Davidson’s Transcendental Externalism

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (2):290-315 (2006)
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Abstract

One of the chief aims of Donald Davidson's later work was to show that participation in a certain causal nexus involving two creatures and a shared environment–Davidson calls this nexus “triangulation”–is a metaphysically necessary condition for the acquisition of thought. This doctrine, I suggest, is aptly regarded as a form of what I call transcendental externalism. I extract two arguments for the transcendental-externalist doctrine from Davidson's writings, and argue that neither succeeds. A central interpretive claim is that the arguments are primarily funded by a particular conception of the nature of non-human animal life. This conception turns out to be insupportable. The failure of Davidson's arguments presses the question of whether we could ever hope to arrive at far-reaching claims about the conditions for thought if we deny, as does Davidson, the legitimacy of the naturalistic project in the philosophy of mind.

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Jason Bridges
University of Chicago

Citations of this work

Externalism about mental content.Joe Lau - 2008 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Resisting the Disenchantment of Nature: McDowell and the Question of Animal Minds.Carl B. Sachs - 2012 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 55 (2):131-147.
The Space of Motivations.Donnchadh O’Conaill - 2014 - International Journal of Philosophical Studies 22 (3):440-455.
Internalism and externalism in transcendental phenomenology.Christian Skirke - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy 30 (1):182-204.

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References found in this work

Mind and World.John Henry McDowell - 1994 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Subjective, intersubjective, objective.Donald Davidson - 1996 - In Philosophy. Bristol: Thoemmes. pp. 555-558.
Causality, interpretation, and the mind.William Child - 1994 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Three varieties of knowledge.Donald Davidson - 1991 - In A. Phillips Griffiths (ed.), Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement. New York: Cambridge University Press. pp. 153-166.

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