Donald Davidson

Davidson was born in Massachusetts and spent part of his childhood in the Philippines. At Harvard he studied classics and philosophy, acted alongside Leonard Bernstein and studied with Whitehead. During the war he taught navy pilots to identify enemy aircraft, then returned to Harvard under Quine and took his doctorate in 1949 on Plato's Philebus. He taught at Stanford for fourteen years, collaborating with Patrick Suppes on decision theory, running experiments and developing his own philosophy there.

He did not publish a major paper until he was forty-six. 'Actions, Reasons, and Causes' (1963) opposed the prevailing view that the reason for an action is not its cause, arguing that rationalising explanation is a kind of causal explanation, since otherwise we could not say that someone acted because of a reason. 'Truth and Meaning' (1967) proposed that a theory of meaning for a language is a Tarski-style theory of truth for it: to know a sentence's meaning is to know under what conditions it is true, a programme that made semantics central to philosophy. 'Mental Events' (1970) introduced anomalous monism: every mental event is a physical event, yet there are no strict laws linking mental and physical descriptions, so the mind belongs ontologically to nature while remaining explanatorily autonomous.

He moved to Princeton in 1967, then Rockefeller and Chicago, and in 1981 to Berkeley, where he remained until his death. 'Radical Interpretation' (1973) asked how an interpreter facing a wholly unknown speaker could understand meaning and belief from behaviour; the answer is that meaning and belief must be assigned together, and the only starting point is the 'principle of charity', taking the speaker to be largely right and rational, without which interpretation cannot begin. 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme' (1974) drew the consequence: there can be no conceptual scheme wholly untranslatable into ours, since if it were untranslatable we would have no reason to call it a language; the basic premise of relativism is incoherent.

Late in life he proposed 'triangulation': thought and language require a triangle of two creatures and a shared world, and without others there is no concept of objectivity. He denied that language is a shared conventional structure, saying 'there is no such thing as a language', only passing theories between interpreter and speaker. His papers are all short, collected in a few volumes, and each opened a field of research. He died at eighty-six after knee surgery; his widow is the philosopher Marcia Cavell.