Editing Donald Davidson (philosopher) (section)

==Philosophical work==

===Anomalous monism===
{{Main|Anomalous monism}}
[[Anomalous monism]] is a philosophical thesis about the [[mind–body problem|mind–body relationship]] first proposed by Davidson in his 1970 paper "Mental Events".<ref>{{Citation |last=Davidson |first=D. |title=Mental Events |date=2001 |work=Essays on Actions and Events |pages=207–228 |url=https://academic.oup.com/book/3354/chapter/144438526 |access-date= |edition= |publisher=Oxford University Press |language=en |doi=10.1093/0199246270.003.0011 |isbn=978-0-19-924627-4|url-access=subscription }}</ref> The theory is twofold and states that [[mental event]]s are identical with physical events, and that the mental is anomalous, i.e. under their mental descriptions, causal relations between these mental events are not describable by strict [[physical law]]s. Hence, Davidson proposes an identity theory of mind without the reductive bridge laws associated with the [[Type physicalism|type-identity theory]].

Since in this theory every mental event is some physical event or other, the idea is that someone's thinking at a certain time, for example, that snow is white, is a certain pattern of neural firing in their brain at that time, an event which can be characterized as both a thinking that snow is white (a type of mental event) and a pattern of neural firing (a type of physical event). There is just one event that can be characterized both in mental terms and in physical terms. If mental events are physical events, they can at least in principle be explained and predicted, like all physical events, on the basis of laws of physical science. However, according to anomalous monism, events cannot be so explained or predicted as described in mental terms (such as "thinking", "desiring", etc.), but only as described in physical terms: this is the distinctive feature of the thesis as a brand of [[physicalism]].

Davidson's argument for anomalous monism relies on the following three principles:

:#'''The principle of causal interaction''': there exist both mental-to-physical as well as physical-to-mental causal interactions.
:#'''The principle of the nomological character of causality''': all events are causally related through strict laws.
:#'''The principle of the anomalism of the mental''': there are no strict psychophysical or psychological laws that can causally relate mental events with physical events or mental events with other mental events.

See the main article for an explanation of his argument as well as objections.

===Third dogma of empiricism<!--'Scheme-content dualism' redirects here-->===
In his 1974 essay ''On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme'',<ref name=":2">{{Cite journal |last=Davidson |first=D. |date=1974 |title=On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/3129898?origin=crossref |journal=Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association |volume=47 |pages=5–20 |doi=10.2307/3129898 |issn=0065-972X|url-access=subscription }}</ref> Davidson critiques what he calls the "third dogma of empiricism". The term is a reference to the famous 1951 essay ''[[Two Dogmas of Empiricism]]'' by his graduate teacher, [[W. V. O. Quine]], in which he critiques two central tenets, or "dogmas", of [[logical positivism]] (and empiricism more generally): the [[analytic–synthetic distinction]] and [[reductionism]]. Davidson identifies an additional third dogma present in logical positivism and even in Quine's own work, as well as the work of [[Thomas Kuhn]], [[Benjamin Lee Whorf]], and others, and he argues that it is as untenable as the first two dogmas.

Davidson's third dogma refers to '''scheme–content dualism''', which is the idea that all knowledge is the result of one's scheme of concepts being imposed upon empirical content from the world. The content is objective because it simply exists in the world or is simply given in experience, while the scheme is subjective because it is a person or community's way of making sense of that content according to some set of criteria. One consequence of scheme–content dualism is conceptual relativism, which is the idea that two different people or communities could have radically different, [[commensurability (philosophy of science)|incommensurable]] (Kuhn's term for untranslatable) ways of making sense of the world. On this view, truth is relative to a conceptual scheme rather than objective.<ref name=":2" />

The general argumentative structure of the essay is as follows:<ref name=":2" />

:#The idea of a conceptual scheme is only intelligible if there can be many different conceptual schemes, as the existence of one implies that there could be others, otherwise the term does not refer to anything in particular.
:#There can only be many different conceptual schemes if they are incommensurable, whether completely or partially, otherwise they would simply be different ways of speaking.
:#We can only recognize a conceptual scheme as a conceptual scheme if it is commensurable with our own (this premise is what Davidson attempts to prove in his essay).
:#Thus, the criterion for distinguishing alternative conceptual schemes, and thus the criterion for their identity, seems to be both incommensurability and commensurability.
:#Thus, the very idea of a conceptual scheme is incoherent.
:#If we lack criteria for identifying conceptual schemes, then we lack criteria for distinguishing scheme from content, and thus criteria for identifying empirical content.
:#Thus, scheme–content dualism is incoherent.

The upshot of Davidson's argument is that there is no strict boundary between subjective and objective knowledge. Knowledge of one's own scheme of concepts is necessarily inseparable from one's knowledge of the world, which undermines the longstanding idea in philosophy that one's own subjective knowledge is fundamentally different than what objectively exists in reality. This also undermines conceptual relativism, as the above argument demonstrates that two different conceptual schemes must be commensurable if they are to even be recognized as different conceptual schemes, and so truth is not relative to a conceptual scheme, but is rather objective insofar as we all have unmediated access to the world.<ref name=":2" />

For Davidson, in order for one's own point of view to be intelligible as a point of view, one must acknowledge the existence of other points of view, and they all must pertain to the same objective reality, which means they must be translatable (he further develops this idea in his 1991 essay ''Three Varieties of Knowledge'').<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Davidson |first=D. |date=1991 |title=Three Varieties of Knowledge |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1358246100007748/type/journal_article |journal=Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement |language=en |volume=30 |pages=153–166 |doi=10.1017/S1358246100007748 |issn=1358-2461|url-access=subscription }}</ref> In Davidson's own words, "Different points of view make sense, but only if there is a common coordinate system on which to plot them."<ref name=":2" />

Unlike the first two dogmas, which can be rejected by empiricists, Davidson claims that the third dogma of empiricism is "perhaps the last, for if we give it up it is not clear that there is anything distinctive left to call empiricism."<ref name=":2" /> [[Richard Rorty]] and [[Michael Williams (philosopher)|Michael Williams]] have even said that the third dogma is necessary for any study of [[epistemology]] (Rorty in particular uses Davidson's critique to advance his own [[neopragmatism|neopragmatist]] critique of philosophy-as-epistemology).<ref name=":4">{{Cite journal |last=McGinn |first=M. |date=1981 |title=The Third Dogma of Empiricism |url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544981 |journal=Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society |volume=82 |pages=89–101 |issn=0066-7374}}</ref>

===Swampman===
Swampman is the subject of a [[thought experiment]] introduced by Davidson in his 1987 paper ''Knowing One's Own Mind''. In the experiment, Davidson is struck by lightning in a swamp and disintegrated, but at the same exact moment, an identical copy of Davidson, the Swampman, is made from a nearby tree and proceeds through life exactly as Davidson would have, indistinguishable from him. The experiment is used by Davidson to claim that thought and meaning cannot exist in a vacuum; they are dependent on their interconnections to the world. Therefore, despite being physically identical to himself, Davidson states that the Swampman does not have thoughts nor meaningful language, as it has no causal history to base them on.

The experiment runs as follows:<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Davidson |first=D. |date=1987 |title=Knowing One's Own Mind |url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/3131782 |journal=Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association |volume=60 |issue=3 |pages=441–458 |doi=10.2307/3131782 |jstor=3131782 |issn=0065-972X|url-access=subscription }}</ref>

{{Quote|text=Suppose lightning strikes a dead tree in a swamp; I am standing nearby. My body is reduced to its elements, while entirely by coincidence (and out of different molecules) the tree is turned into my physical replica. My replica, The Swampman, moves exactly as I did; according to its nature it departs the swamp, encounters and seems to recognize my friends, and appears to return their greetings in English. It moves into my house and seems to write articles on radical interpretation. No one can tell the difference.
But there ''is'' a difference. My replica can't recognize my friends; it can't ''re''cognize anything, since it never cognized anything in the first place. It can't know my friends' names (though of course it seems to), it can't remember my house. It can't mean what I do by the word 'house', for example, since the sound 'house' it makes was not learned in a context that would give it the right meaning—or any meaning at all. Indeed, I don't see how my replica can be said to mean anything by the sounds it makes, nor to have any thoughts.|author=Donald Davidson|source=''Knowing One's Own Mind''}}