DONALD DAVIDSON
THE PHILOSOPHY-LINGUISTICS CONNECTION
BY
GILBERT HARMAN
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Donald Davidson The Philosophy-Linguistics
Connection 1967-76. Gilbert Harman Princeton
University March 17, 2004 Donald Davidson
came to Princeton University in 1967 and
went to Rockefeller University in New York
City from 1970-76, occasionally coming back
to teach a seminar at Princeton. During this
time he and I talked regularly, ran two conferences,
and published two collections of essays.
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Gilbert Harman
Donald Davidson The Philosophy-Linguistics
Connection
1967-76 Gilbert Harman Princeton University
March 17, 2004
Donald Davidson came to Princeton University
in 1967 and went to Rockefeller University
in New York City from 1970-76, occasionally
coming back to teach a seminar at Princeton.
During this time he and I talked regularly,
ran two conferences, and published two collections
of essays.
Donald Davidson came to Princeton University
in 1967 and went to Rockefeller University
in New York City from 1970-76, occasionally
coming back to teach a seminar at Princeton.
During this time he and I talked regularly,
ran two conferences, and published two collections
of essays.
I first met Davidson at the American Philosophical
meeting in December 1963 when he presented
his paper, "Action, Reasons, and Causes,"
a paper which contains the germ of many of
the ideas he developed in the following years.
I next saw him in the summer of 1965. I was
teaching a course at Berkeley that summer.
Hearing that Paul Grice was running a weekly
seminar at Stanford, Tom Nagel, Barry Stroud,
Tom Clark and I drove down to attend. In
the seminar, Paul presented an early version
of "Logic and Conversation," with
Davidson regularly asking for clarifications,
"because otherwise what you say will
just go in one ear and out the other."
Various other philosophers were at the seminar,
including Michael Dummett, who later presented
his own "antirealism" in opposition
to Davidson's "realism." (However,
I believe that at this time the big issue
between them was whether Michael would go
surfing with Davidson.)
Back at Princeton that fall we discussed
Davidson's ideas about semantics as presented
in his paper, "The Method of Intension
and Extension," (in The Philosophy of
Rudolf Carnap) and especially in "Theories
of Meaning and Learnable Languages."
I was especially excited because Davidson's
ideas seemed to connect in an interesting
way with Noam Chomsky's views about what
is needed for languages to be learnable.
In 1966 Davidson gave a lecture at Princeton
on "How Is Weakness of the Will Possible?"
I was quite taken with the argument of the
paper and corresponded with him about it.
One very important idea in the paper concerns
seeming conditional statements involving
ought, like, "If you promise to do something,
you ought to do it." Davidson argued
that such statements are not of the form,
"If P then Q," but are statements
of conditional oughts by analogy with statements
of conditional probability. Since the word
if is not functioning as a sentential connective
in these contexts, the logical principle
of modus ponens does not apply.
There are other instances of this sort of
if. In "Adverbs of Quantification,"
David Lewis observes that if clauses are
often used to put restrictions on the interpretations
of quantifiers rather than as sentential
connectives. One might even speculate that
if never functions as a sentential connective,
so strictly speaking modus ponens never applies.
Davidson came to Princeton in the following
year, 1967. He was made Chair of the Department
the year after that. He then took a year
off to go back to the Stanford Center for
the Behavioral Sciences and, after that,
accepted a position at Rockefeller University
and moved to New York. So, he spent only
two years in Princeton!
As soon as he arrived in Princeton, Davidson
and I met regularly to discuss how his ideas
about semantics and logical form fit with
what what was going on at the time in linguistics.
Davidson's ideas of the time were expressed
in such papers as "Truth and Meaning,"
"The Logical Form of Action Sentences,"
"Causal Relations," and "On
Saying That."
One part of his view was a stress on the
importance for semantics of providing a theory
of truth conditions. In a way he was defending
a version of Quine's translational approach
to meaning: your semantics for a language
L should provide a systemic way to translate
from L into your own language, but with some
additional restrictions. The system of translation
should take the form of a theory of truth
for the other language; it should have a
finite number of axioms (because it has to
be learnable); and it should be expressed
in first-order quantification theory. The
use of second-order quantification or substitutional
quantification is ruled out in part because
it trivializes the requirement that the rules
of translation should take the form of a
theory of truth. Appeal to possible worlds
is ruled out as well, for reasons that are
less clear to me.
Like many other philosophers at the time,
I was completely unconvinced by Davidson's
meta-view about the connection between truth
and meaning. On the other hand I was (also
like many others) rather taken with Davidson's
particular accounts of logical form, for
example, his suggestion that some sorts of
adverbial modification were best treated
by supposing that certain sentences involve
hidden quantifications over events, that
the verbs in such sentences are predicates
of events, and that the adverbs represent
further predicates of time, place, manner,
etc.; or his claim that causal statements
are often statements of causal relations
between events; or his proposal that sentential
that clause complements, as in "Galileo
said that the Earth is flat" be treated
as performances that the rest of the sentence
comments on.
Davidson recruited students and colleagues
to work on problems, such as how to handle
adjective noun constructions, like large
mouse, which cannot be analyzed as simple
conjunctions, since a large mouse isn't very
large; or how to treat pronouns in a theory
of truth so as to avoid the result that your
remark "I have a headache" is true
if and only if I have a headache.
At Princeton, Davidson and I got involved
in discussions of linguistics because these
developments looked as if they might help
with his ideas about logical form and because
his ideas about logical form might help in
linguistics. Katz and Postal had argued for
a version of generative grammar in which
syntactic transformations mapped the "deep
structure" of a sentence into its "surface
structures." Semantic interpretation
rules operated on the deep structure to arrive
at a representation of meaning and phonetic
interpretation rules operated on the surface
structure to provide a representation of
sound.
Davidson and I discussed how a grammar of
this sort might be used to help assign logical
forms to sentences in a natural language.
Similar ideas were being developed by linguists
like Emmon Bach, James McCawley, and George
Lakoff, who argued for a version of the Katz-Postal
theory that did away with the distinction
between semantic interpretation rules and
syntactic transformations. In this view of
"generative semantics," there was
no separate level of deep structure. Instead,
the base rules of the system built up a semantic
interpretation and then transformations mapped
that into surface structure. This idea looked
quite promising at the time, although linguistics
soon went off in a different direction.
Davidson was going to be at the Stanford
Center for 1969-70, so he and I set up a
small conference there in 1969 that brought
together a few linguists and philosophers
of language. The philosophers included Quine,
Geach, and David Kaplan; the linguists included
Bach, Lakoff, McCawley, and Barbara Partee.
(My memories of who attended this conference
are different from Davidson's list in his
autobiography. For example, Davidson says
Richard Montague was there, but I am sure
that Montague was not there.)
Davidson thought that the conference went
well enough that we should bring out a collection
of new papers in Semantics of Natural Language,
which was published the following year in
Synthese. We then we published it as a separate
book, including also Saul Kripke's lectures
on "Naming and Necessity."
Davidson next managed to get support from
the Council for Philosophical Studies for
a six week "summer school" in Semantics
and Philosophy of Language in Irvine in
1971. The "faculty" included Kaplan,
Partee, Quine, Grice, Peter Strawson, Kripke,
and the linguist John Ross. The sixty or
so "students" attending included
Gareth Evans, Richmond Thomason, Robert Stalnaker,
Carl and Sally McConnell Ginet, William Lycan,
Peter Unger, and James McGilvray. After intense
discussions, we would spend time in Laguna
Beach, where Davidson was teaching Quine
to surf.
After Davidson moved to New York, where I
had been living while commuting to Princeton,
we continued to meet regularly to discuss
philosophy, play squash, and have meatless
lunches, after Davidson said he had taken
up vegetarianism for health reasons.
He had a water bed in his high floor apartment
and he worried about how to empty the water.
(I guess this is something that has to be
done regularly?) He got a hose and was siphoning
it out the window, when he almost fell out
himself! He thought that if he had fallen
out, the headlines might have been interesting.
We often talked about the novels he was reading
(Iris Murdoch, Trollope). He was very enthusiastic
about everything. He always spoke very clearly,
with excellent articulation, as if he was
acting, and indeed he said he had been an
actor earlier in life.
We sometimes traveled to conferences together.
He wanted to rent a plane so we could fly
to conferences, but his stories about he
good he had been at handling various electrical
emergencies led me to wonder why there had
been so many emergencies and I always insisted
on driving.
We prepared an introductory anthology of
readings in what we called The Logic of Grammar.
Unfortunately, the publisher went bankrupt
at the time of publication and hardly anyone
has seen this volume who didn't get a free
copy.
In addition to issues of logical form, we
talked a great deal about the theory of action,
practical reasoning, intentions, planning,
and doing something intentionally. Davidson
wanted to explain intentional action in terms
of beliefs, desires, and causality, and then
use the notion of intentional action to explain
what intentions are. I thought this couldn't
work because it seemed to me that intentions
are distinctive psychological states in their
own right, not reducible to desires plus
beliefs. Michael Bratman, who was a student
at Rockefeller during this time, has since
worked out in great detail a nonreductionist
view of this sort.
During his six years at Rockefeller, Davidson
wrote over twenty important papers on a wide
range of subjects, including his Presidential
Address to the 1973 Eastern Division American
Philosophical Meeting in Atlanta, "On
the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme."
All good things come to an end. I left New
York to move to Princeton in 1976 and at
about the same time Davidson moved to Chicago,
and then after a few years to Berkeley. From
that point on I saw much less of him, alas.
What about our project of getting linguists
and philosophers to join forces in developing
the semantics of natural language? One thing
is that, since 1971, serious semantics has
become an important topic in linguistics.
In fact, a majority of the interesting work
in semantics in the last thirty years has
been done by linguists in linguistic departments,
often in framework of Montague Grammar. (Montague
had been murdered a few months before the
1971 conference at Irvine; Barbara Partee
lectured on Montague grammar at the conference.)
Davidson's ideas about adverbial modification
have entered textbooks in linguistic semantics
and have been developed in important ways
by Terry Parsons, for example. Increasingly
philosophers of language have been paying
attention again to results in linguistics.
And there are again more and more workshops
and conferences involving collaborations
between philosophers and linguists. I am
optimistic again about the philosophy-linguistics
connection.
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