What Is Present to the Mind.pdf

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What Is Present to the Mind?

Author(s): Donald Davidson

Source: Philosophical Issues, Vol. 1, Consciousness (1991), pp. 197-213

Published by: Ridgeview Publishing Company

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1522929

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9{\~~~

~PHILOSOPHICAL

ISSUES, 1

Consciousness,1991

What

is Present

the

Mind?

Donald Davidson*

There is a sense in which anything we think about is, while we

are thinking about it, before the mind. But there is another

sense, well known to philosophers, in which only some of the

things we can think about are said to be before the mind;

these are things that are before the mind when we think

about anything at all, but we do not have to think about

them for them to be before the mind. These are things sup-

posed to be so directly before the mind that it is impossible

to misidentify them, or we can misidentify them only if we

do not know what we think; in this they differ from ordinary

physical objects, which are easy to misidentify. We cannot

mistake these entities for others simply because it is these

objects that fix the contents of our thoughts. It is things of

this second sort I want to discuss.

It is things of this second sort, for example, that are the

objects, so called, of desires, beliefs, intentions, worries and

hopes; they are the propositions to which we have the vari-

ous attitudes, the thoughts (as Frege named them) which our

*? Donald Davidson.

198

DONALDDAVIDSON

sentences express. We must also include, of course, the con-

stituents of propositions, such things as properties, relations,

functions, and so forth.

The objects I have mentioned have a special relation to

the mind: it is only through the mind that we can know

them. Since they are abstract, they cannot be accessed by

the senses. They have no causal powers, and so cannot act

on, or be acted on by, our minds, our brains, or us.

This raises the question what sort of relations we or our

minds are thought to have to these objects when we say they

are before the mind. We have many words to express our re-

lations to propositions: we grasp them when we understand

a sentence, we entertain them, reject them, wish they were

true, hope they aren't, or intend to make them true. But

what sort of relations are these? They sound like psychologi-

cal relations, as if there were some sort of mental transaction

between us and these entities. But what kind of business can

be transacted with an abstract object?

The propositional objects of the mind, and their consti-

tuents, are supposed, then, to have these two properties: they

identify a thought by fixing its content; and they constitute

an essential aspect of the psychology of the thought by being

grasped or otherwise known by the person with the thought.

The problem I discuss in this paper is how to reconcile these

two properties. My thesis is that they cannot be reconciled.

Here is the main difficulty. I take for granted that for the

most part we do know what we think, even though there

are departures from total self-knowledge. (I use "think" to

cover all the propositional attitudes.) But if a thought is

constituted the thought it is by the mind's knowledge of the

identifying object, then someone knows what thought she is

thinking only if she knows which object she has in mind. Yet

there seems to be no clear meaning to the idea of knowing

which object one has in mind. The trouble is that ignorance

of even one property of an object can, under appropriate cir-

cumstances, count as not knowing which object it is. This is

the reason philosophers who have wanted to found knowledge

on infallible identification of objects have sought objects that,

like Hume's impressions and ideas, "Are what they seem and

seem what they are" -that is, have all and only the prop-

9. WHAT IS PRESENT TO THE MIND?

199

erties we think they have. Alas, there are no such objects.

Every object has an infinity of logically independent proper-

ties, even those objects, like numbers, all of whose "essential"

properties we specify.1

Recent discussion of de re belief brings out the point. If

we agree with Russell that a person cannot form a judgment

about an object unless he knows which object it is, or (to

put it in another way that Russell favored) it is an object

with which the person is acquainted, and that this demands,

in the case of propositions, that this special relation hold be-

tween the judge and each part of the proposition judged, then

there is a special problem about attitudes like the following:

There is a recipe for making corn bread that Joan believes

is easy. The truth of this attribution not only demands that

there be a recipe for making corn bread, but it also seems to

require that Joan know which recipe it is -or be somehow

acquainted with it. When Quine first emphasized the distinc-

tion between de re and de dicto belief sentences in modern

terms, he was inclined to see de re reference as an island of

clarity in the opaque sea of intensionality.2 Subsequent devel-

opments led to a change of mind. In "Intensions Revisited"

he wrote, "The notion of knowing or believing who or what

1Michael Dummet describes this feature of Fregean "senses": "... A

sense cannot have any features not discernable by reflection on or de-

duction from what is involved in expressing or in grasping it. Only that

belongs to the sense of an expression which is relevant to the determi-

nation of the truth value of the sentence in which it occurs; if we fail to

grasp some features of its contribution to the truth-conditions of certain

sentences, then we fail fully to grasp its sense, while, on the other hand,

any aspect of its meaning that does not bear on the truth-conditions of

the sentences containing it is no part of its sense. It cannot be, therefore,

that the sense has all sorts of other features not detectable by us... A

thought is transparent in the sense that, if you grasp it, you thereby

know everything to be known about it as it is in itself. The Interpreta-

tion of Frege's Philosophy, Duckworth, 1981, p. 50. Dummett limits the

features of senses we cannot fail to detect to their "internal properties",

but it is not clear on what principle such properties are to be told from

others.

2W.V. Quine, "Quatifiers and Propositional Attitudes", The Journal

of Philosophy 53 (1956), pp. 177-187.

200

DONALD DAVIDSON

someone or something is, is utterly dependent on context".3

What led to the change of mind was the difficulty in explain-

ing the relation between a person and an object that would

justify the claim that the person knew which object it was.

A number of attempts have been made to clarify the relation:

F0llesdal declared only "genuine" names could enter into it;

Kripke spoke of "rigid designators"; David Kaplan called the

elect names "vivid".4 Gareth Evans studied the problem in

depth; he thought, with others, that the only psychological

relation that could count as providing the requisite sort of

"fundamental identification" of an object was demonstrative

identification. In such a case alone could one say that the

object was part of the proposition entertained. Following

Russell, Evans concluded that when a person thinks he is

entertaining a singular thought, but is using a non-referring

name, there is no proposition for him to contemplate, and

therefore no thought that he has. If he uses a sentence con-

taining a non-referring name, he expresses no thought. If,

like me, you have trouble feeling confidence in the criteria for

genuine cases of "fundamental identification", you will appre-

ciate why Russell limited such cases to situations in which

the mind is directly acquainted with its objects, something

he thought was possible only with sense data (and perhaps

with oneself).

What lies behind some of these attempts to characterize

the special relation between the mind and its objects is, of

course, the Cartesian drive to identify a sort of knowledge

which is guaranteed against failure. If this search is combined

with the assumption that all knowledge consists in the mind

being in psychological contact with an object, then objects

must be found about which erroris impossible -objects

that

3Reprinted in Theories and Things, Harvard University Press, 1981,

p. 121. (Originally printed in 1977.

4Dagfinn F0llesdal, "Knowledge, Identity, and Existence", Theorie

33 (1967); Saul Kripke, "Naming and Necessity", in Semantics of Nat-

ural Language, ed. D. Davidson and G. Harman, Reidel, 1972; David

Kaplan, "Quantifying In", Synthese 19, 1968.

must be what they seem and seem what they are.

There simply are no such objects. Not even appearances

are everything we think they are. Nor can the "aspects"

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