Problems of Rationality is
the fourth volume of the collected essays by Donald Davidson. Up to now, minor
editing it has been prepared by the late Davidson himself. (There is one more
volume of essays forthcoming.)

The book consists of four parts.
The first part "Rationality and Value" deals with the idea of
objectivity as applied even to evaluations, i.e. questions of moral assessment,
a topic Davidson usually does not treat. The second part "Problems and
Proposals" deals with several questions in the vicinity of a theory of
rationality interpretation of supposedly rational behavior. The third part
"Irrationality" collects some essays Davidson has written over the
years that deal with failures of rationality and irrational conduct.
Additionally to the essays there is a long interview (conducted by Ernie
Lepore) on Davidson’s biography and the development of his ideas.

This book provides no access to
Davidson’s ideas or their strength if the reader is not familiar with the
"classic" papers related to the topics under discussion (e.g. "Radical
Interpretation", "Rational Animals", "Mental Events"
…) and Davidson’s wider philosophical outline. In fact many of the ideas
provided by the essays can be gathered from other essays (especially those in
the first three volumes of the collected essays). Davidson’s remarks on
objectivity of value are more outspoken in this volume. More original and
requiring less background in Davidson’s other work are the papers on
irrationality.

Part One deals with the thesis that
the concepts both of objective reality/truth and objective value are
presumptions of rational thought and speech. Value judgments are as objective
as we — naively — take them to be. The reason for this, however, is not that
some of the usual objectivist ethical conceptions (like Kantianism or
Utilitarianism) is right, but that agreement on values in built into our common
understanding (delineated by radical interpretation) just as agreement on which
sentences are true. Objectivity of knowledge is an idea that comes with thought
having any propositional content at all. One can only have a thought with some
specific content if one has the idea of one’s belief of the world being true or
false. Thought (in Davidson’s sense) is not possible for creatures that do not
have the concept of objective truth (and so the concept of belief). "These
mental attributes are, then, equivalent: to have a concept, to entertain
propositions, to be able to form judgments, to have command of the concept of
truth." (9) The idea of (propositional) objectivity is the notion of a
proposition being true or false independent of one’s beliefs and interests.
Being assured of objectivity requires communication and a shared world. The
same holds for objectivity of evaluations. There are significant moral disputes
only because there is a shared idea of moral validity. As in the case of
propositional truths the objectivity of moral judgments is founded in our
determining what the content of a moral judgment is. To understand someone the
interpreter projects not only her logic and (to some degree) her knowledge of
the circumstances, but also her evaluations of the circumstances. The
correlation established by arising common understanding between interpreter and
interpreted speaker(s) is structurally similar in both domains: "it depends
on there being a systematic relationship between the attitude-causing
properties of things and events, and the attitudes they cause" (47). The
linguistic community shares an understanding what is "good" and given
a genuine dispute (of application of this concept) also shares the criteria
that determine where the truth lies in these cases. Convergence should
ultimately occur: "we should expect people who are enlightened and
fully understand one another to agree on their basic values" (49).

Part Two takes up topics around the
idea of radical interpretation and the attributed rationality with respect to
the interpreted system. So Davidson criticizes the Turing-Test, not because one
should exclude machines from the rational beings, but because of one of its
methodological ingredients: shielding the behavior of the candidates from the
judges view. Given the idea of radical interpretation what is needed is
predominantly to see how the object under interpretation uses its words in its
dealings with its environment.  Davidson stresses the normative character of
the attitude ascriptions imposed by (radical) interpretation. Norms like
reasonableness and plausibility, again, do not apply to (syntactic) programs
but to behavior in a context. Other papers in this part rehearse Davidson’s
arguments that to have thoughts requires having language ("What Thought
Requires" rehearses "Rational Animals") or his idea of a unified
theory of interpretation that deals with meaning, degrees of belief and utility
assessments at the same time starting with speaker’s preferences for some
sentence to be true (the more well known papers on this from the 1990s will
appear in the fifth volume of essays).

Part Three deals with irrationality
and takes up Davidson’s treatment of akrasia (doing what one knows to be not
the best) in the second volume. Davidson has to have a theory on irrationality
not only because it is widespread in our life, but especially because his
methodology of rational interpretation may be misunderstood as working on the
assumption that everyone is rational. Davidson considers his explanation as a
vindication of three ideas to be found in Freud: (a) the mind contains
"semi-independent structures" characterized by mental attributes, (b)
some parts of the mind are "in important respects like people", (c)
some of our dispositions "must be viewed on the model of physical
dispositions" (171). Davidson’s basic idea is that the irrational person
has compartmentalized her knowledge and attitudes in such a way that although
the individual compartments are rational one compartment (or judgment in that
compartment) becomes non-rationally (associatively or otherwise causally)
activated by another compartment although no rational inference would be
allowed. The ultimate motive is specified mentally (given its proper roles in
its compartment) although its workings are explained in a fashion close to
physical explanations. In cases of irrationality a causal relation of content
substitutes for a missing or distorted logical relation. So Davidson in a way
agrees with Freud that the mind may be partitioned into quasi-independent
structures that interact, but he disagrees with a purely non-mental
characterization (like talking of "drives"), because "when the
cause is described in non-mental terms, we necessarily lose touch with what is
needed to explain the element of irrationality" (180). Whereas it is not
necessary for the irrational motives to be "unconscious" the
requirement to have a theory of irrationality justifies "Freud’s mixture
of standard reason explanations with causal interactions more like those of the
natural sciences" (185).

© 2005 Manuel Bremer

Manuel Bremer,
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany

Categories: Philosophical