Donald Davidson The Philosophy-Linguistics 
Connection 1967-76

 

Gilbert Harman Princeton University

 

 

March 17, 2004 Donald Davidson came to Princeton University in 1967 and went 
to Rockefeller University in New York City from 1970-76, occasionally coming 
back to teach a seminar at Princeton. During this time he and I talked regularly, 
ran two conferences, and published two collections of essays.  

I first met Davidson at the American Philosophical meeting in December 1963 
when he presented his paper, “Action, Reasons, and Causes,” a paper which 
contains the germ of many of the ideas he developed in the following years.  

I next saw him in the summer of 1965. I was teaching a course at Berkeley that 
summer. Hearing that Paul Grice was running a weekly seminar at Stanford, Tom 
Nagel, Barry Stroud, Tom Clark and I drove down to attend. In the seminar, Paul 
presented an early version of “Logic and Conversation,” with Davidson regularly 
asking for clarifications, “because otherwise what you say will just go in one ear 
and out the other.” Various other philosophers were at the seminar, including 
Michael Dummett, who later presented his own “antirealism” in opposition to 
Davidson’s “realism.” (However, I believe that at this time the big issue between 
them was whether Michael would go surfing with Davidson.)  

Back at Princeton that fall we discussed Davidson’s ideas about semantics as 
presented in his paper, “The Method of Intension and Extension,” (in The 
Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap) and especially in “Theories of Meaning and 
Learnable Languages.” I was especially excited because Davidson’s ideas 
seemed to connect in an interesting way with Noam Chomsky’s views about what 
is needed for languages to be learnable.  

In 1966 Davidson gave a lecture at Princeton on “How Is Weakness of the Will 
Possible?” I was quite taken with the argument of the paper and corresponded 
with him about it. One very important idea in the paper concerns seeming 
conditional statements involving ought, like, “If you promise to do something, you 
ought to do it.” Davidson argued that such statements are not of the form, “If P 
then Q,” but are statements of conditional oughts by analogy with statements of 
conditional probability. Since the word if is not functioning as a sentential 
connective in these contexts, the logical principle of modus ponens does not 
apply.  

There are other instances of this sort of if. In “Adverbs of Quantification,” David 
Lewis observes that if clauses are often used to put restrictions on the 
interpretations of quantifiers rather than as sentential connectives. One might 

even speculate that if never functions as a sentential connective, so strictly 
speaking modus ponens never applies.  

Davidson came to Princeton in the following year, 1967. He was made Chair of 
the Department the year after that. He then took a year off to go back to the 
Stanford Center for the Behavioral Sciences and, after that, accepted a position 
at Rockefeller University and moved to New York. So, he spent only two years in 
Princeton!  

As soon as he arrived in Princeton, Davidson and I met regularly to discuss how 
his ideas about semantics and logical form fit with what what was going on at the 
time in linguistics. Davidson’s ideas of the time were expressed in such papers 
as “Truth and Meaning,” “The Logical Form of Action Sentences,” “Causal 
Relations,” and “On Saying That.”  

One part of his view was a stress on the importance for semantics of providing a 
theory of truth conditions. In a way he was defending a version of Quine’s 
translational approach to meaning: your semantics for a language L should 
provide a systemic way to translate from L into your own language, but with 
some additional restrictions. The system of translation should take the form of a 
theory of truth for the other language; it should have a finite number of axioms 
(because it has to be learnable); and it should be expressed in first-order 
quantification theory. The use of second-order quantification or substitutional 
quantification is ruled out in part because it trivializes the requirement that the 
rules of translation should take the form of a theory of truth. Appeal to possible 
worlds is ruled out as well, for reasons that are less clear to me.  

 

Like many other philosophers at the time, I was completely unconvinced by 
Davidson’s meta-view about the connection between truth and meaning. On the 
other hand I was (also like many others) rather taken with Davidson’s particular 
accounts of logical form, for example, his suggestion that some sorts of adverbial 
modification were best treated by supposing that certain sentences involve 
hidden quantifications over events, that the verbs in such sentences are 
predicates of events, and that the adverbs represent further predicates of time, 
place, manner, etc.; or his claim that causal statements are often statements of 
causal relations between events; or his proposal that sentential that clause 
complements, as in “Galileo said that the Earth is flat” be treated as 
performances that the rest of the sentence comments on.  

Davidson recruited students and colleagues to work on problems, such as how to 
handle adjective noun constructions, like large mouse, which cannot be analyzed 
as simple conjunctions, since a large mouse isn’t very large; or how to treat 
pronouns in a theory of truth so as to avoid the result that your remark “I have a 
headache” is true if and only if I have a headache.  

At Princeton, Davidson and I got involved in discussions of linguistics because 
these developments looked as if they might help with his ideas about logical form 
and because his ideas about logical form might help in linguistics. Katz and 
Postal had argued for a version of generative grammar in which syntactic 
transformations mapped the “deep structure” of a sentence into its “surface 
structures.” Semantic interpretation rules operated on the deep structure to arrive 
at a representation of meaning and phonetic interpretation rules operated on the 
surface structure to provide a representation of sound.  

Davidson and I discussed how a grammar of this sort might be used to help 
assign logical forms to sentences in a natural language. Similar ideas were being 
developed by linguists like Emmon Bach, James McCawley, and George Lakoff, 
who argued for a version of the Katz-Postal theory that did away with the 
distinction between semantic interpretation rules and syntactic transformations. 
In this view of “generative semantics,” there was no separate level of deep 
structure. Instead, the base rules of the system built up a semantic interpretation 
and then transformations mapped that into surface structure. This idea looked 
quite promising at the time, although linguistics soon went off in a different 
direction.  

Davidson was going to be at the Stanford Center for 1969-70, so he and I set up 
a small conference there in 1969 that brought together a few linguists and 
philosophers of language. The philosophers included Quine, Geach, and David 
Kaplan; the linguists included Bach, Lakoff, McCawley, and Barbara Partee. (My 
memories of who attended this conference are different from Davidson’s list in 
his autobiography. For example, Davidson says Richard Montague was there, 
but I am sure that Montague was not there.)  

Davidson thought that the conference went well enough that we should bring out 
a collection of new papers in Semantics of Natural Language, which was 
published the following year in Synthese. We then we published it as a separate 
book, including also Saul Kripke’s lectures on “Naming and Necessity.”  

Davidson next managed to get support from the Council for Philosophical Studies 
for a six week “summer school” in Semantics and Philosophy of Language in 
Irvine in  

1971. The “faculty” included Kaplan, Partee, Quine, Grice, Peter Strawson, 
Kripke, and the linguist John Ross. The sixty or so “students” attending included 
Gareth Evans, Richmond Thomason, Robert Stalnaker, Carl and Sally 
McConnell Ginet, William Lycan, Peter Unger, and James McGilvray. After 
intense discussions, we would spend time in Laguna Beach, where Davidson 
was teaching Quine to surf.  

After Davidson moved to New York, where I had been living while commuting to 
Princeton, we continued to meet regularly to discuss philosophy, play squash, 

and have meatless lunches, after Davidson said he had taken up vegetarianism 
for health reasons.  

He had a water bed in his high floor apartment and he worried about how to 
empty the water. (I guess this is something that has to be done regularly?) He 
got a hose and was siphoning it out the window, when he almost fell out himself! 
He thought that if he had fallen out, the headlines might have been interesting.  

We often talked about the novels he was reading (Iris Murdoch, Trollope). He 
was very enthusiastic about everything. He always spoke very clearly, with 
excellent articulation, as if he was acting, and indeed he said he had been an 
actor earlier in life.  

We sometimes traveled to conferences together. He wanted to rent a plane so 
we could fly to conferences, but his stories about he good he had been at 
handling various electrical emergencies led me to wonder why there had been so 
many emergencies and I always insisted on driving.  

We prepared an introductory anthology of readings in what we called The Logic 
of Grammar. Unfortunately, the publisher went bankrupt at the time of publication 
and hardly anyone has seen this volume who didn’t get a free copy.  

In addition to issues of logical form, we talked a great deal about the theory of 
action, practical reasoning, intentions, planning, and doing something 
intentionally. Davidson wanted to explain intentional action in terms of beliefs, 
desires, and causality, and then use the notion of intentional action to explain 
what intentions are. I thought this couldn’t work because it seemed to me that 
intentions are distinctive psychological states in their own right, not reducible to 
desires plus beliefs. Michael Bratman, who was a student at Rockefeller during 
this time, has since worked out in great detail a nonreductionist view of this sort.  

During his six years at Rockefeller, Davidson wrote over twenty important papers 
on a wide range of subjects, including his Presidential Address to the 1973 
Eastern Division American Philosophical Meeting in Atlanta, “On the Very Idea of 
a Conceptual Scheme.”  

All good things come to an end. I left New York to move to Princeton in 1976 and 
at about the same time Davidson moved to Chicago, and then after a few years 
to Berkeley. From that point on I saw much less of him, alas.  

What about our project of getting linguists and philosophers to join forces in 
developing the semantics of natural language? One thing is that, since 1971, 
serious semantics has become an important topic in linguistics. In fact, a majority 
of the interesting work in semantics in the last thirty years has been done by 
linguists in linguistic departments, often in framework of Montague Grammar. 

(Montague had been murdered a few months before the 1971 conference at 
Irvine; Barbara Partee lectured on Montague grammar at the conference.)  

Davidson’s ideas about adverbial modification have entered textbooks in 
linguistic semantics and have been developed in important ways by Terry 
Parsons, for example. Increasingly philosophers of language have been paying 
attention again to results in linguistics. And there are again more and more 
workshops and conferences involving collaborations between philosophers and 
linguists. I am optimistic again about the philosophy-linguistics connection.