(see “True to the Facts,” Davidson 1984 [1969]). If we try to say what fact makes it the case that ‘The source of the Nile lies in the Mountains of the Moon’ is true (that is, what fact in virtue of corresponding with which it is true), we can do no better than to say that it is the fact that the source of the Nile lies in the Mountains of the Moon; and it is a fact that the source of the Nile lies in the Mountains of the Moon if and only if the source of the Nile lies in the Mountains of the Moon. We might as well have said: ‘The source of the Nile lies in the Mountains of the Moon’ is true iff the source of the Nile lies in the Mountains of the Moon.
Davidson has suggested that the varieties of deflationary theories that have arisen in recent times are a reaction against inflated views of what theories of truth can do (viz., deliver the Truth), and misguided attempts to reduce it to something else. The simple redundancy theory, which holds that any sentence of the form ‘s is true’ may be replaced without loss of content with s, is the precursor to more recent deflationary theories. It suffers the defect that it cannot handle uses of ‘is true’ in which the sentences said to be true are not given with the sentence, as in ‘Everything Aristotle said is true’. More recent deflationary theories argue that the content of the concept of truth is exhausted by our recognition that every instance of a Tarskian T- schema is true: ‘p’ is true iff p. A defect of this approach when it appeals to the truth predicate as applied to sentences is that it does not tell us how to apply it across languages. The schema tells us only what the extension of ‘is true’ is when the metalanguage contains the object language (and then only when the language does not allow the construction of semantic paradoxes). It is also useless in the case of natural languages that contain context-sensitive expressions. Let us try disquotation with a context-sensitive sentence: ‘I am hungry’ is true iff I am hungry. Because it is a context-sensitive expression itself, no utterance of this correctly represents the conditions under which an utterance in general of ‘I am hungry’ is true. Suppose I now assert: ‘I am hungry’ is true iff I am hungry. Let t be the time of my assertion. Then I have said that ‘I am hungry’ is true iff Ludwig is hungry at t. But this does not give the truth conditions for any assertion of ‘I am hungry’ by anyone else at any time.
These difficulties have motivated a move to a propositional version of the approach, which appeals to the schema, ‘The proposition that p is true iff p’ (restricted to instances that do not give rise to paradox). Davidson has argued, against this, that we lack an account of the semantics of ‘The propo- sition that p’ that can serve the deflationists’ purposes. If we are Fregeans, we should take ‘The proposition that x’ to be a functional expression; it is naturally interpreted as mapping a truth value onto itself, and then we take
Introduction 29
the sentence ‘p’ to denote a truth value; instances of the schema are then trivially true, but they explain nothing about truth, and rather presuppose a grasp of it. If we do not take this route, then we stand in need of an account of the function of the sentence that appears after ‘The proposition that’. If we take the sentence to be mentioned, then it must be relativized to a language, for the same sentence may express different propositions in dif- ferent languages. Then the concept of truth is exhibited as interconnected with the concept of meaning, and this undercuts the deflationist’s attempt to show that the concept is trivial and uninteresting. (See, in particular, Davidson 1996a; 2000c.)
10. RATIONALITY AND IRRATIONALITY
Davidson’s work on irrational action is a direct outgrowth of his work on the basic nature of human agency. Rationality is a condition on agency. To describe an object as an agent with psychological attitudes capable of performing actions requires finding in its behavior, or in its dispositions to behave, a pattern that can be described and explained in terms of attri- butions of patterns of interlocking attitudes that motivate and rationalize what the agent does. Irrational behavior emerges only after we have identi- fied something as an agent. Davidson’s fundamental thesis about irrational action or thought is that it is to be viewed not as nonrational behavior, but as a perturbation of rationality, a disturbance in a largely rational pattern of thought and action, since no object can be irrational except insofar as it is an agent and, hence, largely rational. We identify a particular thought or a particular piece of behavior as irrational by its failure to conform fully to the rational pattern of the rest of the agent’s attitudes and behavior. Its irrationality is to be located in its relation to the rest of the thoughts and behavior of the individual. The inconsistency thus identified is internal to the agent, and is a matter of the agent’s not adhering to norms that he recognizes are constitutive of the attitudes.
Davidson has written persuasively about a range of types of irrational behavior as well as about the nature of irrational behavior more generally. In the case of weakness of the will, Davidson asks how it is possible for someone to judge that a certain thing is the best thing to do, all things considered, and yet do something else, which seems to imply an all-out judgment in favor of it instead. The answer lies in distinguishing between the normative force of someone’s attitudes, which guide his deliberations about what to do, and the causal force of various desires; and in distinguishing between the judgment