Donald Davidson Quotes on Mind
Donald Davidson’s papers collected in Essays on Actions and Events (1980) and Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984) gave late twentieth-century analytic philosophy of mind one of its most influential systematic positions. The central commitments — anomalous monism (mental events are physical events but mental properties are irreducible to physical properties), the principle of charity in radical interpretation, and the doctrine that there can be no thought without language — articulate a distinctive non-reductive physicalism that takes seriously both the autonomy of the rational and the requirement that mental events have causal traction in the natural world. The framework grounds Davidson’s parallel work in the philosophy of language (the truth-theoretic semantics descending from Tarski) and shaped the subsequent analytic engagement with intentionality, action, and externalism through Burge, Dennett, and McDowell.
Quotes
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Attributed to Donald Davidson:
“Reasons are causes.”
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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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“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 rational, as having beliefs, or as saying anything”
Donald Davidson. "Radical interpretation." Dialectica 27.3‐4 (1973): p. 324; as cited in; Herman Parret, Jacques Bouveresse (1981) Meaning and Understanding, p. 186 -
“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 been conceived as providing an explanation or analysis of truth, and this, a Tarski-style theory of truth, certainly does not do.”
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