INCOMMENSURABILITY,RELATIVISM, SCEPTICISM: REFLECTIONS ON ACQUIRING A CONCEPT

Some opponents of the incommensurability thesis, such as Davidson and Rorty, have argued that the very idea of incommensurability is incoherent and that the existence of alternative and incommensurable conceptual schemes is a conceptual impossibility. If true, this refutes Kuhnian relativism and Kantian scepticism in one fell swoop. For Kuhnian relativism depends on the possibility of alternative, humanly accessible conceptual schemes that are incommensurable with one another, and the Kantian notion of a realm of unknowable things‐in‐themselves gives rise to the possibility of humanly inaccessible schemes that are incommensurable with even our best current or future science. In what follows we argue that the possibility of incommensurability of either the Kuhnian or the Kantian variety is inescapable and that this conclusion is forced upon us by a simple consideration of what is involved in acquiring a concept. It turns out that the threats from relativism and scepticism are real, and that anyone, including Davidson himself, who has ever defended an account of concept acquisition is committed to one or the other of these two possibilities. 1     

A Presuppositional Approach to Conceptual Schemes

Abstract

The current discussions of conceptual schemes and related topics are misguided; for they have been focused too much on the truth-conditional notions of meaning/concepts and translation/interpretation in Tarski’s style. It is exactly due to such a Quinean interpretation of the notion of conceptual schemes that the very notion of conceptual schemes falls prey to Davidson’s attack. I argue that what should concern us in the discussions of conceptual schemes and related issues, following the initiatives of I. Hacking, T. Kuhn, and N. Rescher, is not the truth-values of assertions, but rather the truth-value-status of the sentences used to make the assertions. This is because the genuine conceptual innovation between alternative theories/languages does not lie in differences in determining the truth-values of their sentences, but turns on whether these sentences have truth-values when considered within the context of a competing one. The core of conceptual relativism does not consist in the claim that different conceptual schemes may yield incommensurable truth claims, but rather that different conceptual schemes may yield incompatible truth-value-status and therefore lead to distinct perceptions of reality. Conceptual schemes are no longer seen as sentential languages consisting of a set of sentences accepted as true, but rather seen as metaphysical presuppositions of presuppositional languages.     

RELATIVISM,COMMENSURABILITY AND TRANSLATABILITY

This paper discusses conceptual relativism. The main focus is on the contrasting ideas of Wittgenstein and Davidson, with Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend and Hacker in supporting roles. I distinguish conceptual from alethic and ontological relativism, defend a distinction between conceptual scheme and empirical content, and reject the Davidsonian argument against the possibility of alternative conceptual schemes: there can be conceptual diversity without failure of translation, and failure of translation is not necessarily incompatible with recognizing a practice as linguistic. Conceptual relativism may be untenable, but not for the hermeneutic reasons espoused by Davidson.     

On Davidson and interpretation

Davidson's theory of interpretation, I argue, is vulnerable to a number of significant difficulties, difficulties which can be avoided or resolved by the more Quinean approach which I develop. In Section 1 I note difficulties which apply to T-theories but are avoided by translation manuals. In Section 2 I show how to construct what I call T-manuals, which are like T-theories in requiring Tarskian structure, but like translation manuals in avoiding the difficulties discussed in Section 1. In Section 3 I show that the approach using T-manuals does at least as well as Davidson's with respect to a number of other concerns of his. In Section 4 I show that it does better than Davidson's with respect to reporting interpretations, especially where demonstrative utterances are concerned. In Section 5 I argue for (somewhat modified) Quinean empirical constraints, which go with manuals, as superior to the empirical constraints Davidson imposes, which go with T-theories. In Section 6 I show that Davidson is unable to offer an adequate account of what an interpreter knows; and propose a more acceptable theory of language mastery which gives a central role to the requirement that the interpreter's language usage satisfy the refined and amplified Quinean empirical constraints of Section 5.I wish to thank Susan Haack for her help in turning a draft into the present paper.     

BEYOND THE INTERNAL REALIST'S CONCEPTUAL SCHEME

Putnam holds that there can be equally coherent but incompatible conceptual schemes which fit our experiential beliefs equally well. On the other hand however, especially when discussing values, he wants to avoid total relativism because, for him, our choice of values can be considered constant even though our notion of truth varies. I argue that the apparent tension between these two views does not show that the internal realist position is self-contradictory. The way internal realists like Putnam can hold on to both claims is to emphasise the fact that all inquirers, by the very fact that they are classified as inquirers, must be assumed to have a common cognitive faculty. There is flexibility when it comes to conceptualization, but a certain minimal amount of sameness as regards the evaluation of beliefs. In basic everyday practice, all inquirers have the same doxastic attitude towards some basic propositions. The set of all such universal doxastic attitudes constitutes the non-plastic aspect of the mind.     

Relativism,truth, and incoherence

Conclusion There are many contemporary sources and defenders of epistemological relativism which have not been considered thus far. I have, for example, barely touched on the voluminous literature regarding frameworks, conceptual schemes, and Wittgensteinian forms of life. Davidson's challenge to the scheme/content distinction and thereby to conceptual relativism, Rorty's acceptance of the Davidsonian argument and his use of it to defend a relativistic position, Winchian and other sociological and anthropological arguments for relativism, recent work in the sociology of science, and Goodman's novel articulation of a relativism of worlds and of worldmaking, to mention just some of the contemporary loci of debate, all need to be addressed. So also do the plethora of relativistic arguments spawned by Kuhn and related literature in recent philosophy of science. Therefore, it cannot be said that there is no more to be said on behalf of epistemological relativism. Moreover, the positive task of delineating a defensible version of absolutism remains to be accomplished.Nevertheless, the defenses of relativism considered above do seem to have been successfully undercut. More specifically, the arguments for the incoherence of relativism are as compelling as ever, and have manifestly not been laid to rest by contemporary relativists. The basic Socratic insight that relativism is self-refuting, and so incoherent, remains a fundamental difficulty for those who would resuscitate and defend the ancient Protagorean doctrine or a modern variant of it.     

Self-knowledge and scepticism

Donald Davidson has argued that most of our beliefs must be true and that global scepticism is therefore false. Davidson's arguments to this conclusion often seem to depend on externalist considerations. Davidson's position has been criticised, however, on the grounds that he does not defeat the sceptic, but rather already assumes the falsity of scepticism through his appeal to externalism. Indeed, it has been claimed that far from defeating the sceptic Davidson introduces an even more extreme version of scepticism according to which we cannot even know the contents of our own minds. This paper argues that these criticisms are mistaken and that Davidson does indeed have grounds to argue that scepticism is false. The externalism that figures in Davidson's antisceptical arguments is shown to be merely an element in Davidson's overall holism according to which the very possibility of having beliefs that could be true or false depends on most of those beliefs being true and their contents known.     

Davidson's Transcendental Externalism

One of the chief aims of Donald Davidson's later work was to show that participation in a certain causal nexus involving two creatures and a shared environment–Davidson calls this nexus "triangulation"–is a metaphysically necessary condition for the acquisition of thought. This doctrine, I suggest, is aptly regarded as a form of what I call transcendental externalism. I extract two arguments for the transcendental-externalist doctrine from Davidson's writings, and argue that neither succeeds. A central interpretive claim is that the arguments are primarily funded by a particular conception of the nature of non-human animal life. This conception turns out to be insupportable. The failure of Davidson's arguments presses the question of whether we could ever hope to arrive at far-reaching claims about the conditions for thought if we deny, as does Davidson, the legitimacy of the naturalistic project in the philosophy of mind.     

Ordinary Versus Super-Omniscient Interpreters

The sceptic argues that we have little, if any, empirical knowledge. Recently Davidson offered a solution to this challenge by introducing his famous omniscient interpreter argument. Many of Davidson's critics claim that his solution is obviously flawed, since there is an unbridgeable gap between its premises. But I argue that even if his answer is formally acceptable, it is still problematic because circular. I focus on its modal character. Accordingly, a super-omniscient interpreter is introduced, who can beat Davidson's ordinary omniscient interpreter. This demonstrates that Davidson's semantic theory is not adequate for rebutting external-world scepticism; his argument is either circular or incorrigibly inconclusive.     

MAXIMS AND THICK ETHICAL CONCEPTS

I begin with Kant’s notion of a maxim and consider the role which this notion plays in Kant’s formulations of the fundamental categorical imperative. This raises the question of what a maxim is, and why there is not the same requirement for resolutions of other kinds to be universalizable. Drawing on Bernard Williams’ notion of a thick ethical concept, I proffer an answer to this question which is intended neither in a spirit of simple exegesis nor as a straightforward exercise in moral philosophy but as something that is poised somewhere between the two. My aim is to provide a kind of rational reconstruction of Kant. In the final section of the essay, I argue that this reconstruction, while it manages to salvage something distinctively Kantian, also does justice to the relativism involved in what J. L. Mackie calls ‘people’s adherence to and participation in different ways of life’.     

Subordinating Truth – Is <Emphasis Type="Italic">Acceptability</Emphasis> Acceptable?

Argumentation logicians have recognized a specter of relativism to haunt their philosophy of argument. However, their attempts to dispel pernicious relativism by invoking notions of a universal audience or a community of model interlocutors have not been entirely successful. In fact, their various discussions of a universal audience invoke the context-eschewing formalism of Kant’s categorical imperative. Moreover, they embrace the Kantian method for resolving the antinomies that continually vacillates between opposing extremes – here between a transcendent universal audience and a context-embedded particular audience. This tack ironically restores the very external mediation they thought to obviate in their aim to ‘dethrone’ the absolutism and totalitarianism of formal logic with a democratic turn to audience adherence, the acceptability of premises and inferential links, and a contextual, or participant-relative, notion of cogency.     

Non‐Conceptualism and the Problem of Perceptual Self‐Knowledge

Abstract: In this paper we (i) identify the notion of ‘essentially non‐conceptual content’ by critically analyzing the recent and contemporary debate about non‐conceptual content, (ii) work out the basics of broadly Kantian theory of essentially non‐conceptual content in relation to a corresponding theory of conceptual content, and then (iii) demonstrate one effective application of the Kantian theory of essentially non‐conceptual content by using this theory to provide a ‘minimalist’ solution to the problem of perceptual self‐knowledge which is raised by Strong Externalism.     

CONCEPTUAL EVIDENTIALISM

Two recent arguments purport to find a new and firmer foundation for evidentialism in the very nature of the concept of belief. Evidentialism is claimed to be a conceptual truth about belief, and pragmatism to be ruled out, conceptually. But can the conclusion of such conceptual arguments be regarded as the denial of pragmatism? The pragmatist traditionally conceived belief through its motivational role. Therefore, when confronted with conceptual evidentialism, the pragmatist should cede the term ‘belief,’ but insist that pragmatism be understood as a claim about another attitude, a motivational duplicate of belief. Thus, the original dispute is simply relocated terminologically.     

Historical Knowledge as Perspectival and Rational: Remarks on the Annales School's Idea of History

There is an obvious parallel between foundationalism, which ignores history in working out the conditions of knowledge, and radical relativism, which contends that by virtue of its own historical character there is no way to choose among different interpretations, all of which are "equally good." Might it not be, rather, that the recent historicist attack on the very idea of rationality is as damaging as foundationalist objections against the plurality of conceptual schemes or frameworks? Can philosophy maintain the traditional distinction between the form and content of knowledge, between rationality and historicity _ between doxa and episteme ?     

Radical Interpretation and Logical Pluralism

I examine Quine’s and Davidson’s arguments to the effect that classical logic is the one and only correct logic. This conclusion is drawn from their views on radical translation and interpretation, respectively. I focus on the latter, but I first address, independently, Quine’s argument to the effect that the ‘deviant’ logician, who departs from classical logic, is merely changing the subject. Regarding logical pluralism, the question is whether there is more than one correct logic. I argue that bivalence may be subject matter dependent, but that distribution and the law of excluded middle can probably not be dropped whilst maintaining the standard meanings of the connectives. In discussing the ramifications of the indeterminacy of interpretation, I ask whether it forces Davidsonian interpreters to adopt Dummett’s epistemic conception of truth vis-à-vis their interpretations. And, if so, does this cohere with their attributing a nonepistemic notion of truth to their interpretees? This would be a form of logical pluralism. In addition, I discuss Davidson’s arguments against conceptual schemes. Schemes incommensurable with our own could be construed as wholesale deviant logics, or so I argue. And, if so, their possibility would yield, in turn, the possibility of a radical logical pluralism. I also address Davidson’s application of Tarski’s definition of truth.

     

Conceptual Relativism

What is conceptual relativism? Several formulations of the idea that truth, or existence, is somehow relative to conceptual schemes are considered. All are found lacking.     

Talking lions and lion talk: Davidson on conceptual schemes

This essay is a reconstruction and defense of Davidson's argument against the intelligiblity of the notion of conceptual scheme. After presenting a brief clarification of Davidson's argument in On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, I turn to reconstructing Davidson's argument. Unlike many commentators, and occasionally Davidson, who hold that the motive force of the argument is the Principle of Charity (or the denial of the Third Dogma), I argue that there is a further principle which underlies the argument. This principle I call the Strong Discrimination Principle.But the argument of the paper is not purely exegetical. Not only do I show how the Strong Discrimination Principle meets certain objections to Davidson's argument, but I show how the Principle clarifies the realist position. In particular, I show how a line of argument advanced by Rorty and Putnam against (metaphysical) realism can be rejected.If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.Wittgenstein,Philosophical Investigations I have a host of friends. I am grateful to Michael Zimmerman for taking the time to read a preliminary draft of this paper, and to Carolyn Morillo for her comments on a central issue in the paper. I am also especially grateful to the relentlessly enthusiastic participants in the Current Research Seminar at Tulane. To mention but a few: Robert Berman, Radu Bogdan, Norton Nelkin, Graeme Forbes, Jim Stone, and again, Michael Zimmerman and Carolyn Morillo. If I have forgotten just whose objection precipitated yet another footnote or modification, I hope they will be as forgiving as they were helpful. I am also grateful to a referee for having pointed out the relevance of Akeel Bilgrami's article.     

Styles of Reasoning,Human Forms of Life,and Relativism

The question as to whether Ian Hacking’s project of scientific styles of thinking entails epistemic relativism has received considerable attention. However, scholars have never discussed it vis-à-vis Wittgenstein. This is unfortunate: not only is Wittgenstein the philosopher who, together with Foucault, has influenced Hacking the most, but he has also faced the same accusation of ‘relativism’. I shall explore the conceptual similarities and differences between Hacking’s notion of style of thinking and Wittgenstein’s conception of form of life. It is a fact that whether or not the latter entails epistemic relativism is still a controversial question. From my comparative analysis, it will emerge that there are stronger reasons to conclude that Hacking’s notion of style leads to epistemic relativism than there are to reach the same conclusion in the case of Wittgenstein’s conception of form of life. This point will be at odds with the anti-relativistic stance that Hacking has taken in his more recent writings.     

THE PHILOSOPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF TRIANGULATION: LOCATING DAVIDSON'S NON-REDUCTIVE NATURALISM

Abstract: Donald Davidson has emphasized the importance of what he calls "triangulation" for clarifying the conditions that make thought possible. Various critics have questioned whether this triangular causal interaction between two individuals and a shared environment can provide necessary conditions for the emergence of thought. I argue that these critical responses all suffer from a lack of appreciation for the way triangulation is responsive to the philosophical commitments of Davidson's naturalism. This reply to Davidson's critics helps clarify several metaphilosophical issues concerning the overall significance of this use of triangulation. I illustrate how the network of commitments that make up Davidson's conception of non-reductive naturalism inform the respective problems and issues that triangulation is introduced to address. This then serves as an example of the way metaphilosophical considerations are useful in clarifying the status of a respective philosophical position and for understanding the philosophical debates surrounding it.