Donald Davidson's work is even more inaccessible to the general reader than that of Feyerabend. He too has promised a book but at the time of writing we have only a sequence of papers scattered in journals, anthologies, and conference proceedings. These essays are uncompromisingly professional. When there is a dry half-sentence of joke it is likely to be a sign that a whole train of thought has been omitted. Thus he says wryly that one of his opinions ‘can be justified by a transcendental argument (which I will not give here)’. Other philosophers have recently written whole books around their transcendental arguments! These papers of Davidson are compact, allusive, half the length that is usual in contemporary journals of philosophy, and vastly more intricate. They are not easy to understand, and often take for granted quite technical results in the philosophy of logic. Hence this chapter has to be longer than most previous ones, and is broken up into sections, some of which may, in themselves, introduce the reader to a few specialist issues currently aired in analytic philosophy.

As may be seen from the bibliography for Chapter 12, Davidson's papers fall roughly into two categories. In one set of titles we find such key words as action, reason, cause, event; the topics are chiefly drawn from the philosophy of mind. The other batch of titles has truth, meaning, sentence, semantics: this is the philosophy of language. Occasionally a title is constructed from both pools of key words: ‘The Logical Form of Action Sentences’.