Intention and Judgment-Dependence: First-Personal vs. Third-Personal Accounts

ABSTRACT

A Third-Person-Based or Third-Personal Judgment-Dependent account of mental content implies that, as an a priori matter, facts about a subject’s mental content are precisely captured by the judgments of a second-person or an interpreter. Alex Byrne, Bill Child, and others have discussed attributing such a view to Donald Davidson. This account significantly departs from a First-Person-Based or First-Personal Judgment-Dependent account, such as Crispin Wright’s, according to which, as an a priori matter, facts about intentional content are constituted by the judgments of the subject herself, formed under certain optimal or cognitively ideal conditions. I will argue for two claims: (1) Attributing a Third-Personal Judgment-Dependent account to Davidson is unjustified; Davidson’s view is much closer to a non-reductionist First-Personal Judgment-Dependent account. (2) Third-Personal accounts rest on a misconstrual of the role of an interpreter in the First-Personal accounts; the notion of an interpreter still plays an essential role in the latter ones.

KEYWORDS:

• Interpretivism
• Interpretationism
• Judgment-Dependence
• Non-Reductionism
• Donald Davidson
• Crispin Wright

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 For Mölder (2010), as another example, interpretivism is the view that “having mental properties is a matter of interpretation” (2010, 1). There are others who have discussed this view when applied to different areas of discourse, such as DeLancey’s (2004) book-length discussion of the application of interpretationism (as an irrealist theory of mind) to the case of emotions, Curry’s (2020) discussion of the relationship between interpretivism and normativity, and Kriegel’s (2011) discussion of a Dennettian view of intentionality and justification in the attributions of intentional states. Each reads this view in their own way. My worry here is broader, as we will see.

2 See Fodor and Lepore (1992, 142–144), though I do not agree that there is any serious, deep similarity between the views of Davidson and Dennett. I believe Dennett’s view may well be captured in a 3PJD account, while Davidson’s view is indeed first-personal.

3 It is worth noting that Byrne (1998) criticizes the attribution of this view to Davidson, but for reasons entirely different from mine. As the purpose of this paper is not to defend or reject Byrne’s view, I will not engage in a detailed discussion of Byrne’s criticisms, by some of which I am sympathetic and by some I am not. The same is true in the case of Child’s and Mölder’s attributions of this account to Davidson.

4 Though it can be applied to a variety of things, including perceptible properties and other mental states, such as that of color, shape, moral values, meaning, and so forth. See, e.g., Wright (2001, 191–199), (1992, 108–109), and (1988). Although Wright’s account is an account of intention, he also talks about the concept of intention, the predicate “intends”, and the extension of the truth predicate among (self-)ascriptions of intention. That is, if intention is judgment-dependent, it is then the subject’s judgments that fix the truth-value of self-ascriptions of intention, the correct application of the concept of intention, the extension of the predicate “ … intends … ”, and similar. For instance, secondary qualities, as Wright states, “have the feature that the extensions of their signature concepts are determined … , in the case of judgment-dependence, by the very (suitably constrained) judgments of ours about what the concepts in question apply to” (2012, 405). See also Wright (2001, 203) and (1992, 122).

5 See, e.g., Wright (1988) and (2001, 191–199).

6 See Wright (1992, 108–109) and (2001, 192–194, 197-198).

7 See, e.g., Wright (2001, 201).

8 See, e.g., Wright (1992, 119) and (2001, 202).

9 Cf. Johnston’s (1989, 140, 145) “Basic Equation” in which the C-conditions appear within the biconditional. Such equations would have the following form: “x is F ↔ S judges that x is F, under optimal conditions”. Wright thinks that such a characterization of response-dependent concepts causes serious problems, among which is the problem that the obtaining of C-conditions may affect or alter the truth-value of the whole biconditional. On this, see Wright (2001, 193, fn. 33) and (1992, 117–120, 232).

10 See Wright (2001, 192).

11 See Wright (1992, 116–117) and (2001, 193–194).

12 See Wright (1992, 112) and (2001, 194).

13 See Wright (1992, 122–123) and (2001, 195).

14 See Wright (1992, 123–124) and (2001, 205).

15 See Hossein Khani (2023a) for a recent discussion of Wright’s way of dealing with the case of self-deception.

16 Different versions of 1PJD accounts have been defended by Johnston (1989; 1992; 1993), Pettit (1991; 1998), Powell (1998), Railton (1998) and, as we saw, especially by Wright (1988; 1992; 2001).

17 See Wright (2001, Chapter 7).

18 I have called them “fine-grained facts” elsewhere in order to keep them distinct from the Quinean facts about stimulus meaning. But, as here Quine’s view is not involved, I just use “facts” instead, by which I mean facts about the uniquely determinate meanings that utterances are commonly taken (by factualists) to have, or facts as to what specific things a speaker means by her words. See Hossein Khani (2023b; 2021a; 2018a).

19 What about Dennett? Dennett’s famous “intentional stance” seems to suggest a more or less similar view. As Dennett says, “all there is to being a true believer is being a system whose behavior is reliably predictable via the intentional strategy, and hence all there is to really and truly believing that p … is being an intentional system for which p occurs as a belief in the best (most predictive) interpretation” (1979, 29). This is to suggest that facts about a system’s having an intention is constituted by facts about our judgments about it having it, i.e., by an interpreter in the process of producing an intentional-stance interpretation of the system’s behavior. I think, however, that Davidson’s view is substantially different from Dennett’s, as we will see.

20 See Byrne (1998, 202–203) and Child (1994, 1–7, 24, and Chapter 1). See also Fodor and Lepore (1992, 137–139).

21 See also Child (1994, 31).

22 An important question is what are such ideal conditions, under which the interpreter’s judgments metaphysically determine truths about S’s mental content and under which the interpreter can be viewed as an ideal or fully informed one? I will not engage in such a discussion in this paper, though I believe that 3PJD accounts would face serious problems with regard to a proper specification of such conditions, i.e., to specify these conditions in such a way that the Substantiality and A Priority Conditions can be preserved.

23 For a discussion of this constraint, see Hossein Khani (2023a; 2022; 2021b).

24 See, e.g., Wittgenstein (1953, §§201-202); see also Kripke (1982, Chapter 2).

25 For a recent discussion of Davidson’s reading of this Wittgensteinian claim, see Hossein Khani (2020).

26 See, e.g., Davidson (1999, 12).

27 For Davidson’s discussion of Triangulation, see Davidson (1992; 1994; 1999; 2001). For more discussion, see Glüer (2006) and (2011, Section 5.3), Hossein Khani (2020; 2019; 2018b), Ludwig and Lepore (2005, Sectoin 22), Verheggen and Myers (2016).

28 Also, Davidson states that “[a] speaker who wishes to be understood must intend his words to be interpreted (and hence interpretable) … a hearer who wishes to understand a speaker must intend to interpret the speaker’s words as the speaker intended (whether or not the interpretation is ‘standard’)” (1987, 457, fn. 18, emphasis added). Here Davidson emphasizes that the hearer’s job is to attempt to interpret the speaker’s words as the speaker herself intended. Also, in “Intending”, he says that pure or actionless “intention simply is an all-out judgment” (1978, 56). These help to more clearly see how Davidson’s and Wright’s views are close to one another.

29 It is not to say that 1PJD accounts, such as Wright’s, are free from any problems. For some of these problems see Boghossian (2012; 1989), Hossein Khani (2023a) and (2021b), Johnston (1993), and Miller (1989; 2007).

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Ali Hossein Khani

Ali Hossein Khani is Assistant Professor, Science Studies Group, Iranian Institute of Philosophy (IRIP), Resident Researcher, School of Analytic Philosophy, Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM) and Researcher at University of Religions and Denominations. His publications have been mainly on Quine, Davidson, Wittgenstein and Wright. He is the author of the monograph on Kripke, Kripke’s Wittgenstein: Meaning, Rules, and Scepticism (Anthem Press, Forthcoming), and the co-editor, with Gary N. Kemp, of two volumes on Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein and Other Philosophers, Volume I and II (Routledge, Forthcoming) and a collected volume on naturalism, Naturalism and Its Challenges (Routledge, Forthcoming).