The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 57, No.

226
ISSN 00318094

January 2007

DISCUSSIONS

TRIANGULATING WITH DAVIDSON

BY CLAUDINE VERHEGGEN
According to Davidson, triangulation is necessary both to fix the meanings of ones thoughts and
utterances and to have the concept of objectivity, both of which are necessary for thinking and talking
at all. Against these claims, it has been objected that neither meaning-determination nor possession of
the concept of objectivity requires triangulation; nor does the ability to think and talk require
possession of the concept of objectivity. But this overlooks the important connection between the tasks
that triangulation is meant to perform. One cannot fix concepts or meanings, which one must do for
there to be any concepts or meanings at all, without having the concept of objectivity.

1. Over twenty years ago, Donald Davidson introduced the term triangulation to
refer to a process through which, according to him, people have to go in order to be
thinkers and speakers.1 This process consists of the mutual and simultaneous responses of two or more creatures to common distal stimuli and to one anothers
responses (Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, p. xv). Triangulation is necessary, Davidson maintains, both to fix the meanings of ones thoughts and utterances and to
have the concept of objectivity, that is, the awareness, no matter how inarticulately
held, of the fact that what is thought [or said] may be true or false.2 Both these
ingredients, he also maintains, are necessary in order to think and talk at all. The
importance of the triangulation argument in Davidsons philosophy cannot be overstated. Though its primary purpose is to establish the essentially social character of
language and thought, it is also the basis of Davidsons own brand of realism and
semantic externalism, as well as of his anti-foundationalism and anti-scepticism. It is
no wonder, then, that the argument occupies an increasingly central place in his
later philosophy. And given the extensive work it is meant to do, it is perhaps no
wonder that it remains highly controversial. In fact, whenever it is discussed, it is
almost invariably rejected.
My aim in this paper is not to canvass the many ramifications the triangulation
argument has in Davidsons philosophy; this would be a vast project. My purpose is
the more limited but, I think, essential one of addressing the central objections
Davidson, Rational Animals, repr. in his Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 95105, at p. 105. All citations below are of works by Davidson unless
otherwise stated.
2 The Problem of Objectivity, repr. in Problems of Rationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1995), pp. 318, at p. 4.
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which have been advanced against the argument. These objections are threefold. It
is said, first, that triangulation is not necessary for the meanings of ones thoughts
and utterances to be fixed; secondly, that triangulation is not necessary in order to
have the concept of objectivity; thirdly, that one need not have the concept of
objectivity in order to think and talk. I believe these objections are due, at least in
part, to misunderstandings of Davidsons argument. In particular, I think it is a
mistake to try to understand and evaluate separately the two tasks that triangulation
is meant to perform, as many critics have done. The key to recognizing this lies in
Davidsons words that triangulation is not a matter of one person grasping a
meaning already there, but a performance that ... bestows a content on language
(Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, p. xv). One cannot, presumably, have the concept of
objectivity without having some specific concepts of objects and events. But one also
cannot fix concepts or meanings, which, as Davidson indicates above, one must do
for there to be any concepts or meanings at all, without having the concept of
objectivity. This is why the two tasks can only be achieved at once, and thus why we
cannot ask whether triangulation is needed for one apart from the other.
2. In fairness to his critics, I should say that Davidson himself is in part to blame for
being misunderstood, for he has never given us a crystal-clear presentation of the
triangulation argument. Part of the diculty is that he talks both about a primitive (also basic, or simple) kind of triangulation,3 in which even non-linguistic
creatures can engage, and about a more sophisticated kind of triangulation which, in
eect, amounts to full-blown linguistic interpersonal communication. Both kinds of
triangulation, Davidson claims, are necessary for language and thought, although, it
may seem, the second kind only trivially so. I see the discussion of these two kinds,
or better, two stages, of triangulation as providing the two main steps of the argument for the essentially social character of language and thought. As I see it, the first
step diagnoses the problem with a certain conception of meaning-determination,
and indicates that meanings can be fixed only by those who have the concept of
objectivity. The second step shows what puts people in a position to accomplish this.
The first step is itself based on Davidsons perceptual externalism, that is, on the
view that the meanings of ones thoughts and utterances are partly determined by
what typically causes them thus, in the first instance, by objects and events in ones
environment.4 As Davidson emphasizes, according to this view, a history of encounters with some of the things we speak about and have beliefs about is necessary
if we are to refer to and form attitudes towards those objects.5 Initially, it might be
Respectively, in Interpretation: Hard in Theory, Easy in Practice, in D. Prawitz (ed.),
Meaning and Interpretation (Stockholm: Kungliga Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Akademien,
1998), pp. 7186, at p. 85; The Emergence of Thought, repr. in Subjective, Intersubjective,
Objective, pp. 12334, at p. 128; Responses, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 67 (2003),
pp. 6919, at p. 697.
4 See, e.g., Epistemology Externalized, repr. in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, pp. 193
204, at pp. 198201. From now on I shall deal with language and ignore thought. But
everything said about language here applies to whatever has propositional content.
5 Comments on Karlovy Vary Papers, in P. Kotatko, G. Segal and P. Pagin (eds), Interpreting Davidson (Stanford: CSLI, 2001), pp. 285307, at p. 294. See also Knowing Ones Own
Mind, repr. in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, pp. 1538, at pp. 2930.
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CLAUDINE VERHEGGEN

thought that given perceptual externalism, the question of what fixes the meanings
of our most basic utterances is easily answered. Since these meanings are partly
determined by the very objects and events we talk about, all we need to do is to
connect these external things with some words or other. And this looks like something we could each do without the help of anyone else. But this is precisely what
Davidson is arguing against.
The problem with this individualistic externalism is this. To endow ones utterance with meaning, one is supposed somehow to connect it to its typical cause. But,
Davidson asks, which cause is that? According to him, a solitary person, that is, a
person who has been socially isolated from birth, could not answer this question.
And so, given the externalism, a solitary person S could not have a language. But
why is that? Why is it that S could not tell what the cause of his response to the
environment is? This is because, Davidson continues (The Emergence of Thought,
pp. 12930), for a solitary person, the cause is
doubly indeterminate: with respect to width and with respect to distance. The first
ambiguity concerns how much of the total cause [of an utterance] ... is relevant to [its
meaning].... The second problem has to do with the ambiguity of the relevant
stimulus, whether it is proximal ... or distal.

When he was first developing the triangulation argument, Davidson would mention only the second type of ambiguity, and argue that if we were to observe a
solitary person producing utterances in response to his environment, we could not
say whether the causes of his responses are events a certain distance away rather
than, say, on ... [his] skin.6 And this would be true not only of us observing him, but
also of the solitary person. With the first type of ambiguity, which has to do with
what part or aspect of the distal cause is to be the relevant one, whether it is, say, the
surface of an object, or its shape, or its colour, one is reminded of Wittgensteins
discussion of ostensive definition and the lesson to be drawn from this: sheer
association between the utterance of a sound and some feature of the world will not
endow the utterance with meaning. For the question is, association with what? And
if one replies that repeated utterances will nail down the relevant aspect of the cause
in virtue of their similarity to one another, the question then is: in virtue of what are
repeated responses similar to one another?7 Triangulation helps to solve these
ambiguity problems, according to Davidson. This is because if the person S we were
observing triangulated with another, that is, responded to an interlocutor as well as
to features of the environment to which the interlocutor was also responding, we
could then say what it is that S is talking about: it would be the common cause of the
interlocutors and Ss own responses, whatever is located at the intersection of
the two lines that might be drawn from the two interacting interlocutors.
It is rather unclear, however, how this is supposed to help, if only because talk of
the common cause isolated through triangulation seems to be too coarse-grained.
Even if triangulation helps to isolate a distal cause rather than a proximal one, there
The Second Person, repr. in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, pp. 107121, at p. 119.
For a comparison of Davidsons triangulation argument with Wittgensteins views, see my
How Social Must Language Be?, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 36 (2006), pp. 20319.
6
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Realismo: es impor

is still the problem of identifying the relevant part or aspect of the isolated distal
cause. What this suggests is that whenever there is one common cause, there may in
fact be many, leading one to wonder why the solitary S is worse o in this respect.
Why could not S be responding to one common cause at dierent times? Davidson
says (Epistemology Externalized, p. 202) that the common cause of the interacting
interlocutors responses is whatever they find natural to take as the common cause;
but why could this not be true of the solitary person as well? About the aspect
problem, Davidson also says, specifically (The Second Person, p. 130), that what
makes the responses relevantly similar ... is the fact that others find those responses
similar ... it is the social sharing of reactions that makes the objectivity of content
available. But the mere fact that reactions are shared does not make them reactions
to one rather than another aspect. We have still not been told in virtue of what
reactions are relevantly similar. We still have no reason to think that the interacting
person is better o than the solitary one.
Davidson himself is well aware of these problems: this diculty [of saying what is
being meant] remains no matter how many people follow the same course of
action.8 This is why I think the first step of the triangulation argument, that is, the
discussion of the first stage of triangulation, is better seen not as part of the solution
to the problem of meaning-determination, but as a diagnosis of the problem. The
first step identifies the problem with the view that meaning rests on sheer associations between signs and features of ones environment. What is revealed by the
worries just voiced about whether triangulation solves that problem is that
the problem does not concern only individual productions of signs, but shared ones
as well. By themselves, shared responses to the environment will no more fix Yo creo que la disti
their causes than individual ones. Shared responses are just as ambiguous as individual ones. The question remains, then, what will disambiguate them? Here I turn
to the second stage of triangulation, and so to the second step of Davidsons
triangulation argument.
3. For S to mean anything by words, Davidson argues (The Second Person, p. 120),
it is not enough that there are determinate causes of Ss utterances: S must also be in
a position to recognize at least some of those causes as such. Which is to say that for
S to mean anything by words, S must also have the concept of objectivity must be
able to think of those causes as existing independently of speaking about them: in
some cases at least, S must be able to draw an objective line between what are
the same causes and what merely seem to S to be the same causes, and so between
correct and incorrect responses to the environment. Thus the features of S s
environment that could determine the meaning of Ss words will not in fact do so
until S regards at least some of them as doing so. And this, Davidson maintains, is
something S will be in a position to do only after communicating with others.
Davidson is not arguing in a circle here, saying that possession of language requires
possession of the concept of objectivity, which in turn requires possession of
language. The claim is merely that you cannot have one without the other. But the
question is, why not?
8

Externalisms, in Interpreting Davidson, pp. 116, at p. 3; see also p. 8.

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Davidson had defended this connection long before he introduced the triangulation argument, by arguing that one cannot have a language without having
beliefs, and that one cannot have beliefs without having the concept of belief.9
Though few have been convinced by the original argument, Davidson does not
really attempt to defend the claim anew in the second part of his triangulation
argument. He seems to find it obviously true, and to be genuinely baed by those
who question it. Here are some of his last written words about it, typical of how he
usually defends the connection:
Here is all I mean by this claim [that propositional thought, and hence language,
requires the concept of objective truth]. If I believe that what I am seeing is a girae, I
am employing the concept of a girae in the sense that I am classifying what I see.
I could not believe I see a girae if I did not know that some things are correctly
identified as giraes and some things are not. To know this is to know that some
classifications are true and some false. If I were not aware of the possibility of
misclassification, I would not be having a propositional thought.10

I must say that I for one find Davidsons reasoning here unobjectionable. However, I
also think that there is more to be said in defence of the necessary connection between language and the concept of objectivity.
What needs to be pondered is the conclusion of the first step of the triangulation
argument, according to which meanings cannot be fixed by mere associations
between the typical causes of peoples utterances and these very responses. As the
first step of the triangulation argument makes clear, peoples responses, even when
they are shared, are by themselves ambiguous. There is nothing about them or
about their causes, considered in themselves, which is such that they must be
responses to causes of one specific kind rather than another. It is only those who
make the responses who can disambiguate them, by saying which causes are the
same as which and thus which causes are of what specific kind. But this is to say that
it is only if people can distinguish between what is the same and what merely seems
to them to be the same only if they have the concept of objectivity that the
responses they make to their environment can fix determinate causes and so be
meaningful. The grounds for the connection between language and the concept of
objectivity are, therefore, deeper than those most often suggested by Davidson,
though uncovering those grounds helps us to make sense of his insistence that
determinate causes are not sucient for language possession, but must also be
recognized as such. Uncovering those grounds also reinforces my view that the two
steps of the triangulation argument cannot be assessed separately.
As I have said, the first step is not meant to establish the essentially social character of language, but rather to diagnose the problem about a certain conception
of meaning-determination, and to show that according to this conception the
interacting person is in fact no better o than the solitary one. So it is not as if
Davidson had failed to demonstrate in the first step that only triangulating people
See Thought and Talk, repr. in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1984), pp. 15570.
10 Responses, p. 698. See also The Problem of Objectivity, pp. 910.
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could fix the meanings of their utterances, and then tried again, in the second step,
to establish the essentially social character of language via a dierent route, by
arguing that possession of language requires possession of the concept of objectivity,
which in turn requires a social setting. Rather, the second step is needed to solve the
problem of meaning-determination exposed by the first step. Meanings are not
somehow fixed by people who then in addition need the concept of objectivity in
order to have a language. Rather, people need the concept of objectivity in order to
fix meanings to begin with. Or better, since the relation here between meaningdetermination and possession of the concept of objectivity is not temporal but
conceptual, expressions can have a determinate meaning only when they have been
used by people who have the concept of objectivity.
Interestingly, these deeper grounds for the connection between language and the
concept of objectivity may leave room for a weaker connection than that propounded by Davidson. For they may leave room for the possibility that expressions
used by someone who does not have the concept of objectivity may be given
meaning through interaction with others who do have the concept. Thus what the
argument warrants may be not Davidsons claim that possession by someone of a
language and of the concept of objectivity necessarily go hand in hand, but the
claim that possession by someone of a language and possession, possibly by someone
else, of the concept of objectivity necessarily go hand in hand. It is the claim that
only those who have the concept of objectivity can fix meanings which makes for the
essentially social character of language, since only those who communicate with
others can have the concept of objectivity. But why exactly is this so?
As I have shown, however regular ones responses to the environment may
appear to be when considered in themselves, they may in fact be responses of many
dierent kinds. And which kinds they are will depend on which kinds the
respondents take them to be. There is no avoiding the fact that whichever causes the
solitary S takes to be of the same kind will be, for S, of the same kind; and whichever
response S takes to be correct will be, for S, the correct one. The solitary S has no
way of drawing an objective line between what is the same and what merely seems
to be the same, and so to settle for some causes rather than others. S succeeds in
communicating with himself in whatever way he draws the line between correct
and incorrect responses. S never has to draw it in one way rather than another. But
this, in eect, is to say that S can never be in a position to draw it objectively.
On the other hand, interpersonal communication puts people in a position
to make an objective distinction between correct and incorrect responses, for, as
Davidson says, it introduces the gap needed to make sense of the notion of error
(Externalisms, p. 4). In triangulating, all interlocutors establish correlations between
their own responses to features of the environment and the responses of the others.
So long as the correlations go unchallenged, there is no way for the interlocutors to
distinguish objectively between what is the same and what merely seems to them
to be the same. But this distinction is forced upon them, as Davidson puts it
(Thought and Talk, p. 170), when further responses to a shared situation no longer
correlate. In this case it cannot be simply up to one or other interlocutor to decide
which of the responses is the correct one. Interpersonal communication could
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CLAUDINE VERHEGGEN

not succeed if this were so. Thus people who communicate with others are in a
position to have the concept of objectivity, and so to regard features of the world
around them as providing determinate causes, thereby fixing the meanings of
their responses.11
4. I am now in a position to deal with the objections I cited at the outset. First, there
is the claim made by, e.g., Catherine Talmage that meanings are not fixed by triangulation.12 She is unsure whether linguistic interaction is needed for someone to
have the concept of objectivity, but thinks this issue need not be settled in order to
decide how meanings are fixed. If I am right, however, the two issues are inseparable, and only someone with the concept of objectivity, that is, a triangulating
person, could fix meanings. (I stress again that there is no temporal succession of
tasks here; a triangulating person is simply in a position to achieve both at once.)
According to the next objection, a solitary person could have the concept of
objectivity. This claim has been made by, among others, Martin Montminy:
There are at least three ways in which ... [a solitary creature] can come to understand
that one of its beliefs is wrong. First ... [it] can compare its current reaction to a past
one.... A second method ... is to try to see if its current reaction satisfies a generalization it has so far admitted.... Thirdly, the solitary creature can compare its actual
reaction to one it would have if it observed the same situation from a dierent
perspective.13

These methods would all be well and good provided the solitary creature could
think or talk to begin with provided, that is, it had beliefs about present situations
which it could compare with past or imagined situations, or with admitted generalizations, and provided, of course, it could remember, imagine and generalize to
begin with. But again, if I am right, the solitary creature is in no position to do any
of this precisely because it cannot have the concept of objectivity.
The two objections above are obviously based on ignoring the connection
between the two tasks that triangulation is meant to perform. But Kathrin Gler
and Peter Pagin have made the second objection without, apparently, rejecting the
connection. Thus they have suggested that a solitary person could have the concept
of objectivity, maintaining that the claim that triangulation is needed here is sheer
empirical speculation.14 Certainly, as Davidson has said in reply to this objection
(Comments on Karlovy Vary Papers, p. 293), there can be no proof of the claim he
is making. But pure speculation, I think, it is not. The burden here is on those who
I have said more on the link between interpersonal communication and possession of the
concept of objectivity in my Davidsons Second Person, The Philosophical Quarterly, 47 (1997),
pp. 3619. At that time of writing, however, I had not realized the crucial role played by the
possession of the concept of objectivity in the determination of meaning.
12 C. Talmage, Meaning and Triangulation, Linguistics and Philosophy, 20 (1997), pp. 13945,
at p. 144.
13 M. Montminy, Triangulation, Objectivity and the Ambiguity Problem, Critica, 35
(2003), pp. 2548, at pp. 389. See also J. Heil, The Nature of True Minds (Cambridge UP, 1992).
14 P. Pagin, Semantic Triangulation, in Interpreting Davidson, pp. 199212, at p. 207;
K. Gler, Triangulation, in E. LePore and B. Smith (eds), Oxford Handbook of the Philosophy of
Language (Oxford UP, 2006).
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contend that a solitary person could have the concept of objectivity: they must
indicate how this might work. And the burden is on them to indicate how this
problem might be solved together with the problem of meaning-determination, or to
explain why the two problems are not connected. Davidson has no proof that
triangulation is necessary to solve both. But by showing how the two are connected
and how triangulation helps with both at once, he certainly illuminates the nature of
language and thought in a respect in which his critics have not.
Finally, I turn to the objection I most often hear, the objection which many consider the death blow to Davidsons view about the social aspect of language and
thought. This is that one need not have the concept of objectivity in order to have a
language.15 As I have already indicated, I have a hard time attributing a language to
people who have no idea that they could misapply their words, and have no idea
that they could be wrong about what they say or do in response to what others have
told them. As Davidson has put it (Externalisms, p. 9), to rule out awareness ... of
the possibility of error is to reduce mastery of a word or concept to aping the
behaviour of others. In any case, however, to deny that one needs to have the concept of objectivity in order to have a language is not necessarily to deny the connection which I have found between the two tasks to be achieved by triangulation. For
as I have reconstructed the argument, it leaves room for the possibility that expressions used by those who lack the concept of objectivity are still meaningful. But
to the extent that they have any meaning in such cases, it can only be by proxy: they
can have only the meanings which those who do have the concept of objectivity
have given them. So even if in this sense one can have a language without having
the concept of objectivity, it remains the case that language is essentially social in
that only those who are in a position to have the concept of objectivity are in a
position to fix meanings, and it is triangulation that makes both these achievements
possible.16
York University, Ontario

See, e.g., Gler and Pagin, Meaning Theory and Autistic Speakers, Mind and Language,
18 (2003), pp. 2351; for recent reservations about the related claim that one needs to have the
concept of objectivity in order to have beliefs, see H.-J. Glock, Critical Notice on Donald
Davidson, Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, Philosophical Investigations, 26 (2003), pp. 34860;
T. Burge, Social Individualism, Objective Reference, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research,
67 (2003), pp. 68390.
16 A version of this paper was presented at the Fifth European Congress for Analytic
Philosophy (2005). Thanks to the audience, especially to Kathrin Gler, for their comments on
that occasion. Thanks also to an anonymous referee, and to Robert Myers.
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