Work · Analytic Philosophy
On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme
Against the third dogma: scheme and content.
Introduction
Davidson’s presidential address to the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, delivered in December 1973 and printed in the association’s Proceedings in 1974. Its target is conceptual relativism: the idea, which Davidson finds in Whorf, Kuhn, Feyerabend and Quine, that different languages or theories organise experience into incommensurable worlds. Davidson argues that we could recognise something as a language only if we could largely translate it into our own; a wholly untranslatable “alternative scheme” makes no sense. With the dualism of scheme and uninterpreted content – the “third dogma” of empiricism, after the two Quine had rejected – the very idea of a scheme falls away. The essay was reprinted in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984).
Connections
Criticizes
- Two Dogmas of Empiricism1951 · W. V. O. Quine
- The Structure of Scientific Revolutions1962 · Thomas S. Kuhn
More works by Donald Davidson
Sources: Wikidata
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