Interpretation as Davidson concieves it in the essays in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation is a version of the inverse problem. I realized this today.
I also noticed that the Davidson looks a lot jollier on the cover of Truth, Language and History than he does on the cover of Essays on Actions and Events. On the cover of Inquiries he looks sort of ataractic. Those are all the books of his that I have so I can't make a general survey. One can only speculate as to the possible significance of these photos and the attitudes seemingly expressed therein.
This may well be the dorkiest thing I've ever written here.
Going by the pictures on Amazon, his mood seems to improve gradually as you go from the first collection to the fifth. He seems to be puzzling over whatever was troubling him in the early books in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, realizes something in Problems of Rationality, and by the time you reach Truth, Language, and History he's totally fine. And then he finds a new hobby.
Incidentally, the picture of Davidson on Lepore & Ludwig's Davidson's Truth-Theoretic Semantics creeps me out.
Posted by: Daniel | October 25, 2007 at 05:15 PM