Davidson's New Cogito
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Description
Skepticism depends on the claim that one could be in a subjectively indistinguishable state while the objective world outside one's mind was completely different from the way it appears, and not just temporarily, but permanently—past, present, and future. Call this the skeptical possibility. There are two traditional methods of refuting skepticism. One is subjective reductionism—the reduction of the objective to the subjective, in one form or another-so that facts about the objective world are analyzed, in some more or less complicated way, in terms of how things appear to us. This includes various forms of phenomenalism, verificationism, pragmatism, transcendental idealism, and “internal” realism. Reductionism denies that the skeptical possibility is a real possibility. The other response is to leave unchallenged the logical possibility of a gap between appearance and reality, but to argue that we are justified in believing that the world is in fact largely as we take it to be. This response includes arguments as various as Descartes's route to objective knowledge through God's benevolence and Quine's naturalized epistemology. Davidson has produced a third response to skepticism. Like reductionism, it denies the skeptical possibility. But it does not reduce the objective to the subjective; and although in a sense it goes in the opposite direction, it does not proceed by reducing the subjective to something else that is objective, in the fashion of behaviorist philosophies of mind. It is not reductionist at all. Rather, Davidson insists on certain consequences of the fact that thought and subjective experience, the entire domain of appearances, must be regarded as elements of objective reality, and cannot be conceived apart from it. The subjective is in itself objective, and its connections with the objective world as a whole are such that the radical disjunction between appearance and reality that skepticism requires is not a genuine logical possibility. The argument is that our thoughts depend for their content on their relations to things outside us, including other thinkers and speakers. And since we can't doubt that we are thinking, we can't doubt that the world contains our thoughts and that it is of such a character as to be capable of containing those thoughts. Specifically, to have the content which they have, and which we cannot doubt that they have, our thoughts must be largely true of what they are about. Therefore our beliefs must be largely true, and the skeptical possibility is an illusion. Though the argument from thought to the objective world is a little longer, and the conclusion much more comprehensive, the spirit is Cartesian: Not je pense, donc je suis but je pense, donc je sais. It is Cartesian in the sense of the cogito itself, because it depends on the impossibility of doubting that one is thinking the thoughts one thinks one is thinking. This is my interpretation of Davidson's refutation of skepticism, which is most fully set out in “A Coherence theory of Truth and Knowledge,” but whose elements appear in many of his writings. He might not want to put it in quite this way. In particular, he would certainly resist the dramatic structure which makes it an argument from thought to objective reality—on which the parallel with Descartes depends. Davidson's aim is anti-Cartesian: Instead of getting us out of the egocentric predicament, he is trying to show that we can't get into it.
Source Publication
The Philosophy of Donald Davidson
Source Editors/Authors
Lewis Edwin Hahn
Publication Date
1999
Recommended Citation
Nagel, Thomas, "Davidson's New Cogito" (1999). Faculty Chapters. 1319.
https://gretchen.law.nyu.edu/fac-chapt/1319
