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Donald Davidson
Portrait by photographer Steve Pyke in 1990
Born	Donald Herbert Davidson (2025-08-05)6 March 1917 Springfield, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	30 August 2003(2025-08-05) (aged 86) Oakland, California, U.S.
Education
Education	Harvard University (BA, MA, PhD)
Thesis	Plato's 'Philebus' (1949)
Doctoral advisor	Raphael Demos Donald Cary Williams
Other advisors	Alfred North Whitehead Willard Van Orman Quine
Philosophical work
Era	20th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Analytic Neopragmatism
Doctoral students	Akeel Bilgrami Michael Bratman Kirk Ludwig Claudine Verheggen Stephen Yablo
Main interests	Philosophy of language, philosophy of action, philosophy of mind, epistemology, ontology
Notable ideas	Radical interpretation, anomalous monism, truth-conditional semantics, principle of charity, slingshot argument, reasons as causes, understanding as translation, swampman, events, Davidson's translation argument against alternative conceptual schemes (the third dogma of empiricism)

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Donald Herbert Davidson (March 6, 1917 – August 30, 2003) was an American philosopher. He served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago. Davidson was known for his charismatic personality and difficult writing style, as well as the systematic nature of his philosophy. His work exerted considerable influence in many areas of philosophy from the 1960s onward, particularly in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and action theory. While Davidson was an analytic philosopher, with most of his influence lying in that tradition, his work has attracted attention in continental philosophy as well, particularly in literary theory and related areas.

Early life and education

Donald Herbert Davidson was born on March 6, 1917 in Springfield, Massachusetts to Grace Cordelia (née Anthony) and Clarence "Davie" Herbert Davidson. His family moved around frequently during his childhood; they lived in the Philippines until he was four, and then in various cities in the Northeastern United States before finally settling in Staten Island when he was nine. He briefly attended a public school in Staten Island before receiving a scholarship to study at Staten Island Academy. He first became interested in philosophy while in high school, where he read works by Nietzsche as well as Plato's Parmenides and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

After graduating from high school in 1935, he enrolled at Harvard on an English major before switching to classics and earning his BA in 1939. It was at Harvard that he came to know many important philosophers of the time, including C. I. Lewis, Alfred North Whitehead, Raphael Demos, and especially W. V. O. Quine, who went on to become a lifelong friend and major philosophical influence. He also befriended the future conductor Leonard Bernstein while at Harvard.

Soon after earning his BA, he was awarded a Teschemacher Scholarship to pursue graduate studies in classical philosophy at Harvard. As a graduate student, he took courses on logic taught by Quine and was classmates with Roderick Chisholm and Roderick Firth. Quine's seminars on logical positivism greatly influenced his view of philosophy, as they made him realize that "it was possible to be serious about getting things right in philosophy, or at least not getting things wrong." He graduated with an MA in classical philosophy in 1941.

While pursuing a PhD at Harvard, he concurrently enrolled at Harvard Business School, but he ended up leaving a few weeks before graduating in 1942 so that he could volunteer for the U.S. Navy. During World War II, he taught spotters how to distinguish enemy planes from allied planes and also participated in the ground invasions of Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio. After returning from the war in 1945, he completed his PhD dissertation on Plato's Philebus under the supervision of Raphael Demos and D. C. Williams, and it was eventually accepted in 1949, earning him his PhD in philosophy.

Philosophical work

Anomalous monism

Main article: Anomalous monism

Anomalous monism is a philosophical thesis about the mind–body relationship first proposed by Davidson in his 1970 paper "Mental Events". The theory is twofold and states that mental events are identical with physical events, and that the mental is anomalous, i.e. under their mental descriptions, causal relations between these mental events are not describable by strict physical laws. Hence, Davidson proposes an identity theory of mind without the reductive bridge laws associated with the type-identity theory.

Since in this theory every mental event is some physical event or other, the idea is that someone's thinking at a certain time, for example, that snow is white, is a certain pattern of neural firing in their brain at that time, an event which can be characterized as both a thinking that snow is white (a type of mental event) and a pattern of neural firing (a type of physical event). There is just one event that can be characterized both in mental terms and in physical terms. If mental events are physical events, they can at least in principle be explained and predicted, like all physical events, on the basis of laws of physical science. However, according to anomalous monism, events cannot be so explained or predicted as described in mental terms (such as "thinking", "desiring", etc.), but only as described in physical terms: this is the distinctive feature of the thesis as a brand of physicalism.

Davidson's argument for anomalous monism relies on the following three principles:

1. The principle of causal interaction: there exist both mental-to-physical as well as physical-to-mental causal interactions.
2. The principle of the nomological character of causality: all events are causally related through strict laws.
3. The principle of the anomalism of the mental: there are no strict psychophysical or psychological laws that can causally relate mental events with physical events or mental events with other mental events.

See the main article for an explanation of his argument as well as objections.

Third dogma of empiricism

In his 1974 essay On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, Davidson critiques what he calls the "third dogma of empiricism". The term is a reference to the famous 1951 essay Two Dogmas of Empiricism by his graduate teacher, W. V. O. Quine, in which he critiques two central tenets, or "dogmas", of logical positivism (and empiricism more generally): the analytic–synthetic distinction and reductionism. Davidson identifies an additional third dogma present in logical positivism and even in Quine's own work, as well as the work of Thomas Kuhn, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and others, and he argues that it is as untenable as the first two dogmas.

Davidson's third dogma refers to scheme–content dualism, which is the idea that all knowledge is the result of one's scheme of concepts being imposed upon empirical content from the world. The content is objective because it simply exists in the world or is simply given in experience, while the scheme is subjective because it is a person or community's way of making sense of that content according to some set of criteria. One consequence of scheme–content dualism is conceptual relativism, which is the idea that two different people or communities could have radically different, incommensurable (Kuhn's term for untranslatable) ways of making sense of the world. On this view, truth is relative to a conceptual scheme rather than objective.

The general argumentative structure of the essay is as follows:

1. The idea of a conceptual scheme is only intelligible if there can be many different conceptual schemes, as the existence of one implies that there could be others, otherwise the term does not refer to anything in particular.
2. There can only be many different conceptual schemes if they are incommensurable, whether completely or partially, otherwise they would simply be different ways of speaking.
3. We can only recognize a conceptual scheme as a conceptual scheme if it is commensurable with our own (this premise is what Davidson attempts to prove in his essay).
4. Thus, the criterion for distinguishing alternative conceptual schemes, and thus the criterion for their identity, seems to be both incommensurability and commensurability.
5. Thus, the very idea of a conceptual scheme is incoherent.
6. If we lack criteria for identifying conceptual schemes, then we lack criteria for distinguishing scheme from content, and thus criteria for identifying empirical content.
7. Thus, scheme–content dualism is incoherent.

The upshot of Davidson's argument is that there is no strict boundary between subjective and objective knowledge. Knowledge of one's own scheme of concepts is necessarily inseparable from one's knowledge of the world, which undermines the longstanding idea in philosophy that one's own subjective knowledge is fundamentally different than what objectively exists in reality. This also undermines conceptual relativism, as the above argument demonstrates that two different conceptual schemes must be commensurable if they are to even be recognized as different conceptual schemes, and so truth is not relative to a conceptual scheme, but is rather objective insofar as we all have unmediated access to the world.

For Davidson, in order for one's own point of view to be intelligible as a point of view, one must acknowledge the existence of other points of view, and they all must pertain to the same objective reality, which means they must be translatable (he further develops this idea in his 1991 essay Three Varieties of Knowledge). In Davidson's own words, "Different points of view make sense, but only if there is a common coordinate system on which to plot them."

Unlike the first two dogmas, which can be rejected by empiricists, Davidson claims that the third dogma of empiricism is "perhaps the last, for if we give it up it is not clear that there is anything distinctive left to call empiricism." Richard Rorty and Michael Williams have even said that the third dogma is necessary for any study of epistemology (Rorty in particular uses Davidson's critique to advance his own neopragmatist critique of philosophy-as-epistemology).

Swampman

Swampman is the subject of a thought experiment introduced by Davidson in his 1987 paper Knowing One's Own Mind. In the experiment, Davidson is struck by lightning in a swamp and disintegrated, but at the same exact moment, an identical copy of Davidson, the Swampman, is made from a nearby tree and proceeds through life exactly as Davidson would have, indistinguishable from him. The experiment is used by Davidson to claim that thought and meaning cannot exist in a vacuum; they are dependent on their interconnections to the world. Therefore, despite being physically identical to himself, Davidson states that the Swampman does not have thoughts nor meaningful language, as it has no causal history to base them on.

The experiment runs as follows:

Suppose lightning strikes a dead tree in a swamp; I am standing nearby. My body is reduced to its elements, while entirely by coincidence (and out of different molecules) the tree is turned into my physical replica. My replica, The Swampman, moves exactly as I did; according to its nature it departs the swamp, encounters and seems to recognize my friends, and appears to return their greetings in English. It moves into my house and seems to write articles on radical interpretation. No one can tell the difference. But there is a difference. My replica can't recognize my friends; it can't recognize anything, since it never cognized anything in the first place. It can't know my friends' names (though of course it seems to), it can't remember my house. It can't mean what I do by the word 'house', for example, since the sound 'house' it makes was not learned in a context that would give it the right meaning—or any meaning at all. Indeed, I don't see how my replica can be said to mean anything by the sounds it makes, nor to have any thoughts.

—?Donald Davidson, Knowing One's Own Mind

Personal life and death

Davidson was married three times. He married his first wife, artist Virginia Bolton, in 1941 and had his only child with her, Elizabeth Boyer (née Davidson). Following his divorce from Bolton, he married for the second time to Nancy Hirschberg, Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and later at Chicago Circle. She died in 1979. In 1984, Davidson married for the third and last time to philosopher and psychoanalyst Marcia Cavell. He corresponded with Catholic nun, literary critic and poet M. Bernetta Quinn.

Davidson was a lifelong atheist; he believed that many of the claims made by religions are not even truth-apt.

On August 27, 2003, Davidson underwent knee replacement surgery at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland, California, but he went into cardiac arrest shortly after the operation. He died three days later on August 30, 2003 at the age of 86.

Awards

• Hegel Prize (1991)
• Jean Nicod Prize (1995)

Bibliography

• Decision-Making: An Experimental Approach, co-authored with Patrick Suppes and Sidney Siegel. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1957.
• Semantics of Natural Language, co-edited with Gilbert Harman, 2nd ed. New York: Springer Nature. 1973.
• Plato's ‘Philebus’. New York: Garland Publishing. 1990.
• Essays on Actions and Events, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2001a.
• Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2001b.
• Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2001c.
• Problems of Rationality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2004.
• Truth, Language, and History: Philosophical Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005.
• Truth and Predication. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2005.
• The Essential Davidson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006.
• The Structure of Truth: The 1970 John Locke Lectures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2020.

Filmography

• Rudolf Fara (host), In conversation: Donald Davidson (19 video cassettes), Philosophy International, Centre for Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences, London School of Economics, 1997.

See also

• List of Jean Nicod Prize laureates
• List of American philosophers
• Swamp Thing

Further reading

• Dasenbrock, Reed Way (ed.). Literary Theory After Davidson. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press. 1993.
• Hahn, Lewis Edwin (ed.). The Philosophy of Donald Davidson, Library of Living Philosophers XXVII. Chicago: Open Court. 1999.
• Kotatko, Petr, Peter Pagin and Gabriel Segal (eds.). Interpreting Davidson. Stanford: CSLI Publications. 2001.
• Evnine, Simon. Donald Davidson. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1991.
• Kalugin, Vladimir. "Donald Davidson (1917–2003)," Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2006. (link)
• Lepore, Ernest and Brian McLaughlin (eds.). Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1985.
• Lepore, Ernest (ed.). Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1986.
• Lepore, Ernest and Kirk Ludwig. "Donald Davidson," Midwest Studies in Philosophy, September 2004, vol. 28, pp. 309–333.
• Lepore, Ernest and Kirk Ludwig. Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005.
• Lepore, Ernest and Kirk Ludwig. Donald Davidson's Truth-Theoretic Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2007.
• Ludwig, Kirk (ed.). Donald Davidson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003.
• Ludwig, Kirk. "Donald Davidson: Essays on Actions and Events." In Classics of Western Philosophy: The Twentieth Century: Quine and After, vol. 5., John Shand (ed.), Acumen Press, 2006, pp. 146–165.
• Malpas, Jeffrey. Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning: Holism, Truth, Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1992.
• Mou, Bo (ed.). Davidson's Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy: Constructive Engagement. Leiden & Boston: Brill. 2006.
• Preyer, Gerhard, Frank Siebelt, and Alexander Ulfig (eds.). Language, Mind and Epistemology: On Donald Davidson's Philosophy. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1994.
• Ramberg, Bjorn. Donald Davidson's Philosophy of Language: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1989.
• Romaneczko, Marta E. The Role of Metalanguage in Radical Interpretation. Journal of Consciousness Studies. 2007.
• Stoecker, Ralf (ed.). Reflecting Davidson. Berlin: W. de Gruyter. 1993.
• Uzunova, Boryana. The ‘World’ of Donald Davidson: Some Remarks on the Concept. In: Philosophia: E-Journal of Philosophy and Culture – 1/2012.
• Vermazen, B., and Hintikka, M. Essays on Davidson: Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1985.
• Zeglen, Ursula M. (ed.). Donald Davidson: Truth, Meaning and Knowledge. London: Routledge. 1991.

External links

• "Davidson's Philosophy of Language". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• "Donald Davidson". Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
• "Donald Davidson" – by Jeff Malpas, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2005.
• "Donald Davidson (1917–2003)" by Vladimir Kalugin, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2006.
• Guide to the Donald Davidson Papers at The Bancroft Library