Conceptual schemes arise from organising content (phenomena). It doesn't matter how the content is obtained. — Isaac

I think that's about right, at least on how Davidson's using "conceptual scheme". It might also be that a conceptual scheme is implicated in how content is obtained (like the paradigm shift example).

The truth of any scheme can therefore be expressed because it is a matter of language and we've just established that all schemes are translatable. — Isaac

I'm not certain that a conceptual scheme can be true or false, for the purposes of the article, in terms of sentences it's part of their assignment of meaning to sentences (the form the content inhabits) rather than how sentences are true or false given a meaning assignment.

The stuff with T-sentences undermines this wedge between meaning assignment and how sentences are true and false.

Yes, we have translated the objects of one to the objects of another. Have we translated their relations? — Isaac

We have translated proper names? And nothing else?

Beliefs can be stated. Not all of them are stated, of course; but if something is a belief then it can be placed into a statement of the form "A believes p". I would have thought that obvious. The thing is, beliefs can also be false. It can be true that A believes that p, and p is indeed true. It can be true that A believes p, and yet p is false.

That there are beliefs which function in one which would not function in another. — Isaac

"Function"? What is it for a belief to function, as against it's being true?

Also you said it's a joke but you didn't expand. — ZzzoneiroCosm

Well, I meant to address your concern, and wrote stuff about it - around page seven. Perhaps I expected too much.

And later some more about the last few paragraphs in which Davidson points to the problem of having only one conceptual scheme.

Maybe I should put it this way: How would one make sense of translation, if there were only one conceptual scheme? What could translation be doing here? How would Davidson answer this question?

Banno stated in this thread he's convinced philosophy is bunk, — Marchesk

Not so much. The view I have expressed many times and over several years is that philosophical issues in the main are conceptual knots that can be smoothed out with suitable analysis - philosophy as therapy.

The dogma of conceptual schemes is a fog that prevents us talking about what is actually going on. See as an extreme my mooted Chinese herbalist insisting that pangolin scales cure cancer - and the philosopher who defends him by claiming that "it is true for Chinese medicine, but not for Western Medicine - they are different paradigms".

If we were to detect an alien signal, but were unable to decode it despite our best efforts, wouldn't that imply incommensurability? Or just really strong encryption? — Marchesk

Somebody would be considering incommensurability from the get-go, but there would be no way to confirm that. If human evolution was triggered by the contact and we gained the capacity for new concepts in the process, then we could look back and see that there had been no translatability. By then, we'd have the vantage point necessary to know that.

See as an extreme my mooted Chinese herbalist insisting that pangolin scales cure cancer - and the philosopher who defends him by claiming that "it is true for Chinese medicine, but not for Western Medicine - they are different paradigms". — Banno

Was there a philosopher who looked at things this way?

That makes sense.

Really? Sounds a little naive. Since when has one article and a few laconic remarks ever acted as some philosophical fait accompli? — Isaac

I'm not overly happy with this comment. It leads me to think that the effort I put into the exegesis has not been matched by a careful reading of my comments and the article. Would that you expanded on the views of Ramsey, which might take this thread in a far more interesting direction.

:smile: Don't sound so surprised...

THis is excellent. Please continue - I'd love to see where we agree and were we differ.

So far, we seem to be reading the same paper...

I also do not think that Davidson is doing away with conceptual schemes. Rather, it seems he's rejecting the idea that two schemes talking about the same world are not translatable one to another. — creativesoul

Clearly, in the last few paragraphs, he rejects the notion of conceptual schemes altogether.

What we get in the argument for the ministry echoes the argument against transitivity. — Moliere

I hadn't noticed that - you are right.

Was there a philosopher who looked at things this way? — frank

Richard Rorty might be an example. Certainly relativism has been around since ancient philosophy. I believe the Sophists made arguments that truth was relative.

This bit is weird to me: — Moliere

I read it as Davidson pointing out again that it is statements that are true or false; and since statements are part of language, their truth is relative to that language. So "il pleut" is not true in English, even if it is raining.

In the wider discussion of Radical Interpretation he makes it clear that the circumstances of an utterance need to be added to the left-hand side of the T-sentence if it is to be accurate. So we would have something like: "il pleut" as uttered by Pierre last Tuesday at 3:00pm in Paris is true IFF it was raining last Tuesday at 3:00pm in Paris...

Davidson's not wholly agreeing with the claim "truth is relative to a conceptual scheme". — creativesoul

He is wholly rejecting that claim

You seem to have lost track, Creative.

If he wholly rejects the very idea of an uninterpreted world... — creativesoul

Edit: Ah. After reading a bit further ahead, I see where you are going. Sure.

Was there a philosopher who looked at things this way?
— frank

Richard Rorty might be an example. Certainly relativism has been around since ancient philosophy. I believe the Sophists made arguments that truth was relative. — Marchesk

It's usually more like: for the Pharisees, morality dictated washing up to the elbow before eating.

Nobody but a few wackos would think, "Yea, but they were wrong!!!"

Or it's like, Western science is inherently imperialistic and sexist, so we should reject it's truth claims in favor of culturally appropriate ones.

Feyerabend, Kuhn... @Janus, although they might not admit it; this is where their story ends.

I'm not overly happy with this comment. It leads me to think that the effort I put into the exegesis has not been matched by a careful reading of my comments and the article. Would that you expanded on the views of Ramsey, which might take this thread in a far more interesting direction. — Banno

Ah, yes. My comment was directed specifically at your response to critiques/misunderstandings, not your prior exegesis which, I think I had already commented, was exemplary. I'm sorry for any confusion, I hadn't intended to offend (well, not in that context anyway).

I haven't got time tonight to get into the rest of the issues, but I wanted to say at least this.

It seems you have understood the article. Cool. Excellent post.

If we were to detect an alien signal, but were unable to decode it despite our best efforts, wouldn't that imply incommensurability? Or just really strong encryption? — Marchesk

If we couldn't translate it, how could we know it was an alien signal?

How would one make sense of translation, if there were only one conceptual scheme? What could translation be doing here? How would Davidson answer this question? — Banno

I'll read through the paper and thread again and get back to you.

If we couldn't translate it, how could we know it was an alien signal? — Banno

I believe it's possible to know that a radio source is non-natural without being able to decode the message. Or at least that's what I've heard from SETI talks. The first goal is detection, and then after that would be decoding it. You can't decode before you detect an artificial signal.

Fine; so I'll get pedantic and say that what can be concluded is that the signal might be a message, not that it is a message.

So one way forward would be to apply information theory to translation.

Sure, it might be message.

But let's say the signal is in a pattern of prime numbers like with the book and movie Contact, so we would know for sure it was artificial. But let's say the aliens, for unknown alien reasons, decided to send us the works of some arcane philosophy in the writing style of someone like Derrida without any additional guide to their language or culture. That might be untranslatable to us.

So what we would see is a series of prime numbers and - random noise?

Hence my asking about information theory. Recognising that a signal contains a message seems to me to imply some level of understanding of the message.

Does Shannon entropy show us that there is a message without telling us what the message is?

Hence my asking about information theory. Recognising that a signal contains a message seems to me to imply some level of understanding of the message. — Banno

Probably so. I was more focused on whether we could understand the concepts if either the aliens sent us something difficult, or they thought a lot differently, without trying to provide a simpler cipher to help us along.

In Contact, the aliens had included a decoding schema starting with basic arithmetic and chemistry, but the goal was to provide plans for building a machine, which is a little different than sending a cultural text. What was also discussed was the alien's intentions in doing so, which could have been nefarious. It wasn't included in the message, so there was no way to know their intent until operating the machine.