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

“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?…
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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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