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Abstract
Responding to criticisms raised by Christopher Norris, this paper defends an anti‐relativist reading of the work of both Davidson and Heidegger arguing that that there are important lessons to be learnt from their example – one can thus be an anti‐relativist (as well as a certain sort of realist) without giving up on Davidson or on Heidegger.
Notes
The term ‘anti‐realism’ is used here, as it is used by Norris, in quite a broad fashion to indicate a range of relativist and other approaches.
See ‘On Not Going Relativist (Where it Counts): Deconstruction and Convention T’, in The Contest of the Faculties (London: Methuen, 1985), pp. 193–217.
In Resources of Realism (London: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 1–40
In New Idols of the Cave: On the Limits of Anti‐Realism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 6–43.
The realism that I espouse here, and that I think was also something to which Davidson was committed, is not the same as any of those forms of realism (often referred to under labels such as ‘metaphysical realism’) that depend upon asserting some strong form of independence requirement (often in terms that tie such realism to scepticism) or that insist on treating truth as primarily a matter of correspondence between sentences and ‘facts’. Rorty has, however, expressed his regret that ‘Malpas resuscitates the term “realism” to describe Davidson's (and Heidegger's) view’, instead expressing his preference for something like ‘anti‐Cartesianism’ or ‘anti‐scepticism’ (Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin, 1999), p. 43). I should also acknowledge, however, that Davidson himself came to abandon the term ‘realism’, describing it as a ‘vague position’ (‘Indeterminism and Antirealism’, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), p. 70). It may be that it is a mistake to insist on using the term (although my disagreement with Davidson on this matter does not seem to me to constitute a substantive point of difference), but it I simply do not see why the term ‘realism’ should be abandoned to what is, after all, the fairly recent and rather technical sense associated with various forms of Cartesianism, representationalism and reductionism. As I use it, realism means a commitment to the centrality of a notion of objective truth, and to the idea that the world, and the events and entities that make it up, are accessible to us, rather than apart from us – that the world is indeed that wherein we find ourselves.
On Dreyfus, in particular, see the essay co‐written with Charles Spinosa, ‘Coping with Things‐in‐Themselves: A Practice‐Based Phenomenological Argument for Realism’, Inquiry, 42 (1999), pp. 49–78; as well as the responses published together with the Dreyfus/Spinosa piece, by Mark Wrathall, Piers Rawling, T.L.S Sprigge, Richard Rorty and myself.
See Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 204–8. While I would still hold to the core elements of the account advanced in this book, there are specific points on which I would now say things differently. Most importantly, the account of indeterminacy I offered in The Mirror of Meaning was woefully inadequate and on some points mistaken; there are aspects of the account of the Heideggerian position, and Davidson's relation to it, that I would modify; and I would not now employ the notion of ‘horizon’ in the way that I did in 1992 (in my own work that notion has largely been taken over by the concept of ‘place’ or ‘topos’ – see Place and Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992)).
Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning, pp. 249–52.
Ibid. p. 277.
‘Indeterminism and Antirealism’, p. 69.
‘The Objectivity of Values’, in Carlos Gutierrez (ed.) El trabajo filosofico de hoy en el continente (Bogota, Columbia: Editorial ABC, 1995), pp. 59–69 and also in Belgrade Circle 1–2 (1995), pp. 177–88 (in English and Serbian); forthcoming in Problems of Rationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
Norris, ‘Some Dilemmas of Post‐Empiricism’, in New Idols of the Cave, p. 12.
Ibid. pp. 12–13.
Ibid. p. 13.
Ibid. p. 13. Apel's discussion appears as ‘Comments on Davidson’, Synthese, 59 (1984), pp. 19–26. As Apel notes, his paper was intended as a reply to Davidson's ‘Communication and Convention’, which appeared in the same volume (both papers were presented at the same colloquium), but since Apel was not in possession of Davidson's paper, he prepared his comments on the basis of a version of ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’ sent to him by Davidson. The Gricean example Apel deploys here mirrors the example used by Dummett in discussing Davidson's position in ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs: Comments on Davidson and Hacking’, in Ernest LePore (ed.) Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 472.
Grice, ‘Utterer's Meaning and Intentions’, Philosophical Review, 78 (1969), p. 162.
See Apel, ‘Comments on Davidson’, p. 24.
Davidson, ‘The Structure and Content of Truth’, Journal of Philosophy, 87 (1990), p. 310.
So Davidson points out that ‘A metaphor, for example, is wholly dependent linguistically on the usual meanings of words, however fresh and astonishing the thought it is used to express; and the interpreter, though he may be hard pressed to decode or appreciate a good metaphor, needs know no more about what words mean than can be, or ought to be, found in a good dictionary’, ‘James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty’, in P. French, T. E. Uehling and H. Wettstein (eds) Midwest Studies in Philosophy 16 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), p. 1. Davidson notes of Joyce that ‘like any writer he must depend on the knowledge his readers are able to bring to his writings. Much of this knowledge is verbal of course, knowledge of what words ordinarily mean’, but also adds that ‘in Joyce's case much of what is required must come from other sources’ (‘James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty’, p. 8).
In Ernest LePore (ed.) Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 433–46.
In Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 265–80.
Davidson, ‘The Social Aspect of Language’, in Brian McGuinness and Gianluigi Oliveri (eds), The Philosophy of Michael Dummett (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994).
This claim appears in ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’, p. 446, and is defended and explained further in ‘The Social Aspect of Language’.
Norris, ‘Some Dilemmas of Post‐Empiricism’, p. 13.
Ibid. p. 14.
Indeed, neither does it seem to me to give priority to the idiolect over the dialect – in spite of the fact that Davidson occasionally talked of it that way.
See Davidson, ‘The Second Person’, in P. French, T. E. Uehling and H. Wettstein (eds) Midwest Studies in Philosophy 17 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), pp. 255–67.
‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’, p. 446.
Norris, ‘Some Dilemmas of Post‐Empiricism’, p. 15.
Norris, ‘On Not Going Relativist’, p. 215.
Ibid., pp. 212–13. Later in the same paper he comments that ‘The point of appealing to Convention T is to back up the loose but (in practice) indispensable conviction that we know far more than relativist doctrine allows us to know’ (p. 216).
Norris, ‘Some Dilemmas of Post‐Empiricism’, p. 17.
‘On Not Going Relativist’, p. 216.
Thus Gadamer writes that in conversation (Gespräch), which is Gadamer's model for the way in which understanding occurs, ‘Something is placed in the centre, as the Greeks say, which the partners in dialogue both share, and concerning which they can exchange ideas with one another. … To reach an understanding in a dialogue is thus not merely as matter of putting oneself forward and successfully asserting one's own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were’, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1989), pp. 378–9.
See my discussion of this point in ‘Gadamer, Davidson and the Ground of Understanding’, in Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald and Jens Kertscher (eds) Gadamer's Century (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 209–10.
This idea can be seen as essentially a development of the Heideggerian idea of the character of understanding as based in facticity – in our prior ontological situatedness – and it is this idea that I take to lie at the heart of Heidegger's concept of truth as aletheia or ‘uncoveredness’ (a notion also taken up by Gadamer).
On this see my ‘On Not Giving up the World: Davidson on the Grounds of Belief’, forthcoming.
That Davidson's externalism can indeed be seen to follow from his holism is a point I have argued for elsewhere: see esp. Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning, pp. 220–3 and ‘Self‐Knowledge and Scepticism’, Erkenntnis, 40 (1994), pp. 165–84.
See, for instance, ‘Belief and the Basis of Meaning’, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, pp. 145–54.
The idea of triangulation first appeared in ‘Rational Animals’, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, p. 105, originally published in 1982.
‘The Second Person’, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, p. 119. The use of this example illustrates something of the way in which the development of the idea of triangulation in Davidson originates in consideration of the significance of ostensive teaching and learning – see Davidson, ‘Comments on Karlovy Vary Papers’, in Peter Kotatko, Peter Pagin and Gabriel Segal (eds.) Interpreting Davidson (Stanford: CSLI Publications, 2001), p. 99 – the relevant passage is quoted by Davidson in ‘Externalisms’, in Kotatko et al. (eds) Interpreting Davidson, p. 9.
‘Three Varieties of Knowledge’, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, pp. 205–20.
‘The Structure and Content of Truth’, p. 300.
‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, p. 309
See Davidson, ‘The Myth of the Subjective’, in Michael Krausz (ed.) Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989), pp. 159–72.
This point is also relevant to Norris' suggestion (‘Some Dilemmas of Post‐Empiricism’, p. 28) that it is nonsensical to recommend ‘on the one hand … that we give up “the dualism of scheme of [sic] world” (along with all notions of truth as correspondence), while on the other invoking just such a dualist scheme with all its talk of sentences rendered “true or false” by virtue of their correspondence – what else? – with real‐world objects or states of affairs’. There need be no conflict between the claim that correspondence does not provide an adequate explication of truth and the claim that a true sentence ‘corresponds to’ or ‘fits’ the facts. The point is not that we cannot make use of these latter phrases, but that we ought not to think that they offer any proper elucidation of the phrase ‘is true’. Similarly, talk of sentences being true in virtue, in part, of the way the world is need not be taken to reinvoke the dualism of scheme and content.
It is important to note that while Heidegger does reject ‘scientism’, if by that we mean the privileging of natural scientific accounts over all others, he nowhere rejects the truth of scientific claims. It should perhaps be noted that in this discussion I have not specifically addressed the issue of scientific realism as a separate question from realism as such. Norris' claim that the explanatory effectiveness of science ought to be taken as evidence of its truth, and so of the reality of the entities, events and processes that figure in scientific theorizing, does not seem to me, however, to be incompatible with the account I have advanced here. The point is not that science gives us a false picture of the world, or that the picture it provides is nothing more than a particular parochial vision of things relative to a certain time, place and social practice, but rather that natural science does not tell us all there is to know about the world and our relation to it (something that can itself be seen as enshrined in Davidsonian anomalous monism – see Davidson's own comments on ‘scientism’ in ‘Indeterminism and Antirealism’, pp. 70–1) and that there is no natural scientific description of the world (or any other description for that matter) that is uniquely true.
Thus the Heideggerian critique is directed at certain pervasive features of the contemporary world, rather than at science or technology as specific institutional features of that world, and for this reason Heidegger is still able to talk about finding a way of engaging with technology that does not give rise to the levelling‐down of things that he finds so problematic.
In, for instance, the work of Max Weber – see Julien Freund's brief summary of the Weberian idea of ‘rationalization’ in Freund, The Sociology of Max Weber (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 17–25, 142–8 as well as J. M. Berstein's discussion of Adorno's critique of scientific rationalism in Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Hubert Dreyfus suggests connections between the Heideggerian critique of technology and ideas in Foucault's work: see Timothy Armstrong (ed.) ‘On the Ordering of Things: Being and Power in Heidegger and Foucault’, in Michel Foucault: Philosopher (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992); see also Neil Levy, ‘The Prehistory of Archaeology: Heidegger and the Early Foucault’, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 27 (1996), pp. 157–75.