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8 January 2021Martin Stokhof Interpretation Tags: Charity, Davidson, Rationality

Davidson on rationality and the transcendental status of Charity

What is it that strikes one as problematic about Davidson’s appeal to rationality? Is it the apparently metaphysical status of the concept as it plays a role in Davidson’s work, or does it concern the content of the concept that he uses? (In the latter case, how does that differ from the kind of appeal to rationality that is inherent in, e.g., Popper’s approach in terms of falsifiability? Isn’t that another application of a conception of rationality?)

As for the qualms that many people have about the Kantian, transcendental status of Charity: it is certainly true that one can raise objections to the kind of transcendental analysis that Davidson’s use of Charity seems to instantiate. But we should ask ourselves whether the alternative theories are really theories about the same phenomenon, or whether perhaps a shift takes place when we drop the appeal to transcendental notions. For example, one may argue that a consequentialist in ethics `really’ (but the use of `really’ should be a warning sign!) is concerned with a different notion of the good than a deontologist. Likewise, if we talk about interpretation on the assumption of the possibility of an external, independent identification of what counts as (utterances of) the same language, we’re dealing with not quite (another red light flashes) the same problem as Davidson. So what seems to be needed (but at the same time seems very hard to get) is an a priori, non-theory dependent characterisation of the phenomenon in question.

Question: suppose it were clear what exactly Davidson’s conception of rationality was, and suppose it would be one with which we agreed, would that make a difference? In other words, is it the lack of perspicuity of some of the central concepts that is bothering us, or is it the way in which they are used?

Observation: Davidson’s goal is not to come up with empirical theories in the sense in which scientific theories are empirical. (Cf., the discussion in `The Second Person’ about the abstract nature of the concepts of ‘language’, ‘meaning’, etc.) If anything, his goal is to come up with models for empirical phenomena that explain, not their actual ‘ins and outs’, but, one could say, their ‘possibility’.

That actually leads to a second question (one that is not restricted to Davidson’s analyses), viz., what it is that we do when in philosophy we analyse something that is also a straightforward empirical phenomenon. To that question there are many answers, one of which is that of transcendental methodology. And the next step is then to determine how empirical observations are relevant for assessing these philosophical answers.

Martin Stokhof
from: Radical Interpretation Discussion Board
date: fall 2006

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4 December 2020Martin Stokhof Interpretation, Wittgenstein Tags: Charity, Davidson, Practice theory

Uninterpreted content

One question that keeps coming back is what a practice based approach (such as Wittgenstein’s and Schatzki’s) has to offer over and above what Davidson’s appeal to Charity accomplishes. And there are good reasons to ask this question, if only because the Charity principle does seem to lend itself to formal modelling, unlike a practice based view.

The answer can be given in two ways (but it is basically the same answer): ‘uninterpreted content’, and ‘learning’. Participation in a practice originates from a point outside the practice, and a characterisation of what it means to be a participant minimally has to allow for an account of how one becomes one. When the practice is linguistic, -one that involves interpretation-, this involves an account of the transition of the non-linguistic to the linguistic realm, and hence includes a specification of the role of uninterpreted content.

On both counts the Davidsonian approach does not seem to do well: the participants in radical interpretation are autonomous and fully competent, but how they became that way is left in the dark. (Meredith Williams in ‘Wittgenstein and Davidson on the sociality of language’ also voices for criticism along these lines.) In particular, the essentially linguistic nature (in the sense of being linguistically expressible) of what they bring to bear on the task (beliefs, desires, and other attitudes) seems to be an obstacle: there is no role for uninterpreted content here.

Another point that speaks in favour of the learning approach is that it suggests that it is not just the transition from the pre-verbal to the verbal stage that is at stake, but that learning is a continuous process. Hence, ‘teacher’ and ‘pupil’ are really indications of functions, of roles, and even during our days as ‘competent’ speakers of a language we play both roles. If we encounter a new phrase, or one that is used in a new way, we may adopt the role of ‘pupil’ and try to learn what the new meaning is. Or we may adopt the ‘teacher’ role and try to correct the other’s usage. What role we choose depends on a number of factors: our concern with successful communication in this instance, our estimate of the abilities of the other language user, social relations, our emotional attitudes towards the other, and so on.

Martin Stokhof
from: Interpretation
date: fall 2009

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10 October 2020Martin Stokhof Interpretation Tags: Charity, Davidson

Charity and false beliefs

What Charity does is to assume agreement (in beliefs). That by itself does not automatically assume truth (of those beliefs), it does so only in conjunction with the assumption that we ourselves have the right beliefs. And there is the conundrum: we know that some of our beliefs are false, but we do no know which these are (otherwise we would not hold them). So indirectly we will assume that others, even if we assume they agree with us, will not be right all the time, but for the same reason that we can not attribute false beliefs to ourselves without giving them up, we can not attribute false beliefs to other without giving up the assumption of agreement.

Martin Stokhof
from: Interpretation
date: fall 2008

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12 June 202018 December 2020Martin Stokhof Interpretation Tags: Charity, Davidson, Relativism

Davidson, indeterminacy and charity

The point seems to be this: given that we have a shared ontology due to the application of the Tarskian framework (as the theoretical framework in which we formulate concrete theories of meanings for concrete languages) and charity, which implies shared beliefs, why don’t we have a shared vocabulary and a shared theory of reference concerning this vocabulary?

The question boils down to what follows from the assumptions mentioned about reference. Let’s start with the use of the Tarskian framework. For Davidson this follows from the assumptions he makes concerning the nature of meaning (extensionalism) and the function of a semantic theory (explanation of competence); cf., ‘Truth and Meaning’ for the details. So his view is that if we want a theory of meaning for a language, it has to have that particular form. And that in its turn presupposes that in any language we find a shared logical machinery, consisting of propositional connectives, quantificational apparatus (and the basic distinctions brought along by that) and the logical rules governing their behaviour. But that is all, in particular it does not involve any assumptions concerning the reference of the non-logical vocabulary. Of course, reference is used in stating the Tarskian truth theory, but there it is used only as an auxiliary notion. What the theory defines, or accounts for, is (our knowledge of) truth conditions of sentences. It does so using the auxiliary notion of reference of sub-sentential expressions, but, and this is the important point: it does not define truth on the basis of an independent account of reference. And as Davidson points out, any account of truth along these lines leaves reference essentially underdetermined (a point also made by Putnam and several others): two sentences may have the same truth conditions under different assignments of references to their sub-sentential expressions. (If the sentences are from different languages, we have two translatable sentences which do not allow us to infer any shared reference; if the sentences are from the same language, this means that synonymy does not guarantee unique reference; and as a special (but most important) case we have that it is possible to assign to one and the same sentence the same truth conditions based on attributions of different references to one or more of its component expressions.)

Then charity. Notice that charity, too, concerns sentences, not words. In interpretation, i.e., in actually trying to construct a Tarskian theory of truth for a given language, the empirical data we start from are utterances made in a context (situation). The assumption that truth plays the same role for the speakers of the language we are interpreting as it does for us, these data can be viewed as utterances of sentences held true in that situation. A specific (to be determined!) subset of those will be utterances of sentences held true about that situation, i.e., utterances of sentences that are held true on the basis of certain aspects of the situation in which they are uttered. Each and every sentence uttered is supposed to express a belief. So certain sentences uttered in a situation express beliefs of the speaker about that situation. This is where charity comes in: it allows us to proceed on the assumption that the belief that the speaker expresses in these sentences (but remember, we do not know of every sentence in advance whether it belongs to this set) is a belief that we hold about the situation as well. This is supposed to give us enough common ground to work our way into the language. But, and this is the important point, just as two sentences can have the same truth conditions, yet not share reference of sub-sentential expressions, beliefs too can be shared without a shared set of objects, properties and relations that can be attached in a unique way as references to the expressions that occur in the sentences that are used to express these beliefs.

So neither the Tarskian framework nor charity allows us to venture beyond the level of sentences/beliefs and be confident that we will return with a unique ontology in this particular sense. But for Davidson the conclusion is not that hence there is a relativity of ontological schemes, but rather that the idea behind it, viz., that the beliefs we hold and the meanings of the sentences we use to express those beliefs, are built up from referents in this particular way, is misguided in the first place. In combination with the holistic nature of language and belief that Davidson clearly endorses, this assumption would lead to relativism. But there is, according to Davidson, no reason to make it in the first place.

Martin Stokhof
from: Radical Interpretation Discussion Board
date: 10-2003