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Thinkers

Donald Davidson

Analytic · North America · 1917 to 2003

American philosopher who held that mind and body are not two things. He explored how we come to understand each other's speech.

What it is

Donald Davidson (1917 to 2003) was an American philosopher, born in Springfield, Massachusetts, who taught at several American universities, among them Princeton and Chicago, before becoming Slusser Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a student of W. V. Quine, and his influence among American philosophers is matched by few others. He was known for a charismatic personality and a difficult style of writing, and for a philosophy that held together as a system.

He began in decision theory and in the early 1960s published the paper that made his name, "Actions, Reasons and Causes". His essays went on to shape the philosophy of action, of mind and of language. He died in Berkeley in 2003, leaving a book on the nature of predication unfinished; it was published after his death.

The main ideas

  • Reasons are causes. To explain why someone acted by citing their reasons is, he argued, a kind of causal explanation, in spite of arguments that reasons and causes belong to different worlds.
  • Mind without strict laws. In "Mental Events" he defended a view later called anomalous monism, in which mental events are physical events yet are not governed by strict laws, because the mental is tied to rationality.
  • Real irrationality. He treated irrationality as a real feature of mental life and asked how weakness of will is possible.
  • Meaning through truth. He proposed that we understand what the sentences of a language mean by building a theory of truth for it.
  • Radical interpretation. Making sense of a speaker, he held, means assuming that they are largely rational and right, which links meaning to the rationality of the mental.
  • Belief, desire and intention. His account of action and mind relies on a careful analysis of concepts like belief, desire and intention.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine meeting someone whose language you do not speak and trying to work out what their words mean from what they do and what they point at. Davidson would say that you could only begin by assuming that most of what they say is true and sensible by their own lights, and that this assumption is part of what it is to interpret anyone at all. This is an illustration of his line of questioning, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • Decision-Making: An Experimental Approach (1957) is an early work, in decision theory.
  • "Actions, Reasons and Causes" (1963) is his first major philosophical paper.
  • "Mental Events" (1970) sets out his view of the mind.
  • His posthumous book on predication was left unfinished at his death.

Questions and criticism

  • A hard writer. His style is described as difficult, though the system behind it is carefully worked.
  • Lawless mind. If mental events are not governed by strict laws, it is fair to ask how they can still be causes.
  • Is charity enough? If interpretation must assume that speakers are mostly right, it is fair to ask how deep disagreement between people could ever be recognised.

Close neighbours

W. V. Quine was his teacher, and the page on Quine shows the thinker whose influence among American philosophers is matched perhaps only by Davidson's.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • W. V. O. Quine · He was Quine's student and carried on his work on meaning and translation.

Other Analytic thinkers

Sources we used

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