Abstract

Chapter Four focuses on Donald Davidson, who enriched our understanding of thought, language, and reality more deeply and systematically than perhaps any other analytic philosopher. By establishing that Davidson can be understood as a global response-dependence theorist, the chapter examines Davidson’s accounts of radical interpretation and language learning to show that Kantianism can take the subjective source of empirical concepts, terms, or properties to be idiocentric in scope. Conceptual, linguistic, and perceptual capacities can be had by subjects qua individual. It then shows that Kantianism can take the subjective source to be logocentric in scope. Those capacities can be had by subjects qua language user. Finally, by considering an irreconcilable difference between Davidson’s accounts, the chapter shows that Kantianism can be ahistoricist or historicist. Capacities can be those that a subject would or did exercise, respectively.