Davidson on Meaning
You Can Only Understand Someone If You Already Assume They're Rational
Every time you successfully understand what another person means, you've performed a small philosophical miracle that Donald Davidson spent decades trying to explain.
The Idea
Here is the puzzle Davidson sat with: how do we ever understand each other at all? Words don't carry meaning like luggage in a suitcase. Two people can use the same word — 'bank', 'freedom', 'love' — and mean entirely different things. So what bridges the gap? Davidson's answer was radical and somewhat unsettling. Understanding someone requires what he called the 'principle of charity': to interpret another person's words, you must begin by assuming that most of what they believe is true, and that their reasoning is broadly rational. Not because people are always right, but because without that assumption, interpretation breaks down entirely. If you assume the person speaking to you is mostly confused, mostly irrational, or mostly mistaken, you lose your footing. You no longer have a stable base from which to assign meaning to their words at all. This connects to Davidson's deeper claim about meaning itself. He argued that meaning isn't something stored privately in a mind and then transmitted via language like a signal. Instead, meaning is something that emerges in the space between people — it's constituted by the patterns of behaviour, assent, and response that we observe in each other. There is no 'private language' carrying private meanings. To mean something is, in an important sense, already to be in a relationship with others. The implications are quietly profound: understanding is not passive decoding. It is an active, charitable, interpretive act — and one you are performing constantly, mostly without noticing.
In the World
In 1974, Davidson published an essay called 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme', and it quietly detonated a long-standing assumption in philosophy: that radically different cultures or peoples might inhabit entirely different conceptual worlds, so foreign to each other that genuine translation would be impossible. This idea — sometimes called conceptual relativism — had been influential in both philosophy and anthropology. It suggested that the Hopi people, for instance, experienced time in a way so alien to Western concepts that real mutual understanding was out of reach. Davidson thought this was incoherent. His argument: if something is truly untranslatable, we have no grounds for calling it a language or a conceptual scheme at all. The very act of identifying something as a language — as a system of meaningful communication — already requires that we can find enough common ground to interpret it. Total incommensurability is not a description of radical difference; it's a description of noise. This has a striking practical dimension. When anthropologists or linguists engage with a new language, they cannot start from zero. They must begin by watching what speakers respond to — which utterances accompany which situations — and charitably mapping the new language onto familiar patterns of reasoning and reference. This is what Davidson called 'radical interpretation': the thought experiment that reveals what interpretation always involves, even in everyday conversation. You are, right now, a radical interpreter of everyone you meet. You just don't usually notice the scaffold.
Why It Matters
Davidson's principle of charity isn't just a philosopher's technical tool — it reframes what it means to genuinely listen to another person. In an era when disagreement is often treated as evidence of irrationality or bad faith, the charitable stance has become countercultural. Consider what you do when you find yourself unable to understand someone's position. The temptation is to reach quickly for an explanation: they're biased, they haven't thought it through, they're in thrall to ideology. Davidson would push back gently but firmly. If you can't yet make sense of what they're saying, that's not the end of the inquiry — it's the beginning. Your task is to find the interpretation under which their view becomes coherent, even if you ultimately disagree with it. This is not the same as agreeing with everyone. It's a precondition for meaningful disagreement. You can only really argue with someone once you've understood them well enough to steelman their position. Without charity, you're not engaging with their view — you're engaging with your own caricature of it. Mindful attention, in Davidson's sense, means holding the interpretive work consciously — noticing the gap between what someone says and what you assume they mean, and staying curious in that gap.
A Question to Ponder
When you last felt certain you understood someone's point of view — how much of what you understood was what they actually meant, and how much was the most charitable version your own mind quietly constructed?
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