In essence, the thesis of incommensurability is a philosophical doctrine of what D. Davidson calls radical conceptual relativism. Briefly put, conceptual relativists believe that there are distinct conceptual schemes (either between two distinct intellectual or cultural traditions or over the course of history within the same intellectual or cultural tradition) to schematize our experience such that meaning, truth, cross-language understanding and communication, and human perceptions of reality are relative to conceptual schemes. Radical conceptual relativists contend that conceptual schemes or the languages associated with them can be and actually are, in many cases, radically distinct or massively different without any significant overlap, even to the extent of being incommensurable and leading to massive, even complete, communication breakdown between two language communities. For modest conceptual relativists, on the other hand, even if radically distinct schemes without any significant overlap are hard to come by, partially distinct conceptual schemes with some shared common parts are pervasive, which often leads to partial communication breakdown between the language communities associated with them.
According to Davidson’s interpretation of the Quinean notion of conceptual schemes, a conceptual scheme is identical with a sentential language held to be true by its believers. To say that two conceptual schemes or languages are distinct amounts to claiming that they are untranslatable into each other. Similarly (it is not by coincidence), based on the received translation-failure interpretation of the thesis of incommensurability adopted by Davidson, ‘“incommensurable” is, of course, Kuhn’s and Feyerabend’s word for “not intertranslatable”‘ (Davidson, 1984, p. 190). Thus, for Davidson and many others, the thesis of incommensurability as untranslatability and Quinean conceptual relativism are two sides of the same coin. They rise and fall together.
Even if one does not accept the Quinean notion of conceptual schemes and the thesis of incommensurability as untranslatability, one still cannot deny conceptual affinity between the two doctrines. In fact, the thesis of incommensurability presupposes conceptual relativism. Without the possible existence of two conceptually distinct conceptual schemes or languages associated with them, there is simply no issue of incommensurability. On the other hand, the belief that two distinct schemes or languages could be incommensurable is at the very heart of conceptual relativism. To say that two scientific languages are incommensurable is to say that they embody two radically distinct conceptual schemes—whether they are B. Whorf s grammar of natural languages, R. Carnap’s linguistic frameworks, W.V. Quine’s sentential languages, or T. Kuhn’s paradigms and lexicons. This is why most conceptual relativists (B. Whorf, W.V. Quine, T. Kuhn, C.I. Lewis, and P. Feyerabend among them) accept the thesis of incommensurability.
However, both the thesis of incommensurability and conceptual relativism can be intelligible only if we can make sense of ‘the very notion of a conceptual scheme’. The notion of conceptual schemes and its underlying metaphysical dualism between scheme and content serve as the conceptual foundation of the thesis of incommensurability. Dismantlement of the notion would lead to the fall of both conceptual relativism and the thesis of incommensurability. This dismantlement is exactly what Davidson sets out to achieve in his celebrated essay, ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’ (1984).
With a strong faith in the universality of cross-language understanding and communication, Davidson firmly believes that mutual understanding and communication across different languages, cultures, and traditions is theoretically possible and practically achievable. It is not simply because we can somehow manage, through tremendous efforts in some cases, to fully understand and communicate with others whose thoughts, ideologies, moral systems, ways of thinking, or language schemes associated with them, are so remote from us, but rather because others are after all not that different from us. ‘There are limits to how much individual or social systems of thoughts can differ’ (Davidson, 2001a, p. 39). All human beings are alike, or at least we have no good reasons to think otherwise in order to engage in productive dialogue with each other.
Conceptual relativism seems, Davidson believes, to threaten to break our cherished hope of cross-language/scheme understanding and communication by ‘imagining’ the existence of radically different mental schemes or mind-sets associated with different cultures, traditions, and languages. Those distinct mental schemes, mediated between the world and the thoughts, create serious impediments to cross-scheme understanding and communication.
Of course, Davidson is not so naive as to deny the existence of different systems of thoughts that often make mutual understanding and communication difficult. He admits that ‘there are contrasts from epoch to epoch, from culture to culture, and person to person, of kinds we all recognize and struggle with; but these are contrasts which with sympathy and effort we can explain and understand’ (2001a, p. 40). The debate between Davidson and his opponents is about whether those massive differences in thoughts and ideologies are caused by fundamental semantic and/or conceptual obstructions, namely, radically distinct conceptual schemes, or simply because of differences in beliefs.
Instead of taking on different forms of conceptual relativism one by one, Davidson sets to dig out its root, i.e., the very notion of conceptual schemes. To discredit the notion, Davidson presents a host of different kinds of arguments, some simple, some complex, some straightforward, some carrying plenty of heavy controversial theoretical baggage of their own, such as his truth-conditional theory of meaning/understanding/translation. As complicated as they appear to be, all of Davidson’s arguments actually follow two distinct lines of reasoning: One focuses on the verification conditions of alternative conceptual schemes, which targets the Quinean notion of conceptual schemes; the other attacks directly the Kantian schemes-content dualism. Before examining those two lines of criticism of Davidson’s in the next chapter, we need to clarify and define the notion of conceptual schemes as comprehensively as possible first.
Philosophically, the notion of conceptual schemes begins its intellectual life with Kant’s transcendental philosophy. To answer his ingenious question of how experience is possible, Kant divides the mind into active and passive faculties, i.e., sensibility or unsynthesized a priori sensible intuitions of space and time on the one hand and understanding with endowed pure concepts or categories on the other. All possible experience, in order to be the object of our experience at all, is constructed a priori and subjectively by our minds through the joint work of these two basic mental faculties; i.e., understanding uses a priori concepts to ‘interpret’ what ‘the world’ (Kant’s noumenal world) imposes on the sensibility. Without those two basic kinds of mental schemes, no human experience is possible. Of course, for Kant, such mental schemes are universal and unchanged. There are no distinct mental schemes.
However, once the distinction between the data of experience and the schemes for conceptualizing them—the Kantian scheme-content dichotomy—is granted, it is not hard to imagine the existence of distinct alternative schemes. In rejecting Kant’s transcendental idealism, the ‘Historical School’ in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany (including Hegel and others who possessed an impressively broad and deep understanding of the history of ancient ideas, languages, and texts) turned Kant’s grand a priori scheme on its head by making it related to specific historical and cultural contexts, and thereby setting the foundation for the development of conceptual relativism.
Historically, conceptual relativism has been associated with two models. According to the Kantian categorical model, some set of basic or categorical a posteriori concepts are necessary for any possible experience within a context, and such schemes of concepts can change with contexts. By comparison, the Quinean linguistic model takes schemes to be identical with sentential languages composed of sentences accepted as true. Since there can surely be radically different languages, there could be radically distinct conceptual schemes as well.
Although it is controversial as to what counts as a conceptual scheme, a conceptual scheme is, figuratively speaking, commonly considered to be a specific way of organizing experience and/or a way of ‘carving up’ the world under consideration. It determines a unique conceptual way of contacting and describing reality. Briefly put, a conceptual scheme is supposed to be the conceptual framework used to schematize our experience in terms of its metaphysical presuppositions of existents, states of affairs, modes of reasoning, and categorization. Accordingly, conceptual relativism contends that there exist some substantial semantic and/or conceptual disparities between two distinct conceptual schemes. Such a conceptual disparity could create serious impediments to mutual understanding between the respective believers, which, in many cases, could even render one side incommensurable to the other. For instance, C. I. Lewis (1929) asserts that our cognitive experience is composed of two distinguishable elements: the immediate data of the senses presented to the mind, and the form or construction that the mind imposes upon these data. Functioning as schemes of interpretation, different forms of the mind yield different descriptions of reality. If two schemes are not translatable, then their corresponding descriptions of reality are incommensurable.
What is at stake here is not a trivial empirical fact that others could be or actually are different from us in their beliefs, thoughts, worldviews, even normal concepts, but whether those differences in the contents of thoughts are originated from and shaped by the schemes or the forms of thoughts themselves, which may be radically different sets of categorical concepts used to categorize possible experience, different linguistic frameworks of describing reality, different forms of explanation and interpretation for certain domains of discourse, different modes of reasoning/justification, or different ways of thinking. So defined, a conceptual scheme is a much more narrow notion than a worldview, a form of life (L. Wittgenstein), a tradition (H.G. Gadamer), or a culture (R. Rorty), which appear to be the combination of the content and the scheme. A conceptual scheme refers instead to the essential conceptual core or the ontological presuppositions of a worldview.
The thesis of conceptual relativism is not just a philosophical speculation. It has been emphatically supported by many empirical studies from many interpretative disciplines. For example, in the twentieth century, anthropologists gradually realized that the difference between the beliefs of two distinct cultures cannot simply be reduced to the fact that those two cultures are at different developmental stages of a common path, i.e., aiming to achieve a causal, scientific explanation and understanding of the natural world. Other cultures actually think of, interpret, and categorize reality in quite different ways from ours (Evans-Pritchard, 1964.) Therefore, to understand fully the thoughts of alien cultures or distinct historical thoughts within the same cultural tradition, we must understand their categories of thought, forms of explanation, as well as modes of reasoning and justification, which they impose upon reality as they conceive it.
Advocates of conceptual relativism need to be more specific about the essential parameters of a conceptual scheme if they want to avoid the charge of engaging in only ‘empty metaphorical talking’. In fact, behind the above apparently different metaphorical ways of description we can identify three basic doctrines of conceptual relativism.
It is believed that there is an underlying conceptual or linguistic modality that determines a specific way of conceptualizing/perceiving the world or of constructing possible experience. Such a metaphysical distinction between the world/experience and schemes for conceptualizing them to form a set of beliefs or a theory is necessary if the notion of conceptual schemes can serve as a metaphysical notion at all. C. I. Lewis, for example, believes the scheme-content distinction to be an almost self-evident philosophical truth; similarly, P. Strawson, W. V. Quine, J. Searle, and many others embraced the dichotomy wholeheartedly. Davidson identifies correctly the dichotomy as the cornerstone of conceptual relativism, but regards it as the third dogma of empiricism that we had better discard. A variety of scheme-content dualisms have been proposed so far:
The primary bearer of a conceptual scheme: (SI) a set of concepts, such as Kant’s a priori categorical concepts or Neo-Kantian a posteriori basic concepts, such as P. Strawson’s contextual interconnected basic concepts (the Kantian categorical model); or (S2) a sentential language with all the sentences accepted as true (the Quinean linguistic model).
The empirical contents which a conceptual scheme frames: (W) the world/reality for the scheme-world distinction); or (E) experience for the scheme-experience distinction.
The relation between a scheme and its empirical content: (Rl) A scheme could be a categorical framework (usually either a set of categorical concepts or the lexicon of a language) to categorize its empirical content. Alternatively, (R2) a scheme could be a system of interpreting or a way of perceiving/describing (usually a set of basic assumptions about existence or fundamental principles on basic structure of the world) to construct, not represent, its empirical content. Alternatively, (R3) a scheme could be a form of representation (usually a theory or a sentential language) to fit (face, predict and account for) experience.
A sound scheme-content distinction is necessary, but is not sufficient for conceptual relativism. Kantian built-in a priori schemes, for instance, do not allow for the existence of alternative schemes. We need a second doctrine of conceptual relativism:
It is possible to have two radically different conceptual schemes that could even differ massively and be incommensurable to each other.
To justify the above doctrine, a few questions need to be addressed: How could we have two distinct conceptual schemes? In which way can a scheme be relative to language, tradition, culture, and history? The answers to those questions lie in another doctrine of conceptual relativism.
Scheme-content dualism is metaphysical in nature; namely, the distinction between our conceptual apparatus and the world/experience. However, it is very tempting to confuse the distinction with a closely related semantic distinction, the analytic-synthetic distinction (the so-called first dogma of empiricism), that is, the distinction between sentences being true in virtue of their meanings/concepts alone (these being the analytic sentences) and sentences being true in virtue of both their meanings/concepts and their empirical content (these being the synthetic sentences). Despite such differences, many have tried to reduce one distinction to the other. Some argue that the duality of scheme-content commits one to the duality of analytic-synthetic.1 Others suggest that the scheme-content distinction relies on or is motivated by the analytic-synthetic distinction. Hence, the former should be seen as a variant of the latter. The dualism of scheme-content either leads to or presupposes the dualism of analytic-synthetic. R. Rorty argues that the analytic-synthetic distinction is necessary for conceptual relativism, and accordingly, necessary for scheme-content dualism (Rorty, 1982, p. 5). C. I. Lewis (1929, p. 37) also constructs his version of scheme-content dualism based on the analytic-synthetic distinction. Therefore, if we follow Quine in abandoning the first dogma of empiricism, we have to abandon the concept of meaning or the scheme of concepts going with it, which will lead to the fall of the third dogma.
There are some obvious conceptual connections between the two distinctions. Imagine that a scheme functions as a conceptual filter (a thought processor) between the world/experience (the empirical content of a scheme, the input) and the beliefs/thoughts/propositions/theory (the cognitive content of a scheme, the output) in the way that it organizes its empirical content to form its cognitive content. Following this way of thinking, the analytic-synthetic distinction does presuppose scheme-content dualism since the very analytic-synthetic distinction depends upon the scheme-content distinction. However, the contrary is not true. Scheme-content dualism neither necessarily leads to nor presupposes a sharp analytic-synthetic distinction as Quine construed. In the first place, the scheme-content distinction does not entail that the sentences used to describe a scheme have to be analytical. We may hold, following Quine’s holism, that all beliefs form an interconnected ‘web of beliefs’, thus all sentences used to express them have empirical contents and are subject to revision. Therefore, scheme-content dualism will not necessarily lead to a fixed, sharp analytic-synthetic distinction. Secondly, after we abandon the absolute analytic-synthetic distinction, we are not compelled to abandon the scheme-content distinction. We may still hold the very ideas of empirical content and revisable conceptual schemes. In fact, within the Quinean framework, we can retain the dualism of scheme-content even after we have abandoned the analytic-synthetic distinction; as Davidson has admitted, ‘the scheme-content division can survive even in an environment that shuns the analytic-synthetic distinction’ (1984, p. 189). This is the path followed by Quine, Kuhn, Feyerabend, and many other patrons of conceptual relativism.
Although Davidson realizes correctly that scheme-content dualism could well survive after the fall of the analytic-synthetic distinction, he is wrong to allege that ‘giving up the analytic-synthetic distinction has not proven a help in making sense of conceptual relativism’ (1984, p. 189). I will argue that it is exactly the denial of a fixed and absolute analytic-synthetic distinction that makes alternative conceptual schemes possible.
Abandoning the analytic-synthetic distinction leads to abandoning the rigid distinction between concept, meaning, or language on the one hand and belief, thought, or theory on the other. It is no longer a novel idea today that all concepts themselves are empirical and none a priori as argued by American pragmatists against Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Concepts we deploy upon experience are themselves the products of empirical inquiries. In other words, concepts are theory-laden and change with theories. According to Quine’s holism, our conceptual schemes (concepts or meanings) are no longer considered as being separated from their cognitive contents (beliefs). We should think of them instead as a whole language standing in relation to the totality of experience. The Kantian ‘fixed framework of concepts’ model was replaced by the model in which meanings/concepts and beliefs are intertwined.
Based on their extensive knowledge of the historical development of scientific thought, Kuhn and Feyerabend argue that the traditional belief that we describe the world through constructing scientific theories about it in terms of a fixed system of concepts distorts the actual procedure of scientific theory construction. There is no sharp distinction between language (concept and meaning) and theory (belief system). Rather, ‘meaning is contaminated by theory’. The concepts/meanings of scientific terms, such as the concepts of space and time, are not fixed; instead, they are adjusted and redefined by new scientific principles within the framework of emergent theories such as the theory of relativity. Consequently, a new conceptual scheme or paradigm emerges with a new theory. Following a similar line, J. Searle (1995, p. 60) argues that conceptual schemes, as a subspecies of ‘systems of representation’, are influenced by cultural, economic, historical and psychological factors.
However, even if it is true that scheme-content dualism neither necessitates nor presupposes the analytic-synthetic distinction, a total abandon of all forms of the analytic-synthetic distinction seems to render the very notion of a conceptual scheme unintelligible. If meaning is contaminated by theory as Kuhn and Feyerabend try to convince us, then ‘to give up the analytic-synthetic distinction as basic to the understanding of language is to give up the idea that we can clearly distinguish between theory and language’ (Davidson, 1984, p. 187). However, if a scheme is defined as a framework of concepts or language to form its cognitive content (beliefs, propositions, theory) by organizing its empirical content, we must be able to distinguish somehow one’s scheme from one’s beliefs and to discuss them separately. This in turn naturally implies that there is a distinction between the language used to describe a scheme and the theory used to describe experience if we can meaningfully talk about a conceptual scheme at all. Furthermore, without some kind of analytic-synthetic distinction in place, there is no way to tell whether or not two alleged conceptual schemes contain different concepts or whether they simply embody different beliefs. In other words, without some sort of analytic-synthetic distinction, there is no way to tell whether or not any communication failure between two linguistic communities is due to their words having different meanings or due to their having different beliefs since, in radical interpretation, meanings and beliefs are always intertwined. Therefore, the complete abandoning of the analytic-synthetic distinction would lead to the self-destruction of the very notion of conceptual schemes.
It may be true that the meanings of expressions used in the formulation of a theory are introduced, changed or redefined by the theory itself, but it does not follow that no distinction can be made between the language used to formulate a theory and the theory couched within the language. After we abandon the fixed, sharp analytic-synthetic distinction, the organizing role that was exclusively attributed to analytic sentences and the empirical content that was supposedly peculiar to synthetic sentences are now seen as shared and diffused by all sentences of a language. But it does not mean that all sentences play equal roles in forming our beliefs. Still using Quine’s metaphor of ‘a web of beliefs’, sentences in the center of the web are those we are most reluctant to give up and are primarily used to describe the scheme of concepts. Those sentences play primarily the organizing role in the formation of beliefs. Confronted with the conflict of experience, we would prefer to keep those sentences fixed by comparison to the sentences on the fringes, which we would more easily revise in the light of experience. We can still call them ‘analytic sentences’ in a modified sense that the truths of the sentences are widely accepted and fully protected by their users, but they are subject to revision also.
To illustrate such a non-fixed, fuzzy analytic-synthetic distinction, Wittgenstein’s riverbed metaphor comes in handy. Wittgenstein asks us to imagine our worldview as a riverbed, where the bed of a river represents certain ‘hardened propositions’, which is the scheme or the essential conceptual core of the worldview, and the river running on the bed represents the mass of our ever-changing belief systems. ‘The river-bed of thoughts may shift. But I distinguish between the movement of the waters on the river-bed and the shift of The bed itself; though there is not a sharp division between one or the other” (Wittgenstein, 1969, p. 15e). On the one hand, our conceptual schemes, as riverbeds, are relatively fixed and firm over a certain period. They form and guide our beliefs. On the other hand, our beliefs, as the rushing waters of the river could slowly change the shape of the riverbed and alter the course of the river, could change our schemes over time. Thus the distinction between the scheme (or language) and its cognitive content (beliefs and theory) can be distinguished relatively.
Although such a distinction is fuzzy and changeable, it is a necessary distinction we use all the time. By the same token, even if there is no hard and fast criterion for determining when a difference between languages is a difference of concepts rather than beliefs, it does not follow that no distinction can be drawn. This is why Quine does not abolish the analytic-synthetic distinction totally; rather he shows it to be one of degree rather than kind. This leads to our third doctrine of conceptual relativism:
There is a non-fixed, fuzzy distinction between the statements about the scheme of concepts, i.e., the language on the one hand and the statements expressing beliefs of reality/experience, i.e., the theory, on the other.
In spite of its lasting popularity among its advocates, the notion of conceptual schemes remains murky and widespread confusion lingers over its meaning. Even so, a somehow popular notion of conceptual schemes dominates the discussion— namely, the Quinean linguistic model of conceptual schemes. To have a clearer picture of the Quinean notion, let us see where the Quinean linguistic model stands against the three doctrines of conceptual schemes identified earlier.
The primary bearer of a conceptual scheme (S2): For Quine, a conceptual scheme is a set of intertranslatable sentential languages. ‘It is a fabric of sentences accepted in science as true, however provisionally’ (Quine, 1981, p. 41). That is, a sentential language with its referential apparatus, such as predicates, quantifiers, terms, and its descriptive apparatus, i.e., whole sentences held to be true by the speaker.
The empirical content of a conceptual scheme (El): uninterpreted sensory experiences, which are often associated with different names, such as sense data, ‘uninterpreted sensation’, ‘surface irritations’, or ‘sensory promptings’. It refers to what falls under an umbrella term, ‘the sensuous given’, or briefly, the given, such as the patch of color, the indescribable sound, the fleeting sensation.
The relation between a scheme and its empirical content: The scheme or language is used to predict future experience in the light of past experience by providing a manageable structure into the flux of experience. More accurately, (Rl) through its referential apparatus the language individuates, organizes, and categorizes experience (such as the posits, physical objects, forces, energy, etc.). [The organizing model] (R3) More importantly, the language as a whole fits (faces, predicts, and accounts for) experience [the fitting model].3
It is this misleading figure of a language-fitting experience (which is different from R2) that leads Davidson to focus on sentences, rather than predicates, as a primary element of the Quinean notion of conceptual schemes.
A conceptual scheme or language is like an interconnected ‘web of beliefs’, ‘a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges’, so much so that ‘the total field is so underdetermined by its boundary conditions, experience’. ‘A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field’. No sentence, not even the logical rules, is immune to revision (Quine, 1980, pp. 42-3). Consequently, there is no fixed, absolute distinction between analytic sentences used to describe the language and synthetic sentences used to describe experience. However, this does not exclude a relative, contextualized distinction between beliefs at the center of the web that we are most reluctant to give up and the beliefs on the fringes that we are more ready to revise in light of experience. A fuzzy, non-fixed analytic-synthetic distinction is still possible.
One natural consequence of the above non-fixed, contextualized analytic-synthetic distinction is that any language (the riverbed) is subject to change through its interaction with our ever-changing belief system (the river). Meanings or concepts could be contaminated by theory. Therefore, alternative languages or conceptual schemes are not just possible, but are reality, either as real cultural differences due to both posited cultural universals and posited radical differences in conceptual schemes or as conceptual shifts within the same cultural tradition such as from Ptolemy to Kepler, Newton to Einstein, and Aristotle to Darwin.4
1 In some places, Davidson (1984, p. 189) seems to suggest that the duality of scheme-content commits one to or supports the analytic-synthetic distinction as construed by Quine.
2 By the label ‘the Quinean linguistic model’, I do not mean ‘Quine’s model’ as such, namely, what Quine formulates and defends as a well-established theory. Rather, I intend to use the phrase to refer to one pervasive notion of conceptual schemes based on the works of Quine and many other similarly-minded conceptual relativists including T. Kuhn, P. Feyerabend, B. Whorf, and C. Lewis. In general, it is a notion of conceptual schemes identified and criticized by Davidson.
3 Davidson, 1984, pp. 191-4; 2001a, pp. 40-41.
4 Quine, 1960, p. 77; 1970, pp. 9-11; 1980, p. 43.