• On Monday, we will discuss the initial third of the lecture (through the last full paragraph of p. 446). After several pages in which Davidson sets the historical and conceptual context of the issue he will discuss, he defines that issue on pp. 444-446. He defines it in terms of conditions numbered I and II, which are characterized most helpfully not when they are initially introduced but in the last substantial paragraph of p. 444. The idea of a “narrow” psychological state that Davidson mentions in this connection came to be developed into a distinction between “narrow” content (content that is in the head) and “wide” content (content whose characterization requires reference to external factors). On p. 445, Davidson notes a variety of positions concerning the sort of content of the belief expressed by “Here is a glass of water”—whether it is wide or narrow. (In discussing this, Davidson seems to assume, as Putnam did, that the indexical “here” does not itself make the content wide because the meaning of “here” does not include its referent.) Then he goes on to raise the question of the implications of these views for the question of first-person authority. (Let me add two notes on Davidson’s introductory discussion. You have seen hints of Wittgenstein’s approach to the problem of other minds, which Davidson mentions on p. 442, in the final comments of §48 of the Brown Book, p. 103. And the idea of Russell mentioned on p. 443 is the one discussed in The Problems of Philosophy, ch. 5, ¶21.)

• Davidson begins the material we will discuss on Wednesday (from the end of p. 446 through the last full paragraph of p. 451) with a survey of views on mental content in the years following Kripke and Putnam’s discussions of reference. Although their views were a crucial stimulus to new ways of thinking, they were not the only source, and many of the people mentioned were also interested in issues concerning traditional questions of the relation of mind and body (on which Kripke and Putnam had their own, rather different, views). In particular, doubts about “folk psychology” were occasioned not only by the question whether the content of mental states was wide or narrow but also by the emergence of models of cognitive functioning that looked more to neurophysiology than to language. (Davidson developed his own position on mind-body issues, “anomalous monism”; he alludes to it in his comment about laws in the middle of p. 447—“anomalous” here refers to an inability to capture phenomena by laws—and he is a bit more explicit later in the paper, on pp. 452f.)

Although Davidson is often concerned to find points of agreement when he turns to a more detailed discussion of Burge and then Putnam on pp. 448-450, it will be more useful for our purposes to look for points of disagreement. He sets these out pretty clearly in the case of Burge. In the case of Putnam, they are partly disguised by his Quinean aversion to modal ideas, such as rigid designators. One way to see his differences from Putnam is to note that Putnam’s view of how we manage to refer to things like water has the same potential as does Kripke’s account of proper names to lead to cases where people are understood to refer to things about which their beliefs are largely wrong. Davidson’s commitment to something like a principle of charity tends to point him in different directions.

On the final page of this assignment, Davidson begins to stake out the position for which he will argue in the remainder of the paper.

• Davidson’s argument in the last part of the paper (which is what we will discuss on Friday) can stand pretty well on its own. Just let me note that his emphasis in his criticisms on the assumption of “entities” could be misleading. It is worth comparing Quine’s discussion of meanings as entities in “Two Dogmas” (pp. 22f). Quine there shifts to the question of making sense of synonymy—i.e., sameness of meaning—and Davidson would have little reason for doubt about beliefs as entities if he thought that a relation of sameness of belief made sense. That is, although the way he makes his point could suggest that Davidson’s concern is with the introduction of special mental entities, I think that it would be a mistake to understand him in that way. His anticipation at the end of p. 447 of his point in the final pages of the paper can help to make that clear. And his comment on p. 449 about thoughts not being independent of one another is closer to his concluding point than it may at first appear.