"On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme"
This is a continuation of a discussion from What are the best refutations of the idea that moral facts cant exist because it's immeasurable? Its gone in a different direction and deserves a separate OP that doesnt derail Captain Homicides OP.
At issue is the famous paper by Donald Davidson, On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, 1974. @Joshs has pointed us to a 2009 paper by Xinli Wang that takes issue with Davidsons conclusions. I recommend you read both papers, but I think this summary of Davidson's position is fair: Davidson wants to deny incommensurable conceptual relativism by demonstrating that the very idea of a conceptual scheme is incoherent to begin with. Thus we cant have competing conceptual schemes, and thus there is nothing to relativize between. This greatly oversimplifies an elegant paper but Im striving for brevity.
Wang points out, I think rightly, that Davidson relies on some version of the traditional scheme-content distinction carried forward by Kant and W.V.O. Quine. Wang challenges Davidson here in a number of ways, but I want to focus on the one he feels is most exigent. We could phrase it as a question: Is there indeed a ?robust version of the scheme-content distinction that sidesteps the way Kantians and Quinians have presented it? Pretty much everything important hangs on this. If Wang can illustrate such a version, then not only does the very idea of a conceptual scheme survive Davidsons criticisms, but Wang is also in a position to make a plausible case for why there could be many such schemes, opening the door for conceptual relativism.
The alternative, more robust scheme-content distinction Wang proposes involves what he calls common-sense experience (this plays the role of content) and whatever conceptual scheme may be in play among a given community. What is key here is that, for Wang, common-sense experience (which he also calls thick experience, drawing from James) is not innocent of theoretical influence. It is not the same thing as a Kantian/Quinian uninterpreted world of sense-data or things-as-they-are. Our basic experience, the most basic one possible (and this will prove to be crucial), is already theory-laden. There is no sharp distinction, Wang argues, between scheme and content certainly nothing like as sharp as the one Davidson employs. Wang believes that it is only this (fictional) very sharp separation that allows Davidsons argument against such a division to go through.
Concepts are, similarly, experience-laden. Concepts are not only the tools of inquiry but also its products, he urges. The scheme of our basic experiential concepts is globally a posteriori as a product of our experiences. So no concepts are absolutely basic, and certainly not a priori; Wang describes them as hypothetically or historically basic. They are still foundational and universally presupposed by our experience, but not because they are Kantian categories. Rather, it is our past evolutionary history and current structure of environment that makes them so.
This picture of a historicized, empirically derived epistemology is fairly familiar. Can it do the job Wang asks of it? Does the very idea of a conceptual scheme thrive in this new environment?
To consider this, we can look at Richard Rortys criticism of the idea of a common-sense experience, which Wang himself cites:
The notion of ?the world as used in a phrase like ?different conceptual schemes carve up the world differently must be the notion of something completely unspecified and unspecifiable -- the thing-in-itself. As soon as we start thinking of ?the world as atoms and the void, or sense data and awareness of them, or ?stimuli of a certain sort brought to bear upon organs of a certain sort, we have changed the name of the game. For we are now well within some particular theory about how the world is.
In other words, Rorty is saying that theres always that sharp separation, even at the most primitive or innocent levels. To claim otherwise, to appeal to Wangs common-sense experience, with its built-in and supposedly unavoidable theoretical elements, is to change the name of the game. Weve done some sleight-of-hand and imported our scheme disguised as innocent content.
Wang acknowledges that this is the critical point, admitting that the scheme-content distinction is epistemic by nature, namely, the distinction between our conceptual apparatus and the world/experience. And he agrees that the critical question is, How can we meaningfully separate a scheme from its empirical content if we still want to make sense of the scheme-content distinction at all? Yet as far as I can see, his answer is merely to assert that such a separation is possible, that common-sense experience, despite its saturation by theory, can still be taken as distinct, if fuzzily, from conceptual scheme: It is no longer a novel idea today that all concepts are empirical and none a priori. That may be so, but its prevalence doesnt make it true, nor supply an argument for it. We still need to be convinced that Wangs common-sense experience really deserves to be considered as being foundational for perception in the way he claims it is.
There is an even more serious problem for Wang, though. To make his argument go through, I think Wang has to show not only that common-sense experience is possible, but that the other kind raw, unmediated perceptions, "thin experience" is impossible. Otherwise, one can simply fall back on the Rortian/Davidsonian objections and claim that Wang has argued beside the point.
Its unclear whether Wang ever attempts to show that unmediated experience is impossible. Sometimes he seems to assume that there could not be anything more basic than common-sense experience. Yet he also says this: Our common-sense experience is the product of the dialectical interaction between our basic experiential concepts and experiential input from nature, whatever it may be. But surely this cedes the ground he has previously tried to conquer? If there is such a thing as experiential input from nature that is distinct from common-sense experience, then the whole project of trying to find a non-Kantian/Quinian scheme-content dualism has failed. Or at best, one could agree that common-sense experience might happen, or that it sometimes happens, but not that it must.
So were left with two competing pictures of experience. One, Rortys and Davidsons, says that experience is pre-linguistic, pre-theoretical, pre-pretty-much-everything, and because this is untenable (and for a number of other reasons as well), we should abandon the scheme-content distinction. The other, Wangs and perhaps Feyerabends, says that experience is always and already theory-laden, but its possible to use this very fact to show how a viable scheme-content distinction could survive.
At this point, Ill stop and invite comment. Perhaps others can find stronger arguments from Wang than I have. Or perhaps we need to turn the problem over to the psychologists after all, the question of how we experience the world at the most basic level might be an empirical one, best answered through scientific research. Or we might conclude that the only genuine scheme-content dualism is the traditional one drawing from Kant but that Davidson is wrong in finding it incoherent or indefensible.
At issue is the famous paper by Donald Davidson, On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, 1974. @Joshs has pointed us to a 2009 paper by Xinli Wang that takes issue with Davidsons conclusions. I recommend you read both papers, but I think this summary of Davidson's position is fair: Davidson wants to deny incommensurable conceptual relativism by demonstrating that the very idea of a conceptual scheme is incoherent to begin with. Thus we cant have competing conceptual schemes, and thus there is nothing to relativize between. This greatly oversimplifies an elegant paper but Im striving for brevity.
Wang points out, I think rightly, that Davidson relies on some version of the traditional scheme-content distinction carried forward by Kant and W.V.O. Quine. Wang challenges Davidson here in a number of ways, but I want to focus on the one he feels is most exigent. We could phrase it as a question: Is there indeed a ?robust version of the scheme-content distinction that sidesteps the way Kantians and Quinians have presented it? Pretty much everything important hangs on this. If Wang can illustrate such a version, then not only does the very idea of a conceptual scheme survive Davidsons criticisms, but Wang is also in a position to make a plausible case for why there could be many such schemes, opening the door for conceptual relativism.
The alternative, more robust scheme-content distinction Wang proposes involves what he calls common-sense experience (this plays the role of content) and whatever conceptual scheme may be in play among a given community. What is key here is that, for Wang, common-sense experience (which he also calls thick experience, drawing from James) is not innocent of theoretical influence. It is not the same thing as a Kantian/Quinian uninterpreted world of sense-data or things-as-they-are. Our basic experience, the most basic one possible (and this will prove to be crucial), is already theory-laden. There is no sharp distinction, Wang argues, between scheme and content certainly nothing like as sharp as the one Davidson employs. Wang believes that it is only this (fictional) very sharp separation that allows Davidsons argument against such a division to go through.
Concepts are, similarly, experience-laden. Concepts are not only the tools of inquiry but also its products, he urges. The scheme of our basic experiential concepts is globally a posteriori as a product of our experiences. So no concepts are absolutely basic, and certainly not a priori; Wang describes them as hypothetically or historically basic. They are still foundational and universally presupposed by our experience, but not because they are Kantian categories. Rather, it is our past evolutionary history and current structure of environment that makes them so.
This picture of a historicized, empirically derived epistemology is fairly familiar. Can it do the job Wang asks of it? Does the very idea of a conceptual scheme thrive in this new environment?
To consider this, we can look at Richard Rortys criticism of the idea of a common-sense experience, which Wang himself cites:
The notion of ?the world as used in a phrase like ?different conceptual schemes carve up the world differently must be the notion of something completely unspecified and unspecifiable -- the thing-in-itself. As soon as we start thinking of ?the world as atoms and the void, or sense data and awareness of them, or ?stimuli of a certain sort brought to bear upon organs of a certain sort, we have changed the name of the game. For we are now well within some particular theory about how the world is.
In other words, Rorty is saying that theres always that sharp separation, even at the most primitive or innocent levels. To claim otherwise, to appeal to Wangs common-sense experience, with its built-in and supposedly unavoidable theoretical elements, is to change the name of the game. Weve done some sleight-of-hand and imported our scheme disguised as innocent content.
Wang acknowledges that this is the critical point, admitting that the scheme-content distinction is epistemic by nature, namely, the distinction between our conceptual apparatus and the world/experience. And he agrees that the critical question is, How can we meaningfully separate a scheme from its empirical content if we still want to make sense of the scheme-content distinction at all? Yet as far as I can see, his answer is merely to assert that such a separation is possible, that common-sense experience, despite its saturation by theory, can still be taken as distinct, if fuzzily, from conceptual scheme: It is no longer a novel idea today that all concepts are empirical and none a priori. That may be so, but its prevalence doesnt make it true, nor supply an argument for it. We still need to be convinced that Wangs common-sense experience really deserves to be considered as being foundational for perception in the way he claims it is.
There is an even more serious problem for Wang, though. To make his argument go through, I think Wang has to show not only that common-sense experience is possible, but that the other kind raw, unmediated perceptions, "thin experience" is impossible. Otherwise, one can simply fall back on the Rortian/Davidsonian objections and claim that Wang has argued beside the point.
Its unclear whether Wang ever attempts to show that unmediated experience is impossible. Sometimes he seems to assume that there could not be anything more basic than common-sense experience. Yet he also says this: Our common-sense experience is the product of the dialectical interaction between our basic experiential concepts and experiential input from nature, whatever it may be. But surely this cedes the ground he has previously tried to conquer? If there is such a thing as experiential input from nature that is distinct from common-sense experience, then the whole project of trying to find a non-Kantian/Quinian scheme-content dualism has failed. Or at best, one could agree that common-sense experience might happen, or that it sometimes happens, but not that it must.
So were left with two competing pictures of experience. One, Rortys and Davidsons, says that experience is pre-linguistic, pre-theoretical, pre-pretty-much-everything, and because this is untenable (and for a number of other reasons as well), we should abandon the scheme-content distinction. The other, Wangs and perhaps Feyerabends, says that experience is always and already theory-laden, but its possible to use this very fact to show how a viable scheme-content distinction could survive.
At this point, Ill stop and invite comment. Perhaps others can find stronger arguments from Wang than I have. Or perhaps we need to turn the problem over to the psychologists after all, the question of how we experience the world at the most basic level might be an empirical one, best answered through scientific research. Or we might conclude that the only genuine scheme-content dualism is the traditional one drawing from Kant but that Davidson is wrong in finding it incoherent or indefensible.
Comments (141)
Here ya go:
Quoting J
Joseph Rouses critique of Rorty on this point would seem to strengthen Wangs argument by asserting that the notion of raw unmediated perception is incoherent. His claim is that the content of common sense experience is irreducibly and inextricably entangled with the schematic organization of linguistic and material practices.
The second thing I see Rouse doing is questioning what he calls the near side of the scheme-content duality. That is, our schemes and theories are no more innocent of empirical input than our experiences are of conceptual input. But again, this wouldnt necessarily show that the empirical input has no theory-independent existence.
Rouse believes that we are never dealing with anything theory independent when we observe the world empirically. This does not mean that what we observe is nothing but what we have already schematized. What it means is that the world speaks back to us through the apparatuses, language and practices we use to make sense of it.
Why, then, any doubt? When an argument is that good, it deserves to be treated with suspicion. In setting out the argument Davidson sets out a position on the nature of language. Language is truth-functional, it makes statements about how things are, about what is the case. When i try to articulate my doubts, I usually think of Dolphins. They engage in a sophisticated aural interaction that looks prima facie very much like a language. On Davidson's (and Quinn's) account, we should be able to identify regularities, perhaps using statistical analysis, such that some of the sounds made by the dolphin can be identified as equivalent to some of our own utterances - coarsely, there should be a commonality of belief such that "Click Squeak" is true IFF "That is a mullet". But we seem not to have been able to make progress in this direction. It seems instead that Dolphin and whale sound, while exhibiting complex patterns, does not correspond in the requisite way to our statements.
Some suggest that cetacean sounds are more like poetry or music than language. If that is so then we cannot find the equivalent statement in English simply because they are not making statements.
So here's my doubt: for Davidson, language must make statements. Yet here we have what appears to be a language that perhaps does not make statements*. The Davidsonian response will simply be that, therefore, cetacean sound is not a language. But that seems a bit to fast, too neat. Why shouldn't we count something that aural and complex as a language without statements?
The relevance of all this is that I have great sympathy for Wang's view that Davidson's "notion of conceptual scheme and conceptual relativism have a very limited scope". On a first reading I am not convinced that Wang succeeds in rescuing scheme-content dualism from Davidson. I don't see how there could be any scheme-neutral content, any more than there could be a thing-in-itself; for no sooner do we start to talk about it than we place it within a scheme.
But the introduction of a third truth value, with its implicit antirealism, might make for an interesting argument - but I don't see it here. The allegory of the riverbank and the text thereabouts seem to say that there is an interchange between scheme and content, whereas to carry their case Wang must show a separation.
Good thread. Damn nuisance, as Im occupied elsewhere.
[hide]* It might be worth adding that it is not necessary to show that cetacean language contains no statements for this argument to work; what counts is the mere consideration of the possibility that some such could count as a language and yet not contain any statements. [/hide]
I think Tomasello's more empirical approach might agree and disagree with Davidson on his idea of truth-condition statements and language. Rather, it is joint intentionality which can range all kinds of reasons, and is iterative. That seems to be what the research says.. Though there are echoes of Davidson's semantic triangle in Tomasello's research of joint attention.
If you don't say how it might disagree, then that doesn't much help.
Interesting. I like the metaphor. Can you expand on this a little bit? It seems really important to get a precise sense of what "the world" would have to consist of, in order for us to understand how it's separable from apparatuses, language, etc., and how it can have the kind of agency that could "speak back."
Can something both belong and not belong to a framing category at the same time? Can concepts like relevance, significance and mattering lead us to such a notion of a world whose very outsideness and subject-independence is what it is only as a variation of sense with respect to our concerns and purposes? If this appears as a solipsistic rejection of an authentically external world, then perhaps it was never such a world we were concerned with in constructing our sciences. Perhaps the world we ARE concerned with does not pre-exist the ways in which we interact with it, but is instead produced ( and changed) as what it is for us only in actual interactions. Perhaps our interest in the world is not in recovering pre-existing features from it but in enacting a world in felicitous ways. Only such an enacted world can speak back to us in our own language.
This strange way of thinking about subject-world relations is common to enactivist psychology, phenomenology, the later Wittgenstein, poststructuralism and hermeneutics.
Isaac
In that thread, I had an extended, interesting and intelligent discussion with @Isaac. Over the length of the thread we worked out a difference between "models" in conceptual schemes, as treated by Davidson, and "Models" as used in studies of consciousness and perception . See , and thereabouts. It was one of the most powerful interactions I've had on the fora.
has informed us that Isaac has died. No details have been made available.
I'm saddened by this loss. We differed strongly on our attitudes towards a number of issues - Covid comes to mind; and I know others had run-ins with him. I found him to be forthright, and admired the clarity with which he argued his case.
Farewell, Isaac.
And this is part of what I suspect goes amiss in Wang's paper. It's not that we can't seperate concepts from beliefs, nor concepts from meaning, but that it is questionable what a concept is, and what it does. .
That needs to be traced through the Wang paper. I'll just drop it here for now, lest I forget.
But I would have thought that a concept would have some kind of correspondence with an empirical or intellectual object. It seems more determinate to me than a belief - oh, Mary believes that vaccines are dangerous is a belief, but Id hardly call it a concept, would you?
Right.
Quoting Banno
You find many of the same problems as I do in Wang, concerning scheme-content dualism. I dont think the arguments are there on that front. Earlier in the paper, though, he discusses the question you mention concerning alternate truth-values and/or truth-value status in a given language. I didnt address that section at all in my OP, but its very interesting. Maybe someone would like to take it on . . .
Quoting Banno
I think its right on target to see Davidson in the context of defending (or assuming) a particular view of language. Indeed, this is one point where Wang seems to misunderstand him, or make too-hasty equations of terminology. For instance, he attributes to Davidson the identification of conceptual schemes with sentential languages. But Davidson explicitly does not do this. He uses words like association and relation rather than identification, and says that language and scheme will co-vary, but the thrust of his argument relies on clear differences among language, concept, and scheme.
That said, Davidson upholds Tarski-truth as the model of how propositions work. He also believes language must refer. Is it all we can say about language? The cetaceans are a good counter-example. So is human music. Musicians generally dont think that abstract music either states propositions or refers, but it seems impossible to get rid of the idea that music is nonetheless a language. Or, if thats questionable, that it communicates. What, then, does it communicate? What are dolphins talking about?
I think youre offering the cetaceans as an example of a genuinely incommensurable conceptual scheme if they can be said to have a language. And your guess is that Davidson would simply deny them that designation. Or perhaps we could convince him that here is a case of partial translation. Might this not be closer to whats going on with the cetaceans? You say we havent been able to make progress in the direction of translating dolphin sounds. Im sure youre right; I dont know much about it. But dont we treat all animals, even much less intelligent ones, as if they are saying something when they make their various noises? And it isnt just fanciful. I certainly can tell the difference between when my cat is saying Please Feed Me and when shes saying Eff Off, Im Sleeping.
So heres what we would need to ask Davidson: Do you require mental propositional content [or fill in whatever term you like for subjectivity] in order to constitute a language? Does the dolphin have to have the idea of Look, A Tasty Fish? Or are we willing to accept a functional/behavioral sense of what it means to communicate through language? I think we non-philosophical humans have already settled that for ourselves: We dont require that our pets know what theyre talking about -- quite literally. What they know, if anything, is mysterious. But what they mean to tell us is often something even a child can quickly pick up. So: partial translatability? We get some, but not most, of what they say. And the scheme-content dualism remains in place, since whatever translatability is possible is down to the sharing of concepts between two languages provided you give concept a free pass as a mental entity.
When a child is first learning language and points to the balloon and says balloo is that even a truth conditional type statement or just an example of joint attention seeking? What if he said ball ball when pointed? What if just said look! When pointing. I think Tomasello is saying that language starts as simply avenues for joint collaborative ventures. The content matters less than there is a form of theory of mind going on. That the person intends for you to see what they see and then a game ensues where the adult interacts with this, joining and making more complex interactions from there. This doesnt seem to be about the validity of the content of what the world is about. That is synthetic and formal, not primary to whence language? Its a philosophers take but not the empirically observed one from child development.
I'd say our interest in pre-existing features arises from our curiosity regardless of whether it is felicitous or serves other interests. However, we have reasons to be curious.
For example, we discover relations between language and the world that are asymmetric. Words can denote any feature, whereas features exemplify words that already denote them. New or discovered features can and are often defined ostensively, regardless of verbal languages.
Interesting thought. But it depends on who the we is here. I think the evidence is overwhelming that scientists have always until very recently understood their project as trying to understand the authentically external world. They may have been wrong to do so, but lets be careful not to read back into their projects a (post)modern view of science. For me, a more convincing challenge to the traditional idea that science constructs a picture of an external world is the actual work of physicists today. Someone who understands quantum physics better than I do, please correct me, but it seems to be the case that, while an independent external world remain ontologically likely, its no longer believed possible, on epistemological grounds, to know anything about it that isnt observer-dependent. I guess Kant would be happy!
Quoting J
When I say concerned with , I dont mean the way scientists have traditionally explained what they are doing when they do science. A central aspect of Husserls project was to show how we construct the idea of a world external us and then live naively within that construction, making the constructed the ground for the construing process. But the external is internal to the construing process.
mQuoting J
You should check out physicist Karen Barads Meeting the Universe Halfway for an alternate reading. She argues, updating Bohr, that every aspect of the universe is observer-dependent, but this agency is not restricted to living observers.
I was thinking of this lately in terms of the residents of the two-dimensional world. If they ask about the nature of their world, they might be
1. Asking from a vantage point outside their world, which they can't have due to conceptual limitations, or
2. Asking from within their world, looking for signs, such as when a spoon passes through their world, they see a dot which gets wider and then shorter, then disappears into a dot again.
I actually don't think either 1 or 2 works. They can't know things about their world. As for whether there's an outer world, maybe that's a different question. Did you see Chalmers' book Constructing the World? He goes on and on about Laplace's Demon. I'm not sure he really establishes anything though.
As for Husserl, we'd need a new thread! What you say about his project isn't wrong, but the distinction between what is external and what is phenomenologically present preoccupied him throughout his writings. I don't think he doubted for a moment that an external world was there to be encountered. What was important was the bracketing process, the epoche, without which the questions can't be meaningfully posed. But no one will ever have the last word on Husserl! :wink:
The more I think about this the more complicated it seems to get in ways that ultimately might only be resolvable through neuroscience, cognitive perceptual science. But, and perhaps too simply put, I think there is something like pre-lingual, pre-theoretic experience which can be contrasted to knowledge which is enacted within that experience, including things like categorization, association, etc. I agree with Wang that conceptual schemes are fuzzy, non-fixed, and have various levels of abstraction at which we engage and between which, different concepts relate. The idea that commonalities and differences makes complete sense to me, like in the sense that different cultures may have different language concepts but presumably have very similar color perception capabilities. Even when we look at something like the duck / rabbit illusion, ultimately the differences we interpret coexist with the fact we are looking at the same picture and nothing has changed about those perceptual aspects of it. After all, the job of the cortex is to capture information at sensory receptors (e.g. in the retina ) which we all share in common to a significant extent, and process signals that have a basis in object outside of us in the world which are common to us. Equally, I agree with idea that people can have something like different conceptual schemes but with substantial commonalities, like Wang seems to say.
Ultimately though, with regard to my interpretation of Kuhn, I believe that Davidson is attacking a strawman. The whole crux of Davidson's argument is that conceptual schemes are inherently untranslatable but referring to the same world of experiences. He seems to think that untranslatable implies incomparability and non-intelligibility but I think Kuhn means more like establishing a one-to-one correspondence between concepts, something which I think you can find in many languages - words that aren't necessarily beyond understanding to us but just don't quite match any kind of word we have or use, which can sometimes make them seem weird or even artificial. Because we are so unfamiliar, we may not even be good at using them in a way that comes across as natural when we try to speak that language.
Kuhn has a descriptive approach to science so I think he just says that often people do come across difficulties in understanding concepts in different paradigms, which then might make evaluating theories difficult; but that doesn't mean they can't be translated or understood in some way, after all, in the history of science we are talking about many scientists who probably do have lots of concepts in common and speak the same language. How could Kuhn have come to understand Aristotelian motion if he thought it was genuinely incomparable and untranslatable? You can probably look Aristotelian motion up on Wikipedia.
Another thing is that I think incommensurability is essentially just a generalization on scientific underdetermination which is roughly what is meant by his use of the phrase different worlds. This is more than translating words or rearranging meanings that refer to the same world but changing your theory about how you think the world actually is. Knowing how the world really is may be chronically underdetermined empirically, but I think it is also the case they will have completely different descriptions and counterfactuals about how the world would be if we had a perfect ability to observe it. Contrasts between something like Copernican and Ptolomaic views of astronomy is not about just changing meanings of the words but statements about how the world is which are completely different. The stars and planets exist on completely different trajectories in the two pictures which give different, contradictory facts about the world and how it would be if we were to observe it a certain way. It is just that from limited purviews, there may be practical difficulty in demonstrating those distinctions in empirical observation, or ruling out that the empirical demonstration might have been mistaken / faulty / misinterpreted, or that some other theory can account for that particular observation in the same way.
I think basically then that Davidson's notion of conceptual scheme here is fundamentally not what Kuhn was talking about, not and so a strawman is being attacked.
None of this matters unless there is an empirical element. Studying child development, neurology, physiology, cognitive psychology, evolution, genetics, biochemistry, anthropology, and the rest.
The best the "theories" can combine all these. Someone along the lines of a Terrence Deacon or a Michael Tomasello. More science than a priori linguistic philosophizing.
Philosophy of Language a priori, does best when studying its own synthetic, made-up things (logic), not so much logic-as-applied-to-human. This in itself, ironically, is a sort of incommensurability. Evolution is always about "usefulness", not about "truthfulness". How much our ability for interpreting the world in useful ways to stay alive equals truth, itself would need a third-party which can then have an infinite regress. The best we can do is explain "Why" we developed certain features such as language. However, it is an odd shoe-horn to then ask how well language makes truth-conditional statements, or if that is even the real function of language. Rather, the biology recenters these debates away from truth-finding, and more about evolutionary-biological, species-apt theories. What is it about the species Homo sapiens, being a bipedal primate with a specific branch from 2 million years ago, that brought about language? The universe wasn't say, "To formulate better truth-conditional statements". And to the extent that we have "truth-conditional" propositions of the world, and how much people's "schemas" shape them, it is all schema all the way down, but the schemas of individuals cannot be just uprooted from this biological framework, which again, has to be gotten at from an empirical perspective to understand.
Bats, because they are supposedly, famously, beyond our keen. But see here that we know quite a bit about what goes on in a bat's mind. Bats sing like birds. They learn new vocalisations from their community. They use it to "other" bats from outside their territory.
As points out we need empirical data, but that will not be the whole story. We also need good plumbing.
Thank you, , for your sympathetic and considered reply. This thread ought first pull apart the content of Wang's argument, in the light of Davidson's work, and see what is actually being argued. It won't, folk will give their opinion and move on.
So I'll first plagiarise myself to summarise what I take as the main argument in Davidson.
Davidson begins by characterising the notion of conceptual scheme he wishes to critique. A conceptual scheme is such that what counts as real is relative to the scheme, because the scheme supposedly organises and categorises our experiences. Hence, what is said in one scheme is incommensurable with what is said in some other scheme, since any standard that might be used to relate one scheme to another is itself part of one scheme or another.
Notice that he is not arguing that this is the case, but setting out the characteristics of the notion of conceptual scheme to which the article is being addressed.
Now we can apply convention T to conceptual schemes.
We saw that any conceptual scheme worthy of the title must be true. What we want to know is if there can be a conceptual scheme that is both true and untranslatable.
So slot that into our generalised T-sentence, replacing "s" with the mooted untranslatable conceptual scheme, and "p" with the impossible translation.
s is true IFF p
Think on that a bit. I hope it is obvious that we could not know that s is true, unless we had a translation of s; but by the very presumption that s is untranslatable, we reach an impasse.
We could not know that some untranslatable conceptual scheme was indeed true.
Hence, the very idea of a true, untranslatable conceptual scheme is incoherent.
Now the dolphin issue, mentioned above, questions the assumption that any conceptual scheme worthy of the title must be true.
I'd hoped that this might be what Wang addressed in "Redistribution Of Truth-Values Cross Alternative Conceptual Schemes", but it was not so. Instead Wan focuses on the Principle of Charity, claiming that it is muddled, repeating various trite examples. I think he is mislead here. Take the WMT vs CMT example. Both practitioners agree that there are human bodies, that these bodies can experience pain, that these bodies have a pattern of organs, and amongst these is a pancreas, and that there are ways to treat pain in bodies. There is overwhelming agreement. And yet we focus on a relatively small difference, a diagnosis of imbalance of yin and yang, as being untranslatable. Supose the CMT practitioner recommends Ginseng tea; maybe WMT will show that this does not work, maybe that it does, and identify a triterpene saponin that addresses the issue with the pancreas. Here WMT and CMT are no where near incommensurate.
And they cannot be, because they are dealign wiht the very same issues int he very same world. Charity holds.
I mustn't have understood what you are suggesting here. Davidson's argument is a reductio, beginning by assuming that there is a clear distinction between scheme and content and showing how this leads to inconsistency, and so rejecting the assumption.
In particular, it is clear at the conclusion of his article that Davidson is rejecting the notion of raw unmediated perception.
Davidson makes an interesting distinction between two sorts of possible worlds.
In one, we alter what is the case in this world in order to construct other possible worlds, associated with a dualism of necessary and possible sentences.
In the other, which he attributes to Kuhn but for which we might blame quite a few others, what is the case is held steady while those observing each create their own conceptual world. Doing this is what forces a divide between scheme and content.
The idea is that there is stuff, the stuff needs sorting, and the conceptual scheme is what does that sorting. Davidson is here squashing a vast range of philosophical ideas into few small paragraphs; and in summarising it I am insulting it further. Experience, sense data, phenomena, prediction, the given... all these philosophical garden paths bundled into one analysis for easy disposal.
So we have a distinction between stuff (content), and language as sorting that stuff by organising it (schema). So incommensurable schema would be incommensurable sorting of the same stuff. They must be about the very same stuff.
Now one might agree that we could disagree as to how to sort this or that; but it makes no sense to suggest we disagree about everything. Davidson talks of organising the closet as opposed to organising the shirts in the closet:
it's much the same point as Wittgenstein made in On Certainty; one might doubt something, but one cannot sensibly doubt everything; since then one must doubt the very stuff that makes doubt possible.
One can sort the shirts in the cupboard in a different way, but that would remain a sorting of the shirts. There would still be shirts, and so commonality. Two different ways of sorting the cupboard are not incommensurate. So one cannot make sense of incompatible schema in this way.
Just curious, this seems to be an incomplete sentence. Was there something that you meant to write after "We also need..."?
Yes, the meaning of the shirts already bound up with the integrated set of pragmatic relations that includes what they are being used for and how and where they are stored. In relation to this, I understand Wittgensteins hinge propositions as pragmatic presuppositions on which something like the meaning of a shirt hinges. Doubt, unworkability and breakdown get their intelligibility from within a totality of relevance uniting particulars on the basis of a network of in order to. But this totality of relevance isnt grounded by some link to an external cause. The causes are within the totality and the totally is perspectival.
What do you mean?
The later part explains it more.
Well, yes but I don't know what you are addressing in my post.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1312.4057.pdf
Rovelli shows Aristotle is not at all incommensurate with Newtonian physics, by translating him.
Brilliant.
Quoting Apustimelogist
All of this is grounded in nada unless empirical when discussing real human language. If humans are animals, which I believe they are, then it should be empirically based research that the theories are deriving and I mentioned some more theoretical biologists/anthropologists/psychologists that might have a theory more grounded in that. Why should it be taken on a priori grounds that are not tied to research. We don't do that with other processes that derive from nature. Language is for sure a higher order evolutionary trait, and tied with general cognitive evolution, but that is still the sciences.
Just went through this, very interesting and nice apologetics for aristotle, if you will. It does seems that it can be reconstructed as a mathematical approximation of Newtonian mechanics for particular domains. However, its actually still quite trivial to see the incommensurability of Aristotle's word view in the ontological baggage that contextualizes his physics of motion and is a consequence of his limited observations of the world. Its very clear that Aristotle's world view is totally incompatible with the world views of later physicists. You can even say the same about Newton's in contrast to a post-Einsteinian relativity where things like relativity of simultaneity and time dilation paint a picture of the universe which is just utterly metaphysically different to a Newtonian one where these things just cannot happen.
I also still think that the whole translation thing is completely exaggerated. Kuhn doesn't think that incommensurable paradigms are necessarily not mutually intelligible and he has explicitly mentioned the role of historians of science like himself in doing a form of translation of theories like Aristotle's. Seems unlikely to me that Kuhn's views of incommensurability imply the kind of incomparability that Davidson mentions.
I'm sorry, something must be lost in translation between us - both ways presumably - because I still don't understand exactly what you are contesting in this paragraph. What I have written there is more or less about what I believe Kuhn thinks his own theory of science implies, in contrast to Davidson.
If you're saying Kuhn is non-empirical, I guess I would reply that he was more or less writing as a historian drawing on actual events and case studies in the history of science. I don't really know what other kind of language research would have a bearing on this.
Perhaps incommensurability :D.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I'm writing on Davidson's theory on language, not on his theory about Kuhn, so I guess I meant to refer to that, or thought you were referring to that more directly. Davidson was using incommensurability also on language with conceptual schemas, etc. I am saying, rather than theories of language that are not based on empirical research, we should be looking more at what empirical avenues say about language, not a priori theories of it. Michael Tomasello or Terrence Deacon would be more empirically based, for example. It is theoretical because it is putting multiple empirical models into a cohesive whole, but it is based on empirical models more-or-less. Being that human language is derived from human capacities as a certain animal, in a certain environment, that seems to be appropriate.
Totally? Do you really want to use that word, particularly after saying "It does seem that [Aristotle] can be reconstructed as a mathematical approximation of Newtonian mechanics for particular domains"?
Quoting Apustimelogist
Quoting SEP, Thomas Kuhn
Hmm.
Maybe have a read of the section in that article on Incommensurability. It's far from unproblematic. There is something very odd about being forced into saying that we cannot claim Einstein is no better than Aristotle.
Well I think I agree with you generally. From my perspective, what people like Wittgenstein and Quine seemed to do is take away the foundation out from underneath meaning and justification in both language and knowledge. Under these perspectives, everything becomes about practise but there becomes no fact of the matter about the reasons for people's behavior. The way forward from there then seems to be learning empirically, scientifically exactly why and how people behave, use language, learn, perceive, how brains work, etc. I've actually always thought these philosophers (Kuhn too) feel like they resonate amicably with the brain and mind sciences.
As an aside, I think Kuhn was actually doing that kind of flavor of research I mentioned just noe but for the science - rather than looking for prescriptions about what scientists should do or are justified in doing (like Popper tried to do), he tries to look at how they actually do it, regardless of whether they are doing it in a way that seems correct or not.
This would indeed be the best way to salvage Kuhns argument. Im sure Davidsons insistence on the co-variance of concepts and language was, in part, meant to moot the point. But do you agree with this statement from Davidson?: If conceptual schemes arent associated with languages in this way [that is, strict co-variance], 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 ordinary structure. What do you think Kuhn might reply to this?
Yes, thats the key issue. Davidson says it very simply and effectively: Strawsons many imagined worlds [the first, relatively harmless metaphor] are seen or heard or described from the same point of view; Kuhns one world is seen from different points of view. And the argument is that you literally cant conceptualize one world, aka the very same stuff, in this way.
Im not sure Im with you on the T-sentence interpretation. Why does the translation have to be IFF? Wouldnt a more modal understanding be closer to what Davidson means?: s can be true if p We arrive at the same conclusion that its incoherent but without claiming that only being p renders s true.
The section in Wang on WMT vs CMT is by far the weakest in the paper. We could exercise charity ourselves here and agree to ignore it!
Isnt the upshot here, the concept so difficult for many to grasp, that conceptual schemes dont represent a pre-given world but enact a world? That is to say, the reason we cant link different schemes back to the one same world is because schemes introduce new elements into the world. Rather than funneling back to a unitary source, they are themselves the sources of new differentiations, new objects and worlds of meaning.
But also note how in talking against incommensurability Rovelli does not shy from "conceptual structure" -- that's still a working metaphor in trying to describe knowledge. So he's not exactly a friend to Davidson either.
It's been a minute since I've read that Davidson paper, and I'm finding myself more able to respond this time around. So I'm going to post first my response to Davidson, then go through Wang as a way of participating.
Feyerabend is quoted by Davidson:
I'd say there is such a thing as Kuhnian loss through meaning change as the scientific practices change -- "phlogiston" doesn't have the same meaning now that it used to because we don't use it as a serious scientific concept, but rather we use it as an example of how science undergoes changes and abandons concepts. We don't need to go along with Davidson's rendition of conceptual schemes as intertranslatable languages, and treating language meaning as something an individual can "check" strikes me as the wrong way since language is a collective practice. But I can't help but note that this "wrong way" is a common way of thinking so there's still something good about the paper's argument -- it forces a person to make sense of conceptual relativism while making the distinction explicit (be it scheme-content, or something else).
I find historicism adequate to the task of understanding concepts -- it's the historical method, as applied to texts, which allows us to differentiate between concepts, at least (I'm less certain about "schemes", though -- I'd rather talk about the structure of an argument or a philosophy than a conceptual scheme). And rather than Saturnian and English I'd just note that even German and English have problems of intertranslatability, and that this is commonly known among translators as a kind of irresolvable problem. Against the extensional emphasis I put forward poetry translation as a case where we are able to differentiate meanings such that we can partially translate one language into another language, even if we don't know how it is we do this. But then if we have an example of partial translation (and so the case against partial meaning translation can be set aside as being factually wrong), and a method by which we can differentiate concepts, then the question of how it is we're able to make the claim for conceptual-relativism is made explicit and doesn't rely upon an implicit scheme-content dualism: Just as we can learn English and German and translate meanings between languages so we can learn concepts which differ, and it is through that knowledge, rather than a criterion or a duality, that we are able to judge the meanings of sentences. Then it's just a matter of being acquainted with more concepts -- having more knowledge -- which would allow one to make a judgment -- one that could be false! -- that scientists are at least using different concepts (if not inhabiting different worlds -- being-in-the-world, perhaps, but even that doesn't follow by necessity).
And if we can do that then it seems that Davidson's objections are addressed, albeit not with the conceptual tools he chose to set it out with. We abandon scheme-content, and make the heady and exotic doctrine explicit. The question for me would be whether this still counts as a conceptual relativism, or not? In addressing Davidson's concerns do I, by that addressing, make conceptual schemes and relativism to conceptual schemes moot, or at least reducible to the predicate "...is true"?
The problem I feel is that while I doubt schemes, I don't doubt it on the basis of a criteria for translation due to even mundane examples of translation being known to not be able to fully translate meaning. In a way I'm accusing Davidson of having a philosophically pretentious theory of meaning in relation to how we actually use these words.
But I also doubt our ability to tabulate schemes very effectively such that we can make the relations between the elements of a scheme explicit. It seems to me that each time we try to render such a scheme it comes out slightly different -- or, at least, the meanings of sentences we use in describing such a scheme changes with each iteration, and so the task of articulating a scheme becomes incompletable, or at least artificial as we decide to hold some meanings constant in order to specify relations between them. At which point I begin to wonder-- why even call it a scheme if we are unable to articulate a structure without fiat? Why not just "a set of concepts", rather than a scheme, with the attendant difficulty of specifying what "concepts" means?
***
But now onto Wang's paper, which I've never read until now. So it's fresh, and therefore more of a first reaction to the paper (but I didn't want to post before having read the paper, so here it is)
I'm pleased to find Wang's statement:
Mostly out of vanity as it gets along with how I've managed to think through relativism in light of Davidson, and we seem to agree that separating conceptual relativism from Quinean relativism is an effective strategy for making the case.
I found this paragraph to be similar to my strategy above talking about English and German:
And this line of argument to get along with my notion of historicism being adequate to the task of differentiating concepts:
I'd say that these arguments highlighted here are well and good enough in that they highlight an underlying assumption which a relativist does not need to accept, which in turn gives room for the defender of conceptual schemes to come up with a different way to speak about conceptual relativism -- but Wang goes on to articulate a competitor all the same to give some credence to the idea that there are other ways of talking about conceptual schemes.
I found this potent:
A good bit of philosophy is accepting the conclusions of another philosopher, but then working out a different or opposite set of implications for that conclusion. His use of a thick/thin-experience distinction is good in that it gives a believable basis for thinking through concepts as relative: it's our thick experience of the world, the very one Davidson seems to care about in his closing remarks, that gives rise to the belief we are "in different worlds" due to the beliefs or concepts which shape our thick experience.
And I found this insightful:
In that he's making way for a post-Kantian conceptual relativism that makes sense in light of Quine. That's a great way of rendering the very idea at least coherent.
... I find this bit at the end relying upon evolutionary theory odd:
Because I don't think we can safely assume that, nor should we assume it, and even more so I don't think we need this assumption to make the case for a fuzzy distinction between scheme-content. And, even more, it would seem we'd have less reason to believe in conceptual relativism if we had some basic experiential concepts which are shared! If, in articulating a relativism we end up saying there's something the same between us it almost sounds like we're conceding the point to Davidson, that we do share concepts, and its this basis of shared concepts which makes it possible for us to articulate difference? Perhaps the difference here is one of degree, though -- which shouldn't be downplayed because sometimes the degree can at least be intense, and perhaps intense enough to want to use the word "radical" -- but it's at least similar to the notion that we have some kind of agreement from which we can articulate disagreement, putting the conceptual relativist in a shakey position if we want to express ourselves in terms of criteria.
Quoting J
I'm not so sure, here. One of the things that's nice is that it's an actual example. And differences or changes in meaning are frequently the way this thought works out, and here what's nice is that Wang points out that the difference of meaning isn't one of distributing "...is true" across sentences, but rather is a different kind of difference. Whether we ought to call this a radical or incommensurable difference I'm still on the fence about -- but I can at least recognize that the kind of meaning Wang is talking about isn't the same as Davidson's project of translation through truth. It's whether a sentence counts as truth-functional at all to a practice that marks the difference, rather than a distribution of truth-values.
I'm a historicist too.
Translators of poetry roughly divide, in my mind, between literal translators; partial translators; and those like Robert Lowell who provide 'imitations'. The last of these seem to me to be on the edge of saying that a language is a conceptual scheme.
A case-study outside the history of science would be Brian Friel's play 'Translations'. In the early 19th Century in a village in Ireland, there's a confrontation between the Irish, including the learned Irish, and English surveyors who have come here to 'map' the area. In performance, while the actors mostly use English (with a sprinkling of Latin and greek by the Irish), it is understood by the audience that the Irish and English are speaking separate languages and don't understand each other.
Conceptual problems involve recognition of a language: when the Irish speak in Latin, the bluff English don't recognise that it's a learned, separate-from-Irish language; they don't recognise that the native 'hedge-school' is even a school because it's not official.
The problems also emerge in the naming of places in two interlinked ways. One is that for the mapper, each place can only have one name, so they can't accept the fact that (as in any place, informally) most places have more than one name, plus that the area defined by that name is variable. Two is that the English are imposing an English or Anglicised name on a historically-derived Irish name, and insisting on it. The imposition of the supposed requirements of a technology, and the imposition of simple political power, create a different conceptual set of spaces: I'll be honest, I'm uncertain here whether 'scheme' is a useful or discardable word to express the basis of the supposed concepts involved.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Kuhn's theory about paradigm shifts and incommensurability is a meta theory about scientific revolutions. It is philosophy of science in that sense that it is about science. However, it is not a theory of science. Davidson's theory of language seems to be an attempt at something that should be in the realm of science. That is to say, how much does Davidson's theory conform to scientific understanding of how language evolved? By scientific I mean, observable, experimental, and fits in with previous scientific framework of genetics, anthropology, neurobiological, and the rest. If it doesn't, it can be considered an interesting a priori theory of language, but is that the right approach? I am saying, for language - why it exists, how it exists, and the like, it should be tied to those empirical approaches. The more we get away from that and talk about things like "concepts" in a vacuum or "correspondence" in a vacuum, we are getting away from ways to tackle the question to mountains built on mountains built on sand. Chomsky is a good example of this in many ways. He doesn't seem to care about the empiricism except as an afterthought to he his premade ideas about "minimalist project" or anything else.
I do get the point that philosophy can be used as tools for scientists to enhance their hypotheses, but that still entails engaging with the science itself. Here is a good example of someone who does take some ideas from philosophy of language but uses empirical research to test hypothesis and refine theories, creating a more grounded understanding in situ of language:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tomasello
So in regards specifically "incommensurability" as far as it is a problem (is it? or is it Davidson's problem), the research should guide the way to how translatable people's "schemas" are, what "schemas" (conceptual schemes), would even truly "mean" in any evolutionary, biological sense, and how to resolve such problems. The science would guide the way. It would be the starting point, the substance of the debate, and lead to more ideas about how to find better conclusions within that scientific framework. More theoretical, but possibly more satisfying, would then synthesize various findings from the scientific disciplines and make a more comprehensive, if yet more theoretical framework for which could possibly be the case, with the caveat, that at a future point, the science can always destroy this theoretical framework. That is to say, the framework has to be concrete enough to be disproven, but comprehensive enough to try to answer the "big questions". If it is so abstract and lofty as to never be disproven, then it is not a framework, but an elusive moving target that can always encompass anything, and thus says nothing meaningful.
Yep.
Quoting J
Mostly because that is what Davidson uses elsewhere, generating a theory of meaning.
Quoting J
Thank you. it's a missed subtly. Well, not all that subtle, since it is explicit in the last few paragraphs. Perhaps folk don't read that far?
Yes, or rather,
Quoting Banno
Schema include the standard by which they are to be assessed.
It may be true that "phlogiston" doesn't have the same meaning now that it used to". If so, it is worth drawing attention to our realising that this is the case. We've moved beyond the incommensurability of the duck- people versus the rabbit-people to the "transcendental" realisation of the duck-rabbit.
This capacity for "transcendence" (I don't like that word...) permits one to take on an historicist approach. So either one is parochial in taking on the mantle of one conceptual scheme in order to asses other; or one takes a position outside of the various conceptual schemes in order to assess them - an impossibility; or one agrees with Davidson in rejecting the notion of conceptual schema.
If we adopt the historicist perspective, then we must look at the situation at the time Davidson was writing. Davidson's philosophically pretentious theory of meaning was necessary in order to break through the wall built by Feyerabend and Kuhn by providing a formal backbone to his argument.
Further, if we take an historicist approach we must deal with the differing situations not just of Kuhn and Davidson, but of Davidson and Wang. Wang will not be addressing the same paper that Davidson wrote.
Quoting Banno
I am not really convinced by the referentialism talk there. I find it hard to believe that what we refer to wouldn't have a meaning that is itself theory laden to a some degree; otherwise, it seems difficult for me to see how you can always carry on maintaining these kinds of reference through very different theories or meanings without possibly trivialising what is being referred to and making reference very cheap. After all, plausibly very different things could produce the same empirical structure. You can't be totally sure what will be retained and what will change in the future so nothing is assured.
That said, I don't think that concepts cannot be retained in theory change, I am just not a big fan of that kind of referential talk and don't find causal theories of reference convincing or complete, nor especially any particular kind of theory of reference.
For some Kuhnian scenarios like mass, I think the retention is possibly indeterminate or underdetermined which makes it plausible or very reasonable to retain the same concept for mass; maybe you can also argue the other way but it doesn't seem to reflect how scientists have continued to talk about mass.
At the end of the day though, no matter how you want to gerrymander concepts or what is being referred to, Newtonian and Special Relativity are very different and imply fundamentally different ways that the world behaves. I think things like time dilation, energy-mass equivalence and relativity of simultaneity are radical enough to come under the notion of different worlds when compared to Newtonian. Even if something like mass can be said to have been retained, something else in the theory must radically change or be different to produce these effects. In other words, if the incommensurability is not in the mass, it has to be from somewhere else otherwise it would just be Newtonian mechanics again. While something can be said to be the same, something has changed fundamentally so I don't think it stops incommensurability without coming to the conclusion that SR and NM are identical.
Quoting Banno
Well, I wasn't using it in the sense you think I meant - as in wholes in contrast to parts. I was instead using it as a way of emphasis about how different Aristotle's world view really is.
Quoting Banno
I didn't mean to say that Kuhn's ideas were not about translation, but that people have exaggerated what he means by translation into something about unintelligibility rather than simple one-to-one correspondences of words.
Kuhn definitely did think that incommensurable paradigms don't necessitate unintelligibility. If that article looks like it suggests that, it is because it is being vague. I suggest that that quote about "certain kinds of translation are impossible" is talking about translation in the weaker sense I mentioned before: one-to-one correspondenxes between words. This doesn't preclude intelligibility, and I think the rest of that section that the quote is from seems to talk about translation in the one-to-one correspondence sense I mean. They seem to suggest that when they go into more detail about the loss of translation being due to re-alignments of lexical networks and things like that.
A different online encyclopedia is more explicit about Kuhn's later incommensurability views:
https://iep.utm.edu/kuhn-ts/#H4
For instance:
[i]"Translation for Kuhn is the process by which words or phrases of one language substitute for another. Interpretation, however, involves attempts to make sense of a statement or to make it intelligible. Incommensurability, then, does not mean that a theoretical term cannot be interpreted, that is, cannot be made intelligible; rather, it means that the term cannot be translated, that is, there is no equivalent for the term in the competing theoretical language."
"Kuhn noted that although lexicons can change dramatically, this does not deter members from reconstructing their past in the current lexicons vocabulary."
"Although there may be no common language to compare terms that change their meaning during a scientific revolution, there is a partially common language composed of the invariant terms that do permit some semblance of comparison."[/i]
So from these quotes, we might say that Kuhn is employing a stricter definition of translation in terms of word-for-word substitution. In the absence of such, this doesn't mean that intelligibility can't be had, either by learning the new "language" or perhaps even reconstructing it in terms of your own (though if you don't learn the new concepts maybe this isn't so true to what the new theory means). Kuhn suggests different taxonomies may have terms in common which could aide interpretation (and comparison). On top of this, incommensurability is in terms of taxonomies of scientific theories which completely ignores the rest of human language. There is therefore nothing stopping someone from the outside trying to construct an intelligible interpretation using language outside of the scientific taxonomies being talked about; I'm sure this occurs a lot in popular science.
So Kuhn, needs a one-to-one correspondence and so is much stricter. On the other hand, Davidson seems more interested in intelligible interpretation than trying to find words which have one-to-one correspondences: from Davidson's essay -
[i]"We can produce a theory that reconciles charity and the formal conditions for a theory, we have done all that could be done to ensure communication. Nothing more is possible, and nothing more is needed."
"It would be wrong to summarize by saying we have shown how communication is possible between people who have different schemes."
"how then are we to interpret speech or intelligibly, to attribute beliefs and other attitudes?"[/i]
He also claims:
"yet the existence of a common system belies the claim of dramatic incomparability."
Which seems only to be true when it comes to interpretation but not necessarily one-to-one correspondences.
Both the Stanford and he IEP articles on Davidson's philosophy also suggest that his interpretation / intelligibility view is a general feature of his philosophy.
https://iep.utm.edu/donald-davidson-language/#SH2b
"Thus, unlike a Quinean radical translator, who does mention sentences of his home language [i.e. 'she tentatively translates Gavagai! with her own sentence, Lo, a rabbit!'], a Davidsonian radical interpreter adopts a semantical stance: she relates speakers sentences to the world by assigning them objective truth conditions describing extra-linguistic situations and objects. It is in this sense that a Davidsonian linguist is an interpreter, and Davidson calls the project undertaken by his linguist the construction of a theory of interpretation."
To me this description seems more similar to someone learning the new language rather than just translating it into their own. Lack of translatability/interpretability for Davidson (where the interpreter cannot find the truth conditions for sentences) here implies one cannot relate the words to the extra-linguistic context, perhaps leading to Davidson's contention that an untranslatable language just doesn't make sense.
This part is relevant because in the partial translation part of his essay, Davidson is clearly viewing the situation partly in terms of radical interpretation as described in the quote.
I am not really sure I understand this bit at all but my intuition is probably yes it would make more complicated but I don't know how much difference it would make to Kuhn's perspective. I'm finding it hard to imagine exactly what Davidson means here though.
Quoting Banno
Precisely the opposite, aha!
(Quoting myself quoting IEP)
Quoting Apustimelogist
Theories can be interpreted and made intelligible, just there cannot be translation between the terms of incommemsurable theories.
Yes! And no! :D
Let's see... the historicist approach, as I understand the method, has no need for transcendence as much as situatedness. A historian is aware that they are coming from a perspective so much so that their are multiple theories of history and you choose one to write within. So rather than a transcendent view from outside of history the historian writes from where they are, at least in modern historiography. This is why multiple histories of the same event are important for understanding an event -- there are many points of view which must be elaborated upon in order to get a full sense of that event.
But, yes! I agree that in adopting the historicist perspective we must look at the situation at the time Davidson wrote, and I agree that Wang is not responding to the exact same paper which Davidson wrote -- the question I have is, why was it necessary to break through the wall of Feyerabend and Kuhn?
BTW, thanks for all your interesting thoughts on this topic.
As Banno says, theres a lot in your post to think about, so just a couple of initial reactions.
Quoting Moliere
I agree, youve managed to (in a good way) blur the distinctions sufficiently that this question is now key. My response is: Im not sure, and Im beginning to worry that this could lead to a merely verbal/historical dispute about how we ought to divvy up our terms.
The consideration of poetry translation is very good. Id love to know what Davidsons reply would be.
About phlogiston and meaning change: Really? This is a rather eccentric use of meaning, isnt it? Ill grant you that phlogiston now has vastly different connotations and employments than it originally did, but has the meaning actually changed? Or perhaps Im not understanding you deeply enough.
On the Wang paper, youve succeeded in highlighting passages that do seem to further the conversation, for which Im grateful. The point about the difference between truth-values and truth-value status still eludes me, though Id asked into it earlier in the thread, I think. Why would different assignments of either-true-or-false, rather than different assignments of true and false, make any difference to the question of scheme-content dualism? I dont see why the one is more alien or difficult to translate than the other.
This is pretty similar to my objection to the WMT vs. CMT section. You write that the difference of meaning isn't one of distributing ?...is true across sentences, but rather is a different kind of difference. And then you say, Whether we ought to call this a radical or incommensurable difference I'm still on the fence about. Exactly Wang hasnt convinced me. Im off the fence, on the side of no.
Thanks back :) It's always nice to feel appreciated.
Quoting J
Perhaps my repeating the mantra "meaning is use" is obscuring my judgment. However, yes, really. I wouldn't have any idea how to tabulate how much phlogiston, and yet many practicing chemists in the past would have started with that tabulation. It's very easy to imagine that it was the same as we do it now but since we aren't there (or would it be better to say "since we aren't then"?) we don't know that simply, meaning we have to make inferences. Further we don't really use the same instruments that they used at that time, which to me is the most important part in thinking about meaning in science (I'm more on the experimental side than the theoretical side).
So while I accept it sounds weird I think the meaning of phlogiston has sufficiently changed to count as a kind of big change at least in terms of switching concepts. I'm still on the fence about radical, though.
I feel I should note that for me the loss doesn't need to be a net-loss for it to count -- it's not like we change concepts for no reason at all. The important part there is that there is a loss of knowledge in changing concepts. Some loss is common in revolutions that aren't scientific -- why wouldn't the same hold with the social organizations of scientists?
Quoting J
In thinking about sentences which are false, but in the form of the proposition, I always like to go to the example of astrology. If this is a bad example for you then I can find another one.
The difference is in the way I interpret people who speak about astrology -- I would say astrology is a language which people use to talk about their or other people's identities/feelings/histories/etc. and look for a reason why they are the way they are. Which is to say that while it uses the words of planets and positions it doesn't mean that. So if we are to interpret these speakers with respect to the usual meaning we'd be forced -- if we are improperly performing a rational, literal analysis -- to say "These sentences are false. When you speak them I'd use these other sentences", to which we'd surely receive frustration because while I don't believe in astrology, the astrologist-speaking person usually does. But what's important isn't the literal meanings -- it's the talk about who they are and such that's important.
I think that the WMT-person would be inclined to interpret the CMT-person in the same manner that I interpret astrology, and that is what makes communication at least difficult -- but here Davidson would note that since I've stated the case in words we aren't in principle incommensurable. In fact he'd use my example above in a similar manner that he uses the ketch example, I think. But note how this argument can be rendered in the transcendental form: the only possible way for us to disagree is if we agree. We disagree, and therefore we agree (at bottom) :D
But then I have to admit that there is a solid difference between meaningful disagreement, which does seem to need agreement to at least continue, and silence or absurdity. So Davidson still has a point to me, and I feel, in reading all this, that I'm even more uncertain than when I started in spite of spilling so many words.
Can a scientific theory talk about the notion of truth though in the way Davidson does? Can science tell you about translatability in the sense a philosopher like Davidson is interested in? I think this kind of theorizing still has role alongside the more scientific stuff, looking at stuff the science doesn't directly look at, even if its more about analyzing our prior intuitions.
Not sure I interpret you correctly, but I think what you say may be correct in the case of Kuhn's incommensurability /"conceptual schemes". Scientists construct models of how the world may be beyond the limitations of direct observation. Its not just about fitting labels to observations; scientific models operate in the opposite way too in the sense that they stipulate what can and might happen in certain situations. We try to make sense of observations by constructing models of worlds which is not directly observable. Different scientists may happen to be drawn to different models that say completely different things about the world.
No, the theories are incommensurate because they don't have matching directly translatable terms but because they are incommensurate doesn't prevent someone from one background learning the other in a way that is intelligible, or perhaps reconstructing an interpretation of it that they find intelligible.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Im inclined to say that for Kuhn its not a question of a theoretical scheme, or an aspect of it, being beyond the limits of direct observation, but of direct observation being in itself an element of discursive practice. What we observe cannot be divorced from methods of measure and apparatus of observation. They are intrinsic to the meaning of what is directly observed. This is where Davidson gets confused, I think. He understands schemes as either fitting or organizing sense data, surface irritations or sensory promptings. While it is certainly true that for Kuhn scientific practices and theories organize their subject matter, the content they organize does not consist of such stuff supposedly external to discourse.
Joseph Rouse puts it this way:
I would say you could argue that they are somewhat equivalent, the ambiguity of the latter implying the former.
Quoting Joshs
Can you elaborate on what this means?
My sentiments exactly! But I think this is one of the great benefits of doing this kind of intensive and text-based discussion: You understand from the inside out, so to speak, why these questions are so difficult to resolve.
We can write from the point of view of those who see the rabbit, or those who see the duck. That's being "situated" because we are able to contrast the two . But we can also from the view of those who see the duck-rabbit. With what is this to be contrasted?
Or if you prefer, being "situated" is always post-hoc.
It could be built in, as with the residents of the two dimensional world. We can see that they're conceptually limited, but they can't even see us.
Yes, I think that's the idea: that there's no real way to get around the post hoc choice of a situation to write a history from so the best one can do is specify it. You pick duck, you pick rabbit, or you pick duck-rabbit and organize the documents to tell your story accordingly. There's a pluralism here: they're all good for something, and a fuller understanding of history arises by including all of the perspectives. They're still bound by the documents and such to demonstrate their case, too: it can't just be making shit up.
So I have two points.
1) The content of Tomasello's point which might inform Wang's approach (perhaps?)
2) A critique of the a priori Quine approach in general (mainly the idea of conceptual schemes as a thing outside of any observations/experiments),
Starting with the content, taken from the OP for example:
Quoting J'
Cabrera reviewing Tomasello has this summary of Tomasello's theory of "shared intentionality":
Quoting Ivan Gonzalez?Cabrera1
IFF this is leading to an empirically informed and accurate theory of human language, then indeed, there has to be something about human evolution that allows for a sort of "common-sense" way we interpret the world that is "theory-laden", only in the sense that we have a "theory of mind" capacity shared in some sense with other great apes, but a novel/unique sense that by the age of 3 we have the ability to have "joint ventures of intention" with other humans. This equates to a sort of "principle of charity" (pace Davidson), that has to be there for language and cultural diffusion to work in general.
To the second point about the greater project of some philosophy of "conceptual schemes" that is not derived from observation/experimentation, look at this other quote critiquing Tomasello's theory. Now, first let me say, Tomasello himself was very influenced by philosophers such as John Searle with their idea of "social facts". But he did not stop at just going off on a mind-journey. He actually experimented and observed. Now, here is a critique:
Quoting Henrike Moll1 & Ryan Nichols2 & Jacob L. Mackey
Ok, so the point here is to not just completely give you a 180 of Tomasello. These colleagues admire and generally agree with Tomasello's theory, but are pointing to some scientific studies that may challenge some of the details of his (generally agreed upon) view of joint intentionality. That is to say, it is building upon his theory, through empirical means. It isn't just fighting non-empirical thought with non-empirical thought. Rather, the empiricism informs the substance and conclusions of the debate.
Presumably, these conflicts will be resolved with further studies which will then circle around a narrower consensus that is based on the evidence. Arguably, a "meta-theory" then of the complex phenomenon of language can be constructed from these types of empirical studies and consensus-building.
On Searle, I wrote:
Quoting Banno
So where does Tomasello differ to Searle, what sort of evidence is there, as opposed to hypothesising, and how does that fit in with this thread?
Yes, this is the theory I am (more-or-less) supporting, but not because it sounds good (which it does sound very reasonable), but because it has been tested and currently being refined in various experiments.
Quoting Banno
So he doesn't differ tremendously from Searle. He in fact, is confirming Searle's hypothesis. But my point is that these debates on language (is it commensurable, do "conceptual schemes" even exist as a phenomenon in human psychology), should be empirically derived and tested, not just remain at the level of theory built on various traditions that philosophers have made up and thus become their own thing.
Searle is only as good as experiments reveal him to be correct. Same with any philosopher regarding language. It seems to me it should be a problem situated in the empirical sciences. It is one of evolutionary and neurobiology, as well as cognitive and developmental psychology. One can throw in comparative animal studies and anthropology as well, as it touches upon all of it.
However, as a "meta-theory of language- its origins and function", those more empirical fields are most relevant in developing it.
If I am to take the idea of "conceptual schemes" seriously (why should I, for what evidence other than it's in a certain philosophy tradition used by Quine), then perhaps Wang is supported here in his idea of "common-sense" and Davidson is supported in his own way with his theory of "principle of charity", in that evolutionarily our brains, by age three are neurobiologically predisposed to care about what others think and how you can get them to see what you are thinking. The common-sense in a way, is built in. Otherwise, all communication is incommensurate. We would be going back to ape-world where there is a "gulf" of common-ground of intention. It would go back to simply the "I-world" of non-joint intentionality. I take the "joint intentionality" as a common-sense of sorts. A built in ability to carry on "joint ventures of intention" from early development.
But now I think I am just restating what I said in my earlier post, so I suppose it is now on you to see where I am not fitting in to Wang et al and the OP's idea of "conceptual schemes", as I laid out my ideas for both 1 and 2 in the previous post. One was about specifically how Tomasello confirms a sort of common-sense (I am connecting it via joint/collective intention being a foundation and roughly conforms to that notion that there needs to be some common ground of experience), and then I am making a broader critique of making theories that are not empirically based in the first place. I can go on and on, but I'd have to see where your issue or lack of understanding of what I am saying lies. In other words, I'd have to work with you in some sort of joint intention of understanding that may or may not be fruitful :).
Coincidentally, theres an article in the new Phil. of Science by Lorenzo Lorenzetti called Functionalism, Reductionism, and Levels of Reality thats apropos. Lorenzetti talks about theories rather than conceptual schemes, but I think his questions apply.
Suppose A and B are rival theories, but B can be functionally reduced to A. (This would apply to all the examples Wang gives, I think.) So why not invoke the extension/intension distinction and maintain that the reduced and reducing entities are coextensive and identical but have a different intension? As he says, this would be a basic Kripkean response to the question of radically different theories. But the problem is, this doesn't explain the asymmetry of the relationship. A and B dont just offer different descriptions; the claim is that B can be reduced to A (crudely, that A provides a better explanation) but not the reverse. Lorenzetti calls this the puzzle of identity, because we seem to want to say two contradictory things: that A and B wind up talking about identical entities, and that they arent the same because the reduction relation is asymmetrical.
Lorenzetti has some good ideas about how to resolve this, but my question concerns the astrology example. Im realizing that, unlike a traditional pair of incommensurable scientific theories, astronomy doesnt actually claim to offer a reductive explanation of everything contained in astrology. Since astrology is talking about human behavior, among other things, a truly alternative explanation would have to go far afield from astronomy and invoke some psychological/biological laws. What, then, do we want to say is the relationship between astrology and astronomy? Asymmetrical doesnt seem to cover it. Any ideas?
I would propose this idea is even more acute in more established academic sciences (unlike "astrology"). For example, I would think human language should have an overriding theory for its origins and function, but that is far from clear. Often there is no consensus within a field (anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, etc.) let alone between fields. Terrence Deacon wrote a book called The Symbolic Species which focuses much on semiotics and the sign relation, etc. However, none of this kind of speak is in Tomasello's notion of language as deriving from "joint attention". So how do those two theories fit together? Should they? Can they? Why are they so disparate-seeming? How does one create a synthesis of the two, or is this not the correct approach?
This then leads to the point of science. Is science leading to consensus or is it just interesting experiment after interesting experiment? Some things are amenable to no more questions (there is a particle for mass, these biological molecules work with these other ones, etc.), and there are some that are more abstract. The more abstract questions then become widely various in their interpretations and methodology. There are so many "findings" from "studies" that if you go to any science website, none seems particularly like a "breakthrough" because there are so many theories touching on the same thing saying different things and possibly not even connecting with the other studies (though some probably are). Science, the pursuit of, has become so various that it creates a lot of noise.
I'm late to this discussion and haven't looked into what other responses there may have been to this. So please excuse me if this is redundant.
Having spent some serious time thinking about and debating against Plantinga's Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN), I think a strong case can be made for human linguistic ability being evolutionarily adaptive, on the basis that it does provide humans the ability to communicate truths to each other. Undoubtedly partial truths, but a degree of truth that has historically been adaptive for humans. I think I would say that biology does recenter, and in the process expand the fields of knowledge that are relevant to the discussion. However, I'd emphasize that that is far from saying that humans commmunicating truths is out of the picture, given naturalistic evolution. (As Plantinga suggests.)
I am not saying that we do can't make truth-apt statements, but rather, if science is indeed telling us about the natural world, it would have be demonstrated empirically. And I'm sure if we look up various experience we can find evidence of that. But that demonstration would doubtfully move away from evolutionary or at the least naturalistic accounts for it. There are some, Chomsky comes to mind, who are both naturalists, but not evolutionists when it comes to language origins. Using simply his powers of incredulity, he supposes language came about in one major exaptation (not adaptation) via a massive rearrangement of brain architecture or some such. According to him of course, he needs no evidence. Apparently, he thinks "self-talk" really came first and thus language was more about cognitive space than it is about communication. Interesting idea, but again, it needs empirical proof.
Now, you can then turn around and say how do I know that empirical proof is the way towards a truth using some combination of Hume's Problem of Induction. Indeed here is where we can only speculate, and I can provide that speculation, but we know it "works" in terms of application and hypothesis verified or falsified by observations.
That is to say, clearly for humans, some accordance of prediction, problem-solving, and inferencing are necessary for our survival. The fact that hypothesis have been experimentally shown valid and applied via technology seems a pretty good indicator that we have a grasp on various things. But notice, we probably can't have a grasp on everything in its fullest picture. You can never tell if every theory one holds is THE truth, only that it works as far as the methods we know how at this time and place. To throw the baby out with the bathwater seems like a bad faith move to make theological point.
My point more broadly was that the more it is shown that language is embedded in evolutionary development, the more you are grounding it in the "real". The more you move it to some isolated thing, like a computer program, you are moving away from the origins and functions of language to a fantasy-land of how language arose and the reason for it. It's like studying computer language AS IF it was detached from the intentions of its programmer (in this case evolutionary fit).
Have a read of this: A Stanford professor says science shows free will doesnt exist. Heres why hes mistaken
Here's the conclusion:
Observation, and empirical science generally, is insufficient when conceptual clarification is needed.
I agree with the author of this site's conclusion about Sapolsky's conclusion. Admittedly, I haven't read his full book. Assuming the author of this article has read it... it seems Sapolsky, though informed in various senses regarding the neuroscience behind decision-making and one's disposition to choose a course of action, doesn't seem to engage with the broader philosophical debate that he is venturing into.
But this isn't quite what I'm talking about when it comes to language. The question can be, "Is language originated in and a function of evolutionary forces?" If the answer is yes, then truly it is more a matter of empirical research for how language originated, and what the functions of language seem to be for our species. I especially bring up Chomsky because he brings up the a priori, but intriguing idea that language was more about "cognitive internal talk" or something of that nature, rather than starting out as externalized avenues for joint attention (Tomasello, Searle, et al.). Chomsky may have a point, but I'd like to see more hard evidence for it. He did say there is "overwhelming evidence".. Not so sure of that Chomsky...
But whence this pursuit of truth? I mean, I make fun of the Wittgenstein stuff, but his idea of language games and deflating the need for "certainty" was not necessarily wrong in the sense that philosophy is a tradition that goes back to the Greek (Cartesian) notion of TRUTH (certainty). But then I do criticize Wittgenstein by creating his own echo-chamber of linguistic self-referentialism. Rather, he should have then said, "And now let's look at the evidence based on the empirical research in anthropology, neuroscience, and the like."
But here we have the logical positivists who had a fetish for both empirical verification and logic. In the middle we have squishy things like how is empirical verification to be actually verified (or falsified?). Are scientific disciplines and studies commensurable if done in completely different fields and techniques? Are languages commensurable? Are individual people's "conceptual schemes" even commensurable given different initial conditions and frameworks? And we get the inklings of broader differences in pragmatist/post-modern versus analytic/positivist ideas of truth.
Well, if we are to agree language is an evolutionary development, I would think we should look at how it is that humans develop language, what are the biological substrates of language, what is the archeological evidence, and the like. From here, we can build up a theory as to how it is that language helps us to survive. And indeed, that may be how aptly we can use our experiences to make inferences, problem solve, and the like. IF Tomasello et al is correct, then language's primary function is to allow for joint attention, which led to other cultural collaborations. If the question is, "Is there some theoretical component to even 'common sense/experience'?" then the answer would be "Yes, some sort of joint attention component is built into the human language learning mechanism". That comes from empirical research though, not from a bunch of questions asked by someone in an armchair. It's a good start, but it's not where the question is confirmed.
This is a somewhat cringe-worthy statement.
The process is called punctuated equilibrium - a well respected theory of evolution which is perfectly capable of accounting for a relatively sudden exaptation of a universal grammar among humans in our evolutionary timeline.
Also, exaptations are adaptations - !?!?! - just that that which is addressed is adaptive due to a secondary function relative to that function it initially had when it first emerged. Wings used for flight are one example of this. But one doesn't claim that this major exaptation is not adaptation.
As to evidence for universal grammar, there's plenty. Pinker's book The Language Instinct, for example, is a work that makes a very good case for it.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Interesting. Can you provide some reference that substantiates this otherwise vacuous claim.
Up you get, then.
:razz:
I mean I'll gladly read about the research and share!
But something tells me, you are super into the science yourself. And I am just holding the empirical tradition to its own need for empiricism.
You are aware that nucleic acids, neurons, and brains don't fossilize - much less behaviors. Which leaves us with best inferences when it comes to the evolutionary history of psychological attributes such as human language.
So, I am not saying that it can't be true, but that many biologists disagree and have more evidence to back it up. I am not even disagreeing with the notion of varying speeds of evolutionary development (pace Gould and Eldredge). Rather, many biologists think that language occurred drawn out over species, probably starting with Homo erectus, and for social needs, not as a unique, all at once event for internal self-talk or mentalese.
Wow, I just found a podcast about this very subject!! Here it is: https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2023/08/21/ep323-1-tomasello-chomsky-language/#:~:text=Tomasello%20disagreed%20with%20Chomsky's%20claim,innovatively%20using%20complex%20sentence%20structures.
Maybe @Banno would find it interesting...
But, the one I was looking up is here:
Quoting PAUL IBBOTSON & MICHAEL TOMASELLO
Quoting javra
Ok, then let me clarify. What I meant by this is that for Chomsky this new feature was not adapted for, but came by accident "all at once". This is him, not me talking, so I am not sure what you want to call that. I think he places this final phase in which language appeared later than most anthropologists/evolutionary biologists would claim. He seems to believe the notion that it was basically just a feature of a brain that developed a certain way for various happenstance reasons not related to enhancing that feature (of language use) and out of this change in brain architecture that happened, language appeared on the scene.
Quoting javra
Yes I'm aware of this. I don't even think Tomasello would disagree there is a component in our brains that helps with language acquisition. Rather, it is more the how and why, and how much this has to do with our being a social species, rather than a happy accident of brain architecture.
Quoting javra
See article above for one.
Indeed, all the sadder for empiricists that they have less to talk about :sad:.
OK, to make use of some of that armchair stuff called reasoning, first off, when we address "language" what are we referencing: A) communication or B) a grammatically sensible series of symbols?
Bees have outstanding communication skills, to not yet address the great apes or even monkeys for that matter. (Or else trees, but I'll leave this last one alone.) Communication of course evolved among different species of hominids, most of which died out.
But when it comes to language as grammar-dependent communication, the issue drastically changes. You are, I presume, familiar with the mitochondrial eve notion. In parallel, when it comes to grammatical language, one hominid's beneficial mutation which granted it the capacity for grammar who, as such, was immersed in a population wherein no other was endowed with it just might have held a significant evolutionary advantage. Why can only be best speculation, but it could have included the ability to think in greater abstractions (self-talk as you term it). Still, whatever the reason, this one individual might then have had more mates, leading to reproduction of these genes, leading to an initially small population of grammatical-language speakers, eventually leading to us.
I'm not here trying to make a case for particulars. But, unless the same thing happened multiple times via analogous evolution which later turned into convergent evolution - highly unlikely to say the least - then our current species-wide grammar adaptation is then on a par to how all humans are descendants of some mitochondrial eve. Only that in the former, there was a significant mutation involved (in our brains, of course) which facilitated grammar usage.
Quoting schopenhauer1
A mutation (which happened to be beneficial).
Quoting schopenhauer1
Of course. There was no grammatical language before grammatical language was. Its a quantum leap of sorts on account of a mutation, one that fits a punctuated equilibrium model of evolution.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Can you help me out in pinpointing it by giving a specific quote from the article.
To be continued. I suggest listening to part 1 and 2 of the podcast for more background.
Since I'm short on time, I'll try to listen to those podcasts if they provide an alternative evolutionary theory for how grammatical language developed - instead of merely being naysayers in respect to universal grammar theory.
Do they provide such an evolutionary theory alternative to how grammatical language developed?
Part 2: https://partiallyexaminedlife.com/2023/08/28/ep323-2-tomasello-chomsky-language/
Tomasello 1 and 2: seems to be about agency more generally
https://youtu.be/R5VB72dVH7A?si=9oDsojDwJ8U35pUH
https://youtu.be/WL9UU0bqFzE?si=MwvEV9MuRnQW-E-w
Quoting Apustimelogist
Perhaps we should consider the possibility that incommensurability is not as drastic as it seems. There are a number of ways in which we can see a bridge of some kind. First, not only is it possible to for someone not only to learn both Newton and Einstein, but also to use one or the other as appropriate in context. Second, it was essential for the acceptance of Einstein that it explained all the old data (already explained by Newton) as well as the new anomalous data. This suggests that while reference may break down in some areas, it must be maintained in others - at least if the new theory is to compete with the old one. Third, the practices must be recognizable as the same (similar) or different if incommensurability is to be identified at all and when practices are not purely verbal (even if theory-laden), the possibility of sharing references across the divide becomes essential.
Quoting wonderer1
Adaptive, yes. But also so much more. Theoretical practices are important, but only to creatures that have values, wants and needs, doubts, questions, mistakes - and these need to be expressed, communicated and even discussed as well.
It is hard to know how to proceed further. The big problem is how far the practice of the relevant science should be taken on board here.
Quoting Moliere
Yes. The agreements required in order to disagree and, equally important, to reach agreement. seem particularly important to me. But I don't see that necessarily rules out incommensurability that prevents reaching agreement, there must be sufficient commensurability to recognize difference.
Quoting Banno
... and if only people would let philosophers get on with what they do best!
Yes, definitely, I agree.
Quoting Ludwig V
I am not entirely sure it is *essential*. Maybe acceptance may have been unlikely in the Einsteinian case - who's to say - but it doesn't strike me as impossible that there is a shift in preference to a new theory without it having explained everything the old one did. But obviously, this kind of thing really depends on the specific scenario.
Quoting Ludwig V
I don't agree reference must be maintained. I think its plausible one could explain the same data with very different constructs.
Quoting Ludwig V
I go through this topic in some previous posts in the thread that Kuhn's incommensurability does not preclude mutual intelligibility either of theory or practise and I don't see how shared reference is required for that mutual intelligibility in any way, in terms of scientific theories themselves. Incommensurability is not inherently about some inherent sense of intelligibility or communicability, its about whether the concepts in different theories correspond to each other.
I would say that if both theories are explaining the same data, reference has been maintained. And I never meant to say that all references must be maintained. Just enough to establish that they are both theories of the same things, or at least the same world.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I was trying to be brief, but in this case I was too brief. As I understand it, the point is that Einstein is more accurate that Newton, and the difference between them at "normal" - sub-light - speeds is negligible for many purposes.
Quoting Apustimelogist
"Correspond" is a strong word. I would compare different languages (I'm not saying that "theory" and "language" mean the same thing). We can recognize that two languages are about the same world and even about the same things, so long as some (most?) references correspond; it helps if some (most?) concepts overlap, at least roughly. But we can recognize at the same time that that is not true of all references or all concepts.
It seems to me that incommensurability is really quite vague.
Perhaps that's why Davidson was so keen to equate it with nontranslatability; at least this is something you can demonstrate. But he also maintained that there is difference between concept and language, so the question doesn't quite resolve. A very non-Davidsonian way of putting the question might be, "Is it the 'concept' part or the 'scheme' part of a 'conceptual scheme' that's allegedly incommensurable?"
Now, there's a problem.
I have a dim memory that Aristotle characterizes the square root of two as "incommensurable". That would be a different sense again.
Perhaps we need someone to dissect out various uses and various problems.
So what, we are going to praise science and not look at the evidence in one fell swoop? Screw German Idealism but praise low key armchair language theories? If we are going off peoples armchair notions, give me some interesting shit at least.
What is the legitimacy of conceptual schema in the scientific literature or is it a neologism of an idea based on a thought of a persons notion of an idea
It was a joke!
More seriously, the question where philosophy ends and science begins is not clear and is contested.
What is clear is that when conceptual clarification is needed, observation, and empirical science generally, is insufficient.
I share your irritation with low-key armchair theories, but am also irritated by over-confident (and over-excited) generalization from scraps of evidence.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I agree that's one of the issues in the background of this thread.
Some thinking out loud:
Incommensurable is the word I'm tempted by :D
But then it seems to be too convenient, in a way. It depends upon just how radical is radical incommensurability, I think -- taking Kuhn's book sometimes it seems a matter of harsh disagreement, and sometimes it seems they inhabit different experiential worlds which in turn give the theories meaning which in turn explains their radical incommensurability.
Feyerabend made the claim that astrology could be a kind of research program, and it's for this reason that I often think through it as an example. It seems to me that one could, if they wanted, perform a scientific examination of astrology, but that this is not how we relate to astrology at present, be we believers or skeptics in its truth. They are at cross-purposes, and so rather than being incommensurable due to experiential difference they are simply trying to do different things entirely while having a superficial resemblance to one another. Astronomy, as practiced by science, is trying to do science with respect to the stars and planets and such, while astrology is trying to soothe people's fears about the future or their place within the world or what it is they ought to do with their life today: one is descriptive of the universe, and the other is therapeutic. And what Feyerabend would point out is that when astronomer's attempt to debunk astrology they end up looking like one another rather than looking like a proper scientific enterprise; appeals to authority and a general belief in progress from the primitive to the modern frequently substitute for a proper scientific or philosophical analysis of the concepts, where you can find some cases of the stars influencing life -- Feyerabend points to plants responding to solar flares, and oysters responding to the waves which in turn is the result of the moon. It's not what the astrologists say, but that's no excuse for the philosophical examination of astrology.
So minimally I think I'd say they are at cross-purposes, and so this gives a kind of incommensurability that's not conceptual, exactly -- if someone is trying to dance on a floor and another person is trying to tile that floor at the same time then they are incommensurable in the sense that they are working at cross-purposes within the same space.
If we have people working at cross-purposes does that then give us a reason to believe they are conceptually incommensurable? In a way it makes sense of Davidsonian charity as a requisite for intertranslatability --if we want different things then we have less of a reason to extend charity and then speech becomes interpreted in a manner which it's not being employed for, and if we aren't even aware that we're speaking at cross-purposes then we are in a kind of defunct communicative relationship. That at least gives some grounds for judging whether or not our respective "camps" are incommensurable. But it's not exactly conceptual anymore -- it's practical, in the sense of praxis, which seems to me to be a bit more mundane.
But perhaps this is just the result of finding an explanation: when we understand things they seem a bit more mundane. Wasn't that the point of explaining, to make it less surprising? To make it more understandable? So there's a sense in which this explanation dispells the belief in in principle incommensurability.
Though there's still @Banno's example of Dolphins, which I think it is a good example to think through with respect to intertranslatability too. Rather than martians we can just look to our large-brained ocean mammals as a kind of alien which is clearly social and communicating, but seemingly we are unable to translate theirs into our language.
The part that I'd still be uncertain about, at least, is whether or not they inhabit a different world or not. In fact it seems that we could set this as an aside entirely: insofar that we're able to tell that other humans inhabit different worlds so we'd be able to do the same if we are able to communicate with dolphins. But the Davidsonian argument against conceptual schemes -- insofar that conceptual schemes are what lead to different experiential worlds -- presents a difficulty in that by understanding incommensurable worlds we make them no longer incommensurable: what appeared to be radical difference was no more than simple human ignorance. But that does not then mean the Dolphins are in an entirely different world from us as much as it means they experience the world differently, just as you'd expect for any creature which has different capacities but is also social and needing to collectively understand in order to accomplish species-level goals. So in a way, due to this, here we are understanding the Dolphins even if we cannot talk to the dolphins (since we are not dolphins) in the sense that we see they are a species which relies upon other members, like ourselves, and so we interpret their songs and movements as a kind of language -- that is, we're already crossing the in principle level of incommensurability which Davidson speaks against as impossible.
The question sort of becomes: is this what was ever meant by incommensurable theories? Probably not, given how little dolphins feature in Kuhn's or Feyerabend's work ,at least to my knowledge. But, all the same, it's a good point to bring up about truly alien conceptual thinking: if it were, then we don't understand it, by the very notion of "alien"; however, this might be a bit of a bulldozer in the face of the seemingly incommensurable between human beings, which requires a bit more nuance to see in what way it's not incommensurable.
No problems! :smile:
I guess what it comes down to is how much should philosophy be the handmaiden of science. The continental philosophers, and less-empirically-tied philosophers in general don't have to justify this. Oddly, since they don't have to make commitments to science (what they might call "scientism"), they don't have to justify why they aren't working off that framework for their metaphysics/epistemology.
However, traditions stemming from scientific naturalism (modern empiricisms, logical positivisms, OLP, or anything that stems from that Frege/Russell/Analytic tradition really), then has to justify why it is that it would armchair philosophize anything over and above the scientific data/research/studies. It can perhaps save a bit of space for itself with its obsessions with logic and math and symbolic logic in general, but that just becomes highly technical jargon, and not necessarily "what is the case". You then have quasi-theories of language that are kind of emergent from debates around debates of debates of former philosophers, but are these just epiphenomenal to the field, or actually the case? Well, if you are committed to empiricism, then I would suppose what is closer to "actually the case" is the scientific evidence, not journal articles leading back to neologisms from various early analytic philosophers.
So my own idea I guess is that philosophers of the empirical bent have to be committed to where the evidence from science takes them, otherwise they are not in the empirical camp anymore. And if they do this, they can help clarify various results of the findings into meta-theories, or offer the very frameworks for which hypotheses can be framed to do the experiments and observations.
Now, I do think that commensurability is an extremely important thing- not only for history of science, but between the sciences and even intra-findings within the same field. That is to say, philosophers can help make sense of the findings and help scientists with interdisciplinary ways of finding seemingly disparate findings that are using different techniques but are investigating the same phenomena. Otherwise, as I stated in an earlier post, science just becomes a noisy room of various disparate findings that don't necessarily go together or create a meta-theory of the smaller ones.
Starting from Tomasello you are rather assuming there is just one account of joint/shared attention. But there are a number of philosphical options. Among armchair folk, that is.
There is a more individualistic approach from Michael Bratman, who's written a book about it. For him a shared intention can be adequately represented as a combination of individual intentions to do the same thing, more or less. This doesn't require a conceptual leap in the justification of language to the sort of 'cooperative' purposes Tomasello assumes, or regards himself as uncovering.
The cooperative approach favoured by Tomasello was pioneered by Margaret Gilbert, whose work was neglected for a long time then was re-examined. Her classic example is about walking together: her emphasis is that there is a 'collective' intention involved that can't be filleted out into individuals' intention to undertake a joint project. She argues that this is because certain extra obligations arise through joint action.
I'm abbreviating here, obvs.
There is a substantial literature that has evolved from these ideas over the last 30 years.
The relation with empiricism seems to me more complicated than you're saying. Researchers go to a prescribed portion of the world already armed with ideas, looking to confirm or refute them; the ideas come from the armchair or from previous researchers. Certainly for instance Gilbert and Searle's speculations long preceded Tomasello's work in the field (though I really like his fieldwork too, I'm a cooperative-minded person). And Chomsky's initial arguments in the 1960's were taken by some as justifying *not* engaging in certain kinds of empirical linguistic research, since variation between people and their languages was not relevant to his overarching theory: the philosophical presumption dictates what empirical research you undertake, and the reasons for it.
There are lots of degrees and levels of agreement within science, and just as many degrees and levels of incommensurability. Among participants in a scientific paradigmatic community, there need mot be unanimous agreement on conceptual definitions in order to work
productively together. I do think it can be helpful to conceive of normative discursive communities in terms of shared worlds, as long as we treat the idea of world as something like form of life or language game. In a shared world, my behaviors and your responses are mutually intelligible enough to allow for each of us to anticipate the others next moves in the game. Now let us say my scientific community undergoes a paradigm shift. Is our new shared world incommensurable with our old one, and if so, how are we then able to go back and forth between the old and new paradigm? I suggest what happens here is that in formulating the new way of thinking, at the same time we subtly reconstrue the sense of meaning of the old concepts such that we now see that old vocabulary in a different light. It is not as if we are able to make the old theory and the new one logically commensurable, but our redefining of the old terms in themselves makes it possible to form a bridge between the old and the new concepts. The old scheme becomes an inadequate or incomplete version of the new one as we retrospectively look back at it. Much the same thing happens in religious conversion. When look back at our old thinking, we implicitly reshape what the old notions were through the filter of the new ones.
Now lets say we encounter someone who remains within the old way of thinking. We can share their world with them, maybe even consciously taking into account that we no longer conceive of the particulars of that old
world exactly in the way that we used to and the other still
does. But the bridge we created between the old and new doesnt exist for the other. Our new world is mostly invisible to them, at least as evidenced by the impossibility of sharing practices based on that new thinking.
But there are many other worlds of practices that we CAN share with the other. We can participate with them in shared recreational activities, for instance. We can do the same with alien species like dogs, when we play fetch with them. Whether we are really understanding each other is not a question that need be asked as long as the game is flowing smoothly. Given that astrology makes use of concepts that are loose enough to be amenable to a wide variety of interpretations producing different practices among disparate communities, one can find those who consider themselves to have undergone a conversion form astrological belief to astronomy, where for others astrology and astronomy can happily co-exist as distinct but not incommensurable worlds.
I think its important to take seriously the reality of radically incommensurable conceptual schemes, worlds, forms of life. The often violent breakdown in communication that incommensurability between ethico-political communities produces cannot be adequately ameliorated by consultation of a presumed single real world, even Davidsons indirect one One needs to recognize that these multiple worlds of practices cannot be reduced to a single correct one., even if we believe such reduction is only an asymptotic goal never to be reached.
I think it is one way of articulating what is happening when normal ways of conducting arguments break down. That problem is not only found in science.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I glad you put "actually the case" in scare quotes. It is the crucal question. The great temptation for empiricism is to jump to conclusions. Too much focus on the data is not helpful. Too little is a waste of time.
Quoting schopenhauer1
But that's the question. Where does this evidence take us? This question becomes acute when there is evidence pointing in different directions - or interpretations of the available evidence that do not agree on which way it points.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Well, from the outside, it all too often looks as if that's exactly what it is. Given time (maybe a century or so), the community usually sorts itself out - and then finds something else to disagree about.
That's a very helpful analysis. Thanks.
What you describe seems to me to come down to working out ways to get along in the world that we share. (And we must be sharing it because we know that the others radically disagree with us.) It is more demanding that "toleration", because toleration is compatible with non-communication - which will often break down because we must co-exist or fight.
I've re-read Feyerabend - Against Method and Science in a Free Society - with a view to tying down his notion of commensurable and incommensurable, and decided that his view changed over time. I think he started with something like Wittgenstein's language games in mind - he had gone to England with the intent of studying with Wittgenstein, but the latter's illness and death led him to Popper. I think he carried something of "language games", or perhaps a "forms of life", into his dealings with Lakatos. In Against Method Feyerabend emphasises incommensurability, but plays it down in later writings, even I racal, denying that incommensurability meant that there could be no comparison.
Quoting Moliere
Seems to me that, that we understand dolphins to be social and communicative shows us that they inhabit the same world we do. If their songs are showing rather then saying, then they are not subject to Davidson's considerations of sentential language.
Contrary to , if we commence by assuming that there is no possibility of communication on important issues, then we are throwing out the possibility of "ameliorating" the "violent breakdown in communication".
Again, we can come to understand that the rabbit is a duck-rabbit, and hence to see the point of view of those who only see the duck. Only where there is some potential for agreement is there also potential to avoid violence.
The impossibility of communication on important issues is a historical fact, which is to say, it is a product of historically
situated philosophical assumptions concerning the necessary preconditions for agreement. If, for instance, it is stipulated that agreement must be grounded in pre-existing states of affairs (i.e. that all individual points of view look out onto some aspect or other of the same pre-existing field which already contains ducks and rabbits), then agreement on many important issues will be impossible.
We have to allow that one point of view sees a rabbit, another a duck, a third a duck-rabbit, and a fourth a new form whose sense of meaning may not be available to the other three because it brings a new form of life into existence whether than representing a pre-existing form. To agree about the meaning of this new form, one must first enact it intersubjectively rather than simply discover it in the world. If we are having trouble enacting some other communitys new form of life, we can still respect its validity and legitimacy for them.
Requiring agreement to hook onto a same world for all forces outliers into the position of error and falsity.
Well, that's what I said.
And I'm happy to add respect, where appropriate.
:up: Thanks for the historical context on Margaret Gilbert's original idea.
Quoting mcdoodle
Well yeah, it seems he just wants us to accept his theory on strong belief from the armchair. Being this thread also revolves around commensurability, I am waiting for the disparate ideas to be brought together in a more integrative way whereby the fieldwork is repeatedly determined as more-or-less "true" the extent it can be deemed as the current theory as to language origins and the like. There are so many ideas about human uniqueness, language, and the like, that it's hard to make some meta-theory.
That being said, are these theories here in some way different than the kind of armchair philosophies of a Wittgenstein or a Davidson or (put language philosopher here) or are they part-and-parcel of the same kind?
I do notice Quine and and Searle in there.
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This charaterization of astrology seems insignificant; I'd say astrology imagines a magical relationship- a correspondence between the cosmos and the human psyche, which is captured in the ancient hermetic principle "as above so below".
I just don't see why reference has to be maintained. Not saying that constructs from successive theories cannot be deemed the same or used in virtually the same way. I just don't see this as necessary.
To be honest, I am not entirely comfortable with the idea of referencing something in the world that one cannot access. To me, what seems to be a maintaining of reference is driven by the continuities in the empirical structure that successive theories predict or explain. I don't feel like there is an obligation to think of reference as always continued.
Quoting Ludwig V
Well, I think with different languages, people usually are not only literally in the same world, but living lives in similar ways with similar objects.
I think the closest thing to incommensurability when it comes to normal language would be describing things in peoples lives whether objects, customs or whatever that simply do not exist in another person's culture. But then again, languages are also flexible enough to describe the same object in many different ways by referring to different properties - and those novel customs and *objects of other cultures* can usually be described in corresponding words in that way. For instance, some tool that doesn't exist in your culture can be described in terms of materials and ways people behave using it that you are familiar with.
I don't know if scientific taxonomies are so much like this though. They don't have this kind flexibility and the worlds are not as rich as the ones we describe with language. If you come across a new concept like a wave function in quantum mechanics, you cannot simply re-describe that in terms from the taxonomy of Newtonian mechanics in the same way one might by re-describing a tool in terms of materials. Its a totally new object which means it is a world incompatible with the old Newtonian one with a different ontology and different possibilities, even if they also share many of the same things. I think, however, maybe there is no fixed, neat dividing line between what you would call two different worlds. But I also think in something like physics, they are usually talking on such a fundamental level of description that in well known examples like relativity, quantum mechanics, its not really ambiguous at all. If you think quantum mechanics is literally getting rid of classical particle trajectories then I think its very difficult to say that this is the same world as classical mechanics.
I think incommensurability, at least Kuhn's, is less vague than people think; it is just misunderstood. I *think* it is just about different scientific theories having different ontologies. Sometimes scientists talk past each other if they are not aware of their different assumptions but Kuhn isn't saying that different theories are inherently unintelligible from different perspectives.
My personal opinion is that Kuhn got misunderstood because in describing how scientists do things, he was essentially also trying to give descriptions of the psychological nature of how they come to their beliefs. Now, central to Kuhn's revolutions is that there is no logical entailment between evidence and the correct theories. There is then this kind of arbitrary nature in which scientists come to hold beliefs, going by intuition, going through "conversion" processes, having a stubbornness and talking past each other because they may work from different assumptions or reject each other's standards of evidence, etc. His account of theory change isn't about *logical entailment* like Popper, but psychological change in people's minds which is not constrained in a determinate, algorithmic way by evidence.
I think people have confused these very visceral descriptions of psychology with the idea that scientists live in different conceptual schemes which are inherently unintelligible. But I think Kuhn's idea is much closer to common scientific underdetermination than people think. He talks about translation I think initially in the sense of how scientists may initially misinterpret each other's theories purely out of naivety, and later he uses this as a kind of criteria for how different theories are incommensurable. But this notion of translatability Kuhn uses isn't about intelligibility, *intelligibility* incidentally very close to Davidson's notion which he comes to use in the "Very Idea Of" paper. Kuhn's translatability is instead just about if the structure of lexical networks match up and terms in one theory have a direct correspondence or interchangeability to constructs in the other so that they can be thought of the same thing. This has no bearing on whether someone can *or cannot* come to understand that theory.
But obviously all this is just my view of Kuhn, no one else.
Edit: clearing up for clarity, hopefully: marked by *...*
Yes, I would agree with that. But one needs to tease out what counts as access.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Yes. There's an ambiguity about language. Most people seem to equate "language" with "conceptual scheme" or "paradigm". But I can't see that natural languages can be equated to a single conceptual scheme or paradigm, so I prefer to regard them as distinct. But the point applies to conceptual schemes or paradigms as well as languages.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Yes, that's clearly true. He's a bit like Hume, who demolishes the claim that logic or reason establishes causal powers or causal laws, and then turns to psychology to fill the gap. I'm doubtful about this, because it seems to reduce the issues to causality or subjectivity. Which misrepresents what's going on, I think. One couldn't seriously argue that Newton's theory was not better (more comprehensive, more accurate, more coherent (?), simpler (?)) than Aristotle's.
I hesitate about "more useful" because it isn't particularly obvious at the moment that Einstein is more useful that Newton.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Well, yes. The new science (Newton, LaPlace) abandoned the Aristotelian idea of "matter" in favour of a different conception of what physical objects consist of. But it was pretty clear that both concepts were "about" at least some of the same thing(s). Is that what you had in mind?
Yes, well put. By introducing the idea of reasons, or reason as a faculty, rather than causes or preferences, we enter a different way of thinking, one in which (as your next sentence shows) we can start to use concepts like "better," "more accurate," etc.
I like this exposition. I think it surprisingly gets along better than I would have predicted with the Davidsonian picture -- perhaps we could treat Davidson's notion of incommensurability as a kind of high-standard, truly alien incommensurability, but that this is a bit off from the sort of incommensurability which Kuhn and Feyerabend are talking about, or what we ourselves may distinguish.
In a way we could read Davidson as providing some hurdles to the notion of incommensurability such that we have to be able to understand how it is we come to understand designating a scheme as such, and in so doing how it is it's not just something mundane, like disagreement or ignorance, when we do come to understand that.
It seems you and I have some agreement that it comes down to how people interact together, their practices and such , and I can get along with conceiving of normative discursive communities as participating in differing worlds when we understand these worlds as language games or forms of life, since I try to understand incommensurability in terms of what people are doing and noting how sometimes they are acting at cross-purposes.
And I think your description of changing beliefs makes a good deal of sense -- how the bridge beliefs between beliefs are mostly invisible to someone who still believes such and such makes a lot of sense. Isn't it this difference in beliefs, and the ability to understand someone else's beliefs, that gives rise to the notion that we have the ability to distinguish between concepts, or at least competing beliefs, such that we'd be able to make the claim to a schematism?
But also I think you're on point to say that as we move from a previous belief to a new one the old belief "morphs" to some extent. It's no longer the same belief, but a new one as defined by the web within which it sits. One thing here, then, might be that while there's a schematism it can never be articulated because the very act of articulation changes it. We come to understand that there's a scheme behind our belief formation, but in so understanding we also cut ourselves off from its constancy such that we can call it a scheme -- it becomes a bundle of beliefs that are ever-changing instead.
Quoting Joshs
I agree! But also note that this is why it's important that we get it correctly -- breakdown in communication and incommensurability can have some of the worst consequences for us. I agree that the temptation to reduce everything to a single way of speaking, My Way Which is Right, gets in the way of finding real strategies for understanding one another and coming to live together.
I think that we could be tempted to use Davidson to skip over what was ever meant by "incommensurable" -- but I think that it's better for understanding when we might go "off the rails" with the idea and become either incoherent or dogmatic.
Quoting Ludwig V
This is a very good point and one I have thought about a fair amount recently. From my intuition this may be a substantial reason for gulfs between realists and anti-realists - realists are much more permissive when it comes to access than anti-realists.
I don't think there is necessarily a rigid, neat, well defined line on what counts as access. It may be fuzzy and people think different things depending on assumptions, inclinations, topic under question. A realist may think the different perspectives we have on the world are different ways of viewing the same thing, an anti-realist may say those same perspectives block knowledge of the thing in and of itself. A realist may say theories are approximately true, an anti-realist may say the notion of "approximately true" is arbitrary and just highlights that the theory does not explain all of the data.
My intuition is that this threatens to make the division between realist and anti-realist something that is in some sense subjective and I am not sure how substantive concepts like "real" or "not real" really are if such dividing lines cannot be established.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, I think when it comes to Kuhn at least, his mention of translation is not talking about languages generically but about words thats constitute specific scientific theories.
Quoting Ludwig V
Which point are you referring to?
Quoting Ludwig V
Obviously, Kuhn has no idea what is going on inside the head but I don't think this Humean line of thought misrepresents, because what is going on when scientists form beliefs and create theories is going to be directly related to whatever is going on in a mechanistic brain (and therefore psychology). And whatever a brain does is going to be complicated and difficult to scrutinise. Certainly belief formation does not have to be constrained by strict notions of logic or entailment and I think people's thoughts are definitely not constrained this way in everyday life. Such logical entailments are impossible if data is inherently underdetermined by different possible explanations, people emphasize different arguments / evidence, and people have different starting assumptions on how they view the world. Logical entailment then becomes intractable.
It is very rare I think that people totally follow some prescribed, unwaivering set of extremely detailed logical steps when coming to beliefs. And I think people can often have intuitive impressions of what they think is correct without coming to it by some transparent logical process. For instance, I reckon most people that are unconvinced by the many world interpretation did not need some logical steps to come to their impression that it is intuitively, unrealistically strange. People don't need to follow some set of logical steps to come to the conclusion that there are true moral facts - often people just have a blunt intuition that some things are objectively wrong. I'm sure such kinds of intuitive thought apply to various kinds of theoretical thinking in science. The existence of these kinds of phenomena are not to say that what the brain is doing is random, however. If you think of artificial neuronal networks as having an inherent ability to optimize their learning due to their design then its pretty realistic to say that similar things apply to the brain. Just because people have intuitive impressions doesn't mean that they are totally random or not driven by some process which has efficacy in learning. But as with artifical networks, more complicated, open ended problems gives bigger scope for error, ambiguity and coming up with different solutions (or theories) that may not even be compatible.
Quoting Ludwig V
What Kuhn described in his "Structure of Revolutions" just tries to describe what scientists do I think, not justify them. From what he observes, it seems that different perspectives can arise in different people who then evaluate theories differently. What is the objective standard? This doesn't seem to fall out from anywhere. All there are are different people and their different perspectives which are not all the same, for various reasons.
I think you could very well say Newton's theory is better and most people would agree; but obviously this is still arguing from within your own perspective and assumptions. It may just happen to be that lots of people share many of those same assumptions, and probably for good reason; for instance, its difficult for people generally to motivate scientific theories without those theories explaining evidence. But then again, the more detailed you look at it, the more disagreement you might find e.g. about what simplicity is or what comprehensive means, what kinds of explanations are preferable, etc. It seems more trivial comparing Newton and Aristotle from today, but I am sure at the time it would have been not as clear cut when people did not know what a success Newtonian theory would become.
Quoting Ludwig V
Sure, Newton and Aristotle both describe motion but Aristotle's worlds of four elements or whatever it was seems radically different to what we understand today. I don't think they can be construed as the same world. In terms of Kuhn's translatability one would not be able to give one-to-one correspondences between the elements in Aristotle and their supposed equivalents in modern science. Modern science paints a far richer picture of the world with relations which do not exist in the Aristotelian picture and making it impossible for those Aristotelian elements to be equivalent or matched to the modern ones in an interchangeable way - they play very different roles in the new scientific picture where they are not even fundamental anymore. There is no more one-to-one correspondence between the modern and Aristotelian notions of air, or the respective notions for fire. They exist in completely different networks of constructs. I assume you might be able to match parts of these notions but it will be a mismatch as a whole. I am sure Aristotelian fire occurs in the world in places where it doesn't occur in the Newtonian world while there are blatant phenomena in the Newtonian world which don't occur at all in the Aristotelian one even though they are related to Newtonian fire. The ontologies are fundamentally mismatched in an incompatible way, though I get that there generically may be no well-defined fine line between compatible and incompatible.
I think perhaps from Kuhn's perspective the real significance is simply that scientists have different incompatible claims about the world which are not easily settled by available evidence. From his point of view, the narrative that textbooks seemed to paint was a picture where instead, all that scientists did was just passively discover new things about the world that piled up. For him, these textbooks missed the combative clash of incompatible beliefs between different scientists.
So I just want to summarize a few things I brought up earlier but haven't had a definitive answer for:
1. For what evidence is there empirically for "conceptual schema" to be a "thing" as applied to language use itself (not necessarily as a meta-theory of differences in scientific frameworks aka "incommensurability").
2. What role does Philosophy of Language play in understanding language as opposed to linguistic anthropology, linguistic cognitive neuroscience, psycho-linguistics, and related empirical, or scientific-naturalistic adjacent fields?
For example, when we talk about "forms of life" and "language games", yes that is indeed a neologism created in the Philosophy of Language, but have "forms of life" and "language games" and related neologisms (like "conceptual schema") just become runaway theoretical constructs?
My personal opinions:
Quoting schopenhauer1
I don't think these schemes are necessarily a "thing" in the language sense you talk about. All that there is, in a physical sense, is our use of language. Different people will use language differently in different contexts which you could categorize in different ways. What is the consequence though? We more or less live in the same experiential worlds and the richness and flexibility of how we both use and learn languages make the obstacles of different language schemes like this temporary or trivial. No one is obliged to choose between different ways of using language. People regularly assimilate.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I think philosophy always has a role in clarifying concepts but I do suspect that at some points in time natural philosophy formed the main basis for understanding certain topics. Over time, as empirical knowledge improved, natural philosophy would be overtaken by scientific areas like physics etc. I think that something similar could be the case with language where in the early 20th century, there was a heavy emphasis on forming theories of language, meaning, epistemology. With Later Wittgenstein, we hit the limits of these approaches. I agree "forms of life" and "language games" are vague and not that informative as terms, but they are enlightening in terms of the limits of philosophy in this area. I think they should be taken as stop-gaps not ends in themselves. They were introduced in the context of the inability to logically prescribe meanings to language and reference. Nonetheless, language and knowledge carry on and are used regardless in complicated ways which we give those labels of "language games" and "forms of life".
Why? Clearly, its the brain. The brain is mechanistic so it doesn't have to be driven by logic and rationality, just physics. "Forms of life" and "language games" are then stop-gaps for scientific, empirical theories of how people actually use language and why they behave (ultimately caused by the brain). That's not to say that science replaces philosophy here, just that a limit has been reached when Wittgenstein came upon these concepts. Similarly, I believe Quine talks about language being about people's practices which we would investigate scientifically.
That doesn't mean that philosophy still won't be important in other ways for clarifying concepts concerning language, just not necessarily in terms of grand theories trying to describe how language actually works. Perhaps more in helping to clarify concepts that scientists and other professions come up with, and their consequences.
I think I largely agree with all you stated there. I just want to emphasize that indeed, if discussion circles around neologisms like "language games" and "forms of life", without research and countervailing theories that might discredit them, or at least significantly elaborate on (and basically outgrow) the initial theory, they just become totems and fetishes of a particular field, as if sacred shibboleths to not be messed with. That would be poor philosophy indeed.
Of course, Schopenhauer's ideas need not be tested in this way, being non-empirical and highly speculative and all :wink:.
I'd also like to mention there is perhaps an inner tension already from analytic philosophy from the start, especially with "logical positivism". The logical part wants to retain its a priori status and the positivism part is committed to empirical observational studies. But language poses the problem that traditionally it is viewed as a priori, like a playground of various things you can manipulate into theories of this and that. However, anthropology, psychology, and neuroscience might disagree that language is properly just there to be a priori arranged to various interesting theories of its use, function, origin, and acquisition.
So you have fields that discuss a languages phenomes and syntax and pragmatics, etc. and this starts looking more like the "logical" part. And then you have fields like anthropology, neuroscience, etc. and this starts looking like the "positivist" part. You can say they are coming at it two different ways, for sure. One is describing its formal aspect, one its functional, how it originated biologically, etc.
Contra the super positivism of people like Skinner, you had Chomsky with a super formalist approach. And then as I keep mentioning, you may have people more in the middle who understand the formalism, but put it in the context of the positivist setting of biology and anthropology. That would probably be the way to go I would think if we want to get a proper meta-theory of language, its origins, functions, etc. and how it related more generally to human cognition and cultural development.
That is a brilliant account of the debates. It makes it look as if it just a question of different ways of saying the same thing. The catch is that it's hard to see why it matters which way one jumps.
Quoting Apustimelogist
That may well be true. But that makes his use of "translation" very different from what translation between languages involves. Word-for-word translation is almost always a mistake. Perhaps it would be better to talk about "equivalence"; but then the concepts of a theory are inter-related, not defined one by one. Perhaps we should just stick to "incommensurable".
That question reads a bit convoluted to me. Can you rephrase the question?
I am tempted to say that any notion of conceptual scheme would claim that putting empirical evidence prior to determining the scheme is the wrong way about: in the strong version the scheme determines evidence, in the weak version the scheme is part-and-parcel to the evidence. At the very least there are beliefs around empirical evidence which can be questioned from a non-evidential standpoint -- there's a certain sense in which we have to delimit what evidence even is.
For example: there are beliefs about how temperature is measured, but those beliefs are different from empirical evidence of temperature, which is just the measurement itself. But in order to be able to measure we already understand temperature conceptually to be a measure of heat, that heat transfers to the thermometer and equilibrates at the same temperature as the object it's surrounded by, and that this effects the density of mercury such that if we put regular marks on the thermometer we can see just how hot or cold it is in accord with some standards, like the boiling and freezing point of water, and because it's equal in temperature to what's being measured after such and such a time, how hot or cold some other object is is the same as what the thermometer's temperature is. These beliefs coincide with but aren't identical to evidence.
At least this is what seems to be meant by the notion of conceptual schemes. The Underdetermination of a theory by evidence is frequently cited in favor of conceptual schema, for instance. They are what's posited as an explanation for our understanding a theory at all. Given this underdetermination schema or the conceptual frame is that which evidence is situated within and made intelligible by. The "raw, unmediated empirical" is sort of the very thing being questioned: concepts, though unarticulated, are there from the first observation, rather than something we come to construct from non-conceptual empirical reals separate from conceptual articulation.
So, given that, I'm wondering what would even be in the domain of possible evidence? Either people talking to one another is support for the idea, or it's not. We're sort of at a level of generality where appeals to evidence aren't going to be easy to even understand as being in favor of or against schemata, much less be persuasive.
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EDIT: Question 2 seems a bit too off the beaten path to me -- I think the question between science and philosophy and their merits deserves at least a thread of its own, unless I can see how it'd relate to incommensurability.
So I see "conceptual schemes" in Philosophy of Language, as applying Kuhn's theory meant for paradigms in the history of sciences (and science in general) to that of individual schemes for understanding the world and language communities in general. So that's what I meant by language "itself", if that helps.
It always pleases me that I manage to set out something which actually manages to capture some sort of agreement, so thanks for letting me know.
Quoting Banno
I honestly should do the same. My reading on Feyerabend, and Kuhn too for that matter, is old and probably missed some points he made. No promises here yet, because projects are too easy to want to take on relative to how hard they are to actually complete while maintaining employment :D
Quoting Banno
Here we might be talking past a bit -- speaks of worlds as language games or forms of life, for instance. But I take your point; same world, due to showing.
And I think it correct, too. I think that if the lion could speak English to us, for instance, I'd simply accept that speech while feeling it's a bit strange rather than saying "Oh, they're a lion, they don't know what they are saying"
On the other hand I think there is something to be said for an insistence upon an answer as being a problem in finding ways of communicating. At least some of the time. Sometimes, though it is hard to set out when in words (for that is the very problem, so it seems), it's the insistence upon finding out who is wrong and who is right, what is true and what is not -- if we'd just concede this or that or give up on this or that then perhaps we could find ways to talk again. If we're particularly committed to consistency, which I share that fault, then we might make note upon realizing this new way of talking how I was wrong and they were wrong in certain respects, but then we'd be talking about meaningful disagreement instead of... whatever the yes/no assertion disagreement is.
But the metaphor I'd reach for here is...well, Hegel I guess. There's the duck, the rabbit, the duck-rabbit, and whatever that comes after which actually manages to make us click. No guarantees on how that works at present -- Hegel already tried, and was forced, even as a rationalist philosopher, to accept contradiction as the engine, which surely already shows how difficult it is to understand, from a rational perspective, when we create something new that happens to work.
But among rationalists, at least, astrology is generally viewed as not-scientific. And even those who practice will make caveats with respect to science or some such if pressed, that it's "just fun" or they don't take it that seriously -- so it's not as much a true magical incantation but the words are still worth engaging in for them. (Not for me. I'm on team disappointment, or at least disenchantment if we have to like how the world is going)
And even among non-rationalists they'll understand what I mean when I say "OK, but compare astrology to astronomy. There's a difference there, yes?" -- the important part is that we agree that there are at least some times that when we speak the literal, referential truth isn't what's important -- something else is. That's enough for the worry of error theory to at least get off the ground as a possibility worth considering: since we sometimes believe everything we say is false, so it could be that we've done it again.
But I have to admit that this is a bit afar from incommensurability. Still, I use the example of astrology enough I felt I ought say something.
Yes, I think all kinds of different fields with different methods, focusing on different topics sould be crucial for understanding. In terms of the ways you talk about, its probably useful for there to be specialists on both the formal and positivist end and simultaneously people who try to mix between. People that will mix it up will depend on the extreme ends where people have created specialized, deep knowledge for those specific topics (e.g. formal or empirical) from which the middle people can make use of to integrate.
I think personally, in this kind of topic of investigation, I am most interested in computational approaches using things like neural networks and dynamic systems which can then be used to explain how we use language in a symbolic way without being explicitly symbolic. Approaches that are broadly enactive/embodied which I think resonate well with Wittgenstein's view of meaning as use. So in my opinion, there are ways you can kind of validate the views late Wittgenstein came on to... at least under my interpretation of Wittgenstein.
I actually think Large language models are kind of Wittgensteinian; these models are working basically through just learning to predict and choose what comes next based on previous context which is kind of similar to how I see Wittgenstein's meaning-as-use. Predictive computational models like these seem to be good at explaining brain responses:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2105646118
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-022-03036-1
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.01930
Which is interesting because you can then speculate that brains don't need much more than prediction for complex cognitive functions like language (and predictive processing is already very popular in neuroscience). Such a view of language seems very thin though for people used to a view which is strongly symbolic and thickly representational. At the same time, its quite consistent with enactive/embodied views of cognition.
So I think to some extent there are ways to link new empirical findings back to some things philosophers might have said back in the day, caveat being that my interpretation of Wittgenstein is probably unique to me given how difficult he can be to understand.
Obviously, what I find most interesting is just one small area in all the kinds of fields and areas of investigation in language.
Aha I think this would create a regress of the same problem as someone else would come along and say that it isn't just different ways of the same thing.
But yes, I have thought about ways of kind of possibly ignoring labels of "real" or "non-real". Ironically, I feel like its very difficult to do this in a way that doesn't just look like normal anti-reaalism.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, and I suspect maybe this has contributed to misunderstandings when people conflate his translatability of theories with translatability of languages. Languages are so flexible, and the experiences that we are talking about are so rich, that even if a word doesnt have a direct word equivalent in another language, it might be possible to still reconstruct it or make a new correspondence using other words.
For instance:
Gökotta (Swedish) - To rise at dawn in order to go out and listen to the birds sing.
As far as I know this word has absolutely no equivalent in English but its very easy for us to reconstruct the meaning of the word that is more or less the same by using other words. A Swedish person would also be able to do the same in the Swedish because words are rich and redundant *(i.e. I am sure there is a direct translation of "To rise at dawn in order to go out and listen to the birds sing" in Swedish that doesn't use the word Gökotta")*. There's a hundred *(redundant)* ways to describe a table which roughly preserves what I am talking about *when I talk about tables*.
You can't really do that nearly as well in science taxonomy. You cannot use words from Newtonian Mechanics as surrogates for Quantum Wave function in the same way you can for the Swedish word. As far as I know, particles-type things aren't in Aristotelian theory (only *using particles as* a demonstration anyway) and so you cannot reconstruct modern particles either using Aristotelian ontology. Maybe Aristotle could describe them as "points" or something, but he is not using taxonomy from his theory, he is just using other words that he can use everyday to describe what a particle in the other theory is, in an intelligible way. That wouldn't count as a correspondence between the two scientific theories. *(At the same time, I realis, maybe there isn't a sharp line between terminology that is part of theory or not part of the theory, since I imagine all theories must make use of words or concepts or math, etc., that is not unique to the theory.)*.
Kuhn also I think specifies a little more about translation with things like the "No-overlap" principle (kind of similar to the partial matching thing I mentioned in a previous post) to try and specify his criteria for translatability. That obviously has nothing to do with ordinary language translation.
Kuhn's notion of translation (which he explicitly uses to characterize incommensurability) clearly is not supposed to be generally applied to language. He designed it to track when ontologies in different scientific theories don't correspond to each other.
So this is partly why I have tried to be explicit where I am talking about Kuhn specifically in this thread since I think his view is quite different to the idea of generic conceptual schemes in languages. Nonetheless, Kuhn still seems to be a main target of Davidson in his "Very Idea" paper. But I think insofar as Davidson mentions Kuhn as an originator of the idea he is attacking, he has constructed a strawman since Kuhn isn't representative of the idea he attacks
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, I believe establishing that they correspond more or less equates to how a term is interrelated with other terms in the same theory. You can then match the networks of concepts together. I believe it would be something like: some places concepts match because their relation to neighbouring concepts also match. But then in other parts of the networks, these things break down.
Edit: some clarifying *...*
I would reply that the claim needs to be backed up by a demonstration of the difference. Mere assertion won't cut any ice.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Yes, it's a common difficulty when one wants/needs to deny the validity of a distinction.
Quoting Apustimelogist
Yes. One either picks a specific theory, but then has to interpret it correctly. But that's open to "strawman" claims, or devises one's own statement of the issue, which is also open to the same claim. There's no third alternative that I can think of.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I saw a suggestion somewhere that a third possibility that one adjusts one or other concept (or network of concepts) so that there is sufficient overlap to enable the theories to be compared. That would sometimes be helpful because it would enable people to conduct experiments that will support one theory or the other.
Quoting Ludwig V
Well sure, I'm just saying that I think if that discussion were opened there would be disagreements, just like with the realism debate. I guess this would be the meta-realism debate.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, Kuhn mentions this. The relation between all these issues are quite subtle I think. Matching concepts is about how similar theories' ontologies are. This doesn't mean they are not mutually intelligible and scientists may become "bilingual"; however, at the beginning, the differences between theories may make it difficult to compare where scientists talk past each other because they aren't aware (or sometimes just don't agree) of the underlying assumptions and meanings of each other's theories. At the same time, when there is some overlap, especially toward the more empirical parts of the theoretical networks, it makes it easier to immediately compare predictions in experiment in ways where scientists aren't immediately and totally met with disagreements about whether particular methods or interpretations of observations, etc. are valid, which would *otherwise* block scientists seeing the validity of opposing theories.
I think you are confusing two different things. If I say that the last bus goes at 10:30, the fact that someone can say "Oh, no! There's another bus that goes after that" doesn't prove that there is another bus that goes after that. Merely saying that the there's another step in a sequence doesn't prove that there is. That has to be proved, not merely claimed.
Quoting Apustimelogist
I think I agree with every word of that paragraph.
Well I wasn't making an argument for or against the merits of some view or claim, I was just saying what I think would happen. I was just thinking it would be ironic that a viewpoint attempting to resolve the realism/anti-realism debate might lead to a meta-realism debate. I wonder if there could be a similar middle ground position to that debate as well (maybe not; hard to visualize).
Ah, that's different. The infinite meta- debates. Quite so. That's why I very suspicious of the meta-concept.
I'm thinking on the hoof here. But I think there has to be a way of arguing that the debate is broken.
The referee is not a player, but is just as much on the field as any player. They are not somehow separate and above the game, but immersed in it. Ditto judges.
A dictionary uses the same language that it describes, but is just as much a book as any other.
My line would be that the debate doesn't pay attention to the actual use of "real" vs its many opposites and the muddled idea that "real" is somehow equivalent to ontology. I think J.L. Austin "Sense and Sensibilia" Lecture VII is an excellent reference for the first claim. I'm afraid I don't have a reference for the second.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, I think this kind of thing is very much in my preferred domain. My inclination right now I think is to just not try to shoehorn my understanding of science into the "real" or "not real", at least not use words like that as the focal point. Rather, I would want explanations of how science works, how people's cognition works, how brains work, how language works and let those things speak for themselves.
My inclination is that how these things all work are in the same way that the scientific instrumentalist does science. Its just about predictions (parallel to predictive processing in neuroscience) or use like tools. For me, words are no deeper representation-wise than how they fit in the dynamics of our experiences. Uses of words like "truth" and "real" are no different. So because they are no more than where they fit as part of our experiences, their ontological significance is kind of deflated somewhat... just in the sense that they are nothing more than how they might fit in the dynamics of experience... because that is exactly what happens, I say words, hear words, read words in the context of other experiences... and thats all there is to it (a lot of help from neuroscience would be required). Obviously knowledge and science are trying to explain our experiences but then, the words / concepts we use as part of "explanations" and "knowledge" are effectively just moving parts embedded in the stream of the very thing trying be explained (experience... as a whole).
Yes, that sounds sensible. But that's an ideal and there may never be answers that are more than provision (see philosophy of science). Can you suspend all judgement while people work out all those answers? And can people work out all those answers without negotiating the issues we are bothered by - just without us? What do we do with our confusions while we are waiting?
Quoting Apustimelogist
Well, I would go further than that.
Quoting Apustimelogist
That's right. Not merely fixing the ship while we sail in it, but building a new one while we sail in it.
If philosophy was easy, everyone would be doing it. Oh, yes, they are. Most very badly - even worse than you and I.
Yes, thats definitely a good point. We don't know nearly enough about the brain, cognition, etc. But I do think we know enough about the world to make some general arguments about the kind of manner in which these things should work, maybe some of this being in the field of philosophy of mind, for instance, maybe other areas too. Following from this there's also room for making arguments about why I think its good to let those explanations speak for themselves, why I might want to deflate certain things which I do not think can add anything else substantial or veridical. And obviously philosophers have been making arguments of that kind of nature for a while.
Quoting Ludwig V
Aha, yes I think I would too. Its one of those things where I am aware that the initial motivation was to make notions of "realness" redundant in this area but also feels like just another form of anti-realism. I think its not that inaccurate to say that I think of myself as a kind of instrumentalist about everything which most would say is just anti-realism. I guess it has just got to the point where the anti-realist becomes anti-realist about anti-realism.
Quoting Apustimelogist
LaPlace's famous reply to Napoleon (I think) that he has no need of the hypothesis of God marks the point at which instrumentalism, which had enabled the new science to evade the religious challenges ever since Copernicus, "collapsed" into realism. (I'm gesturing at an argument here but I think you probably know how it goes).
But how about a more radical position? Avoid speaking about "reality", just as one avoids speaking about "existence". (I don't remember whether you ever looked in on the thread about Austin's "Sense and Sensibilia", but the argument is in there.) Suppose we treat concepts as instruments (cf. telescope, microscope, galvanometer, etc.). Instruments do not make claims about particular empirical truths (or the generalizations we derive from particular truths). They enable us to establish empirical truths. You would be a realist and an anti-realist at the same time.
Yes, this seema actually quite similar to what I mean by being instrumentalist. I will have to take a look at the Austin thread; maybe you have a particular post in mind, or page in the thread?
I'll sort something out for you. But that's only about "real" and "reality". The bit about concepts is my own invention.
Here's a link for a download Austin "Sense and Sensibilia"
Lecture VII pp. 62 - 77.
I hope you find it enjoyable and profitable.
Thanks, I will take a look!