It might help if you would sketch the argument that you take McDowell to be misapprehending — Pierre-Normand

Why? I'm not making McDowell's argument. If you think he has a case, then you can make it.

Thanks for the response.

We ought be careful not to think of seeing the cat on the mat as happening in isolation, especially since this is what Davidson says does not happen. That what we see is interpreted as cat and mat is not seperate to the belief - in a sense it is the belief, caused by the physics and physiology of the situation. The physics and physiology cause the belief that the cat is on the mat; the "experience" doesn't "contribute to the justification" that you see the cat, since there is no justification. You see the cat. The experience is not isolated from the beliefs.

So thinking of LE as a belief about your experience would not fit Davidson's account. Part of what is going on here is an ambiguity in introducing the term "experience". A better way to say this would be that the physics and physiology cause the belief; dropping the word "experience".

Are you now suggesting that there is a convention that if you and I are sitting in an empty room with a dog, and I say, "The dog," there is a fixed referent?

The consequence of the indeterminacy I think is not that we may sometimes disagree but that there is nothing intrinsic to words. — Apustimelogist

Yep.

I think spiders do experience things, and I think it's probably so different from my own experience that if we could upload the spider's thoughts and download them into my brain, my mind would just detect inexplicable noise. — frank

I wanted to come back to this, to make a point this time about what conceptual schema are not. They are not a neural network.

Frank's description here is part of the reason I thought his OP excellent, since it makes explicit a misunderstanding of the relation between brain and mind. Frank may well be quite right that if the spider neural net were somehow grafted to his own, the result would be noise. But that need not count against Davidson's account. The beliefs of the spider sit apart from the mere firing of the neural networks that cause it's movement, and cannot be reduced to them. Indeed, it is problematic to attribute beliefs to the spider at all, since beliefs sit within the broader framework of of triangulation, interpretation, and hence occur at a level that it utterly foreign to the spider.

Which is just to say, we can explain the behaviour of the spider in terms of belief, but the spider cannot.

For Davidson, mental events—like beliefs, desires, intentions—are not reducible to physical events. There is no deterministic, law-like relationship between the two; instead, mental descriptions are interpreted within the broader context of social practices and linguistic frameworks.

Hence the anomalism of the mental. There need be no correspondence between physical stats and the intentional descriptions of them.

The supposed illusory nature of certain experiences is trivial. Consider that we are aware that they are illusions. We are aware of this becasue they are evaluated by the whole web of belief, and not segregated and separated as "experiences". The "Need" McDowel sees to "distinguish the experience" suggests a profound misapprehension of Davidson's much more subtle argument.

That is, I don't see much value in McDowell's comments. While you are welcome to try to convince us otherwise, so far, I'm not seeing it.

For Davidson, the "world-in-itself" is a nonsense. His is a rejection of "Cartesian" and "representative" approaches. Indeed, it follows Wittgenstein in rejecting that sort of dualism, the very grounding of the realism/idealism dichotomy. It's not that there is one conceptual scheme, but that the very idea cannot be made coherent.

We were talking specifically about empirical judgements and their justification. — Pierre-Normand

You might be. I think the discussion should be somewhat broader.

Davidson's claim that experiences cause agents to acquire beliefs is an expression of his conception of empirical experience, not belief. — Pierre-Normand

Of course it is an expression of his conception of belief. How could it be one and not the other? That would be to reintroduce the scheme - content dualism he rejects. He denies that there is a place for experience in our knowledge apart from our beliefs. There can be no "pure experience" separate from our ratiocinations; any empirical judgements already have the whole web of belief "built in". If McDowell seeks to seperate out again the experience from the judgement, he is a long way from Davidson.

And I think mistaken.

But this is a thread about Davidson, not McDowell. That McDowell misapplies Davidson is neither here nor there.

Davidson denies, as the third dogma of empiricism, that a distinction can be maintained between a conceptual component and an empirical component; between supposed objective and a subjective aspects of knowledge.

The idea that Davidson would deny that some of our beliefs might be the product of ratiocination is absurd.

If nothing else it ignores triangulation and holism, and that interpretation itself is a rational process.

If you and I are sitting in an empty room with a dog, and I say, "The dog," there is a fixed referent. You know exactly what I am referring to. — Leontiskos

Perhaps your landlord? The police officer you met on your drive home last night? The best in show of last year's Crufts?

, I'm not suggesting the AI is wrong, just unreliable. Nor am I interested in a debate over AI in a thread about Davidson. By all means make a case using the AI, but I hope no one here will accept the AI as an authority.

If this is to be yet another thread about AI, I'm out.

And now we have Deepseek, raising the spectre of a Chinese technical development pulling out the rug. Investors might not be so willing to take such a risk on Nvidia chips...

Trouble is, US policy has forced China towards self-reliance, to not needing US products.

A belief that you can walk thorough walls can be tested very readily. A conceptual scheme in which you could walk through walls would have very different meanings for "walk" or for "wall". There are two simple points here, that not just any belief will do, and that overwhelmingly we agree as to what is the case. In order for another way of talking to be recognised as a way of talking at all, it would be largely congruent with our own way of talking. Yes, we live in communities and hold our language is common, but that language is embedded in how things are, which is largely not chosen by us but a given.

Well, 's AI starts off by talking about "raw sensory data" in. a way which is not found in the article. Looks to be a confabulation, again. As a foundation, sense data is explicitly rejected in the argument, at page 12 of the Jstore version. The AI partly saves itself later, but I remain dubious as to the benefits of such conversations. They are unreliable.

But if you want to put something together, that might be of interest.

A simpler example of the sort of argument you propose might be dolphins rather than aliens. Here we have a creature that has the brain capacity and social structure we'd expect to see in a creature with a language, but we have been unable so far to build a simple translation. Perhaps their beliefs are so different that there are no common grounds on which to build a mutual understanding - "If a dolphin could speak, we could not understand him". But notice that what is at stake is whether dolphins have a language, and we can't understand it, or whether they have no language at all. This lends itself to Davidson's idea that in order to recognise that dolphins have a language, we would need to understand at least some of what that language is doing.

The apocryphal that the Greeks had no "concept" of the colour blue is not a bad point, either. Tentatively accepting the apocryphal, we would say that we learned to distinguish blue from red, because that was a distinction on which we could agree and which became relevant. That distinction is not just in the mooted conceptual scheme, but is found in our shared beliefs. It became part of the language when our attention was drawn towards it.

Davidson has been criticized for rejecting any rational influence of the world on our beliefs. — frank

Again, that looks to be more than Davidson is saying. While some of our beliefs are caused, it does not follow that they all are. The belief in that pain in your back is not a rational deduction. But go ahead.

Meh. I liked the OP.

It'll be a problem if what you want are the necessary and sufficient conditions (or properties, or whatever you choose - the nature of essences remains unaddressed beyond an ineffectual equivalence) under which the proper use is supposedly determined. The self, in psychology, has long been treated as the sum of various attributes or aspects. Remove some of those, add others, the self remains. It's a pretty clear example of a family resemblance. There need be no definitive set of attributes that set out what the self is in a determinate way. Or folk of a more authoritarian bent may insist that this or that particular set simply is that definition, and say that anyone who uses "self" otherwise is mistaken. That's a posture, not a fact.

So we can talk sensibly of Truman's body as still being Truman, and we know what that means, and how the corpse is different to the living man. There's not a problem here. I don't see any contradiction, rather a mistaken notion of reference.

My take-away here is that since there's no fact of the matter that affixes reference, but we are able to refer, there must be something other than the facts which makes us able to refer. As is often the case in my thinking where this leads me to is the necessity of us sharing a language -- the things language does is present to more than my own cogito. So there's no theory I can hold to in evaluating whether you have referred separate from our collective interpretation of the language being spoken. It takes two to refer. — Moliere

Yep.

Yep.

I don't wish j's thread to turn into a discussion of Davidson.

I've flagged the posts for consideration by the mods.

Cheers. If you prefer, I will delete the above, posted before I saw your explanation. Or we could have a mod delete all these posts.

In other words, someone like Banno thinks that if Thales never existed then the word 'Thales' has no (objective) referent, and therefore does not refer at all. Thus for Banno the claim, "Thales believed everything is made of water," is not a proposition, and is neither true nor false. The same idea is expressed in Banno's bio: — Leontiskos

This, after I had explained only yesterday how we can give such sentences a truth value using free logic. And of course, the example is a common one in model logic, in which "Thales believes everything is made of water" can be true on some possible world.

This goes to deepen my conviction that Leon has only a minimal grasp of the logic in use here. For him logic stoped in the middle ages. Which is not to say that his points are not of interest, it's just that it is difficult to make sense of them in terms of more recent developments.

Nor is there a monolithic

modern concept of reference — Leontiskos

Russell and Quine were superseded by Kripke and Donnellan, and the discussion is ongoing.

But I won't be defending this at any length as an alternative. I don't need to present a detailed alternative in order to address the issues with the account from Rödle. That there are alternatives will suffice.

Perhaps the most useful way to see it is Davidson's,

Pat believes the tree is an oak. Quintin believes that.

But of course this is not without its own difficulties.

Have you not settled all possible readings to be useless? — Paine

No. If I had, I would not be participating.

If you don't mind, could you fit the terms "I think 'grass is green'" into the Fregean a/b/a schematic you gave us? — J

As I understand it,

⊢ grass is green

OK, don't hate me, but Rodl would ask, "What is this activity you are calling 'to entertain'? Is it the same thing as 'to think'? Not 'to think' in the sense of 'judge', presumably; that's the very point you want to deny. So it must be 'to think' in the sense of 'to have a thought' -- but what is that? Everyone believes it must be obvious what 'to have a thought' means, but I find myself perplexed when I try to say more about it." — J

I think this is the mouth of your rabbit hole. You do entertain propositions without judging them. You can think about what might be true without deciding if it is true. You do not really need to go further.

"To have a thought" does not have one meaning. And to have thought is not always to make a judgement. Sometimes it is to have a suspicion, to have a doubt, to consider a possibility, to fancy that it is so.

But if the thought cannot be isolated from the act of thinking, then in thinking that Pat thought the Oak was shedding Quentin would be thinking that the Oak was shedding. — Banno

If the thought cannot be isolated from the act of thinking, then

Quentin thinks that Pat thought the Oak was shedding. But the thought cannot be isolated from the content. Therefore we cannot write:

Pat thought the Oak was shedding

And even if we did, the thought cannot be isolated from the content and so we could not then write:

The Oak was shedding

The very argument that is dependent on our being able to look at the content apart from the force. Wayfarer is making use of the extensionality that Rödl would remove.

q = "Grass is green"
p = "I think q" = "I think 'grass is green'" — J

Supose the grass is the lawn. The it follows from q by substituting lawn/grass that the lawn is green. And this is correct. But if we substitute lawn/grass into "I think 'grass is green'" we get "I think 'lawn is green'". But this may not be so, since the individual concerned may have no such belief.

That is, putting "I think..." in front of each proposition buggers extensionality.

So, to display a small part of what is at stake, one may proceed by deduction from "Grass is green" to "Something is green". But one cannot by deduction proceed from "I think 'Grass is green'" to "Something is green.

Frege's response is set out . It was, speaking crudely, to keep the whole argument within the one Begriffsschrift, "⊢".

What would Davidson's criticism of this be? Basically, he would say that I've overstepped in claiming that a spider has a conceptual scheme. In order to know for sure, I'd need to go beyond the human format and somehow come to know what spiders experience. But this is the very thing I've said I can't do, so I'd have to contradict myself. Davidson would say that by the time I've verified that spiders actually have experiences different from my own, I will have destroyed scheme-content duality. — frank

This is a good explanation. There is more to be said here.

The spider's conceptual scheme is not just it's experiences, but the beliefs it forms as a result. For Davidson, becasue those beliefs and our beliefs are about the same world, they will be congruent. And this may well be so regardless of the experiences of the spider.

As she crawls along the ceiling of the room, she believes that she can move forward, and does so again and again. Until she encounters the wall. Here she stops believing that she can move forward - stretching her pedipalps forward reveals an obstacle - instead believing that she must change direction.

Despite the experiences had by the spider and ourselves being quite different, the belief had by both is congruent.

Might leave this here. I'm sure it will be enough to receive a reaction.

Excellent OP.

I hope we can use it to bring out some of the subtly of On the very idea of a conceptual scheme.

Someone who agrees with Davidson can agree that spiders have very different experiences to you and I. The sort of conceptual schemes that Davidson is addressing do not consist in experiences, so much as in beliefs about those experiences. They are for Davidson much the same as Quine's web of belief. Similar ideas are found throughout the literature. It is the foundation for conceptual relativism of all sorts.

Conceptual schemes, we are told, are ways of organizing experience; they are systems of categories that give form to the data of sensation; they are points of view from which individuals, cultures, or periods survey the passing scene. — On the very idea, p.1

The basic idea in Davidson's paper is fairly straight forward. That folk have different points of view can make sense only if there is some common framework from which we might notice the difference. But if we have such a common framework, then by that very fact, aren't we working in the same conceptual scheme? Doesn't the difference now become that of a disagreement within a conceptual scheme, and not between conceptual schemes?

And if that is the case, then any plurality of conceptual schemes reduces to at most one.

And there is a further step for Davidson. If there is at most one conceptual scheme, then how does it make sense to talk of conceptual schemes?

The conclusion Davidson reaches is that the notion of our beliefs being embedded in a conceptual scheme drops out of consideration. Our beliefs are tested against the world, not against competing conceptual schemes.

Have we killed this thread?

In other words, someone like Banno thinks that if Thales never existed then the word 'Thales' has no (objective) referent, and therefore does not refer at all. Thus for Banno the claim, "Thales believed everything is made of water," is not a proposition, and is neither true nor false. The same idea is expressed in Banno's bio: — Leontiskos

This badly misrepresents not only my view, but those of Russell, Quine and Donnellan. has a history of this sort of thing.

Perhaps Leon's post is in the wrong thread?

Yes, odd.

@tim wood?

Sure. Magic reactors.

“we could see massive costs being incurred by other utility customers at a time when affordability has never been more important”, says Morris.

Point being increased demand will increase price while any "catch up" occurs, so consumers will be paying more for their electricity.

I'd stand by this, I think:

Seems to me that there is nothing that talk of qualia is about. In so far as talk of qualia is usable and useful, it is no different to talk of colours or tastes or what have you. In so far as something is added to the conversation by the addition of qualia, seems to me that Dennett is correct in showing that there is nothing here to see. — Banno

But I will not try explaining it to a drunk.

Not at all.

Nothing quite along those lines. If you are interested in my opinion see
Nothing to do with Dennett's quining qualia

Not a short thread.

Not a topic to treat in a couple of words.

what do you think p is meant to signify — J

A range of things from utterances through to propositions.

What's important here is that we pull those out of their intensional context so that they can be treated extensional. Not "I think that Superman can fly" but "Superman can fly". Then we can substitute Clark Kent for Superman without losing truth values.

That's the point of the Begriffsschrift, "⊢".

I don't see indexicals as so problematic that we need to drop extensionality entirely - which is what Rödl's account seems to require.

Yes! That's it! :wink:

Just to be sure, this is an excellent thread, in that, that he is taken seriously is itself the puzzle. I am missing something here, but what?