PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY VOL. 150, NO. 2, JUNE 2006

6 march 1917 . 31 august 2003

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biographical memoirs

ONALD DAVIDSON was one of the most influential phi-losophers of the twentieth century. He made fundamentalcontributions for more than half a century, starting with his

early work in decision theory, but exemplified most completely in the fivevolumes of his papers published over the years by Oxford UniversityPress. This stream of important work in analytic philosophy began withthe classic 1963 paper, “Action, Reasons and Causes,” which has beenreprinted or translated numerous times. Most of the important topicsin analytic philosophy have been the subject of at least one of David-son’s seminal contributions. This list ranges from the theory of action,philosophical psychology, philosophy of language, and theory of mean-ing to ethics and value theory.

Like another influential philosopher of the twentieth century, PaulGrice, Davidson did not during his lifetime produce a large systematicwork pulling together these many strains of thought. Rather, Davidsonwrote a large number of shorter, elegant, and, at the same time, diffi-cult analyses of philosophical problems. Awkwardness of expression isnot uncommon, even in great philosophers. Kant and Dewey are primeexamples. Stylistic elegance is not always present. Among well-knownphilosophers of the twentieth century, Bertrand Russell and Davidsonshare first place in my ranking of philosophers as writers.

Donald Davidson was born on 6 March 1917 in Springfield, Mas-sachusetts. From the age of nine until graduation from high school, helived with his family on Staten Island, New York, and attended the StatenIsland Academy, a private school modeled on the progressive ideas ofJohn Dewey. Encouraged by one of his high-school teachers, he beganreading Plato and Kant in these early years, but by his own accountwas probably drawn even more to English literature. (I am here and inparagraphs that follow drawing on Davidson’s intellectual autobiography[1999a].)

Upon graduation, he got a scholarship to Harvard, receiving a B.A.degree in 1939. Worth recording, from a historical standpoint, is thatas a sophomore he was a student in the last year of Alfred North White-head’s teaching at Harvard, even though he was majoring in English.He switched to comparative literature at the end of his sophomoreyear. Soon he was introduced to Joyce and Proust by the well-knownHarvard Joyce scholar, Harry Levin. Not surprisingly, Davidson wroteabout Joyce years later. In his senior year, he devoted much of his timeto classical philosophy as well as Greek and Roman literature.

The next step was a crucial one. He was offered, and accepted, agraduate scholarship in classics and philosophy at Harvard. In this set-ting he took his first course in logic with Quine. From this encounterthere developed what many think of as the strongest intellectual bond

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between any two major philosophers of the twentieth century, a topic Ireturn to. (Both were members of this society.) Davidson went on towrite a dissertation on Plato’s

Philebus

, but its completion was delayedby the war. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1942 to 1945.

His first teaching position was as an instructor at Queens College,New York, 1947–51, during which time he finished his dissertation in1949. From 1951 to 1967, he was at Stanford, then Princeton 1967–70, Rockefeller University 1970–76, the University of Chicago 1976–81, and finally the University of California, Berkeley, from 1981 untilhis death; in 1986 he was appointed as Willis S. and Marion SlusserProfessor of Philosophy at Berkeley.

Davidson received many fellowships and prizes, as well as honor-ary degrees from the University of Oxford and Stockholm University.He was much in demand and he loved to travel, so the list of his visit-ing professorships and lectureships is extraordinarily long, as is the listof honorary societies to which he was elected. I mention just a few:American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Institut International de Phi-losophie, British Academy, Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.He was president, at different times, of both the Eastern and PacificDivisions of the American Philosophical Association.

I knew him best during our first years at Stanford together, so I willbe more detailed about it than about his later work, which was, cer-tainly, the more important part of his career. In his intellectual auto-biography, he does stress the significance of these earlier years, spent ondecision theory and experiments measuring subjective probability andutility. They formed a foundation for developing his later influential viewson the close connections between belief, desire, truth, and meaning.

I arrived at Stanford in August 1950, having just finished my Ph.D.at Columbia University. Don arrived just a few months later, in January1951. Our arrival just about doubled the number of full-time instruc-tors in philosophy at Stanford. For reasons I can’t remember in detailnow, the logician J.C.C. McKinsey, who had also joined the departmentin 1951, Don, and I began discussing the theory of value in philosophy,concurrently with studying the theory of expected utility in game theoryand economics. This led to our first joint publication (1955).

Certainly no later than the fall of 1953 or the winter term of 1954,Don and I focused on experimentally measuring expected utility. We were,at that time, both naïve about running experiments. Neither of us haddone so before, and neither of us had taken the kind of graduate coursesthat teach students how to do it. So we got the cooperation of SidneySiegel, who was at that time a graduate student in psychology at Stanford,to join us in designing and carrying out some experimental studies. Donand I also spent time on the theory of measurement, a special interest

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of mine, needed as a background for empirical analysis of utility andsubjective probability. This theoretical work led to our 1956 joint paper.The intuitive ideas were close to those set forth much earlier by FrankRamsey (1931). But the details were different, because of the finitisticrequirements of experimentation. A full report on our experimental workwas given in our last collaborative effort, the 1957 book with Siegel,

Decision Making: An Experimental Approach.

I end this account with some remarks on our collaboration. Thefirst, and perhaps most important, one is that by and large we workedin a very congenial and easy way. I think it is fair to say that manypeople thought, perhaps correctly, that Don had a rather prickly per-sonality. But at least not so in those early years. The collaboration withme was the most extensive in terms of published research of any suchefforts during his long academic career, and so I can speak with someauthority about what it was like to work with him. We argued a lot,but in the intellectual spirit of clarifying things that initially neither oneof us understood well. We were exploring territory new to both of us,and we instinctively recognized that we ourselves had different intel-lectual backgrounds, which enabled us to make separate but essentialcontributions to the research under way. Don’s thinking about our exper-iments was as careful and systematic as those who knew him wouldexpect.

Just a few years later, Davidson collaborated with the economist JacobMarschak on further experimental work testing a stochastic decisiontheory (1959). An important influence on Davidson during the years atStanford was his interactions with Carnap at UCLA. McKinsey hadagreed to write an article on Carnap’s semantics for the Library of Liv-ing Philosophers volume on Carnap. He asked Don to join him. AfterMcKinsey’s death, Don took it over and subsequently discussed the workextensively with Carnap.

An even bigger influence on Don was Alfred Tarski, the Polish logi-cian, who was at Berkeley. Tarski encouraged Don’s application of hislogical results on the definition of truth to problems in analytic philos-ophy. Davidson’s use of Tarski’s work was probably the most famouswork on truth in the philosophy of language in the twentieth century,not universally accepted by analytic philosophers, but known and dis-cussed by all and sundry.

Carnap and especially Tarski were important to the development ofDavidson’s thought, but, as I have already remarked, by far the strongestinfluence was that of Quine, originally his teacher and later his closefriend and colleague. I have abstracted from Don’s intellectual autobiog-raphy a partial chronology of their many interactions after Harvard.

In 1950 Don read in manuscript Quine’s celebrated article “Two

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Dogmas of Empiricism.” He much agreed with Quine’s arguments againstreductionism and the analytic/synthetic distinction, so prominent sinceKant. But he did not accept Quine’s implicit empiricist dualism of experi-ence and conceptual schemes (Davidson 1999b, 729). Years later, Quineasked in the summer of 1997, “What is this third dogma of empiricismyou accuse me of?” This dialogue of agreement and disagreement fruit-fully continued over nearly half a century.

So back to the chronology. Quine spent the academic year 1958–59at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, located atStanford, and he invited Don to read the manuscript of

Word and Object

,in many ways his most important book. Here is Don’s reaction: “Ifound this new work difficult to take in. When I finally began to get thecentral idea, I was immensely impressed; it changed my life. What Ihad found so hard to take in was the idea that there could be no moreto meaning than could be learned by being exposed to the linguisticbehavior of speakers” (p. 41). Don worked closely with Quine duringthat entire year. But, as he said, he differed from Quine in how toaccount for the content of sentences closely connected with perception.

On the eve of giving his Carus Lectures in 1980, Don remarkedthat “following Quine, I had given up the analytic/synthetic distinc-tion and a foundationalism based on sense data” (p. 56). The next year,1981, Davidson gave at a meeting of Germany’s Hegel Society a paperentitled “A Coherent Theory of Truth and Knowledge.” Quine was oneof the commentators. This is Davidson’s description of the encounter(pp. 58–59):

For me the most interesting moment came when I argued for an exter-nalist account of the contents of perceptual beliefs. Quine commentedthat it should make no difference whether we took the content to bedetermined by patterns of sensory stimulation or by the external object,since they were simply at different points in a single causal chain. Iclaimed it did make a difference. I agreed that taking the proximalstimulus (Quine’s “stimulus meaning”) made error easier to explain,but it failed to anchor words and thoughts to the right objects. Quine(incredulous): “What someone believes is not [wholly] determined bythe physical state which is, you agree, the belief?” Davidson: “That’sright!” (I have a transcript of the exchange someone made from atape recording.) The question whether the meaning of a perceptualsentence is fixed by the distal or the proximal stimulus was one onwhich we had long disagreed, but this was the first time the issue hadbeen raised so clearly. Commenting on this exchange in his autobiog-raphy, Quine pays me a compliment he deserves far more than I: “Wepursue any initial differences with an eye on the problem and an inter-est in solving it, as scientists might, rather than with the dismal games-manship so common in philosophy.” (Quine 1985, 454)

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Six years later, at Stanford in 1987, Davidson again tried to per-suade Quine about the virtues of the distal as opposed to the proximalstimulus. Don summarized the outcome in these words (p. 59): “Quinerecords the failure of my attempt to persuade him: ‘I remain unswervedin locating stimulation at the neural input. . . . Unlike Davidson I stilllocate the stimulations at the subject’s surface, and private stimulusmeanings with them’” (Quine 1990, 41, 44).

And this continued, almost without intellectual interruption, at aconference at Washington University in St. Louis the next year (p. 59):

I read a paper plumping for my point once more, though also emphasiz-ing the many passages in Van’s work that seemed to foreshadow myview. . . . Quine, in reply, and generous as always, “moved to an inter-mediate point between Don’s distal and my old proximal position.” . . .The new position abandoned stimulus meaning, but retained the prior-ity of the neural stimulations. Only thus, Quine argued, could one keeptrack of the “flow of evidence from the triggering of the senses to the pro-nouncements of science” and give an account of how we arrive at the“reification of rabbits and the like.” An emphasis on empathy emerged,to be further developed in Quine’s reactions to the papers (among themone of mine [Davidson 1995]) read at a conference in San Marino 1990.

Davidson recorded that, writing six years later, Quine adopted a posi-tion even closer to his: “. . . what two observers agree on is the shareddistal subject matter and not the unshared proximal stimulations” (Quine1996, 161).

This covers most of what Davidson had to say about these remark-able exchanges continuing over many years in a cordial atmosphere ofmutual inquiry. For a detailed sense of what Quine thought in theselast years about the similarities and differences of their views, a nicereview is given in the same volume in a short article, “Where do we dis-agree?” (Quine 1999). On more than one occasion Davidson acknowl-edged the gracious way in which Quine accepted his criticisms on theirpoints of disagreement.

Quine died in 2000, Davidson three years later. Their friendship ofmore than half a century, and their many shared views of importantconceptual issues will be recognized for years to come in the history ofphilosophy. Independent of Quine, Davidson’s prominent place in thathistory is assured.

Elected 1985

Patrick Suppes

Lucie Stern Professor of Philosophy, EmeritusStanford University

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References

Davidson, Donald. 1999a. Intellectual autobiography. In

The philosophy of DonaldDavidson

, ed. L. E. Hahn, 3–70. Illinois: Open Court Publishing.———. 1999b. Reply to Dagfin Føllesdal. In

The philosophy of Donald Davidson

,729–32.

Quine, Willard V. O. 1985.

The time of my life: An autobiography.

Cambridge, Mass.:MIT Press.

———. 1990.

Pursuit of truth.

Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.———. 1996. Progress on two fronts.

Journal of Philosophy

93: 159–63.———. 1999. Where do we disagree? In

The philosophy of Donald Davidson

, 73–79.