Reply to Jeff Malpas: on truth, realism, changing one's mind about Davidson (not Heidegger), and related topics

Abstract

This essay responds to Jeff Malpas's foregoing article, itself written in response to my various publications over the past two decades concerning Donald Davidson's ideas about truth, meaning, and interpretation. It has to do mainly with our disagreement as regards the substantive content of Davidson's truth‐based semantic approach in relation to the problematic legacy of logical empiricism, including Quine's incisive but no less problematical critique of that legacy. I also raise questions with respect to Malpas's coupling of Davidson with Heidegger, intended to provide a more adequate depth‐ontological grounding for the formalized (logico‐semantic) conception of truth that Davidson adopts from Tarski. My essay then argues the case for an outlook of objectivist causal realism joined with a theory of inference to the best, most rational explanation that would satisfy this need in more philosophically (as well as scientifically) accountable terms.

Keywords:

• Davidson
• Heidegger
• interpretation
• Quine
• realism
• truth

Notes

Christopher Norris, ‘Some Dilemmas of Post‐Empiricism: Hermeneutic Themes in Philosophy of Language and Science’, in New Idols of the Cave: On the Limits of Anti‐Realism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 6–43.

Norris, Resources of Realism: Prospects for ‘Post‐Analytic’ Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1997); Against Relativism: Philosophy of Science, Deconstruction and Critical Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997); Minding the Gap: Epistemology and Philosophy of Language in the Two Traditions (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000); Truth Matters: Realism, Anti‐Realism and Response‐Dependence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2002); Philosophy of Language and the Challenge to Scientific Realism (London: Routledge, 2004); Language, Logic and Epistemology: A Modal‐Realist Approach (London: Macmillan, 2004).

See J. E. Malpas, Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); also Fred R. Dallmayr, The Other Heidegger (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993); Hubert L. Dreyfus, Being‐in‐the‐World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division One (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Mark Okrent, Heidegger's Pragmatism: Understanding, Being, and the Critique of Metaphysics (Cornell University Press, 1988); Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Donald Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001). For some recent assessments see Lewis E. Hahn (ed.) The Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Chicago: Open Court, 1999); Kirk Ludwig (ed.) Donald Davidson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Ursula M. Zegle'n (ed.) Donald Davidson: Truth, Meaning, and Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1999).

See n. 2 above.

See especially Norris, Against Relativism and Truth Matters.

Gilbert Harman, ‘Inference to the Best Explanation’, Philosophical Review, 74 (1965), pp. 88–95; Peter Lipton, Inference to the Best Explanation (London: Routledge, 1993); also J. Aronson, R. Harré, and E. Way, Realism Rescued: How Scientific Progress is Possible (London: Duckworth, 1994); Michael Devitt, Realism and Truth, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Jarrett Leplin (ed.) Scientific Realism (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984); Stathis Psillos, Scientific Realism: How Science Tracks Truth (Routledge, 1999).

Norris, Resources of Realism and Philosophy of Language and the Challenge to Scientific Realism.

Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996).

W. V. Quine, ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, in From a Logical Point of View, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), pp. 20–46.

Alfred Tarski, ‘The Concept of Truth in Formalized Languages’, in Logic, Semantics and Metamathematics, trans. J. H. Woodger (London: Oxford University Press, 1956), pp. 152–278; also Davidson, ‘The Method of Truth in Metaphysics’, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, pp. 199–214.

See n. 3 above.

Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); also Albert Borgman and Carl Mitcham, ‘The Question of Heidegger and Technology: A Critical Review of the Literature’, Philosophy Today, 31 (Summer 1987), pp. 99–194; Michael E. Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology, Politics, Art (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991).

Heidegger, Being and Time.

Davidson, ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, pp. 184–98; p. 198.

See, for instance, Gaston Bachelard, The Philosophy of No, trans. G. C. Waterston (New York: Orion Press, 1969) and The New Scientific Spirit, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984); also Mary Tiles, Bachelard: Science and Objectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

See, for instance, Joseph Rouse, Knowledge and Power: Toward a Political Philosophy of Science (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987); also Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).

Norris, ‘On Not Going Relativist (Where it Counts): Deconstruction and “Convention T”’, in The Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after Deconstruction (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 193–217.

Norris, ‘Reading Donald Davidson: Truth, Meaning and Right Interpretation’, in Deconstruction and the Interests of Theory (London: Pinter, 1988), pp. 59–83.

See especially Norris, Resources of Realism.

See references in n. 4 above; also Simon Evnine, Donald Davidson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991) and Marc Joseph, Donald Davidson (Chesham: Acumen, 2004).

See especially Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).

For a range of views see Pierre Bourdieu, The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, trans. Peter Collier (Cambridge: Polity, 1991); Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, ed. J. Margolis and T. Rockmore, trans. P. Burrell (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1989); Hugo Ott, Heidegger: A Political Life (London: HarperCollins, 1993); Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger's Nazism and Philosophy (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992); Richard Wolin (ed.) The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993).

Tom Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism and Being (London: Routledge, 1995).

Philippe Lacoue‐Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); also Norris, ‘Settling Accounts: Heidegger, de Man and the Ends of Philosophy’, in What's Wrong with Postmodernism: Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), pp. 222–83.

Davidson, ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, p. 198.

See n. 11 above.

For arguments to this effect, see Norris, Resources of Realism; also W. H. Newton‐Smith, The Rationality of Science (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) and David Papineau, Philosophical Naturalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993).

Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, p. 225.

See Norris, Minding the Gap and Truth Matters.

John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); also Norris, ‘McDowell on Kant: Redrawing the Bounds of Sense’ and ‘The Limits of Naturalism: Further Thoughts on McDowell's Mind and World’, in Minding the Gap, pp. 172–96 and 197–230.

Davidson, ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, p. 198.

See especially Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Rorty, ‘Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth’, ibid., pp. 126–50.

Davidson, ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, in Ernest LePore (ed.) Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 307–19; pp. 317–18.

Rorty, ‘Pragmatism, Davidson and Truth’, p. 135.

Such a theory is intitially promised – but not, so far as I can see, actually delivered – in Davidson's series of articles ‘The Structure and Content of Truth’, Journal of Philosophy, 87 (1990), pp. 297–328.

See references in n. 7 above.

See especially D. M. Armstrong, Universals and Scientific Realism, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science (Leeds: Leeds Books, 1975); Rom Harré, Varieties of Realism: A Rationale for the Natural Sciences (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986); Wesley C. Salmon, Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984).

See, for instance, Reed Way Dasenbrock (ed.) Re‐Drawing the Lines: Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction, and Literary Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) and Dasenbrock (ed.) Literary Theory after Davidson (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993); also W. J. T. Mitchell (ed.) Literary Studies and the New Pragmatism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).

Davidson, ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’, in LePore (ed.) Truth and Interpretation, pp. 433–46; Jacques Derrida, ‘Signature Event Context’, Glyph, 1 (1977), pp. 172–97; also Shekhar Pradhan, ‘Minimalist Semantics: Davidson and Derrida on Meaning, Use, and Convention’, Diacritics, 16 (1) (1986), pp. 66–77, and Samuel C. Wheeler, Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000).

For further argument see Norris, Resources of Realism.

Davidson, ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’; Derrida, ‘The Supplement of Copula’, in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 175–205. See also Norris, ‘Deconstruction, Ontology and Philosophy of Science’ and ‘Deconstructing Anti‐Realism’, in New Idols of the Cave, pp. 78–116 and 117–55.

Emile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary E. Meek (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971).

See nn. 40 and 41 above.

See n. 7 above; also – for a strong recent defence of alethic (objectivist) realism – William P. Alston, A Realist Theory of Truth (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996).

Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, p. 81.

Ibid., p. 81.

Ibid., p. 81.

Ibid.; also Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism (Brighton: Harvester, 1982) and Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

For a sharply contrasted (though to my mind unconvincing) line of argument, see Cora Diamond, The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); also Norris, ‘The Limits of Whose Language? Wittgenstein on Logic, Mathematics, and Science’, in Language, Logic and Epistemology, pp. 66–110.

See especially Rouse, op. cit., and references in n. 13 above.

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970); also The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 1972).

See John Dupré, The Disorder of Things: Metaphysical Foundations of the Disunity of Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); also Peter Gallison and David J. Stump (eds) The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts, and Power (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996) and Joseph Margolis, Science Without Unity: Reconciling the Human and Natural Sciences (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).