Background
Donald Davidson was born on March 6, 1917, in Springfield, Massachusetts, United States, to the family of Clarence Herbert Davidson and Grace Cordelia Anthony.
Cambridge, MA, United States
Davidson's graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University was interrupted by three years of service in the United States Navy (1942-1945), and he was awarded a doctoral degree in 1949.
(The Essential Davidson compiles the most celebrated paper...)
The Essential Davidson compiles the most celebrated papers of one of the twentieth century's greatest philosophers. It distills Donald Davidson's seminal contributions to our understanding of ourselves, from three decades of essays, into one thematically organized collection.
https://www.amazon.com/Essential-Davidson-Donald/dp/0199288860/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Donald+Davidson&qid=1593075271&sr=8-1
2006
Donald Davidson was born on March 6, 1917, in Springfield, Massachusetts, United States, to the family of Clarence Herbert Davidson and Grace Cordelia Anthony.
Davidson's family moved around so much that he had no formal education till the age of nine or 10 when he attended a public school on Staten Island. Even as a child he was fascinated by philosophy, but he opted to study English, having been offered a scholarship by every university he applied for and accepted one at Harvard.
Davidson's graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University was interrupted by three years of service in the United States Navy (1942-1945), and he was awarded a doctoral degree in 1949.
While his first position was at Queen's College in New York, Davidson spent much of the early part of his career (1951-1967) at Stanford University.
He subsequently held positions at Princeton (1967-1970), Rockefeller (1970-1976), and the University of Chicago (1976-1981).
From 1981 until his death Donald Davidson worked at the University of California, Berkeley.
Davidson was the recipient of a number of fellowships and awards including Jean Nicod Prize. Moreover, he was a visitor at many universities around the world.
(The Essential Davidson compiles the most celebrated paper...)
2006Donald Davidson wasn't involved in politics.
Davidson's philosophy of language addresses philosophical constraints on theories of linguistic understanding. Truth and Meaning (1967) argues that knowledge of the truth conditions of assertions suffices for understanding them and that Tarski's account of truth in formalized languages shows how a semantic theory could eschew generalized conceptions of meaning or linguistic representation. Subsequent essays develop a metatheory of radical interpretation, specifying how interpreters could test whether a truth theory is interpretative for an uninterpreted language. The criterion of empirical success here is that theory correctly predicts circumstances of utterance for arbitrary sentences of a language. This implies semantic holism: that the meaning of a term reflects its place in the totality of linguistic behavior. Such behavior counts as evidence only if, applying the "principle of charity," speakers are assumed to have largely true beliefs. The Structure and Content of Truth (1990) argues that interpretation presupposes a grasp of truth irreducible to theoretical notions like correspondence or coherence. A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs (1986) employs literary cases of unconventional speech such as Sheridan's Mrs. Malaprop to argue that the notion of a common language has little explanatory role in semantics - a line of reasoning comparable to Derrida’s use of the notion of iterability to deconstruct philosophical appeals to convention or shared practice.
Like Quine, Davidson holds that interpretations are underdetermined by considerations of charity. There are, in consequence, no "deeper" facts that could allow an interpreter to decide between competing interpretative theories explaining the same speech behavior. Charity and the resultant ‘semantic indeterminacy’ have broader epistemological import. In On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme (1974), they are deployed against empiricist and transcendentalist pictures of mind "forming" the world from unconceptualized "content" which he takes to underlie relativism and strong incommensurability claims. Strong Kantian parallels can be found, however, in Thought and Talk (1975) and Rational Animals (1982) where it is argued that only creatures possessing a concept of belief can have beliefs and that an understanding of objectivity emerges in the intersubjective context of linguistic interpretation. The Myth of the Subjective (1987) argues that the mental content is only fixed under charitable interpretations of an agent’s activity within a common world, thereby undermining Cartesian-style appeals to intrinsically contentful ‘Ideas’ as a basis for philosophical reflection.
Quotations:
"There are three basic problems: how a mind can know the world of nature, how it is possible for one mind to know another, and how it is possible to know the contents of our own minds without resort to observation or evidence. It is a mistake, I shall urge, to suppose that these questions can be collapsed into two, or taken into isolation."
"The aim of interpretation is not agreement but understanding."
"Terminological infelicities have a way of breeding conceptual confusion."
Donald Davidson married Marcia Cavell. He was married three times, with his third marriage, in 1984, being to Marcia Cavell, who undertook the editing of Davidson's posthumously published essays.