E'morto Donald Davidson

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Mi è arrivata la triste notizia che sabato scorso a Berkeley è morto a causa di un attacco di cuore il filosofo "analitico" Donald Davidson.

Donald Davidson è professore presso l'Università di California, a Berkeley. La vasta produzione che investe il campo dell'epistemologia, della filosofia del linguaggio e della filosofia della mente lo qualifica come uno dei maestri del pensiero analitico contemporaneo. I saggi principali di Davidson sono raccolti nei volumi Actions and Events (1980) e Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984). L'edizione italiana dei due lavori è apparsa a cura di Eva Picardi presso Il Mulino. Il pensiero di Davidson, che risente dell'influsso di Quine suo maestro, ma anche di C. I. Lewis, di Frank Ramsey, di Kant e dell'ultimo Wittgenstein, mira ad un singolo approccio integrato dei problemi della conoscenza, dell'azione, del linguaggio e della mente. Il dibattito filosofico contemporaneo, da Quine a Putnam, da Dummett a McDowell, considera Davidson un punto di riferimento essenziale. Infatti un imponente numero di studi critici sul pensiero di Davidson è riunito nelle due antologie Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (1985) e Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (1986) edite da Ernest Lepore e in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson (1999) edito da Lewis Edwin Hahn. Al pensiero davidsoniano sono dedicati i volumi di B. Ramberg, Donald Davidson's Philosophy of Language: An Introduction (1989), S. Evnine, Donald Davidson (1991), D. Sparti, Sopprimere la lontananza uccide. Donald Davidson e la teoria dell'interpretazione (1994), M. De caro, Dal punto di vista dell'interprete. La filosofia di Donald Davidson (1998), S. Levi, Soggetti sottintesi. Razionalità e comprensione in Donald Davidson (2001).

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Donald Davidson's obituary

American philosopher whose groundbreaking work studied language to help us understand who we are

Jane O'Grady
Thursday September 4, 2003
The Guardian

Donald Davidson, who has died aged 86, was one of the greatest philosophers of the late 20th century. Unusually for a philosopher dealing with problems by analysing language, the various topics he tackled seem to constitute a grand design (if not a totally spelt-out one). He struggled to resolve the crucial philosophical issue of the time: how to reconcile science and materialism with our sense of ourselves as communicating and meaningful rational beings.
A professor at University of California, Berkeley, having taught at Queens College (New York), Stanford, Princeton and Chicago, he perhaps had even more kudos in Britain than in the US, revered here for his ability to be both scientific and anti-scientific simultaneously.

His theory of anomalous monism as a solution to the mind/body problem was an ingenious attempt to combine a view of the world as wholly physical with respect for our ineluctable sense that the mental is crucially distinct from the physical. And his theory of action was also a deft dovetailing of both the commonsense and scientific beliefs, usually seen as irreconcilable, as to how reasons cause actions.

Systematically he sought to show how philosophy of language can give us the right way to understand who we are. Having studied classics and literature before devoting himself to philosophy, he had a wider background than most philosophers. He loved flying two-engine planes, and was a keen surfer and mountain-climber till late in his 70s, as well as an excellent pianist.

Davidson was born in Springfield, Massachusetts. His family moved around so much that he had no formal education till the age of nine or 10, when he attended a public (state) school on Staten Island. Even as a child he was fascinated by philosophy, but he opted to study English, having been offered a scholarship by every university he applied for, and accepted one at Harvard.

Here he got to know CI Lewis, Alfred Whitehead and Willard van Orman Quine, the eminences of the philosophy department. He used to play duets with his fellow student Leonard Bernstein, who wrote the score for Davidson's production of Aristophanes' The Birds. After graduating in classics, Davidson was offered a scholarship in philosophy.

Having been brought up to think of the first world war as a capitalist plot to make money for munitions manufacturers, he was, by his own account, a "fellow traveller". Yet, "given a choice between becoming cannon fodder or making a pile of money", he chose the latter and attended the Harvard Business School, as well as studying philosophy, until Germany invaded Russia in June 1941, when he volunteered for the navy. With Pearl Harbor in December, the US entered the war.

He returned to Harvard in 1946, and wrote a dissertation on Plato's Philebus. He went to teach at Queens (1947-50), but as a result of the anti-leftwing feeling of the McCarthy era left in 1951 for Stanford, where he almost single-handedly transformed the lacklustre philosophy department into a world-class one.

He still had no philosophical project and had scarcely been published, but then he discovered the logician Alfred Tarski's paper on the concept of truth, which he took a whole six months to absorb. And so he came to prominence in his late 40s, with the publication, in 1963, of the seminal article Actions, Reasons And Causes. It was a reaction against the then widely accepted notion, inspired by Wittgenstein, that reasons could not be the causes of actions, since psychological explanation is too sloppy and variable to accommodate the strict, invariable laws of natural science.

With what might at first appear inconsistency, Davidson accepted both that any particular cause is an instance of a precise, exceptionless law, and that our ordinary ascriptions of causes, embedded as they are in a wider framework of reasons and beliefs, cannot achieve such stringent exceptionlessness. A hurricane (physical) can, commonsensically, be seen as causing a catastrophe (mental), but "the laws needed to predict the catastrophe with precision would, of course, have no use for concepts like hurricane and catastrophe".

Yet, he argued, there are, even if unknown to us, strict physical laws under which there is a particular hurricane-catastrophe causal fit. Similarly, motives do indeed cause actions according to strict physical laws. These, however, cannot be stated in terms of networks of motives and actions, but only apply to discrete physical events.

Davidson relies on the same distinction between events per se, and events as described in his most famous and anthologised paper, Mental Events (1970). He relies on our inescapable intuition that mental events can have "causal intercourse" with physical events (wanting an ice-cream can cause me to go and buy one), and vice versa (licking the ice-cream can cause pleasure). But equally he insists on, secondly, the strictly law-like nature of cause and effect, and, thirdly, on what he calls the "anomalism of the mental" - that there are "no strict deterministic laws on the basis of which mental events can be predicted and explained".

The only way these three assertions can be reconciled is by accepting that "laws are linguistic" and "events are mental only as described". Events are, for him, "particular" and "unrepeatable", and causality, like identity, is the relation "between individual events no matter how described". As with much of his writing, particularly on the philosophy of language, Davidson's arguments baffled as well as awed his fellow-philosophers, but they certainly secured him a following.

In 1967, Davidson went to Princeton, and gave the then-prestigious John Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1970. That year he was recruited to the Rockefeller University, a sort of academic think-tank; in 1976 to Chicago University; and in 1981, he became a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where he remained till his death.

Much of his writing is to be published posthumously, but his most important works are the papers collected in Actions And Events (1980) and Truth And Interpretation (1984). They are an extraordinarily rich blend of philosophy of mind, metaphysics, theory of action, and philosophy of language.

Davidson's revolutionary work in the philosophy of language probes the issue of how anyone is to understand another (unknown) language. Starting out from the theories of Frege and Tarski, he developed his theory of radical interpretation, according to which it "would beg the question, in trying to study the nature of interpretation, to assume that you know in advance what a person's intentions, beliefs, and desires are". Since you have "no master key" in advance of a particular communicative interaction, you have to "work your way into the whole system at the same time", adopting a theory of interpretation that can be supported or verified by evidence that is plausibly available to the radical interpreter.

This also relies on the principle of charity (the assumption that people are, in general, rational and have thoughts that fit together coherently), without which it would be hard to make sense of what you are seeking to interpret. Davidson was urging us to try and construct in a deliberate, laborious way what we do instinctively and immediately, so as to analyse how we do it. This holistic, empirical method was also applied to the interpretation of people's beliefs and desires.

In the third volume of his essays Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (2001), Davidson propounded his theory of triangulation. In some ways reminiscent of Wittgenstein's private language argument, it argued that in any communication between two persons, some item in the outside world is invariably the focus of attention. Thus, even if not certain of exactly what the other person means or experiences, we are ensured a shared discussion in the context of an outside reality. As well as in his opposition to scepticism, Davidson was optimistic in denying relativism. He also produced rich ideas on the notion of metaphor and weakness of will.

He is survived by his second wife, Marcia Cavell, and a daughter, Elizabeth.