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Essays on Actions and Events
This collection brings together a series of connected essays on the nature of human action. Davidson argues for an ontology that includes events along with persons and other objects. Topics discussed include freedom to act; weakness of the will; the logical form of talk about actions, intentions, and causality; the logic of practical reasoning; Hume's theory of the indirect passions; and the nature and limits of decision theory.
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1980
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About the author
Donald Davidson
119 books69 followersDonald Davidson was one of the most important philosophers of the latter half of the twentieth century. His ideas, presented in a series of essays from the 1960's onwards, have been influential across a range of areas from semantic theory through to epistemology and ethics. Davidson's work exhibits a breadth of approach, as well as a unitary and systematic character, which is unusual within twentieth century analytic philosophy. Thus, although he acknowledged an important debt to W. V. O. Quine, Davidson's thought amalgamates influences (though these are not always explicit) from a variety of sources, including Quine, C. I. Lewis, Frank Ramsey, Immanuel Kant and the later Wittgenstein. And while often developed separately, Davidson's ideas nevertheless combine in such a way as to provide a single integrated approach to the problems of knowledge, action, language and mind. The breadth and unity of his thought, in combination with the sometimes-terse character of his prose, means that Davidson is not an easy writer to approach. Yet however demanding his work might sometimes appear, this in no way detracts from either the significance of that work or the influence it has exercised and will undoubtedly continue to exercise. Indeed, in the hands of Richard Rorty and others, and through the widespread translation of his writings, Davidson's ideas have reached an audience that extends far beyond the confines of English-speaking analytic philosophy. Of late twentieth century American philosophers, perhaps only Quine has had a similar reception and influence.
Donald Herbert Davidson was born on March 6th, 1917, in Springfield, Massachusetts, USA. He died suddenly, as a consequence of cardiac arrest following knee surgery, on Aug. 30, 2003, in Berkeley, California. Remaining both physically and philosophically active up until his death, Davidson left behind behind a number of important and unfinished projects including a major book on the nature of predication. The latter volume was published posthumously (see Davidson, 2005b), together with two additional volumes of collected essays (Davidson 2004, 2005a), under the guidance of Marcia Cavell.
Davidson completed his undergraduate study at Harvard, graduating in 1939. His early interests were in literature and classics and, as an undergraduate, Davidson was strongly influenced by A. N. Whitehead. After starting graduate work in classical philosophy (completing a Master's degree in 1941), Davidson's studies were interrupted by service with the US Navy in the Mediterranean from 1942-45. He continued work in classical philosophy after the war, graduating from Harvard in 1949 with a dissertation on Plato's ‘Philebus’ (1990b). By this time, however, the direction of Davidson's thinking had already, under Quine's influence, changed quite dramatically (the two having first met at Harvard in 1939-40) and he had begun to move away from the largely literary and historical concerns that had preoccupied him as an undergraduate towards a more strongly analytical approach.
While his first position was at Queen's College in New York, Davidson spent much of the early part of his career (1951-1967) at Stanford University. He subsequently held positions at Princeton (1967-1970), Rockefeller (1970-1976), and the University of Chicago (1976-1981). From 1981 until his death he worked at the University of California, Berkeley. Davidson was the recipient of a number of award and fellowships and was a visitor at many universities around the world. Davidson was twice married, with his second marriage, in 1984, being to Marcia Cavell.
-http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dav...
Donald Herbert Davidson was born on March 6th, 1917, in Springfield, Massachusetts, USA. He died suddenly, as a consequence of cardiac arrest following knee surgery, on Aug. 30, 2003, in Berkeley, California. Remaining both physically and philosophically active up until his death, Davidson left behind behind a number of important and unfinished projects including a major book on the nature of predication. The latter volume was published posthumously (see Davidson, 2005b), together with two additional volumes of collected essays (Davidson 2004, 2005a), under the guidance of Marcia Cavell.
Davidson completed his undergraduate study at Harvard, graduating in 1939. His early interests were in literature and classics and, as an undergraduate, Davidson was strongly influenced by A. N. Whitehead. After starting graduate work in classical philosophy (completing a Master's degree in 1941), Davidson's studies were interrupted by service with the US Navy in the Mediterranean from 1942-45. He continued work in classical philosophy after the war, graduating from Harvard in 1949 with a dissertation on Plato's ‘Philebus’ (1990b). By this time, however, the direction of Davidson's thinking had already, under Quine's influence, changed quite dramatically (the two having first met at Harvard in 1939-40) and he had begun to move away from the largely literary and historical concerns that had preoccupied him as an undergraduate towards a more strongly analytical approach.
While his first position was at Queen's College in New York, Davidson spent much of the early part of his career (1951-1967) at Stanford University. He subsequently held positions at Princeton (1967-1970), Rockefeller (1970-1976), and the University of Chicago (1976-1981). From 1981 until his death he worked at the University of California, Berkeley. Davidson was the recipient of a number of award and fellowships and was a visitor at many universities around the world. Davidson was twice married, with his second marriage, in 1984, being to Marcia Cavell.
-http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dav...
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June 4, 2025
There is no way for me to get into all of the key ideas found across these essays. Let me focus on a strand of thought I’ve begin picking up on in the essays “Mental events,” “Psychology as Philosophy,” Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” and “How is Weakness of the Will Possible?” This is all very tentative at the moment. Davidson’s thought is subtle and deep. I’m not sure if I’m on the right track, but here’s a go.
Davidson argues that it is necessary to behavior (as an expansive category defined in terms of contrasting mere reflexive or physiologically-determined motion; it includes intentional action, i.e., action we undertake on the basis of reasons we’ve deliberately fixed, but goes beyond that) that citing the agent’s intention is relevant. Moreover, the concept intention must be defined in relation with those of belief, desire, and other propositional attitudes, and together these cannot be properly analyzed in terms to physical concepts. The upshot is that we shouldn’t expect the social sciences to offer explanations of the forms we find in the physical sciences. While our everyday practice of making each other’s behaviors intelligible by attributing to the agent certain beliefs and desires is a form of offering causal explanation, Davidson shows that these are causal explanations in a significantly different sense in which the explanations found in the physical sciences are. In the process of arguing for this, Davidson shows that belief, desire, intention, and action must have certain essential characteristics, on the basis of certain kinds of situation that we find ourselves in and that must serve as the starting point for our talk about these mental categories.
How does Davidson establish these points? He starts off with his thesis on the relation between mind and world. While the mind is part of the world, it is impossible for us to find deterministic laws that govern the mind. This follows from the facts that such laws must cite kinds or concepts concerning the phenomenon under consideration, and any mental concept cannot be analyzed in terms of physical concepts; and we only have deterministic laws for physical phenomena, involving physical concepts. Why this irreducibility of the mental concept? In order to pick out any particular belief, desire, intention, etc. in a given person’s psychology, we must understand other parts of their psychology in relation to one another. For example, all we have to start off with for ascertaining any belief of a person is to look at their behavior; alongside consideration of their desires, we can attribute to them belief, which makes sense of their behavior.
Davidson implies that it is impossible to just know what a particular belief of a certain person at a certain time is independent of this basis. At first, one might think that belief can be simply introspectively offered. In this paper, Davidson doesn’t address this possibility, but I have some tentative thoughts on how he might. In other work (e.g., “Thought and Talk”) he argues that in order to determine the content of a particular thought, we must look at both belief and speech behavior. In particular in order to have thought, we must be able to interpret the speech of others.
How is this supposed to work? The kind of thought under consideration is thought that represents something as being the case, and so can be assessed as true or false. This is the heart of any other form of cognition and communication, such as asking questions or putting out commands. In order to represent something as being the case (which is just having a belief), it must be possible to distinguish what that is which you represent from alternative possibilities. For example, if I’m thinking about lambs in the highlands, it must be possible to distinguish this from my thinking about lambs shivering or lambs soon to become grownup sheep… (I’m not sure how to complete this, and have inserted a question about it below).
There are certain necessary conditions that we must assume are in place in order for us to go about the practice of attributing beliefs to one another (also desires, intentions, etc.); these serve ipso facto as truths we must assume, whenever we think there is a certain belief, desire, intention, etc. In general, when we attribute a belief to a person, we must have reason to do so, and this reason will normally be that it describes or explains their action. In explaining action, we’ll mention a desire, value, aim, etc. the subject had, in addition to a belief that explains why the person took the particular means at hand as an opportunity for satisfying this desire. Let me list out what we must assume must be the case, in order for us to attribute beliefs and to talk about belief at all (in no particular order).
First, a set of assumptions arises from consideration of the fact that when we posit beliefs and desires in explaining someone’s behavior, we must take these beliefs and desires to cause their behavior, where the causal linkage between these mental phenomena must be of a certain form. Davidson shows that it’s unlikely we can offer necessary and sufficient conditions in specifying this essential form of causal linkages; attempts at this will end up being circular. A fair characterization, however, is that the beliefs and desires of the subject must bear on one another, and on causing action, through a rational process. For example, we clearly do not think that a person’s belief and desire, which we’ve posited to make sense of their behavior, could have totally randomly or accidentally ricocheted off each other and elicited their behavior. Nay, we have a sense of how if we ourselves had this belief and desire, how it’d be reasonable to go about the action that we see the subject under consideration undertake.
Davidson specifies that there are two ways in which beliefs and desires may rationally cause action. First, we can be aware of our beliefs and desires, endorse them, see how a certain course of action is good in light of these, and endorse that. Second, we can be oblivious to all of this and be running on autopilot, one might say. Nevertheless, when we aren’t occurrently thinking about and endorsing our reasons for action, still our beliefs and desires integrally figure into why we act as we do.
Another set of necessary conditions arises from appreciation that in going about the practice of attributing beliefs to one another, we must assume that we’re talking about the same belief under consideration. Tracking a certain belief of a certain person presupposes that we’ve talked about it, and our communication was successful, in the sense that we’re talking about the same thing. So, what’s necessary to communication is also necessary to belief.
What’s necessary to communication? Davidson goes into this elsewhere. For example, in “Thought and Talk” he argues that we must generally have true beliefs and assume this of one another, among other things… In this collection, Davidson focuses on how in communication we use language, and in using language we make certain fine distinctions; and this leaves an imprint on belief: we take beliefs to be as fine-grained as the distinctions we make in language are.
For example, I ask my friend to put on some music, and he puts on some jazz. I attribute to him the intention to put on jazz music; he desires to listen to this kind of music, and he believes that the song he put on is of this kind. But there are alternative attributions that are possible. I might think that he intends to put on a genre of music that I’m befuddled by but am interested in coming to appreciate, that he intends to educate me, or even he intends to annoy me (if I assume that he picked up on that I wanted familiar, soothing music). In general, in attributing beliefs, desires, and intentions, we can make very fine distinctions, as fine as the distinctions afforded by our language.
This implies that the task of figuring out whether my friend indeed has the belief I attribute to him is just as tricky as the task of figuring out what he means by a certain sentence he utters. There are as many possible beliefs behind a behavior as there are meanings behind an utterance. Davidson even says that these two problems are the same. I can’t know what he believes without also knowing what he means by what he says. Vice-versa, I can’t know what he means by his speech without also knowing what he believes. In order to interpret his words, I must be able to correlate his words with what he sees in the world, or what he takes to be the case. The basic conveyer of meaning is the belief, which is a matter of taking something to be the case; and to tease out exactly what a person takes to be the case requires using language, since behavior isn’t fine-grained enough. This practice also requires knowing what he desires or values; that must be hold fixed, when I observe his behavior, in order to narrow down the possibilities of what he believes in doing what he does.
Rationality and coherence of a person is presupposed beneath this all. If a person kept on taking up and discarding beliefs and desires, or if their beliefs and desires could constantly conflict, there is no way of telling what they mean by what they say, and what they believe/desire by what they do. Any individual behavior is vastly underdetermined regarding candidate ascriptions; it takes looking at my friend's behavior elsewhere, and his beliefs and desires elsewhere, to narrow it down. For these parts of him from elsewhere to help me narrow it down now, he must be rational and coherent; his belief from elsewhere should be constant and apply now, for example.
On a further note on rationality: Davidson uses the fact that assuming it for the subject is necessary to individuating belief for supporting his position of anomalous monism. Mental concepts can't be reduced to physical concepts because the physical laws we have for conceptualizing physical phenomena do not abide by norms of rationality and coherence. At best, we can get rough correlations between mental and physical phenomena, but nothing like deterministic laws that predict the workings of mental phenomena. Why exactly? I didn't follow this, but I think that Davidson thinks that as soon as we eliminate the element of rationality from the picture of understanding mental phenomena, we've changed the subject matter, so there's something about the irreducibility of rationality itself.
In other words, in thinking that a certain person has a certain belief, we also must think that the following is the case: my friend is generally rational; his beliefs and desires are coherent over time, and in general his beliefs are true. He can speak his mind, and I can, too. What he means by what he says align with what I’d mean by saying the same thing. Beliefs and desires cause his actions, where this causation is rational in character (i.e., taking there to be a reason for doing X causes him to do X).
Davidson addresses the objection that we can understand belief and desire under the explanatory mode of the physical sciences. There’s decision theory. On that approach to understanding belief and desire, it is believed that we can compute from a person’s choices in an activity (e.g., gambling) what that persons’ values are, and what degrees of belief they have in various propositions relevant to the task. Davidson’s response is that decision theory is downstream of all the considerations he’s been raising. In order for the decision theorist to tell what preferences and credences a person has, they must first apparently know what they’ve chosen, and knowing that requires that the theorist has observed their behavior and attributed to them a certain intention in light of that. The issues surrounding the practice of attributing belief applies at this point.
In order to apply decision theory, we just first need to find a proposition with the property that the subject doesn’t care whether it is true or false; its truth value is not tied up with outcomes that are more or less attractive. This is supposed to give a baseline for fixing credences, akin to how in physics, we specify temperature on the basis of appealing to certain ideal conditions and thinking about how motion happens under those. Davidson’s response, however, is that we aren’t entitled to think that such propositions with that certain property exist. Whenever we look at a person’s behavior, there is a range of propositions we could raise their credence towards which would be relevant to explaining their behavior. To pick out propositions whose purportedly having the above property seems right will always be ad-hoc and unestablished.
Here are the most urgent of the questions I'm left with. First, how is it supposed to work that we can’t have thought without speech? Is it that the “fabric” of thought is belief, i.e., the “special attitude” of taking something to be true, and the only way to fix belief is to see what a person utters under the circumstances that would make their utterance true—where this won’t work with behavior alone, which is far too rough-grained, and so we need communication to determine how the person is seeing the world and so what they’re taking to be true regarding what they’re picking out there? (And behind all of this is the assumption that because we do already have language, and attributing belief happens typically in language, we’ll demand of a person’s beliefs to be as fine-grained as what we can express in language?)
Davidson claims that it’s a two-way street between knowing what someone means and knowing what they believe. I have a better sense of the direction from knowing what someone means to making possible knowing what someone believes. For example, in order to know what my friend believes, I need to be able to talk to him and figure out his views from that, given that behavior is going to be very underdetermined regarding the various distinctions found in language. But what about the opposite direction—why in order for me to know what he means, given the exact words he uses, I need to have a sense of what he believes? Is it as simple as that, in the case of using words in demonstrative reference, my friend's belief about what’s going on secures what he’s referring to, and so what he means in this instance?
Is Davidson’s argument concerning the interdependence of belief, speech, and meaning secretly circular— from the premise that when we take something to be the case, often we do so by using language, so the finegrainedness of language must be shot through meaning, intention, etc.?
Is Davidson’s conception of rationality deeply interpersonal? It appears that in requiring a person to be rational in order for us to interpret them, this isn’t only a matter of that we assume that their beliefs and desires from elsewhere apply now and are generally coherent. Maybe we also need to add that I’d assume you have something analogous to what I’d see as reasonable for myself? Or maybe that addition isn’t necessary…
Why doesn’t Davidson address the possibility that we can ascertain our beliefs in isolation, independently of observing one another and communicating? It isn’t an uncompelling picture that through sheer introspection I can know what I believe, that I don’t have to rely on others’ observing me, or my observing other people, in order to gain the capacities or resources necessary for telling what I mean by what I say, and what I believe. (I sort of remember that he answers this in his paper "Three Varieties of Knowledge," so I'm gonna revisit that).
A last note. I'm very impressed by a certain dialectical move Davidson does, in at least two contexts: in addressing the relation between avoiding contradictions and rationality, and the relation between speech and thought. With rationality, for example, we should look at what must hold of the subject, and her interlocutors, in order for her to potentially be rational at any given instance, and then we can understand how at certain instances she may do something that we can deem ‘irrational’ by the lights of this general sense of rationality that’s located in the different domain of a lifetime, or the mind as a whole… So, there’s a move of appreciating how K works at a “global level,” and then seeing how it’s still appropriate to talk about K at a “local level,” and Davidson might say that we’re forced to understand K locally, and the lack of it, in terms of global K?
With language use and speech, we can see how it’s necessary that in order to assess someone’s claim as true or false, we must first determine exactly what they’re saying; and it’s necessary that behavior alone is underdetermined regarding exactly what they mean. Davidson says that dogs, or any nonverbal creature, can have thoughts, or we can appropriately attribute thoughts to them. But there is nothing the dog does that enables us to attribute appropriate one particular thought that P over another thought that Q (or is it rather that if the interpreter of the dog also lacks language, then we can’t get determinacy of thought of the sort that is necessary for the evaluation of truth and falsity of thought?) So, while in any individual instance, verbally articulating thought is not necessary for there to be thought, it is a necessary condition for the capacity to have propositional thought that the subject (or both the subject and interlocutors?) be capable of speech. Without speech, it’s gonna be left under-determined or indeterminate like this; we need speech in order to get the possibility of ascertaining truth or falsity, amidst the range of eligible candidates on the basis of behavior.
What’s the nature of this shift in the dialectic? Seems that Davidson does this when addressing whether it’s a requirement upon rationality that we avoid contradictions, as well. This seems particularly strange, elusive, and interesting. It likely isn’t a straightforward move from examining what’s required at a particular instance over into what’s required at the level of development or ontogenesis. This is because Davidson appears to be very concerned with how our concepts are constitutive upon practical conditions, like our capacities to communicate. But maybe it is as straightforward as that. Here’s a go: We’re asking the wrong question in asking what’s necessary for particular instances of K, because K is intrinsically admitting of variations across instances, and the better question to ask is after the underlying principles concerning K that explains those variations. Or, maybe there’s no general account that explains both of these dialectic moves, but their similarities are superficial…
Davidson argues that it is necessary to behavior (as an expansive category defined in terms of contrasting mere reflexive or physiologically-determined motion; it includes intentional action, i.e., action we undertake on the basis of reasons we’ve deliberately fixed, but goes beyond that) that citing the agent’s intention is relevant. Moreover, the concept intention must be defined in relation with those of belief, desire, and other propositional attitudes, and together these cannot be properly analyzed in terms to physical concepts. The upshot is that we shouldn’t expect the social sciences to offer explanations of the forms we find in the physical sciences. While our everyday practice of making each other’s behaviors intelligible by attributing to the agent certain beliefs and desires is a form of offering causal explanation, Davidson shows that these are causal explanations in a significantly different sense in which the explanations found in the physical sciences are. In the process of arguing for this, Davidson shows that belief, desire, intention, and action must have certain essential characteristics, on the basis of certain kinds of situation that we find ourselves in and that must serve as the starting point for our talk about these mental categories.
How does Davidson establish these points? He starts off with his thesis on the relation between mind and world. While the mind is part of the world, it is impossible for us to find deterministic laws that govern the mind. This follows from the facts that such laws must cite kinds or concepts concerning the phenomenon under consideration, and any mental concept cannot be analyzed in terms of physical concepts; and we only have deterministic laws for physical phenomena, involving physical concepts. Why this irreducibility of the mental concept? In order to pick out any particular belief, desire, intention, etc. in a given person’s psychology, we must understand other parts of their psychology in relation to one another. For example, all we have to start off with for ascertaining any belief of a person is to look at their behavior; alongside consideration of their desires, we can attribute to them belief, which makes sense of their behavior.
Davidson implies that it is impossible to just know what a particular belief of a certain person at a certain time is independent of this basis. At first, one might think that belief can be simply introspectively offered. In this paper, Davidson doesn’t address this possibility, but I have some tentative thoughts on how he might. In other work (e.g., “Thought and Talk”) he argues that in order to determine the content of a particular thought, we must look at both belief and speech behavior. In particular in order to have thought, we must be able to interpret the speech of others.
How is this supposed to work? The kind of thought under consideration is thought that represents something as being the case, and so can be assessed as true or false. This is the heart of any other form of cognition and communication, such as asking questions or putting out commands. In order to represent something as being the case (which is just having a belief), it must be possible to distinguish what that is which you represent from alternative possibilities. For example, if I’m thinking about lambs in the highlands, it must be possible to distinguish this from my thinking about lambs shivering or lambs soon to become grownup sheep… (I’m not sure how to complete this, and have inserted a question about it below).
There are certain necessary conditions that we must assume are in place in order for us to go about the practice of attributing beliefs to one another (also desires, intentions, etc.); these serve ipso facto as truths we must assume, whenever we think there is a certain belief, desire, intention, etc. In general, when we attribute a belief to a person, we must have reason to do so, and this reason will normally be that it describes or explains their action. In explaining action, we’ll mention a desire, value, aim, etc. the subject had, in addition to a belief that explains why the person took the particular means at hand as an opportunity for satisfying this desire. Let me list out what we must assume must be the case, in order for us to attribute beliefs and to talk about belief at all (in no particular order).
First, a set of assumptions arises from consideration of the fact that when we posit beliefs and desires in explaining someone’s behavior, we must take these beliefs and desires to cause their behavior, where the causal linkage between these mental phenomena must be of a certain form. Davidson shows that it’s unlikely we can offer necessary and sufficient conditions in specifying this essential form of causal linkages; attempts at this will end up being circular. A fair characterization, however, is that the beliefs and desires of the subject must bear on one another, and on causing action, through a rational process. For example, we clearly do not think that a person’s belief and desire, which we’ve posited to make sense of their behavior, could have totally randomly or accidentally ricocheted off each other and elicited their behavior. Nay, we have a sense of how if we ourselves had this belief and desire, how it’d be reasonable to go about the action that we see the subject under consideration undertake.
Davidson specifies that there are two ways in which beliefs and desires may rationally cause action. First, we can be aware of our beliefs and desires, endorse them, see how a certain course of action is good in light of these, and endorse that. Second, we can be oblivious to all of this and be running on autopilot, one might say. Nevertheless, when we aren’t occurrently thinking about and endorsing our reasons for action, still our beliefs and desires integrally figure into why we act as we do.
Another set of necessary conditions arises from appreciation that in going about the practice of attributing beliefs to one another, we must assume that we’re talking about the same belief under consideration. Tracking a certain belief of a certain person presupposes that we’ve talked about it, and our communication was successful, in the sense that we’re talking about the same thing. So, what’s necessary to communication is also necessary to belief.
What’s necessary to communication? Davidson goes into this elsewhere. For example, in “Thought and Talk” he argues that we must generally have true beliefs and assume this of one another, among other things… In this collection, Davidson focuses on how in communication we use language, and in using language we make certain fine distinctions; and this leaves an imprint on belief: we take beliefs to be as fine-grained as the distinctions we make in language are.
For example, I ask my friend to put on some music, and he puts on some jazz. I attribute to him the intention to put on jazz music; he desires to listen to this kind of music, and he believes that the song he put on is of this kind. But there are alternative attributions that are possible. I might think that he intends to put on a genre of music that I’m befuddled by but am interested in coming to appreciate, that he intends to educate me, or even he intends to annoy me (if I assume that he picked up on that I wanted familiar, soothing music). In general, in attributing beliefs, desires, and intentions, we can make very fine distinctions, as fine as the distinctions afforded by our language.
This implies that the task of figuring out whether my friend indeed has the belief I attribute to him is just as tricky as the task of figuring out what he means by a certain sentence he utters. There are as many possible beliefs behind a behavior as there are meanings behind an utterance. Davidson even says that these two problems are the same. I can’t know what he believes without also knowing what he means by what he says. Vice-versa, I can’t know what he means by his speech without also knowing what he believes. In order to interpret his words, I must be able to correlate his words with what he sees in the world, or what he takes to be the case. The basic conveyer of meaning is the belief, which is a matter of taking something to be the case; and to tease out exactly what a person takes to be the case requires using language, since behavior isn’t fine-grained enough. This practice also requires knowing what he desires or values; that must be hold fixed, when I observe his behavior, in order to narrow down the possibilities of what he believes in doing what he does.
Rationality and coherence of a person is presupposed beneath this all. If a person kept on taking up and discarding beliefs and desires, or if their beliefs and desires could constantly conflict, there is no way of telling what they mean by what they say, and what they believe/desire by what they do. Any individual behavior is vastly underdetermined regarding candidate ascriptions; it takes looking at my friend's behavior elsewhere, and his beliefs and desires elsewhere, to narrow it down. For these parts of him from elsewhere to help me narrow it down now, he must be rational and coherent; his belief from elsewhere should be constant and apply now, for example.
On a further note on rationality: Davidson uses the fact that assuming it for the subject is necessary to individuating belief for supporting his position of anomalous monism. Mental concepts can't be reduced to physical concepts because the physical laws we have for conceptualizing physical phenomena do not abide by norms of rationality and coherence. At best, we can get rough correlations between mental and physical phenomena, but nothing like deterministic laws that predict the workings of mental phenomena. Why exactly? I didn't follow this, but I think that Davidson thinks that as soon as we eliminate the element of rationality from the picture of understanding mental phenomena, we've changed the subject matter, so there's something about the irreducibility of rationality itself.
In other words, in thinking that a certain person has a certain belief, we also must think that the following is the case: my friend is generally rational; his beliefs and desires are coherent over time, and in general his beliefs are true. He can speak his mind, and I can, too. What he means by what he says align with what I’d mean by saying the same thing. Beliefs and desires cause his actions, where this causation is rational in character (i.e., taking there to be a reason for doing X causes him to do X).
Davidson addresses the objection that we can understand belief and desire under the explanatory mode of the physical sciences. There’s decision theory. On that approach to understanding belief and desire, it is believed that we can compute from a person’s choices in an activity (e.g., gambling) what that persons’ values are, and what degrees of belief they have in various propositions relevant to the task. Davidson’s response is that decision theory is downstream of all the considerations he’s been raising. In order for the decision theorist to tell what preferences and credences a person has, they must first apparently know what they’ve chosen, and knowing that requires that the theorist has observed their behavior and attributed to them a certain intention in light of that. The issues surrounding the practice of attributing belief applies at this point.
In order to apply decision theory, we just first need to find a proposition with the property that the subject doesn’t care whether it is true or false; its truth value is not tied up with outcomes that are more or less attractive. This is supposed to give a baseline for fixing credences, akin to how in physics, we specify temperature on the basis of appealing to certain ideal conditions and thinking about how motion happens under those. Davidson’s response, however, is that we aren’t entitled to think that such propositions with that certain property exist. Whenever we look at a person’s behavior, there is a range of propositions we could raise their credence towards which would be relevant to explaining their behavior. To pick out propositions whose purportedly having the above property seems right will always be ad-hoc and unestablished.
Here are the most urgent of the questions I'm left with. First, how is it supposed to work that we can’t have thought without speech? Is it that the “fabric” of thought is belief, i.e., the “special attitude” of taking something to be true, and the only way to fix belief is to see what a person utters under the circumstances that would make their utterance true—where this won’t work with behavior alone, which is far too rough-grained, and so we need communication to determine how the person is seeing the world and so what they’re taking to be true regarding what they’re picking out there? (And behind all of this is the assumption that because we do already have language, and attributing belief happens typically in language, we’ll demand of a person’s beliefs to be as fine-grained as what we can express in language?)
Davidson claims that it’s a two-way street between knowing what someone means and knowing what they believe. I have a better sense of the direction from knowing what someone means to making possible knowing what someone believes. For example, in order to know what my friend believes, I need to be able to talk to him and figure out his views from that, given that behavior is going to be very underdetermined regarding the various distinctions found in language. But what about the opposite direction—why in order for me to know what he means, given the exact words he uses, I need to have a sense of what he believes? Is it as simple as that, in the case of using words in demonstrative reference, my friend's belief about what’s going on secures what he’s referring to, and so what he means in this instance?
Is Davidson’s argument concerning the interdependence of belief, speech, and meaning secretly circular— from the premise that when we take something to be the case, often we do so by using language, so the finegrainedness of language must be shot through meaning, intention, etc.?
Is Davidson’s conception of rationality deeply interpersonal? It appears that in requiring a person to be rational in order for us to interpret them, this isn’t only a matter of that we assume that their beliefs and desires from elsewhere apply now and are generally coherent. Maybe we also need to add that I’d assume you have something analogous to what I’d see as reasonable for myself? Or maybe that addition isn’t necessary…
Why doesn’t Davidson address the possibility that we can ascertain our beliefs in isolation, independently of observing one another and communicating? It isn’t an uncompelling picture that through sheer introspection I can know what I believe, that I don’t have to rely on others’ observing me, or my observing other people, in order to gain the capacities or resources necessary for telling what I mean by what I say, and what I believe. (I sort of remember that he answers this in his paper "Three Varieties of Knowledge," so I'm gonna revisit that).
A last note. I'm very impressed by a certain dialectical move Davidson does, in at least two contexts: in addressing the relation between avoiding contradictions and rationality, and the relation between speech and thought. With rationality, for example, we should look at what must hold of the subject, and her interlocutors, in order for her to potentially be rational at any given instance, and then we can understand how at certain instances she may do something that we can deem ‘irrational’ by the lights of this general sense of rationality that’s located in the different domain of a lifetime, or the mind as a whole… So, there’s a move of appreciating how K works at a “global level,” and then seeing how it’s still appropriate to talk about K at a “local level,” and Davidson might say that we’re forced to understand K locally, and the lack of it, in terms of global K?
With language use and speech, we can see how it’s necessary that in order to assess someone’s claim as true or false, we must first determine exactly what they’re saying; and it’s necessary that behavior alone is underdetermined regarding exactly what they mean. Davidson says that dogs, or any nonverbal creature, can have thoughts, or we can appropriately attribute thoughts to them. But there is nothing the dog does that enables us to attribute appropriate one particular thought that P over another thought that Q (or is it rather that if the interpreter of the dog also lacks language, then we can’t get determinacy of thought of the sort that is necessary for the evaluation of truth and falsity of thought?) So, while in any individual instance, verbally articulating thought is not necessary for there to be thought, it is a necessary condition for the capacity to have propositional thought that the subject (or both the subject and interlocutors?) be capable of speech. Without speech, it’s gonna be left under-determined or indeterminate like this; we need speech in order to get the possibility of ascertaining truth or falsity, amidst the range of eligible candidates on the basis of behavior.
What’s the nature of this shift in the dialectic? Seems that Davidson does this when addressing whether it’s a requirement upon rationality that we avoid contradictions, as well. This seems particularly strange, elusive, and interesting. It likely isn’t a straightforward move from examining what’s required at a particular instance over into what’s required at the level of development or ontogenesis. This is because Davidson appears to be very concerned with how our concepts are constitutive upon practical conditions, like our capacities to communicate. But maybe it is as straightforward as that. Here’s a go: We’re asking the wrong question in asking what’s necessary for particular instances of K, because K is intrinsically admitting of variations across instances, and the better question to ask is after the underlying principles concerning K that explains those variations. Or, maybe there’s no general account that explains both of these dialectic moves, but their similarities are superficial…
March 25, 2007
Who thought it would be a good idea to have Davidson look like a ghost on the cover of this and the four other volumes? He's the most frightening on Problems of Rationality.
April 16, 2024
When we’re in the business of giving reasons, we’re in the business of causal explanation. While causal explanation connects with nomological reference, it only hints at there being *an* explanatory law, not to *the* law. Even though each mental event is identical to a singular physical event, that does not mean the laws in question are psychophysical laws, for the kind of explanation we get from connecting different mental events can’t be gotten from scratch by connecting (how?) different physical events; hence a difference at the level of the scope of the quantifier, or a form of “holism” in DD’s account, aka anomalous monism. I’m not entirely convinced by it, because I’m wondering if the nomological oddity at the mental level couldn’t be explained away as precisely a feature of folk psychology; ofc strictly physical laws wouldn’t yield the same pattern, to use Dennett talk, as psychology, but isn’t that an argument for, and not against, EM? But ok, DD was writing in the 70s.
In this historical perspective, he looks like an intermediate spot between Anscombian dualism (intentional and observational are description relative features of an action, and reasons and causes don’t overlap) and Dennett (reasons and causes do overlap, and the difference is just ways of carving up a pattern).
More about causal explanations: just because someone has the intention of doing something, makes the relevant steps towards doing it, and does it, and it happens that what he had the intention of doing gets done, doesn’t mean he caused it necessarily: there is still some contingence left between the point where his contribution to the event stops, and the world’s functioning as it does begins (cf the famous example of the wild animals startled by a gunshot). The more specification goes into the description of the cause, the more the effect will appear necessary, but the less also the cause will appear sufficient, and vice versa.
Pretty good philosophy overall, some of the middle essays were not exactly gripping though; really love his style, agree with his criticisms of Strawson on concept dependence and Parsons on predicate places in action descriptions, but none of this really blew my socks off. Maybe it’s getting oldy
In this historical perspective, he looks like an intermediate spot between Anscombian dualism (intentional and observational are description relative features of an action, and reasons and causes don’t overlap) and Dennett (reasons and causes do overlap, and the difference is just ways of carving up a pattern).
More about causal explanations: just because someone has the intention of doing something, makes the relevant steps towards doing it, and does it, and it happens that what he had the intention of doing gets done, doesn’t mean he caused it necessarily: there is still some contingence left between the point where his contribution to the event stops, and the world’s functioning as it does begins (cf the famous example of the wild animals startled by a gunshot). The more specification goes into the description of the cause, the more the effect will appear necessary, but the less also the cause will appear sufficient, and vice versa.
Pretty good philosophy overall, some of the middle essays were not exactly gripping though; really love his style, agree with his criticisms of Strawson on concept dependence and Parsons on predicate places in action descriptions, but none of this really blew my socks off. Maybe it’s getting oldy
April 16, 2019
I think I agree with Davidson about a lot, although I'm less certain about other things (do causal statements really have to be nomological deductions?). My main problem with this book - and the reason for its low rating - was mostly the topics. I really don't care about philosophy of language, I don't care about the logical form of action sentences, I don't care about how we talk about events; I care about actions and I care about events. I don't mean to fault Davidson for this; he is a reasonably clear writer (given the age of the essays, at least) and seems to know his stuff. In fact, maybe I should care about what Davidson is talking about. But unfortunately I don't. I probably should have done more research about the topics discussed in this book, but there you go.
December 6, 2017
Reading Davidson for me is a mixed bag. On one hand him being a clear Quinean (indeterminacy of translation), is where I think I agree most with Davidson and then on the other hand his philosophy of mind and action just doesn’t click with me.
I will confess though, philosophy of action isn’t my favorite area of study in analytic philosophy, however philosophy of mind is. I guess this work shows it age because the reasoning behind his philosophy of mind (which is pretty good) obviously comes from an armchair philosopher perspective, which is to say no (to my knowledge) usage of data from the cognitive sciences.
I will confess though, philosophy of action isn’t my favorite area of study in analytic philosophy, however philosophy of mind is. I guess this work shows it age because the reasoning behind his philosophy of mind (which is pretty good) obviously comes from an armchair philosopher perspective, which is to say no (to my knowledge) usage of data from the cognitive sciences.
Read
August 8, 2025That was tough. Excited to see how this pairs up with Anscombe.
to-keep-reference
October 30, 2019... los actos humanos son racionalmente intencionales y explicables en términos de las creencias y los deseos del agente.
Sobre la Violencia Pág.103
Davidson es un monista anómalo (todos los presuntos sucesos mentales son sucesos físicos).
La mente Pág.102-103
Sobre la Violencia Pág.103
Davidson es un monista anómalo (todos los presuntos sucesos mentales son sucesos físicos).
La mente Pág.102-103
June 24, 2011
Donald Davidsons work probably consists many great thoughts, nevertheless I never managed to get to them. The main cause of this is his style of writing and how he develop his points. His thoughts and works are great for all who love to read analytic philosophy, but unfortunately, I don't.
Analytic philosophy irritates me for his 'overfixation' on logic and correct reasoning. Not that that is a bad thing, but by doing so, according to me, they lose grip on reality and the context of the subject. This is the main reason why I did not liked this work.
Analytic philosophy irritates me for his 'overfixation' on logic and correct reasoning. Not that that is a bad thing, but by doing so, according to me, they lose grip on reality and the context of the subject. This is the main reason why I did not liked this work.
June 8, 2024
Clear, easy to follow, but maybe a little bit loosely edited
May 23, 2025
Finally finished this book. Trudged through the last three essays. Surprisingly accessible, yet subtle and insightful.
August 11, 2023
It seems to me that the single central theme pervading all of Davidson’s work is that of interpretation. The cardinal question in philosophy of language is what it is to speak, to understand, and to be understood. For Davidson, this is all approached through the lens of interpretation, as witness his central claim that only an interpreter of another could have meaningful speech and thoughts of his own. Davidson defended, and worked out the consequences of, this tenet in various ways and forms through the rest of his career. It might seem that this project only begins in volume 2 of Davidson’s essays, but it is actually a central concern of the work in this volume as well.
Davidson’s concern with actions is to understand them in the context that is essential to them: decisions that can be understood in terms of reasons that agents have. This framework is what allows our actions to be interpretable by others, as well as by ourselves. The role of reasons in understanding actions is thus of crucial importance to getting any kind of philosophical theory about actions off the ground. Having given an elegant and plausible account of how it can be said that reasons cause actions, this idea is applied to akrasia, or weakness of the will. Here Davidson fills a gap that has been left wide open ever since Aristotle broached the issue: why don’t we always act on the reason we know is best (Aristotle’s own “solution” seems flatly inconsistent with his own syllogistic account of practical reasoning)? While the answer to this particular question is quite properly left a mystery, the question of how akrasia is even *possible* is answered very straightforwardly: sometimes a reason other than the one we know is best all things considered ends up being the reason that causes an action (see also “Paradoxes of Irrationality,” vol. 4). Davidson’s approach to this is also groundbreaking in that he seemed to be the first to realize that the issue of akrasia is not solely the province of moral philosophy, but of action theory more broadly; in choosing akratically, one does not necessarily morally err, but may just be foolish or merely inconsistent.
The subsequent essays that go on to locate and characterize agency and intention in this framework are full of careful analysis and good sense, yielding a fleshed-out theory that is both plausible and parsimonious. Also doing crucial work here is Davidson’s characteristic treatment of events and their individuation, which get their own explicit attention in the second section of the book. Davidson addresses the primary issue here by pressing his view of events as individuated by their causes and effects rather than by their descriptions. I see the latter notion as one of the worst ideas in the history of philosophy, so to me, it’s well-nigh impossible to overstate the importance of this material. There are more subtle distinctions at work here too, like that between describing and referring to an event (on which he cites Frank Ramsey’s “Facts and Propositions”).
For reasons to cause actions, they have to be physical, and so they have to be part of a physical mind. So, naturally, in “Mental Events,” all the foregoing is essentially put together. Davidson��s theory of anomalous monism is in some ways very straightforward and in many other, more treacherous ways, very easy to misunderstand and mischaracterize. Fully understanding any one of Davidson’s views also requires understanding and accounting for all his other views that interlock with it, so suffice it to say that if you haven’t taken on board his view of the individuation of events, you might end up making objections like “but then the mental aspect of mental events isn’t efficacious” (Kim, Sosa, and others). As Davidson later responded (see “Thinking Causes” and “Law and Cause” in vol. 5), since by his own lights events are causes independently of how they’re described, there can be no such thing as an event being causally efficacious “only as” a physical event and not “as” a mental event. Jaegwon Kim, for one, has made a career out of this simple refusal to understand anomalous monism, but however much it may have come in for criticism, I think Davidson’s position on this issue is exactly right.
And you might think at this point the issue of interpretation has been left behind, but that is not so, as in the follow-up essays “Psychology as Philosophy” and “The Material Mind,” Davidson explicitly portrays anomalous monism as underpinning the project of explaining what makes rational agents and their actions interpretable. And bearing anomalous monism in mind, one can retrospectively find it already baked into “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” right at the start. Davidson’s my favorite 20th century philosopher for the systematicity, uniqueness, and congeniality of his positions. His work rewards careful reading and re-reading.
Davidson’s concern with actions is to understand them in the context that is essential to them: decisions that can be understood in terms of reasons that agents have. This framework is what allows our actions to be interpretable by others, as well as by ourselves. The role of reasons in understanding actions is thus of crucial importance to getting any kind of philosophical theory about actions off the ground. Having given an elegant and plausible account of how it can be said that reasons cause actions, this idea is applied to akrasia, or weakness of the will. Here Davidson fills a gap that has been left wide open ever since Aristotle broached the issue: why don’t we always act on the reason we know is best (Aristotle’s own “solution” seems flatly inconsistent with his own syllogistic account of practical reasoning)? While the answer to this particular question is quite properly left a mystery, the question of how akrasia is even *possible* is answered very straightforwardly: sometimes a reason other than the one we know is best all things considered ends up being the reason that causes an action (see also “Paradoxes of Irrationality,” vol. 4). Davidson’s approach to this is also groundbreaking in that he seemed to be the first to realize that the issue of akrasia is not solely the province of moral philosophy, but of action theory more broadly; in choosing akratically, one does not necessarily morally err, but may just be foolish or merely inconsistent.
The subsequent essays that go on to locate and characterize agency and intention in this framework are full of careful analysis and good sense, yielding a fleshed-out theory that is both plausible and parsimonious. Also doing crucial work here is Davidson’s characteristic treatment of events and their individuation, which get their own explicit attention in the second section of the book. Davidson addresses the primary issue here by pressing his view of events as individuated by their causes and effects rather than by their descriptions. I see the latter notion as one of the worst ideas in the history of philosophy, so to me, it’s well-nigh impossible to overstate the importance of this material. There are more subtle distinctions at work here too, like that between describing and referring to an event (on which he cites Frank Ramsey’s “Facts and Propositions”).
For reasons to cause actions, they have to be physical, and so they have to be part of a physical mind. So, naturally, in “Mental Events,” all the foregoing is essentially put together. Davidson��s theory of anomalous monism is in some ways very straightforward and in many other, more treacherous ways, very easy to misunderstand and mischaracterize. Fully understanding any one of Davidson’s views also requires understanding and accounting for all his other views that interlock with it, so suffice it to say that if you haven’t taken on board his view of the individuation of events, you might end up making objections like “but then the mental aspect of mental events isn’t efficacious” (Kim, Sosa, and others). As Davidson later responded (see “Thinking Causes” and “Law and Cause” in vol. 5), since by his own lights events are causes independently of how they’re described, there can be no such thing as an event being causally efficacious “only as” a physical event and not “as” a mental event. Jaegwon Kim, for one, has made a career out of this simple refusal to understand anomalous monism, but however much it may have come in for criticism, I think Davidson’s position on this issue is exactly right.
And you might think at this point the issue of interpretation has been left behind, but that is not so, as in the follow-up essays “Psychology as Philosophy” and “The Material Mind,” Davidson explicitly portrays anomalous monism as underpinning the project of explaining what makes rational agents and their actions interpretable. And bearing anomalous monism in mind, one can retrospectively find it already baked into “Actions, Reasons, and Causes,” right at the start. Davidson’s my favorite 20th century philosopher for the systematicity, uniqueness, and congeniality of his positions. His work rewards careful reading and re-reading.
July 15, 2008
been going through this book this summer and I have come to realize many things about davidson that i did not in the past, perhaps the most important is, the extant that he is a quinian, yet the more i come to know davidson the less i like his philosophy
March 14, 2009
Hard to argue against...
March 22, 2008
Importsnt work
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