In common with all your other antinatalist threads (and I'm slightly inclined to agree with @DingoJones about the proselytising) you're simply assuming an individualist assessment of both utility and ethics. People do not consider only the ethical implication of their actions on one person, but on the community as a whole. This is why people consider bad faith to be negative even when the person directly affected didn't notice. It's bad for the community as a whole.

So it is with this latest incarnation of how evil it is to have kids. We're taking a gamble on the relative consequences for the whole community (or at least, I think we should be - I'm not about to argue that most people make moral choices about having children, I'm pretty sure they don't).

We can't presume, in this decision, that the rest of our community will not have children, that seems unlikely. So there will be a next generation. The choice then is - is it better for that community that I have and raise children, or that I don't.

It seems to follow from this that if one considers oneself more likely to raise children more beneficial than average one is obliged to do so. If one is of the opposite opinion, one is obliged to not.

Given the above, the only remaining issue would be if your, as yet, unborn child also carries that duty. If not, then you'd be imposing on their autonomy. But if such a duty of care were not considered categorical, then we need have no care for the future children in any case, so we must presume it is categorical. Given that, we can be certain that our, as yet unborn, children will inherit that duty. It is therefore no additional imposition on them.

So the 'experimenting' issue doesn't arise at an individual level. There may be some merit in it at a community level (we're gambling that continuing the human race is overall a good idea), but such decisions (as far as individuals are concerned) have already been made.

There seems to me to be two main justifications for having children. Either - "I think they'll like this", or "I think they ought to help with this", or I suppose a bit of both. Both are estimates where there's no loss to the individual for not even taking the bet (the antinatalist argument in a nutshell), but both estimates run a risk to the community from not even taking the bet.

OK - here's my interpretation of Ramsey's answer to that problem.

Firstly, it's important to note the way Ramsey opens the section on logical consistency(what we're dealing with here) in Truth and Probability - He says...

the ideally best thing is that we should have beliefs of degree 1 in all true propositions and beliefs of degree 0 in all false propositions. But this is too high a standard to expect of mortal men, and we must agree that some degree of doubt or even of error may be humanly speaking justified.

What he's saying here is that the description of beliefs must be first and foremost psychological. To put it another way - we cannot, no matter how hard we squeeze, get any more out of 'the cat is on the mat' than that I believe the cat is on the mat. Ramsey is not saying that truth's are beliefs because of some logical deduction about truths. He's saying so because the notion is contained within a mind and there are limits that places on what it can possibly be.

So, to the objections...

Let's take the definition that "B is true" iff "B is a belief that P and that P":

(A) There are less than 3 bodies in orbit around Saturn at the moment.
(B) There are exactly 3 bodies in orbit around Saturn at the moment.
(C) There are more than 3 bodies in orbit around Saturn at the moment.

Let P = (A) or (B) or (C), the disjunction of all three of them. P is true since it exhausts all possible cases of the number of bodies in orbit around Saturn. I will believe that P.

This entails that (A) is true, or that (B) is true, or that (C) is true. By the above definition, this entails that (A) is a belief or that (B) is a belief or that (C) is a belief. But I don't believe in any of them, I simply believe in the disjunction — fdrake

In order to believe in the disjunction, it is necessary that you believe in all of them. The disjunction is a tautology of your belief in the three parts.

For Ramsey, a belief that p is a disposition to act as if p, and here speech is taken as an act. So if you hold the disjunction to be true, if someone were to ask "is it possible that there are less than 3 bodies in orbit around Saturn at the moment?", holding the disjunction to be true compels you (all other matters being equal) to answer "yes". So you do have a belief, in some degree, in each of the three options. Without such beliefs you could only justifiably believe the abstract logical truth of disjunction, not the specific one regarding Saturn and its moons.

My grasp of modal logic is not that great, so it may well be that I'm missing something crucial in what you're saying, but if not, then it seems that what we're talking about is a difference in what constitutes a 'belief' rather than anything else.

As for beliefs necessarily being probability distributions assigned to sets of statements, this is also quite contentious, there's no probability distribution that assigns indifference to the list (1)...(n) even when there is no information about (1) to (n ) — fdrake

Ramsey says...

the Principle of Indifference can now be altogether dispensed with; we do not regard it belonging to formal logic to say what should be a man's expectation of drawing a white or a black
ball from an urn; his original expectations may within the limits of consistency be any he likes; all we have to point out is that if he has certain expectations he is bound in consistency to have certain
others. This is simply bringing probability into line with ordinary formal logic, which does not
criticize premisses but merely declares that certain conclusions are the only ones consistent with
them.

I take this to mean that indifference is acceptable within bounds, but that your belief in the disjunction would act as just such a bound.

"B is true :=: (∃p). B is a belief that p & p." — Isaac


This seems to still fall to my counterexample, that there can be truths that are not believed. — Banno

If you don't mind, I've tried to deal with the truth/belief issues in my reply to @fdrake below, so hopefully I respond to this there are it will save me a bit of typing if you read that first and see if it answers your concern (or makes it worse!).

I'll grant that Kuhn emphasises the psychology of science while Davidson emphasis the language. — Banno

Yes, again this touches on my approach throughout this (although it's Ramsey's approach originally, I'm not claiming original thoughts here). We have only the human mind, which must have primacy over language. There's no doubt the one arises out of the other, there's no mutual standing in causation. Learning German doesn't alter one's thinking (much), but both physical and mental trauma to the mind can affect language. I know it's a bit territorial coming from a psychologist, but I'm in no doubt that the human mind is as far back as we can go in our understanding of the world (everything we know/understand is undoubtedly formed by, and contained within, it, and we can go no further than it because we cannot get outside of it). So I have a lot of sympathy for a linguistic approach, especially when it comes to philosophical problems, but psychology takes precedent, for me.

And do you claim the same fro truth? Is it subject to degree? — Banno

Yes, in some contexts I think we'd have to say that. Is it true that I like whiskey? - well, partly. I like some whiskeys and not others, there are occasions where I don't fancy a whiskey (can't think of any right now, maybe a bad example), I didn't like whiskey when I was seven...I think we'd have to say either that "I like whiskey" is simply not well formed enough to admit of truth vales (which gets us back to Tarski's limitation), or we'd have to admit that it is partially true.

I cannot see how you can sensibly divorce one from the other. Conceptual schemes are as much about cats and mats as they are about sensory inputs. There need be no justification between what counts as cat and what as mat. — Banno

Why do you say there need be no justification? I mean, with cats and mats, there's nothing to dispute, but that's not the target here. It's 'gravity, 'phlogiston', 'ether', 'strings', 'atoms', 'ecosystems', minds', 'selves', ...I don't really understand how you can say that there's no need for any justification as to what counts as any of those things. The justification seems to be entirely the point of any theory about them, and opponents of those theories simply deny their existence. I understand Davidson would point to translatability as an indicator of some more atomic objects which are being 'organised' into these 'conceptual objects', or he might point to a difference in belief about them within a network of shared beliefs (the key term being 'about them'), but I don't see that this makes them commensurable.

Directly perceptible things... common referents(says Davidson). — creativesoul

This presumes that the creation of a referent is never axiomatic, and I don't see where Davidson would be getting such a assumption from. The creation of objects of perception out of the raw sense data is not only entirely possible, but, given modern neuroscience, seem highly probable. No pre-existing - more atomic - objects of perception that they are built from, just constructed from raw data to which we (consciously, and so linguistically) have no direct access.

Ans so with Jenny. The feeling will not suffice. She demonstrates her understanding of other minds by changes in language and behaviour.

SO I think I can agree with what you are saying while maintaining that it's the language and associated behaviour that really count. — Banno

Really count for what, though? I completely understand the pragmatic issue with trying to get at non-linguistic concepts. 'Other minds' is a public concept and Jenny can only show she's 'got it' publicly - language and behaviour. I get that (though, as above, I'd place a lot more emphasis on behaviour - in fact I personally see language as just a type of behaviour, but that's another thread). But if we then remove the notion that these public concepts have themselves been derived, constructed, by some process, where does that leave cognitive science? Similarly, if we treat all public concepts this way, even those which are widely disputed, how can we frame such disputes? Jenny might have to show she's 'got the rule' publicly, but that does not constrain us in talking about 'the rule' in other terms. We needn't reify it simply because we become necessarily bound to it in each context.

Davidson, in discussing partial incommensurability, describes it as differences of belief, not of conception. I gather that you do not think this applies in Jenny's case, since she has no beliefs about other minds. I'm suggesting that the situation is better described as a difference in belief, since that allows us to challenge the erroneous beliefs and hence to help Jenny build a theory of mind; in a way that simply saying "she lacks the concept..." does not. — Banno

This is a very persuasive argument. A pragmatic one, I'll insist, not an ontological argument for other minds. But I think I'd have to concede that talking this way is more useful as an approach to helping people change erroneous beliefs, and the same would be true of your previous example of relativistic physics. I'm not sure a pragmatic way of improving people's beliefs is the sole remit of Davidson's paper, but I certainly find myself agreeing with your line of thought here. Nicely put.

Let Jenny be out 2-year-old. there are four possible beliefs she might have:


Jenny believes that other people have minds
Jenny does not believe that other people have minds
Jenny believes that other people do not have minds
Jenny does not believe that other people do not have minds


some of these can be paired up consistently, others, not without contradiction. You perhaps have taken be as asserting the second option; but I wish to assert both the second and the last - that is, that Jenny has no beliefs about the minds of other people. — Banno

I agree, Jenny has no beliefs about the minds of other people, she doesn't even have the concept 'minds of other people' her world is one of freely accessible knowledge about her world. So 'teaching' doesn't make any sense to Jenny (how can someone give her information, where would it have come from?), different emotions in other doesn't make sense to Jenny (how could others feel differently about things?)...

Whole fields of knowledge simply have no correlates in Jenny, no way of making her see what the mind-theorist sees. Jenny's difference in beliefs means that she has no 'other minds' in her world view for anything to even be about.

In the language of the simple world (using Davidson's example), she has no shoes in her closet to re-arrange. The problem Davidson is trying to dissolve is that we seemingly cannot say to her "Oh, I arrange shoes this way", by way of 'translating' (and therefore dissolving) our different conceptual scheme, because Jenny will just reply "What on earth are 'shoes'?".

But, in the simple world, we can explain what shoes are in terms that Jenny does understand and in this respect Davidson is exactly right - we'd been duped into thinking Jenny had a different conceptual scheme becasue she didn't have 'shoes' in her closet, but really all that had been the case was that we'd though we were arranging 'shoes' when actually we were arranging 'bits of leather' and 'feet'. Now Jenny knows what shoes are in those terms - perfect.

Except... going back to minds, it doesn't work. What are the underlying constituent parts common to both Jenny's world and ours? Jenny just has to feel that there are other minds, she has to develop the actual neural networks which alter her actions to behave as if there were other minds. It's not a linguistic matter. The same is true of all fundamental cognitive models, all complex scientific models, anything where we have not got good cause to assume shared beliefs are constituting the models.

Well, let's not kill the messenger. Davidson approaches the discussion in this way both because it is his area of interest, and because it presents a common ground for disparate branches of conceptual relativism. — Banno

Yes, I'm aware of that claim. That's the reason I brought up Kuhn and Quine as Davidson's targets. They certainly didn't think that way. Kuhn actually says "translation, if pursued, allows the participants in a communication breakdown to experience vicariously something of the merits and defects of each other’s points of view". Basically, I'm saying none of Davidson's targets equate non-translatability with incommensurablility, so I think Davidson needs to make a clearer case as to why he thinks that are the same if he is to attack Quine, Kuhn etc. If he's not opposing their positions, but instead merely presenting an alternative framework for looking at apparent differences, then he need make no such connection, but that's not what he's doing here, and that's not the place you're trying give his conclusions either.

Well, do you believe that the cat is on the mat? then you will hold "the cat is on the mat" to be true. And if not, then I suppose you will not. — Banno

As I've been trying to explain, I don't see belief in binary terms, belief is a probability statement. I have a degree of certainty that the cat is on the mat. Not believing it then simply doesn't make sense, Not believing it is just believing some alternative, contradictory thing, with a greater degree of certainty.

The point of this line of questioning though, is to find how Davidson makes the leap from Tarskian truth theories in formal languages, to truth theories in the real world (the content of Fit-Reality type conceptual schemes). He seems to me to do this in a rather 'hand-waivy' kind of way claiming that we all have fundamentally similar beliefs and we have to assume as much to talk to each other, such that the meaning of the meta-language's 'the cat is on the mat' is a statement about the way the world is (which is where he breaks from Tarski). It is this 'way the world is' that Davidson seems to want to invoke as a sufficiently general level of agreement that all conceptual schemes are fitting/organising.

The problem is, I don't think that description fits the two important areas of conceptual schemes that are being attacked here - complex matters of science, and fundamental level schemes of cognition/perception. I don't see any evidence fo the similarity of beliefs here that would bring Tarski out of formal languages into the real world.

A side issue - I think this is wrong, in that it gives primacy to strings over cats. Both are perhaps real. — Banno

Perhaps both are, but one is built from the other. If we are realists (and I'm presuming we are) then the only thing we're committed to axiomatically is an external reality. That reality has to be heterogeneous, otherwise we would be making up the variations of cats, people, trees, etc..., and we're back to idealism. But that's it. That's all that realism alone commits us to. To say that some collection of reality is a 'cat' and some other collection is 'not cat' requires some justification for putting the boundaries there and not elsewhere. Some justification for saying objects are determined by their form, not say, their function, or their energy fluxes, or any other aspect of reality we could have chosen. Those justifications are conceptual schemes (in the Quinean sense) and they cause the objects to be, they're not about cats and mats, they about sensory inputs, and such inputs are not shared, they vary according to the conceptual scheme, they also are often pre-linguistic, thus one cannot apply Tarskian truth theories to them.

Where? It's just that the you use notation may differ from that in the article. Is a, for instance, an individual? — Banno

I see where we've got crossed wires. The first presentation is from Ian Rumfitt's "Ramsey on truth and meaning", it's a n expression Rumfitt uses, I though might be more succinct a way of expressing Ramsey's later thought from Ramsey unpublished work "On Truth". The actual version is

"B is true :=: (∃p). B is a belief that p & p."

My later comment was in reference to the description of belief in terms of certainty which is indeed in 'Truth and Probability'. Two different parts of Ramsey's thinking which I'm bring together here. Apologies for any confusion there.

Edit - I take it all back. I've just had a look at one other philosophy forum and some of the stuff on reddit and twitter... Good God! I'll just keep quiet about what now seem like minor infractions.

But just being an unpleasant dick isn't in itself a banning offence. — Baden

Why not? I mean, I'm all for philosophy done with passion, but done badly - just to be obnoxious... I don't get why these people are allowed to remain. It's not like the Internet is going to run out of space for discussion forums. I think it would be a lot better if we (or some other forum, of course - I'm speaking hypothetically) had a relatively clear set of standards which differed from those of other forums sufficiently to give a range of options depending on how people choose to engage.

At the moment it's much like the chore of buying jeans - you have choice of over a thousand varieties, all of which virtually identically match the fashion of the day.

With Facebook, twitter, reddit and several other philosophy forums, I don't see why each one need cater to the same wide-as-possible audience.

Obviously, this forum might choose to cater to the borderline-sociopathic-narcissist market, I'm not in a position to suggest which way you should go, I'm just saying I don't think there's any harm in picking a way and being polite but firm with those who don't fit that ethos.

in order to understand an alien language we must assume that overwhelmingly they believe much the same sort of thing as we do...Davidson is talking about our beliefs as a whole. — Banno

I understand that, but Davidson's targets are Quine and Kuhn (and your target earlier was model-dependant realism). The problem is that these targets are not themselves talking about our beliefs as a whole either. Quine is not implying that whole languages of thought might arise untranslatably (he barely mentions translatability in that context). Kuhn doesn't mention translatability at all, and in fact specifically says that incommensuarable (his term) does not mean not translatable, and he goes on to use the fact that we share enough common beliefs to be able to recognise and even translate different paradigms. Hawking certainly is confining his thoughts to the technical terminology required by different paradigms in physics.

So I'm still (third read through now) not seeing the justification for Davidson's switch to language as signifier of a sufficiently different conceptual scheme as to make it incommensurable. He seems to have just assumed this, when it comes to the Fit-Reality option of his four types of conceptual scheme (the one I'm primarily interested in).

It seems the need to link truth and belief is for some overwhelming - and it's clear why; we want our beliefs to be true, after all. — Banno

For some? What is the meaning of the second proposition (in the meta-language) in ""The cat is on the mat" is true iff the cat is on the mat"? Either we are saying truth is indefinable outside of formal languages (Tarski's own conclusion), or we're sneaking in correspondence by the back door without declaring as such. What more can you do than believe the cat is on the mat? It's not the case that in the real world the cat is either on the real world mat or not, there's no 'cat' in the real world, no 'mat' and probably not even an 'on'. There's just atoms, maybe, strings, possibly. How do you tie together the idea that the cat really is on the mat with the idea that most of what makes up the cat can't even be pinned down to a location somewhere in the universe, let alone 'on the mat'? Maybe I'm wrong about atoms, I don't understand quantum physics (it shows doesn't it?), but I do understand child development, and it's just not feasible without some quasi-religious belief in human rationality, that things like object definition and spatiotemporal location are not theories children develop, much as Quine says.

I have no problem at all with saying that truth is a property of propositions, I'm quite laissez-faire about definitions, but to do so simply leaves the problem of whether the cat actually is on the mat unresolved.

It's obvious that we can believe things that are true, and that we can believe things that are false. — Banno

Not at the time. This is the model Ramsey uses - in 'Truth and Probability (1926). Our beliefs are bets placed against their future utility (which is related to the way the world actually is, but we never get to access that, so we can never say how). So all we can say is that a belief turned out to be false. It does not make any sense to say it was false at the time because beliefs are measured in certainty, not binary true/false. If there is a 20% chance that I can jump a chasm, then I'm right to have 20% certainty that I can, regardless of whether it transpires that I actually can.

So the proposal is the modified T-sentence

s is true IFF p, and p is believed — Banno

This modifies the Ramsey theory in a way that takes away one on the key components. You're placing truth as a property of s, not as a property of a. As a property of s (the statement), belief in it is redundant, we can rely on Tarski, but that only gets us to "..iff the cat is on the mat", which is not far enough to reject conceptual schemes, themselves based on the resolution of that modality. To deal with the resolution we must put the concept in the belief in one or other option "the cat is on the mat", and measure options there.

The relevance of this to incommensurable conceptual schemes being that relations and definitions of objects fall into this category - ie, they have beliefs (bets) about them. Like whether there is such a thing as a 'cat', or a 'mat' and whether 'on' is even a concept at all. Not that I'm suggesting people weigh up the options in these cases, but they'll weigh what they think of a possibilities.

It's tempting to say that they do not have the concept that others have a mind distinct from their own. I think that's a mischaracterisation; I think we get closer to the truth when we talk about their not having a belief in the minds of others. — Banno

This seems like a very convoluted way of talking to me. Why would a 2 year old have a concept of 'other minds' which it rejects as not likely? Where would it get the concept from in the first place if it's only going to reject it. Does it also have the concept of a microprocessor, only to decide that such a thing probably doesn't exist as it has no evidence for one? What is wrong with the far more simple explanation that they do not have these concepts that they show no behavioural evidence of having?

You cannot talk to a severely autistic person about the contents of another's mind, it just doesn't make sense to them, they have not got the concept that attaches to the language being used. You cannot talk to a colourblind-synasthete about the colour they see associated with the number 6, we have no language for their colours. Yes, these are small issues within a much broader frame of agreement, but they cannot be dismissed as different beliefs about the same fundamental structures,

I'm going to try to re-frame the problem and I hope respond to some of the points you've both made in doing so. Apologies if this totally misses the mark.

Taking the inference model, there are states of the world which can be represented by some set R{a,b,c} where a,b,c are atomic facts. Our phenomenal representation of those states is E{d,e,f} and is the result of some function f(R). Our model of those states is M{g,h,i} which we take to be our best guess at R. The complication is that M acts as a filter/modifier for E no matter what R actually is. So it's not a one way system. This is just a rephrasing of what fdrake has already said, but I can't do the mathjax thing.

Translating to Davidson, I think the issue is whether M acts more as a filter or more as a modifier to E. This is where @fdrake and I have our argument. If we believe that the more significant feedback is that of error reduction by updating E, then, as Fdrake points out, the fact that those errors come from R (actual unmodified R) means that our M must be approaching R. Or, without my paraphrasing,...

Theory ladened perceptual features are still about their content; they are a relation between a body and an environment. — fdrake

If, rather as I do, we think that M's effect on E is more confirmatory, only shaken when overwhelmingly contradicted, then, most of the time M is running the show and the effect of R is constraining rather than forming. It limits M, it doesn't directly shape it. Now, of course M is still about R, but this affects what we can say about M in terms of truth and translatability.

But I need to first say why I think this is important with regards to Davidson, and it has to do with the difference between Tarski and Ramsey on truth, so a little diversion into @Banno's post above...

Ramsey and Tarski do seem to have very similar accounts of truth, both making use of meta-languages, but Ramsey said that he would be quite happy to have his labelled as a correspondence theory - why? I think it's because of Ramsey's view on belief and certainty which (when it comes down to it) is what the meta language (both his and Tarski's) is in terms of. It is our shared certainty that the cat is on the mat (no quotation marks) that makes the truth of "the cat is on the mat". It is only this way that anyone can use Tarski to say anything about the real world outside of Formal Languages.

Ramsey is a pragmatist about truth (in his later work). The Ramsey-Prior theory states that

T) a is true if and only if for some p, a is a . . . that p and p.

The dots have to be filled by some mental states that could be bearers of truth. so mental states or mental acts are bearers of truth, particularly - beliefs.

Hence Ramsey's assertions that there are two types of truth, those of tautology and those of functioning beliefs - induction.

The mind works by general laws ; therefore if it infers q from p, this will generally be because q is an instance of a function φx and p the corresponding instance of a function ψx such that the mind would always infer φx from ψx.

The pictures we make to ourselves are not pictures of facts

Anyway, rather than me bang on about Ramsey for another few paragraphs, I'm going to assume you get the difference and perhaps add more if there's any queries.

So, getting to...

The sin Davidson is castigating is that of thinking we can not talk about dollars, but only about economic models of dollars. — Banno

Here 'dollars' are the 'pictures of facts' about which an economic theory is made, and I think Davidson is absolutely right to castigate the idea that two economic models about dollars could ever be incommensurable. But some models alter the pictures of facts. An economic model about dollars doesn't have any impact on what a dollar is, a dollar is not a different thing in each of two models. If ever it was, even then, we might simply be able to say "how different?", define those differences in terms of some more atomic picture of fact and translate the schemes.

But our models of reality create the very pictures of facts they are about, by induction, It is not possible, then, to use theories of truth to dismiss the uncertainty about R where those theories appeal to meta-languages about atomic facts (pictures of facts). We can only use Davidson one level up from that process - which means he's out of bounds in both cognitive neuroscience, child development, and model-dependant realism (which is where I'm not sure he defeats Kuhn).

Is M a conceptual scheme of they type Davidson wants to do away with, or is M more properly thought of as the contents of such a scheme? I think there are arguments for both, and , since Davidson raises some very important points about the problems of relativism, personally I'd prefer to rescue what he has to say by assuming M are (or rather, would be, pre-Davidson) the contents of conceptual schemes and so Davidson is right, but with the caveat that this does not lead to naive (or even modulated) realism about R.

@Banno

I should add, just to be clear - I'm not 100% sure that Davidson even does use Tarski to dispose of the Fit-Reality option. He definitely does with the Fit-Experience option, but one of my issues with the paper is that I can't really see where he deals with the Fit-Reality option at all. So this may well be where I've gone wrong - I'm attacking the wrong argument because I haven't seen/understood the argument Davidson actually makes against Fit-reality types.

TL;DR - applying Tarski to conceptual schemes assumes underlying beliefs are the same, the article demonstrates they're probably not.

OK, I'll try again.

One of Davidson's conceptual scheme possibilities is the Fit-Reality combination, right? He argues that alternative conceptual schemes in this case would have to be largely 'true' but not translatable. He then argues that 'true' and translatable are the same, the truth of some statement in the language of one scheme is simply it's translation into another - because both schemes are talking about the same beliefs, if they weren't we'd simply better presume we got the translation wrong.

But in this particular arrangement of a conceptual scheme, we're not talking about fitting experience (that would be another of the four), we're talking about fitting reality.

Nothing problematic for Davidson so far, because fitting reality is no different from being true. Being true doesn't add anything to the expression of what is.

This is where the paper comes in. Something can be 'true' if the scheme's predictions match the phenomenal experience, but the phenomenal experience is mediated by the scheme - we see what we want/expect to see, we literally make it true (now in the Ramseyan sense - which is the only way we can use 'true' here because Tarski doesn't apply). So for Davidson's fourth possible idea of what a conceptual scheme could be (Fit-Reality) the truth-theory of the language that conceptual scheme has isn't enough to say that no two schemes are 'true' and yet not translatable.

One person's scheme might include relations between objects which entirely match their phenomenal experience, precisely because they're altering their phenomenal experience to make it match the relations they're expecting to experience. Those relations would be 'true' for them, entirely translatable as relations to us, yet not 'true' for us who have different phenomenal experiences because we're not expecting them to be 'true', because of our model which does not allow for them.

The thing is, all this happens at the level of perception, sensory input in general, which is where I think we need to accept the idea of different, possibly incommensurable, ones existing. It's very possible that Davidson would like to say that conceptual schemes are something different, but in allowing for a Fit-Reality option in his definition, he's opened up this possibility.

Any tertiary sources? — Banno

I think Wikipedia's article is basically OK, but I'm no expert on this, so I couldn't vet it.

That's it. — Banno

Cool. Also, as a companion, if you have access to any academic journals you could tack down the snappily titled "Children's Understanding of Representational Change and Its Relation to the Understanding of False Belief and the Appearance-Reality Distinction" by Alison Gopnik. It's an introduction to the stuff I mentioned about how children's minds develop and adjust their models. The article is more readable than the title!

Obviously, don't feel obliged. I love this stuff at the interface between philosophy, psychology and cognitive science, but it's not everyone's cup of tea so I won't be offended by "no thanks, not interested"

Yes. I'm particularly concerned with the way Davidson says that

"Incommensurable" is, of course, Kuhn and Feyerabend's word for "not intertranslatable.

I'm not sure it is, but I too will have to go back to Kuhn to see if my feeling is right.

I cant see the link you provided earlier; can you put it up again? — Banno

Can't remember what I linked to, possibly the Friston paper, on the way expectation models affect perception? If that's not it, come back to me, I'll try again.

Wierd timing. I think that's more or less what I just suggested to Banno, whilst you must have been writing your post. Let me know if I've missed the mark, but if not I think we're on the same page here.

My reaction is that perhaps the conceptual schemes Davidson is dealing with differ in some important way from the models that you are discussing here. — Banno

This is very much the conclusion I'm coming to as well. The only exception to that is Kuhn. The article specifically 'attacks' Kuhn and yet it feels like Kuhn is talking about the sorts of models I'm discussing (or there's some overlap, might be more accurate).

I'm no expert on Kuhn though, beyond his contribution to constructivism in social sciences, so I'm hoping someone more knowledgeable might point out the differences. Maybe there's some aspect of Kuhn that fits the kind of schemes Davidson wants to do away with, but which does not entirely encompass Kuhn's whole project? Or maybe I've just got Kuhn wrong.

I agree with your earlier fears about where relativism can lead and I think, possibly, avoiding those ends is best achieved by limiting the scope of what we're prepared to accept as a different conceptual scheme (rather than removing them altogether). No one thinks the liquid in the cup really is the blood of christ, and pangolin scales definitely do not cure cancer. I don't think these are matters of different conceptual schemes (of the sort I'm talking about) they're just matters of lying or misunderstanding.

So maybe different conceptual schemes can be considered as acting on models (rather than models themselves). This would create the distinction you're looking for and enable Davidson to do away with them as sentential truths, but would allow model-dependant ideas of fundamental perception?

But that's just not true. If the tumour goes away, the tumour goes away, regardless of what you call the tumour. — Banno

That's as may be, but all that shows is some translatability, not the complete absence of genuine difference. The fact that you can translate the outcome does not in any way infer that you can translate 'yin'.

This notion of one paradigm not being translatable into the other fails, because overwhelmingly we share the same beliefs. — Banno

How? A baby is not born with a full set of beliefs. Beliefs are stored in the brain, yes? So if beliefs are acquired from the environment (which varies radically for different children), and those acquisitions are stored in the brain (whose structure can differ radically between individuals), what is the mechanism you propose which 'levels out' all of those differences to yield the same fundamental beliefs?

Work by Eric Corchesne on 6 month old babies has strongly indicated they may not even have a concept of distinct objects at that age, object permanence is certainly questionable, the idea of other minds is not demonstrable until 3 or 4 (much later in autistic children), consistency of time as a concept has been seriously questioned in under fives... I could go on.

Basically, almost every belief we have seems to be the result of some prediction-testing approach, crucially, the prediction comes first, and is only rejected when the test fails (and fails beyond what the body can do to make it right).

Without an idea of conceptual schemes, models, predictions, expectations... We simply would have to discard the last two decades of cognitive science. That's quite an ask on the say so of one article.

I'm not certain that a conceptual scheme can be true or false, for the purposes of the article — fdrake

Davidson says "...something is an acceptable conceptual scheme or theory if it is true" I thought it a simplification to allow a wider view, but since it is one the author uses too, that seems a reasonable endorsement to use it, no?

Presuming the rest is OK, I'll try again to outline my issues with it. I've written much of this already, but it remains unaddressed.

Experience of reality is the result of, not the content of, conceptual schemes. This is the main conclusion of the work on perceptual schemes all the way back to Heimholtz, it's been a standard view in neuroscience for at least a decade. This is the main problem with Davidson's argument as I see it.

His approach is to lay out the four different things a conceptual scheme could be, demonstrate that failure of translatability in each does not make sense, and thereby, he claims, there can be no such discernible thing as a conceptual scheme. His four types are made up fo the Reality/Experience divide with regards to content, and the Organise/Fit divide with regards to purpose. I'm concerned primarily with the Fit-Reality combination.

I don't think Davidson really covers this option very comprehensively at all, he kind of glosses over it, but to the extent it is covered, the argument seems to go...

Alternative conceptual schemes in this case would have to be largely true but not translatable. Truth and translatable are the same (or rather truth does not add anything to merely the statement in that language - Tarski) so this can't be made sense of.

But fitting reality is different from being true. Something can be 'true' if the scheme's predictions match the phenomenal experience. But As I said right at the start, we are fairly sure that one's phenomenal experience is heavily the result of one's conceptual scheme, so different conceptual schemes will generate different phenomenal experiences which will be 'true' to the bearers of that conceptual scheme, but nonetheless different when compared to the hidden states of the real world.

Schemes are different if they work on different phenomena. Note, this does not necessarily make different schemes untranslatable. Here we get into Ramsey's notions of truth and behaviour. If we identify the truth of a belief as being the satisfactory completion of some task based on it (my belief that the pub is at the end of the road is 'true' if, when wanting to visit the pub, I walk to the end of the road and find it something which carries out the function I expect a pub to). Which leads to...

Yes, we have translated the objects of one to the objects of another. Have we translated their relations? — Isaac


We have translated proper names? And nothing else? — Banno

Objects are their functions and their functions are not necessarily translated into any language. So to say 'knife' in English is 'couteau' in French si to translate the object, but if French people only used such a thing for fighting, and English only used such a thing for peeling potatoes, we have not translated that information by translating the referring term for the object. Now, you could say we translate all the verbs which describe what they do with the objects, and then we'll have a complete picture, but don't we then end up with Wittgenstein's problem of having to know the rules by which a word means what it does prior to knowing the word. The words themselves do not tell us what the rules are, we cannot ever tell if anyone has 'grasped the rule'. As such, no amount of translation of words is going to yield up the behaviours, the rules, for which those words are used.

What we can do, though, is observe behaviour - we can watch a toddler fail the theory of mind test, we can deduce that, for that toddler, another mind is not what another mind is to us (because if it was she would have behaved differently). We can deduce that the toddler has a different conceptual scheme, all without the toddler even having the word for mind.

That there are beliefs which function in one which would not function in another. — Isaac


"Function"? What is it for a belief to function, as against it's being true? — Banno

This just relates to Tarski's idea of 'true' which is what Davidson is co-opting. If a belief functions (works as expected) then we could say it was 'true', indeed, that's how I prefer to use the term. That's how Ramsey uses it. But crucially, that's not how Tarski uses it, and it's Tarski's 'true which is being used to measure Davidson's stipulation that alternative conceptual schemes in this case would have to be largely true but not translatable (a standard he says they fail).

That's just your own conclusion about the same subject matter. You implied I hadn't actually understood the article, so I was asking where I'd gone wrong in that respect, not where the the statements I drew from the article were wrong, in your opinion.

As Is evident, I don't think I agree with the conclusions in the article either, but I'm trying to ensure I've understood it properly first, so if you have some cause to think the article itself says something other than I've paraphrased, I'd be really grateful if you could explain those, in preference to your own conclusions, just initially.

I'm not overly happy with this comment. It leads me to think that the effort I put into the exegesis has not been matched by a careful reading of my comments and the article. Would that you expanded on the views of Ramsey, which might take this thread in a far more interesting direction. — Banno

Ah, yes. My comment was directed specifically at your response to critiques/misunderstandings, not your prior exegesis which, I think I had already commented, was exemplary. I'm sorry for any confusion, I hadn't intended to offend (well, not in that context anyway).

I haven't got time tonight to get into the rest of the issues, but I wanted to say at least this.

The failure of intertranslatability is a necessary condition for difference of conceptual schemes;

nothing, it may be said, could count as evidence that some form of activity could not be interpreted in our language that was not at the same time evidence that that form of activity was not speech behavior.

My strategy will be to argue that we cannot make sense of total failure [of translatability]

Struggling to see how those two propositions don't add up to exactly the idea that we cannot have differing conceptual schemes because that would require a failure of translatability and such failure is incoherent. Perhaps you could help?

Conceptual schemes arise from organising content (phenomena). It doesn't matter how the content is obtained.

Incommensurable schemes are nonetheless translatable, they must be for us to even know they are a scheme, and to know they are incommensurable.

Truth is a property of propositions, which by necessity are expressed in a language.

The truth of any scheme can therefore be expressed because it is a matter of language and we've just established that all schemes are translatable.

If we can express the truth of any scheme in common language then they are not truly incommensurable.

If they're not truly incommensurable, they might as well not exist. (bonus - if they don't exist then there's no scheme/content divide).

___

Any of that anywhere near?

Yes, I'd certainly disagree with any notion that we actually perceive the same objects, unaffected by our beliefs and states of mind, I just wasn't at all sure that's what CS was arguing, so didn't want to go responding to the wrong thing.

The evidence that prior belief and emotional state can alter actual perception is overwhelming. This is, I think, what Kuhn is referring to, and I can't find anywhere in the paper where Davidson deals with the possibility of a content-scheme divide where the real/shared world content and the content upon which the scheme is built are one step removed by the model-dependent nature of our perception.

The idea even that we all perceive something as simple as snow the same way is questionable, but when it comes to objects of scientific theory, which was Kuhn's target, I think it very unlikely that we do.

he made quite a few mistakes which make his conclusion unwarranted — leo

Oh No! He'll be gutted.

First of all my example is not an investor. They’re the owner of a business. — Brett

You said...

Yes, and because of that many were able to enter the computer age without having to pay for the top end. Business is quite a savage arena. Most of us get by without having to enter the ring. All we have to do is wait for the benefits to come our way without any risk at all. — Brett

Which is what my initial comment to you was aimed at. That some material risk was being taken by businessmen, like those who built Microsoft, that is greater than the risks known by the mere consumers of the product. That is your claim.

I responded by saying that the ordinary consumer has to work long hours too and if that work is not successful (they get fired) they put their house at risk. So the idea that the entrepreneur know some kind of risk that the ordinary consumer is protected from is utter nonsense.

You responded with some fantasy about a proprietor-owned building company. I charitably presumed it had at least something to do with my counter argument, otherwise I'd be left with absolutely no clue at all what on earth you were going on about.

The comment I responded to was about material risk and your claim that the entrepreneur takes some material risk that the consumer does not. Unless you've got anything further to actually support your claim, I don't much see the benefit of quoting parables from the Randian bible that have nothing to do with the issue at hand.

What is the risk that an entrepreneur, like the developers of Microsoft, take that is so outside of the scale of the ordinary worker that by comparison their contribution is "without any risk at all"? That's all I want to know.

Not all companies go on the stock market. — Brett

The top ten building companies in the US close close to 200,000 projects a year, the very largest privately owned company closes just 3,000. I didn't say all companies go on the stock market, I said that except in rare cases, when a company is doing really well, it will be floated. The figures bear this out.

understand that not everyone in business is the same. — Brett

The homogeneity or otherwise of people in business is irrelevant to any opposition to the system set up to support it. Business could be constituted of 49% angels who do nothing but slave for the public good, it would still mean that a system set up to support it was primarily benefiting the 51% who are not. This is a common straw-man of the capitalist apologist - finding one lone example of the tyke who made it big, the rags-to-riches holy grail. One-offs are irrelevant to policy, it's the overall trend that matters.

The overall trend is that investors(who may also be business owners) speculate on commodities, services and property, all of which makes them very rich because...
1. They are protected from the harm of their losses to a greater extent than they are taxed for the benefit of their gains.
2. They are able to manipulate markets to create false demand for the commodity, service, or property they are gambling on.

It makes non-investors poorer because some of the commodities, services and property that the investors are speculating on are essential for living and the speculation drives the prices up faster than wages compensate.

All physiological sensory perception. "Visual" points to one kind, one system, etc. There are more as you well know. — creativesoul

OK, so all physiological sensory perception. Who has suggested (or who do you think might suggest and so need correction) that the physiology of these systems might be mediated by language use - the act of communicating with words. I can't see any possible connection at all (which I know is literally what you're saying), but I don't understand why you said it.

What I wrote sounds nothing like what you wrote. — creativesoul

If you believe this, then I have to question your sincerity here. Read them aloud and see for yourself. Red herring. Non sequitur. Invalid objection. Unacceptable.

You'll have to do better than this.

Come on, a little charity! I already stated that because it sounded that way to me, I must be missing something. I then asked you what I was missing.

Being unmediated by language use is not so much in opposition to anything... aside from being informed by language, and thus being existentially dependent upon language. — creativesoul

... Still not helping I'm afraid. You're talking about 'perception' - the processing of visual stimuli, right? And language - the method of communication by written or spoken word, right? I'm failing to see why anyone would think the physiology of one was mediated by the other in the first place (hence my analogy of 'the price of bread', something which people also would not think connected to physiology of perception in the first place). I mean what could the process even be by which such a thing would be possible? Co-evolution perhaps?

If all you're saying is that the physiology of perception is unaffected by our method of communicating using words then we agree, but why mention such an obvious and trivially true point? Hence me thinking I'm missing something.

I have no idea what any of that has to do with my comment.

You said

Most of us get by without having to enter the ring. All we have to do is wait for the benefits to come our way without any risk at all. — Brett

It was that to which I was responding. The business entrepreneur risks bankruptcy if things don't work out, the employee risks losing their home if things don't work out. The only person who is in the position you claim where we take no risk at all for the benefits we reap, is the person for whom the loss of investment is not a materially damaging matter, ie the very wealthy.

Notwithstanding the above, to address your ludicrously fantastical notion of how business works...

1. People don't have any incentive to develop 'reliable products'. Well-marketed products which need regular repair or replacement are more profitable.

2. The idea that the investor is helping the workers pay for their house by providing work is absurd. House prices have risen 14 times faster than wages driven entirely by property speculation carried out by those same investors. They have, on the one hand raised property prices to an unaffordable level, then created jobs which, no matter how demeaning, no one can afford not to take because of the aforementioned price increase, and you try to make out they're doing us a favour!

3. If there are sufficient companies in the market to create competition, then a new entry into the market is not creating any more jobs are they? They are just transferring jobs from their competition whom they are now outperforming. The entrepreneur benefits, but the workers just swap jobs, probably to a less well paid one (hence the competitive advantage).

4. None of this actually happens to an entrepreneur (except in extremely rare cases) because the moment a company is doing well it is floated on the stock market and owned by its investors.

Physiological sensory perception that is unmediated by language use. — creativesoul

In opposition to what? It sounds like you've just stated the equivalent of "perception is unaffected by the price of bread", no one ever thought it was. I'm missing something here. Do you mean to argue that interpretation of perception is unmediated by language use? That's something people have suggested. Or that perception is unaffected by conceptual schemes (related to languages)? That too is a claim that's been made here.

What no one has claimed (thankfully for our collective sanity) is that the physiological process of perception is affected by the act of making vocal sounds with a view to communicating with others - which is what you have literally opposed.

Business is quite a savage arena. Most of us get by without having to enter the ring. All we have to do is wait for the benefits to come our way without any risk at all. — Brett

Your home is at risk if you do not keep up payments on a mortgage or other loan secured on it

But hey, what's losing your home compared to the risk you might lose someone else's money and then declare yourself bankrupt with no liability at all for any losses you made - oh, the savagery!

Snow is directly perceptible. — creativesoul

What do you mean by 'directly' perceptible? As opposed to what 'indirect' perception?

As if the article, and this thread, didn't happen. I'm nonplussed. — Banno

Really? Sounds a little naive. Since when has one article and a few laconic remarks ever acted as some philosophical fait accompli?

Suppose we have two conceptual schemes, such that some things are accounted true in one, but not in the other - the idea being that what is to count as true depends on what scheme one is using. — Banno

I'll see where this goes, but want to get in here that I don't see something being 'true' in one scheme but not 'true' in another as necessarily the distinction between schemes that I would personally make. Notwithstanding...

And yet already we have translation - because we have talked about the very same thing being true in one, but not in the other... — Banno

Yes, we have translated the objects of one to the objects of another. Have we translated their relations?

What could the claim that two conceptual schemes are incommensurable amount to, if not that there are things that can be true in one, but not in the other? What sort of things are true, if not statements? — Banno

As Ramsey argues, beliefs can be considered 'true' too. One can say another's belief that the pub is at the end of the road is 'true' if, when wishing to visit the pub, and walking to the end of the road, one finds there what services as a pub. A belief can be true if it functions.

What could the claim that two conceptual schemes are incommensurable amount to, if not that there are things that can be said in one, but not in the other? — Banno

That there are beliefs which function in one which would not function in another.

That there are relations in one which do not exist in another.

That some behaviour resultant from one cannot be produced by any stimuli through another.

My own objections - that without a some way to verify access to the "content" portion of the scheme-content dyad there's no basis for claiming the absence of a conceptual scheme - haven't been addressed either. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Some approaches here are more exegetical than discursive. They can still be quite interesting but, often not being clearly labelled as such, one can often expend a bit of time and effort finding out which it is. Your objection seems not far from mine - that Davidson has merely assumed a commensurability of experience.

And here it seems that the intent of the speaker matters. — Marchesk

Yes, that's exactly what I'm trying to say. The proposition "The sun is settling" is true if the sun is setting. It's entirely linguistic and to say "it is true that the sun is setting" is prosentential (not that that makes it useless, we could still say "that last statement was true" and the term serves some purpose). But...

To ask if John's belief that the sun is setting is true... That requires that we consider the success of John's actions in respect to that belief.

I don't think he does away with them either. But I'm new to Davidson so I'm willing to listen. — ZzzoneiroCosm

I don't have a lot of knowledge about Davidson either. I mainly object to being told that Davidson has "killed off", or, "done away with" anything. Not because I know any better but because perfectly intelligent people possessed of all the same facts nonetheless disagree.

My own personal disagreement is laid out way back on page 5, but I still don't know if it's flawed, or misunderstands Davidson completely because, as I said, I'm no expert myself.

Okay, but what if the terms of that schema are wrong? Are they still referring to a translatable true statement in our schema? — Marchesk

Not sure what the terms of the schema being 'wrong' would mean here. Do you mean that they fail to refer, or that they refer, but in a contradictory manner, or some other class of failure?

if a Norseman made some statement about the North Star, with that being translatable to a correct modern statement about the North Star, would both of them be true — Marchesk

Their truth would be dependent on what was said no less than in any other scheme. The point is simply that it would be relative to what the terms refer to in the scheme, truth being a property of propositions and propositions always being in some language or other.

I'm a Ramseyan about truth, so I don't share Davidson's wholly linguistic approach, though I have a lot of sympathy for it, but talk about the truth of beliefs (as opposed to the truth of statements) cannot be encompassed in prosentential theories, which is why I don't think Davidson does away with conceptual schemes simply by declaring them necessarily translatable...but that argument seems to be falling on deaf ears, so I suspect perhaps I'm wasting my time...

why bringing about conditions of harm, and forcing these conditions with collateral damage is necessary. That is the difference here in our current deadlock. — schopenhauer1

You keep getting almost there but then fall back on the same absolutism at the end.

What possible reasons could anyone give you in answer to the question 'why?' here. Both what makes something 'necessary' and what constitutes a satisfactory reason why, are subjective. People have given you reasons why they think such conditions are necessary to bring about. They have given you such reason in droves. You have simplyffound they do not match what you consider necessary, or that their reason isn't sufficient for you. This is inevitable because you are clearly fairly well versed in the opposing arguments and yet remain of an anti-natalist perspective.

So I'm baffled (and I think you're confused too) about what you're asking for here.

If people give their reasons for having children according to their own ethical principles, you say "I don't share those ethical principles". Well, that much is obvious.

If you ask people to give their reasons for having children according to your ethical principles, they obviously can't because your ethical principles lead to the conclusion that one shouldn't have children.

I don't understand what you think you're going to get out of keeping on hammering this.