Davidson, Donald (1917–2003)

8. Animal thought

According to Davidson, the capacity to think requires facility with language, so that only creatures with a language can think. He defends this controversial thesis in ‘Thought and Talk’ (1984) and ‘Rational Animals’ (1985). His argument begins by noting that ascriptions of propositional attitudes – belief, desire, intentions and the like – exhibit semantic opacity. In attributing, for example, to a dog the belief that the cat went up the tree we might wonder whether the propriety of this ascription would be affected were we to substitute for ‘the tree’ another expression that refers to the tree. If not, this would disclose that our attribution of belief to the dog falls short of literalness. If a dog holds a belief about a tree, it must do so under some description or other (1985: 475).

Davidson’s main contention is that semantic opacity could be had only by connecting thought to language. He advances two different lines of argument to this conclusion. The first appeals to holism and it is of the form that since we could never have grounds for ascribing the required background beliefs to creatures without a language, we could never be warranted in ascribing to such creatures any thoughts at all. The argument is that since ascriptions of belief exhibit semantic opacity and since semantic opacity requires that we regard beliefs as possessing some definite intentional content and since the possession of a belief with a definite content presupposes ‘endless’ further beliefs, it follows that a creature to whom we are warranted in ascribing a belief is one possessing a sophisticated behavioural repertoire; and only linguistic behaviour exhibits the sort of complex pattern that might warrant such ascriptions.

Even if sound, this argument at most establishes that we are unlikely ever to have decisive evidence that a speechless creature has beliefs. Davidson, however, draws the stronger conclusion that ‘unless there is actually such a complex pattern of behavior, there is no thought’ (1985: 476). He is aware of this shortcoming in his argument and offers another. He argues that propositional attitudes require a dense network of beliefs, that ‘in order to have a belief, it is necessary to have the concept of belief’, and that ‘in order to have the concept of belief one must have language’, that is, one must be a member of a ‘speech community’ (1985: 478). How, it will be asked, does Davidson get from the ubiquity of belief and the claim that beliefs in turn require second-order beliefs to the conclusion that ‘a creature must be a member of a speech community if it is to have the concept of belief’ (1984: 170)?

Davidson argues as follows: the possibility of belief or thought generally depends on the concept of a representation that might be true or false; and a concept of truth and falsity includes some notion of an objective, public domain. And this, in turn, is possible only for an interpreter (1984: 170; 1985: 480). Davidson seems to hold that only utterances can afford the fine-grained structure required for attributing thought; for only a creature whose behaviour exhibits the kind of structure implied by a theory of meaning is a creature in which semantically opaque representations can make an appearance (see Animal language and thought).