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On the Conceivability of an Omniscient Interpreter
Abstract
I examine the “omniscient interpreter” (OI) argument against scepticism that Donald Davidson published in 1977 only to retract it twenty-two years later. I argue that the argument's persuasiveness has been underestimated. I defend it against the charges that Davidson assumes the actual existence of an OI and that Davidson's other philosophical commitments are incompatible with the very conceivability of an OI. The argument's surface implausibility derives from Davidson's suggestion that an OI would attribute beliefs using the same methods as a fallible human interpreter. But this problem can be remedied via the adoption of an ambiguity theory of belief.
Logic plays a central role in radical interpretation. As Davidson explains,
The process of devising a theory of truth for an unknown native tongue might in crude outline go as follows. First we look for the best way to tit our logic, to the extent required to get a theory satisfying Convention T, on to the new language; this may mean reading the logical structure of first-order quantification theory (plus identity) into the language, not taking the logical constants one by one. but treating this much of logic as a grid to be fitted on to the language in one fell swoop. (Davidson 1973, p. 136).
Knowledge and Reality brings together a selection of Colin McGinn's philosophical essays from the mid 1970s to the late 1990s, whose unifying theme is the relation between mind and reality. The essays are divided into three groups (‘Knowledge and Necessity’, ‘Thought and World’, and ‘Reality and Appearance’) and range over several topics of recent interest, including the analysis of knowledge, the a priori, necessity, possible worlds, externalism, essentialism, realism, mental representation, intentionality, and colour. While all but one essay has been previously published elsewhere, McGinn has provided a new postscript to each essay, placing it in its philosophical context by sketching the background against which it was written, explaining its relations to other notable work, and offering his current reflections on the topic. The volume thus traces the development of McGinn's ideas and their role in some central philosophical debates. Seen together McGinn's essays bear out his commitment to ‘not making the world depend upon our means of knowing about it’, offering a many‐sided defence of realism, while emphasizing the epistemological price that realism exacts.
The publication of Davidson 2001, anthologizing articles from the 1980s and 1990s, encourages reconsidering arguments contained
in them. One such argument is Davidson’s omniscient-interpreter argument (‘OIA’) in Davidson 1983. The OIA allegedly establishes
that it is necessary that most beliefs are true. Thus the omniscient interpreter, revived in 2001 and now 20 years old, was
born to answer the skeptic. In Part I of this paper, I consider charges that the OIA establishes only that it is possible
that most beliefs are true; if correct, then it is also possibly the case that most beliefs are false—the skeptic’s very position.
Next, I consider two responses on Davidson’s behalf, showing that each fails. In Part II, I show that the OIA establishes
neither that it is necessarily merely possibly but actually the case that most beliefs are true. I then conclude that this
is enough to answer the skeptic.
This is the third volume of Donald Davidson's philosophical writings. In this selection of his work from the 1980s and the 90s, Davidson critically examines three types of propositional knowledge—knowledge of one's own mind, knowledge of other people's minds, and knowledge of the external world—by working out the nature and status of each type, and the connections and differences among them. While his main concern remains the relation between language, thought, and reality, Davidson's discussions touch a vast variety of issues in analytic metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind, including those of truth, human rationality, and facets of the realism–antirealism debate.