Abstract
According to a common line of criticism, Donald Davidson’s argument in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” is invalid because it moves illicitly from the relatively weak thesis that conceptual schemes cannot be incommensurable to the stronger thesis that the idea of a conceptual scheme itself is incoherent. I argue in this paper that such objections fail because they misunderstand the position that Davidson’s argument is intended to rule out. According to the “scheme-content dualism” Davidson targets, conceptual schemes differ only if they are incommensurable with one another. Thus, if Davidson has successfully shown the idea of incommensurability to be incoherent (as the critics in question grant), then he has shown “the very idea of a conceptual scheme” to be incoherent, as well.
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Notes
Davidson himself, in fact, sometimes employs a kind of scheme-talk he finds innocuous. See, for example, (Davidson 1999, pp. 305-310).
As this hopefully makes clear, I am not suggesting that Davidson had in mind a range of notions that all go by the title “conceptual scheme,” and that he intentionally limited his discussion to just one of these. It seems, rather, that he simply took the Quinean understanding of “conceptual scheme” for granted and assumed (mistakenly, it turns out) his readers would recognize that he was doing so. My point is simply that other possible notions of “conceptual scheme,” whether Davidson explicitly thought of them or not, lie outside the scope of his critique.
To keep the discussion manageable, I will focus on Quine and Kuhn, since these appear to be the writers Davidson has most chiefly in mind.
In a later essay, Davidson (1982, p. 100) denies that thought and language are related in quite this way. While he affirms throughout his career that thought requires language, he denies that “what we can’t say we can’t think” and that “each thought depends for its existence on the existence of a sentence that expresses that thought.”
For Quine, who denies the analytic/synthetic distinction, all our sentences have empirical import.
Wang supports his reading by appeal to the very passage from Davidson I cited in the previous paragraph. Curiously, though, Wang’s citation cuts off just before the sentence I italicized.
We could, if we chose, define a scheme not as a set of available propositions, but as a set of available concepts which, together with rules about how the concepts can be combined, would determine a set of available propositions. The difference between thinking of schemes as sets of concepts and as sets of propositions maps onto the distinction between the two metaphors that Davidson highlights in “On the Very Idea.” As sets of propositions, schemes would generate theories that aim to “fit” or “account for” the empirical data. As sets of concepts, schemes would function to ‘organize’ the data into identifiable unities which would in turn be synthesized into propositions and theories that “fit” it. The differences between the two metaphors are unimportant for my purposes here, and while (1΄) suggests the first more than the second, it expresses what is common to both.
The scientists themselves, of course, would not express their worries in these terms.
Of course, the content here is not really “empirical,” since it is only imagined. But the same would of course be true if the two logicians were perceiving a world of three individuals.
What I have described here is what I take to be the best interpretation of Forster’s critique, but another interpretation is possible. On this other reading, what Forster is highlighting is the difference between what I described above as “absolute” and “synchronic” incommensurability. So interpreted, Forster’s point is that the latter does not entail the former: even if your scheme cannot be integrated with mine, there is nothing stopping me from coming to understand you by “acquiring quite new concepts” through the same processes of socialization by which you, as an “infant” or “child,” acquired your “first concepts.” As I noted above, this may well be correct. However, it constitutes an objection to Davidson’s claim that differing schemes are necessarily incommensurable only if we assume that by ‘incommensurable’ Davidson means “absolutely incommensurable,” and we need not suppose that. Nothing in the text of “On the Very Idea” supports this reading; on the contrary, as we have seen, there Davidson explicitly follows Kuhn in defining “incommensurable” simply as “non-intertranslatable,” not unintelligible tout court.
Forster does cite Davidson’s references in another essay to alternative schemes being “mutually unintelligible” and “forever beyond our grasp” (Davidson 2001, p. 40), but neither of these is dispositive. In the first case, Davidson glosses “mutually unintelligible” as “incommensurable, or forever beyond rational resolve” (emphasis mine). In light of that, there is nothing about this language which demands that we read him as referring to absolute incommensurability. Schemes that are only synchronically incommensurable are also “beyond rational resolve;” we cannot rationally compare them or integrate them into a coherent whole. In the second case, while it is true that the idea of schemes being “forever beyond our grasp” does suggest that alternative schemes are absolutely incommensurable, it does not demand this reading. For one thing, Davidson does not here claim that all alternative schemes must be “forever beyond our grasp,” only that the idea of such a scheme is “meaningless.” Further, “forever beyond our grasp” can, and probably should, be read as simply repeating in different terms the notion of something’s being “beyond rational resolve” from the previous paragraph. It is plausible to understand “grasping” something as a matter of integrating it with one’s own current ways of thinking; and in this sense synchronically incommensurable are ‘forever beyond our grasp.’
Lastly, even if Davidson’s texts left this issue entirely unsettled (which I do not think is the case), interpretive charity would forbid the “absolute” reading. For that reading entails not only that Davidson’s argument is invalid, but also that he is guilty of an inexplicable and dramatic misreading of Kuhn. Kuhn is clearly one of Davidson’s chief targets but, as we have seen, it is obvious that Kuhn does not think that different paradigms are absolutely incommensurable.
The primary difference between Forster and Case appears to be that while Forster wants to equate conceptual schemes with the total set of concepts possessed by a thinker at a given time (such that thinkers can possess multiple schemes over a lifetime but only one at a given moment), Case thinks of schemes as smaller, regional sets of interrelated concepts, such that an individual can possess several at once. Either way, the supposed problem for Davidson’s position is the same.
Nor is it news to Davidson: “Of course there are contrasts from epoch to epoch, from culture to culture, and person to person, of kinds we all recognize and struggle with; but these are contrasts which with sympathy and effort we can explain and understand” (Davidson 2001, p. 40).
I have argued against it myself in (Lynch 2016).
References
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Lynch, G. What Does Davidson Reject When He Rejects Conceptual Schemes?. Acta Anal 33, 463–481 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-018-0356-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-018-0356-5