Introduction

Essays on Actions and Events (Davidson 2001a, henceforth EAE) brings together seminal papers by Donald Davidson, one of the most influential philosophers in the analytic tradition in the latter half of the twentieth century, in the areas of the philosophy of action, the metaphysics of events and the philosophy of psychology. Davidson's central contributions to philosophy are presented in EAE and its companion volume Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Davidson 2001b), which deals with issues in the theory of meaning and philosophy of language. The fifteen essays collected in EAE are divided into three groups: “Intention and Action”, “Event and Cause” and “Philosophy of Psychology”. The first deals with the nature of agency, action and action explanation. The central theme is that actions are events – bodily movements – caused and explained by reasons, construed as beliefs and desires, which make sense of the action from the point of view of the agent. The second deals with the metaphysics of events, which Davidson argues are dated particulars and part of the metaphysics of ordinary language. The third deals with issues in the philosophy of mind, principally the relation of the mental to the physical, and features Davidson's celebrated thesis of anomalous monism, according to which each mental event is identical to some physical event, although there are no strict laws connecting the mental with the physical. This essay surveys the central contributions of EAE, giving most attention to the work in the philosophy of action, which is connected with and prefigures the work in the latter two parts of EAE.

Donald Davidson's work on the theory of meaning has been enormously influential since the publication of “Truth and Meaning” in 1967. His central proposal was that an understanding of what it is for “words to mean what they do” (Davidson 1984b, p. viii) can be pursued by way of constructing and confirming for a speaker an axiomatic truth theory, modeled on a Tarski-style axiomatic truth definition, for his language. In this chapter, we first discuss the background of Davidson's famous suggestion, initially introduced in “Truth and Meaning.” We begin with his arguments for the importance of attending to the compositionality of natural languages in §1, then turn in §2 to his criticisms of traditional approaches to the theory of meaning. In §3, we discuss Davidson's introduction of a truth theory as the vehicle for a compositional meaning theory; in §4, we explore some interpretive issues that arise about his intentions, specifically the question of whether Davidson intended to replace the traditional project (providing an account of meaning) with a more tractable one (providing an account of truth conditions), or whether he intended to pursue the traditional project by novel means. We argue that, though Davidson has been widely misunderstood, his intention is clearly the latter, and, specifically, that his goal has always been to give an account of what illuminating constraints a truth theory can meet that would suffice for it to be used to understand any potential utterance of an object language sentence.

Donald Davidson has been one of the most influential philosophers working in the analytic tradition in the last half of the twentieth century. He has made seminal contributions to a wide range of subjects: the philosophy of language and the theory of meaning, the philosophy of action, the philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics, and the theory of rationality. His principal work, spread out in a series of articles stretching over nearly forty years, exhibits a unity rare among philosophers contributing to so many different topics. His essays are elegant, but they are also noted for their compact, sometimes cryptic style, and for their difficulty. Themes and arguments in different essays overlap, and later papers often presuppose familiarity with earlier work. Together, they form a mosaic that presents a systematic account of the nature of human thought, action, and speech, and their relation to the natural world, that is one of the most subtle and impressive systems to emerge in analytic philosophy in the last fifty years.

The unity of Davidson's work lies in the central role that reflection on how we are able to interpret the speech of another plays in understanding the nature of meaning, the propositional attitudes (beliefs, desires, intentions, and so on), and our epistemic position with respect to our own minds, the minds of others, and the world around us.