Triangular Normativity? Revisiting McDowell’s Critique of Davidson

Sa？etak McDowell rejects Davidson’s causal account of intentionality on the grounds that it cannot account for the normative features that essentially characterize states like belief and judgment. Curiously, however, McDowell never considers how Davidson’s theory of “triangulation,” which purports to explain normativity by appeal to the social, rather than intentional, dimension of our thinking, might provide such an account. Absent a reason for thinking that triangulation fails in this explanatory task, McDowell’s critique poses no substantial problem for Davidson. This essay aims to fill the gap in McDowell’s critique by arguing that neither triangulation, nor any similar account, can square a causal view of intentionality with an acknowledgement of mental normativity. This difficulty gives those who are committed to normativity of the relevant sort good reasons to suspect that intentionality cannot be a strictly causal affair, and that something like McDowell’s “minimal empiricism” must be correct