Davidson, Donald

Davidson, Donald

(born March 6, 1917, Springfield, Mass., U.S.—died Aug. 30, 2003, Berkeley, Calif.) U.S. philosopher. He taught at various universities before settling at the University of California at Berkeley in 1981. In a series of seminal papers, he developed strikingly original and unusually systematic positions on a wide range of traditional philosophical problems. According to his doctrine of anomalist monism, although mental events are identical to physical events (in the brain) under appropriate descriptions, there are no psychophysical laws (in the strict sense) that relate the two; it follows that reduction of the mental to the physical is impossible (see also supervenience). He argued that a formal requirement for any adequate theory of linguistic meaning is that it generate theorems that express the truth conditions of sentences in the “object language” in terms of sentences in a metalanguage. He also developed sophisticated arguments against the possibility of conceptual relativism (the view that there are mutually unintelligible “conceptual schemes”) and global skepticism (the view that most if not all of one's beliefs about the world may be false).

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Davidson, Donald (1917–  ) philosopher; born in Springfield, Mass. After earning a doctorate from Harvard (1949), he taught at Queens College (1947–50), Stanford (1950–67), Princeton (1967–69), Rockefeller University (1970–76), and the University of Chicago (from 1976), before joining the University of California: Berkeley in 1981. In Inquiries Into Truth and Interpretation (1983) and other influential works, he analyzed the semantic structures of ordinary languages and made contributions to philosophy of mind.