A theory of human action should provide an account of the connection between reason and action when an agent acts for a reason, and it should provide an account of the explanatory force of explanations of actions. On the causal theory of action, the connection between reasons and actions is that of event causality and explanations of actions are modeled on ordinary causal explanations, where events are explained by citing other events as their causes. A once common objection to the causal theory had it that reasons cannot be causes, since explanations of actions do not fit reason and action into a nomic nexus expressed by laws or law-like generalizations. Against this train of thought, Donald Davidson defends a version of the causal theory by arguing that the view that the connection between reasons and actions is that of event causality and the view that explanations of actions do not fit reasons and actions into a nomic nexus are compatible. Davidson's theory generated a small industry of criticism focusing on the implications of his version of the causal theory for the nature of the causal connection between reasons and actions.

Donald Davidson infamously claims that belief is in its nature veridical, and that skepticism is for this reason fundamentally incoherent. To those who take the issue of external world skepticism seriously, Davidson's arguments may seem to involve a conjuring trick. In particular, his invocation of an ‘omniscient interpreter’, whose intelligibility supposedly ensures that our beliefs must be largely true, has the air of incense and lantern-rubbing about it. Davidson's claim has received considerable critical response in the literature, almost all of it negative. In my view, some commentators have indeed lit on a critical and controversial lemma in Davidson's argument, but this basic result has been obscured by being presented amidst an array of other criticisms that simply make no sense from a Davidsonian point of view. The aim of this paper is to clear away some of the confusion that stands in the way of a more productive evaluation of Davidson's important claim.

I Introduction

At Metaphysics Γ 3, Aristotle argues that it belongs to a single discipline, which he calls first philosophy, to investigate both substance (οὐσία) and a special class of claims which includes among its members the principle of non-contradiction (PNC). At Γ 4, after insisting that the PNC is, strictly speaking, indemonstrable, he sets forth a series of sketches of refutative arguments intended to show how it can, nonetheless, be substantiated. Traditionally, his main refutative argument has been taken to be embedded in the passage which runs from 1006a31 to b34. In that passage, he tries to show that anyone who denies the PNC and who can then be led, by means of an artfully arranged series of questions, to agree (whether willingly or grudgingly) to a few seemingly modest theses about the signification of expressions of a certain type — which Aristotle illustrates with the general term ‘man’ (ἄνθρωπος) — is thereby logically committed to the following modal claim: ‘It is necessary, then, if it is true to say that something is a man, that it be a bipedal animal' (1006b28-30).

Analysis of the nature of voting is fundamental to an understanding of the nature and value of democracy. Three questions ought to be distinguished concerning voting. First, how are we to conceive of the activity of voting? What is its nature? Second, what is it that people aim at when they vote? What are the grounds on which people vote, the reasons with which they justify their vote? And third, what ought people to aim at when they vote? What are the relevant grounds for voting in one way or another? These last are explicitly normative questions. At times individuals vote on the basis of concerns which are not appropriate to the issues involved. The first question is not a question of psychology or of value; it is a metaphysical question. What is the nature of voting? How is it possible to count votes? Two answers are widely given in the literature. The first is that voting consists in the expression of preference. On this kind of view, either a vote is a preference or it is a fairly direct and unambiguous expression of the preference of the voter.

In 1989 the philosopher and self-described feminist Christina Sommers published a short essay — ‘an opinion piece,’ she called it — that was eventually developed into and published as a philosophical article. In this essay Sommers criticized ‘feminist philosophers’ (her term) for being ‘oddly unsympathetic to the women whom they claim to represent.’ Specifically, Sommers accused these philosophers of ignoring the ‘values of the average woman’ and of being caught up in an ‘ideological fervor.’ To emphasize her point that the so-called feminist philosophers have lost touch with ‘the average woman,’ Sommers wrote that ‘One must nevertheless expect that many women will continue to swoon at the sight of Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett O'Hara up the stairs to a fate undreamt of in feminist philosophy.’