"On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme"

This is a continuation of a discussion from “What are the best refutations of the idea that moral facts can’t exist because it's immeasurable?” It’s gone in a different direction and deserves a separate OP that doesn’t derail Captain Homicide’s OP.

At issue is the famous paper by Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” 1974. @Joshs has pointed us to a 2009 paper by Xinli Wang that takes issue with Davidson’s conclusions. I recommend you read both papers, but I think this summary of Davidson's position is fair: Davidson wants to deny incommensurable conceptual relativism by demonstrating that the “very idea” of a conceptual scheme is incoherent to begin with. Thus we can’t have competing conceptual schemes, and thus there is nothing to relativize between. This greatly oversimplifies an elegant paper but I’m striving for brevity.

Wang points out, I think rightly, that Davidson relies on some version of the traditional scheme-content distinction carried forward by Kant and W.V.O. Quine. Wang challenges Davidson here in a number of ways, but I want to focus on the one he feels is most exigent. We could phrase it as a question: “Is there indeed a ‛robust version’ of the scheme-content distinction that sidesteps the way Kantians and Quinians have presented it?” Pretty much everything important hangs on this. If Wang can illustrate such a version, then not only does the “very idea of a conceptual scheme” survive Davidson’s criticisms, but Wang is also in a position to make a plausible case for why there could be many such schemes, opening the door for conceptual relativism.

The alternative, more robust scheme-content distinction Wang proposes involves what he calls “common-sense experience” (this plays the role of content) and whatever conceptual scheme may be in play among a given community. What is key here is that, for Wang, common-sense experience (which he also calls “thick experience,” drawing from James) is not “innocent” of theoretical influence. It is not the same thing as a Kantian/Quinian uninterpreted world of sense-data or things-as-they-are. Our basic experience, the most basic one possible (and this will prove to be crucial), is already theory-laden. There is no sharp distinction, Wang argues, between scheme and content – certainly nothing like as sharp as the one Davidson employs. Wang believes that it is only this (fictional) very sharp separation that allows Davidson’s argument against such a division to go through.

Concepts are, similarly, experience-laden. “Concepts are not only the tools of inquiry but also its products,” he urges. “The scheme of our basic experiential concepts is globally a posteriori as a product of our experiences.” So no concepts are absolutely basic, and certainly not a priori; Wang describes them as “hypothetically or historically basic.” They are still “foundational” and “universally presupposed by our experience,” but not because they are Kantian categories. Rather, it is our “past evolutionary history and current structure of environment” that makes them so.

This picture of a historicized, empirically derived epistemology is fairly familiar. Can it do the job Wang asks of it? Does “the very idea of a conceptual scheme” thrive in this new environment?

To consider this, we can look at Richard Rorty’s criticism of the idea of a “common-sense experience,” which Wang himself cites:

“The notion of ‛the world’ as used in a phrase like ‛different conceptual schemes carve up the world differently’ must be the notion of something completely unspecified and unspecifiable -- the thing-in-itself. As soon as we start thinking of ‛the world’ as atoms and the void, or sense data and awareness of them, or ‛stimuli’ of a certain sort brought to bear upon organs of a certain sort, we have changed the name of the game. For we are now well within some particular theory about how the world is.”

In other words, Rorty is saying that there’s always that sharp separation, even at the most primitive or “innocent” levels. To claim otherwise, to appeal to Wang’s common-sense experience, with its built-in and supposedly unavoidable theoretical elements, is to “change the name of the game.” We’ve done some sleight-of-hand and imported our scheme disguised as innocent content.

Wang acknowledges that this is the critical point, admitting that “the scheme-content distinction is epistemic by nature, namely, the distinction between our conceptual apparatus and the world/experience.” And he agrees that the critical question is, “How can we meaningfully separate a scheme from its empirical content if we still want to make sense of the scheme-content distinction at all?” Yet as far as I can see, his answer is merely to assert that such a separation is possible, that common-sense experience, despite its saturation by theory, can still be taken as distinct, if “fuzzily,” from conceptual scheme: “It is no longer a novel idea today that all concepts are empirical and none a priori.” That may be so, but its prevalence doesn’t make it true, nor supply an argument for it. We still need to be convinced that Wang’s common-sense experience really deserves to be considered as being foundational for perception in the way he claims it is.

There is an even more serious problem for Wang, though. To make his argument go through, I think Wang has to show not only that common-sense experience is possible, but that the other kind – raw, unmediated perceptions, "thin experience" – is impossible. Otherwise, one can simply fall back on the Rortian/Davidsonian objections and claim that Wang has argued beside the point.

It’s unclear whether Wang ever attempts to show that unmediated experience is impossible. Sometimes he seems to assume that there could not be anything more basic than common-sense experience. Yet he also says this: “Our common-sense experience is the product of the dialectical interaction between our basic experiential concepts and experiential input from nature, whatever it may be.” But surely this cedes the ground he has previously tried to conquer? If there is such a thing as “experiential input from nature” that is distinct from common-sense experience, then the whole project of trying to find a non-Kantian/Quinian scheme-content dualism has failed. Or at best, one could agree that common-sense experience might happen, or that it sometimes happens, but not that it must.

So we’re left with two competing pictures of “experience.” One, Rorty’s and Davidson’s, says that experience is pre-linguistic, pre-theoretical, pre-pretty-much-everything, and because this is untenable (and for a number of other reasons as well), we should abandon the scheme-content distinction. The other, Wang’s and perhaps Feyerabend’s, says that experience is always and already theory-laden, but it’s possible to use this very fact to show how a viable scheme-content distinction could survive.

At this point, I’ll stop and invite comment. Perhaps others can find stronger arguments from Wang than I have. Or perhaps we need to turn the problem over to the psychologists – after all, the question of how we experience the world at the most basic level might be an empirical one, best answered through scientific research. Or we might conclude that the only genuine scheme-content dualism is the traditional one drawing from Kant – but that Davidson is wrong in finding it incoherent or indefensible.

Paine

Back when the Davidson essay was first discussed here, one can read it without paying. Does anybody know of an alternative to JSTOR?

Joshs

↪Paine

Here ya go:

https://eltalondeaquiles.pucp.edu.pe/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/On-the-Very-Idea-of-a-Conceptual-Scheme.pdf

Thanks!

Joshs

↪J

Rorty is saying that there’s always that sharp separation, even at the most primitive or “innocent” levels. To claim otherwise, to appeal to Wang’s common-sense experience, with its built-in and supposedly unavoidable theoretical elements, is to “change the name of the game.” We’ve done some sleight-of-hand and imported our scheme disguised as innocent content… If there is such a thing as “experiential input from nature” that is distinct from common-sense experience, then the whole project of trying to find a non-Kantian/Quinian scheme-content dualism has failed. — J

Joseph Rouse’s critique of Rorty on this point would seem to strengthen Wang’s argument by asserting that the notion of raw unmediated perception is incoherent. His claim is that the content of common sense experience is irreducibly and inextricably entangled with the schematic organization of linguistic and material practices.

“Rorty is correct to say that the practices through which utterances are connected to their publicly accessible surroundings are not a justificatory encounter between already "interanimated" sentences and something alien to language and social norms. He has nevertheless retained from the representationalist tradition the underlying conception of inferential relations among sentences and causal relations among things as alien to one another. Causal interaction with unfamiliar objects or unfamiliar noises (i.e., metaphors) can (causally) prompt new sentences, he argues, but they cannot belong to networks of meaning and understanding. Rorty thereby hopes to avoid the objectivist claim that causal relations with things can justify some of these inferential networks from the “outside.” There is, however, a different way to challenge realists' claim that causal interaction with the world can provide an external vindication of some of our theories. Rorty overlooks the possibility that scientists' material interactions with apparatus and objects are too integral to scientific discourse to provide it with the kind of external, objective justification that realists seek. The practices that connect utterances to their circumstances are not justifications of independently meaningful utterances, but instead are already part of the articulation of those utterances as meaningful sentences (and simultaneously of those surroundings as intelligible objects and processes). On such an account, the development of a science involves new ways of talking and new ways of encountering and dealing with its objects, articulated together.

Rorty says non-linguistic objects like “[platypuses and pulsars] do not (literally) tell us anything, but they do make us notice things and start looking around for analogies and similarities. They do not have cognitive content, but they are responsible for a lot of cognitions. For if they had not turned up, we should not have been moved to formulate and deploy certain sentences which do have such content. As with platypuses, so with metaphors.”

Rorty thereby maintains a sharp distinction between contentful language and the world, at the cost of relocating novel (“metaphorical”) utterances from the former to the latter. I urge a different conclusion: neither meaningful sentences or theories, nor articulated objects, can be manifest except through their ongoing mutual interrelations. Contra Rorty, both newly manifest phenomena, and new ways of talking, can be telling, but only because even in their novelty, they already belong to larger patterns of material and discursive practices. Practical interactions with our material surroundings are not external to our discursive practices, but indispensable components of them.

Rorty argues that we can never get outside our language, experience, or methods to assess how well they correspond to a transcendent reality. My line of argument suggests that the “near” side of realists' supposed correspondence relation is just as problematic. We should not think of our web of belief as itself intelligible apart from ongoing patterns of causal interaction with our surroundings (good Davidsonian that he is, Rorty recognizes that utterances are only interpretable as part of a larger pattern of action, in a shared set of circumstances). To that extent, the Quinean metaphor of a “web of belief” might better be replaced by that of a “field of possible action,” or a “meaningfully configured world.”

The point of my criticisms is that these marks and noises do not form a coherent pattern by themselves, but only as part of that larger pattern of practical engagement with the surrounding world. Rorty has already argued forcefully that scientific understanding cannot be disaggregated into distinct components of meaning and fact, fact and value, or linguistic scheme and experiential content. My arguments suggest that we also cannot usefully divide human interaction with the environing world into distinct components of social solidarity and material practice, unforced agreement and prediction and control, inferential norms and causal effects, or (familiar) meanings and (unfamiliar) noises.”
(From Realism or Anti-Realism to Science as Solidarity)

↪Joshs

Are you sure Rouse is arguing here for the impossibility of pre-linguistic or pre-theoretical experience? I read him as saying two related but different things. First, he says that once we arrive at Wang’s “common-sense experience,” it’s an experience of something that is no longer “innocent” but inculcated with theory, the web of belief, and all the other familiar metaphors. That's true, given how Wang defines common-sense experience. But does Rouse claim there is no possibility of an experience prior to this? I couldn't find a passage that argues for this.

The second thing I see Rouse doing is questioning what he calls the “near side” of the scheme-content duality. That is, our schemes and theories are no more innocent of empirical input than our experiences are of conceptual input. But again, this wouldn’t necessarily show that the empirical input has no theory-independent existence.

Joshs

↪J

↪Joshs Are you sure Rouse is arguing here for the impossibility of pre-linguistic or pre-theoretical experience?…
The second thing I see Rouse doing is questioning what he calls the “near side” of the scheme-content duality. That is, our schemes and theories are no more innocent of empirical input than our experiences are of conceptual input. But again, this wouldn’t necessarily show that the empirical input has no theory-independent existence. — J

Rouse believes that we are never dealing with anything theory independent when we observe the world empirically. This does not mean that what we observe is nothing but what we have already schematized. What it means is that the world speaks back to us through the apparatuses, language and practices we use to make sense of it.

Banno

↪J

,

↪Joshs

, its pleasing to see some serious objections being raised to Davidson. I've always harboured a doubt as to the argument, but have found it quite resilient. Despite some hesitancy, I have long accepted that the argument is sound.

Why, then, any doubt? When an argument is that good, it deserves to be treated with suspicion. In setting out the argument Davidson sets out a position on the nature of language. Language is truth-functional, it makes statements about how things are, about what is the case. When i try to articulate my doubts, I usually think of Dolphins. They engage in a sophisticated aural interaction that looks prima facie very much like a language. On Davidson's (and Quinn's) account, we should be able to identify regularities, perhaps using statistical analysis, such that some of the sounds made by the dolphin can be identified as equivalent to some of our own utterances - coarsely, there should be a commonality of belief such that "Click Squeak" is true IFF "That is a mullet". But we seem not to have been able to make progress in this direction. It seems instead that Dolphin and whale sound, while exhibiting complex patterns, does not correspond in the requisite way to our statements.

Some suggest that cetacean sounds are more like poetry or music than language. If that is so then we cannot find the equivalent statement in English simply because they are not making statements.

So here's my doubt: for Davidson, language must make statements. Yet here we have what appears to be a language that perhaps does not make statements*. The Davidsonian response will simply be that, therefore, cetacean sound is not a language. But that seems a bit to fast, too neat. Why shouldn't we count something that aural and complex as a language without statements?

The relevance of all this is that I have great sympathy for Wang's view that Davidson's "notion of conceptual scheme and conceptual relativism have a very limited scope". On a first reading I am not convinced that Wang succeeds in rescuing scheme-content dualism from Davidson. I don't see how there could be any scheme-neutral content, any more than there could be a thing-in-itself; for no sooner do we start to talk about it than we place it within a scheme.

But the introduction of a third truth value, with its implicit antirealism, might make for an interesting argument - but I don't see it here. The allegory of the riverbank and the text thereabouts seem to say that there is an interchange between scheme and content, whereas to carry their case Wang must show a separation.

Good thread. Damn nuisance, as Im occupied elsewhere.

Reveal

* It might be worth adding that it is not necessary to show that cetacean language contains no statements for this argument to work; what counts is the mere consideration of the possibility that some such could count as a language and yet not contain any statements.

schopenhauer1

↪Banno

I think Tomasello's more empirical approach might agree and disagree with Davidson on his idea of truth-condition statements and language. Rather, it is joint intentionality which can range all kinds of reasons, and is iterative. That seems to be what the research says.. Though there are echoes of Davidson's semantic triangle in Tomasello's research of joint attention.

Banno

I think Tomasello's more empirical approach might agree and disagree with Davidson — schopenhauer1

If you don't say how it might disagree, then that doesn't much help.

The world speaks back to us through the apparatuses, language and practices we use to make sense of it. — Joshs

Interesting. I like the metaphor. Can you expand on this a little bit? It seems really important to get a precise sense of what "the world" would have to consist of, in order for us to understand how it's separable from apparatuses, language, etc., and how it can have the kind of agency that could "speak back."

Joshs

The world speaks back to us through the apparatuses, language and practices we use to make sense of it.
— Joshs

Interesting. I like the metaphor. Can you expand on this a little bit? It seems really important to get a precise sense of what "the world" would have to consist of, in order for us to understand how it's separable from apparatuses, language, etc., and how it can have the kind of agency that could "speak back." — J

Can something both belong and not belong to a framing category at the same time? Can concepts like relevance, significance and mattering lead us to such a notion of a world whose very ‘outsideness’ and subject-independence is what it is only as a variation of sense with respect to our concerns and purposes? If this appears as a solipsistic rejection of an authentically external world, then perhaps it was never such a world we were concerned with in constructing our sciences. Perhaps the world we ARE concerned with does not pre-exist the ways in which we interact with it, but is instead produced ( and changed) as what it is for us only in actual interactions. Perhaps our interest in the world is not in recovering pre-existing features from it but in enacting a world in felicitous ways. Only such an enacted world can speak back to us in our own language.

This strange way of thinking about subject-world relations is common to enactivist psychology, phenomenology, the later Wittgenstein, poststructuralism and hermeneutics.

Banno

↪Paine

Four years ago.

Isaac

In that thread, I had an extended, interesting and intelligent discussion with @Isaac. Over the length of the thread we worked out a difference between "models" in conceptual schemes, as treated by Davidson, and "Models" as used in studies of consciousness and perception . See

↪Isaac

,

↪Isaac

and thereabouts. It was one of the most powerful interactions I've had on the fora.

↪fdrake

has informed us that Isaac has died. No details have been made available.

I'm saddened by this loss. We differed strongly on our attitudes towards a number of issues - Covid comes to mind; and I know others had run-ins with him. I found him to be forthright, and admired the clarity with which he argued his case.

Farewell, Isaac.

Banno

Anyway, in that thread ~~I suggested that we dispose of the notion of concepts and replace it with the notion of beliefs.~~

And this is part of what I suspect goes amiss in Wang's paper. It's not that we can't seperate concepts from beliefs, nor concepts from meaning, but that it is questionable what a concept is, and what it does. .

That needs to be traced through the Wang paper. I'll just drop it here for now, lest I forget.

Wayfarer

I suggested that we dispose of the notion of concepts and replace it with the notion of beliefs. — Banno

But I would have thought that a concept would have some kind of correspondence with an empirical or intellectual object. It seems more determinate to me than a belief - ‘oh, Mary believes that vaccines are dangerous’ is a belief, but I’d hardly call it a concept, would you?

Banno

↪Wayfarer

Yeah, I'll rescind that. Needs more work.

The allegory of the riverbank and the text thereabouts seem to say that there is an interchange between scheme and content, whereas to carry their case Wang must show a separation. — Banno

Right.

I don't see how there could be any scheme-neutral content, any more than there could be a thing-in-itself; for no sooner do we start to talk about it than we place it within a scheme. — Banno

You find many of the same problems as I do in Wang, concerning scheme-content dualism. I don’t think the arguments are there – on that front. Earlier in the paper, though, he discusses the question you mention concerning alternate truth-values and/or truth-value status in a given language. I didn’t address that section at all in my OP, but it’s very interesting. Maybe someone would like to take it on . . .

In setting out the argument Davidson sets out a position on the nature of language. — Banno

I think it’s right on target to see Davidson in the context of defending (or assuming) a particular view of language. Indeed, this is one point where Wang seems to misunderstand him, or make too-hasty equations of terminology. For instance, he attributes to Davidson “the identification of conceptual schemes with sentential languages.” But Davidson explicitly does not do this. He uses words like “association” and “relation” rather than identification, and says that language and scheme will “co-vary,” but the thrust of his argument relies on clear differences among language, concept, and scheme.

That said, Davidson upholds Tarski-truth as the model of how propositions work. He also believes language must refer. Is it all we can say about language? The cetaceans are a good counter-example. So is human music. Musicians generally don’t think that abstract music either states propositions or refers, but it seems impossible to get rid of the idea that music is nonetheless a language. Or, if that’s questionable, that it communicates. What, then, does it communicate? What are dolphins “talking” about?

I think you’re offering the cetaceans as an example of a genuinely incommensurable conceptual scheme – if they can be said to have a language. And your guess is that Davidson would simply deny them that designation. Or perhaps we could convince him that here is a case of partial translation. Might this not be closer to what’s going on with the cetaceans? You say we haven’t been able to make progress in the direction of translating dolphin sounds. I’m sure you’re right; I don’t know much about it. But don’t we treat all animals, even much less intelligent ones, as if they are “saying something” when they make their various noises? And it isn’t just fanciful. I certainly can tell the difference between when my cat is “saying” Please Feed Me and when she’s saying Eff Off, I’m Sleeping.

So here’s what we would need to ask Davidson: Do you require mental propositional content [or fill in whatever term you like for subjectivity] in order to constitute a language? Does the dolphin have to have the idea of Look, A Tasty Fish? Or are we willing to accept a functional/behavioral sense of what it means to communicate through language? I think we non-philosophical humans have already settled that for ourselves: We don’t require that our pets know what they’re talking about -- quite literally. What they know, if anything, is mysterious. But what they mean to tell us is often something even a child can quickly pick up. So: partial translatability? We get some, but not most, of what they say. And the scheme-content dualism remains in place, since whatever translatability is possible is down to the sharing of concepts between two languages – provided you give “concept” a free pass as a mental entity.

schopenhauer1

↪Banno

If you don't say how it might disagree, then that doesn't much help. — Banno

When a child is first learning language and points to the balloon and says “balloo” is that even a truth conditional type statement or just an example of joint attention seeking? What if he said “ball ball” when pointed? What if just said “look!” When pointing. I think Tomasello is saying that language starts as simply avenues for joint collaborative ventures. The content matters less than there is a form of “theory of mind” going on. That the person intends for you to see what they see and then a game ensues where the adult interacts with this, joining and making more complex interactions from there. This doesn’t seem to be about the validity of the content of what the world is about. That is synthetic and formal, not primary to “whence language”? It’s a philosopher’s take but not the empirically observed one from child development.

jkop

↪Joshs

Perhaps our interest in the world is not in recovering pre-existing features from it but in enacting a world in felicitous ways. Only such an enacted world can speak back to us in our own language. — Joshs

I'd say our interest in pre-existing features arises from our curiosity regardless of whether it is felicitous or serves other interests. However, we have reasons to be curious.

For example, we discover relations between language and the world that are asymmetric. Words can denote any feature, whereas features exemplify words that already denote them. New or discovered features can and are often defined ostensively, regardless of verbal languages.

If this appears as a solipsistic rejection of an authentically external world, then perhaps it was never such a world we were concerned with in constructing our sciences. — Joshs

Interesting thought. But it depends on who the “we” is here. I think the evidence is overwhelming that scientists have always – until very recently – understood their project as trying to understand the authentically external world. They may have been wrong to do so, but let’s be careful not to read back into their projects a (post)modern view of science. For me, a more convincing challenge to the traditional idea that science constructs a picture of an external world is the actual work of physicists today. Someone who understands quantum physics better than I do, please correct me, but it seems to be the case that, while an independent external world remain ontologically likely, it’s no longer believed possible, on epistemological grounds, to know anything about it that isn’t observer-dependent. I guess Kant would be happy!

Joshs

↪J

If this appears as a solipsistic rejection of an authentically external world, then perhaps it was never such a world we were concerned with in constructing our sciences.
— Joshs

Interesting thought. But it depends on who the “we” is here. I think the evidence is overwhelming that scientists have always – until very recently – understood their project as trying to understand the authentically external world. They may have been wrong to do so, but let’s be careful not to read back into their projects a (post)modern view of science — J

When I say ‘concerned with’ , I don’t mean the way scientists have traditionally explained what they are doing when they do science. A central aspect of Husserl’s project was to show how we construct the idea of a world external us and then live naively within that construction, making the constructed the ground for the construing process. But the external is internal to the construing process.
m

it seems to be the case that, while an independent external world remain ontologically likely, it’s no longer believed possible, on epistemological grounds, to know anything about it that isn’t observer-dependent. I guess Kant would be happy! — J

You should check out physicist Karen Barad’s ‘Meeting the Universe Halfway’ for an alternate reading. She argues, updating Bohr, that every aspect of the universe is observer-dependent, but this agency is not restricted to living observers.

frank

after all, the question of how we experience the world at the most basic level might be an empirical one, best answered through scientific research. — J

I was thinking of this lately in terms of the residents of the two-dimensional world. If they ask about the nature of their world, they might be

1. Asking from a vantage point outside their world, which they can't have due to conceptual limitations, or
2. Asking from within their world, looking for signs, such as when a spoon passes through their world, they see a dot which gets wider and then shorter, then disappears into a dot again.

I actually don't think either 1 or 2 works. They can't know things about their world. As for whether there's an outer world, maybe that's a different question. Did you see Chalmers' book Constructing the World? He goes on and on about Laplace's Demon. I'm not sure he really establishes anything though.

↪Joshs

Yes, I figured you didn't mean the scientists themselves thought this way. But it still remains important, I think, not to separate self-understanding from an allegedly more accurate account, here or anywhere else. Wouldn't that be a too-firm dualism of the sort that a lot of postmodernism rejects?

As for Husserl, we'd need a new thread! What you say about his project isn't wrong, but the distinction between what is external and what is phenomenologically present preoccupied him throughout his writings. I don't think he doubted for a moment that an external world was there to be encountered. What was important was the bracketing process, the epoche, without which the questions can't be meaningfully posed. But no one will ever have the last word on Husserl! :wink:

Apustimelogist

↪J

The more I think about this the more complicated it seems to get in ways that ultimately might only be resolvable through neuroscience, cognitive perceptual science. But, and perhaps too simply put, I think there is something like pre-lingual, pre-theoretic experience which can be contrasted to knowledge which is enacted within that experience, including things like categorization, association, etc. I agree with Wang that conceptual schemes are fuzzy, non-fixed, and have various levels of abstraction at which we engage and between which, different concepts relate. The idea that commonalities and differences makes complete sense to me, like in the sense that different cultures may have different language concepts but presumably have very similar color perception capabilities. Even when we look at something like the duck / rabbit illusion, ultimately the differences we interpret coexist with the fact we are looking at the same picture and nothing has changed about those perceptual aspects of it. After all, the job of the cortex is to capture information at sensory receptors (e.g. in the retina ) which we all share in common to a significant extent, and process signals that have a basis in object outside of us in the world which are common to us. Equally, I agree with idea that people can have something like different conceptual schemes but with substantial commonalities, like Wang seems to say.

Ultimately though, with regard to my interpretation of Kuhn, I believe that Davidson is attacking a strawman. The whole crux of Davidson's argument is that conceptual schemes are inherently untranslatable but referring to the same world of experiences. He seems to think that untranslatable implies incomparability and non-intelligibility but I think Kuhn means more like establishing a one-to-one correspondence between concepts, something which I think you can find in many languages - words that aren't necessarily beyond understanding to us but just don't quite match any kind of word we have or use, which can sometimes make them seem weird or even artificial. Because we are so unfamiliar, we may not even be good at using them in a way that comes across as natural when we try to speak that language.

Kuhn has a descriptive approach to science so I think he just says that often people do come across difficulties in understanding concepts in different paradigms, which then might make evaluating theories difficult; but that doesn't mean they can't be translated or understood in some way, after all, in the history of science we are talking about many scientists who probably do have lots of concepts in common and speak the same language. How could Kuhn have come to understand Aristotelian motion if he thought it was genuinely incomparable and untranslatable? You can probably look Aristotelian motion up on Wikipedia.

Another thing is that I think incommensurability is essentially just a generalization on scientific underdetermination which is roughly what is meant by his use of the phrase different worlds. This is more than translating words or rearranging meanings that refer to the same world but changing your theory about how you think the world actually is. Knowing how the world really is may be chronically underdetermined empirically, but I think it is also the case they will have completely different descriptions and counterfactuals about how the world would be if we had a perfect ability to observe it. Contrasts between something like Copernican and Ptolomaic views of astronomy is not about just changing meanings of the words but statements about how the world is which are completely different. The stars and planets exist on completely different trajectories in the two pictures which give different, contradictory facts about the world and how it would be if we were to observe it a certain way. It is just that from limited purviews, there may be practical difficulty in demonstrating those distinctions in empirical observation, or ruling out that the empirical demonstration might have been mistaken / faulty / misinterpreted, or that some other theory can account for that particular observation in the same way.

I think basically then that Davidson's notion of conceptual scheme here is fundamentally not what Kuhn was talking about, not and so a strawman is being attacked.

schopenhauer1

↪Apustimelogist

None of this matters unless there is an empirical element. Studying child development, neurology, physiology, cognitive psychology, evolution, genetics, biochemistry, anthropology, and the rest.

The best the "theories" can combine all these. Someone along the lines of a Terrence Deacon or a Michael Tomasello. More science than a priori linguistic philosophizing.

Philosophy of Language a priori, does best when studying its own synthetic, made-up things (logic), not so much logic-as-applied-to-human. This in itself, ironically, is a sort of incommensurability. Evolution is always about "usefulness", not about "truthfulness". How much our ability for interpreting the world in useful ways to stay alive equals truth, itself would need a third-party which can then have an infinite regress. The best we can do is explain "Why" we developed certain features such as language. However, it is an odd shoe-horn to then ask how well language makes truth-conditional statements, or if that is even the real function of language. Rather, the biology recenters these debates away from truth-finding, and more about evolutionary-biological, species-apt theories. What is it about the species Homo sapiens, being a bipedal primate with a specific branch from 2 million years ago, that brought about language? The universe wasn't say, "To formulate better truth-conditional statements". And to the extent that we have "truth-conditional" propositions of the world, and how much people's "schemas" shape them, it is all schema all the way down, but the schemas of individuals cannot be just uprooted from this biological framework, which again, has to be gotten at from an empirical perspective to understand.

Banno

↪J

Musician Peter Gabriel has been funding research into animal communication. There'sa. curious lecture at

Bats, because they are supposedly, famously, beyond our keen. But see here that we know quite a bit about what goes on in a bat's mind. Bats sing like birds. They learn new vocalisations from their community. They use it to "other" bats from outside their territory.

As

↪schopenhauer1

points out we need empirical data, but that will not be the whole story. We also need good plumbing.

Thank you,

↪J

, for your sympathetic and considered reply. This thread ought first pull apart the content of Wang's argument, in the light of Davidson's work, and see what is actually being argued. It won't, folk will give their opinion and move on.

So I'll first plagiarise myself to summarise what I take as the main argument in Davidson.

Davidson begins by characterising the notion of conceptual scheme he wishes to critique. A conceptual scheme is such that what counts as real is relative to the scheme, because the scheme supposedly organises and categorises our experiences. Hence, what is said in one scheme is incommensurable with what is said in some other scheme, since any standard that might be used to relate one scheme to another is itself part of one scheme or another.

Notice that he is not arguing that this is the case, but setting out the characteristics of the notion of conceptual scheme to which the article is being addressed.

Now we can apply convention T to conceptual schemes.

We saw that any conceptual scheme worthy of the title must be true. What we want to know is if there can be a conceptual scheme that is both true and untranslatable.

So slot that into our generalised T-sentence, replacing "s" with the mooted untranslatable conceptual scheme, and "p" with the impossible translation.

s is true IFF p

Think on that a bit. I hope it is obvious that we could not know that s is true, unless we had a translation of s; but by the very presumption that s is untranslatable, we reach an impasse.

We could not know that some untranslatable conceptual scheme was indeed true.

Hence, the very idea of a true, untranslatable conceptual scheme is incoherent.

Now the dolphin issue, mentioned above, questions the assumption that any conceptual scheme worthy of the title must be true.

I'd hoped that this might be what Wang addressed in "Redistribution Of Truth-Values Cross Alternative Conceptual Schemes", but it was not so. Instead Wan focuses on the Principle of Charity, claiming that it is muddled, repeating various trite examples. I think he is mislead here. Take the WMT vs CMT example. Both practitioners agree that there are human bodies, that these bodies can experience pain, that these bodies have a pattern of organs, and amongst these is a pancreas, and that there are ways to treat pain in bodies. There is overwhelming agreement. And yet we focus on a relatively small difference, a diagnosis of imbalance of yin and yang, as being untranslatable. Supose the CMT practitioner recommends Ginseng tea; maybe WMT will show that this does not work, maybe that it does, and identify a triterpene saponin that addresses the issue with the pancreas. Here WMT and CMT are no where near incommensurate.

And they cannot be, because they are dealign wiht the very same issues int he very same world. Charity holds.

Banno

Joseph Rouse’s critique of Rorty on this point would seem to strengthen Wang’s argument by asserting that the notion of raw unmediated perception is incoherent. His claim is that the content of common sense experience is irreducibly and inextricably entangled with the schematic organization of linguistic and material practices. — Joshs

I mustn't have understood what you are suggesting here. Davidson's argument is a reductio, beginning by assuming that there is a clear distinction between scheme and content and showing how this leads to inconsistency, and so rejecting the assumption.

In particular, it is clear at the conclusion of his article that Davidson is rejecting the notion of raw unmediated perception.

Banno

Plagiarising myself again, here is the part of Davidson's argument that addresses the division between scheme and content.

Davidson makes an interesting distinction between two sorts of possible worlds.

In one, we alter what is the case in this world in order to construct other possible worlds, associated with a dualism of necessary and possible sentences.

In the other, which he attributes to Kuhn but for which we might blame quite a few others, what is the case is held steady while those observing each create their own conceptual world. Doing this is what forces a divide between scheme and content.

The idea is that there is stuff, the stuff needs sorting, and the conceptual scheme is what does that sorting. Davidson is here squashing a vast range of philosophical ideas into few small paragraphs; and in summarising it I am insulting it further. Experience, sense data, phenomena, prediction, the given... all these philosophical garden paths bundled into one analysis for easy disposal.

So we have a distinction between stuff (content), and language as sorting that stuff by organising it (schema). So incommensurable schema would be incommensurable sorting of the same stuff. They must be about the very same stuff.

Now one might agree that we could disagree as to how to sort this or that; but it makes no sense to suggest we disagree about everything. Davidson talks of organising the closet as opposed to organising the shirts in the closet:

We cannot attach a clear to the notion of a meaning organizing single object (the world, nature etc.) unless that object is understood to contain or consist in other objects. Someone who sets out to organise a closet arranges the things in it. If you are told not to organize the shoes and shirts, but the closet itself, you would be bewildered. How would you organize the Pacific Ocean'? Straighten out its shores, perhaps, or relocate its islands, or destroy it's fish? — Davidson, p. 14

it's much the same point as Wittgenstein made in On Certainty; one might doubt something, but one cannot sensibly doubt everything; since then one must doubt the very stuff that makes doubt possible.

One can sort the shirts in the cupboard in a different way, but that would remain a sorting of the shirts. There would still be shirts, and so commonality. Two different ways of sorting the cupboard are not incommensurate. So one cannot make sense of incompatible schema in this way.

schopenhauer1

As ↪schopenhauer1 points out we need empirical data, but that will not be the whole story. We also need — Banno

Just curious, this seems to be an incomplete sentence. Was there something that you meant to write after "We also need..."?

Banno

↪schopenhauer1

Fixed. Thanks.

Joshs

it's much the same point as Wittgenstein made in On Certainty; one might doubt something, but one cannot sensibly doubt everything; since then one must doubt the very stuff that makes doubt possible.

One can sort the shirts in the cupboard in a different way, but that would remain a sorting of the shirts. There would still be shirts, and so commonality. Two different ways of sorting the cupboard are not incommensurate. So one cannot make sense of incompatible schema in this way. — Banno

Yes, the meaning of the shirts already bound up with the integrated set of pragmatic relations that includes what they are being used for and how and where they are stored. In relation to this, I understand Wittgenstein’s hinge propositions as pragmatic presuppositions on which something like the meaning of a shirt hinges. Doubt, unworkability and breakdown get their intelligibility from within a totality of relevance uniting particulars on the basis of a network of ‘in order to’. But this totality of relevance isn’t grounded by some link to an external cause. The causes are within the totality and the totally is perspectival.

"On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme"

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