Truth, Language, and History: Philosophical Essays Volume 5 by Donald Davidson

Author:Donald Davidson [Davidson, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 019823757X

end p.168

are excluded, categories which lend themselves to incorporation in a system of laws with as few ceteris paribus clauses as possible.

It is a serious mistake, if I am right, to suppose that the relatively simple Aristotelian-Thomistic scheme I proposed for analyzing the concept of acting with a reason aims to assimilate this concept to the natural sciences simply because it invokes causality. This gets things backwards: serious science strives to extrude the concept of causality in favor of strict laws. It is teleological explanation that cannot do without the concept of causality, and for that reason, among others, reason-explanations cannot hope to be reduced to, or incorporated in, the natural sciences.

It remains the case that my schematic account of the intention with which an action is performed is no positive help for someone who wants to construct an interesting psychology of action. The imagination might be caught, however, at the point where it becomes appropriate to identify, to give propositional content to, the various beliefs, desires, motives, and attitudes that cause an intentional action, and by causing it, determine in turn its appropriate descriptions.

An ineluctable feature of teleological explanation is its normative character. This does not mean, as one of the contributors to this volume thinks, that I confuse the purported norms of logic or of Bayesian decision theory with descriptive theories.4 There is no definition of "perfect rationality", whatever we take that to be, according to which people satisfy the definition. My point has rather been that we can explain and understand irrationality only against a background of rationality, a background each of us must, as an interpreter, supply for himself. There is no fixed list of standards, no eternal hierarchy of values, to which we all must subscribe, but some norms are so basic to intelligibility that we cannot avoid shaping thoughts to their patterns. Thus as Quine has pointed out, we can interpret some speaker's device as expressing conjunction only if the speaker generally treats that device in accord with the truth table for conjunction; but then we have attributed a bit of logic to that person. The norms of decision making under uncertainty, of induction, and so on, are far more flexible, and we can understand deviations easily, including differences over what the norms are. But I would

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