Davidson, Donald (1917–2003)

10. Against facts

In recent writings, for example, ‘The Myth of the Subjective’ (1989) and ‘The Structure and Content of Truth’ (1990), Davidson attempts to refute the claim that there are representations of reality. In the latter he argues against ‘the popular assumption that sentences, or their spoken tokens, or sentence-like entities or configurations in our brains can properly be called “representations”, since there is nothing for them to represent’ (Davidson 1990). If facts do not make sentences true, then in what sense are they representations? On Davidson’s approach to meaning no entities (facts, objects or events) correspond to sentences.

Davidson’s main argument against facts and correspondence theories of truth appears in his ‘True to the Facts’ (1984). There we find the Great Fact argument that given certain plausible assumptions there is at most one fact. The assumptions are ‘that a true sentence cannot be made to correspond to something quite different by the substitution of coreferring singular terms, or by the substitution of logically equivalent sentences’ and from these assumptions one can prove that ‘if true sentences correspond to anything, they all correspond to the same thing’ (Davidson 1990: 303). Rightly or wrongly, Davidson takes these assumptions to embody traditional wisdom about facts (see Neale 1995). The main point is that if a context satisfies these two assumptions, then that context is truth functional. So, if a sentence is made true by some fact f, then every materially equivalent sentence is made true by f as well, and thus, f is the Great Fact (see Facts §2).