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Davidson and Rorty: Triangulation and Anti-‐‑foundationalism
Bjørn Torgrim Ramberg
This essay appears as chapter 17 (216-235) in Malpas, Jeff And Gander, Hans-Helmuth (eds.), The Routledge Companion To Hermeneutics (2015).
1. Davidson and Rorty: the hermeneutical challenge
In the history of 20th century philosophy Donald Davidson’s work of the 1960s
and 1970s stands out as a major, indeed paradigmatic, contribution to what is
perhaps vaguely but still quite uncontroversially designated analytic
philosophy.1
Yet our task here, now, is to consider Davidson as a hermeneutic
thinker.2 Richard Rorty, who is also one of the most perceptive and
innovative readers of Davidson, presents a similarly troublesome case with
respect to philosophical genre. Perhaps most famous for the deconstruction of
the idea of philosophy as epistemology performed in Philosophy and the Mirror
of Nature (Rorty 1979), and thus, unlike Davidson, often thought of in
opposition to analytic philosophy, Rorty is at first blush a more plausible
candidate for inclusion in the present volume than is Davidson. Rorty, after
all, provocatively proposed hermeneutics as the name for the kind of activity
philosophers should be engaging in once the epistemological paradigm was
left behind (Rorty 1979: 315ff). However, Rorty’s conception of hermeneutics
appears to be idiosyncratic. A pragmatic naturalist whose most persistent aim
2
has been to show what philosophy is like when it is no longer metaphysics
but rather a genre of cultural politics, Rorty seems to be fundamentally at
odds with basic features and aspirations of hermeneutic philosophy. After all,
philosophical hermeneutics is explicitly ontological, and indisputably aspires,
in its way, to universality.3 Rorty, too, then, confronts us with a basic
challenge; in just what sense is his thought a contribution to hermeneutic
philosophy?
My response will be to suggest that there can be genuine dialogue
between canonical expressions of hermeneutic philosophy, notably the work
of Hans-‐‑Georg Gadamer, and the philosophical projects of Rorty and
Davidson. But what is genuine dialogue? What is the significance of its
possibility? These are indeed questions that point toward the main theme of
this chapter. The matter at hand – what Gadamer calls “die Sache – is in our
case precisely the nature of dialogical understanding.4 It is with respect to this
basic hermeneutic theme that Davidson, Rorty and Gadamer can be – so I will
claim—brought into enlightening and productive conversation, and in
relation to which we may see them as engaged in working up a common
discursive ground. That, at least, will be our exegetical working hypothesis.
Davidson and Rorty are both multifaceted thinkers, with oeuvres spanning
five decades. With respect to such bodies of text, it is tempting to divide them
into temporal chunks, taking chronologically limited segments to provide the
natural units of interpretation—such limited units tend to be more easily
3
assimilated to prevailing categories and genres. Thus, in Davidson’s case,
early Davidson may be assimilated with analytic philosophy, late Davidson
with – perhaps – hermeneutics. As for Rorty, it is sometimes claimed that he
started out as a bona-‐‑fide analytic philosopher, and then broke rank – turning
to Heidegger and others to debunk the tradition of which he himself is a part.
However, while there are examples of warranted application, there is a real
danger that this strategy of temporal division filters out exactly what is most
original in a thinker. While there certainly are transitions and dialectical shifts
to be tracked, it is in the dynamic unity of their thinking that Davidson’s and
Rorty’s most fundamental contributions to philosophy lie. This is just what a
hermeneutic reading must strive to make evident. And the claim of this
chapter is that for both Rorty and Davidson, the dynamic unity of their work
in its various phases and aspects is captured by a question characteristic of
philosophical hermeneutics; how can we conceive of communicative
understanding as a task for temporal, limited, situated agents – as, that is to
say, essentially an achievement of human finitude?
From here we go on as follows. Section 2 highlights relevant aspects of
Davidson’s early contributions to analytic philosophy, and then describes
characteristic features of his account of linguistic competence specifically.
Section 3 notes that the link between meaning and truth, between
understanding and agreement, has striking affinities with Hans-‐‑Georg
Gadamer’s hermeneutic account of understanding as a fusion of horizons.5
4
We do run a risk here of overhasty and misleading assimilation, but, I argue,
Davidson’s basic concern with understanding as a shared achievement of
temporal, finite creatures actually aligns him in a decisive and illuminating
way with Gadamer’s hermeneutic ontology of understanding. The issue turns
on the sort of agreement one takes Davidson to be envisaging, and on this
matter we must look to his idea that the nature of communicative
intelligibility may be characterized in terms of triangulation.
The connection between Davidson’s project and philosophical
hermeneutics is salient in Rorty’s response, and responsiveness, to the
hermeneutic developments in Davidson’s thinking. Moreover, by taking a
Davidsonian view of Rorty – that is, reading Rorty as committed to the
Davidsonian idea of triangulation – we also bring into view Rorty’s own
genuine proximity to hermeneutic thought. I suggest in Section 4 that Rorty’s
anti-‐‑foundationalist view of philosophy is not simply a diagnosis of the failures
of epistemological efforts to ground knowledge. Breaking fundamentally with
the representationalist presuppositions of epistemology since Descartes and
Locke, Rorty’s notion of solidarity is an effort to advance the historicist
approach to knowledge, understanding and philosophy that hermeneutics
represents. Thus, in my reading both Rorty and Davidson offer
interpretations of the hermeneutic theme of the historicity of understanding.
Crucially, Rorty and Davidson allow us to see historicity as an essentially and
literally productive feature of understanding, rather than as an encapsulating
5
condition; they advance a conception of communicative understanding that
takes us, to borrow from Richard Bernstein, beyond objectivism and
relativism.6 In Section 5 I briefly sum up the case I have presented,
underscoring its character as a hermeneutical exercise.
2. Agency, interpretation, charity
In the standard picture of 20th century Anglophone philosophy Davidson’s
first major contribution is his succinct presentation (Davidson 1963) of the
idea that while human actions must be considered to be fully embedded in
the natural causal web of worldly events, they are nevertheless distinguished
by the fact that they are done for reasons, and by the fact, moreover, that the
justifying considerations – the primary reason – for an action are also, in the
standard case, its cause. Reasons, in short, may be naturalistic causes, and
indeed they had better be, Davidson argues, if the standard pattern for our
accounts of action is to have real explanatory power.7 This thesis in the
philosophy of action appears to respond to a worry generated by something
like a physicalist – or at least a naturalistic – metaphysics; a concern that the
world view warranted by science makes problematic the idea of agency as an
exercise of freedom and a manifestation of reason. Already here, however,
Davidson has set out in a direction that will shake this framework and break
with key assumptions built into it, assumptions that drive what is often
6
referred to as “placement problems.”8 A resolution to a metaphysical
placement problem, like the question whether there really can be such things
as actions done for reasons in a universe naturalistically conceived, will be
solved when we have a convincing account of what can respectably count as
truth-‐‑makers for the requisite class of statements. And indeed we might take
Davidson on action as having made a case for the view that action statements
are truth-‐‑apt because they are about – refer to – naturalistically respectable
events. More, however, is going on, and to see this, it will be useful to glance
briefly at Davidson’s relation to his most direct and explicit influence, W.V.
Quine.
Quine’s behaviorist, third-‐‑person account of linguistic behavior (Quine
1960), though devastating in its effect on the standard mode of metaphysics as
conceptual analysis, gives us a view of linguistic understanding that remains
metaphysically conditioned, at least in that it is intended to be compatible
with an austere physicalist ontology. This ontology Quine took to be
mandated by naturalism; ideal physics provides a basic ontological constraint
on philosophical explanation of any kind. Now, in his work on linguistic
meaning and on the nature of the mental in the 1960s and 1970s Davidson
certainly takes the Quinean third-‐‑person approach to meaning as a
mandatory starting point. Davidson shares Quine’s thought that to explain
linguistic communication is to account for the way in which what is available
for public observation can be regimented so as to support systematic
7
characterization of the linguistic behavior of speakers. However, Davidson
develops quite different views of how that target behavior is best described,
and also of how what is public can be said to support systematic description
of that behavior. Invoking the notions of truth and of charity (of which more
below), Davidson breaks with Quine’s understanding of the naturalistic
constraint on philosophical theory. Concomitantly the ontological stance that
Quine occupies – along with many of those who opposed him from within a
physicalistic perspective – undergoes with Davidson a significant
transformation. In fact, Davidson’s essential move is evident already in the
early work on action; here he makes the point that an event that is a
naturalistic cause may also be reason, in so far as it enters into a requisite kind
of pattern of events. Whether we take an event as a purely naturalistic cause or
primarily as a justifying reason is a matter of the kind of pattern we are
considering – the irreducible difference between the mental and the physical,
between agency and mere causation, as Davidson argues most famously in
“Mental Events,” (1970), is the difference between a pattern of description
that is sensitive to norms of rationality and one that is geared toward non-‐‑
rational regularity. Thus, Davidson claims, “events are mental only as
described.“ (Davidson 2001a: 215) Events conceived atomistically and in
isolation have no determinate character, either as physical or as mental.9
As I have described it so far, this ontological monism may look like a
cheap answer to the metaphysician’s worry; for, we will want to know, what
8
is it about events that makes it the case that these different kinds of predicate
actually apply to them (when they do)? What assurance of the propriety of
these concepts can be found in talk of different kinds of patterns that events
may be a part of? Davidson’s account of actions as well as his monistic, non-‐‑
reductive construal of the relationship between the mental and the physical is
frequently met with versions of this response.10 However, neither “Actions,
Reasons and Causes,” nor “Mental Events” and related papers (Davidson
2001a) are actually in the business of giving direct answers to the
metaphysical question that concerns the kind of naturalist who worries about
how there can be reason and mind in the world as revealed by physics.
Concluding “Mental Events,” Davidson remarks:
Mental events as a class cannot be explained by physical science; particular
mental events can when we know particular identities. But the
explanations of mental events in which we are typically interested relate
them to other mental events and conditions (Davidson 2001a: 225).
Davidson’s concern was never with how predicates of agency and of mental
states can be seen properly to represent worldly items. His concern is with the
particular nature of the human interests that those vocabularies express. That
vocabularies are also ways of addressing and of dealing with the world is
such a fundamental part of Davidson’s outlook that worries of the
9
metaphysician’s kind cannot seriously arise. To see this, however, we need to
turn to Davidson’s work on language. It is in Davidson’s account of linguistic
communication that his break with representationalist metaphysics (for that is
what we have been talking about in the last paragraphs) is most apparent and
explicit. And it is along this track that we find the dynamic developments in
Davidson’s thought most relevant for present purposes.
Taking off from Quine’s idea of radical translation, which was a device
for imposing behaviorist constraints on an account of linguistic
communication, Davidson developed his own account of radical
interpretation.11 A radical interpreter is an interpreter with no specific
assumptions about what a speaker means by the words she uses. By making a
wide range of suitable observations of the speaker – of what she says when –
and applying a tight bundle of general principles which constrain what ought
in various circumstances to be said, the radical interpreter proceeds to
construct a theory that assigns syntactic structure and semantic value to the
language of the speaker. The radical interpreter’s theory, Davidson argues,
captures the extension of the truth-‐‑predicate for the observed speaker’s
language.12 The fundamental thought here is that what we get when we get
what some uttered indicative sentence literally means, is the way in which the
words in that sentence interact to generate its truth conditions. Here, though,
it is important to be careful. It is not that Davidson thinks that there are such
things as truth-‐‑makers in the world, and that these, described the right way,
10
turn out to be the meanings of sentences. Rather, the thought is that if we
understand how the elements of a language systematically combine to
determine truth-‐‑conditions for any possible indicative sentence of the
language, then we have understood all there is to know about the semantics
of that language. When we talk about linguistic meaning, this, Davidson
argues, is all we can be talking about. Aspects of linguistic communication
that cannot be accounted for in terms of truth-‐‑theoretic structure do not
belong to semantics.
Two important lines of inquiry flow from Davidson’s idea that we can
understand meaning in terms of a semantic truth theory. One concerns the
actual prospects for truth-‐‑conditional semantics, including the question of
what it is that such a semantics is supposed to apply to; what is the proper
object of a theory that systematically ascribes semantic properties? The other
line of inquiry asks what the basic principles are that allow the radical
interpreter to use observations of speech behavior as constraints on theory
formation at all. Davidson’s key idea is that the process of construing
meaning can be modeled by the empirical construction of a truth-‐‑theory for a
speaker only in so far as the process of radical interpretation is governed by
the constraint of charity. In Davidson’s early essays, the principle of charity
was taken to be a matter of an interpreter’s construing a speaker so as to
maximize agreement between them. Since what you will sincerely assert in a
given situation will depend on what you actually take to be the case, the
11
interpreter must make some assumptions about your beliefs, if she is to be
able to construct a theory that assigns meaning to your sentences. Charity, as
Davidson puts it in the 1973 paper, “Radical Interpretation,” is “intended to
solve the problem of the interdependence of belief and meaning by holding
belief constant as far as possible while solving for meaning.” (Davidson
2001b: 137)
Davidson claimed that the requirement of charity in radical
interpretation entails more than intersubjective alignment. Charity
guarantees that both speaker and interpreter are largely correct in their
beliefs.13 On this score, however, Davidson received a great deal of resistance.
Why should the intersubjective convergence of belief required for
interpretation also indicate truth? Is not what the interpreter constructs for
the speaker’s language, not a truth-‐‑theory, but rather an “agreement-‐‑theory”?
Couldn’t we achieve intersubjective alignment while being massively
mistaken together? Moreover, isn’t an account of linguistic meaning that
requires great overlap of belief between subjects highly implausible, anyway?
Do we want a theory of meaning that severely constrains the possibility of
disagreement, of difference in outlook and in worldview?
These reactions are natural responses from the point of view of a
representationalist view of meaning and interpretation. The meaningfulness
of thought and language surely does not depend on an interpreter’s activities
– it is a target for that activity. And if it is, then why should our contingent
12
ability to construe as intelligible other minds and languages have essential
bearing on whether something is a mind and uses language at all? 14
The Davidsonian response to these questions points toward a deep
division between Davidson and the theorists of mind and meaning who
operate within the metaphysical framework alluded to earlier. To make this
clear, however, we need to return to the first of the two questions that
Davidson’s meta-‐‑semantical proposal opens up, the issue of the prospects for
truth-‐‑conditional semantics. Davidson himself, along with a great number of
other philosophers of language and theoretical linguists, took this to be a
matter of determining the extent to which features of natural language could
be reconstructed in terms of truth-‐‑functional operations on the logical form of
utterance types.15 For many of those engaged in this project, the question of
what it is that a theory of meaning actually construes, what it applies to, was
not prominent. For Davidson, however, this question of what a theory of
truth for a language actually applies to soon became a principal focus of
philosophical attention. And what he had to say about it was surprising, and
for many highly counterintuitive. In a controversial paper from 1986, “A Nice
Derangement of Epitaphs,” Davidson surprisingly concludes that, “there is no
such thing as a language.”16 (Davidson 2005: 107) Truth-‐‑theories, in so far as
they illuminate what goes on in linguistic communication, do not apply to
given linguistic structures – languages – with set meanings that we as users
know and as learners and interpreters must figure out. Rather, the idealized
13
radical interpreter targets, with her truth-‐‑theory, not a language that the
speaker has come to possess, but the language that a speaker is producing at
the moment– an idiolect. Furthermore, this target, this idiolect, is not a fixed
object but something undergoing constant change. As an interpreter of
linguistic behavior, then, the radical interpreter is engaged in an on-‐‑going
process of perpetual modification of truth-‐‑theories.17 The radical interpreter is
dynamically construing what a speaker is continuously doing, rather than
decoding some thing, some fixed structure, that the speaker has or possesses
and gives sequential expression to. And a speaker, for her part, making
herself understood, is engaged in a process of constantly exploiting what she
takes to be the interpreter’s evolving understanding of what she is doing.
While Davidson does not back away from the idea that truth-‐‑
theoretical semantics of natural languages is a worthwhile explanatory project,
it is now clear that even if such a semantics were convincingly developed for
some natural language, we could no longer take that to explain
philosophically what it is that we achieve, and how it is that we achieve it,
when we communicate with language. Given that there is no such entity as a
language that bears the semantic properties in question, what we now want to
know about is the nature of the abilities that go into that dynamic process of
mutual accommodation which is linguistic understanding, and in relation to
which truth-‐‑theoretic semantics can never be more than an idealized static
model. To understand those abilities is also to understand the underlying
14
affordances that allow us to deploy them, and it is as he increasingly attends
to this issue that Davidson’s break with the representationalist approach to
meaning and mind becomes fully explicit. Moreover, as Davidson dispenses
entirely with representationalist worries about verificationism and other sins,
the themes that connect Davidson with hermeneutic thought become
prominent, as we will now see.
3. Triangulation, temporality, and semantic historicism
In an early (1974) but transitional paper of great significance for present
purposes, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Davidson not only
draws some important consequences of the radical interpretation approach to
meaning, he also gives us important hints as to the conception in which this
approach is embedded. For many readers, Davidson’s initial remarks on the
principle of charity had raised the question of exactly what it was that
supposedly needed to be shared between interpreter and speaker for
interpretation to be possible. How extensive must the overlap be? What sorts
of things – a priori structures, perceptual beliefs, general empirical beliefs,
epistemic interests, or perhaps norms of rationality – would provide the
required common ground? One reader who saw right away that this was
entirely the wrong sort of question to ask, was Richard Rorty. For Rorty,
Davidson’s attack on the third dogma of empiricism, the metaphor of scheme
15
and content, epitomized the radical character of Davidson’s break with a
representationalist, epistemic notion of meaning precisely because it made it
clear that charity ought not to be construed as a preexisting cognitive overlap
of any kind at all. Far from fulfilling the goal of finally guaranteeing a shared
frame, Davidson, in Rorty’s narrative, does away with the entire ambition.
Rorty writes:
To construct an epistemology is to find the maximum amount of common
ground with others. […] Within analytic philosophy, it has often been
imagined to lie in language, which was supposed to supply the universal
scheme for all possible content. To suggest that there is no such common
ground seems to endanger rationality (Rorty 1979: 316-‐‑317).
What is being endangered, in Rorty’s view, is a specious sort of rationality, a
philosopher’s invention, tied to the idea that languages or conceptual schemes
are possibly treacherous mediators of reality. This is the master idea of
philosophy as a cultural overseer (Rorty 1979:317), of the theory of knowledge
charged with adjudicating the representational reliability or lack thereof of
language in its various modes of operation. Davidson, Rorty thinks, takes
analytic philosophy beyond its founding epistemic remit exactly because he
allows us to leave behind the empiricist picture that makes us worry that
possessing a language may be to suffer some form of containment. To give up
16
that picture is to give up on the possibility that epistemology provides
foundations. More importantly, it is to give up the idea that foundations are
needed. Thereby, as Davidson remarks in conclusion, “we do not give up the
world, but re-‐‑establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose
antics make our sentences and opinions true or false.” (Davidson 2001b: 198)
Moving away from representationalism – which for both Rorty and
Davidson is just another word for conceptual-‐‑scheme epistemology – is also
to change our perspective on linguistic intelligibility. A representationalist
about meaning will take it that philosophical understanding of
communication is achieved by way of an adequate theoretical model of a
certain kind of knowledge that a subject is supposed to possess and apply. On
such a model languages may indeed also be structures of confinement; what
is interpretable will depend on the semantic knowledge possessed or
available to the speaker – the limits and presuppositions of such knowledge
become salient philosophical themes. By contrast, as Rorty clearly sees, for
both Davidson and Gadamer language is a capacity for openness.
Another constructive and groundbreaking reader of both Gadamer and
Davidson (and of Rorty), John McDowell, puts this point well in an essay
comparing Davidson and Gadamer on relativism: "ʺDavison’s argument
against relativism turns on the thought that – to put it in a way that
emphasizes the correspondence with Gadamer – any linguistic practice is
intelligible from the standpoint of any other"ʺ (McDowell 2002: 181).
17
And why is this? It is not because we have philosophical assurance that
our schemes or practices share core beliefs, or conceptual structures, or
whatever. Rather it is because to engage in linguistic interpretation, as both
Gadamer and Davidson conceive of it, is to make new ground, new
intelligibility, together. That is what dialogical understanding amounts to.
This is what Rorty saw, and this is why he invokes both Davidson and
hermeneutics in the chapter of Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature where he
explicitly rejects the very ideal of a foundational vocabulary, or ideal
linguistic practice, in which all genuine content can be made commensurable.
McDowell, however, after recognizing this point, goes on to criticize
Davison for not being attuned to he significance of sharing linguistic practices,
thus foregoing insights that Gadamer brings to the fore in his hermeneutic
account of understanding as a fusion of horizons, and underscores with his
notion of the working of tradition in effective-‐‑historical consciousness. We
may wonder, though, whether McDowell here really follows Davidson far
enough in his movement away from the idea that to understand is to apply a
knowledge already possessed. What Davidson argues against in favoring, as
McDowell slightly tendentiously puts it, idiolect over shared languages
(McDowell 20012: 181), is the thought that the kind of sharing that makes
understanding possible comes into view if we attend to the semantic and
syntactic patterns that are characteristic of an individual’s or group’s manner
of using language. It is not Davidson’s point that such patterns are
18
uninteresting or without significance – they are worthy objects of scientists of
language, of ethnographers and of social scientists, etc., and we need not stop
doing neither semantics nor investigations of languages as living social
structures. However, what Davidson is after is the level and pattern of
interaction that provides that very context in which it makes sense to think of
patterns of language use as communicative exchange, whether these are
diverging or converging, changing or not. And here no specific commonalities,
whether semantic, syntactic or cultural, do any explanatory work.
It is in characterizing distinctively linguistic behavior and its success
conditions that Davidson invokes charity, and here what is actually shared, as
a presupposition of understanding, is, as we should now see, in fact no
determinate thing at all. Taking on board the lessons of Davidson’s argument
against conceptual schemes and against the very idea of a language we must
conclude that charity simply does not refer back to a determinate
antecedently held set of beliefs or attitudes or practices at all. To say that
charity is an assumption of successful understanding indicates rather that a
certain kind of forward-‐‑looking commitment is required for dialogue to occur.
Jeff Malpas seems to me to get this exactly right in his clarifying discussion of
various levels of agreement that might taken to be at issue here, and the
different senses in which they might be thought to be presupposed by
understanding. Malpas ends his critical discussion affirmatively: "ʺThe
agreement that enables understanding is precisely the agreement that consists
19
in this openness toward the world, an agreement that can never be uniquely
determined, since it is that on the basis of which any determination is
possible"ʺ (Malpas 2011a: 276).
The principal hook that Davidson used for over two decades to
elaborate this point is the idea of triangulation. The idea is deployed in many
contexts and interpreted in different ways over several essays (Davidson
2001c). Late in his life, looking back, Davidson sums it up thus:
[T]he objectivity which thought and language demand depends on the
mutual and simultaneous responses of two or more creatures to common
distal stimuli and to one another’s responses. This three-‐‑way relation
among two speakers and a common world I call “triangulation"ʺ (Davidson
2001c: xv).
Triangulation is a dynamic of two (or more) subjects in an interactive
situation where both are participants. The abstraction of the pure observer
characteristic of radical interpretation is gone. Still, it may be possible to
conceive of triangulation as an abstract specification of the structure of
content. It might then be assimilated to what is fundamentally an
epistemological perspective on meaning – whether as contents of utterances
or of thoughts. Triangulation then indicates only how content is to be
conceived, while still be taken principally as an object of knowledge in
20
representationalist terms. This, however, is not Davidson’s view. As he goes
on to say: “[…] triangulation is not a matter of one person grasping a meaning
already there, but a performance that (when fully fleshed out) bestows a
content on language.” (Davidson 2001c: xv) What Davidson brings into focus
here is the making of intelligibility; communicating agents’ coming-‐‑to-‐‑share
intelligibility as a creative social act in particular circumstances and
surroundings. When Davidson says that meaning presupposes actual
communication – something for which he has been much criticized – this is
what he has in mind. And when Davidson speaks of triangulation as a kind of
performance, he aligns himself with philosophical hermeneutics. This is the
import of the claim that philosophical hermeneutics is a project of ontology,
advanced both by Heidegger and Gadamer as they break fundamentally and
self-‐‑consciously with the epistemic approach to meaning.
Hermeneutic thought, however, also gives us reason to be cautious
here, even if the convergence I have sketched is real. For one thing, Davidson
and Gadamer themselves were not very successful in their attempt to enter
into dialogue with one another.18 Of course this is not in itself a very
significant consideration, but it may be indicative of more worrying issues; it
may be that the failure of dialogue is due less to contingent facts of
circumstance and personality and more to differences in theoretical
vocabulary, in proximal influences, framing of problems, and styles of
argumentation. This leads Davidson, for instance, to a seriously flawed
21
diagnosis of Gadamer’s idea of the kind of sharing that understanding
requires, and so to mischaracterize the relation between their views.19 But
then, if factors such as these are very different, is not this simply to say that
Gadamer and Davidson belong to different traditions? And is not
philosophical hermeneutics exactly a tradition, in Gadamer’s sense of that
term? Even if we take it, as we surely should, that a tradition is not a closed
structure of meaning but a continuously developing source of new meanings,
we must take seriously the challenge that the question of tradition raises here.
If there is a way forward, it will lie in the recontextualization of his
own investigations that Davidson brings about with the emphasis on
triangulation as performance pertaining to the ontology of intelligibility. Any
strain of hermeneutic thought at its core is an effort to grasp the consequences
for human understanding of the fact that we are essentially historical beings.
As readers of Davidson will know, this is hardly a prominent theme in any of
his essays. Yet as he attempts to characterize the performance of triangulation,
Davidson connects with a set of issues that in historical terms may be traced
to Hegel’s reaction to Kant, and Kant’s to empiricism, and his contributions
may be situated in terms of that larger history.20 In such terms, then, it may
not be far-‐‑fetched to look for commonalities that are indicative of tradition in
the requisite sense.
It might help to have a way to characterize the stance that is common,
in this larger context, to both explicitly historicist thinkers and Davidson. I
22
suggest semantic historicism. The essence of the view is that intelligibility
comes into being through the dialogical interaction of agents. Philosophical
hermeneutics, particularly through Gadamer, emphasizes the historical
situatedness that makes this possible. It shows us how the particular,
contingent resources agents take to any encounter represent their belonging
and beholdenness to tradition, while at the same time constituting the flexible
resources of their creative semantic agency. Through what Gadamer calls
effective-‐‑historical consciousness, meaning comes to be through the ongoing
fusion of horizons that is a mutual making and remaking in language of past
from the present and present from the past. This dynamic, however, can also
be looked at from a different perspective – from close up, as it were. What, in
concrete interpretation, is the structure of the dynamic that allows meaningful
utterance to be made and taken? Davidson’s triangulation may be regarded as
an answer to this question. It abstracts away from the particulars of the
historicity of subjects, bringing into view instead the way that particular
subjects interacting in a common world are able to acquire differentiating
perspectives on that world – able to acquire, that is to say, a horizon – at all.21
Taking seriously the ontological dimension – as we understand this
term in the context of philosophical hermeneutics – of Davidson’s
triangulation, means that we can recognize in Davidson’s view, also, an
elaboration of key hermeneutic insight. The differentiation of particular
subjects as well any subject’s participation in contexts of commonality are two
23
sides of the same dialogical process; both what is individual and what is
shared is an intersubjectively produced intelligibility of the world to subjects
and of the subjects to themselves and to other subjects. In “Three Varieties of
Knowledge” (1993) Davidson makes just this point:
Until a base line has been established by communication with someone else,
there is no point in saying one’s own thought or words have propositional
content. If this is so, then it is clear that knowledge of another mind is
essential to all thought and all knowledge (Davidson 2001c: 213).
Self-‐‑knowledge, knowledge of other minds and knowledge of the objective
world are mutually interdependent. For this reason, it is clear to Davidson
that all understanding is always also self-‐‑understanding. Indeed, Davidson,
we can now see, offers a particular way to understand this claim. It is not
merely that as we learn more truths about objects in the world or other people,
we thereby also come to learn more truths about ourselves – maybe we do,
maybe we don’t. Rather, the point is that as we succeed in making the world
and others more intelligible, the intelligibility of ourselves to ourselves is also
enhanced. As Davidson remarks, “What is certain is that the clarity and
effectiveness of our concepts grows with the growth of our understanding of
others. There are no definite limits to how far dialogue can or will take us”
(Davidson 2001c: 219).
24
4. Solidarity
Keeping in mind the hermeneutic dimension of Davidson’s thinking, we see
that this last remark is something more substantive than mere pious hope. It
expresses the hermeneutic insight that any claim to be tracing alleged limits of
dialogue, in other than purely practical and contingent senses,22 is to fall back
to an ahistoricist, ultimately Platonistic, conception of meaning.23 Discursive
creatures are always on the way to intelligibility. This is a point that David
Vessey makes when he remarks that the “bottom line for Gadamer is that
anything intelligible to anyone is potentially intelligible to everyone”24
(Vessey 2011: 255). As we have seen, it applies equally and for the same basic
reason, to Davidson. Of course, though, the “potentially” matters here; it
makes the point that there is no guarantee in any particular case that dialogue
will bring us into a common discursive space where “die Sache” and our
respective views emerge as clear and mutually accessible. Occasional,
perhaps frequent, failure to realize mutual understanding is indeed our
experience. But this is our fate not qua linguistically confined creatures, but
rather as finite, temporal ones; further discursive effort may bring us closer,
always, if we are able to dialogically augment the intelligibility of what is
being said. Through language, say both Gadamer and Davidson, any
particular finitude may always get past its current particular state of self.
25
These qualifications, the ifs and the mays, are perhaps not prominent in
the formulations of Gadamer and Davidson, but they may have been what
mattered most to Rorty. As I have suggested, Rorty’s reading of Davidson
enabled him to articulate his historicist view of intelligibility. However,
Rorty’s fundamental concern is with articulating a view of philosophical
activity that faces up to the responsibilities to which this view opens us. That
this is so, illustrates how very badly read Rorty has been by those who
dismissed him as irresponsible and cynical, as a pernicious relativist and a
subjectivist. One can understand that Rorty’s notion of philosophy as
conversation (1979) left many shaking their head in wonder – what’s the point
of a conversation with no point except its own prolongation? And indeed,
Rorty, too, came to see his efforts in the final section of Philosophy and the
Mirror of Nature as feeble.25 And while Heidegger continued to compel
Rorty’s imagination, hermeneutics, as a line of philosophical thought, did
not.26 Still, though his explicit invocation of hermeneutics was also in his own
eyes something of a failure, Rorty never went back on the seriousness of his
efforts to think constructively about the normative implications of historicism
for philosophical reflection that he performs in the final third of Philosophy and
the Mirror of Nature. And perhaps we are now in a position to make the idea
that philosophy should go hermeneutical, that keeping up the conversation is
the point of philosophizing, rather than the resolution of metaphysical
puzzles, slightly less bland. Vessey points out that Gadamer’s notion of
26
dialogue – Gespräch – is a great deal more constraining than, on the face of it,
the notion of dialogue or communication. Rather than mere exchange of
information or points of view, it is “the collaborative act of seeking to
articulate understanding of a subject matter […] It belongs to the category of
activities Gadamer calls play.” (Vessay 2012: 36) Playing, and particularly
playing together in conversation, becomes in Gadamer’s hands a pivotal
hermeneutic idea.27 It involves both a kind of submission, a surrender of
control of the individual subject to the norms inherent in a joint venture, and
at the same time – indeed, by the same token – a realization of the subject’s
freedom to be moved by reason, to be changed, to become more by
understanding more. Playing this game is risky, because genuine
participation is to place one’s fate as interpreter beyond one’s subjective
control. As Gadamer remarks, ”all playing is a being-‐‑played.” (Gadamer
1991a: 106) Playing the game and being played by it, one depends, at the very
least, on the good faith and will of co-‐‑players – without that, there can be no
play, no game, at all. A chief demand, then, of discursive play – a very serious
activity for interpreting self-‐‑interpreters – is courage; a virtue that in this
context is mirrored by – and made possible by – a presumption of solidarity.
Solidarity in dialogue is the positive affirmation of the inextricability of our
fates as interpreting and self-‐‑interpreting subjects – one enters the game of
hermeneutic dialogue under the presupposition of this form of discursive
solidarity. Solidarity is what charity becomes when it is conceived in terms of
27
semantic historicism and therefore as also future-‐‑directed and considered in
terms of its practical implications, rather than as invoking some presumed
already-‐‑shared structure, scheme or practice.
Rorty’s invocation of hermeneutics as a context for his proposed norm
for post-‐‑representationalist philosophy – “philosophers’ moral concern
should be with continuing the conversation of the West’ (Rorty 1979: 394) –
may then be taken as a gesture toward the idea that the development of
interpretive understanding asks us, above all, to cultivate future-‐‑directed
charity, forms of courageous solidarity. Reading Rorty along these lines, we
see that the key opposition between epistemological philosophy and
hermeneutic philosophy that he articulates is really between philosophy that
attempts to mark out the limits of a given common ground and philosophy
that strives to bring common ground into being. Conversation, for Rorty, is a
morally loaded term: “Disagreements between disciplines and discourses are
compromised or transcended in the course of the conversation.” (Rorty 1979:
317) This normative notion of conversation, sketchily worked out in his 1979
critique of representationalism, is what Rorty tries to work out in explicitly
moral and political terms in what remained his own favorite book (see Rorty
2007a), Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Rorty 1989). That this book makes no
mention of hermeneutics is perhaps an irony, but, one that does not
compromise the fundamentally hermeneutic character of Rorty’s project.
28
5. Dialogue and the formation of a hermeneutic horizon
Though neither Rorty nor Davidson engage Gadamer in particularly deep or
revealing ways, both, I have claimed, belong with philosophical hermeneutics.
Both break fundamentally with what I have called the representationalist
view of interpretation, by making meaning – what is understood – not
primarily an object of epistemic determination, but a product of successful,
charitable interaction between participating, acting, transforming and self-‐‑
transforming subjects in a shared world. In Rorty’s terms, dialogical
understanding is an achievement of solidarity. Rorty’s emphasis encourages
us to take responsibility for our interpretive agency, in conversation but also,
equally, as readers of texts, as participants in the formation of effective
histories. And so it is also with our central issue; that is, the question whether
a point of view is available such that our protagonists can be seen as
dialogically working up a common tradition. There is a real risk, as Dostal
emphasizes, that we may be involving ourselves with a curios overlap in
intellectual history, rather than participating in an advance in philosophical
understanding, a genuine fusion of horizons. Still, provided we are not
confounded either by false conceptual friends or by merely apparent
disagreements, and provided we reify neither language, nor tradition, nor
vocabulary, this treacherous terrain may be negotiated. Davidson, Rorty and
Gadamer can be brought together precisely in the perspective they afford on
29
this very issue; taking the particular shape of our linguistic repertoire at any
given time to constitute an openness, as the nature of our access to a common
process of transformation – a serious playing and being played – all insist,
fundamentally, that continuing fusion of horizons always remains a
possibility. And if such a possibility is realized, if fusion of horizons here
were to occur, if it is indeed occurring – in spite of subjective limitations on
mutual philosophical understanding and self-‐‑understanding, as our
protagonists all clearly display – then it is because we, the readers of
Gadamer, Heidegger, Rorty, and Davidson, are up to the challenge of
bringing into being a common discursive space. Less metaphorically, it is a
matter of creating a sufficiently rich set of shared, conceptually and
historically interlinked questions to which Rorty, Davidson and hermeneutic
thinkers are all trying to respond. To achieve through dialogue a shared sense
of the relative importance of various questions and of the relevance to them of
various considerations – that is indeed what a fusion of intellectual horizons
comes to. The notions of semantic historicism and of conversational solidarity
are proposed in this spirit. Their purpose is to let us see the emphasis on
process and dynamics and incompleteness in Davidson’s gradually emerging
account of dialogical understanding as springing from questions and
concerns that are of a kind with those that give us Rorty’s historicism of
solidarity and the hermeneutic view of understanding as a fusion of horizons.
30
The decisive question, then, is this. Are we able to retrieve a richer
understanding of dialogical understanding by bringing together Davidsonian
triangulation, Rortyan solidarity and the commitments of philosophical
hermeneutics in the way that I have sketched? Are we in fact illuminating a
subject matter? That is the condition of success against which these
interpretive suggestions must be gauged. Accordingly, I have tried to show
that Davidson with his notion of triangulation delivers a version of semantic
historicism that also provides an extension of the scope and power of the
hermeneutic account of the historicity of understanding. This is so, I think,
even if Davidson nowhere discusses the historical situatedness of
understanding in Gadamer’s sense. And I have attributed to Rorty an idea of
conversational solidarity that is available only if one accepts the hermeneutic
view of intelligibility as coming into being through dialogue. Forward-‐‑directed
charity, as I have called Rorty’s notion of solidarity, emphasizes the moral and
political responsibility we all bear, not by metaphysical necessity, but as a
consequence of the recognition of our finitude and our dependence as
discursive beings on the contingencies of dialogue beyond our subjective
mastery and control.
I have, moreover, tried to show that Davidson’s philosophical thinking,
and Rorty’s deployment of it in his deconstructive narrative of
representationalist epistemology, is ultimately a transformation of Davidson’s
own contributions to the dialectical sharpening of the problems of analytic
31
philosophy as they appeared in the 1960s and 1970s. While these are
contributions for which Davidson is justly esteemed, his work, taken
hermeneutically in its full diachronic span, opens a perspective on the
philosophical puzzles of metaphysical naturalism from which they appear as
a particular – ingenious – set of instances of a broader, on-‐‑going effort of
human understanding to articulate its own finitude, incompleteness, and
openness. So while Davidson was, by his own account, a problem-‐‑oriented
philosopher, his way with those metaphysical problems produced, over time,
a body of work that gives us something much more important than
metaphysical solutions. Davidson teaches us something about how those
problems – of meaning, of mind, and of action in a natural world – come to be
problems for creatures like us, and what it means to be facing them
philosophically. This is something that in particular Rorty’s reading of
Davidson allows us to see. So perhaps, then, it is exactly in their relation to
analytic philosophy, the tradition in terms of which much of their writing is
carried out, that Rorty and Davidson most clearly display their contribution
to philosophical hermeneutics. Over the course of Davidson’s and Rorty’s
work, the philosophical problems that constitute the defining challenges for
familiar strands of analytic philosophy are stripped of their autonomy as
metaphysics, though not thereby to be dismissed or overcome, but rather
restored to us as tasks of concrete historical human self-‐‑understanding; as
tasks, that is to say, of self-‐‑formation. Through this performance, Davidson and
32
Rorty provide core insights of philosophical hermeneutics with applications
that they otherwise would not have had.28
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36
— (2008) 'ʹOn Not Giving Up the World – Davidson and the Grounds of Belief’,
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— (2011a) 'ʹWhat is Common to All: Davidson on Agreement and
Understanding,'ʹ in Dialogues with Davidson: Acting, Interpreting,
Understanding, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
— (ed.) (2011b) Dialogues with Davidson: Acting, Interpreting, Understanding,
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Honor of Hans-‐‑Georg Gadamer, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
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Quine, V.W. (1960) Word and Object, Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.
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— (2003) 'ʹIlluminating Language: Interpretation and Understanding in
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37
— (2008) 'ʹRorty, Davidson and the Future of Metaphysics in America,'ʹ in The
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— (2011a) 'ʹMethod and Metaphysics. Pragmatist Doubts,'ʹ in Dialogues with
Davidson: Acting, Interpreting, Understanding, ed. Jeff Malpas, Cambridge,
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— (2011b) 'ʹTurning to Hermeneutics: On Pragmatism’s Struggle with
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Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, Sonderheft 11, Berlin: Felix Meiner Verlag.
Rorty, R. (1979) Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton: Princeton
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— (1989) Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Cambridge: Cambridge University
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(1991a) 'ʹInquiry as recontextualization: An anti-‐‑dualist account of
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— (1991b) Essays on Heidegger and Others, Philosophical Papers Vol. 2,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
—(2000) 'ʹUniversality and Truth,'ʹ in Rorty and his Critics, ed. R. Brandom,
Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
38
—(2007a) 'ʹIntellectual Autobiography of Richard Rorty, 'ʹ in The Philosophy of
Richard Rorty, ed. R.E. Auxier and L.E. Hahn (The Library of Living
Philosophers, Vol. XXXII), Chicago: Open Court Publishing Company.
—(2007b) 'ʹAnalytic and conversational philosophy,'ʹ in Philosophy as Cultural
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Further reading:
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Interpretations of Hans-‐‑Georg Gadamer, ed. L. Code, University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press.
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39
Taylor, C (2002), 'ʹUnderstanding the Other: A Gadamerian View on
Conceptual Schemes,'ʹ in Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-‐‑Georg
Gadamer, ed. Jeff Malpas et al, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Stueber, K. (1994) 'ʹUnderstanding Truth and Objectivity: A Dialogue between
Donald Davidson and Hans-‐‑Georg Gadamer,'ʹ in Hermeneutics and Truth, ed.
B. Wachterhauser, Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Wachterhauser, B (2002) 'ʹGetting It Right: Relativism, Realism, and Truth,'ʹ in
The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, ed. R. Dostal, New York: Cambridge
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Weinsheimer, J. (2005) 'ʹCharity Militant: Gadamer, Davidson, and Post-‐‑
critical Hermeneutics,'ʹ in The Force of Tradition: Response and Resistance in
Literature, Religion, and Cultural Studies, ed. D. Marshall, Lanham: Rowman
& Littlefield.
1 These are the papers in philosophy of mind, philosophy of action and
philosophy of language that are collected in volumes first published in
1980 (here cited as Davidson 2001a) and 1984 (here cited as Davidson
2001b). Davidson as regarded from the point of view of analytic
philosophy is expounded and interrogated most extensively and
systematically—and emblematically—in works by Ernest Lepore and Kirk
Ludwig (Lepore and Ludwig 2005; 2007; Ludwig 2003). See also (Preyer
40
2012) for recent essays on Davidson critically engaging the Lepore-‐‑Ludwig
reading largely on its own terms.
2 John McDowell, in Mind and World (McDowell 1996), has done more than
any other thinker to place Davidson and Gadamer within the frame of the
same philosophical narrative. Several essays in a recent volume edited by
Jeff Malpas (Malpas 2011b) examine the relationship between Davidson
and Gadamer: Braver 2011; Dostal 2011; Fultner 2011; Hoy and Durt 2011.
Malpas 2011a). David Vessey helpfully lists number of papers addressing
the topic in recent decades (Vessay 2011: 257 fn9). I have made use of
Vessey’s list in the suggested further readings.
3 These are main themes of Hans-‐‑Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method
(Gadamer 1991a). See also his slightly later (1966) essay, ”The Universality
of the Hermeneutical Problem” (Gadamer 1976). For Rorty’s dim view of
universality claims, see for instance his ”Universality and Truth” (Rorty
2000).
4 Robert Dostal is illuminating and chastening on the significance of
Gadamer’s use of this term, “die Sache,” and on the treacherousness of
translations into English. (Dostal 2011: 172).
5 In addition to McDowell’s influential (cf. note 3), several commentators have
explored this connection in recent years. My own early enthusiasm may be
observed in (Ramberg 1989), while (Ramberg 2003) underscores the
41
distance between Davidson and Gadamer’s understanding of common
terms. Kristin Gjesdal, emphasizing the fundamental hermeneutic thought
that all understanding is also self-‐‑understanding, is even more skeptical.
(Gjesdal 2010) David Hoy, on the other hand, is more positive, in view of
the common break with Cartesian understanding of subjectivity, as are
Hoy and Christop Durt (Hoy and Durt 2011). The papers mentioned above
(fn. 4) in the Malpas volume all perform useful calibrations. Thus, for
instance, Barbara Fultner’s excellent paper on incommensurability very
effectively situates Davidson and Gadamer in relation to this idea.
Fultner’s analyses bring out Davidson’s and Gadamer’s common stance
against reifying conceptions of language and understanding, but she also
suggests, considering the relation between interpretation and translation,
that there are important differences in their basic conception of what
understanding is. (Fultner 2011: 231)
6 In his Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis
(Bernstein 1983), Bernstein very effectively makes this point about the
hermeneutic conception of historicity, and argues that Rorty and Gadamer
here are closer than their different vocabularies indicate. However, he
remains critical of both for failing, in Bernstein’s view, to integrate the
dimension of praxis.
42
7 See in particular Davidson’s seminal paper, “Actions, Reasons and Causes,”
(Davidson 1963), and other papers in (Davidson 2001a).
8 The worry is whether there can be anything in the world capable of making
true statements about metaphysically problematic entities (values,
seemings, norms, etc.).
9 In “Laws and Cause” from 1995 Davidson provides an account of the nature
of the physical in terms of the constitutive interests expressed in the
relevant vocabularies. I try to come to terms with Davidson’s view in
(Ramberg 1997).
10 The debate about mental causation, specifically about the kind of
supervenience of the mental on the physical that mental causation actually
requires, will serve as an example of this. It illustrates also Davidson’s own
occasional difficulties in disentangling his position from the metaphysical
assumptions framing debates in mainstream analytic philosophy of mind.
See the essays in Part One of J. Heil and A. Mele’s very instructive
collection, Mental Causation (Heil and Mele 1995: 3-‐‑52)
11 See the essays collected in Davidson’s Truth and Interpretation (Davidson
2001b).
12 Davidson here adapts to natural language the work that Alfred Tarski did
on formal languages. Tarski showed how we can define a truth-‐‑predicate
for a given axiomatized language. (Tarski 1944) When we give such a
43
truth-‐‑definition, we are using one language (the language of the theory, or
the meta-‐‑language) to describe the structure of another language (the object
language). A consistently characterized formal language does not contain
its own truth-‐‑predicate, and this places constraints on the adaptation
Davidson performs.
13 Davidson writes:
If we cannot find a way to interpret the utterances and other behavior of a
creature as reveling a set of beliefs largely consistent and true by our own
standards, we have no reason to count that creature as rational, as having
beliefs, or as saying anything at all.
Davidson 2001b: 137
14 These worries are often expressed by way of accusations of verificationism,
irrealism, or even linguistic idealism.
15 The iconic collection Semantics of Natural Language from 1972 (Davidson and
Harman 2013) embodies both the spirit and the practice of this research
program, all aspects of which were under lively critical discussion from the
start. See (Lepore and Ludwig 2007) for a comprehensive and thorough
recent examination of the program.
16 Here is what Davidson writes: "ʺI conclude that there is no such thing as a
language, no if a language is anything like what many philosophers and
linguist have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned,
44
mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined
shared structure which language-‐‑users acquire and then apply to cases"ʺ,
Davidson 2005: 107.
17 Davidson describes this in terms of a dynamic between prior and passing
theories: "ʺFor the hearer, the prior theory expresses how he is prepared in
advance to interpret an utterance of the speaker, while the passing theory
is how he does interpret the utterance. For the speaker, the prior theory is
what he believes the interpreter’s prior theory to be, while the passing
theory is the theory that he intends the interpreter to use"ʺ, Davidson 2005:
101.
18 Lee Braver (2011) analyses Davidson’s misreading of Gadamer (Davidson
1997) in Davidson’s invited contribution in the Library of Living
Philosophers volume on Gadamer (Hahn 1997). Davidson emphasizes their
common ground and expresses his great admiration for Gadamer both as a
reader of Plato and as a theorist of understanding. He adds to this,
however, some points of divergence. But where such initial disagreement
for a hermeneutic reader would be entry-‐‑points for exploration, Davidson
simply notes them, and this, Braver argues, betrays precisely a lack of
hermeneutic charity. In hermeneutic terms, the principle of charity cannot
amount simply to the demand that we interpret others to agree with us.
Rather, charity expresses the idea that interpretation proceeds as a
45
movement towards coming into agreement. As Braver puts it: ”The
expectation that the other has something to teach us is Gadamer’s version
of charity, which forms the necessary beginning point for all interpretation”
(Braver 2011: 158). Hermeneutically speaking, humility is the better part of
charity.
19 Several writers have convincingly demonstrated the point. (Braver 2011;
Malpas 2002) Dostal sums it up nicely: "ʺThe difference between Gadamer
and Davidson about this is not great. What difference there is comes from
accentuating differently one of the two sides of Davidson’s triangulation.
Davidson sees Gadamer insisting on working out first a common language
and then coming to an agreement (or disagreement) about the topic of
conversation. Davidson objects that the language does not come first, but
rather that 'ʹit is only in the presence of shared objects that understanding
can come about.'ʹ Gadamer should not accept Davidson’s characterization
of his view here, for Gadamer would deny that language could be worked
out 'ʹfirst'ʹ without reference to life in a world. Neither side, language or
world, is first. Davidson would agree"ʺ, Dostal 2011: 178 (the embedded
quotation is from Davidson 1997: 432).
20 Dostal makes this point (Dostal 2011). The point may be underscored by
considering Robert Brandom, a philosopher who is in something of the
same line of work as Davidson, and who uses the vocabulary of analytic
46
philosophy to address the dynamics of the emergence of intelligibility
through interaction (Brandom 1994). Unlike Davidson, Brandom has
devoted a great deal of effort to construing this larger tradition and to
insert his own analytic work into it (Brandom 2002).
21 I owe this way of thinking about the aspects of semantic historicism to
remarks by Ramon del Castillo, who suggested that semantic historicism
affords both a macro-‐‑perspective and a micro-‐‑perspective, and that we
need not take these to be isomorphic.
22 Of course practical and contingent limits to dialogue are immensely
important, though not in a particularly philosophical way.
23 We should note that Gadamer’s Plato may not have been a Platonist about
meaning in the sense I invoke here.
24 As Vessey also puts the point, in a Davidsonian key: “We are never in a
position to conclude that a disagreement in dialogue is evidence of
incommensurability” (Vessey 2011: 255).
25 ”My invocation of Gadamerian hermeneutics,” writes Rorty, looking back
across the decades, ”was feeble and unproductive” (Rorty 2007: 13).
26 For Rorty’s engagement with Heidegger, see the essays collected in Rorty
1991b. Regarding questions raised by Rorty’s conspicuous lack of
engagement with hermeneutics, see Ramberg 2011.
47
27 In the subsection of Truth and Method entitled, “Play as the clue to
ontological explanation” (Gadamer 1991a: 101-‐‑134), Gadamer provides an
initial condensed exposition of a basic claim about the structure of
dialogical understanding and the relation of subjectivity to tradition. The
fundamental theme is, “the primacy of play over the consciousness of the player”
(Gadamer 1991a: 104, italics in the original).
28 I have been greatly aided by conversations with Kristin Gjesdal on the
topics I pursue in this paper. Ramon Del Castillo and Ángel Faerna,
astutely responding to a presentation of the main ideas, helped me make
them clearer. Endre Begby, through conversations also about more
empirically oriented matters, has had a greater influence on the reading of
Davidson offered here than he may realize. The reader may notice that I
have learned much from Jeff Malpas'ʹ work on Davidson. In any case, his
sound advice not only made this chapter more interesting and more
readable than it would otherwise have been, but also, and most
fundamentally, his patient persistence also coaxed it into being. My sincere
thanks go to all.
This work was partly supported by the Research Council of Norway through
its Centres of Excellence funding scheme, project number 179566/V20.
