Davidson was married three times. His first wife was the artist Virginia Davidson, with whom he had his only child, a daughter, Elizabeth (Davidson) Boyer.[7] Following his divorce from Virginia Davidson, he married for the second time to Nancy Hirschberg, Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and later at Chicago Circle. She died in 1979.[8] In 1984, Davidson married for the third and last time, to philosopher Marcia Cavell.[9]
I conclude that there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, 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. And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in language; or, as I think, we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions.
— "A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs," Truth and Interpretation, 446
Swampman
Swampman is the subject of a philosophicalthought experiment introduced by Donald Davidson in his 1987 paper "Knowing One's Own Mind". In the experiment, Davidson is struck by lightning in a swamp and disintegrated; simultaneously, an exact copy of Davidson, the Swampman, is made from a nearby tree and proceeds through life exactly as Davidson would have, indistinguishable from Davidson. The experiment is used by Davidson to claim that thought and meaning cannot exist in a vacuum; they are dependent on their interconnections to the world. Therefore, despite being physically identical to himself, Davidson states that the Swampman does not have thoughts nor meaningful language, as it has no causal history to base them on.[10]
Suppose lightning strikes a dead tree in a swamp; I am standing nearby. My body is reduced to its elements, while entirely by coincidence (and out of different molecules) the tree is turned into my physical replica. My replica, The Swampman, moves exactly as I did; according to its nature it departs the swamp, encounters and seems to recognize my friends, and appears to return their greetings in English. It moves into my house and seems to write articles on radical interpretation. No one can tell the difference. But there is a difference. My replica can't recognize my friends; it can't recognize anything, since it never cognized anything in the first place. It can't know my friends' names (though of course it seems to), it can't remember my house. It can't mean what I do by the word 'house', for example, since the sound 'house' it makes was not learned in a context that would give it the right meaning—or any meaning at all. Indeed, I don't see how my replica can be said to mean anything by the sounds it makes, nor to have any thoughts.
"Actions, Reasons, and Causes," Journal of Philosophy, 60, 1963. (Reprinted in Davidson, 2001a.)
"Truth and Meaning," Synthese, 17, 1967. (Reprinted in Davidson, 2001b.)
"Mental Events," in Experience and Theory, Foster and Swanson (eds.). London: Duckworth. 1970. (Reprinted in Davidson, 2001a).
"Agency," in Agent, Action, and Reason, Binkley, Bronaugh, and Marras (eds.), Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 1971. (Reprinted in Davidson, 2001a.)
"Radical Interpretation," Dialectica, 27, 1973, 313–328. (Reprinted in Davidson, 2001b.)
Semantics of Natural Languages, Davidson, Donald and Gilbert Harman (eds.), 2nd ed. New York: Springer. 1973.
Plato's ‘Philebus’, New York: Garland Publishing. 1990.
The Essential Davidson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006.
Filmography
Rudolf Fara (host), In conversation: Donald Davidson (19 videocassettes), Philosophy International, Centre for Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences, London School of Economics, 1997.[citation needed]
^Davidson, Donald. "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme." Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association47(1) (1973–1974): 5–20.
^Michael Dummett, The Interpretation of Frege's Philosophy, Duckworth, 1981, p. xv.
^McGinn, Colin. "Cooling it". London Review of Books. 19 August 1993. Accessed 28 October 2010.
^Dasenbrock, Reed Way, ed. Literary Theory After Davidson. Penn State Press, 1989.
^Baghramian, Maria, ed. Donald Davidson: Life and Words. Routledge, 2013.
^"In Memoriam: Donald Davidson 2015-02-26 at the Wayback Machine"
^Malpas, Jeff (2019), "Donald Davidson", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2019 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 2020-07-29
^Davidson, Donald (1987). "Knowing One's Own Mind". Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association. 60 (3): 441–458. doi:10.2307/3131782. ISSN 0065-972X. JSTOR 3131782.
Further reading
Dasenbrock, Reed Way (ed.). Literary Theory After Davidson. University Park: Pennsylvania University Press. 1993.
Hahn, Lewis Edwin (ed.). The Philosophy of Donald Davidson, Library of Living Philosophers XXVII. Chicago: Open Court. 1999.
Kotatko, Petr, Peter Pagin and Gabriel Segal (eds.). Interpreting Davidson. Stanford: CSLI Publications. 2001.
Evnine, Simon. Donald Davidson. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1991.
Lepore, Ernest and Brian McLaughlin (eds.). Actions and Events: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1985.
Lepore, Ernest (ed.). Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1986.
Lepore, Ernest and Kirk Ludwig. "Donald Davidson," Midwest Studies in Philosophy, September 2004, vol. 28, pp. 309–333.
Lepore, Ernest and Kirk Ludwig. Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language and Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005.
Lepore, Ernest and Kirk Ludwig. Donald Davidson's Truth-Theoretic Semantics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2007.
Ludwig, Kirk (ed.). Donald Davidson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003.
Ludwig, Kirk. "Donald Davidson: Essays on Actions and Events." In Classics of Western Philosophy: The Twentieth Century: Quine and After, vol. 5., John Shand (ed.), Acumen Press, 2006, pp. 146–165.
Malpas, Jeffrey. Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning: Holism, Truth, Interpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1992.
Mou, Bo (ed.). Davidson's Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy: Constructive Engagement. Leiden & Boston: Brill. 2006.
Preyer, Gerhard, Frank Siebelt, and Alexander Ulfig (eds.). Language, Mind and Epistemology: On Donald Davidson's Philosophy. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. 1994.
Ramberg, Bjorn. Donald Davidson's Philosophy of Language: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1989.
Romaneczko, Marta E. The Role of Metalanguage in Radical Interpretation. Journal of Consciousness Studies. 2007.
Stoecker, Ralf (ed.). Reflecting Davidson. Berlin: W. de Gruyter. 1993.
Uzunova, Boryana. . in: Philosophia: E-Journal of Philosophy and Culture – 1/2012.
Vermazen, B., and Hintikka, M. Essays on Davidson: Actions and Events. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1985.
Zeglen, Ursula M. (ed.). Donald Davidson: Truth, Meaning and Knowledge. London: Routledge. 1991.
External links
Wikiquote has quotations related to Donald Davidson (philosopher).
donald, davidson, philosopher, donald, herbert, davidson, march, 1917, august, 2003, american, philosopher, served, slusser, professor, philosophy, university, california, berkeley, from, 1981, 2003, after, having, also, held, teaching, appointments, stanford,. Donald Herbert Davidson March 6 1917 August 30 2003 was an American philosopher He served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California Berkeley from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments at Stanford University Rockefeller University Princeton University and the University of Chicago Davidson was known for his charismatic personality and the depth and difficulty of his thought 5 His work exerted considerable influence in many areas of philosophy from the 1960s onward particularly in philosophy of mind philosophy of language and action theory While Davidson was an analytic philosopher and most of his influence lies in that tradition his work has attracted attention in continental philosophy as well particularly in literary theory and related areas 6 Donald DavidsonPortrait by photographer Steve Pyke in 1990 BornDonald Herbert Davidson 1917 03 06 6 March 1917Springfield Massachusetts U S Died30 August 2003 2003 08 30 aged 86 Berkeley California U S EducationHarvard University AB 1939 PhD 1949 Era20th century philosophyRegionWestern philosophySchoolAnalyticNeopragmatism 1 ThesisPlato s Philebus 1949 Doctoral advisorRaphael DemosDonald Cary WilliamsOther academic advisorsWillard Van Orman QuineDoctoral studentsAkeel BilgramiMichael BratmanKirk LudwigClaudine VerheggenStephen YabloMain interestsPhilosophy of language philosophy of action philosophy of mind epistemology ontologyNotable ideasRadical interpretation anomalous monism truth conditional semantics principle of charity slingshot argument reasons as causes understanding as translation swampman events Davidson s translation argument against alternative conceptual schemes 2 3 the third dogma of empiricism a Influences Quine Tarski Wittgenstein Russell Frege Kant Goodman FeiglInfluenced Colin McGinn Ernest Lepore Kirk Ludwig Richard Rorty John McDowell Robert Brandom Jeff Malpas Tyler Burge Mark Bevir Michael Dummett 4 Contents 1 Personal life 2 Swampman 3 Awards 4 Bibliography 5 Filmography 6 See also 7 Notes 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External linksPersonal life EditDavidson was married three times His first wife was the artist Virginia Davidson with whom he had his only child a daughter Elizabeth Davidson Boyer 7 Following his divorce from Virginia Davidson he married for the second time to Nancy Hirschberg Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign and later at Chicago Circle She died in 1979 8 In 1984 Davidson married for the third and last time to philosopher Marcia Cavell 9 I conclude that there is no such thing as a language not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed There is therefore no such thing to be learned 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 And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in language or as I think we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs Truth and Interpretation 446Swampman EditThis article needs additional citations for verification Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources Unsourced material may be challenged and removed Find sources Donald Davidson philosopher news newspapers books scholar JSTOR August 2011 Learn how and when to remove this template message Swampman is the subject of a philosophical thought experiment introduced by Donald Davidson in his 1987 paper Knowing One s Own Mind In the experiment Davidson is struck by lightning in a swamp and disintegrated simultaneously an exact copy of Davidson the Swampman is made from a nearby tree and proceeds through life exactly as Davidson would have indistinguishable from Davidson The experiment is used by Davidson to claim that thought and meaning cannot exist in a vacuum they are dependent on their interconnections to the world Therefore despite being physically identical to himself Davidson states that the Swampman does not have thoughts nor meaningful language as it has no causal history to base them on 10 The experiment runs as follows 11 Suppose lightning strikes a dead tree in a swamp I am standing nearby My body is reduced to its elements while entirely by coincidence and out of different molecules the tree is turned into my physical replica My replica The Swampman moves exactly as I did according to its nature it departs the swamp encounters and seems to recognize my friends and appears to return their greetings in English It moves into my house and seems to write articles on radical interpretation No one can tell the difference But there is a difference My replica can t recognize my friends it can t recognize anything since it never cognized anything in the first place It can t know my friends names though of course it seems to it can t remember my house It can t mean what I do by the word house for example since the sound house it makes was not learned in a context that would give it the right meaning or any meaning at all Indeed I don t see how my replica can be said to mean anything by the sounds it makes nor to have any thoughts Donald Davidson Knowing One s Own MindAwards EditJean Nicod Prize 1995 Bibliography EditDecision Making An Experimental Approach co authored with Patrick Suppes and Sidney Siegel Stanford Stanford University Press 1957 Actions Reasons and Causes Journal of Philosophy 60 1963 Reprinted in Davidson 2001a Truth and Meaning Synthese 17 1967 Reprinted in Davidson 2001b Mental Events in Experience and Theory Foster and Swanson eds London Duckworth 1970 Reprinted in Davidson 2001a Agency in Agent Action and Reason Binkley Bronaugh and Marras eds Toronto University of Toronto Press 1971 Reprinted in Davidson 2001a Radical Interpretation Dialectica 27 1973 313 328 Reprinted in Davidson 2001b Semantics of Natural Languages Davidson Donald and Gilbert Harman eds 2nd ed New York Springer 1973 Plato s Philebus New York Garland Publishing 1990 Essays on Actions and Events 2nd ed Oxford Oxford University Press 2001a Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation 2nd ed Oxford Oxford University Press 2001b Subjective Intersubjective Objective Oxford Oxford University Press 2001c Problems of Rationality Oxford Oxford University Press 2004 Truth Language and History Philosophical Essays Oxford Oxford University Press 2005 Truth and Predication Cambridge Mass Harvard University Press 2005 ISBN 978 0 674 01525 8 The Essential Davidson Oxford Oxford University Press 2006 Filmography EditRudolf Fara host In conversation Donald Davidson 19 videocassettes Philosophy International Centre for Philosophy of the Natural and Social Sciences London School of Economics 1997 citation needed See also EditList of Jean Nicod Prize laureates List of American philosophers Swamp ThingNotes Edit W V O Quine elaborated the first two dogmas in his paper Two Dogmas of Empiricism References Edit Pragmatism Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Malpas Jeffrey Donald Davidson Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2005 Davidson Donald On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 47 1 1973 1974 5 20 Michael Dummett The Interpretation of Frege s Philosophy Duckworth 1981 p xv McGinn Colin Cooling it London Review of Books 19 August 1993 Accessed 28 October 2010 Dasenbrock Reed Way ed Literary Theory After Davidson Penn State Press 1989 Baghramian Maria ed Donald Davidson Life and Words Routledge 2013 Nancy Ann Hirschberg In Memoriam 1937 1979 In Memoriam Donald Davidson Archived 2015 02 26 at the Wayback Machine Malpas Jeff 2019 Donald Davidson in Zalta Edward N ed The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy Fall 2019 ed Metaphysics Research Lab Stanford University retrieved 2020 07 29 Davidson Donald 1987 Knowing One s Own Mind Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 60 3 441 458 doi 10 2307 3131782 ISSN 0065 972X JSTOR 3131782 Further reading EditDasenbrock Reed Way ed Literary Theory After Davidson University Park Pennsylvania University Press 1993 Hahn Lewis Edwin ed The Philosophy of Donald Davidson Library of Living Philosophers XXVII Chicago Open Court 1999 Kotatko Petr Peter Pagin and Gabriel Segal eds Interpreting Davidson Stanford CSLI Publications 2001 Evnine Simon Donald Davidson Stanford Stanford University Press 1991 Kalugin Vladimir Donald Davidson 1917 2003 Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2006 link Lepore Ernest and Brian McLaughlin eds Actions and Events Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson Oxford Basil Blackwell 1985 Lepore Ernest ed Truth and Interpretation Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson Oxford Basil Blackwell 1986 Lepore Ernest and Kirk Ludwig Donald Davidson Midwest Studies in Philosophy September 2004 vol 28 pp 309 333 Lepore Ernest and Kirk Ludwig Donald Davidson Meaning Truth Language and Reality Oxford Oxford University Press 2005 Lepore Ernest and Kirk Ludwig Donald Davidson s Truth Theoretic Semantics Oxford Oxford University Press 2007 Ludwig Kirk ed Donald Davidson Cambridge Cambridge University Press 2003 Ludwig Kirk Donald Davidson Essays on Actions and Events In Classics of Western Philosophy The Twentieth Century Quine and After vol 5 John Shand ed Acumen Press 2006 pp 146 165 Malpas Jeffrey Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning Holism Truth Interpretation Cambridge Cambridge University Press 1992 Mou Bo ed Davidson s Philosophy and Chinese Philosophy Constructive Engagement Leiden amp Boston Brill 2006 Preyer Gerhard Frank Siebelt and Alexander Ulfig eds Language Mind and Epistemology On Donald Davidson s Philosophy Dordrecht Kluwer Academic Publishers 1994 Ramberg Bjorn Donald Davidson s Philosophy of Language An Introduction Oxford Basil Blackwell 1989 Romaneczko Marta E The Role of Metalanguage in Radical Interpretation Journal of Consciousness Studies 2007 Stoecker Ralf ed Reflecting Davidson Berlin W de Gruyter 1993 Uzunova Boryana The World of Donald Davidson Some Remarks on the Concept in Philosophia E Journal of Philosophy and Culture 1 2012 Vermazen B and Hintikka M Essays on Davidson Actions and Events Oxford Clarendon Press 1985 Zeglen Ursula M ed Donald Davidson Truth Meaning and Knowledge London Routledge 1991 External links Edit Wikiquote has quotations related to Donald Davidson philosopher Davidson s Philosophy of Language Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Donald Davidson Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy Donald Davidson by Jeff Malpas Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2005 Donald Davidson 1917 2003 by Vladimir Kalugin Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2006 Guide to the Donald Davidson Papers at The Bancroft Library Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Donald Davidson philosopher amp oldid 1162974490, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,
