Interpretation, Reasons, and Facts

This article was downloaded by: [Northeastern University]On: 09 October 2014, At: 07:46Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: MortimerHouse, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of PhilosophyPublication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/sinq20

Interpretation, Reasons, and FactsRichard N. Manning aa Carleton UniversityPublished online: 05 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Richard N. Manning (2003) Interpretation, Reasons, and Facts, Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal ofPhilosophy, 46:3, 346-376, DOI: 10.1080/00201740310002406

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00201740310002406

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) containedin the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose ofthe Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be reliedupon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shallnot be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and otherliabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematicreproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in anyform to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/sinq20

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showCitFormats?doi=10.1080/00201740310002406

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00201740310002406

http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Interpretation, Reasons, and Facts

Richard N. ManningCarleton University

Donald Davidson argues that his interpretivist approach to meaning shows thataccounting for the intentionality and objectivity of thought does not require an appeal,as John McDowell has urged it does, to a specifically rational relation between mindand world. Moreover, Davidson claims that the idea of such a relation isunintelligible. This paper takes issue with these claims. It shows, first, thatinterpretivism, contra Davidson’s express view, does not depend essentially upon anappeal to a causal relation between events in the world and speakers’ beliefs. Second,it shows that interpretivism essentially, if implicitly, depends upon interpreters’appealing to facts taken in in perception, and that such facts are suited to provide arational connection between mind and world. The paper then argues that none ofDavidson’s legitimate epistemological arguments tell against the idea that experience,in the form of the propositional contents of perception, can play a role in doxasticeconomy. Finally, it argues that granting experience such a role is consistent withDavidson’s coherentist slogan that nothing can count as a reason for holding a beliefexcept another belief.

I

Consider two theses. The first, championed by Donald Davidson, is arefinement of hermeneutic semantics and folk psychology, and embodies aconstitutive claim concerning meaning and the propositional attitudes. Itholds that the meanings of a speaker’s words and the contents of herpropositional attitudes are constituted of those meanings and contents that shewould be ascribed in the course of an interpretation, radical in the sense ofbeing undertaken under certain idealized constraints. Accordingly, tounderstand a person’s words, and the person herself, correctly, is tounderstand them as one would through such a process. Call this the‘Interpretivist Thesis’. The second has roots in Kant and in the critique of theMyth of the Given, and has lately been promoted by John McDowell. Itconcerns our entitlement to the claim that our empirical thinking can beunderstood as objective, that is, as directed at an independent world, and suchthat the way that world is is criterial for the correctness of that thinking.According to this thesis, the only way we can make sense of this objectivity isto think of experience as providing specifically rational grounds for ourempirical judgments. To do justice to this idea, we need to think of the worldwe experience as making claims or demands on us, as epistemic agents; thisalone can make it intelligible how our judgmental response to that experience

Inquiry, 46, 346–376

DOI 10.1080/00201740310002406 � 2003 Taylor & Francis

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

can be rational (or irrational) in its light. Call this the ‘Rational ResponseConstraint’.

My goal here is not to elaborate or defend these theses, though I think theyhave much to recommend them. Such elaboration and defense as I offer willcome only in the course of exploring the questions whether these theses aremutually consistent, and if so, whether one can gain any support from theother. This first question might at first blush seem odd, for on the face of it thetheses do not seem to have much to do with one another, and it is certainly notobvious why there should be a tension between them. Yet Davidson, who hasmost thoroughly articulated what the Interpretivist Thesis involves, flatlyrejects the Rational Response Constraint. On the one hand, he claims that theprocess of radical interpretation shows that no such constraint is required tounderwrite the objectivity of thought. On the other, he claims that the idea thatour experience constitutes any sort of tribunal to which our empiricaljudgment might be a rational response is itself unintelligible. So in his view,the Rational Response Constraint need not and cannot be satisfied.

I will argue that, despite Davidson’s claims to the contrary, the two thesesare not only consistent, they coincide in important ways. I will proceed byarguing first, that Davidson is wrong to suppose that radical interpretationessentially involves an appeal to causal relations between the world andbeliefs. This will show the prima facie mutual consistency of the two theses. Iwill then argue that radical interpretation essentially, though implicitly,contains an ontological commitment to facts that can be taken inperceptually.1 Since such facts are the sort of thing to which our judgmentcan be a specifically rational response, it follows that the Interpretivist Thesisis implicitly committed to the existence of aspects of the world that could playa role in satisfying the Rational Response Constraint. I shall then defend myconclusions in light of some Davidsonian considerations that ariseindependently of interpretivism: namely, his rejection of the philosophicalbona fides of the notion of facts, his rejection of the idea of an epistemologicalrole for experience, and his positive arguments for coherentism.

II

Davidsonian radical interpretation is the (ideal) process of ascribing meaningto a speaker’s utterances and contents to his propositional attitudes withoutthe use of any antecedent assumptions about what his words might mean orwhat his attitudes are likely to be. Of necessity, radical interpreters areconstrained to employ the principle of charity. The proper formulation of thisprinciple has been and still is the topic of considerable debate, but for presentpurposes a rough characterization will suffice. Charity demands thatinterpreters optimize the truthfulness and rationality of their interpretees.

Interpretation, Reasons and Facts 347

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Thus, their candidly asserted declarative sentences must be ascribedmeanings that make them true, when possible, and which therefore makethe beliefs ascribed in the light of such assertions true as well. Speakers mustbe ascribed sufficient other true beliefs to anchor their possession of theconcepts deployed in these (e.g., no believing that that is a Shiba dog withoutalso having a substantial number of beliefs, such as that dogs are animals, thatthere are various breeds of dog, that the Shiba is a dog breed, etc.) and in waysthat avoid inexplicable error and optimize coherence. Moreover, the mentalstates ascribed must rationalize speakers’ actions, so that for each doingdescribed as an action ascribed to a speaker, there is some belief-desire pairascribable to him which could function as a good primary reason for his soacting. And these pairs must together make reasonably good sense of aspeaker as a self-identical agent through time.

This orientation to the mind provides materials for a quick anti-skepticalargument. The Interpretivist Thesis entails that no putative belief system thatcould not in principle be ascribed in radical interpretation can be genuine. Theprinciple of charity ensures that any belief system that could be so ascribedwill contain largely true beliefs. These will be, moreover, coherent, hencedoxastically justified; so such ascription will necessarily yield, in the main,justified, true belief: knowledge (more or less).2

The standard objection to coherence theories of justification and knowl-edge is that a belief system could be fully coherent as an internal matter, yetfundamentally cut off from the world, so that its contents, coherent as youlike, fail to be true of it. (Paranoid conspiracy theories and fictional narratives,false though they are, can seem to be internally coherent). Davidson’s reply tothis standard objection is implicit in another necessary methodologicalconstraint on radical interpretation. Radical interpreters cannot just beginanywhere, but rather must begin with the ascription of meaning to occasionsentences3 and of contents to the beliefs manifested by assent to suchsentences. Occasion sentences are those sentences assent to which comes andgoes with salient changes in the external environment shared by interpreterand speaker. Charity requires that the belief so ascribed must be true on and ofthe occasion. Thus the methodologically primary steps of radical interpreta-tion already establish a connection between the speaker’s beliefs and theworld. The ongoing demand to interpret a speaker’s occasion sentencescharitably also shows the unintelligibility of the objection that charity at bestyields agreement between speaker and interpreter, but not agreement in truth.An interpreter must indeed ascribe beliefs to a speaker that are true by theinterpreter’s lights. But unless what is true by the interpreter’s lights on suchoccasions is, in the main, objectively true, attempts to interpret the speaker onsubsequent saliently similar occasions will be thwarted, and the possibilitythat the interpreter and speaker agree in error will be eliminated.

If we focus more specifically on the process of interpreting occasion

348 Richard N. Manning

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

sentences, we will begin to see why Davidson thinks that the objectivity ofour thought need not depend on its constituting a specifically rationalresponse to the empirical world, as the Rational Response Constraint wouldhave it. Davidson has consistently emphasized the role played by theinterpreter’s appeal to causal relations between the environment and speakerin determining the contents of speakers’ beliefs. On Davidson’s view, radicalinterpreters ascribe contents to speakers’ occasion beliefs by appealing to thevery same environmental goings on that cause those beliefs. Occasionsentences are to be interpreted ‘according to … the events and objects in theoutside world that cause them to be held true’.4 With respect to occasionsentences, he says ‘the evidence for [their] translation is the causes of changesof assent’.5 Indeed, it is just this ability to determine causes by a kind oftriangulation that secures our grip on the outside world and on others’thoughts. ‘Without … sharing of reactions to common stimuli, thought andspeech would have no particular content – that is, no content at all. It takestwo points of view to give a location to the cause of a thought, and thus todefine its content’.6 Accordingly, interpreters must ‘take the objects of abelief to be the causes of belief’ and these are ‘what in fact they are’.7 Bymeans of this identification, the objectivity of occasion belief is secured. Thedirectedness of thought to the world – its intentionality – is secured in thesense that the appeal to causes of occasion beliefs isolates objects for suchbeliefs to be about. Moreover, since the beliefs are about their objects, theirtruth or falsity depends upon the way those objects are; the way the world is isthus criterial for the correctness of our thought about it.

Now if this sort of appeal to the external causes of occasion beliefs isnecessary in radical interpretation, then radical interpretation presupposes theexistence of external causes of belief. In light of the strong constitutive natureof the interpretivist thesis, this presupposition seems to mark an immediatetension with the Rational Response Constraint. For if interpreters need toappeal to causes of belief, and if this appeal is sufficient, by way mind-worldconnection, to account for the intentionality and objectivity of belief, then, nospecifically rational connection between mind and world is required.

There is an obvious, but ultimately unsatisfactory reply available to theproponent of the Rational Response Constraint, which bears consideration.She could say that if we could conceive of the causal relation between worldand belief allegedly exploited in interpretative triangulation as both causaland rational, then the fact that triangulation supposes that the connection iscausal would not be inconsistent with the Constraint’s demand that there be arational linkage as well. Davidson is of course well known to have argued forthe claim that reasons can be causes. But it is clear that there is no easyrecourse to Davidson’s way of making reasons into causes here. On his view,some events that have descriptions under which they take part in theinstantiation of laws also have descriptions under which they take part in a


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

rational pattern. In virtue of being correctly describable in the first of theseways, the event takes part in the causal order; in virtue of being correctlydescribable in the second of these ways, the event may constitute a reason.However, according to Davidson, causal events that are external to the mindcan have no descriptions of the second sort. An event’s participation in thesort of rational pattern that is constitutive of rational relations is a matter of itsbeing describable in such a way that it plays a role in rationalizing otherevents that are describable as actions. Thus an event’s being a reason is itshaving a description under which it takes part in the economy of propositionalattitudes, making sense of action.8 This is a specifically psychologicaleconomy. Hence no extra-psychological event, such as an external cause ofan occasion belief itself, could have a description under which it constituted areason. External causes, in Davidson’s view, then, are brute.9 And here thetension between the Rational Response Constraint and interpretivism asDavidson conceives it becomes evident. The leading thought behind theconstraint is that empirical beliefs are in their very natures commitments tothe way the world external to us is, and that the upshot of such brute casescannot constitute such a commitment.

If one were to attempt to dissolve this tension by claiming that, contraDavidson, external causes can be reasons, one would face a dilemma. On theone hand, one could try to argue that external causes can after all qualify asreasons with the Davidsonian framework of how reasons are constituted. Butthis tack is not very promising, as it would involve showing that externalcausal events could also have descriptions as elements of a psychologicalrationalization of action. Their very externality would seem to make thisimpossible. On the other, one might avoid this difficulty by denying that thatframework states necessary conditions for something’s qualifying as a reason.But this would be to assume the burden of providing an alternative account ofhow external causes can be reasons.

But neither of these alternative ways of trying to conceive external causesas reasons would get at the real difficulty here. This difficulty is a version ofthe epiphenomenalist objection often raised against Davidson’s account ofreasons as causes. For if there is a description of an external event underwhich it causes an event such as an occasion belief, appealing to that externalevent under that causal description would seem sufficient to account for theoccurrence of that second event. No additional appeal to the fact that the firstevent also has a description as a reason would be required. Thusinterpretivism appears to hold that we can account fully for the objectivityof a speaker’s thoughts without appeal to rational relations as such. Whateverother status those causes might have would be superfluous to the interpretivistaccount, and hence unnecessary. And that is a strict conflict with the RationalResponse Constraint.

However, I shall show that the apparent conflict is illusory. I will do this by


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

arguing that interpretive triangulation does not in fact depend upon theidentification of causes of belief, and that therefore, it does not assume thatsuch causes exist and are sufficient by way of relation between world andmind to account for the objectivity of thought. While not itself showing that arational relation is necessary, this argument will show that interpretivism issilent as to the nature – rational or merely causal – of the relation that obtainsbetween mind and world.

In the passages in which he describes triangulation, Davidson cruciallyoverstates what is actually demanded of interpreters. They need not appeal tothe causes of belief, but at most to the causes of speakers’ behaviors that aretaken to manifest their beliefs. Consider this passage describing triangulation.

[E]ach of two people is reacting differentially to sensory stimuli streaming in from acertain direction. Where the incoming lines intersect is the common cause. If the twopeople now note each other’s reactions (in the case of language, verbal reactions) theycan each correlate these observed reactions with their stimuli from the world. Acommon cause has been determined. The triangle which gives content to thought andspeech is complete.10

Note that here, Davidson writes not of causes of belief, but rather of the causesof differential reactions. And on reflection, we can see that in the otherpassages in which he explicitly claims that the objects of belief are the causesof belief, he has said more than he needs to. For each of them can be recastwithout loss of force to claim only that the objects of belief are the causes ofthe differential reactions that are identified by the interpreter as manifesting aspeaker’s belief; typically, this is behavior amounting to prompted assent.Thus, where Davidson says that an interpreter’s evidence for translation is‘causes of changes in assent’, he might just as well have said ‘causes ofchanges in assenting behavior’. And where he says ‘it takes two points ofview to give location to the cause of a thought’, he might as well have saidthat it takes two points of view to give location to the cause of the differentialreactions to which an interpreter appeals in determining the object of aspeaker’s thought. Similarly, one could say that interpreters must take theobjects to be, not the causes of belief, but the causes of differential reactionsthat manifest the belief.11 Since nothing in interpretive triangulation requiresan appeal specifically to the causes of belief, triangulation does not imply thatthere are such causes. Thus it does not imply, contra the Rational ResponseConstraint, that there is an a-rational connection between thought and theworld that is necessary and sufficient by way of such connection to secure theobjectivity of thought.

At first blush, the fact that interpretivism does not require an appeal to thecauses of belief does not seem to help buttress the Rational ResponseConstraint. For all I have said so far, it might seem that there need be neither arational nor a causal connection between world and thought, a causalconnection between world and behavior sufficing. But the idea that there is a


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

genetic relation between world and behavior, but not between world andthought, cannot seriously be on the table. Surely it is because of someexplanatory relation between what goes on in the world and our thoughts thatwe have the occasion beliefs we do. The question is what the nature of thatrelation is. Given, as I have argued, that interpretivism does not require us tothink of the relation in any particular way, and given that there must be somesuch relation, it remains open how to conceive it, hence open to conceive it, inaccord with the Rational Relation Constraint, as rational.

Second, one might suggest that, while interpretivism needn’t appeal to acausal relation between beliefs and world, such an appeal would be sufficientto account for objective belief. In the next section, I argue that this ismistaken, that more is required, and that what more is required is well suitedto provide the sort of connection between mind and thought demanded by theRational Response Constraint.

III

I think it can be shown, not just that the Interpretivist Thesis and theRationality Constraint are mutually consistent, but also that the RationalityConstraint can draw some support from interpretivism. In particular I shallargue that interpretive triangulation depends upon an appeal, not just to causalrelations between occasion events and speaker’s behaviors, but toperceptually available facts. Further, such facts are just the sorts of thingsthat could help satisfy the Rationality Constraint.

Unless an interpreter’s appeal to causes of differential reactionsmanifesting occasion belief can be made (at least initially) independentlyof an appeal to facts, the appeal to causes itself implies the existence of facts.Elsewhere, Davidson rightly claims that we cannot first identify beliefs andthen ask what features of the world caused them.12 But nor can weindependently identify causes, and then ask what causal facts they take partin. For we cannot identify (or misidentify) an event c as a cause of an effect ewithout taking it (or mistaking it) that c caused e. And supposing that one canidentify an event c as a cause independently of identifying any of its effects,one still cannot do this without taking it that c is a cause. Indeed, one cannotnote even the event of a rabbit’s hopping by as such (let alone note that eventas the cause, or as a cause of some particular reaction), without noting that arabbit is hopping by (noting that the rabbit’s hopping by was a cause, orcaused the reaction). Hence the injunction to interpret occasion sentences‘according to … the events and objects in the outside world that cause them tobe held true’ already presupposes that the interpreter grasps various causalfacts that obtain on the occasion. Indeed, Davidson himself at one pointacknowledges that interpreters appeal not just to causes, but to facts, saying


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

that ‘the data for translation or a theory of truth for a speaker are thus factsabout what causes the speaker to hold various sentences true’.13

In a recent exchange with Dagfinn Føllesdal, Davidson raises considera-tions that might seem to block my claim that interpretive triangulationdepends upon appeal to, hence the existence, of facts. Davidson says:

In its simplest form, triangulation does not require language or propositional thought.All animals react selectively to their environment. We, who have the relevantconcepts, say they distinguish hot from cold, moist from dry, infrared from othercolors, male from female, lion from giraffe. When we say they distinguish thesethings, we mean they behave in ways we distinguish when exposed to changes inenvironment we distinguish. … The cases I am interested in are cases where animalsassociate events and objects sensed with the responses of other members of the herd.This is triangulation in its pure state: two or more animals equipped to correlate theresponses of the others with events and situations they jointly distinguish. This iscommon in the animal world, and does not require propositional thought.14

It would be hard to deny that brute animals do in fact coordinate their actionsby correlating sensible events and objects, including the reactions of con-specifics and other animals, with one another. Herd hunters would go hungryotherwise. Short of ascribing propositional thought to such creatures (apossibility Davidson rejects, and which I shall not consider), this is adequate,I think, to support Davidson’s claim that simple triangulation of this sort doesnot require specifically propositional thinking.

One might infer from this that interpretive triangulation does not requireappeal to facts, since facts have propositional structure. But such an inferencewould be too quick, for at least two reasons. First, despite its not involvingpropositional thought, it is not clear that brute, animal triangulation does notinvolve responsiveness to facts. Notice that the inference from ‘doesn’trequire propositional thought’ to ‘doesn’t require responsiveness to facts’ isinvalid without the addition of a premise to the effect that a being must havepropositional thought in order to be responsive to facts. This premise isdubious. We can see why by attending to Davidson’s own views concerningconcept possession. Davidson holds that it makes sense to credit beings withconcepts only if it makes sense to credit them with propositional thought,specifically propositional attitudes. Since Davidson does not think bruteanimals can be credited with propositional thought, it follows that he deniesthem concepts. Nonetheless, he concedes that they can triangulate in thesimple way, and in so doing, coordinate their joint activity, directing it atparticular, shared stimuli – particular objects. So for Davidson, responding toobjects by triangulation on them does not require that the they be broughtunder concepts, does not require that the lame zebra in the herd be recognizedas such, or as anything else by members of the pursuing pride. As we mightput it, their discriminative responses to objects and events are entirely de re.In this light, we may ask why, if animals can discriminate and coordinate with


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

respect to objects and events without discriminating them as anything, couldthey not also discriminate and coordinate with respect to facts withoutdiscriminating them as anything, again entirely de re? If, as Davidson holds,responsiveness to objects and events does not require the capacity toconceptualize them, then why should responsiveness to facts require thecapacity to think them? If it does not, then the case of brute triangulation,even if it involves no propositional thought, does not show that triangulationinvolves no responsiveness to facts.

There is, of course, much to be said about the difference between objectsand events, on the one hand, and facts on the other. I will say more (thoughnot enough) about facts later on. But for immediate purposes, it bears notingthat facts, unlike ‘mere’ objects and events, are not paradigmatic participantsin the material, causal order. And it is common to assume that everything thatcan be said about the mind-independent world and about the doings ofthoughtless beings animate and inanimate can be said without the mention ofanything that is not paradigmatically of that order. But in the present contextit simply won’t do blindly to toe the apparent line drawn in this commonpicture. In particular, it will not do in this context to argue for the plausibilityof brute responsiveness to events and objects, on the one hand, and against theplausibility of brute responsiveness to facts, on the other, by claiming thatfacts, unlike objects and events, are intrinsically linguistic, mental, orconceptual beings. Worldly facts, as such, are hardly in any language (thoughthey are suitable for expression in language), and they are by hypothesismind-independent, hence not mental. Moreover, they are not conceptual, if by‘conceptual’ one means something like ‘made of or by concepts’, whereconcepts are either mental entities or subjective rules for application to somenon-conceptual experiential content. Facts are, of course, structured in a waythat ‘bare’ events and objects are not. But this alone does not distinguish themfrom events or objects for our purposes, since both events and objects (andrelations, to which animals are also plainly responsive in triangulation) arealso structurally complex, and this does not make them linguistic orconceptual.

I now turn to the distinction between simple, brute triangulation and thetriangulation involved in the interpretation of speech. While coordinatingactivity, interpreters, by hypothesis unlike animals, ascribe propositionalattitudes to one another. So to the extent the interpretive project per sedemands the identification of facts, the non-interpretive triangulation animalsengage in is irrelevant. Interpretive triangulation is, unlike brute triangula-tion, an epistemic process in a crucial sense. That to which an interpreterappeals in triangulation must be such as to guide her in generating hypothesesconcerning the propositional contents of the speaker’s occasion beliefs, andconcerning the propositional meanings of the sentences to which he manifestsassent. To do this, it must be epistemic both in the sense of being within her


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

ken (otherwise she could not appeal to it), and in the sense of being suited toguide the formation of hypotheses (otherwise her appeal would be in vain).Since Davidson thinks that interpreters appeal to causal relations betweenspeakers’ beliefs (or behaviors) and the objects of their beliefs, he must thinkthat such relations, as the interpreter appeals to them, are within her ken andcapable of guiding such hypothesis formation. According to Davidson,interpretive triangulation occurs when interpreters ‘note’ speakers’ reactionsand ‘correlate these observed reactions with their stimuli from the world’, inorder to ‘determine’ a common cause.15 The interpreter cannot note what isepistemically unavailable, cannot correlate what is noticed with externalstimuli that are epistemically unavailable, a fortiori could not determine theobject of belief if these behaviors and stimuli were unavailable. Davidsonuses yet more blatantly epistemic terms to describe that to which theinterpreter appeals as well. It is ‘evidence’ and ‘data’.16

We can further see the difference between brute triangulation and theepistemic process of interpretive triangulation if we reflect on what isinvolved in hypothesis generation as such. One cannot be said to formulate orentertain a hypothesis as such unless one can be said to understand that thehypothesis might be wrong. Thus, a responsiveness that grounds hypothesisgeneration, as opposed to mere mutually coordinative response, must sustainthe distinction between the way one takes the world to be, and the way it is. Inthe instant case, the interpreter must recognize the difference between hisjudging that some event caused some reaction of the speaker’s, and its beingthe case that that event caused the speaker’s response. There is nothing at alllike this in the case of brute triangulation. The triangulating lion does notgrasp that he might be wrong to anticipate the zebra’s moves as she does, nordoes her failure to bring it down lead her to acknowledge that her calculationswere in error. Now only propositional entities can be inconsistent with oneanother. So in acknowledging that the way the world is might be inconsistentwith the way we think it to be, interpreters acknowledge the propositionalsignificance of the world.

Bearing in mind the epistemic character of that to which interpreters appealin triangulation, it should be clear that appeal to mere causes alone (whateverthat would amount to), could not be epistemic in the required sense. Informing hypotheses about the object and content of a speaker’s occasionbeliefs, it is surely because of its causal status that it is appropriate to appeal tothe last common cause of speaker’s and interpreter’s differential reactions. Abare acquaintance with the event or object that is the cause, but not with theevent as the cause (or at least as a salient event or object noticed by speakerand interpreter), surely could not support the hypothesis that the event orobject was the object of belief. So taking the event as the cause is required fortaking it as data or evidence for triangulation. However, exceptional casesaside, to take a as F is to take it that a is F. To take e as the cause of r, as


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

interpretive triangulation demands, then, is to take it that e caused r. And onecannot correctly take it that a is F unless that a is F is the case, unless that a isF is a fact.

One might respond to this reasoning by pointing out that causes are events,and that events to which an interpreter might appeal in triangulation, such as arabbit’s hopping by causing the speaker to behave in such and such a way, areadequate to guide interpretive hypothesis formation. Adding that events arenot facts, one might conclude that no appeal to facts is needed. This responsewon’t do. Bare events, as it were, cannot serve to guide hypothesis formation.For an event to do so, it must be appealed to as an event of a certain kind;namely, as an event satisfying the content of some description. In the aboveexample, the interpreter must appeal to the event as one satisfying thedescription ‘the event which is a hopping by a rabbit and a cause of thespeaker’s reaction …’. But on standard Russellian analysis, such adescription, functioning attributively in this way, implicitly involvespropositional content (in any context in which it is significant). Moreover,this is no mere linguistic matter; the thought one has in taking an event as ahopping, by a rabbit, … , which caused the speaker’s reaction, etc,. is one inwhich the descriptive content functions essentially; thus it contains claims.And where those claims are true, the appeal to the event is implicitly anappeal to facts.

One might try to resist my claim that the interpreter’s appeal to eventsinvolves an appeal to facts by denying that the causal status of the eventfigures in the content of a definite description functioning attributively.Rather, one might point out, it figures predicatively. Thus, instead ofsupposing that the causal status figures in some reference such as ‘The causeof the speaker’s reaction … ’, one might suppose it figures in some thought ofsome form such as ‘that event was the cause of the speaker’s reaction …’. Butthis avoids my analysis only by conceding the main point. For on the offeredalternative, the interpreter appeals straightaway to a claim about the causalstatus of the event in question, and not to the bare event itself. If the claim istrue, the appeal is directly to a fact.

While this last attempt to evade my conclusion would obviously be a non-starter, it is telling. For it is fairly clear that, as the attempt suggests, the causalstatus of the events appealed to in triangulation indeed figures as the predicateof an interpretive hypothesis, rather than as a attributive feature of a definitedescription of such events. If we abstract away from the precise point at issuein our discussion – whether appeal to events alone can suffice in interpretivetriangulation – we can see that it is much more natural to think of interpretersas appealing to causal facts than to causes themselves. Presumably, aninterpreter supposes such things as that the rabbit’s hopping by caused thespeaker’s reaction. That it did so (if it did) is not an event, but a fact. As wesaw, Davidson himself can’t quite resist slipping into this natural mode of


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

expression. My rather oblique detour through the analysis of definitedescriptions taken attributively, then, is necessitated by the awkwardness ofthe idea that interpreters appeal to causes or events, in the first place, ratherthan to facts. The deep reason why Davidson characterizes the interpretiveprocess in this awkward way is that he takes facts to be intentional items, inthe sense that they realize intensional properties (he takes this as a mark of themental17), and takes interpretivism to be a thesis about the constitution, notjust of linguistic meaning and the propositional attitudes, but of theintentional simpliciter. Now we should be wary of too quickly linking theintensional with the intentional, let alone with the mental. But for presentpurposes, it should suffice to note that even if facts are intentional in this orsome other important sense, and if my argument that interpreters cannotappeal to causes without appealing to facts is sound, then hopes of accountingof the intentional simpliciter by appeal to interpretivism are dashed. But thatwould not compromise the Interpretivist Thesis as an account of linguisticmeaning and the propositional attitudes. And in characterizing the process ofinterpretation for these purposes, there would be no pressure to avoid thenatural locution that interpreter’s appeal to causal facts in locating objects of,and assigning contents to, speakers’ occasion sentences and thoughts.

It remains to make explicit the tie between this conclusion and the RationalResponse Constraint. Much more deserves to be said about the nature of facts(and about how much one should be required to say about them) than I can sayhere. A brief characterization will have to suffice. Facts are complex entities,in which particulars and properties or relations, or properties and relations andhigher order properties and relations, are connected by an irreducible nexus orlogical form. We may say that the entities – particular or universal – stand ascontent to the logical form or nexus in which they are connected. Despite theircomplexity, facts are part of the basic ontology of the world, in the sense ofnot being reducible to their constituents. Given that they are both logicallystructured and saturated with content, they, unlike brute causes, are suited tobear inferential relations to other facts and to the contents of thoughts.Depending upon what their constituent contents are (e.g., whether they areperceptible particulars and properties or relations), some facts are directlyperceptible. Among these are the sorts of occasional facts to whichinterpreters must appeal in triangulation. When taken in, these can providereasons for supposing the world to be some particular way.18 Occasionalperceptible facts, then, can be both experienced and reasons. They are aspectsof our experience to which our empirical judgments may be specificallyrational responses. They are thus suited to play a role in satisfying theRational Constraint.

Facts taken in in perception are, then, the very elements of the world towhich interpreters appeal in triangulation. Far from showing that there is noneed to conceive empirical thought as rationally responsive to the world,


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

interpretivism itself essentially countenances just the right kinds of things toground that rational response.

IV

My conclusion that interpretivists, including Davidson, are committed to theexistence of facts taken in perceptually in triangulation must seem bold, inlight of some Davidsonian considerations that arise independently of hisinterpretivism. Davidson has persistently argued against the philosophicalsignificance of the notion of a fact. Moreover, he has vigorously denied anyepistemological role for experience, defending a version of coherentism onwhich experience plays no such role. My aim in the rest of this essay is todefuse and deflect these considerations.

Davidson has presented a number of explicit arguments against factsthrough the years.19 His Ur-argument is the so-called ‘slingshot’, detailed in‘Truth and Meaning’ and ‘True to the Facts’, and iterated briefly elsewhere.20

The conclusion of that argument can, for our purposes, be stated as follows: iftrue sentences (or statements) correspond to facts, then all true sentences (orstatements) correspond to the same fact. Its significance in our context isclear: in triangulation, appealing to the one Great Fact could not help identifythe objects of belief, nor could the one Great Fact be of use in satisfying theRational Relation Constraint. A full discussion of the Slingshot would be outof place here. Let it suffice to point out that the argument has been shown toinvoke assumptions that are unacceptable to anyone who takes the idea of anontology of facts seriously.21 It may well also be invalid.22 Moreover, theargument has its home in two contexts: the criticism of reference based,bottom-up programs in compositional semantics, in which facts are treated asquasi-referents of true sentences, and in connections with the correspondencetheory of truth. These are simply not the uses to which they are put ininterpretive triangulation, or in connection with the Rational RelationConstraint.

Another of Davidson’s express reasons for rejecting facts is that, since factsare not identifiable independently of true sentences, they have no explanatorypower. But again, this consideration, once more targeted at the correspon-dence theory of truth, is simply inapposite here. If what we were seeking toexplain was the truth of particular sentences, and if we were to define facts byappeal to their being expressed by true sentences, we might possibly have avacuous pseudo-explanation on our hands.23 But, as should be clear, this isnot the role in which we have encountered facts, and that is not theexplanatory use to which they are being put. Moreover, that we can onlyindividuate facts by the use of expressions which serve also to individuatetrue statements and beliefs (as Moore supposed) simply would not be grounds


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

for suspicion that we had merely invented a pseudo-entity. Our explanatorygrounds here for acknowledging facts are quite independent of any attempt tofind something for true belief or statements to correspond to. And while thesegrounds arise in connection with the general project of securing the objectivecontent of belief, the specific facts I have argued play a role in interpretationare not in that process assigned as the contents of the beliefs interpretersascribe by appeal to them. The interpreter appeals to such facts as that therabbit’s hopping by caused (or correlated with) certain behaviors in aspeaker, in order to assign to that speaker such belief as that there’s a rabbithopping by.

Yet another of Davidson’s worries about facts arises from a connection hesees between them and the mental entities representationalism he has arguedagainst through the years. Davidson’s concern seems to be that facts givesuccor to representationalists by providing them with something for sentences– uttered or inscribed (or in mentalese?) – to represent. Following a referenceto the Slingshot, he says that, assuming that argument’s conclusion that thereis but one Great Fact:

We ought also to question the popular assumption that sentences, or their spokentokens, or sentence like entities or configurations in our brains, can properly be called‘representations’, since there is nothing for them to represent. If we give up facts asentities, we ought to give up representations at the same time, for the legitimacy ofeach depends upon the legitimacy of the other.24

The supposed mutual dependency of facts on representationalism is bogus.First, while an ontology of facts may be necessary for any representationalisttheory of mind, it is hardly sufficient; merely acknowledging facts does notentail acknowledging the rest of any pernicious representationalist theory.Anti-representationalists find representationalism pernicious because it positsmental intermediaries between subjects and the world, which represent theworld to the subject. But this is not part of what is involved in theinterpretivist commitment to facts perceptually taken in in triangulation. Suchfacts are themselves worldly, hence not representational intermediariesbetween the world and anything else. Nor is the state of taking in a factperceptually an intermediary between subject and what he perceives. Such astate is appropriately ascribed to an agent in light of his actions, linguistic orotherwise. But the state is not one to which the subject is related, and whichthen relates him to the world. Rather, it is a state of the subject as a whole.Moreover, the idea of such a state does not depend essentially on the positingof any entity ‘internal’ to the agent, which intermediates between her and thefact she takes in, by representing it. No doubt much goes on in the head of aperson when they perceive that such and such is the case; no doubt what doesgo on is in any given case essential to their so perceiving. But there is no goodreason to suppose that perceiving that so-and-so is a matter of there being


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

some internal mental entity or event to which the person is related, and whichin turn represents so-and-so.

In sum, Davidson’s arguments against facts do not suffice to show that thevery idea of facts is incoherent, or that there are none. Rather, they show atmost that there is no such thing as a fact, if facts are the kinds of thingscompositional semanticists, theorists of truth, and representationalists havesupposed them to be, or better, hoped they would be.25 But all of this is justinapposite here.

V

In this and the next section, I turn to the questions whether the claim thatinterpretive triangulation involves an appeal to facts taken in perceptuallyfalls afoul of any of Davidson’s strong arguments against empiricisms thatgrant a special epistemological role to experience, and for coherentism inepistemology. In ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, Davidsonargues against accounts of epistemic warrant that attempt to ground justifiedbelief in what he calls ‘the testimony of the senses’. On traditionalempiricism, sensory experience supplies the interface between mind andworld that both justifies empirical beliefs and etiologically grounds theirpossession. But on Davidson’s view, there is and can be no such interface,since there is no conception of ‘experience’ on which it can do these jobs.26

The rejection of this justificatory interface leads to Davidson’s coherentistdictum: the only thing that can count as a reason for belief is another belief.

In explicating what he means by ‘testimony of the senses’, Davidson offersthe following list: ‘sensation, perception, the given, experience, sense data,the passing show’.27 But this list is motley in a way Davidson does not appearto recognize, or in any event think important. I shall return to this in amoment. Davidson points out that Hume’s empiricism of ideas conflatesperceiving a green spot with perceiving that a spot is green. The former, aninstance of perception-of, is a sensation; the latter, an instance of perception-that, is, claims Davidson, a kind of judgment. Subsequent philosophers, henotes, have avoided the confusion, but have ‘tried to attain the same results byreducing the gap between perception and judgment to zero by attempting toformulate judgments that do not go beyond stating that the perception orsensation or presentation exists’.28 Such theories try to base empiricaljustification, not on appeal to sensations, but on appeal to beliefs claimed tohave ‘exactly the same epistemic content as a sensation’, and thus to bebeyond the need for further justification.29 These attempts, Davidson claims,all fail, first, because such ‘basic’ judgments would in any event not supportinferences to an objective world, and secondly, because there are no suchbasic beliefs.


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

The testimony of the senses, in the form of such judgments, cannot supportinferences concerning an objective, external world because their contentsconcern only the subjective and inner, from which no inference to the outercan be made, short of illicit appeal to a divine non-deceiver. But to the extentthat judgements go beyond the content of sensation, in a way that mightunderwrite inferences to an objective world, they cannot serve asepistemologically basic, because, Davidson says, they ‘may be lying’. WhileI would quibble with the idea that it is only if a judgment goes beyond thecontents of sensation that it might be lying, this reasoning provides the germof satisfactory grounds for Davidson’s anti-foundationalist conclusion. I willreturn to this point later on. But Davidson additionally claims that hisarguments tell against the idea that experience plays a role in justification, andhere I think his reasoning has gone astray, owing to a pair of confusions.

The first arises in the passages I quoted above, where Davidson explicitlyruns together the contents of experience, perception and sensation. He claimsthat theorists tried to reduce the gap between perception and judgment byattempting to formulate judgments that do not go beyond the epistemiccontent of a sensation. Thus on Davidson’s view, the only way to ensure thatthe content of judgment doesn’t go beyond the content of experience is tolimit its content to that of sensation. This latter he conceives as some sort ofintermediary between belief and the objects beliefs are about, as in both theclassic case of Lockean ideas of sense, and the paradigm contemporary caseof Quinean stimulus meanings. Treating all perceptual or experiential contentas such sensory content, Davidson then argues that since such sensory contentcannot bear logical relations to beliefs, experience is epistemically idle.

Interestingly, he doesn’t get the reason why such sensory content cannotbear logical relations to belief quite right. He says ‘the relation betweensensation and a belief cannot be logical, since sensations are not beliefs orany other propositional attitudes’.30 The reasoning here is problematic, andfairly obviously so. Prima facie, that 2 is the largest even prime can belogically related to my belief that 2 is the only even prime, even though that 2is the largest even prime is not itself a belief or propositional attitude. Indeed,the possibility that non-beliefs can be logically related to beliefs is essential tocentral normative characteristics of epistemic relations. Unless my beliefscould bear logically on what I do not believe, it would make no sense to saythat I fail of my epistemic responsibility in failing to draw the consequencesof my beliefs or in failing to seek out relevant facts and draw consequencesfrom them. So it cannot be the mere fact that sensations are not beliefs orpropositional attitudes that disqualifies them from bearing logically onbeliefs.

Nonetheless, Davidson’s conclusion is right: sensations, conceived in thisway, cannot bear logical relations to beliefs, hence can play no epistemic role.But the real reason for this is the same reason that keeps them from having the


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

same epistemic content as judgments. For the content of sensation, asDavidson conceives it, lacks logical structure. Hence it can neither bearlogical, inferential relations to beliefs, other attitudes, facts, propositions oranything else, nor be contents of judgments. Since the capacity to enter intoinferential relations is of the essence of epistemic relata, sensation isepistemically impotent. The experiential contents of perceptions-that,however, are different. If in perception, we take in the fact that that Shibais circling, the content of our perception is that that Shiba is circling. And this,unlike the contents of sensation, has logical structure, and can bear inferentialrelations to other facts, say, the fact that that Shiba is moving, and,potentially, to the contents of beliefs. Given that I have taken in such content,it can bear the sort of relations to the contents of my beliefs that constitute it asepistemically significant – as a reason – for me. For example, it can licenseme to infer that something is circling, and can bear epistemically on my beliefthat that Shiba circles when she’s thirsty, thereby giving me a reason to thinkshe is thirsty, and to fill her water dish.

Now that we have seen through the illicit assimilation of all experientialcontent to sensation, we can also see why the conclusion that perception-thatis a kind of judgment does not preclude experience from playing a role injustification. For the experiential contents of perceptions-that can themselvesconstitute the content of judgments, a possibility to which the assimilationblinds Davidson. Granting this possibility, the claim, if true, that justificatoryrelations are always among judgments would preclude experiential contentfrom functioning in justification only on the absurd assumption thatjudgments function epistemically independently of their contents.

Davidson’s blindness to the possibility of experiential contents ofjudgments also stems from an illicit conflation of belief with its content. Ina passage in which he discusses the notion of experience as a ‘source ofinformation’, Davidson says ‘the notion of information … applies in a non-metaphorical way only to … beliefs. So “source” has to be read simply as“cause” and “information” as “true belief” or “knowledge” ’.31 Davidsonappears to reason thusly: ‘information’ applies non-metaphorically only tobeliefs; experiences are not beliefs; therefore experience does not literallycomprise information. On this reasoning, experience is relegated to the statusof cause of information, informing us only in the sense of bringing aboutbeliefs in us, which, when true, themselves constitute literal information.What experience cannot be, on this view, is something we can consult orappeal to for the information it contains. This of course reinforces hisconclusion that experience is not something that has epistemic – evidential –significance.

The inference from ‘information applies non-metaphorically only tobeliefs’ to ‘information is true belief’ is of dubious validity. (Compare:‘green’ only applies non-metaphorically to the surfaces of objects; therefore


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

green is identical to the surfaces of green objects). But there is surelysomething to the idea that ‘information’ applies literally only to beliefs. Afterall, facts of which no one is aware inform nobody; they count as informationonly in the derivative sense that, if someone knew of them, they would beinformed. But there is another way we can do justice to this idea. Content,experiential or otherwise, is not the same as belief. But of course, what makesthe difference between mere belief and true belief is its content; in particular,that its content informs rather than misinforms the believer. Thus while literalinformation is tied to belief, it is likewise tied to the veracity of belief content.We can, then, respect the idea that ‘information’ applies non-metaphoricallyonly to belief, without identifying the two, by saying that the content of a truebelief, in the context of its being a belief content, is information. And insofaras the content of true beliefs can be experiential, such experiential content canitself be informative, hence epistemically significant.

In effect, eliding the distinction between belief and content forcesDavidson to identify information with true belief; this in turn enables himto recognize the distinction between belief and experience only by denyingthat experience can in any literal way comprise information. Further, holdingquite correctly that a belief is a mental rather than a mind-independent,worldly thing, Davidson concludes that the contents of beliefs cannotthemselves count as part of the world we experience. The conflation leadsDavidson to draw a rigid experience/belief dichotomy, and simply to ignorethe possibility that some judgments have as their very contents aspects of theworld revealed to the agent in a genuine experience – in perceptions-that. Sohe never entertains the epistemically relevant conception of experience, andnone of the arguments he gives against an epistemological role for thetestimony of the senses tells against it.

VI

Now as we saw, Davidson treats perception-that as a kind of judgment whichcan, as such, play a role in justification. This accords with his coherentistdictum that ‘nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except anotherbelief’.32 One of his arguments for this dictum, as we saw, is that only beliefsor other propositional attitudes have the logical structure required to play anepistemic role. I have argued here that this is false. But Davidson has another,quite different argument for the same conclusion. Wondering how ‘an attitudewhich has no subjective degree of probability whatever’ could possibly‘provide a reason for a positive belief’,33 Davidson denies that such anattitude could, and concludes that no sub-doxastic attitude (a fortiori, no non-attitude) could be a reason for a belief.

This reasoning seems prima facie plausible, in light of a pair of intuitive


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

thoughts about rationality and epistemic responsibility. First, it would seemepistemically irresponsible, hence irrational, to employ propositionalcontents that one did not think likely to be true in inquiry directed at truebelief.34 So if it is rational for an agent to use some content as a premise inreasoning directed at truth, then they must believe it. Second, it is surely ahallmark of epistemic reasons that it may be rational for an agent inpossession of them to draw inferences from them. So if something is a reasonfor an agent, then it is rational for her to employ it as a premise in reasoning.35

The coherentist dictum follows trivially from these thoughts.McDowell has recently advanced an argument against the coherence

dictum, issuing from the following scenario.36 Suppose that Jones (as we shallcall him), under lighting conditions he believes to be deceptive, has aperceptual experience involving a brown sweater. Because of his belief aboutthe lighting conditions, Jones does not believe that his experience entitles himto believe that the sweater is brown, and does not believe that it is. Jones laterlearns that the lighting conditions were after all normal. According toMcDowell, he can now say ‘I thought I was looking at your sweater under akind of illumination that makes it impossible to tell what colors things are, butI now realize I was actually seeing that it was brown’.37 In realizing this,claims McDowell, Jones ‘recognizes that [he] had, at the relevant time, anentitlement that [he] didn’t then realize [he] had’ (ibid.). McDowell concludesthat, since Jones’s perception entitles him to believe that the sweater is browneven though he does not believe its content, it is a reason without being abelief, and thereby violates the coherentist dictum.

Two claims are implicit in McDowell’s reasoning. One is that a subject’sperception that such and such is the case (call these sorts of experiences‘perceptions-that’) neither necessarily constitutes the subject’s belief thatsuch and such is the case, nor entails that she so believe. The other is that suchperceptions-that can constitute entitlements for belief, giving the perceiverreasons to believe their content (and presumably what follows from thatcontent in conjunction with other things they believe or are entitled tobelieve) independently of belief in that content.

It would be question-begging here to reject the claim that Jones’sexperience involving the brown sweater constitutes a perceiving-that simplyon the ground that he didn’t believe what he saw. 38 Unless perceiving-thatjust is a kind of judging that (which is precisely what is at issue) then there isno obvious reason to suppose that perceiving-that P entails believing that P.Clearly, had Jones not had his erroneous beliefs about the lighting conditions,there would be no denying that he perceived that the sweater is brown. Butprima facie, his erroneous beliefs change neither the phenomenology of hisexperience nor the onto-genetic relation between that experience and the factthat the sweater is brown. Thus it is hard to deny that what Jones perceives isthat the sweater is brown.


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

McDowell’s example is, it should be noted, an unusual one. Cases in whichwe might be inclined to say something of the form ‘I perceived (saw, heard …)that P, but didn’t believe it’ are often either not genuine cases of perceivingthat P (as when one says ‘I heard that you dyed your hair blonde, but didn’tbelieve it’), or are cases in which what is perceived is indeed believed, butwhat is expressed is not actually disbelief, but surprise (as in ‘I saw thatWoods hit that 6 iron over the flag out of the trap, but didn’t believe it.’).Another common case arises when one fails to attend to what one hasperceived to be the case, as when one perceives that the car is making suchand such a funny sound, but fail to take any conscious notice of it until one islater asked by the mechanic if the car has been making any unusual noises.Here it seems right to say that one did believe what one perceived to be thecase, but was unaware of that belief. While there may well be cases where wewould want to deny that any positive attitude was held at the time towards thecontents of one’s perception-that, aside from trivial modifications ofMcDowell’s example, clear cases of perceiving that P without believing thatP are not easy to come by.39 Be that as it may, that Jones’s case is not the rulefor, or even typical of, cases in which we say we didn’t believe what weperceived to be the case does not compromise its point. Thus, the experienceseems indeed to qualify as a perceiving that the sweater is brown, despite hisnot believing that it is brown at the time. I thus accept, tentatively, the first ofMcDowell’s claims. Jones perceives that the sweater is brown; he just doesn’tbelieve that it is.

I now turn to the second claim, which directly conflicts with the coherentistdictum. First I should make a terminological point that suggests a substantiveone. In the passage quoted above, McDowell speaks not of Jones’s perceptionthat the sweater is brown constituting a reason, but rather of its constituting an‘entitlement’. Presumably this is because the term ‘reason’ is too broad tocapture unambiguously the sense in which McDowell thinks the experiencewould ground Jones’s belief that the sweater is brown. After all, we might saythat the fact that the murder weapon is at the bottom of the river is a reason tothink the murderer will go free, but that mere fact does not entitle one tobelieve that the murderer will go free. Or we might say that the fact that somemere conjecture is true is a reason for believing it and what follows from it.Epistemic entitlements give epistemic rights, and one has no epistemic rightto draw conclusions from mere conjectures, however true they may be, orfrom facts of which one is unaware, though in some attenuated sense, thesemight be reasons; it would be plainly irrational to do so. In any event,whatever the reason for McDowell’s choice of terms, it is clear that he intendsthe term ‘entitlement’ to cover what Davidson means by ‘reason’ when thelatter says that only beliefs can be reasons for other beliefs. After all, the caseof Jones and the brown sweater is precisely offered as a counter-example toDavidson’s dictum.


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

But we must be on guard here, lest use of the term ‘entitlement’ and itscognates mislead us. For the logic of entitlements as it applies in their properhome – the legal context – is not a perfect guide to its application in theepistemic domain. One may perfectly well have a legal entitlement to somebenefit utterly without regard to one’s having any awareness of thatentitlement, or even of the circumstances in virtue of which one is so entitled.Epistemic entitlements are quite different. Whether one has a legalentitlement depends upon one’s legal status, but whether one has anepistemic entitlement depends upon one’s epistemic status – in particularupon one’s epistemic relation to evidence for that to which the entitlemententitles one. Thus it would not do to rest McDowell’s claim on something likethe following analogy. Jones is like Smith, who has in his possession adocument that entitles the bearer to some legal benefit, say, a tax break. Smithknows of the document, but doesn’t understand its status as an entitlement,and moreover believes that his possession of it does not entitle him to such abenefit. Nonetheless, it does. Jones, in parallel, is in possession of something– a perception that the sweater is brown – but does not understand that thisentitles him to believe that the sweater is brown, and indeed, thinks that itdoes not. Nonetheless, just as in Smith’s case, it does so entitle him. Simplereliance on this analogy would ignore the crucial fact that one’s epistemicentitlements are a function of one’s epistemic status. This is not to say thatpossession of the perception-that does not constitute an entitlement; rather, itis simply to say that this reasoning based on the analogy with the legal case isinsufficient.

One similarity between the logic of legal entitlements and the logic ofepistemic entitlements seems clear, however. Just as one cannot be subject tolegal blame for the exercise of a legal right or entitlement, one cannot besubject to epistemic blame for the exercise of an epistemic right orentitlement.40 As we will see, McDowell’s view of the case of Jones conflictsnot only with the dictum and its plausible basis, but also with this principle.

We can read McDowell’s scenario as posing a double-barreled threat to thedictum. First, there is the threat posed by his explicit claim that Jones’sperception that the sweater is brown is an entitlement for him to believe it isbrown at the time he has that perception. Second, even if the perception is notan entitlement at the time Jones has it, there is the further possibility that itcomes to constitute an entitlement upon his learning of his mistakeconcerning the lighting conditions, but independently of his belief in itscontent. In either case, the dictum would be violated.

To help us think clearly about the first barrel of the threat, I shall pose acouple of other scenarios, interestingly analogous to the case of Jones.Consider Smith, who has received three successive letters from the samesource. The first says that until further notice of a precisely specified kind,subsequent messages will be written in what looks like ordinary English, but


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

is in fact in a code, unknown to and uninterpretable by Smith. The secondcontains the specified notice. The third is written in ordinary English. SupposeSmith has read the first letter, but not the second. She now reads the third,takes its ordinary English to be in uninterpretable code, and does not believewhat it says as ordinary English. We might well say here that Smith hasreason to believe the ordinary sense of what was written in the third letter, butwhat makes this claim natural here is the sense that Smith was culpable fornot reading her mail. She had a reason – even an epistemic reason, though notof the sort mentioned in Davidson’s dictum – to read the second letter, and isblameworthy for not having done so. She thus had a sort of reason to knowthat the third letter should be understood as ordinary English. But this is notthe same thing as the third letter’s actually entitling her to believe what itsays, so understood. And given that she has not read the second letter, wewould deny, I think, that it does so.

But Jones’s perception does not constitute a reason for him to believe thatthe sweater is brown in even this attenuated sense. Jones is (so far as we know,and as certainly might be the case) utterly without blame for believing thelighting conditions to be non-standard, and thus for not taking his seeing thatthe sweater is brown as a reason for believing that it is. So to refine theexample, suppose that the second letter had never reached Smith, and that shewas therefore utterly blameless for not having read it. Smith has dutifully readthe credible first letter, and now receives the third. Surely we would deny thatthis letter entitles Smith to believe the literal English sense of its words;indeed, given that she has not received the second letter, she would be subjectto epistemic blame for doing so. If we were to say nonetheless that thesubsequent letter did so entitle Smith, we would be claiming, in conflict withthe plausible principle I mentioned above, that Smith is epistemicallyblameworthy for the exercise of an epistemic entitlement.41 Now Jones is inmuch the same situation as Smith in this second version of her case. Givenwhat Jones blamelessly believes about the lighting conditions, it would beepistemically blameworthy of him believe that the sweater is brown on thebasis of what he perceives. If we were to say that his perceiving that thesweater was brown then entitled him to believe that it is, we would have Jonesbeing epistemically blameworthy for exercising an epistemic entitlement.This is a consequence we should avoid.

To do so, we need simply deny that Jones’s perception that the sweater isbrown constitutes an epistemic entitlement for him to believe that it is. Ofcourse, had Jones not been misinformed as to the lighting conditions and hadthe same experience, he would have been entitled to believe the sweater isbrown. But as it is, the experience provides him with a counterfactualentitlement only, that is, with something that, had things been a bit differentthan they in fact were, would have entitled him to the belief. Unlike actualepistemic entitlements, it does not follow from having a counterfactual


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

entitlement that one would be epistemically blameless for its exercise.Recognizing such counterfactual entitlements allows us to do justice both tothe idea that perceptual experience can provide us with opportunities to knowperceptual facts, and to the tie between warrant and epistemic virtueembodied in the idea42 that such opportunities bestow actual entitlementsonly when the subject’s doxastic set is such that the subject would beepistemically blameless for believing the content of the perception.

The question remains whether we must analyze Jones’s perception-that ashaving come to constitute a reason for him after he is disabused of the falsebelief as to the lighting conditions, but independently of his belief that thesweater is brown. Again, an analysis on which this is not the case is easy toprovide. The key is to realize that Jones perceived not just that the sweater isbrown, but also that it seems – better, looks (the visual mode of seeming) –brown. This latter is not, however, something he merely perceived, but alsosomething he believed in the perceiving of it. Later, learning that the lightingconditions at the time of his experience were standard, he comes to believethat the circumstances under which he had perceived that the sweater looksbrown are circumstances in which things in fact are the colors they look to be.He now infers from these beliefs both that the sweater is brown and that hehad perceived that it is. (On this analysis, Jones’s perceptual belief is acquiredinferentially; but the Jones case is atypical, and there is no suggestion thatsuch an inferentialist analysis applies to typical cases of perceptual beliefacquisition.43) Now Jones’s experience does figure for him as a reason forbelieving the sweater to be brown, but only insofar as its content is that thesweater looks brown. And this is something he believed. But nothing hedoesn’t believe functions as a reason for him. In particular, Jones doesn’t usethe experiential content that the sweater is brown itself, independently of hisbelief that he had had seen that it is brown, as a reason for coming to believethat it is. The analysis thus suffices to resist the McDowell’s anti-coherentistconclusion.

I have said that Jones, at the time of his perception that the sweater isbrown, believed that the sweater looks brown, but not that the sweater isbrown. I have also suggested that his belief that the sweater looks brown is abelief in the content of a perception that the sweater looks brown. Thus Jonesperceives both that the sweater is brown and that it looks brown. But thesemust not be taken as two distinct experiences, with distinct contents. Theseare but one experience with one content; the difference between them is theextent to which what seems to be the case in the experience is straightawaybelieved. In the ordinary situation, one endorses without effort or inferencethe content of what one perceives. On also endorses the various seemings thatcharacterize that perception. Ordinarily, when one sees (hears) aright, onebelieves what one sees (hears), but one also sees (hears) how things look(sound) and also believes that things so look (sound). But these visual,


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

auditory (or other) seemings do not play any cognitive role as such in theordinary case. They do so only in the uncanny circumstances in whichseemings have their home.

Treating Jones’s experience as a counterfactual reason only is a fairlyobvious move. Indeed, it is an instance of the standard epistemologicaltreatment of these sorts of cases as involving the defeat by the agent’s beliefsof the warrant conferring status that such perceptual states would ordinarilyhave. My analysis of Jones’s subsequent coming to believe the content ofwhat he earlier perceived to be the case is likewise fairly obvious andintuitive. Thus it seems likely that McDowell has other grounds, notfollowing directly from examples like the case of Jones, for holding that thecontents of perceptions-that constitute entitlements independently of theirbeing believed.44

One reason McDowell or any other proponent of the Rational ResponseConstraint might suppose that perceptions-that must function as entitlementsindependently of belief in its contents is the suspicion that the contrary viewthat I am advocating does not actually meet the demands of the Constraint.Granting that on my view, belief acquisition is the taking in of propositionallystructured aspects of the world, and that these are suited to constitute reasons,still, it might seem that process is not itself a rational one in any sensesufficient to satisfy the demand for a rational linkage between mind andworld. This objection would be akin to the epiphenomenalist objection thatplagues both Davidson’s account of how reasons can be causes, and, as wesaw earlier, any attempt to resolve the tension between interpretivism asDavidson understands it and the Constraint by simply identifying externalcauses and reasons. In those contexts, the objection is that the character of acause as a reason does no work in accounting for how the cause brings aboutan action or belief. Thus the cause qua reason is inessential, and we are stillwithout an account of how the rational character of the cause was relevant toits role in producing its supposed effect. Similarly here, the objection wouldgo, while what is taken in in perception-that cum belief is the kind of thingthat can be a reason, this feature plays no role in explaining how it comes to bebelieved. In the alternative, if we regard the worldly content as first taken in inperceptual experience, and then believed in virtue of that experience’s beingan entitlement to belief in its content, then the worldly content figures inbelief formation as a reason, thus genuinely satisfying the rationalityconstraint.

But this objection, it seems to me, will not stand. The process by whichperception-that cum perceptual belief arises in fact crucially involves thepropositional, hence logical, rational structure, of the content taken in. It isessential to one’s taking in a given perceptual content that it engage logicallywith one’s epistemic set,45 and such engagement depends, obviously, uponsuch logical structure. It is, then, crucially because of the logical structure that


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

suits the content of a perception to function as a reason that that contentcomes to be believed. It is of course true that the process I describe here is nota matter of ordinary reasoning; the contents of perceptual beliefs are notarrived at, in the ordinary case, by inference.46 This would again fly in theface of the idea that it is irrational to draw inferences from what one does notbelieve. Moreover, for a proponent of the Rational Response Constraint toinsist that the only way that a belief formation process could be rational is forit to be inferential would seem to commit him to the problematic claim thatordinary perceptual belief acquisition is inferential. In extraordinary case,such as where we have reason to suspect that perceptual conditions are non-standard, it takes extra effort to resist the normal belief in what we see, orseem to see. But in the ordinary case, we believe what we perceive to be thecase without any additional mental act or effort.47 And one who rejects theidea that belief acquisition is always a matter of inference and yet holds that itis a rational process, will of course have to admit some non-inferentialprocess as rational. Given that, on my view, the logical character of thecontent of perception-that cum belief is essential to its being taken in, suchtaking in seems adequate. Indeed, in light of the fact that belief acquisition isnot always a matter of inference, it seems to me that some such account asmine would have to be acknowledged to apply in the case of the process bywhich perception-that becomes belief in any event. I don’t see that conceivingperceptual belief as rationally, but not inferentially, grounded in perceptions-that is a better way of satisfying the Rational Response Constraint thanregarding perceptual belief itself to arise by a rational, but not inferential,relation directly to facts perceived. So I don’t see that the Rational ResponseConstraint demands that we think of perceptions-that as in all cases, or in theusual ones, distinct from perceptual beliefs themselves.

Thus there seems to be no compelling reason to hold that, in all cases, or inthe ordinary case, perception-that falls short of belief. Thus we are under nopressure to hold either the implausible view that perceptual belief acquisitionis always a matter of inference (from seemings or other contentful states), orthat when perception-that does fall short of belief, it nonetheless is a reason,entitling the perceiver to believe its content.

It remains to tie up one loose end. Epistemological coherentism involvesmore than just the claim that the only thing that can count as a reason forholding a belief – as part of a justification – is another belief. Afoundationalist might well hold the same, simply claiming that some sortsof beliefs are basic, and in need of no justification. Thus coherentism, as analternative to foundationalism also depends upon the claim that there are nobasic beliefs in this sense, i.e., that all beliefs stand in need of justification.Earlier, I said that Davidson has given good reasons why a perceptualjudgment cannot count as an epistemological foundation. If a state is ajudgment, it is a candidate for truth or falsity, and at least in the case of


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

empirical judgments, the possibility that it is false must grip any responsibleagent. After all, in Davidson’s phrase, it may be lying,48 hence cannot betrusted as a secure foundation, and stands in need of justification. This mightseem in tension with the view I have been advocating, on which perceptualjudgments whose contents are worldly facts play a role in epistemic economy.For since there are of course no false (or true) facts, there is a sense in whichno perception-that can lie. But the anti-foundationalist insight is notcompromised by the intrinsic veridicality of perceptions-that; they are notimmune from the demand for justification by appeal to other judgments. Forwhile such states themselves cannot lie, they don’t wear their status asgenuine perceptions on their sleeves, and the subject cannot tell from thecontent of a perception-that alone that it is genuine.49 Thus each ostensibleperception-that is suspect, even though the genuine ones cannot lie. Sincesuspect, each must be interrogated. This, of course, is done by evaluating itscoherence with other of the agent’s judgments; that is, by justifying it byappeal to the agent’s beliefs. That some beliefs have intrinsically veridicalcontents does not entail that there are epistemically basic beliefs.

VII

To sum up, I have argued that the Interpretivist Thesis, as embodied inDavidson’s approach to the attribution of mental contents and to securing theobjectivity of the relation between mind and world, is not inconsistent withthe Rational Response Constraint. I have also urged that Davidson’s hostilityto facts is not only under-supported by the explicit arguments he has offeredagainst them, but in tension with interpretivism itself. Davidson’s indepen-dent arguments against the idea that the testimony of the senses has anyepistemic significance and for coherentism tell against neither the claim thatworldly facts can be contents taken in in perception nor the claim that theycan, when so taken in, play a role in justification. Given that interpretivismdemands facts, and facts can be reasons, adherents the Interpretivist Thesisneed not reject the Rational Response Constraint; they can embrace it.50

NOTES

1 McDowell himself tries to show that the Rational Response Constraint can be and is satisfiedby the taking in of facts in perception. See his Mind and World (Harvard University Press,1994), where, echoing Wittgenstein, he writes ‘when we see that such and such is the case,we, and our thinking, do not stop short of the fact’, p. 29 (see generally pp. 26ff).

2 In my ‘Interpreting Davidson’s Omniscient Interpreter’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy(1995), pp. 335–374, I offer a detailed defense of Davidson’s anti-skeptical strategy against anumber of objections.

3 Davidson follows Quine’s account of radical translation here. See, e.g. Word and Object(MIT Press: Cambridge, 1960), chap. 2.


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

4 ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, reprinted in Lepore (ed), Truth andInterpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson (Cambridge: Blackwell,1986), pp. 307–19, at p. 317 (emphasis added).

5 ‘Pursuit of the Concept of Truth’, in Leonardi and Santambrogio (eds), On Quine: NewEssays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 15.

6 ‘Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective’, in Coates and Hutlo (eds), Current Issues inIdealism, (Thoemmes Press, 1996) pp. 155–176, at p. 166 (emphasis added). An earlierversion of this paper appears as ‘Three Varieties of Knowledge’, in A. Phillips Griffiths (ed),A. J. Ayer: Memorial Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), reprinted inD. Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Clarendon: Oxford University Press,2001) at pp. 203–20.

7 ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, pp. 317–18.8 See Davidson, ‘Mental Events’, in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1980), pp. 207–227, especially p. 221ff. Some care is required in formulating thispoint, for while it is true to say that only mental events have descriptions as elements of arational pattern, it is not quite right to say that all mental events do so. For on the definition of‘mental event’ Davidson offers in ‘Mental Events’, a mental event is any event that has auniquely identifying description essentially using a mental verb. And for trivial reasons, itturns out that many physical events one would not ordinarily class as mental have suchdescriptions. Thus, the event of two particles colliding in some distant part of the universemight be a mental event in virtue of being the only event of its physical type that issimultaneous with some particular agent’s believing some proposition. However, the merefact that such a physical event is also a mental event does not entail that it fits into a rationalpattern, which fit is, for Davidson, essential to an event’s being a possible reason. Thanks toRay Elugardo for reminding me of this point.

9 The figurative term ‘brute’ nicely captures the sense in which external causes as Davidsonconceives them cannot play a role in satisfying the rationality constraint. They have novoice, so cannot make claims or demands upon us to which we could be answerable.

10 Davidson, ‘Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective’, p. 166. Much the same wording appearsin ‘Three Varieties of Knowledge’, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, at p. 213.

11 ‘Differential reaction’ is a clumsier expression than ‘behavior’, but I use it in order to avoid acrucial ambiguity in the latter. It can mean ‘bodily movement’, as in classical behaviorism,on the one hand, or something more intentionally loaded, such as an action in the full sense,on the other. In the Davidsonian context, these issues matter, for the ideal of radicalinterpretation places constraints on the extent to which interpreters may appeal to eventsinvolving the speakers they interpret under intentional description. The exact nature, scopeand motivation of these constraints is a matter of considerable unclarity and great import,and I cannot go into it here. In this paper, when I speak of the differential reactions to whichradical interpreters appeal in triangulation, I mean whatever it is about a speaker to which aradical interpreter must appeal, under whatever description she must use, in ascribingoccasion beliefs to him. Presumably, Davidson himself believes that the way interpretersappeal to speakers’ manifestations of occasion belief does not violate the constraints ofradical interpretation, and I will assume that Davidson is right about this.In her ‘How to Get an Interpretivist Committed’, Protosociology 14, pp. 77–117 (2000),Rebecca Kukla argues that interpreters must approach the speakers they interpret asirreducibly intentional, and that the only reason Davidson supposes, or needs to supposeotherwise, is a pernicious, residual reductionism. Presumably, his response would be that heis motivated not by reductionism, but by the desire to avoid circularity in the project ofexplaining meaning and intentional content. This does not imply a commitment to the viewthat the intentional is constituted by or reducible to the non-intentional.

12 ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, p. 315.13 ‘Pursuit of the Concept of Truth’, p. 15. (Emphasis added). Given his official hostility to

facts, Davidson would likely regard this passage as a slip, or at best a facon de parler.Elsewhere, for example, he speaks of facts as what ‘make sentences and theories true’, butimmediately claims that the point could be better made without the mention of facts. ‘On theVery Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, at p. 194. Forthis reason, I have not made much of the passage quoted in the text. But if my argument is


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

sound, interpretive triangulation cannot succeed without an appeal to facts; interpreters mustuse facts, even if neither they, nor descriptions of the process in which they are engaged,explicitly mention them.

14 ‘Reply to Dagfinn Føllesdal’, in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson, (Open Court, 1999),pp. 729–732, at 731.

15 ‘Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective’, p. 166.16 ‘Pursuit of the Concept of Truth’, p. 15.17 This is clear from the following remark he makes in assessing McDowell’s position: ‘I

assume, perhaps wrongly, that [McDowell] does not believe that intentional properties arerealized in the world except in thinking creatures’. Reply to John McDowell, in ThePhilosophy of Donald Davidson, at p. 107). Davidson’s assumption about McDowell’s viewis, I believe, mistaken.

18 This will raise a red flag. For the sorts of facts to which I have said interpreters must appealare causal facts obtaining between occasional events and speaker’s behaviors. And thus Iseem to be committing myself to the claim that we can perceive causal relations. I am notsure I would bother to deny the claim. But in any event, I need not commit myself to it. Wesaw that Davidson’s claim that interpreters must appeal to the causes of belief overstateswhat is required in radical interpretation. So too may the claim that they must appealspecifically to causes of differential behaviors. Appealing to facts concerning merecorrelations between occasional events and such behaviors may well suffice. And surelythese facts can be perceived, if any can.

19 I examine these arguments in detail in my ‘All Facts Great and Small’, Protosoziologie:Cognitive Semantics II, (1998), pp. 18–40.

20 ‘Truth and Meaning’, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1984), pp. 17–36, at pp. 19ff. The slingshot also appears in ‘True to the Facts’, id. pp.37–54, and in ‘The Structure and Content of Truth’, Journal of Philosophy LXXXVII(1990), pp. 279–328.

21 See Barwise and Perry, ‘Semantic Innocence and Uncompromising Situations’, in P. A.French, T. E. Euhling and H. K. Wettstein (eds), Midwest Studies in Philosophy VI(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), pp. 387–404; J. Searle, TheConstruction of Social Reality (Free Press, 1995), Appendix. A lone exception appears tobe Barry Taylor. See his Modes of Occurrence: Verbs, Adverbs, and Events (Oxford:Blackwell 1985), pp. 30ff. Taylor’s view is explicitly designed to accomodate Quineanqualms about intensional semantics, qualms Quine generated in part by means of slingshotarguments.

22 See H. Hochberg, ‘Explaining Facts’, Metaphilosophy 6 (1975), pp. 277–302. Hochberg’sdemonstration of the Slingshot’s invalidity involves, perhaps contentiously, treating one ofthe argument’s crucial premises as being stated in a misleading short form notation for aRussellian definite description. Once the short form is replaced with the full, canonicalRusselian expression, it can be seen that one of the argument’s central inferences does not gothrough. Hochberg’s grounds for so treating the notation seem to me solid. One of theargument’s inferences plainly treats the descriptive content of the premise attributively.Hochberg further shows that to cure the invalidity of the argument one would have to add apremise to the effect that all sentences that have the same truth-value share reference, orcorrespond to the same fact. Such a premise would obviously beg the questions here.

On the other hand, Hochberg’s analysis may possibly apply only to Davidson’sformulation of the Slingshot, or some limited class of formulations like it, and not againstothers that purport to force the same sort of collapsing conclusion. Stephen Neale, in hisFacing Facts (Oxford University Press, 2001) presents a thorough and precise analysis of theSlingshot, and constructs, on the basis of Godel’s version, a deductive argument that appearsto be the strongest possible Slingshot. While I cannot go into the details here, Neale makequite clear that even this version cannot force the collapsing conclusion. For example, itcannot do so where definite descriptions are given a Russelian, rather than referential,treatment (this marks a consonance with Hochberg’s analysis, which surprisingly, Nealedoes not discuss). See Facing Facts, p. 221, 223.

23 In ‘Explaining Facts’, Hochberg defends the correspondence theory against this charge ofcircular vacuity.


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

24 ‘The Structure and Content of Truth’, p. 304.25 Davidson writes that ‘there is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like

what many philosophers and linguists have supposed’. ‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs’,in Philosophical Grounds of Rationality, Grandy and Warner (eds) (Oxford: ClarendonPress 1986), pp. 157–174, at 174.

26 This argument is similar to Sellars’ attack on the Myth of the Given in ‘Empiricism and thePhilosophy of Mind’, which Davidson only later cites as a forerunner of his own.Interestingly, Sellars’ attack is specifically directed at the idea that one sort of episode couldboth serve as a terminus of justification and ground the possession of empirical concepts andcontent. He does not, however, draw Davidson’s coherentist conclusion; he does not denythat our knowledge may, as a matter of its justificatory structure, rest on foundations ofperceptual belief. But he does deny that our conceptual capacities, hence our knowledge, restontogenetically on a foundation of sensory episodes.

27 ‘A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, at p. 310.28 Ibid.29 Ibid.30 Ibid., p. 311 (Emphasis added.)31 Ibid., pp. 311–312.32 Ibid., p. 310.33 D. Davidson, ‘Reply to John McDowell’, in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson, p. 107.

Davidson makes the same point in his ‘Reply to Roger F. Gibson’, in U. Zeglen (ed.),Donald Davidson: Truth, Meaning and Knowledge (Routledge, 1999), pp. 134–135, at p.135.

34 That is, except for purposes of demonstration by reductio, conditional proof, and the like.35 This is not to say that the only way to respond rationally to a reason is to employ it in

inference.36 McDowell offered this scenario as a counter-example to Davidson’s coherentism in his

‘Comment on Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective’ (unpublished manuscript),presented at the Pacific Division Meetings of the American Philosophical Association, in2002, in a special session in honor of the publication of Davidson’s collection of that title(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). McDowell also makes use of like cases in hisWoodbridge lectures, ‘Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant and Intentionality’, Journalof Philosophy XCV:9 (1998), at p. 437, n.10, and again at p. 474, and in his ‘Response toBarry Stroud’, in Reading McDowell (ed.) Nicholas Smith (London: Routledge, 2002), at pp.277–79.

37 J. McDowell, ‘Comment on Donald Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective’, p. 14.38 Davidson, as McDowell recognizes, simply rejects the first claim. On his view, the locution

‘perception that P’ simply identifies a kind of belief caused by external events. See ‘ACoherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge’, at pp. 310–312. I have already said much thatbears on this claim and its relation to interpretivism per se. But for present purposes, simplynote that the considerations adduced in the text in support of the coherentist dictum have noevident bearing on McDowell’s first claim. They say only that whatever states we have cancount as reasons only if they are beliefs. Since my concern here is to defend the dictum andthose considerations, rather than Davidson’s epistemology as a whole, I am free to accept, asI do, the claim.

39 One non-trivial modification would involve the idea that a person whose conceptualcapacities have not yet developed in a way that permits them to have beliefs couldnonetheless perceive that something is the case. Later, once they have gained the relevantcapacities, they might be said to remember having perceived that it was the case, and now toknow that that it was, in part on that basis. Something like this is suggested by Sellars in‘Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind’, in the course of suggesting a way in which we canunderstand how a person could come to make perceptual knowledge claims, despite suchclaims depending on one’s having beliefs about one’s own reliability as a perceiver. For aprovocative and original reading of Sellars, which denies that Sellars means to tell a literalstory about the development of the capacity for perceptual knowledge, see R. Kukla, ‘Myth,Memory, and Misrecognition’ in Sellars’ ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’,Philosophical Studies 101 (2000), pp. 161–211.


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

40 This can be derived from the principle, adduced earlier in support of the dictum, that, ifsomething is a reason (an entitlement) for an agent, then it is rational for her to employ it as apremise in reasoning (exercise it), combined with the claim that if it is rational for a subjectto use some content as a premise in reasoning, then the subject would be blameless for doingso. One might of course be subject to a variety of other sorts of blame. Indeed, the matter is abit subtler than the text suggests. Consider the case of one who believes that P, and that Pimplies Q, and is epistemically entitled to these beliefs. We would say she is epistemicallyentitled to believe that Q. However, if she were to infer Q from the conditional alone, shewould be subject to epistemic blame for believing something to which she is epistemicallyentitled. A better, if not perfect formulation of what I am getting at in the text might be ‘oneis not subject to epistemic blame for exercising an epistemic entitlement by epistemicallylegitimate means’. This does not destroy the parallel with the legal case, which invitessimilar refinement.

41 Acording to the scenario, Jones’s believes that the illumination ‘makes it impossible to tellwhat colors things are’. Given this, the fact that the sweater looks brown is presumably not asufficient ground for thinking that it is even probably brown. But given that there is no reasonto think it even probably brown, and perfectly good reason for thinking it some color (as allsweaters are), then the perception is plausibly a reason for thinking that the sweater which isperceived is not brown. So to claim that Jones’s perception, given his beliefs, entitled him tobelieve that the sweater is brown would be to claim that that perception entitled him both to abelief and to its denial. Surely this is to be avoided, if possible.

42 McDowell admits that in light of false beliefs about the probability of hallucination and thelike (presumably including illusion, as in the Jones case), ‘it may be doxastically virtuous’for a subject not to suppose that a perception that provides her with a justification for beliefin its content. But, he continues, ‘it is completely unobvious that the right notion ofjustification or warrant, for thinking about perceptual knowledge, is controlled by suchconsiderations of doxastic virtue, so that our subject does not have a justification for thebelief – as opposed to a notion that connects with that perfectly intelligible talk ofopportunities to know, which we can be prevented from taking, in unfavorable cases, by acaution dictated by doxastic virtue’. ‘Response to Crispin Wright’, in Reading McDowell, atp. 289. But what McDowell claims is ‘completely unobvious’, I claim to be at worstimperfectly obvious, in light of the intuitive link between the rights bestowed byentitlements and the idea that one is blameless for the (relevantly innocent) exercise of one’srights. More importantly, speaking about counterfactual entitlements as I do in the textpermits us to connect perfectly well with talk of perception providing opportunities to know.See also n. 44.

43 In any event, it is doubtful that the sort of analysis I have given could be generalized to allcases of perceptual belief. For on that analysis, Jones’s perceptual belief that the sweaterlooked brown plays an essential role in his coming to believe by inference that it is brown,and it seems impossible to account for how that first belief could be arrived at by inference.

44 Indeed, McDowell himself supposes that the dictum would be vindicated ‘if it were right torestrict the entitlements a subject has to those she can cite, given her doxastic set’. J.McDowell, ‘Comment on Donald Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective’, p. 14.But in the context of this remark, McDowell gives an uncharacteristically tepid ground forresisting that option. He first points out that to take the option would be to take a first-personal approach to epistemic entitlement, which is in some sense true. He then counselsagainst this approach, on the ground that ‘epistemology’s topic should be, not what subjectsknow, but what they are in a position to know’ (p. 15), a distinction brought to light in justsuch cases as that of Jones. But understanding entitlements in the first-personal way to whichMcDowell objects need not limit epistemology’s topic in the way he suggests it would. Thestudy of interesting counterfactual entitlements, i.e., of what one would be entitled to, andwhy, in salient counterfactual circumstances, would remain. Moreover, the distinctionMcDowell presents between what subjects know and what they are in a position to knowitself depends upon recognizing an epistemically significant difference between the cases,drawn precisely along first-personal/third-personal lines. Recognizing that difference byanalyzing it at least in part in terms of the difference between actual and counterfactualentitlements should have no tendency to divert attention from either side of the line.


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

45 The case of Jones might be thought to provide a counterexample, in that what Jones takes in– that the sweater is brown – does not mesh with what Jones believes – that it seems brownand that the lighting is such that things are not the colors they seem to be. But first, it does notfollow from the fact that a content must engage with one’s epistemic set in order for it to betaken in that it be consistent with that set. Indeed, such a requirement would prohibit our everperceiving things that would force us to change our other beliefs. Second, as I pointed outabove, Jones also perceives that the sweater looks brown. This is certainly consistent withwhat he believes, and is not in fact a different experiential content.

46 One might wish to claim that the process is a kind of reasoning after all, since it clearly doesinvolve crucially the logical structures of both what is taken in and the epistemic set intowhich it is taken. And it would be natural in this light to speak of what is taken in in this sortof ‘reasoning’ as ‘reasons’. But I do not wish to quibble about terminology. What matters isthat the propositional content taken in not entitle the perceiver to belief in that content,independently of its being believed. Speaking of the process of perceiving-that as‘reasoning’ and even of the contents taken in as ‘reasons’ does not entail that we take it to doso.

47 Such a view would fly in the face of the phenomenology of perception. In the ordinary case,perceptual belief acquisition is unmediated by any apparent inference or other process. Westraightaway believe what we see. Both Davidson and McDowell reject inferentialism in theordinary acquisition of perceptual belief. In Davidson’s case, his causal account is obviouslynon-inferential. And in Mind and World, McDowell says that, ‘in outer experience, a subjectis passively saddled’ with contents (p. 31), and that ‘not … all of one’s beliefs are the resultof actively making up one’s mind’, p. 60. Indeed this is crucial to McDowell’s retention of adistinctive role for receptivity in his quasi-Kantian picture of cognition, without which hewould be genuinely subject to the charge of idealism.

48 To be precise, Davidson makes this point about information delivered by epistemicintermediaries, and I have denied that perceptions-that are intermediaries. But theintermediary status of an information delivering state is inessential. What is essential isthat the veridicality of the state cannot be discerned from awareness of the state alone.

49 There is no need to hold that the difference between genuine, veridical perception andmistaken or illusory judgment with putatively perceptual content must be immediatelyapparent to the perceiver. As McDowell has argued, that two states are indistinguishable‘from the inside’ does not entail that there is no ontological difference between them. SeeMcDowell’s ‘Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge’, in Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality(Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 369–94, for a discussion of this point.

50 I presented drafts or portions of this paper at Carleton University, University of Victoria,University of Toronto, and meetings of the Canadian Philosophical Association. Mythinking, and the paper, have benefited greatly from the participation of my audiences onthese occasions, to whom I am indebted. I am also grateful to Robert Stainton for extensivecomments on an earlier draft and much fruitful conversation, and to John McDowell, AndreKukla and Fred Schuler for valuable discussion as well. My greatest debt is to RebeccaKukla, who provided insightful substantive comments on a number of drafts of varioussections of the paper, and who also helped me to organize my arguments into a much morecohesive and digestible whole than I had managed to do on my own. The errors are mine.

Received 21 October 2002

Richard Manning, Department of Philosophy, Carleton University, Ottawa ON K1S 5B6,Canada. E-mail: [email protected]


Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Nor

thea

ster

n U

nive

rsity

] at

07:

46 0

9 O

ctob

er 2

014

Documents

Interpretation, Reasons, and Facts