Learning from others

Nous

Volumn 36, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 525-549

  Ebbs, Gary ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA CHAMPAIGN   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 55449111469     PISSN: 00294624     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1468-0068.00400     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. See C. A, J. Coady, Testimony (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), chapter 9.
2. For a similar argument, see Tyler Burge, "Content Preservation," Philosophical Review 102 (1993) 457-488. Burge argues that our trust in testimony is justified by an a priori principle that is "clearly similar to what is widely called a 'Principle of Charity' for translating or interpreting others." (487) Burge rejects Davidson's assumption that speakers of the same natural language should use the methods of radical interpretation to interpret each other. But Burge suggests that something like a Principle of Charity provides an a priori entitlement to accept what others say as true.
3. In "Telling and Trusting: Reductionism and Anti-reductionism in the Epistemology of Testimony," Mind 104 (1995): 393-411, Elizabeth Flicker also raises doubts about Coady's attempt to use Davidson's principle of charity to justify our reliance on testimony, but not by raising doubts about Coady's assumption that Davidson's principle of charity is a constraint on correctly interpreting what others write or say. Fricker's point is that testimony may be unreliable even if many of our beliefs are true (409-410).
4. This is an elaboration on the arthritis case that Tyler Burge first presented in his classic paper "Individualism and the Mental", in Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, volume IV (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979), 73-122. I chose to elaborate on Surge's arthritis case, and not to construct a completely new case of my own, for two main reasons. First, many philosophers now accept our initial, commonsense description of Burge's case, even though this description conflicts with some theories of meaning that were once widely accepted. This consensus about how to describe Burge's case aids my argument. Second, even though Burge's arthritis case has been discussed extensively, to my knowledge no one has yet clearly articulated the points I will highlight, or fully appreciated their consequences.
5. To avoid Grelling's paradox, (D) must be restricted. And I have not said anything about what would motivate us to accept applications of (D). Following W. V. Quine, I think the best reason for accepting such applications is that they enable us to specify a truth predicate that we can use to state such logical generalizations as 'every sentence of the form 'p v p' is true', 'every sentence of the form 'Ax(Fx → Fx)' is true', and 'every sentence of the form 'ExAyGxy → AyExGxy is true'. Also like Quine, 1 favor using a Tarski-style truth predicate defined for regimented sentences of one's own language in terms of restricted applications of a disquotational pattern similar to (D). For more detail on this motivation for accepting a suitably restricted version of (D), see my paper "Truth and Trans-Theoretical Terms," in James Conant and Urszula Zeglen, eds., Hilary Putnam: on Pragmatism and Realism (London: Routledge, 2002), I agree with Quine on many technical points, but my view of truth differs fundamentally from his. I reject his behavioristic account of translation, and, for reasons I will partly explain below, I propose that we incorporate our practice of taking each other's words at face value into a disquotational account of truth and denotation.
6. For a more thorough and accurate account of Quine's views on meaning and translation, see chapter 2 of my book, Rule-Following and Realism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997).
7. Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 129.
8. Davidson Inquiries, 24.
9. W.V. Quine, "Truth by Convention" (1935), reprinted
10. W.V. Quine, The Ways of Paradox, revised and enlarged edition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 77-106; quotation from 82.
11. In "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs," published in E. LePore, editor, Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), Davidson emphasizes that ".if the speaker is understood he has been interpreted as he intended to be interpreted." (436). In "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs" Davidson endorses some of H. P. Grice's views about the relationship between a speaker's intentions and the literal meanings of her words. But Davidson thinks that a speaker's intentions to be interpreted in a certain way cannot have the status that Grice attributes to them. In "Belief and the Basis of Meaning" (reprinted in Inquiries, 141-154) Davidson argues that ". making detailed sense of a person's intentions and beliefs cannot be independent of making sense of his utterances. If this is so, then an inventory of a speaker's sophisticated beliefs and intentions cannot be the evidence for the truth of a theory for interpreting his speech behavior." (144)
12. Davidson, "The Second Person,"
13. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, volume XVIII (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 255-267, quotation from 261. Davidson elaborates on this attitude towards "incorrect" usage in "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs," where he writes that ". error or mistake of this kind, with its associated notion of correct usage, is not philosophically interesting. We want a deeper notion of what words, when spoken in context, mean . " (434).
14. One might think that Davidson can avoid this conclusion by claiming that 'arthritis' is a theoretical term. Davidson himself has claimed that "Disagreement about theoretical matters may (in some cases) be more tolerable than disagreement about what is more evident . " (Donald Davidson, Inquiries, 169). One might try to use this common-sense observation to argue that Davidson could allow both that Al's word 'arthritis' does not denote the ailment in Al's thigh, and that Al believes that he has arthritis in his thigh. There are two main problems with this objection. First, given Davidson's conception of the task and test of a theory of interpretation, he has no grounds for thinking that Al's word 'arthritis' is a theoretical term. Second, even if we did have some reason to regard Al's word 'arthritis' as theoretical, that would not show that the error that we would be attributing to him if we were to take his word 'arthritis' to denote x if and only if x is arthritis is, by Davidson's standards, explicable. Recall that to explain a given false belief of a speaker, according to Davidson, it is not enough simply to attribute other false beliefs to the speaker in light of which her mistake makes sense. Despite Davidson's occasional suggestions to the contrary, his principle of charity apparently implies that it is no easier to accept error among theoretical beliefs than among observational ones. Simon Evnine thinks that a distinction between theoretical beliefs and observational beliefs can be invoked to defend Davidson against the charge that on his view error is impossible. See Simon Evnine, Donald Davidson (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University, 1991), chapter 6, especially section 6.5. At the crucial point, however, Evnine simply quotes Davidson's commonsense remark about the likelihood of error among our theoretical beliefs, and concludes that Davidson can accommodate error. For the reasons I just sketched, I don't see how Davidson's remark can help him to avoid the consequence that according to his theory of interpretation, Al can't be mistaken about whether he has arthritis in his thigh.
15. Thus I disagree with some critics of Davidson's principle of charity, such as Richard Grandy (in "Reference, Meaning, and Belief," The Journal of Philosophy 70 (1973): 439-452)
16. and David Lewis (in "Radical Interpretation," Synthese 23 (1974): 331-344), who think they can avoid counterintuitive consequences of that principle by reformulating it slightly, without questioning Davidson's conception of the problem of interpretation.
17. Sometimes two speakers will disagree about the proper definition of the word without concluding that they are actually using different words with different denotations. This possibility is crucial to the attempt to provide good definitions of words already in use. See chapter 8 of my book Rule-Following and Realism, and Tyler Burge, "Intellectual Norms and Foundations of Mind," The Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986): 697-720.
18. Ebbs, "The Very Idea of Sameness of Extension Across Time," American Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 37, Number 3 (July 2000): 245-268.
19. W. V. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1960), 257-262.