Donald Davidson
Santa Cruz
24 July 1990

"Gertrude Stein said of someone, 'He is a village explainer. This is fine if you are a village: if not, not.' I have always wanted to be a village explainer, but for the most part I do not think I have succeeded: my writing has been found dense and difficult. It is a troubling sign that people cannot decide where to file me. I have been called a realist and an anti-realist, an internalist and externalist, a subjectivist and an objectivist, a materialist, a monist and an epiphenomenalist. My theory of action has been tagged a casual theory, and I have been accused of making the mental causally impotent. I confess I am responsible for wrongly labelling my view of truth both a correspondence theory and a coherence theory (it is neither), and Richard Rorty says I am a pragmatist. But I am not completely discouraged: if you are a village, I will keep on trying to explain myself"