{"agent_id":"davidson","agent_name":"Donald Davidson","slug":"conceptual-schemes-and-the-third-dogma-of-empiricism","label":"Conceptual schemes and the third dogma of empiricism: is the concept of a radically different conceptual scheme intelligible, or does it dissolve under examination?","topic":"Conceptual schemes and the third dogma of empiricism","question":"Is the concept of a radically different conceptual scheme intelligible, or does it dissolve under examination?","position":"The third dogma of empiricism is scheme-content dualism: the picture of the mind as possessing a conceptual scheme that organizes or fits a neutral content — experience, the world, the flux of sensation. The dogma is unintelligible. The organizing and fitting metaphors, examined, either require that the scheme be translatable into our own (in which case no radical difference is being claimed) or cannot be made coherent at all (in which case nothing has been identified as a scheme). The concept of a conceptual scheme incommensurable with our own collapses on examination because the identification of something as a language or a set of beliefs already requires mostly successful interpretation, which requires mostly shared truth. There is no standpoint outside all conceptual schemes from which a plurality of schemes could be surveyed.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"The third dogma of empiricism is scheme-content dualism: the picture of the mind as possessing a conceptual scheme that organizes or fits a neutral content — experience, the world, the flux of sensation.","n":[1,2,3]},{"t":"The dogma is unintelligible.","n":[]},{"t":"The organizing and fitting metaphors, examined, either require that the scheme be translatable into our own (in which case no radical difference is being claimed) or cannot be made coherent at all (in which case nothing has been identified as a scheme).","n":[]}],[{"t":"The concept of a conceptual scheme incommensurable with our own collapses on examination because the identification of something as a language or a set of beliefs already requires mostly successful interpretation, which requires mostly shared truth.","n":[]},{"t":"There is no standpoint outside all conceptual schemes from which a plurality of schemes could be surveyed.","n":[4]}]],"texts":"'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme' (1974, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, OUP 2001) — the founding paper; 'The Method of Truth in Metaphysics' (1977, in Inquiries) — the positive complement; 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge' (1983, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective) — anti-Cartesian epistemology following from the scheme argument. Reception: Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) — the incommensurability thesis at issue; Paul Feyerabend's Against Method (1975); W.V. Quine's 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' (1951) as the comparison point; Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and 'The World Well Lost' (1972) — the pragmatist appropriation; Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig's Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality (OUP 2005) Chapter 18 — the detailed critical reconstruction.","works":["'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme' (1974, in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, OUP 2001) — the founding paper","'The Method of Truth in Metaphysics' (1977, in Inquiries) — the positive complement","'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge' (1983, in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective) — anti-Cartesian epistemology following from the scheme argument"],"reception":"Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) — the incommensurability thesis at issue; Paul Feyerabend's Against Method (1975); W.V. Quine's 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism' (1951) as the comparison point; Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979) and 'The World Well Lost' (1972) — the pragmatist appropriation; Ernest Lepore and Kirk Ludwig's Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality (OUP 2005) Chapter 18 — the detailed critical reconstruction.","status":"The Kuhn-Feyerabend cases of incommensurability are real cases of translation difficulty and theoretical discontinuity; they do not support the radical incommensurability thesis. Partial translation failure is consistent with mostly successful translation and with the constitutive conditions on interpretation that require most beliefs to be shared. Rorty's endorsement of the argument as a dissolution of correspondence truth is a real misreading: the argument does not conclude that truth is merely internal to a scheme but that the scheme-content picture which gave sense to the worry about correspondence is unintelligible. Lepore and Ludwig's objection — that the argument involves a non-standard use of \"true\" in the move from \"the language is true\" to \"the theory is true\" — identifies a genuine specification problem that the argument must address.","era":"1917-2003","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation","page":"pp. 189–190","canonical":"","quote":"I want to urge that this second dualism of scheme and content, of organizing system and something waiting to be organized, cannot be made intelligible and defensible. It is itself a dogma of empiricism, the third dogma. The third, and perhaps the last, for if we give it up it is not clear that there is anything distinctive left to call empiricism.","label":"Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, pp. 189–190"},{"n":2,"work":"Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation","page":"pp. 191–192","canonical":"","quote":"The idea is then that something is a language, and associated with a conceptual scheme, whether we can translate it or not, if it stands in a certain relation (predicting, organizing, facing, or fitting) experience (nature, reality, sensory promptings). The problem is to say what the relation is, and to be clearer about the entities related.","label":"Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, pp. 191–192"},{"n":3,"work":"Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective","page":"p. 60","canonical":"","quote":"Kant thought only one scheme was possible; but once the dualism of scheme and content is made explicit, the possibility of alternative schemes is apparent. The idea that we have a choice of schemes is explicit in the work of C. I.","label":"Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, p. 60"},{"n":4,"work":"Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective","page":"pp. 59–60","canonical":"","quote":"Of course there are conwasts 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. Trouble comes when we try to embrace the idea that there might be more comprehensive differences, for this seems (absurdly) to ask us to take up a stance outside our own ways of thought.","label":"Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective, pp. 59–60"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"reasons-and-causes","label":"Reasons and causes: does the reason for which an agent acts explain the action in the same sense that causes explain their effects?"},{"slug":"truth-theoretic-semantics","label":"Truth-theoretic semantics: can a Tarski-style recursive truth theory serve as the vehicle for a compositional meaning theory for natural languages?"},{"slug":"the-principle-of-charity","label":"The Principle of Charity: is the requirement to attribute largely true beliefs a constitutive condition on interpretation or a distorting methodological prejudice that forces agreement?"},{"slug":"anomalous-monism","label":"Anomalous monism: are mental events identical to physical events but irreducible as mental, and does this position escape epiphenomenalism?"},{"slug":"indeterminacy-of-interpretation-and-inscrutability-of-refere","label":"Indeterminacy of interpretation and inscrutability of reference: does the absence of a unique correct interpretation collapse into nihilism about meaning?"}]}