TRIANGULATION, OBJECTIVITY AND THE AMBIGUITY PROBLEM
MARTIN MONTMINYABSTRACT. Davidson claims that a creature that has spent its entire life in isolation cannot have thoughts: (i) interaction with another creature (what he calls "triangulation") is required to locate the cause of the creature's responses, and (ii) linguistic communication is necessary to acquire the concept of objective truth, which is itself required in order to have thoughts. At best, these two reasons imply that in order to have thoughts a creature must be capable of participating in triangulation, not that it must have already participated in triangulation. Triangulation doesn't solve the ambiguity problem (it doesn't entail that a being's tho ughts and utterances are about distal objects rather than proximal patterns of stimulation). Fortunately, ambiguity, like other forms of indeterminacy, doesn't entail that we cannot have thoughts.