Int J Psychoanal 2004;85:1225–30 PHILOSOPHY

Editors’ introduction
This essay by the late Donald Davidson on truth is the last in a series of highly praised
essays on philosophy and its relevance to psychoanalysis. When David Tuckett and Arnold
Cooper originally commissioned this series of contributions, they recognized that many
analysts had significant gaps in their knowledge about philosophy, and an educational
series was long overdue. At no time in the history of psychoanalysis has philosophical
influence been as pronounced as it is today. Philosophical themes, such as subjectivity,
objectivity, truth, reality, epistemology and perception, to name only a few, have become an
intrinsic part of psychoanalytic discourse in our meetings and our journals. The fundamental
premises of philosophy are often incompletely understood by analysts, and these essays
have been informative and illuminating to many of our readers. The philosophy section has
been designed, organized and shaped under the superb leadership of Marcia Cavell, herself
a distinguished philosopher. As Joint Editors-in-Chief, we feel we owe a profound debt of
gratitude to Dr Cavell for her extraordinary work in the design and implementation of this
outstanding section of IJP.
GLEN O. GABBARD, PAUL WILLIAMS

Truth
DONALD DAVIDSON†
Late Department of Philosophy, University of California, 314 Moses Hall (#2390), Berkeley,
CA 94720-2390, USA1

There is a long tradition according to which the concept of truth is one of the most
important subjects for philosophical discussion; but in this century the tradition
has come to be seriously questioned by a large number of philosophers, not to
mention historians, literary theorists, art critics, anthropologists, political scientists,
psychoanalysts, sociologists, and others. I think this is because of various tempting
errors and confusions. Here I examine a few of the reasons truth has become
tarnished, or at least diminished, in the minds of many, and then go on to say why
1
Donald Davidson was the Marion Slusser Professor of Philosophy here from 1986 until his death on
30 August 2003. He had agreed to write an essay on truth for the series of essays by philosophers on
topics of current interest to psychoanalysis that I have been editing, but had not yet done so. Among
the papers he left behind I found two that are perfectly suitable for this series. I believe Davidson
would have thought so as well. I have pieced this essay together from ‘Whose truth?’, which Davidson
delivered at a conference on ‘The place of psychoanalysis in contemporary culture’ at the Whitney
Humanities Center, Yale University in 1998, and ‘Truth rehabilitated’, which will be the first essay
in Truth, language, and history, Volume V of Davidson’s collected essays, soon to be published by
Harvard University. I have added nothing of my own.—Marcia Cavell.
Please address correspondence regarding this paper to Dr Cavell at 1570 Olympus Avenue,
Berkeley, CA 94708, USA — cavell@uclink.berkeley.edu.

©2004 Institute of Psychoanalysis

1226 DONALD DAVIDSON

the concept of truth should be restored to its key role in our understanding of the
world and of the minds of agents.
Before it could come to seem worthwhile to debunk truth, it was necessary to
represent truth as something grander than it is, or to endow it with powers it does not
have. When there was no clear line between philosophy and science, it was natural for
philosophers to claim to be purveyors of the closest thing to truth on offer. Concentration
on epistemology, especially when epistemology seemed called on to provide ultimate
grounds of justification for knowledge, encouraged the confused idea that philosophy
was the place to look for the final and most basic truths on which all other truths,
whether of science, morality or common sense, must rest. Plato’s conflation of abstract
universals with entities of supreme value reinforced the confusion of truth with the
most eminent truths; the confusion is apparent in the view (which Plato ultimately
came to question) that the only perfect exemplar of a universal or form is the form
itself. Thus only circularity (the universal or concept) is perfectly circular, only the
concept of a hand is a perfect hand, only truth itself is completely true.
Here we have a deep confusion, a category mistake, which was apparently
doomed to flourish. Truth isn’t an object, and so it can’t be true; truth is a concept, and
is intelligibly attributed to things like sentences, utterances, beliefs and propositions,
entities which have a propositional content. It is an error to think that, if someone
seeks to understand the concept of truth, that person is necessarily trying to discover
important general truths about justice or the foundations of physics. The mistake
percolates down to the idea that a theory of truth must somehow tell us what, in
general, is true, or at least how to discover truths.
No wonder there has been a reaction! Philosophy was promising far more than it,
or any other discipline, could deliver. Nietzsche famously reacted; so, in a different
way, did the American pragmatists. Dewey, for example, quite properly rejected the
idea that philosophers were privy to some special or foundational specie of truth
without which science could not hope to advance. But he coupled this virtuous
modesty with an absurd theory about the concept of truth; having derided pretensions
to superior access to truths, he felt he must attack the classical concept itself. The
attack, in the fashion of the times, took the form of a persuasive redefinition. Since
the word ‘Truth’ has an aura of being something valuable, the trick of persuasive
definitions is to redefine it to be something of which you approve, something ‘good
to steer by’ in a phrase Rorty endorses on Dewey’s behalf. So Dewey declared that
a belief or theory is true if and only if it promotes human affairs.2
It would be otiose to review the obvious objections to this view, for both its
proponents and critics are familiar with them. Proponents glory in the conflicts with
common sense;3 critics swell with the silly pleasure of having spotted irresponsible

2
Most of what I say here about pragmatists early and contemporary is inspired by a review of Alan Ryan
(1995) by Richard Rorty. Rorty writes, ‘To take the traditional notion of Truth seriously, you have to do
more than agree that some beliefs are true and some false … You must agree with Clough that “It fortifies
my soul to know/That, though I perish, Truth is so.” You must feel uneasy at William James’s claim that
“ideas … become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relations with other parts of our
experience.” You must become indignant when Ryan (accurately paraphrasing Dewey) says that “to call a
statement ‘true’ is no more than to say that it is good to steer our practice by”’ (1996, p. 7).
 TRUTH 1227

rhetoric. It is more interesting to ask why Dewey, and the others Rorty includes in
Dewey’s camp—James, Nietzsche, Foucault and himself—put forward a thesis so
clearly contrary to the ordinary, but philosophically interesting, concept of truth. I
think of four related reasons.
According to Rorty, Dewey ‘agreed with Nietzsche that the traditional notion of
Truth, as correspondence to the intrinsic nature of Reality, was a remnant of the idea
of submission to the Will of God’ (1996, p. 7). Truth as correspondence with reality
may be an idea we are better off without, especially when, as in this quotation, ‘truth’
and ‘reality’ are capitalized. The formulation is not so much wrong as empty; but
it does have the merit of suggesting that something is not true simply because it is
believed, even if believed by everyone. The trouble lies in the claim that the formula
has explanatory power. The notion of correspondence would be a help if we were able
to say, in an instructive way, which fact or slice of reality it is that makes a particular
sentence true. No one has succeeded in doing this. If we ask, for example, what makes
the sentence ‘The moon is a quarter of a million miles away’ true, the only answer we
come up with is the fact that the moon is a quarter of a million miles away.
When ‘truth’ is spelled with a capital ‘T’, it is perhaps natural to think there
is a unique way of describing things which gets at their essential nature, ‘an
interpretation of the world which gets it right’, as Rorty puts it, a description
of ‘Reality As It Is In Itself’ (1996, p. 7). Of course there is no such unique
‘interpretation’ or description, not even in the one or more languages each of us
commands, not in any possible language. Or perhaps we should just say this is
an ideal of which no one has made good sense. It hardly matters, for no sensible
defender of the objectivity of attributions of truth to particular utterances or beliefs
is stuck with this idea, and so there is no reason why, if we abstain from the search
for The Perfect Description of Reality, we have to buy the thesis that there is no
distinction, ‘even in principle’, between beliefs which are true and beliefs which
are ‘merely good to steer by’ (p. 7).
We come here to a far more powerful consideration in favor of a somewhat
tamer, but clearly recognizable, version of the pragmatic theory of truth. Rorty (1995)
brings it to the fore when he credits Dewey with the thought that the correspondence
theory adds nothing to ‘ordinary, workaday, fallible ways of telling … the true from
the false’. What is clearly right is a point made long ago by Plato in the Theaetetus:
truths do not come with a ‘mark’, like the date in the corner of some photographs,
which distinguishes them from falsehoods. The best we can do is test, experiment,
compare and keep an open mind. But no matter how long and well we and coming
generations keep at it, we and they will be left with fallible beliefs. We know many
things, and will learn more; what we will never know for certain is which of the
things we believe are true. Since it is neither visible as a target, nor recognizable
when achieved, there is no point in calling truth a goal. Truth is not a value, so

3
Thus Rorty, in final praise of the pragmatic attitude to truth, says that ‘non-competitive, though perhaps
irreconcilable, beliefs [may] reasonably [be] called “true”’ (1996, p. 8). Of course one can imagine
circumstances under which it might be reasonable to say this (for example to prevent a fist-fight), but
could it be reasonable, or even possible, to think irreconcilable beliefs are true?
1228 DONALD DAVIDSON

the ‘pursuit of truth’ is an empty enterprise unless it means only that it is often
worthwhile to increase our confidence in our beliefs, by collecting further evidence
or checking our calculations.
From the fact that we will never be able to tell for certain which of our beliefs
are true, pragmatists conclude that we may as well identify our best researched,
most successful, beliefs with the true ones, and give up the idea of objectivity. (Truth
is objective if the truth of a belief or sentence is independent of whether it is justified
by all our evidence, believed by our neighbors or is good to steer by.) But here we
have a choice. Instead of giving up the traditional view that truth is objective, we
can give up the equally traditional view (to which the pragmatists adhere) that truth
is a norm, something for which to strive. I agree with the pragmatists that we can’t
consistently take truth to be both objective and something to be pursued. But I think
they would have done better to cleave to a view that counts truth as objective, but
pointless as a goal.4
Some contemporary pragmatists have moved away from the hopeless idea that
a belief is true if it helps us get on with life, or the less foolish, but still wrong, view
that truth is no different from what is, perhaps at its practical best, epistemically
available. But other philosophers who would not call themselves pragmatists are
still rocking in the wake of the legitimate reaction against inflated or misguided
theories of truth. The tendency they have joined is a broad one, one which is
perhaps now the mainstream of philosophical thought about the concept of truth.
The banner under which these debunkers march is deflationism. The idea common
to the various brands of deflationism is that truth, though a legitimate concept, is
essentially trivial, and certainly not worth the grand metaphysical attention it has
received. This view receives its strength from two sources. One is wide, and largely
justified, dissatisfaction with the standard attempts to define or otherwise explicate
the concept. I have already said why I think correspondence theories are without
explanatory content. Coherence definitions or ‘theories’ have their attractions, but
only as epistemic theories, not as accounting for truth. For while it is clear that only
a consistent set of beliefs could contain all true beliefs, there is no reason to suppose
that every consistent set of beliefs contains only truths.
Openly epistemic theories have their powerful supporters: I think particularly
of Michael Dummett and Hilary Putnam, both of whom, with modifications, hold
that truth is warranted assertability. I respect this idea for the same reason I respect
closely related pragmatic theories, because it relates truth to human attitudes like
belief, intention and desire, and I believe any complete account of truth must do this.
But theirs cannot be the right way to express the relation. For either the conditions of
warranted assertability are made so strong that they include truth itself, in which case

4
Curiously, Rorty sensibly argues that truth is not a norm and that there is no difference in principle
between what is true and what is justified: ‘Pragmatists think that if something makes no difference
to practice, it should make no difference to philosophy. This conviction makes them suspicious of
the philosopher’s emphasis on the difference between justification and truth’ (1995, p. 281). If there
is no difference, truth is identical with what is justified; but Rorty claims there is lots to say about
justification, yet little to say about truth. If, as seems right, it is a legitimate norm to want to be justified,
but not to seek the truth, then there must be a large difference between them.
 TRUTH 1229

the account is circular, or circularity is avoided by making the conditions explicit,

and it then becomes clear that a fully warranted assertion may be false.
The concept of truth is troubling because, on the one hand, truth seems coolly
distant from human concerns; we never know for sure what we know, and, as I have
argued, it isn’t sensible to make it a goal over and above the search for justification.
The truth—of history, of the beginnings of the universe, of the origin of species, of
the details of what explains how animals develop, of whether the universe will go
on expanding forever—these truths owe nothing to us. The truth in each of these
cases has always, and always will be, what it is independent of what we believe,
independent of our existence.
On the other hand, nothing in the world would be true or false if it were not for
us. Truths may be eternal, but the entities that are true or false are just our states of
belief, our utterances and our scribblings. We talk of sentences and propositions as
being true or false, but these are abstractions which would be of no interest if the
sentences were never uttered or the propositions never believed or doubted. The
magic predicate ‘true’ would have no application if it were not for us.
The complication is this: our utterances are true or false, given what they mean.
What decides this? Until we know what an utterance or inscription means, or know
the propositional content of a belief or other thought, we do not know what is needed
even to raise the question of truth. It is here, in the arena of interpretation, that issues
concerning ‘kinds’ of truth arise.
They arise, first of all, when we realize that it is seldom that we use words that
literally express what we want to convey to a hearer. Even when we are saying what
we believe, with no attempt to exaggerate, deceive or misrepresent, we often do not
mean what we literally say. If I say, ‘No man is an island’, what I literally say is no
doubt true; an island is a piece of land surrounded by water, and no man is a piece of
land surrounded by water. This is what I literally say, and it is something I believe,
but it isn’t what I mean, or what my utterance means. What I mean, of course, is
that no man is entirely isolated from his human environment; this is also true, and
something I believe. Both truths are relevant to understanding what was said, but
in quite different ways. The first is relevant only because we have to know the truth
conditions of the utterance taken literally if we are to grasp the metaphor. That is,
we have to know that the sentence ‘An island is a piece of land surrounded by water’
is true if and only if an island is a piece of land surrounded by water. (This is the
only sense in which we might say that truth, of a belief or proposition, is a matter of
correspondence with what is the case.) We would not understand the metaphor if we
did not know what a man or an island was. The truth of the second ‘meaning’, the
metaphorical meaning, if we like to talk that way, is the truth of what was meant. We
may be uncertain whether what was meant in this sense is actually true, but we can
be fairly sure what the speaker intended us to take as true.
Of course, there are many other ways in which truth may be relevant to an
utterance. When I was about to be born, the doctors told my father they could save
the mother or the child, but not both. My father made the sensible choice, and I was
discarded. It was only when I loudly protested that measures were taken to see if I
too could be kept alive. I told this story, believing my mother had told it to me, until
1230 DONALD DAVIDSON

I was 40-some years old, when she informed me that it was completely false, and
she had never told the story to me. If you know all this, you will take my story to
be literally false, and what I consciously intended to convey by telling it false. My
story has the marks of a standard tale of the birth of heroes, so no doubt there was
something I hoped to convey beyond the literal meaning; and you, knowing that
the story is almost certainly false, will also think there is a truth about myself that I
unknowingly revealed by telling my tale.
Understanding anything a speaker says requires that we get the literal meaning;
for everything implicated, intentionally suggested, ironically or metaphorically
conveyed is conveyed by way of the literal. But what is the literal meaning? One
way to think about it is to reflect on how we learn a first language, or, for that
matter, a second if we do not have a bilingual speaker or dictionary to prompt us.
What we have to go on is the verbal behavior of others. We will first learn one-word
sentences, through overt ostension, or the implicit ostension that connects, for the
learner, items or episodes in the shared and observed world with sounds. At this
stage, there is not even the possibility of error: whatever the learner observes as
consistently correlated with a sound provides the content of the utterance. (This can
be corrected and refined subsequently, but the point remains: whatever content our
words have is conferred on them by the observed usage of others.)
When the learner becomes a speaker in his own right, those who understand him
will become learners in turn; they will be learning to understand his idiolect. The
idea of a shared language is a myth, a useful myth that allows us to group together
people who mean more or less the same thing by the same words. But when we
want to evaluate the truth of what speakers say, we cannot count on knowing what
they mean except by learning their particular idiolect, and it is the product, in the
individual, of a social process. In this sense, and only in this sense, truth is a social
construct.
I have said why I cannot accept correspondence, coherence, pragmatic or epistemic
theories of truth. The deflationists are right in thinking that truth cannot be defined,
but wrong in thinking the concept of truth is trivial. Rather, it is so fundamental a
concept in our understanding of other basic concepts like knowledge and belief that
it can be reduced to nothing simpler and other than itself. Rorty doesn’t much mind
my saying that truth is one concept among a number of other related concepts which
we use, and must use, in describing, explaining and predicting human behavior.
But why, he asks, say truth is any more important than such concepts as intention,
belief, desire, and so on? (Rorty, 1995, p. 286). Importance is a hard thing to argue
about. All these concepts (and more) are essential to thought, and cannot be reduced
to anything simpler or more fundamental. Why be niggardly in awarding prizes; I’m
happy to hand out golden apples all round.

References
Rorty R (1995). Is truth a goal of inquiry? Davidson vs. Wright. Review of Truth and objectivity, by
Crispin Wright. Philos Q 45:180, July 1995, p. 281–300.
Rorty R (1996). Something to steer by. A review of John Dewey and the high tide of American
liberalism, by Alan Ryan. London Rev Books 18(12), 12 June, p. 7–8.