Ep. 191: Conceptual Schemes: Donald Davidson & Rudolf Carnap (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 191 is something like, what does it mean to claim that we grasp the world through a conceptual scheme? And we read on the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme by Donald Davidson from 1973 and Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology by Rudolf Carnap from 1950. For more information, please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer beyond the Possibility of Literal Translation in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:31 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:35 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey indulging in metaphysical pseudo statements in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:40 Dusty: And this is Dusty Dahlman in Chicago, Illinois.

0:44 Mark: Welcome back, Dusty.

0:45 Dusty: Thanks for having me back from our

0:47 Mark: Chicago Analytic Philosophy guest chapter.

0:50 Dusty: Right, right. Along with Matt Teichman. Yep.

0:53 Mark: Folks will recall Dusty from our Wilfrid Sellars episode, our most popular episode yet. Okay, it's not. Not even close, but of Analytical Philosophy within the Chicago chapter of Analytic Philosophy, perhaps it was among the more popular.

1:12 Dusty: Even then I feel like Quine or Kripke might have won out, but nevertheless, it's important that it happened.

1:16 Mark: I feel I enjoy that one. So this is an interesting. This duo you picked for us, Dusty. We're just looking to do some more analytic philosophy. And kind of by coincidence, this overall theme about the conceptual scheme, I think lines up very well with what we're going to be doing. So this would be maybe the first of five episodes roughly on arguments against relativism, let's say. So we're going to do two episodes on truth in a little bit. And before that, we're going to do on a couple on a liberal education and why it's important to study the classics, why those are objectively better, maybe for an education.

1:50 Dylan: There might be a controversy on whether you're required to do that for a liberal education.

1:54 Mark: And this one starting it off. I think we've talked about relativism a lot with regard to ethics and epistemology and ethics most of all, since that's the one that people, you know, it's just all relative. I can't judge anybody. And I think our Nietzsche episodes are a really good guide for why you could have a very sophisticated epistemology, why you could think that everything is not just, you know, objectivism in the Ayn Randian sense is not right, but yet still not be at all. Relativists think that there very much is a basis for morality before we actually get into this Davidson article, which I think that's the.

Even though it's chronologically later, Davidson's arguing on the very idea of a conceptual scheme against the coherence of this notion. And then Carnap, Dusty, you were taking him, even though he's earlier, as really sort of a response, right, that. Well, at least here's one notion of conceptual scheme that seems to make sense.

2:42 Dusty: Yeah, you could certainly frame it that way. So, I mean, realistically, these two articles are not in direct conversation with one another, but they're clearly part of the same kind of intellectual constellation. This notion of conceptual scheme was really prevalent in these circles that both Carnap and Davidson ran in. The obvious mediating figure is Quine, who I know you all have already discussed with Matt Teichman, actually. So I take it that Davidson is responding to what he takes to be an obsession on the part of a lot of contemporary intellectuals, not just philosophers, but linguists, historians of science, etc.

And he takes there to be something deeply implausible about it. And so I see Carnap just as offering, if still flawed in various ways, an interesting and sophisticated and considered vision of the work that this kind of conceptual scheme relativism could do. I thought it would be interesting to discuss these as two different angles on or perspectives on the topic of conceptual scheme relativism, without needing to frame one as having arguments directly against the other, etc.

3:46 Dylan: Whenever we do analytical philosophy, it always feels a little bit foreign to me because I don't have any of it, steeped in my own education. And so it takes me a while to get my bearings on it. And so it took me a little while to realize that when you say a term like conceptual schemes, you immediately mean something like conceptual scheme relativism. That is, if there is such a thing as conceptual schemes, meaning that there is more than one, then you can have that conversation. So therefore, on the very idea of a conceptual scheme is sort of, by its title, immediately tells someone who knows these things that he's arguing against the very idea of conceptual schemes.

I found it very interesting that he formulated the discussion in terms of translation for most of it. And one of the linchpins for him was being able to go from one to the other. And as a test of validity, I mean, he has the strong test and the sort of weak test of it, but I found that really interesting way to talk about it.

4:47 Mark: Yeah. Which is not necessarily the complete history. Davidson points right back to Kant, the idea that we don't experience the world directly, but that we do it through some sort of concepts. And even though Kant didn't seem to think that we had to worry about other possible conceptual schemes, that's been the history and the way that Davidson says, as soon as you say there are concepts in between you and the world, then that at least opens the logical possibility that there could be different concepts. So even if it's true, as Kant might think, that all rational beings use the same concepts to interpret the world, well, at least lots of other post Kantian thinkers took that the next step, the obvious next step, that maybe there are potential other conceptual schemes out there. At least the notion of it, according to Davidson, implies that there's plural possibles.

5:35 Dylan: But let's be careful. I mean, it's really important what we mean by other, right? I mean, that's what the whole article turns on is just because you have two different languages doesn't mean that you're not talking about the same thing. And so the whole argument, right, is about whether or not you have conceptual schemes that are untranslatable to one another. That's one way of putting it. Whether they're genuinely distinct from one another.

5:57 Wes: So, yeah, I think we should just briefly say what we mean by conceptual schemes. I know you guys have sort of been getting at that, as Davidson puts it, and he's sort of referring to the way other people have been putting it. Conceptual schemes are ways of organizing experience. They're systems or categories that give form to the data of sensation. And then they are points of view from which individuals, cultures, or periods survey the passing scene. So you, Mark, brought up Kant as sort of a fundamental example of a conceptual scheme. And it's one that's basic and cognitive in nature, right?

So Kant thinks that for us to have experiences at all, for us to make sense of the world, we have to see it through the lens of spatiotemporality and causation and unity and these other logical and empirical science sort of concepts. And so that's fine. I think, Mark, you were talking about an extension of that to say, thinking that, hey, the French speak a different language and they have a different culture, so they look at the world completely different than we do. And even when we translate amor into love, with all the connotations and the different associations and connections within the language, our translation is always approximate.

It doesn't mean the same thing. We don't ever fully grasp what's meant there, except until we can speak the language. I don't think that's an example of this conceptual relativism. That Davidson is talking about with failures of translation. But it gets you at this idea, the sense in which you can extend conceptual scheme to mean something that's basically cultural or something like that.

7:31 Dusty: Right.

7:31 Mark: I think if we're going to start this discussion by why is this question even relevant? This is why I tried to put it in terms of cultural relativism, broadly speaking. And the cultural relativism that you're talking about is exactly the kind of thing that's often referred to, to. And so getting at, well, why does that not count as a conceptual scheme? Or would it? I mean, according to Davidson, really none of them make sense. So it's kind of academic to him which things fall into this category. Or we might take exception to the way he defines, if he really defines conceptual schemes, that the problem with them is the impossibility of true translation between them.

And you might say, okay, Davidson, I accept that, and we'll obviously lay out that argument in detail. But that's not really what we mean by conceptual schemes. We mean something more like what you're talking about, Wes, with French versus English, and there's just a fundamental French point of view that is built into the language and you just can't understand it.

8:25 Dylan: And that last step, though, is also another tricky bit, right? It may be that there is something that's a view, right? But whether or not you can't understand it, that's part of what's at stake about what you mean by it being genuinely relative or not. And the relativism, the conceptual relativism, I guess I found myself struggling a little bit about the term because in the way we're talking about it here, and I guess it has to do with point of view, the way it's interpreted is there's a fundamental non communication, not even miscommunication, non communication, which the lens through which you look at the world.

I mean, this is part of what Davidson ends up making him think. It just doesn't make any sense. Is why I find it a little bit confusing is that I would normally think of it being relative in the sense of coordinate systems. It's your point of view, but you're still talking about the same kind of thing. But here it's conceptual relativism is in that way sort of deeper. It might be that you have a cultural relativism or an ethical relativism where you could easily agree on the facts of the matter, but you just disagree on whether or not it's ethical or not.

That's different than this, right?

9:32 Dusty: I think some of this will come out more as we get into Davidson's argument. But one of the worries that you might have while reading this paper is that none of the figures who Davidson names as having the kind of ugly version of the view he's attacking obviously have that view. It's possible that they do. Sometimes they'll talk in kind of sloppy ways that seem to suggest that they believe something like that. Some people have such radically different concepts for describing the world that they would be fundamentally unable, even after perhaps like an indeterminately long conversation or effort to translate, to understand the things said by the person next to them. The difference between these people is so radical as to be insurmountable.

10:20 Dylan: What would it mean to even say that such a conversation even happened?

10:24 Dusty: Right. This is one of the concerns that Davidson raises. What's not obvious, though, necessarily, is that the specific names he names as people who think this could be the case actually ever held that it could be. So that's a worry that one might have. And it's possible that Davidson is right.

10:42 Mark: Let me just read a little more of the quotes on the first page here. So the one that west started. Their ways of organizing experience. Systems of categories that give form to the data of sensation, points of view from which individuals, cultures, or periods survey the passing scene. And here it continues. There may be no translating from one scheme to another, in which case the beliefs, desires, hopes, and bits of knowledge that characterize one person have no true counterparts for the subscriber to another scheme. Reality itself is relative to a scheme.

What counts as real in one system may not in another. So this is fundamentally getting at ontology, getting about reality. And the Carnap article that we're going to read is explicitly about ontology. And in fact, it is kind of a response to the On What There Is paper by Quine that we covered in the previous episode. So folks might want to actually, before they listen to the second half here, go listen to that. I don't think for Davidson, you have to know anything about Quine. But yeah, that's the worry that the notion of what is real might actually fundamentally be different.

And how does reality versus Translation. Can we make that a little clearer? Because I'm just trying to think like, in my conceptual scheme, I believe in auras and you don't believe in auras. Well, that's not a difference in untranslatability. It's not that you can't understand what I mean by aura. I can describe what I mean by aura. You just think that those don't exist,

12:02 Dylan: you just disagree, right? I mean, the same thing would be true for scientific concepts, right? Like, do you believe in atoms? We don't think that that is a live conversation. But when atomism was first being developed, some of the most prominent physicists and chemists thinking about these things didn't agree. They didn't believe in atomism. So you had this case where you had this, what seems like an ontological category of an atom as being a thing, but they don't agree that such a thing exists. For one group, they're things just as real as rocks. And for another group, they're like auras. There's something you can talk about and you can say what it is, but it doesn't exist. Folks are the same. Same way.

12:43 Dusty: Yeah. So two conceptual schemes are going to be intertranslatable, just in case. Even if my conceptual scheme doesn't have the exact same concept that yours has, say, of an aura. If you can explain to me, or if I can, through the process of reconstructing your concept in my scheme, using a more elaborate description, I can come to understand what you're talking about. In fact, on Davidson's understanding of what a conceptual scheme is, that would make these the same conceptual scheme. A conceptual scheme is understood as a set of inter translatable languages.

13:18 Mark: So maybe the reason I think that you have an aura is because I look at your mood or something. We have a conversation about this. I keep talking about auras, and really what it comes down to is that I'm paying attention to subtle clues of how hungry and miserable or whatever somebody looks. And translating that to yellow aura, that's just a misunderstanding.

13:38 Wes: I think it's difficult to distinguish between differences in concepts or conceptual scheme and then just differences in what we think are true or false statements within that scheme. Right. And it may turn out the way Davidson describes it when he's trying to give us an example of different conceptual schemes via Kuhnian paradigm shift. So he says sometimes revisions in the list of sentences held true in a discipline are so central that we may feel that the terms involved have changed their meanings. So the way of thinking about that is just if you discover that Newtonian physics is not all there is and that relativity plays this role, you may think, well, that's not just like overturning some previous sentence we thought was true or adding new sentences or something like that.

It actually calls for a reinterpretation of terms and it changes the meanings of a whole set of sentences. Once I come to believe that relativity is true, and develop a theory around that which amounts to just a set of sentences. Basically, then the meanings of the terms involved in our discussions have changed. So when I talk about mass, for instance, I no longer mean what I meant when I talked about mass under the Newtonian scheme, let's say.

15:04 Dylan: And in fact, you're going to have to talk about how it was different than what you talk about now. And there'll be a story to that, but most importantly, you will mean something different than you did before.

15:14 Dusty: Yeah.

15:14 Mark: I should point out we did have a past episode on Thomas Kuhn as well. And I think one of the things that we are emphasizing in that is that Kuhn is actually pretty careful when he's spelling out these things. As you were saying, Dusty, it's not clear that Davidson's accusation that Kuhn actually holds this view is really true. It's probably not worth going into why this is or is not a good interpretation of Kuhn. But I think in that discussion, we are trying to be pretty careful to distinguish between what Kuhn actually says and the excitement that that generated.

And, you know, how that really is, regardless of what he actually said or how consistent he was, how careful he was consistently in his language. A lot of people took that to say, wow, different periods in science. They just said very incommensurate things. It's not just that one replaced the other and decided that a few of the sentences that the previous paradigm said were true. Now, those are false. No, they completely redefined everything. And you just. I don't know if Kuhn ever said or anybody ever says that the people in the two paradigms just can't even understand each other.

Like, that wasn't really the issue. They're breaking things up in different ways.

16:18 Dusty: Yeah.

16:18 Dylan: Davidson quotes Kuhn. This is on page 12 at the end of that quoted paragraph. Most of the same signs are used before and after a revolution. For example, force, mass, element, compound, cell. The ways in which some of them attach to nature has somehow changed. Successive theories are thus, we say, incommensurable. That's a pretty strong term. Davidson takes incommensurable to mean untranslatable, but it's not clear to me that it means that.

16:48 Unknown speaker: Right.

16:49 Dusty: So, yeah, I think there are clear instances in all three of the folks that he kind of attacks, specifically Quine, Kuhn, and Whorf. There are instances of them speaking loosely in a way that definitely suggests these ideas. There's at least a kind of surface plausibility for charging them with what he charges them with. But I Think there's also a certain kind of philosophy article that is addressing a real trend in thinking. But it's the kind of trend that, you know, these philosophers are encountering at cocktail parties and at student philosophy clubs and, you know, in the hallways of whatever school they're teaching at.

It's an idea that's kind of in the air, and it might be hard to pin down to one specific passage in one particular philosopher's book, but it's definitely a real thing. And I think it's clear that Kuhn contributed to. As you were saying, Mark, to a kind of large trend of people talking in this way.

17:39 Dylan: Well, I just wanted to go back to an example of trying to understand the notion of conceptual scheme and what kind of incommensurability there might be. I thought your example of Newtonian physics to quantum mechanics was a good one, where both what you mean by something like space and time changes in going from Newtonian physics to quantum mechanics. And also there are questions that you have different answers for or you end up having nonsensical answers for in Newtonian physics that you have then different answers in quantum mechanics that are sensible then.

So it makes me think that when someone like Kuhn says they're incommensurable, there's something right about that. You can't encompass quantum mechanics with Newtonian mechanics. There isn't a way of describing quantum mechanics that is from the standpoint of what you understand in Newtonian mechanics, be it conceptually, mathematically, you can't do it. But that doesn't mean they're untranslatable, that you can't go from one to another and understand that transition. So in that way, I felt like the term conceptual scheme is. Was taken to be in some ways kind of radically different, so that in Davidson's case, you end up just not being able to talk to one another.

The idea of a conceptual scheme and there being different conceptual schemes is so bizarre on the face of it that the end result would be that you couldn't even tell if somebody else had a different conceptual scheme, because they can't even talk to you. And there'd be no way for you even to know that. But if you can know that they have a different conceptual scheme, that's the crack that allows you to translate between them. There's a middle ground to me, that has to do with acknowledging that different ways of looking at the world might be incommensurable.

Maybe it isn't quite translatable. They're not like coordinate systems that you can just have one simple transformation for one another. There's something that has to be added, a narrative transformation.

19:45 Wes: So maybe this will be helpful. I think, Dylan, you're pointing out. I think for Davidson to say that there are distinct conceptual schemes, we need to be able to say that there's either a complete failure of translation between what turn out to be sorts of languages or sets of concepts, or partial failures, because if we don't have that failure, we're essentially still within the same conceptual scheme. That's the way I read Davidson as well. But maybe there's a better way to think about that. Dusty, you can maybe help. But the other example from Whorf might also be helpful.

I read Whorf in high school. I was very excited by him. And I remember something about Inuits, I think, having like 100 different words for snow, not just slush or sleet or powder. Some things we might use in various contexts, but just many, many different fine gradations. And the argument could be made that, I think WHORF did make it, that they see the world in a fundamentally different way because of that, because they deploy a different language and divide things up at a different level of granularity and essentially have different concepts.

And I think, Dylan, what you're suggesting is, well, this use of conceptual scheme is not just a matter of saying that there's some sort of failure of translation. It's translatable, but it's still a different way of looking at the world, which does not amount to a difference in sentence, truth values, something like that. It's still a conceptual difference, but it's not necessarily untranslatable.

21:17 Dylan: Yeah, and when you say it that way, it reminded me of the question of why does it mean that if it is translatable, that there are no distinctions that make a difference, that any differences would be catastrophic? I found that kind of weird.

21:33 Mark: We wouldn't say that just because they're like different kinds of shoes and different kinds of socks, that those are two different conceptual schemes. No, those are just two different classifications. And even if there are overlapping things, we're talking about different kinds of animals versus different kinds of organic beings. So, like, it's not shoes and socks that don't overlap. These two categories do overlap. Still, those two different categorization systems don't amount to conceptual schemes. I like your thinking about this in terms of coordinate systems.

Makes a lot of sense to me. You know, if you're just looking at space itself, three dimensional space, let's pretend it's just straight up three dimensional Euclidean space, then any system of plotting coordinates could be translated to any other system. So yeah, those are two different systems and you might use them for different things. But there's still ways of breaking up the world. One is assuming a Euclidean space and one is assuming some non Euclidean relativistic space or something like this. Then that's when you can't actually say this point in this system corresponds to this point in the other system.

They just might not even have the same number of points. It becomes much more complicated. Does that seem to work as an example?

22:43 Dylan: I agree with you somewhat about the distinction. But I. So let's take the three dimensional space case where you could have polar coordinates, you have spherical coordinates, you could have hyperbolic coordinates, you could have Cartesian coordinates, any of those things. And it's true that the distance between any two points there is going to be the same number and you're going to have a way of writing down the physics in those coordinate systems. But I guess I wonder if it's. It doesn't seem like a distinction that has no difference to be looking at something that's in polar coordinates and understanding it as a fundamentally cyclic behavior and that it just isn't manifest in a Cartesian coordinate system. Even if you can translate from one to the other.

23:26 Mark: I don't think people are going to follow what you were just saying about it being cyclical. Meaning I'm not following that exactly. Can you.

23:33 Dusty: So can I maybe try to. So in my academic life I work on Marx despite being an analytic guy. One way you might think about this in terms of Marx because it touches more on whatever everyday practical concerns is. Marx thinks that the reason that certain kinds of classical or liberal economic theories have the attraction that they do and are as prevalent as they are is because of what he calls commodity fetishism. That our experience under capitalism causes us to kind of incorrectly perceive value as inhering in commodities. Obviously we don't need to talk about that now.

But the point is there are features of our framework for understanding our own economic lives that prevent us from seeing important features of what's actually going on. One might want to frame that in terms of this kind of conceptual scheme relativism and say that there's an important meaningful difference between the person who accepts the conceptual scheme that Marx is criticizing and Marx's conceptual scheme. And that even if that difference doesn't amount to one of untranslatability, there's somehow something real and important going on there.

Is that roughly. Yeah.

24:47 Wes: We're trying to get at the question of why can't we have different conceptual schemes without there necessarily being this failure of translation? I think we can accept this idea, for instance, in the example of paradigm shift. The revisions to certain central sentences mean a change in meaning of our terms, let's say. So we could accept that idea, but it's still unclear. So in other words, is Davidson arguing against just a certain conceptual relativism? Is he just arguing against people who happen to say that there's this incommensurability? Or does he think that incommensurability is sort of tied up and then lack of translatability is sort of an essential part of even distinguishing conceptual schemes? I took him to be doing the latter, and in that case I'm not sure why one implies the other.

25:39 Mark: Well, should we get more into some quotes from here to see why he does and what the actual argument is? We've been kind of trying to deny his initial assumption, which he does say at the quote I already gave, there are different ways of organizing experience, systems of categories. There may be no translating from one scheme to another, in which case the belief. So even the way he introduces it, it's not necessarily that it's lack of translation is necessary, but at least it is suggested by the idea.

26:06 Wes: But it seems to become necessary over the course of the paper. But yeah, but maybe that's wrong even

26:10 Mark: just on that first page, the second paragraph, why I brought up Kant in the first place. Even those thinkers who are certain there's only one conceptual scheme are in the sway of the scheme concept. Even monotheists have religion. And when someone sets out to describe our conceptual scheme, his homey task assumes, if we take him literally, that there might be rival systems. So I mean, what do we think of that? I mean as a complaint about Kant, for instance, whom he does not name here.

26:35 Dusty: So I think this points to the important kind of assumption he thinks underlies a lot of these philosophers views, which is that we can distinguish between what he calls scheme and content. So if you set out to describe our conceptual scheme, maybe what you're trying to set out to describe is say something like our grappling with the content that is delivered to us through our senses, our specific way of grappling with what's given to us through the senses, or you might alternatively he distinguishes these two different images of what's going on there.

You might alternatively be trying to grapple with our way of organizing what's given to us through the senses. In the second role we maybe play a bit more of an active role. Either way, the idea is that there's something out there that is external to us and we have a particular conceptual way of coming to grips with it. And so in describing our conceptual scheme, even if you say it's just one, you're still under the sway of this picture of what's going on when we encounter the world.

27:38 Mark: Yeah, you might say that there's undoubtedly, just from what we understand about the senses, there is the world out there and then there is the world as our senses give it to us by filtering out some things they can't detect, ultraviolet frequencies and things like that. So that part of the Kantian image often described as wearing green glasses or something, so everything looks green because we're wearing green glasses. But I think that where Davidson is starting to complain here is using language to do that, which is something that Kant, I think, following Aristotle, Right.

Aristotle has the notion of the categories, though we have not read that and can't really say if that was an epistemological tool in Aristotle's use of it in the same way that it is in Kant. But certainly by the time we get to Davidson here, right, we've got the blooming, buzzing confusion of experience. And one of the essential tools that we use to distinguish this from that, to pick out some things and not pick up others, is language. And so, yeah, oh, the Hopis have seven words for snow and we only have one. Well, they actually see more kinds of snow.

They're breaking the world into different categories, different schemes. And that at least suggests that there's a problem there. What would it be for me to then understand the seven kinds of snow? It seems at least I would just have to learn the language. But I guess that's the issue that we're having trouble with. If you could just learn the language doesn't really count as a different scheme.

29:02 Dusty: One thing that has to be acknowledged is that Davidson is a very difficult writer. And so one of the obstacles to getting into the details of his arguments is that they're a bit elusive. This was a conference talk as well. That's one of the features that makes it difficult, is that it's somewhat informal. And Davidson was known for preparing his conference talks very last minute, like sometimes on the airplane on the way to the conference. This has been a very influential paper, but I find it very like, the structure of it is baffling.

29:32 Wes: It's structured right around this idea of conceptual relativism, depends upon this idea of partial or complete failures and translatability between languages, which Davidson argues that we have to identify language and conceptual scheme. Yeah. So he starts out by going over why complete failures and translatability don't make sense. And then he looks at partial failures and tells us why they don't make sense. So that's the basic. It doesn't make it any less baffling, but just thought I'd say that for listeners.

30:05 Mark: So why do complete failures of translation not make sense?

30:08 Wes: Well, we might want to back up and say why translation? Because that's the first part of the paper, why we're using translation as the criterion. I know we've addressed it a little bit, but.

30:18 Dylan: Well, identifying conceptual schemes with languages. I mean, right on page seven, he just says we may identify conceptual schemes with languages then. Or better, allowing for the possibility that more than one language may express the same scheme sets of inter translatable languages, languages we will not think of as separable from souls. Speaking a language is not a trait a man can lose while retaining the power of thought. I didn't see that he gave much of an argument other than just saying that. He says earlier on page six, we may accept the doctrine that associates having a language with having a conceptual scheme, but speakers of different languages may share a conceptual scheme, provided there's a way of translating one language into another.

Studying the criteria of translation is therefore a way of focusing on criteria of identity of conceptual schemes. I didn't see that he made an argument for that, that he just said that share a conceptual scheme is equal to translation.

31:18 Dusty: Right. So yeah, he wants there to be an argument. I think it's not whatever subjective error on your part to feel like he hasn't given an argument because he promises one. He says that this should appear as the conclusion of an argument in order to have a kind of persuasive force. Otherwise it's just a. Like a postulate. But he then makes a number of asides where he discusses problems with the transitivity of translatability. And he introduces this whole figure of scheme content dualism. And it seems like only once he's kind of laid all of that groundwork does he come back to what I take to be the argument for the conclusion that inter translatability has to play this defining role in understanding what a conceptual scheme even is, which is that after he's specified, he distinguishes between the image of a conceptual scheme as organizing the content of experience or objects in the world, and then the image of conceptual scheme as fitting them.

He then considers each of the possible combinations, like what if a scheme is for organizing nature? What if the scheme is for organizing experience. And in each case he tries to show how it ultimately ends up involving translatability into a familiar language. Or at least that's his effort.

32:30 Wes: Yeah, that does jump us to the end. Although I know you're trying to get at the sense in which there's an argument for identifying conceptual scheme of the language. But he does so earlier on page six. Studying the criterion of translation is therefore a way of focusing on criteria of identity for conceptual schemes. If conceptual schemes aren't associated with languages in this way, the original problem is needlessly doubled. For then we would have to imagine the mind with its ordinary categories, operating with a language with its organizing structure.

Under the circumstances, we would certainly want to ask who is to be master. So in other words, if we try to pry apart conceptual scheme from language, then we get these two organizing schemes related to each other, one which is wordless and one which uses words. So he doesn't give a robust argument there, but it is kind of difficult to imagine what it would mean to talk about a scheme for organizing the world which is language free, and that language is somehow writhe on top of that.

33:35 Dylan: Let's say, didn't we get something like that kind of argument from Sellars?

33:39 Wes: Yes, I was reminded of Sellars reading this.

33:42 Dylan: I wrote Sellars in the margin on mine.

33:44 Dusty: Davidson, I think, claimed to have written this after reading a lot of Sellars.

33:49 Mark: Can we just spell out the connection explicitly for listeners to remind them? The idea being that there can't just be a given the world, this wordless world, and then we use schemes to chop it into bits, that there is no such thing, according to Sellars, as this prelinguistic given.

34:06 Wes: He goes on to say here, page six to seven. Alternatively, there is the idea that any language distorts reality, which implies that it is only wordlessly, if at all, that the mind comes to grips with things as they really are. Kind of getting at what you were just saying, Mark. This is to conceive of language as an inert, though necessarily distorting, medium, independent of the human agencies that employ it. A view of language that surely cannot be maintained. Yet if the mind can grapple without distortion with the real, the mind itself must be without categories and concepts.

This featureless self is familiar from theories in quite different parts. So what he's saying here, you could go the alternate route and say, well, it's not that we're prying apart language with its concepts and categories, and then the mind with its own. We could make another sort of distinction where the mind doesn't have any categories or concepts, but comes directly into contact with the real, which in many theories I think would just be sense data. And then the distorting effect of language and concepts get applied to that and it's necessarily distorting in that sense.

And he's going to reject that as well, right?

35:17 Dusty: Yeah. So maybe something that happened is also that there are two points. One, I think is a very reasonable question, why identify conceptual schemes directly with languages? And then there's the second question, which, but it's closely related, which is why think that translatability has to play this important role? When he claims, for instance, that nothing can count as evidence of complete untranslatability, that wouldn't also count as evidence that the behavior that you're looking at is non linguistic, that it's not speech behavior.

35:46 Mark: Isn't he making that initial identification? Because he's pointing at what folks like Whorf, Benjamin Lee Whorf. If you look up linguistic relativity in Wikipedia, I was reading about that here on page six. He says, Whorf, wanting to demonstrate that Hopi incorporates a metaphysics so alien to ours that Hopi in English cannot, as he puts it, be calibrated, but he uses English to convey the contents of sample Hopi sentences.

36:10 Dylan: That phenomena is a quintessential example for Davidson of the absurdity of the notion of relative conceptual schemes.

36:17 Mark: And so somebody like Whorf, who's claiming that, is probably not going to claim that there really is like between English and French such an alien ness. So that's why he says, well, conceptual schemes, we can start by identifying them as different languages. But probably, you know, if there's complete translatability between two languages, then we could say, well, they really share conceptual schemes. So maybe putting some words in Whorf's mouth here, you know, there's the Western way of looking at things and there's these other ways, the indigenous way. You know, we had so much trouble our, you know, our American Indian philosophy episode, trying to figure out how to understand their concepts or think even further, I think like that movie Arrival. Did you guys see that?

36:58 Wes: Yeah.

36:59 Mark: Yes, Squid aliens who use inkblots to communicate, basically. And if you can understand the inkblot, in fact, then you can see through time because their way of breaking up the world is so different, but with their different senses. For us to even understand it is to become a wholly different kind of being.

37:17 Wes: Yeah, I think we've set up the beginning of this so we identify conceptual schemes with languages because we can't really make sense of ways of organizing the world that are language free. But that's not to say, Mark, as you pointed out, that every different language is a different conceptual scheme. So there's always the possibility that all the different languages may express the same scheme. They may always be inter translatable. But to have a different conceptual scheme, they have to at least partially fail in translation. So that's the thing we were discussing earlier on.

Well, why do we have to say that a difference in conceptual schemes amounts to this inability to translate? Why does intertranslatability imply the same conceptual scheme? Don't the French, yes, indeed, look at the world in a different way, even though we can ultimately maybe translatable. That's what we were discussing in the beginning. This is the idea. To be in the same conceptual scheme is to be within any number of languages that are inter translatable. To be in different conceptual schemes is to have something that cannot be translated.

38:19 Mark: And maybe the ultimate conclusion that you might want to take out of this is you could admit that there are different points of view, but think that conceptual scheme is not the best way to express that. When all the people that say, no, you're just a bunch of white males, you know that there's something singular about your point of view. If you had these other points of view on the podcast or. Well, that doesn't mean that we need to add people that have untranslatable other languages. That would not be a very productive conversation. There must be something that is not directly having to do with concepts if you want to still talk about the point of view in that enriching way.

38:54 Dylan: I still just find myself stumbling over the untranslatability question in that once you have translatability, you've eliminated distinctions that make a difference. It's a funny kind of almost overly mathematical way of looking at the problem.

39:10 Wes: To me, I mean, the one thing that we, I think, can agree on is that if we're going to say that conceptual schemes are different, then there is this implication that there is a fundamental difference in the meanings of terms and the way the world is carved up, regardless of the question of translatability. So it's not just we disagree about something, or in one way of looking at things, a certain sentence is said to be true.

39:37 Dylan: Maybe that's one of the reasons why it's such a strong distinction in Davidson, is that the link of conceptual schemes really comes down to truth values between things. And that's the linchpin for translatability is you're able to judge and say which things are true and False, ultimately, when you have translation, properly speaking. So to say that there are different conceptual schemes means that ultimately you're going to say that two different things about the world are true or not true. You're going to disagree about that, and you will not resolve that. And that I think he finds absurd.

40:14 Dusty: Yeah, absolutely. Although, you know, it's not just because of a kind of gut reaction against that kind of relativist scenario, but although I'm sure he has that, many philosophers do have just a kind of horror at that relativist outcome. But it ultimately is because he thinks that the very notion of taking something to be true or taking someone else to take something to be true involves already translating their belief into your own language. He just thinks that translation plays this fundamental shaping role in the way that we understand each other's beliefs. You couldn't even conceive of someone as having a belief without supposing that you could translate that belief into your language.

40:55 Wes: I think we jumped kind of into the end there, didn't we? You guys talking about charity?

41:00 Unknown speaker: Oh.

41:01 Dusty: So, I mean, I also think it plays a role in the slightly earlier argument against the possibility of complete untranslatability. So, for instance, if we conceive of our conceptual scheme as organizing nature or experience, Davidson writes, it's on 14, on a journal copy, we cannot attach a clear meaning to the notion of organizing a single object, the world, nature, etc. Unless that object is understood to contain or consist in other objects. Someone who sets out to organize a closet arranges the things in it. If you were 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 its fish? He'll go on to say that in order to organize the constituent parts of something, you have to be able to individuate them. And so if your conceptual scheme is organizing the parts of nature, what it's organizing is something that has, in some sense, already been organized. We're already assuming that these things are determinant, specific things. We're assuming a conceptual description of them when we present them as being organized by our conceptual scheme.

42:12 Mark: Isn't that weird, the difference between organizing and carving up those two different metaphors

42:17 Wes: there he distinguishes between organizing and fitting. Predicting. Right. So. Right, you're using the word carving up. That's why I got confused.

42:24 Dusty: Right.

42:25 Mark: The first time that we encountered this in our reading was in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, where the points, the atoms, are the Atomic facts. And then he uses this analogy of different kinds of mesh that could lay over the atomic facts to group them in different ways. And these might be considered conceptual schemes. I think this is exactly the way Davidson is talking, as if there are these atoms, just like there are things in the closet that can be arranged in certain ways. But that's quite different than, you know, what we got out of William James and Pirsig and folks like that, of having the blooming, buzzing confusion that gets carved up. Or you're saying that he's already covered that in the notion of fitting.

43:05 Wes: The idea here is that you're talking about organizing the world. You're not thinking in terms of standing outside of a unitary entity and then somehow organizing that. You already have to be attributing thinking of it as a multiplicity, as divided up in some way. So suppose we say, okay, here's two different languages, and they don't have any predicates that match. So every predicate in the language sort of picks out, has different extensions. There are different groups of objects for each language that in the world that belong to it. Well, when we've said that all of that, we're assuming a common ontology to do that. Unless we assumed a common ontology to talk about how the extensions don't match up for those predicates, we could never even make an assertion about the predicates not matching.

43:47 Dylan: We have to mean the same thing by extension. We have to be able to map the two different.

43:52 Wes: No, it's not about the meaning of the word extension. It's the fact that. So English dog picks out all dogs, right? That's their extension. Every individual thing in the world that's a dog falls under the extension of the predicate dog. And there's some other hypothetical language where there is no such predicate, but they have a predicate, you know, make up some imaginary word that refers to, say,

44:16 Mark: I'm thinking of the grue and bleen or whatever, you know, so it's dog up to time T1, but cat after T1. You know, that's what I mean by dog.

44:24 Wes: But anyway, I can't begin to say, hey, there's a language in which there's no predicate that describes dogs or has the same extension as our word dog. Well, I can't even say that unless I assume a common ontology. Even the making of that distinction between predicates assumes this common ontology. The placid world, full of these objects that are going to fit into one extension or another.

44:50 Mark: So by ontology, we're not saying it has to have dog in it. Right? That's not an ontological category, because clearly in there we don't have a common ontology. You don't have dog in your language, and I do.

45:02 Wes: So we don't have common concepts, but we have a common ontology in the sense that there are all these entities waiting to be captured by our concepts or not.

45:12 Dusty: And this same problem reoccurs if you conceive of what's being sorted out by the conceptual scheme not as the objects in nature, but as our experience itself. He says the kind of events of experience that we're sorting out end up being things like stubbing a toe or having a sensation of warmth. Again, things that have to be antecedently separated out from one another. A very similar problem occurs if you conceive of it that way.

45:39 Wes: So the way he puts it, a language that organizes such entities must be a language very like our own. We're already getting at the sense in which the world itself has some say here. It has some tug on things. If we assume that we're talking about the same world, then we have to assume that there's a lot in common between our languages and as it turns out, that they have to be translatable.

46:06 Dusty: His argument against the fitting side is a bit more arcane, or at least it relies a little bit more on kind of the traditionally analytic, technical logicy stuff.

46:16 Wes: Yeah, so when we get to the question of fitting, we're no longer just talking about things, we're talking about full sentences and facts. We're talking about asserting things about the world. Because really we're talking about prediction. Right. When we say something is predicted, it's a statement about the world that's predicted.

46:35 Dylan: Would a strong way of trying to see a conceptual scheme difference be imagining completely non overlapping categories of sense data between two entities? So, for instance, I have one entity that has something that we'll both call seeing, but that they are completely different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. And so the sense data that one entity interacts with and the sense data that I interact with are completely different. Maybe we come to agree through our intellectual evolution that we end up having a similar way of describing them. You know, we both come to the conclusion of electromagnetic waves and so forth. But the fact is, is that our interaction with the world through our sense data is at a completely different spectrum. Or maybe that other different kinds of senses, manifestations of sense data.

47:29 Mark: I like that example. And even an easier one to understand is just One guy is blind, one is deaf. How are they communicating? What kind of ontologies would they have? Or imagine a whole deaf society and a whole blind society. The primary qualities, you might say they have in common, they could both figure out that there's an object in front of them. They could feel it. So they could, you know, still talk about squares or something like that. But they certainly, in the respective conceptual schemes, one of them would have colors in it. The other one would have, you know, amplitudes of sounds in it. And there's going to be no translating between those two for the two populations.

48:08 Dylan: Interestingly, in the way you described it eliminated the other senses, I think, because my first thought would be, is that they end up talking about things in terms of touch. They ends up being a mode of translation for them.

48:22 Mark: Well, that's why I was thinking it's a partial translation breakdown, that they could still talk about the desk in front of us, and maybe they could figure out a way, you know, by rapping on each other's hands or something, that they can talk to each other. Each population is going to have a distinct category of concepts outside of the scheme of the other population. So why is that not count as just a. Yeah, that's a completely understandable partial failure of translation. It's not a total failure.

48:48 Dusty: I think it might count as something like that. I'm not sure exactly what Davidson would say about this particular case, but ultimately, I take it in this example, both of these people are speaking English. Even the blind person is speaking a language which has the kind of categorical structure to accommodate claims about how things look. And they may not be in a position to make claims about how things look, but they're, so to speak, exploring the world from the perspective of a conceptual scheme that has those categories. You might be able to frame the issue in a way that it comes out as some kind of partial translation problem, but you would have to construe them as speaking different languages.

I don't think Davidson would be inclined to do that. I think here you'd want to say that they're speaking the same language. They're just differently positioned to make different kinds of claims, which is something more similar to a difference in opinion than it is to a difference in conceptual scheme.

49:44 Dylan: That sounds like the end of the paper.

49:48 Wes: Yeah. I think the other thing to add about the blind person is so you could take an example in which the blind person is an expert in the science of seeing, and they will not know what it's like to see colors, but they will Know on some general level that there's this capacity for a certain type of distinction that the eye makes. And they may have analogous. They can use analogies in their own experience. So for instance, different qualities to tones or sounds or something like that spread out along a spectrum to help them understand those distinctions. I don't know if that really counts as translatability. So what I'm trying to say here is that maybe translatability is not just the same thing as saying, well, can they have the same experience?

50:33 Dylan: That phrase right there is actually a good way to get at the distinction we've been talking about several different times. Just because two things might be translatable, one into the other, doesn't mean that the distinctions that are between them don't make a difference. And that would be in the phrase you used in the form and quality of their experience. And there's something about the form and quality of their experience has something really important to do with the way they both experience and understand the world, even if they can make that translation.

You gave the example of a blind person understanding spectrum and stuff like that. And we already do that. We know that there are animals, people are colorblind. Right. There's a range of spectrum that really graspable for us normally of abilities, whether it be sight versus blindness. But there's also animals that see in wavelengths that we don't experience. We're just blind to. But we can translate that experience. But I'm not sure that's the same thing as having lived that experience. If you can see many, many different wavelengths than what a normal human being does, it's not clear to me that it's translatable the way you would like in a TV show.

And you would have Geordi, who can see in the infrared, and he also has different shapes out there. That's not clear to me that that's what the experience would be like.

52:00 Mark: So how close is this to. You don't understand suffering. We might both use the word suffering, but I have suffered in my life. And you are coddled and. And you just don't understand the word suffering. Yeah, in a certain sense you can't actually translate if there are different connotations in their first person experience, you could understand that in that the person could tell you about their suffering and like, oh, that's what you mean by suffering. And as Wes was pointing out, there's still going to be a difference between knowing as much academically about it as you could, knowing all about the Holocaust or whatever, and then actually having experience that Those are going to be different. It's just that just doesn't seem to be what Davidson would consider a conceptual difference.

52:43 Unknown speaker: Right.

52:45 Dusty: So there's different ways. Right. Even using that example. So you might accuse someone of not understanding suffering and mean by that that literally they haven't fully understood the meaning of the term, that they don't understand the nature of the phenomenon, they don't understand all of its effects. They don't understand maybe the way it can hold on to you over a long period of time, or the way it can interfere with your day to day life. That would be charging them with a kind of cognitive error. And you might say that it's something like them not understanding the language.

Alternatively, you could mean that they haven't had the kind of qualitative experience of suffering. I take it Davidson, at least here, is not going to be interested in that question unless you're kind of using sense data or conscious experience in these kind of questionable epistemic ways that Davidson is trying to rule out. I don't know that he would take any issue with that. I think he would just think it's a different subject matter.