In his presidential address to the American Philosophical Association in 1973 and in subsequent writings, Davidson turns his attention to the “philosophical fallout from the approach to truth and interpretation” that he recommends and which we have been surveying over the course of the preceding chapters (Davidson 1984a: xviii). This fallout casts doubt on central threads of the weave that defines European philosophy since the seventeenth century.

The early modern philosophers are linked to one another and to their twentieth-century heirs by their efforts to answer the sceptic's challenge to validate the objectivity of human knowledge. Russell, for example, writes that Descartes

And Moritz Schlick, one of the founders of logical positivism in the early-twentieth century, observes that “all important attempts at establishing a theory of knowledge grow out of the problem concerning the certainty of human knowledge. … This problem in turn originates in the wish for absolute certainty” (Schlick 1959: 209). This “wish for absolute certainty” is heir to the Cartesian drive to meet the sceptical challenge.