| dc.description.abstract | Transcendental arguments built on idealist assumptions are illegitimate. However, Donald Davidson, who has been accused of being an idealist, argues transcendentally for doxastic veridicality – the thesis that most of our beliefs are necessarily true. Thus, a question arises: does Davidson’s argument contain an idealist premise? In this step-by-step analysis of Davidson’s argument, the premises and objections aiming to reveal idealism in the argumentation are discussed.
It starts from the Principle of Charity, discussing the lack of irrationality and asymmetry implied by the rationalist idealism that Simon Evnine recognizes in the Principle. Subsequently, the Principle is applied to the hypothetical case of the ‘omniscient interpreter’, in which the anti-sceptical force is contained. After testing Davidson’s conception of ‘language’ to the conceivability idealism conceptualized by Thomas Nagel, it is concluded that our beliefs are largely true.
Davidson’s argument is successful in the sense that it can establish our doxastic veridicality without appealing to idealism. Concerning irrationality, the claim that a belief-system generally conforms to standards of rationality leaves room for the realist position that one might have some beliefs that are not ideally rational. With respect to asymmetry, theoretical construction of mental content does not undermine the fact that a first-person perspective offers more insight in one’s mind than any other perspective, since theoretical construction is not constitutive of actual content. Neither is Davidson’s argument idealist in the notion of ‘language’; due to the basic powers inherent to language, translation of superior languages into inferior ones is possible, and this translatability criterion for language does not amount to the idealist thesis that ‘what there is must be possibly conceivable by us’. However, we have no anti-sceptical certainty concerning the knowledge of the meanings of our beliefs. Externalism and holism need to be united convincingly in order to deal with epistemic and ‘introspective’ scepticism all at once. Thus, Davidson’s argument succeeds, but it does leave room for the sceptic to say that we might not know what our sentences mean at all. | |
