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
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 Pres-
idential 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 Amer-
ican 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 Kunst,
edited by Michael Benedikt and Rudolf Berger, by Edition S. Verlag
der Österreichischen 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, Philosophie 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’où va le caractère public d’une langue?’ in Wittgen-
stein et la philosophie aujourd’hui, edited and translated into French
by J. Sebestik and A. Soulez (Paris: Méridiens 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 Collège International de
Philosophie (Paris: Éditions 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 Überlegungen 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.
Introduction

The essays in this book are concerned with three sorts of proposi-
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. All three varieties of knowledge are, however, objective in the
sense that their truth is independent of their being believed to be true.
This is obvious in the second two cases, but it holds even in the case
of beliefs about our own beliefs and other attitudes: such beliefs can
be wrong. All our knowledge is also objective in the sense that it
could for the most part be expressed by concepts which have a place
in a publically shared scheme of things.
Essay 1, ‘First Person Authority’, asks what explains the presump-
tion that a speaker is right when he sincerely attributes a belief, desire,
or intention to his present self, while no such presumption is appro-
priate when others make similar attributions to him. It is argued that
‘solutions’ to the problem of other minds which merely restate the
asymmetry leave the field open to the sceptic. A new explanation of
first person authority is offered which traces the source of the author-
ity to a necessary feature of the interpretation of speech.
Essay 2, ‘Knowing One’s Own Mind’, takes up an apparent diffi-
culty about first person authority: how can we reconcile the fact that
xiv Introduction
the contents of our minds are in part determined by external factors
of which we are ignorant with the claim that we know the contents
of our minds without (normally) needing or appealing to evidence? I
argue that the answer depends, among other things, on giving up the
idea of ‘objects before the mind’ none of whose attributes can be
hidden from the agent.
In Essay 3, ‘The Myth of the Subjective’, I try to make clear what
it means to deny that there are objects before the mind when we have
sensations or think. The idea that there is a fundamental distinction
to be drawn between uninterpreted experience and an organizing
structure of concepts is closely related to the supposed dichotomy of
the subjective and the objective. These dualisms have dominated and
defined the problems of much of modern philosophy, the problems
not only of epistemology, but also of philosophy of language and
philosophy of mind. In this essay I inveigh against the picture of the
mind that is presupposed by the dualisms, and so against the
dualisms themselves, and the epistemological and metaphysical
positions based on them. The view that the subjective is the founda-
tion of objective empirical knowledge is attacked; it is claimed that
empirical knowledge has no epistemological foundation, and needs
none.
Essay 4, ‘What is Present to the Mind?’, continues the theme of
the last two essays with fresh examples and arguments restated.
A number of philosophers have questioned whether there is any
‘fact of the matter’ concerning the propositional attitudes. Essay 5,
‘Indeterminism and Antirealism’, attempts to put these doubts to rest.
In particular it disputes the claim that if one accepts Quine’s indeter-
minacy thesis, as I do, then one has abandoned first person authority.
Essay 6, ‘The Irreducibility of the Concept of the Self’, empha-
sizes the features of our beliefs about our present attitudes which
remain in place after we give up the myth of the subjective and its
mental objects. These features include, of course, the special author-
ity that attends such beliefs and the irreducible role of indexical
sentences. It is the thoughts such sentences express which relate us
and our speech to the world around us. I also discuss briefly the fact
that there is no final court of appeal beyond our own standards of
rationality, a point that is raised again in Essay 14.
Essay 7, ‘Rational Animals’, is one of a number of attempts I have
made to specify some of the ingredients of rationality. By rationality
I mean whatever involves propositional thought. In an earlier essay
 Introduction xv
(‘Thought and Talk’, essay 11 in Inquiries into Truth and Interpreta-
tion) I argued for a mutual dependence of thought and language.
Many readers were not persuaded. Here I try again, taking a differ-
ent tack, one I have subsequently developed in the essays that follow.
The considerations I adduce for the close connection between
language and thought do not constitute anything like a demonstration
or proof. They depend in part on what I think we know about crea-
tures like us.
In Essay 8, ‘The Second Person’, I dwell on the idea that language
is necessarily social. It is argued that to have thoughts, and so to
mean anything in speaking, it is necessary to understand, and be
understood by, a second person. If Wittgenstein held that language is
necessarily social, then the central thesis of this essay is Wittgen-
steinian. But it is denied that communication requires that one person
speak as others do. Rather, the objectivity which thought and
language demand depends on the mutual and simultaneous responses
of two or more creatures to common distal stimuli and to one
another’s responses. This three-way relation among two speakers
and a common world I call ‘triangulation’. In the end, the idea is as
simple as that of ostensive learning, but with an insistence that trian-
gulation is not a matter of one person grasping a meaning already
there, but a performance that (when fully fleshed out) bestows a
content on language. This thesis, and its ramifications for philosophy
of mind, language, and epistemology, turn up again and again in my
work after 1982 (Essay 7). Carol Rovane, Akeel Bilgrami, and
Marcia Cavell were early critics of this idea. Their suggestions and
candid doubts helped greatly in shaping my thinking.
Essay 9, ‘The Emergence of Thought’, asks how we are to
describe the transition from the prelinguistic, preconceptual mind of
an infant to a child with language, beliefs, and the other propositional
attitudes. I argue that we do not have a vocabulary for describing the
early stages of such development, and that it is unclear what would
satisfy the felt need for such a vocabulary. It is suggested that a few
major steps can be distinguished by considering the strengths of the
semantic theories required for various languages.
Essay 10, ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, was
written in 1981, before any of the first nine of these essays. There is
no paper I have written I would like more to rewrite. It has under-
standably attracted much criticism, which is why I reprint it here
without change. Anyway, I have in effect been rewriting it ever since
xvi Introduction
it was written; the nine essays that precede it in this book are partial
evidence of my subsequent misgivings, and Essay 14 is further testi-
mony. I have also tried to make amends in replies to various critics
in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson (in the Library of Living
Philosophers, edited by Lewis E. Hahn, (Chicago: Open Court,
1999) ) and in ‘Replies’ to Barry Stroud, John McDowell, and
Richard Rorty in Critica 30 (1998). What I would most like to
correct is the impression that I think experience and perception play
no role in our beliefs about the world. ‘Experience’ and ‘perception’
are perfectly good words for whatever it is that goes on in our minds
when we look around us, smell, touch, hear, and taste. I was so eager
to get across the idea (for which I should have given credit to Wilfrid
Sellars) that epistemic intermediaries between the world and our
beliefs are a mistake that I made it sound to many readers as though
I were repudiating all serious commerce between world and mind. In
truth my thesis then as now is that the connection is causal and, in the
case of perception, direct. To perceive that it is snowing is, under
appropriate circumstances, to be caused (in the right way) by one’s
senses to believe that it is snowing by the actually falling snow.
Sensations no doubt play their role, but that role is not that of provid-
ing evidence for the belief.
Essay 11, ‘Empirical Content’, provides a historical background
for, and commentary on, the theme of Essay 10. Although Neurath
and Schlick were more enmeshed in a very old debate than they
seemed to realize, their sense that they were saving philosophy from
its metaphysical past gave zest and a linguistic turn to a well-worn
problem.
‘Epistemology and Truth’, Essay 12, discusses the relation of
epistemology to truth. Two positions are often seen as opposed: that
truth is ‘radically non-epistemic’ (in Putnam’s words) or that it is to
be understood in terms of what it is possible (in practice, in theory,
or ideally) for us to know. Neither of these alternatives, it is argued,
is acceptable. Truth cannot be limited to what we can or could deter-
mine to be true; nevertheless, there are firm reasons to connect truth
with true belief in one way or another. A way of partially reconciling
the two positions, based on the ideas explored in Essay 10, is
outlined.
From the time of Descartes most epistemology has been based on
first person knowledge. According to the usual story we must begin
with what is most certain: knowledge of our own sensations and
 Introduction xvii
thoughts. In one way or another we progress, if we can, to knowledge
of an objective external world. There is then the final, tenuous, step
to knowledge of other minds. In Essay 13, ‘Epistemology External-
ized’, I argue for a total revision of this picture. All propositional
thought, whether positive or skeptical, whether of the inner or of the
outer, requires possession of the concept of objective truth, and this
concept is accessible only to those creatures in communication with
others. Third person knowledge—knowledge of other minds—is
thus essential to all other knowledge. But third person knowledge is
impossible without knowledge of a shared world of objects in a
shared time and space. Thus the acquisition of knowledge is not
based on a progression from the subjective to the objective; it
emerges holistically, and is interpersonal from the start. Several
forms of externalism are examined and found wanting. It is argued
that triangulation, which has featured in many other essays in this
book, corrects and augments both a version of perceptual external-
ism and a version of social externalism.
‘Three Varieties of Knowledge’, Essay 14, comes closest to
pulling together the main ideas in this book. If all the essays had been
written after my thoughts had gelled, ‘Three Varieties of Knowledge’
would certainly have come first, and a reader who wants an overview
might well begin here.

I have tinkered with the essays in this book to improve the grammar
or style and occasionally to delete repetition or what I now see as a
minor mistake. I am sure many more errors persist, and there is prob-
ably too much hammering away at certain theses. But when I
contemplated major rewriting I realized that either I must reproduce
my past work pretty much as it stood or simply start over again, and
this would take years. I console myself with the thought that a fresh
start would mean wiping out what amounts to a history of my
attempts to come to grips with the triangle composed of a person, his
society, and the shared environment. It would also deprive my critics
of some of their favorite targets.
Among those critics I must especially thank Richard Rorty, who
has been egging me on for years to collect and publish these essays.
Ernest Lepore generously gave up a week of his time to sort through
and help order not only the essays in this volume but also those to
appear in two subsequent volumes. I am indebted to Ariela Lazar
who earlier gave me her discriminating advice on arranging my
xviii Introduction
work, and to Arpy Khatchirian, who corrected the spelling, grammar,
and thinking in many of the essays. Peter Momtchiloff of the Oxford
University Press has been an encouraging, kindly, and forgiving
editor; his assistance has made a task I found distasteful in prospect
more endurable than I imagined possible.
A number of people, lectureships, universities, and other institu-
tions have provided opportunities to try out many of the ideas in
these essays. There has been welcome feedback from my students at
Berkeley, and from audiences who attended lecture series in Mexico
(1992), Rome (1993), Munich (the Kant Lectures, 1993), Gerona
(the Ferrater Mora Lectures, 1994), Leuven (the Francqui Lectures,
1994), and Buenos Aires (1995). Finally, there were my Jean Nicod
Lectures (1995), delivered in Caen and Paris, from which I hope to
develop a more unified and detailed account of the thoughts scattered
through the present volume.
I am indebted to all those who added to, subtracted from, or modi-
fied my thoughts. I did not keep track of those who made especially
trenchant suggestions, so any list I draw up will be shamefully
incomplete. But it must certainly include Rosario Egidi, Pascal
Engel, Dagfinn Føllesdal, Olbeth Hansberg, Dieter Henrich, Pierre
Jacob, Carol Rovane, and those who came to the ten lectures and
seminars in Gerona, particularly W. V. Quine, Burton Dreben, Akeel
Bilgrami, Ernest Lepore, Barry Stroud, and Bruce Vermazen. Marcia
Cavell not only attended many of the talks where I tried out versions
of my ideas, but was an intellectual companion throughout these
years, gently trying to temper my armchair speculations with a more
empirically oriented, and psychoanalytically educated, outlook.