Triangulation, the Third Dogma, and the Problem of Objectivity

Abstract

In the latter part of his career, Donald Davidson introduced a model of communication involving two creatures interacting with each other and a mutually perceived object. My view is that Davidson’s introduction of this triangulation model was occasioned by a long-running debate with his mentor, W. V. O. Quine. This debate concerned interpretation, a topic important to both thinkers. The focus of the debate was what to take as the stimuli that cause speakers to utter certain sentences about their environment. Quine favored the proximal cause, the stimulation of one’s sensory receptors; Davidson favored the distal cause, the objects themselves. This paper concerns the proximal-distal debate and its role in motivating Davidson’s introduction of triangulation. While the proximal-distal debate concerns interpretation, I aim to make clear why Davidson came see the debate as a “minor corollary” of a more fundamental difference with Quine concerning epistemology. Generally, Davidson rejects Quine’s epistemology as embodying an empiricist version of the dualism of scheme and content. Quine’s motivation for taking proximal stimuli as central for meaning and epistemology derives from his epistemic project of accounting for our conceptual sovereignty in building conceptual schemes (and in particular, different ontologies) to match the input of our sensory receptors. Now, since radical translation involves the matching of proximal stimuli, Quine avoids the problem of error attribution; moreover, because proximal stimuli are matched, sentences conditioned to them can serve as objective checks on conceptual schemes and so common content. Rejecting scheme-content dualism in favor of the distal theory makes it difficult for Davidson to account for error attribution in the context of interpretation and objective truth in the context of epistemology. Indeed, for Davidson the problem of error is just the epistemic problem of objectivity seen in the mirror of meaning. I argue that triangulation is meant to address the problem of objectivity by accounting for our concept of error as arising within the context of two minds communicating about a shared world rather than by analyzing objectivity as an epistemic relation between mind and something external to it.