Donald Davidson
 

 

Awhile back when I was arguing with the defenders of analytic philosophy it was suggested to me that I might like Donald Davidson if I read him – apparently one of the things I said sounded like something Davidson might say. So just now I went to the library and checked out Essays on Actions and Events (second ed., 2001).

 

It’s an understatement to say that I didn’t like the book. I am strongly interested in three of the themes in this book: the ontology of events, the concept of action, and the distinction between causes and reasons. However, I found Davidson’s treatment useless at best, and appalling at worst.

 

One of the things I study is history, where all these questions are important, and one of the things I might have hoped for from Davidson’s book would have been a new understanding of action, or of reasons for action, or of events -- an improved understanding which would have helped historians do a better job at what they do, the way Newtonian physics helped people in many different fields do a better job at what they did. When a discipline is as heavily scientized and professionalized as philosophy is, one of the things you normally expect is increased scientific power. But not only was nothing in Davidson’s book useful for a historian, as far as I can tell nothing in it could possibly have been so, and in fact it seems that the goal of being useful that way had been formally ruled out almost from the beginning. (Philosophy has merged the ideal of the dilletante aristocrat and the ideal of the pure scientist in an amazingly self-serving way.)

 

The enforcement of work rules by the philosopher’s union is apparently very strict, because nothing Davidson writes about agency, events, or reasons ever even mentions any actual, non-hypothetical action, event, or reason (which are all presumably controlled by the psychologist’s union and historian’s union). Based on my understanding of the other sciences, while the development of purely formal concepts is often part of the work, the test of these concepts ultimately comes when they are applied to some kind of actuality, and often enough the new concepts were developed in the first place partly in response to a concrete problem. But apparently philosophy is a science of an entirely different sort.

 

As far as I can tell, analytic philosophy hopes to defer the contact with actuality indefinitely. The motive is apparently not to come up with a better way of talking about acts and events, but rather to insist that all valid discussion of acts and events must be in some way congruent with the language of the physical sciences which do not talk about acts and events. The role of the analytic philosopher is thus rather like that of the Vatican censor in charge of making sure that all writing is consistent with church doctrine. The nice censors try to find loopholes in Catholic doctrine in order to make it possible for writers to write a bit more freely and more realistically, whereas the mean censors are very strict. But for all of them, consistency with Church doctrine is required.

 

Imagine the greatest historian in the world today. (Using hypothetical examples is required in this game). What would a Davidsonian have to say to him about acts, events, and reasons? As I have said,  the analytic philosopher does not consider it his job to provide the historian with superior ways of talking about of acts, events, and reasons.  The philosopher’s ploy, I think, would be to wait for the historian to say something philosophical about one these topics, and then pause politely for a moment, smile a little analytical-philosophy smile, and finally say something like “Of course, it is not fair to expect historians, who have to spend a lot of time dealing with masses of factual detail, to have a sophisticated understanding of difficult philosophical concepts.”

 

Here are couple of examples of sophisticated philosophical thinking:

 

“Things change; but are there such things as changes? A pebble moves, an eland is born, a land slides, a star explodes. Are there, in addition to pebbles and stars movements, births, landslides, and explosions?” (p. 180.)  

“Chisholm argues… that Nixon’s being in Washington is not the same event as Johnson’s successor being in Washington” (p. 185).

 

Somehow, these lines of thinking do not seem likely ever to be helpful to a historian or to anyone trying to understand human behavior. I’m aware that abstruse formalistic discussions often do lead to powerful discoveries. But has it done so in this case? Could it possibly have done so? Was there ever the intention of doing so? As far as I can tell, the intention here is to defer judgment forever -- while always continuing to keep the upper hand over the ontologically unsophisticated historians.

 

My understanding is that the perfectionism of analytic philosophy is of the self-defeating kind, and that the precise, meticulously constructed arguments of analytic philosophy are Potemkinesque false fronts, perfect the way that model railroads are perfect. There are lots of interesting questions to ask about events, actions, and causes / reasons, and non-philosophers like J.H. Hexter (The History Primer) and Ilya Prigogine (Order Out of Chaos) ask some of these questions. Is history predictable or contingent? Are events in history repeatable or unique? But as far as I can tell, these aren’t among the things that analytic philosophy talks about. They are more interested in gred emeroses (p. 225).

 

 (Yeah, I know that this stuff is 20-35 years old. The 2001 copyright date fooled me. Soon I’ll be off to the library to get something more recent.)

 

UPDATE:
Paul Pietroski's "Semantics and Metaphysics of Events" (Donald Davidson, ed. Ludwig, Cambridge, 2003, pp. 137-162) has satisfied me that the situation has not changed much since 1970 or so.

Discussion

Ryan Lake writes:

Some of your complaints about the practice of analytic philosophy may be fair, but I think it has to be said that you're judging Davidson in terms of goals that he quite obviously didn't have. He can't be faulted for not providing helpful tools to historians when this wasn't an aim of his.

The aims of his analyses were to provide a groundwork for other debates that have more of a connection with areas both wihin and outside of philosophy. For example, his work has far reaching implications for questions of autonomy and the will, freedom and responsibility, and the relation between the mind in the body. I would argue that these are important and interesting issues in their own right, and the significance of Davidson's early work as it relates to these issues is evidenced all over in contemporary thought.

Another point: it also seems that you may have misread Davidson in some significant ways. For example, you claim that a motive of analytic philosophy is to "insist that all valid discussion of acts and events must be in some way congruent with the language of the physical sciences which do not talk about acts and events". But if you understood Davidson, you'd know that he is in fact very explicitly opposed to this view. He is clear about this in several of the essays in the book you're discussing. Given such a fundamental misreading, I have to wonder if Davidson's analyses are really as useless to historians as you think they are.


Ryan Lake | 02.04.06 - 9:48 pm |
(upgraded from comments, so Haloscan doesn't lose the post):

John Emerson writes (expanded and slightly edited for style):

I didn't really misread Davidson -- I skimmed some stuff looking to see what use it would be, and decided "not much".

Davidson, from my point of view, made one small step in the right direction. I was initially interested in the idea of events as particulars, which indeed does move a smidgen away from the scientistic model.

But 20 or more years later (whenever the anthology came out), there wasn't a second step, as far as I could tell. They were still talking about the first step, which had become a new topic in its own right. So we were back to the meta-level and would stay there.

A substantive interest of mine is the difference between historical ("path-dependent") systems and theoretical systems (governed by ahistorical laws). People who have illuminated this question for me include SJ Gould, Ilya Prigogine, John Gunnell, Hartshorne and Whitehead, JH Hexter, and Donald Campbell.

Of these, Hartshorne and Whitehead are philosophers, but of a school which has almost been extinguished (process philosophy). Campbell was a student of Popper and, IIRC, did not stay in philosophy. The others are a biologist, a Nobel-prize-winning chemist, a political scientist, and a historian.

Davidson's event-ontology might possibly have contributed to the argument (Davidson had been Whitehead's student, though he rejected him rather scornfully). But the fact that he worked within analytic philosophy meant that the first step would not be followed by a second.

I call it perfectionist defeatism. You have to make the first step perfect before you take the second. Then you make the first part of the first step perfect, and then the first part of the first part.....It's like a Kafkaesque nightmare, or more to the point, Zeno's paradox.

This question was of lively interest before 1950 -- Pierce, Popper, Whitehead, and others talked about it. But when analytic philosophy gained control of the profession, questions of this scope (and the people who studied them) were purged. (Elsewhere I have written about the quasi-existentialist side of Wittgenstein, which was not quite so thoroughly purged, but which is mostly ignored by now.)

For me, big-picture questions of the type I just described should be at the core of philosophy. On the one hand, the move to smaller questions which can be perfectionistically treated in a formalized, scientific-seeming way leads to stunted philosophy. On the other, some of the philosophical work worth doing has to be done elsewhere by non-philosophers.

My primary objection to analytic philosophy has always been the opportunity cost of the analytic monopoly, which has frozen out a lot of better stuff. Academic politics, like all other politics, is about control of turf. (Later: the economics of the  philosophy monopoly, and the concept of "intellectual protection rent".)

John Emerson | 02.05.06 - 8:09 am |

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