Conceito de crença, triangulações e atenção conjunta

Abstract

In his last writings, Davidson develops a set of theses around the concept of triangulation which bring changes to the way radical interpretation was formerly conceived. While his aim is still to understand how it is possible to read mind and meaning out of agents' behaviour, the main difference between earlier formulations of radical interpretation and these late views is the role of intersubjectivity. Intersubjectivity is brought in through the concept of triangulation. Davidson calls 'triangulations' those settings in which two agents react in a coordinate way to each other and to a third element in their common environment. According to Davidson, triangulations structure a range of situations, from animal behaviour to linguistic communication among humans. Davidson describes two kinds of triangulation: (I) pre-conceptual and prelinguistic, (II) conceptual and linguistic. Between the first and the second triangulation, he situates the emergence of thought (thought as it is characteristic of our kind of minds, i.e. thought about the objective world, involving the concepts of belief and truth). Still, he puts forward no hypothesis as to what explains it that a creature may change from being a participant in the first kind of triangulation to being a participant in triangulations of the second kind (and this, we know, happens – it happened, namely, in each one of us). In this article, I start from interpretations of studies of joint attention in cognitive science to explore a hypothesis concerning the change from the first to the second kind of triangulation. The upshot is a criticism of the use Davidson makes of the concept of belief in his theory of mind.