Davidson on First-Person Authority and the Essential Sociality of Meaning

As some authors have recently pointed out, the notion of first-person authority has an importantly social dimension: it concerns not only how one’s mental self-ascriptions can be usually (or always) true, but also how one’s interlocutor can presume such mental self-ascriptions to be true (Borgoni 2019, Winokur 2023). An adequate theory of first-person authority should account for both aspects of the phenomenon, but the traditional discussion has focused mainly on the former. In this paper, I will reexamine Davidson’s account of first-person authority in this light and argue that it has interesting theoretical resources to address both aspects of first-person authority within a unified framework. In the literature, there is a consensus that (1) the key idea in Davidson’s account is to explain first-person authority in terms of a speaker’s authoritative knowledge of the meanings of her own words, and (2) Davidson explains the special status of a speaker’s semantic knowledge by invoking his non-communitarian view of meaning-determination. I will argue that, to see a fuller picture of Davidson’s view on first-person authority, these ideas need to be integrated with his discussion on triangulation, where he purports to show that meaning should be essentially social and interpretable. This will allow us to recognize how Davidson's theoretical system, as a whole, is indeed tailored to capturing the social dimension of first-person authority highlighted in the recent discussion.