Review - Problems of Rationality
by Donald Davidson
Oxford University Press, 2004
Review by Manuel Bremer
May 17th 2005 (Volume 9, Issue 20)

Problems of Rationality is the fourth volume of the collected essays by Donald Davidson. Up to now, minor editing it has been prepared by the late Davidson himself. (There is one more volume of essays forthcoming.)

The book consists of four parts. The first part "Rationality and Value" deals with the idea of objectivity as applied even to evaluations, i.e. questions of moral assessment, a topic Davidson usually does not treat. The second part "Problems and Proposals" deals with several questions in the vicinity of a theory of rationality interpretation of supposedly rational behavior. The third part "Irrationality" collects some essays Davidson has written over the years that deal with failures of rationality and irrational conduct. Additionally to the essays there is a long interview (conducted by Ernie Lepore) on Davidson's biography and the development of his ideas.

This book provides no access to Davidson's ideas or their strength if the reader is not familiar with the "classic" papers related to the topics under discussion (e.g. "Radical Interpretation", "Rational Animals", "Mental Events" …) and Davidson's wider philosophical outline. In fact many of the ideas provided by the essays can be gathered from other essays (especially those in the first three volumes of the collected essays). Davidson's remarks on objectivity of value are more outspoken in this volume. More original and requiring less background in Davidson's other work are the papers on irrationality.

Part One deals with the thesis that the concepts both of objective reality/truth and objective value are presumptions of rational thought and speech. Value judgments are as objective as we -- naively -- take them to be. The reason for this, however, is not that some of the usual objectivist ethical conceptions (like Kantianism or Utilitarianism) is right, but that agreement on values in built into our common understanding (delineated by radical interpretation) just as agreement on which sentences are true. Objectivity of knowledge is an idea that comes with thought having any propositional content at all. One can only have a thought with some specific content if one has the idea of one's belief of the world being true or false. Thought (in Davidson's sense) is not possible for creatures that do not have the concept of objective truth (and so the concept of belief). "These mental attributes are, then, equivalent: to have a concept, to entertain propositions, to be able to form judgments, to have command of the concept of truth." (9) The idea of (propositional) objectivity is the notion of a proposition being true or false independent of one's beliefs and interests. Being assured of objectivity requires communication and a shared world. The same holds for objectivity of evaluations. There are significant moral disputes only because there is a shared idea of moral validity. As in the case of propositional truths the objectivity of moral judgments is founded in our determining what the content of a moral judgment is. To understand someone the interpreter projects not only her logic and (to some degree) her knowledge of the circumstances, but also her evaluations of the circumstances. The correlation established by arising common understanding between interpreter and interpreted speaker(s) is structurally similar in both domains: "it depends on there being a systematic relationship between the attitude-causing properties of things and events, and the attitudes they cause" (47). The linguistic community shares an understanding what is "good" and given a genuine dispute (of application of this concept) also shares the criteria that determine where the truth lies in these cases. Convergence should ultimately occur: "we should expect people who are enlightened and fully understand one another to agree on their basic values" (49).

Part Two takes up topics around the idea of radical interpretation and the attributed rationality with respect to the interpreted system. So Davidson criticizes the Turing-Test, not because one should exclude machines from the rational beings, but because of one of its methodological ingredients: shielding the behavior of the candidates from the judges view. Given the idea of radical interpretation what is needed is predominantly to see how the object under interpretation uses its words in its dealings with its environment.  Davidson stresses the normative character of the attitude ascriptions imposed by (radical) interpretation. Norms like reasonableness and plausibility, again, do not apply to (syntactic) programs but to behavior in a context. Other papers in this part rehearse Davidson's arguments that to have thoughts requires having language ("What Thought Requires" rehearses "Rational Animals") or his idea of a unified theory of interpretation that deals with meaning, degrees of belief and utility assessments at the same time starting with speaker's preferences for some sentence to be true (the more well known papers on this from the 1990s will appear in the fifth volume of essays).

Part Three deals with irrationality and takes up Davidson's treatment of akrasia (doing what one knows to be not the best) in the second volume. Davidson has to have a theory on irrationality not only because it is widespread in our life, but especially because his methodology of rational interpretation may be misunderstood as working on the assumption that everyone is rational. Davidson considers his explanation as a vindication of three ideas to be found in Freud: (a) the mind contains "semi-independent structures" characterized by mental attributes, (b) some parts of the mind are "in important respects like people", (c) some of our dispositions "must be viewed on the model of physical dispositions" (171). Davidson's basic idea is that the irrational person has compartmentalized her knowledge and attitudes in such a way that although the individual compartments are rational one compartment (or judgment in that compartment) becomes non-rationally (associatively or otherwise causally) activated by another compartment although no rational inference would be allowed. The ultimate motive is specified mentally (given its proper roles in its compartment) although its workings are explained in a fashion close to physical explanations. In cases of irrationality a causal relation of content substitutes for a missing or distorted logical relation. So Davidson in a way agrees with Freud that the mind may be partitioned into quasi-independent structures that interact, but he disagrees with a purely non-mental characterization (like talking of "drives"), because "when the cause is described in non-mental terms, we necessarily lose touch with what is needed to explain the element of irrationality" (180). Whereas it is not necessary for the irrational motives to be "unconscious" the requirement to have a theory of irrationality justifies "Freud's mixture of standard reason explanations with causal interactions more like those of the natural sciences" (185).

© 2005 Manuel Bremer

Manuel Bremer, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany