Donald Davidson: ‘Rational Animals’.(Essay 7 in his Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Oxford University Press, 2001)

The American philosopher Donald Davidson, who died in 2003, is one of the most important and influential of those philosophers who work in the long shadow cast by Wittgenstein.

The first of these papers provides an explicit argument for a thought that Wittgenstein often expressed: it is because of language that humans can think thoughts that animals cannot. (For example, Wittgenstein once said that while we can say that a dog expects his master to beat him, we cannot say that he expects his master to beat him tomorrow: Davidson’s paper can be read as providing an explanation and defence of that brief remark). The term ‘proposition’ is derived from the Latin word ‘propositio’ which, in turn, was used to translate the Greek term ‘protasis’ used by Aristotle to describe that which is asserted or denied. In Aristotle’s sense, a proposition is something fit to serve as the premise of conclusion of a deductive argument. Gottlob Frege used the German word Gedanke, usually translated as ‘thought’, to cover the same ground – and his comment that in order to study a thought one must study the linguistic expression of that thought exerted a great influence on Wittgenstein. Whereas Aristotle said that propositions can be asserted or denied, Frege said that thoughts can be true or false. Of course, if something can be true, we can hope that it is true, fear that it is true, intend to make it true and so on: these are examples of what is meant by having ‘propositional attitudes’.

On p.101, Davidson explains the point of the paper. It is now a popular idea to say that thought requires language, but he wants to find an argument to support this idea (it is not enough to say ‘Wittgenstein said so.’)

First, Davidson argues that in order to have a propositional attitude, one must be capable of recognising a proposition as being the kind of thing that could be true or false.

Let me give an example, (not taken from Davidson), that I think illustrates his point.

The Hammer Orchid has a lip that resembles a female wasp. Male wasps are attracted to the lip and copulate. This copulation cannot result in the birth of more wasps, but it does spread pollen, and so result in the birth of more orchids. Does the wasp make a mistake? That depends on whether it was trying to copulate, or trying to produce children. With regard to human beings, we can distinguish between these two goals of behavior: we can take steps to ensure that copulation does not lead to children, or to make it more likely to produce children, or, of course, we can engage in copulation purely for the sake of momentary pleasure, and then find to our regret that we have also produced children. When the wasp copulates, it just copulates, there is no distinction for a wasp between copulating for momentary pleasure and copulating to produce off-spring.

Suppose, on the other hand, there was a plant-species that resembled a seductive human female, and that a human male copulated with a member of this plant species. Did he believe he was copulating with a woman, or did he in fact know that he was copulating with a plant, or was he so drunk that he did not care one way or the other? The man can have a mistaken belief whereas the wasp has no belief at all, it just does what it does.

(One might be tempted to say that the biological purpose of copulation is always to produce off-spring, because that is how copulation contributes to species survival. However, too much off-spring can lead to over-population and therefore extinction. Sometimes the Hammer Orchid’s imitation of the female wasp might contribute to the survival of the wasp species, sometimes it might be detrimental to it. Since the relationship between survival value and copulation is variable, I do not think that the survival value of copulation determines its true purpose).

So, Davidson thinks that if we cannot make sense of you recognizing that your belief was mistaken, then we should not say that you have beliefs at all.

Then he argues that, in order to be able to recognize that our belief’s are mistaken, we must learn to communicate with others. This part of the article is too compressed, but some of Davidson’s other writings make his thoughts a little clearer.

Suppose that we have a small species of monkey that is exceptionally vulnerable to lions. When a member of this species sees a lion, they emit a scream. If there are two members of the same species, then each will notice that the other emits a scream when there is a lion present, and soon, they will respond to the other’s scream in the same way that they would respond to the lion itself (for example, by climbing a tree). Let us then suppose that one day, a lion turns up but the light is poor, and one of the monkeys responds to the lion as if it were a gazelle. This provides the other monkey with an example of a mistake: a gazelle-response has been emitted when a lion-response was called for. Perhaps the monkeys will develop a response to incorrect responses (it has been suggested, although not by Davidson, that this is the origin of laughter). Davidson refers to this as triangulation: each monkey needs to respond to the lion, and to the responses of the other monkey to the lion. It is only by observing others responses, he thinks, that we can acquire the idea of mistaken responses: in developing a response to mistaken responses, the monkeys are developing a means for enforcing linguistic rules, for saying ‘But that’s not true.’ A lone monkey, thinks Davidson, might make mistakes, but would never be in a position to realize that it was emitting a mistaken signal, since while it might scream at the sight of a lion, this scream would not be functioning as a signal. (If the lone monkey did not climb a tree when the lion came, it would be in for an unpleasant experience, but that does not mean it would be able to think that it had made a mistake). We could put Davidson’s point this way: we learn from our mistakes, but it takes the presence of other people communicating with us to be aware of such things as mistakes from which we can learn.

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