A ¿Y TÚ, QUÉ HARÍAS? ESTUDIO DE CASOS

We think that what exactly Davidson’s attitude towards the sceptic is, comes to light best in Barry Stroud’s essay on Davidson’s anti-scepticism and Davidson’s reply to it.25

Stroud applauds Davidson’s rejection of scepticism. However, regarding the veridicality thesis he thinks that Davidson vacillates between a weaker and a stronger reading.

According to the weaker reading, belief ascription is globally veridical from the perspective of the ascriber and (hence) if we interpret someone, we cannot but conclude that most of her beliefs are true (and if someone interpreted us, she would conclude the same about our beliefs). It is impos- sible to reach the verdict (in particular not by an omniscient interpreter)

22

Cf. Nagel (1999), pp. 2014-205. We shall not go into the question whether a Platonist can maintain that he may be a brain in the vat, but at least a Platonist could maintain to be a solipsist. 23 Cf. Nagel (1999), p. 202. 24_{Cf. RTG, p. 194.} 25 Stroud (1999) and RTS.

that a person’s beliefs are false in the main. According to the stronger read- ing, anyone’s beliefs are in fact mostly true. In other words: not only do interpreter’s necessarily conclude that the interpretee is largely right, but beliefs arereally largely true.26 Stroud accepts the veridicality thesis on the weaker reading, but rejects the stronger reading.

For Stroud the stronger reading cannot be established, and the weaker reading for him suffices to eliminate any serious threat from scepticism. It seems therefore that Stroud accepts Davidson’s agreement thesis, and accepts Davidson’s argument that the conditions of interpretation urge us to believe that others’ (and our own beliefs) are largely true, but does not (fully) accept Davidson’s argument ‘from agreement to veridicality’. Stroud thinks that both of Davidson’s attempts in A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge to extend agreement to veridicality fail (and in general he thinks that, as a philosophical enterprise, it is mistaken to try to establish the stronger reading).

For Stroud the omniscient interpreter argument fails because even though it is right that such an omniscient interpreter would find our beliefs largely trueif she interpreted us, whence they would in fact be largely true, we do not know if our beliefs are interpretable by an omniscient interpreter.27

The other of Davidson’s arguments simply relied on ‘the complicated causal truth’ that makes us the believers we are: roughly, our beliefs are typically caused by what they are about, and hence are typically true.28 Stroud thinks that we have no compelling reason to think that our beliefs are caused by what makes them true, even if Davidson is right that interpre- tation relies on such causes. Specifically, he argues that it is not necessary for successful interpretation that the contents of our beliefs are determined by whatactually typically causes them. Stroud agrees that we do interpret each other by identifying conditions that cause speakers to hold true their sentences. However, he thinks this does not require that the conditions as we identify them arein fact the causes of the beliefs. He gives one example of this. To correctly interpret a speaker’s sentence as being about a rabbit, it is not required that the speaker’s holding true the sentence is caused by the actual presence of a rabbit that is observed by speaker and interpreter: it is instead required that the speakerand the interpreter both take some- thing to be a rabbit (possibly mistakenly) and take that to be the cause of each other’s belief that there is a rabbit and of the speaker’s holding true the related sentence. That would suffice for successful communication. Therefore, Stroud argues, communication does not necessarily arise where causes converge, but where causes aretaken to converge and where they are

26_{Cf. Stroud (1999), pp. 144-145.} 27

Cf. Stroud (1999), section V. As we discussed in chapter 3, Genova takes this to be an implicit assumption, which Stroud thinks begs the question.

28

identified as a common cause.29

Nevertheless, Stroud thinks that the weaker reading suffices to establish that the possibilities proposed by the sceptic are inconceivable and hence can be rejected. Stroud writes: ‘an enquirer’s relation to the apparently innocent possibility from which a sceptical threat is thought eventually to arise is therefore parallel to a speaker’s relation to the possibility expressed in the paradoxical sentence ‘I believe that it is raining, and it is not raining.”30 That sentence may be true, but cannot consistently believed to be true. The same goes, according to Stroud, for the scenario’s sketched by sceptics. This means that what the sceptic asserts (e.g. that all our beliefs may be false) may be true (all our beliefs could in fact be false), but cannot consistently be

believedto be true. Stroud writes: ‘There is a difference between something’s being simply inconsistent or impossible (which someone’s believing that it’s raining, and its not raining, is not) and something’s being impossible for anyone to believe or discover.’31 Davidson’s arguments for Stroud make us appreciate that the ‘sceptical possibility’ is inconceivable, but not that it is impossible. What Stroud has in mind seems to be the following: it is an inconsistent idea to think that a set of beliefs is completely mistaken and to think that those are someone’s (or our own) beliefs, since it is inconsistent to attribute a largely false set of beliefs. Nevertheless, that this is inconsistent to do for us (given the way belief ascription works) does not mean that there is no possibility that we entertain beliefs that are largely false: rather, knowing that a set of beliefs is largely false, we could not attribute that set: not only not to ourselves, also not to others, since it goes against the principles of belief attribution to attribute largely false beliefs. It seems that Stroud’s ‘unbelievable’ possibility could be actual in only two scenarios: either our beliefs are largely false and we have never communicated with someone, or our beliefs are largely false and we have communicated with others, but (by the agreement thesis) on the basis of shared largely false beliefs (but Stroud would then add that it is inconceivable to think that either of these is actual, since were we to think that, we could not anymore believe that we had those false beliefs.) For Davidson, however, neither of these is possible.

However, the point of scepticism is not that the sceptic believes that his beliefs are false (as Stroud’s rain sentence suggests), but rather that she thinks she does not have sufficient reason to think they are (mostly) true. The sceptic therefore has the meta-belief that all her beliefsmay be false, or (if she takes that to be inconsistent) she suspends judgement and has no beliefs (except meta-beliefs).32 It seems therefore that Stroud’s reading of

29_{We shall come back to this point in the next section.} 30

Stroud (1999), p. 156. Cf. below for our comment on this comparison.

31

Stroud (1999), p. 156.

32_{In as far as philosophers are interested in scepticism and think there is no good}

the veridicality thesis does not suffice to prove the sceptic wrong: it merely implies that it is inconsistent to think that all one’s beliefs are false, but the sceptic does not believe this (and one may argue that it is obviously inconsistent to think this, it does not need a sophisticated argument like Davidson’s). Maybe what Stroud means is that the sceptic could not even consistently tell us that our beliefs may be largely false, because that would imply that the sceptic has identified our beliefs not as largely true, which would imply that he interpreted us wrongly. That would get close to what we think is what Davidson means by the thesis (see below), but it would still not explain why Descartes’s position (or any traditional sceptical position) is inconsistent, since Descartes suspends judgement about all things, except theCogito.33

To support his reading of the thesis, Stroud appeals to Davidson’s idea that a community of minds is the measure of all things. For Stroud this is the core insight of Davidson’s epistemology: we cannot step outside the realm of beliefs and judge about them. Stroud construes scepticism as a negative verdict on a body of putative knowledge made from an impossible position outside it.34 Stroud thinks Davidson should refrain from making a positive verdict from the same position, against the sceptic. Stroud therefore thinks we do not know that all or most of the things we believe are true.35

The problem with Stroud’s interpretation is that Davidson himself is clearly after a stronger answer to the sceptic than Stroud, as is clear from Davidson’s reply to Stroud’s essay. In the reply he argues that Stroud de- mands too much of knowledge and that we do know that the sceptic is false, something that Stroud explicitly denies. Stroud on the other hand overestimates what Davidson thinks is the power of the argument for veridi- cality. Davidson’s reply to Stroud (and his disagreement) sheds light on how ‘strong’ the veridicality thesis for Davidson is and also what Davidson is after in arguing for the veridicality of belief.