a somewhat modified English version was published in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 17, which was edited by P. French, T. E. Uehling, and H. Wettstein (Indianapolis: University of Notre Dame Press). About four pages near the end are taken from 'The Conditions of Thought', a paper written for, and delivered at, a plenary session at the World Congress of Philosophy in Brighton, 1988. It was published in Le Cahier du College International de Philosophic (Paris: Editions Osiris, 1989). Essay 9, The Emergence of Thought', was given as a talk at a seminar on emergence held at the University of Frankfurt in 1993. Translated into German by T. Marschner, it was published with the title 'Die Emergenz des Denkens' in Die Erfindung des Universums? Neue Oberlegungen zur philosophischen Kosmologie, edited by W. G. Saltzer, P. Eisenhardt, D. Kurth, and R. E. Zimmermann (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1997). It was subsequently published in English with its present title in Erkenntnis, 51 (1999), 7-17. Essay 10, 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge', was my contribution to a colloquium organized by Richard Rorty as part of the 1981 Stuttgart Hegel Congress. W. V. Quine and Hilary Putnam were the other participants in the colloquium. Our papers were published two years later in the proceedings of that congress, Provenance of the Essays xi Kant oder Hegel? After Stuttgart the four of us had a more leisurely exchange on the same topics at the University of Heidelberg. When the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association met in March of 1983, Rorty read a paper titled 'Pragmatism, Davidson, and Truth'. In it he commented on some of the things I had written in 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge'; his paper was subsequently published (with revisions) in Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. I replied with 'Afterthoughts, 1987'. which was first published in conjunction with a reprinting of 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge' in Reading Rorty, edited by Alan Malachowski (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1990). 'Afterthoughts' as printed here is, aside from some biblio- graphical details noted above, a reprint of 'Afterthoughts, 1987'. 'Empirical Content', Essay 11, was read at a conference in Vienna (in the house Wittgenstein helped design) to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the births of Moritz Schlick and Otto Neurath. It was published in the year of the conference in Grazer Philosophische Studien, 16-17 (1982). Essay 12, 'Epistemology and Truth', was read at the Fourth Panamerican Philosophy Conference, held in Cordoba, Argentina, in September of 1987. It was published in the proceedings of that conference by the National University of Cordoba in 1988. Essay 13, 'Epistemology Externalized', was read in an early version at a SADAF meeting in Buenos Aires in 1989. The next year it was presented at a conference in Biel, Switzerland, and published in 1991 in Dialectica, 45 2-3: 191-202. 'Three Varieties of Knowledge'. Essay 14, was written to be delivered in February of 1991 as an A. J. Ayer Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy. When the date for the lecture arrived, a snowstorm disabled the transportation system of southern England to such an extent that the lecture was cancelled. It was subsequently published with other memorial lectures in A. J. Ayer Memorial Essays: Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 30, edited by A. Phillips Griffiths (Cambridge University Press, 1991). With some changes it was delivered as a Heisenberg Lecture in one of the upgraded stables of the Nymphenburg Palace in Munich and published in German in Merkur with the same title as the title of the present book. This page intentionally left blank Introduction The essays in this book are concerned with three sorts of preposi- tional knowledge and the relations among them. We all have knowl- edge of our own minds, knowledge of the contents of other minds, and knowledge of the shared environment. The subsections of the book are titled Subjective, Intersubjective, and Objective. The words track real differences. First person knowledge is distinguished by the fact that we can legitimately claim a unique sort of authority with respect to what we believe, want, intend, and some other attitudes. Second person knowledge and knowledge of the rest of the world of nature do not have this authority, but they differ from each other in that our knowledge of other minds is normative in a way the latter is not.