What Roskies dubbed Davidson’s Master Argument is a reconstruction of Davidson’s position, capturing in a nutshell both his basic assumptions about how we understand others and the background to his claims about human cognition. As Roskies puts it:
According to Davidson’s interpretationism, having beliefs entails being an interpreter. The basic idea of the Master Argument is that possessing certain concepts is a prerequisite for being an interpreter, and that an organism must have language in order to have these concepts. […] the Master Argument links thought to language by way of higher order thoughts. Specifically, Davidson suggests that a concept of belief is a prerequisite for propositional attitudes, and that a concept of belief is unavailable without language. (this collection, pp. 6–7)
According to Roskies, then, Davidson is forced to endorse the view that a cognizer must know what beliefs are in order to have them. Can Davidson’s view be sound? It might be correct to claim that a cognizer must possess the concept of belief to recognize herself as having them or to be able to attribute such a state to herself. This seems to be an act of metacognition, in which a subject scrutinizes her own mental states and recognizes them as mental states of a special kind. But is having the concept of belief necessary for first-order cognitive acts, i.e., simply believing a proposition of some kind without reifying this state as a belief state?
Before delving into this line of thought, let us review Roskies’ structural reconstruction of Davidson’s Argument.
M1 If S has propositional attitudes, then S has beliefs.
M2 If S has beliefs, then S has a concept of belief.
M3 If S has a concept of belief, then S has language.
MC If S has propositional attitudes, then S has language.
M1 seems to be correct, if a belief is seen as a paradigmatic kind of propositional attitude.
M2 is a critical premise of Davidson’s Master Argument, as we have already indicated above. The question in play here is: does having a belief automatically entail the possession of the concept of belief? We will discuss this point once again further below.
M3 is refuted by Roskies with the help of studies on false belief comprehension in prelinguistic infants (e.g., Onishi & Baillargeon 2005). However, a further point might be made here: M3 might indeed hold if having any concept at all implies the possession of language. However, there are models of non- and pre-linguistic concept possession (cf. Mandler 2004; Newen & Bartels 2007), which allow us to explain concept acquisition during development; theories presupposing language as necessary prerequisite for the possession of concepts, however, fail to do so.
Roskies’ main criticism targets the notion of the “concept of belief”. She aims to show that Davidson employs the concept of belief inconsistently throughout his argument. If this is so, then the argument fails due to equivocation.
According to Roskies, Davidson’s conception of belief can be understood in three ways. She distinguishes three kinds of conceptions of belief: “on this robust view, having a concept of belief is an epistemologically-rich notion that entails having an ability to pass the ‘false belief test’” (this collection, p. 7); the so-called deflationary conception, in which “belief can come apart from reality”, (ibid.) and which amounts to “having the concept of an objective reality”; and last, the so-called intermediate concept of belief, which “involves the ability to attribute representational mental states to oneself and others”, (ibid.). The intermediate concept of belief, as its name implies, is intended to be a weaker notion than the robust one. In the remainder of the paper, Roskies deconstructs each reading, providing empirical examples with the aim of showing why and how Davidson fails to make his decisive point, namely, that language is a necessary prerequisite for holding beliefs.
The robust conception of belief is convincingly refuted by studies on the ability to understand counterfactual beliefs in others, as demonstrated by the so-called false belief test. Children only display the possession of a concept of belief when they pass the false belief test, usually at around the age of three to four years.[2] It is implausible, though, not to ascribe propositional attitudes to them (in a first-order sense) prior to having acquired such a robust notion of belief. It can even be claimed that they need the ability to ascribe propositional attitudes to develop a robust notion of belief in the first place. Thus, the robust conception of belief is not linked to having propositional attitudes and Davidson’s premise M2 fails, if belief is understood in the robust sense.
The second reading of belief, the deflationary view, can be read out of Davidson’s stance on so-called triangulation[3] as a means of understanding objects as part of a reality external to us—via linguistic interaction with another person. However, as Roskies rightly states, the argumentative force of forging the link between language as a means of recognizing the external as external, making it thus objective, is quite weak. Further, it would strike us a bit of an overreach, if not as absurd, to assume that non-linguistic creatures cannot develop any sense of the external world as being external to them.
The third and final understanding of belief à la Roskies, the so-called intermediate view, stating that animals understand other animals as having mental representations of some sort, which are behaviorally relevant, rests on empirically undecided ground; here, however, the tight connection between having beliefs and possessing the concept of belief is called into question.
Having a concept of belief might be important for reflective capacities, as we want to attribute them to rational agents that must be capable of justifying their actions, but not important for having beliefs:
perhaps being a believer requires being able to think of oneself as a believer, and thus requires the concept of belief. […] However, while there are arguments that the ability to think about oneself as a believer is required for a rich construal of theoretical rationality (see Bermúdez 2003, Ch. 7), there is no clear argument why such reflective ability should be constitutive of having beliefs. (Roskies this collection, p. 11)
Roskies has thus shown that the connection between propositional attitudes and the possession of a concept of belief (and its dependence on language possession), which Davidson tries to establish, cannot be held in light of the diverging readings of the notion of the concept of belief. Thus, Davidson’s strategy fails.