Davidson: “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”

Conceptual relativism: the idea that there could be differing and incommensurable conceptual schemes.

Paradox in notion of conceptual scheme: dominant metaphor is different points of view, but you only have different points of view of the same thing. Otherwise they’re not comparable enough to be called different.

Suggestion: associate languages with conceptual schemes. Then, however, if one language can be translated into another, the two languages share the same conceptual scheme.

“speaking a language is not a trait a man can lose while retaining the power of thought. so there is no chance that someone can take up a vantage point for comparing conceptual schemes by temporarily shedding his own.” [273]

Sum: Two people would have different conceptual schemes if they spoke languages that

failed of intertranslatability.

Two possibilities - partial or total failure

Reason why Davidson rejects total: translatability is a criterion of languagehood, so if something cannot be translated, it isn’t a language (and therefore a conceptual scheme).

(But if it can, then of course, it shares the same CS as ours)

However, Davidson realises this claim must be argued for.

First question: how could different conceptuatl schemes be possible, even in theory?

Three elements must be present:

1. Language as an organizing force (conceptual scheme)

2. something (the world? Experience?) that is organized (empirical content)

3. failure of intertranslatability (see Whorf example, 277-8)

(Davidson calls the “scheme/content dualism” the “third dogma of empiricism”)

SUM [278]: something is a language, and associated with a conceptual scheme, whether we can translate it or not, if it stands in a certain relation (predicting, organizing, facing, or fitting) to experience. Thus, the CHALLENGE is to say what the relation is and be clearer about the entities related.

Two notions of relation: organization or fit

Two notions of the “something” in (2): the world/nature, or experience

Problem with organizing:

Either the “something” (be it nature or experience) is undifferentiated and monolithic, in which case it can’t be organized, or it is individuated, but then:

“whatever plurality we take experience to consist in ... we will have to individuate according to familiar principles. A language that organizes such entities [ships and shoes and sealing wax, cabbages and kings] must be a language very like our own.” [278]

Problem with experience:

things other than the objects of our experience (“sensations, surface irritations, sense data”) need to be organized as well (“knives and forks, railroads and mountains, cabbages and kingdoms”)

Fit:

Something is an acceptable conceptual scheme or theory if it fits the sensory evidence. But (says Davidson) that is just to say that it is true.

So, we can say that a conceptual scheme different from ours is one that is “largely true but not translatable”

BUT: you can’t make sense of truth without translatability, because our best guess about truth is Tarski’s convention T, which makes essential use of the notion of translation into a know language (the metalanguage) [280]

CONCLUSION: we should abandon the attempt to make sense of the metaphor of a single space within which each scheme has a position and provides a point of view.

Time to consider PARTIAL failure of intertranslatability (more modest claim)

Recall: the speech act theory of meaning explained the meaning of a person’s utterances in terms of mental states (intentions, in particular). Therefore mind is prior to language. BUT Davidson rejects this because attributing mental states is simultaneous with attributing meaning (neither is prior)

close relationship between attribution of beliefs and interpretation of sentences: “a man’s speech cannot be interpreted except by someone who knows a good deal about what that speaker believes AND.. fine distinctions between beliefs are impossible without understood speech”

How to break this circle?

Answer: make assumptions about what sentences the speaker accepts as true

Example [281]: ketch and yawl. You assume that he holds that sentence true, and that therefore he believes that a ketch is a “yawl”.

This is the PRINCIPLE OF CHARITY: assume that the person means what he says, holds his sentences to be true (i.e., that he agrees with us in his beliefs about the facts)