Organizing, Fitting, Predicting
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Organizing, Fitting, Predicting Nilanjan Bhowmick1 Received: 22 June 2017 / Revised: 2 March 2019 / Accepted: 11 November 2020 © ICPR 2020
Abstract This article introduces a dilemma regarding conceptual schemes and suggests a solution. The dilemma is about whether there are conceptual schemes or not. There are good reasons for maintaining either position. There must be conceptual schemes because theory is underdetermined by evidence. And there cannot be conceptual schemes because Davidson has given an almost unassailable argument against it. I resolve the dilemma by arguing that Davidson’s argument is based on a false dilemma generated by too strong a principle of charity. This makes space for conceptual schemes without sacrificing the intelligibility of any. Keywords Conceptual schemes · Underdetermination · Translation · Principle of Charity
Introduction There is a certain dilemma that strikes the mind if one weighs two propositions: first, that evidence underdetermines the choice between two theories, or theory-internal choices, generally (Turnbull 2017), and second, Davidson (2001) has shown, in his paper “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” that there is no such thing as scheme-content dualism. The first proposition leads to the idea that there must be conceptual schemes; the second denies this. Briefly, we may have two theories that have the same observational evidence supporting them, but the theories themselves are contradictory. That is a familiar way of understanding the term “underdetermination.” If underdetermination is true, we cannot choose between theories based solely on evidence, but must rely on other factors. The different theories that exist to account for the same phenomena may be taken as conceptual schemes. They refer to entities and attribute properties of them that seem not in consonance with each other, but the same evidence stands for both theories. But Davidson (2001) argued powerfully against the notion of there being different conceptual schemes. Davidson * Nilanjan Bhowmick [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, University of Delhi, New Delhi 110007, India
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Journal of Indian Council of Philosophical Research
argued that we cannot make any sense of the notion of incommensurable conceptual schemes, and a fortiori, we cannot make sense of the notion of intelligible conceptual schemes that differ from the home idiom but are still conceptual schemes in their own right. Indeed, the home idiom is itself not a conceptual scheme. Davidson writes, “…if we cannot intelligibly say that schemes are different, neither can we intelligibly say that they are one.” (2001:198). The dilemma, obviously enough, is that we are forced to choose one of the propositions and yet we cannot make the choice for there are apparently good reasons to hold both propositions. There is good reason to believe underdetermination of theory choice by evidence, and there is good reason to believe that Davidson has got something right in his argument
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