Online research in philosophy

Substantial research efforts have been devoted to developing a cure for autism, but some advocates of people with autism claim that these efforts are misguided and even harmful. They claim that there is nothing wrong with people with autism, so there is nothing to cure. Others argue that autism is a serious and debilitating disorder and that a cure for autism would be a wonderful medical breakthrough. Our goal in this essay is to evaluate what assumptions underlie each of these positions. We evaluate the arguments made on each side, reject those that are implausible and then highlight the key assumptions of those that remain.

My topic is the attempt by Donald Davidson, and those inspired by him, to explain knowledge of meaning in terms of knowledge of truth conditions. For Davidsonians, these attempts take the form of rationales for treating theories of truth, constructed along Tarskian lines, as empirical theories of meaning. In earlier work1, I argued that Davidson’s two main rationales – one presented in “Truth and Meaning”2 and “Radical Interpretation,”3 and the other in his “Reply to Foster”4 – were unsuccessful. Here, I extend my critique to cover an ingenious recent attempt by James Higginbotham to establish Davidson’s desired result. I will argue that it, too, fails, and that the trajectory of Davidsonian failures indicates that linguistic understanding, and knowledge of meaning, require more than knowledge of that which a Davidsonian truth theory provides. I begin with a look at the historical record.

What is the relation between interpreting a person's speech and actions, on the one hand, and interpreting a written text, on the other? That question is considered in connection with the theories of interpretation offered by Donald Davidson and Paul Ricoeur. There are some important similarities between those theories. However, it is argued that Davidson and Ricoeur are divided on fundamental questions about the relation between meaning and intention, about the reference of texts, about the relation between the meanings of texts and the meanings of spoken words, and about the notion of correctness that applies to interpretation. On each of these points, it is contended, Davidson has the better of the dispute.

Recent literature comparing the works of Heidegger and Davidson suggests that one of the main differences between these two thinkers is that the latter lacks any notion of non-linguistic interpretation and understanding; the only way of making sense of a domain of entities for Davidson is theory. I argue against this common perspective and show that Davidson is committed to a primitive, pre-conceptual form of understanding that is socially mediated. This primitive form of understanding is essential to the functioning of what Davidson calls 'primitive triangulation'. Properly understood, primitive triangulation shares many structural features with Dasein's comportment.

In this essay I argue for a constructivist account of the entities composing the object languages of Davidsonian truth theories and a quotational account of the reference from metalinguistic expressions to interpreted utterances. I claim that ‘radical quotation’ requires an ontology of repeatable events with strong similarities to Derrida's account of iterable events. In part one I summarise Davidson's account of interpretation and Olav Gjelsivk's arguments to the effect that the syntactic individuation of linguistic objects is only workable if interpreters make richer assumptions about semantic properties than Davidson can tolerate. In part two I show that the objectivist account of syntactic objects which Gjelsivk's arguments presuppose is incompatible with one corollary of Davidsonian semantic indeterminacy: namely, the relativity of language to interpretative scheme. In place of this an account of radical interpretation is presented in which a quotational theory of metalinguistic reference furnishes the requisite relativity. In part three I argue that this account requires that particular utterance events must be repeatable to be radically quotable and give reasons why particularity and repeatability are not incompatible.

This paper problematizes contemporary cultural understandings of autism. We make use of the developmental psychology concepts of ‘Theory of Mind’ and ‘mindblindness’ to uncover the meaning of autism as expressed in these concepts. Our concern is that autism is depicted as a puzzle and that this depiction governs not only the way Western culture treats autism but also the way in which it governs everyday interactions with autistic people. Moreover, we show how the concepts of Theory of Mind and mindblindness require autism to be a puzzle in the first place. Rather than treat autism as a puzzle that must be solved, we treat autism as a teacher and thus as having something valuable to contribute toward an understanding of the inherent partiality and uncertainty of human communication and collective life.

Foreword to the new edition Acknowledgements Introduction: radically interpreting Davidson I. From translation to interpretation 1. The Quinean background 1.1 Radical translation and naturalized epistemology 1.2 Meaning and indeterminacy 1.3 Analytical hypotheses and charity 2. The Davidsonian project 2.1 The development of a theory of meaning 2.2 The project of radical interpretation 2.3 From charity to triangulation..

Donald Davidson argues in "Thought and Talk" that all speakers must be interpreters of other speakers: linguistic competence requires the possession of intentional concepts and the ability to attribute intentional states to other people. Kristin Andrews (in Philosophical Psychology, 15) has argued that empirical evidence about autism undermines this theoretical claim, for some individuals with autism lack the requisite "theory of mind" skills to be able to interpret, yet are competent speakers. In this paper, Davidson is defended on the grounds that the high-functioning autistic individuals in question have a more robust theory of mind than has been acknowledged, and that this is sufficient for them to be interpreters of other speakers. It is argued, further, that Davidson's theory would remain intact even if one or more autistic speakers lacking a theory of mind were to exist, as he makes conceptual claims about thought and language that are not vulnerable to empirical counterexamples.

Donald Davidson's account of interpretation purports to be a priori , though I argue that the empirical facts about interpretation, theory of mind, and autism must be considered when examining the merits of Davidson's view. Developmental psychologists have made plausible claims about the existence of some people with autism who use language but who are unable to interpret the minds of others. This empirical claim undermines Davidson's theoretical claims that all speakers must be interpreters of other speakers and that one need not be a speaker in order to be a thinker. The falsity of these theses has consequences for other parts of Davidson's world-view; for example, it undermines his argument against animal thought.

In this paper, I provide further support for my earlier claim that the existence of high-functioning autistic speakers does not undermine Davidson's theory of radical interpretation. Andrews and Radenovic, in criticizing my arguments for this position, have presented fresh evidence from the clinical literature on autism for the existence of an individual who speaks but does not interpret, and maintain that the existence of such an individual seriously challenges Davidson's theory. I counter this claim by showing that the evidence they point to in fact better supports the conclusion that this autistic speaker, and others like him, are Davidsonian interpreters.