and therapy can sometimes help the insane. There is good reason to regard
human beings, no matter what their failures to think and act coherently over
a given stretch of time, as having one and all the dignity of at least potential
agents. But thinking and acting remain things that one must grow into by
taking up one or another set of recognitional strategies that are necessarily
shared to some extent.^5
Two closely related points about the natures of thought and action as they
are objects of understanding or interpretation, including the understanding
or interpretation of art, immediately follow. First, there is no unique, isol-
ated,“inner”thought that occurs as a private event prior to the making of
the work. It is true that inner or unavowed thoughts, intentions, and plans
can precede actual artistic work. But even these inner thoughts, intentions,
and plans require the use of shared concepts – shared recognitional
strategies–in terms of which they are formulated. Though there can be
conceptual innovations and new strategies for recognizing objects, these
innovations and new strategies must be intelligible outgrowths of shared
concepts. Once we realize this, we can become disabused of the idea that a
correct understanding of a work of art must capture some fully formed inner
something–the occurrence of a fully formed, individual, governing intention
or plan for the work that is somehow private or hidden from us. We can
capture no such thing, nor need we. Instead, to understand a work is to situate
it within a network of concepts or strategies for recognition that are both in
principle shareable and necessarily at least partly shared. While agents,
including artists, have a certain degree of first-person authority in knowing
and reporting (if they wish) their own“inner”thoughts and plans, this first-
person authority is not a matter of their having unique, privileged, introspect-
ive access to objects that are inherently private or inner. It is rather a function
of the fact that mastery of any concept or recognition strategy normally
(though not necessarily on every single occasion) carries with it articulable
awareness of what one is doing or can do (though on occasion others can know
better).^6 Understanding of thought and action, andeo ipsounderstanding of
(^5) See the more extended discussion of language and thought in Eldridge,Leading a Human
Life, especially, p. 271 inf.
(^6) See Donald Davidson,“First Person Authority,”“Knowing One’s Mind,”and“The Myth of
the Subjective,”all reprinted in Davidson,Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, pp. 3–14,
15 – 38, 39–52.
Understanding art 147