Keyboard Shortcuts?

I’m still not completely happy that I’ve properly explained the evidence which is the starting point. Perhaps this is a better way to put it: the evidence is evidence that you could possess in advance of knowing what any particular individual believes, desires, intends and so on.

I’ve just been saying that Dennett’s account of the Intentional Strategy isn’t much use as an accounnt of radical interpretation because it doesn’t explain what sort of evidence would be useful in inferring facts about minds. Fortunately Davidson’s theory is more illuminating ...

Holding true is an attitude Ayesha has to a sentence. To hold a sentence true is to have a belief. So the evidence we are starting with is really evidence about beliefs. But, importantly, can know that Ayesha holds a sentence true without knowing what the sentence means and so without knowing what Ayesha believes.

So evidence of this kind is evidence that is in principle available to a radical interpreter at the start.

The ‘p’ picks out a proposition; it may be that Ayesha holds this sentence true because it is raining, because her eyes are open, and because there are splashes in the puddle on the roof outside her window.

Note that we are interested not in which sentences Ayesha holds true but in what causes here to change her beliefs---what causes her to come to hold a sentence true.

At any particular time there will be many propositions p such that Ayesha comes to hold S true because p. As already mentioned, Ayesha comes to hold the sentence ‘It is raining’ true because it is raining, because she has her eyes open and because there are splashes in the puddle on the roof outside her window.

There is, then, no hope of inferring what Ayesha believes from a single change in Ayesha’s holding a sentence true.

But we can consider many different events of Ayesha coming to hold a sentence true at different times. Consider, for instance, that on one occasion Ayesha comes to hold the sentence ‘It is raining’ true because she has her eyes open. On another occasion, she comes to hold this sentence true while cycling through an intense storm; on this occasion, the fact that she has her eyes open plays no role in her coming to hold the sentence ‘It is raining’ true.

The evidence confirms or falsifies a generalisation of the form, Ayesha comes to hold S true because p.

The hope is this: if we have enough evidence, we will find that the only generalisation supported by all the evidence is this one: Ayesha comes to hold the sentence ‘It is raining’ true because it is raining.

This is unrealistic, of course. However Davidson’s theory doesn’t strictly require this because sentences are things with structure. They contain elements, the words, which reoccur in different sentences. Davidson exploits this in making his theory of radical interpretation much more sophisticated than the simplified version I am describing, and avoiding the implausible notion that we would observe Ayesha coming to hold each sentence true millions of times. But we can ignore the complication as it won’t be central to our interests in social cognition (it would be more relevant for philosophy of language).

So, idealising and simplifying, we have lots of evidence which, for each of many sentences like ‘It’s raining’, supports a unique generalisation about why Ayesha comes to hold that sentence true. For example, the only generalisation supported by all the evidence for the sentence ‘It’s raining’ is the one that says Ayesha holds this sentence true because it’s raining.

We already saw that this assumption is required by Dennett’s Intentional Strategy. The assumption allows us to draw a conclusion about meaning:

For our purposes you could replace this by ‘S means that p’, if you believed in meanings. (There are good reasons for appealing to truth conditions but they aren’t central on this course.)