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[This excerpt begins with the end of Borradori's preamble to the interview.]
Thought depends on a triangular configuration of relations involving at least two interlocutors and a series of shared events. What is given to the individual is not, in the last instance, the sensory organs; rather, it is this communicative triangulation. It is not perception, but intersubjectivity and interpretation that are at the basis of knowledge.
... the communicative process, understood as the reaching of a consensus by a specific social or scientific community, has always lain at the basis of thought in the pragmatist tradition, from Charles S. Peirce to Clarence I. Lewis. For Davidson, on the contrary, the notion of consensus remains secondary, and precisely herein lies his fundamental originality in comparison with the pragmatist perspective. Intersubjectivity is the root of thought, in the sense of its transcendental condition, which therefore does not require the production of a consensus. Speaking of consensus means presupposing that ideas exist prior to the consensus, and that these ideas, when confronted with other ideas, bring about an agreement. In Davidson's mind, language, understood as the intersubjective production of meanings, comes before everything: before sharing in a vision of the world, ideas do not exist.
[The first two-thirds and last few questions of the interview have been trimmed.]
...For you, it is no longer sufficient to maintain, like the pragmatists, that one can have knowledge only from the moment in which the single vision of the world is shared, but you insist that it is not possible to reach a vision of the world in the first place without intersubjective sharing.
Look, what I call the "Cartesian vision" is just a metaphor, and not a comment on Descartes. There is one way of doing philosophy in which you suppose that something is presented to us. That something is either raw experience, sensory data, or stimulations of our nerve endings — it doesn't make any difference; on the basis of this, we construct a picture of an outside world and of other people. I prefer to call such pictures empirical and Cartesian because we can develop a picture of the world all by ourselves, and we could do so even if there were nobody else in the world. Now, my own view is that, until we have an idea of what's going on in the minds of other people, it doesn't make sense to say that we have the concept of objectivity, of something existing in the world quite independent of us. The empiricists have it exactly backwards, because they think that first one knows what's in his own mind, then, with luck, he finds out what is in the outside world, and, with even more luck, he finds out what is in somebody else's mind. I think differently. First we find out what is in somebody else's mind, and by then we have got all the rest. Of course, I really think that it all comes at the same time.
How would you define the concept of mind in the context of the absolute priority of intersubjectivity?
The mind is nothing more than the brain, and we can characterize people at certain points as having thoughts. The basis of objectivity is intersubjectivity.
But if objectivity does not exist without intersubjectivity, how do you define the space of subjectivity? it is in this sense that I am interested in what you have to say about the mind.
We really can distinguish three different kinds of knowledge. The most important one, the one without which there would not be any other, is third-person knowledge; that is, the knowledge of what is in other minds. The implication is that we have to communicate with somebody else, which means knowing what they are thinking in order to have a concept of objectivity — that is, a concept of objects in a public space and time. Of course, if we have knowledge of other minds, we must at the same time already have a concept of the shared world. Knowledge of the external, in the sense of shared, world, is the second kind of knowledge, from which follows a third: the knowledge of what happens inside ourselves.
Are there differences between these three types of knowledge: that which we can learn from someone else's mind, that of common objects in the world, and that of oneself?
Certainly. And to understand them, we need to begin with a question. If we ask what the criteria are for saying that some object is three feet long, the criteria themselves are objective in the sense that we can agree with other people as to what the criteria are. For example, we map lengths of things or temperatures on the basis of numbers, insofar as the relevant properties of numbers is a fact we can agree upon. When it comes to keeping track of what is in somebody else's mind, there is no way to agree on criteria, because our contacts with other minds were the basis of the criteria. So, when we ask, "what does somebody else think, believe, or want?" all we can do is relate their states of mind to our own states of mind. There is only a subjective yardstick. But there is also a mild paradox — that intersubjectivity is the sphere where each of us uses his own thoughts to make sense of other people's thoughts — so that between us we construct something intersubjective that is objective.
Then, knowledge of someone else's mind first comes from knowledge of the outside world.
This is what I take to be the deep difference between the social sciences and the physical sciences. There is a sense in which the yardstick we use is unshared when we talk about other people, whereas when we are talking about the outside world, it is shared. Roughly, external objects are at an equal distance between us and we try to triangulate that. But if we ask ourselves about the type of communication between two minds, the feature is different.
And the third type of knowledge? that of oneself?
The third type of knowledge is the knowledge of our mind, and we cannot talk about criteria anymore. It does not make any sense to ask, "Does my sentence 'the snow is white' really mean that the snow is white?" Self-interpretation does not have criteria, except when you begin to use very sophisticated psychoanalytic and Freudian concepts to question the contents of your own mind from the point of view of other things that are also in your mind. Basically, however, you don't interpret yourself on the basis of evidence. When things go wrong, you act as though you were looking at yourself from the outside.
Now I understand better your anti-Cartesian position.
There is a sense in which I believe we know what is in our minds without having to go through other people. However, I don't think that this is the basis of our knowledge of the external world. The empiricists, as well as the "Cartesianists," agree that what happens in our minds is the point from which we start to build by induction. I don't agree at all.
Could one say that consensus is at the basis of objectivity?
Consensus is the wrong way of putting it, because to speak of consensus makes it sound as though each of us has his own ideas and we come to an agreement, whereas, I am saying that we don't have any ideas until we share a picture of the world. For me, the wrong picture is that each of us has our own ideas and we develop language to find out whether we agree or disagree. It is not until communication springs up that we begin to have ideas. It is not as though we have to reach agreement. Rather, the question is whether we succeed in talking together and thinking together. And if we do, we share a great deal.
An aside: Davidson is one of the most important philosophers on this side of the second World War. He is also firmly on the left side of the sometimes bitter Analytic/Continental divide in contemporary philosophy (Davidson's writings would probably be considered "dry" by logicians and chemists). The interviewer, an Italian, is far over to the right side (along with most philosophers you've heard of if you've studied history, geography, political science, women's studies, sociology, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, literature, art history — in fact, if you've studied pretty much anything aside from philosophy "proper" in the mid-80s to now you are almost certain to have read the continental philosophers.)
It's not really captured here, but there is a little tension throughout the book where the interviewer pushes her subjects in directions they'd rather not go and repeatedly tries to steer them into admitting that it's all just one big happy post-modernist thing. Highly recommended book though, suitable for both the casual and the serious reader, especially if you are curious about the state of contemporary philosophy.
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