Davidson's Abdication

I honestly can't remember the last time I threw a book across a room.  Yet, something Donald Davidson said near the end of his life made me so angry that I found the temptation irresistable.  The heavy thunk against the far wall, the pages damaged under the weight of the fallen book, the startled looks of fellow library patrons... so satisfying.

Those who know Davidson know that only Quine outstrips his influence in the analytic world over the past 50 years.  His central project takes human communication as a given and asks how it is possible.  His answer is, on the face of it, extremely exciting: in order for communication to be possible at all, we have to share a huge number of beliefs, and those beliefs must be about an external world.

BAM.  Goodnight, other-minds skepticism.  Fare thee well, global skepticism.  Brains in vats, don't let the laboratory door hit you in the cerebellum on the way out.  As Davidson put it, we can now "re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false".   Things are as we think they are, everyday realism is enthroned, and philosophy can finally rest.  Damned exciting stuff.

But then, as the years wore on, Michael Dummett began to press a series of objections against Davidson concerning the total remoteness of Davidson's "Radical Interpretation" from our actual practises of communication and linguistic understanding.  Fodor and Lepore, in 1987, strongly echoed this criticism.  It seemed bizarre to them that anyone would think that Davidson's model could possibly be instantiated in the real world.  Davidson had this to say:

I do not think I have ever conflated the (empirical) question how we actually go about understanding a speaker with the (philosophical) question...  I have focused on the latter question, not because I think it brings us close to the psychology of language learning and use, but because I think it brings out the philosophically important aspects of communication while the former tempts us to speculate about arcane empirical matters that neither philosophers nor psychologists know much about.

And, elsewhere:

...I assume that there must be many alternative approaches to interpretation.  I have outlined one; others may be less artificial or closer to our intuitions concerning interpretive practise.

The logic of the situation is this: where many took Davidson to be offering an account of the necessary conditions for real human communication, at best he was only offering a few jointly sufficient conditions for the abstract possibility of communcation.  The account is not supposed to be reflected in any actual situation of communication. This essentially makes his life's work extraordinarily unexciting, perhaps even totally uninteresting, insofar as philosophy aims to clarify actual human thoughts and practises.

The situation is like that of a scientist who claims to have explained global warming by saying that temperatures are being willed to rise by Gaia the angry earth-goddess.  Indeed, this is an explanation: it is sufficient for the phenomena in question. It is a coherent explanation that can be used to account for any feature of the situation.  What separates real inquiry from pointless inquiry is that it tries to establish necessary connections as well: it must be shown why the angry-goddess hypothesis rules out alternatives, why it is necessary, in some sense, that we accept it.  Not just that we could if we are in a certain mood.

Davidson seemed to sense, at the end, that this was an abdication:

But one should not take for granted that the procedure I have sketched is totally remote from what is practised.

And he was still fond of drawing explicitly realist metaphysical conclusions from his method:

If we can communicate with [a] creature on a range of topics in our natural environment, it is conscious and it is thinking.

Which, of course, only follows if the procedures of radical interpretation are necessary for this real-life communication to occur.  If they are merely sufficient, no such extraordinary conclusion follows.

The question then becomes: why are we studying you, Donald?  Why should one isolated account of interpretation now be taken as a tool for philosophers to use more generally?  I am not asking that we all become field linguists, but surely this abdication, if I am right in identifying it, represents yet another detestable retreat by analytic philosophers from the conditions of the actual human world.