Donald Davidson

1917-2003 · American · Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Action, Metaphysics, Epistemology

All understanding of the speech of another involves radical interpretation.

Educated at Harvard under W.V. Quine, Donald Davidson spent his career asking a deceptively simple question: what would you need to know to interpret a stranger's speech from scratch, with no prior grasp of their language or beliefs? That thought experiment — the "radical interpreter" — became the lever he used to rebuild philosophy of language, mind, and action as one system.

Topics Donald Davidson addresses

• radical interpretation
• truth-theoretic semantics
• T-sentences and Convention T
• compositional meaning theory
• the Principle of Charity
• anomalous monism
• reasons as causes
• events as particulars
• logical form of action sentences
• the third dogma of empiricism
• conceptual schemes
• indeterminacy of interpretation
• holism about meaning and belief
• token physicalism
• irreducibility of the mental
• mental causation
• passing theory and prior theory
• triangulation
• externalism about thought content
• first-person authority
• propositional attitudes
• weakness of will
• the slingshot argument
• that-clauses and indirect discourse

Converse with Donald Davidson on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Donald Davidson's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.