If the thesis of the anomalousness of the mental is correct, it shows that there are limits to the extent to which psychology may aspire to be a science like physics, since it precludes the possibility of a comprehensive closed system of psychological laws for predicating and explaining behavior. (2) Davidson’s nonreductionist account of the relational individuation of thought content rests on reflections on what assumptions the radical interpreter has to make in order to succeed in fitting the concepts of the theory of interpretation onto behavioral evidence. The radical interpreter interprets another on the basis of evidence that consists in part essentially in what prompts behavior of a speaker that is potentially interpretable as in- tentional. An idea implicit in the adoption of this position as basic to un- derstanding meaning and the propositional attitudes is that what a specific utterance means, and what a particular thought is about, depends upon how a speaker is embedded in his environment. While this idea is implicit in the basic methodological stance that Davidson takes on meaning and thought, it comes to prominence only in essays of the 1980s and 1990s.
The discussion develops in two phases. In the first, Davidson brings out the reliance of the interpreter on correlating hold-true attitudes with events and conditions in the environment as his first entry into what a speaker be- lieves and what he means by his words. If we can assume that to be a speaker at all requires that he be interpretable in any environment in which we find him, it will follow that what a speaker’s thoughts are about will depend on what their pattern of typical causes is, for it is only by linking a speaker’s thoughts to their typical causes, as identified by an interpreter, that inter- pretation from the third-person point of view is possible. This connection is already embodied in the treatment of the Principle of Charity as a con- stitutive principle of correct interpretation. This makes the concepts of the propositional attitudes also backward-looking causal concepts (if Davidson is right), because their causal history is essential to their individuation. This provides another ground for the thesis of the anomalousness of the mental, since causal concepts do not figure in strict laws.
In the second phase, Davidson emphasizes the importance of commu- nication as a way of narrowing down the choice of relevant causes of a speaker’s thoughts. Many causes of any given thought can be isolated for attention by treating different elements of the total physical cause as part of the background, and there are potentially many candidates for what a thought is about along any causal chain leading up to the thought. Which one is the right one? What objective criterion tells us what the thought is about? The suggestion that Davidson makes is that it is the “triangulation” between interpreter, speaker, and a common object of thought. That is, it is
Introduction 21
only in the context of interpretation, a context in which a speaker and inter- preter are responding to each other’s common response to a stimulus in the environment, that we can find an objective determinant of what a thought is about. The object of the thought is where the causal chains leading to each common response intersect.
(Perhaps some additional work is required, for it is not clear that there are not also many common causes of common responses for two communi- cants in any situation. Imagine two people watching the news on television – there are events at the screen’s surface, in the cable, at the cable station, in a satellite in geosynchronous orbit, and at distance trouble spots around the world, which are common causes of their thoughts. It is no different in other situations in which it is more difficult to identify all of the links in the causal chains.)
In some passages, it sounds as if Davidson thinks that it is only if there is an actual interpreter that it is possible to say determinately that a speaker has a thought. “If we consider a single creature by itself, its responses, no matter how complex, cannot show that it is reacting to, or thinking about, events a certain distance away rather than, say, on its skin” (“The Second Person” [Davidson 1992a, p. 263]). But a more plausible interpretation is that we can make sense of what a speaker’s thoughts are about only against the background of a pattern of interaction with other speakers.
Importantly, while these connections between our thoughts and our environments are treated as constitutive of them, and as essential for their correct individuation, there is no suggestion in Davidson’s arguments that we can offer any conceptual reduction of what it is to have thoughts, or to be a rational agent, to anything else. It is rather an upshot, on Davidson’s view, of the character of the irreducible concepts of the theory of inter- pretation and agency that they organize data that includes the pattern of interaction between speakers and their environments. However, as we have seen, Davidson also argues that the constitutive principles governing the concepts that are thus fit onto behavior preclude even any strict projectible correlations between mental and physical properties.
(3) A third important theme in Davidson’s work in philosophical psy- chology is the thesis, first advanced in “Thought and Talk” (Davidson 1984 [1975]), that language is essential for thought.
(1) One can have any propositional attitudes only if one has beliefs. (2) One can have beliefs only if one has the concept of belief. (3) One can have the concept of belief only if one is a speaker. (4) Therefore, one can have thoughts only if one is a speaker.