In this chapter we turn from reason explanation to the nature of human actors themselves. This move takes us, one might say, from the logic of the social sciences to their ontology, except that Davidson's premier achievement in the philosophy of mind has been to reconceptualize and thereby recast the traditional problems. Fodor writes that when he “was a boy in graduate school, the philosophy of mind had two main division: the mind/body problem and the problem of other minds” (1995: 292). Davidson rewrites the mind-body problem by arguing that “there are no such things as minds, but people have mental properties” (1995b: 231). That is, philosophers have erred in looking at the mental through the lens of ontology: “the mental”, he says, “is not an ontological … category” standing opposed to the category of the physical (1987b: 46). And in his recent writings, Davidson has refashioned the issues that underlie and seem to generate the problem of other minds.

We shall return in Chapter 9 to the problem of other minds, which has a bearing upon the basis of modern scepticism and the deep issue of the relation between subjectivity and objectivity. In this chapter we examine Davidson's account of the mind or, better, what John McDowell calls “minded beings”.