On the Social Dimension of Beliefs and Concepts

According to Donald Davidson, in order to have any concept or belief whatsoever, a creature must “triangulate” (or at least have “triangulated”) objects and events in the outside world with other creatures sufficiently similar to itself. More precisely, he argues that there are two prerequisites for thought – that is, fixing the empirical content and having the concept of objectivity – that can only be obtained through “triangulation” and that “triangulation” is the simplest kind of social interaction. Hence, social interaction can be considered fundamental for having concepts and beliefs. However, according to several critics Davidson’s main argument for the thesis that thought is necessarily social has proven to be seriously flawed. The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, I will briefly sum up the difficulties of Davidson’s account showing that the two prerequisites for thought he recognises are both inadequate and that the very notion of “triangulation” he employs is useless to defend the social dimension of concepts and beliefs. On the other hand, I will try to reconstruct Davidson’s very argument by identifying two weaker prerequisites for thought and a different kind of “triangulation”. In particular, I will claim that the two prerequisites for thought are: fixing some common domains of current relevance and a concept of proto-objectivity, conceived as the awareness that there is a difference between agreement and disagreement. Furthermore, I will exploit the psychological notion of “joint attention” to sketch a kind of triangulation that may be a genuine example of social interaction, truly necessary for the two prerequisites I identified, as well as a pre-cognitive and pre-linguistic process. In the end, I will explain how this alternative account of the emergence of thought guarantees its social character and is neither circular nor reductive.