Davidson, Donald Herbert

▪ 2004

      American philosopher (b. March 6, 1917, Springfield, Mass.—d. Aug. 30, 2003, Berkeley, Calif.), applied logical and linguistic analysis to difficult problems in the philosophy of action, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. Davidson argued, against the widely held Wittgensteinian view, that reasons were the causes of actions and that, thereby, the rational and the causal domains were connected. In a related argument, he resolved Cartesian dualism (which maintains that mind and matter are completely distinct substances) with a nonreductionist physicalism in which mental events are describable in causal terms but are characterized by intentionality, which has a rational as well as a causal dimension. This position Davidson called anomalous monism. He also maintained that meaning in natural languages is understood by means of the concept of truth, for which he employed the semantic definition of Alfred Tarski. For Davidson the empirical determination of such truth requires what he called radical interpretation. Davidson earned a Ph.D. in 1949 from Harvard University. He taught at several universities, most recently the University of California, Berkeley (1986–2003). Many of his papers were collected in the volumes Essays on Actions and Events (1980) and Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984).

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