Donald Davidson Quotes on Knowledge
Donald Davidson's Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984) and Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (2001) develop the most rigorous truth-theoretic semantics for natural language and a distinctive externalism about meaning, mind, and knowledge. The principle of charity — the methodological constraint that interpretation must maximize the truth of the interpreted speaker's beliefs, on pain of having no determinate interpretation at all — combines with the program of giving the meaning of a language by way of a Tarskian truth theory to yield the result that radical skepticism about the external world is unintelligible, since the very possibility of having mostly true beliefs is built into the conditions of having beliefs at all. The framework has been formative for contemporary philosophy of mind, language, and action.
Quotes
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“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed.”
Davidson, Donald. " A nice derangement of epitaphs ." Philosophical grounds of rationality: Intentions, categories, ends 4 (1986): 157. -
Attributed to Donald Davidson:
“Belief is by nature veridical.”
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Attributed to Donald Davidson:
“Without thought there is no language; without language there is no thought.”
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Attributed to Donald Davidson:
“Charity is forced upon us; whether we like it or not, if we want to understand others, we must count them right in most matters.”
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“The methodological advice to interpret in a way that optimizes agreement should not be conceived as resting on a charitable assumption about human intelligence that might turn out to be false. If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behaviour of a creature as revealing a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our standards, we have no reason to count that creature as r”
Donald Davidson. "Radical interpretation." Dialectica 27.3‐4 (1973): p. 324; as cited in; Herman Parret, Jacques Bouveresse (1981) Meaning and Understanding, p. 186 -
“In quotation not only does language turn on itself, but it does so word by word and expression by expression, and this reflexive twist is inseparable from the convenience and universal applicability of the device. Here we already have enough to draw the interest of the philosopher of language.”
Donald Davidson. "Quotation" in: Theory and Decision, March 1979, Vol. 11, Iss. 1, pp 27-40; Cited by Willis Goth Regier, Quotology, (2010), p. 4 -
“Davidson, Donald. " A nice derangement of epitaphs ." Philosophical grounds of rationality: Intentions, categories, ends 4 (1986): 157.”
I conclude that there is no such thing as a language , not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases. And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense -
“I thought... that the fact that in characterizing truth for a language it is necessary to put words into relations with objects was enough to give some grip for the idea of correspondence; but this now seems to me a mistake. The mistake is in a way only a misnomer, but terminological infelicities have a way of breeding conceptual confusion, and so it is here. Correspondence theories have always be”
Donald Davidson (1990, p. 135), as cited in: Simon Evnine (1991) Donald Davidson. p. 137 -
“There are three basic problems: how a mind can know the world of nature, how it is possible for one mind to know another, and how it is possible to know the contents of our own minds without resort to observation or evidence. It is a mistake, I shall urge, to suppose that these questions can be collapsed into two, or taken into isolation.”
Davidson. Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, (2001) p. 208, as cited in: Dermot Moran (ed). The Routledge Companion to Twentieth Century Philosophy, (2008), p. 681