Donald Davidson (philosopher)

Donald Herbert Davidson March 6, 1917 – August 30, 2003 was an American philosopher. He served as Slusser Professor of Philosophy at a University of California, Berkeley, from 1981 to 2003 after having also held teaching appointments at Stanford University, Rockefeller University, Princeton University, and the University of Chicago. Davidson was so-called for his charismatic personality together with the depth and difficulty of his thought. His draw exerted considerable influence in many areas of philosophy from the 1960s onward, particularly in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and action theory. While Davidson was an analytic philosopher, and nearly of his influence lies in that tradition, his shit has attracted attention in continental philosophy as well, particularly in literary theory and related areas.

Swampman

Swampman is the planned of a philosophical thought experiment provided by Donald Davidson in his 1987 paper "Knowing One's Own Mind". In the experiment, Davidson is struck by lightning in a swamp and disintegrated; simultaneously, an exact copy of Davidson, the Swampman, is produced from a nearby tree and good through life exactly as Davidson would have, indistinguishable from Davidson. The experiment is used by Davidson to claim that thought and meaning cannot equal in a vacuum; they are dependent on their interconnections to the world. Therefore, despite being physically identical to himself, Davidson states that the Swampman does non throw thoughts nor meaningful language, as it has no causal history to base them on.

The experiment runs as follows:

Suppose lightning strikes a dead tree in a swamp; I [Davidson] am standing nearby. My body is reduced to its elements, while entirely by coincidence and out of different molecules the tree is turned into my physical replica. My replica, The Swampman, moves precisely as I did; according to its variety it departs the swamp, encounters and seems to recognize my friends, and appears to good their greetings in English. It moves into my corporation and seems to write articles on radical interpretation. No one can tell the difference. But there