Essays on Actions and Events, and: Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (review)

Essays on actions and eventsis the first of five books in a series by Oxford University Press that honors Donald Davidson’s influential contribution to philosophy of mind and language. Except for two new essays, the second edition is identical to the first.

The selected essays are organized into three parts. The five essays in Part 1, ‘Intention and action’, outline D’s theory of action that is founded on the core idea that reason explanations are causal explanations. In the first essay, he presents the notion of ‘primary reason’ and shows that explanations of action can be formulated in terms of beliefs and desires. Reliance on reason in his theory raises the question of irrational belief and action. In the second essay, D provides a reasonable account of why the strongest reason need not be the strongest cause. The next challenge for his theory is to describe the nature of action and agency. His action ‘under a description’ adequately explains the distinction between things that only occur to people and the things they intentionally do (Essay 3). The most vulnerable part of causal theories is about free actions. D argues that freedom to act could not be defined as a causal power without assuming the notion of intention (Essay 4). A major revision occurs in the fifth essay. D gives up the view that there is no primitive state of intending, and concludes that future intentions play a decisive role in what the actor is to do.

Part 2, ‘Event and cause’, as a whole is essentially a presentation of D’s semantics of natural language, ranging over discussions about the logical forms of verbal actions (Essay 6), identity statements of events (Essays 7 and 8), and the event ontology (Essays 9 and 10). In the first three essays, D defends and elaborates his identity theory entitled ‘anomalous monism’, for which he seeks evidence from the compatibility of what he calls three principles—the principle of causal causes, the principle of the nomological character of causality, and the anomalism of the mental. The other two essays in this section were written individually for Carl Hempel’s causal view of action and David Hume’s analysis of pride. One appended essay serves as a supplement for his event ontology, and the other reflects his adoption of Willard Quine’s views on event identity.

The Davidsonian theory of knowledge represents the central theme in the third book in the series, Subjective, intersubjective, objective. This slim volume presents D’s ambitious project of constructing a comprehensive theory framing linguistic and nonlinguistic behaviors together in the interpretation of meaning.

Fourteen essays are grouped into three parts: ‘Subjective’, ‘Intersubjective’, and ‘Objective’. The last essay provides an overview of main ideas in the book, where D categorizes three sorts of propositional knowledge, namely, knowledge of one’s own mind, knowledge of other mental contents, and knowledge of the shared environment. He argues that none of the three modes of knowing can be reduced to one or both of the others, and none of them is possible without the presence of the other two. Their mutual inseparability and irreducibility compose a Davidsonian metaphor of triangulation symbolizing a three-way relation among two speakers and a shared world. Justification and attribution of mental contents are all through the interaction between two speakers as well as interaction between each speaker and a set of common objects in the world. This metaphor has been employed in the second part of the book to elaborate his position that rationality and language possess social traits (Essays 7 and 8) and to explain the transition from the prelinguistic, preconceptual mind to the mind with language and propositional attitudes (Essay 9). Six essays in the first part deal with most aspects of self-knowledge, such as the first person authority, asymmetry between indirect...