Je vous en prie!

“What’s a philosopher?” said Brutha.
“Someone who’s bright enough to find a job with no heavy lifting,” said a voice in his head.
—Terry Pratchett, Small Gods

In giving up dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside of all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth – quite the contrary. Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and reality, we get conceptual relativity, and truth relative to a scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by the board.

I’m not going to argue for Davidson. Somehow, I don’t think I can improve on him ;-)

Nevertheless, ‘ueber-scheme’ and ‘one big science’ is exactly what he says he doesn’t need to be positing or assuming and why his point is so interesting to humanities (and, by the way, why the humanities should not accept the superiority of the ‘exact’ sciences).

His insistence on the concept of truth is not about language (I don’t think he’d say that truth is a notion relative to language) but on the possibility of having objective truth (against scepticism, solipsism) i.e. having an extralinguistic benchmark to separate true from false statements. ‘I am not a native speaker in English’ is objectively true regardless of the language in which it is stated (the reason being that my native language is Dutch).

It would be equally wrong to announce the glorious news that all mankind – all speakers of language, at least – share a common scheme and ontology. For if we cannot say that schemes are different, neither can we intelligibly say that they are one.

As far as I know, he didn’t think this position defeated the inscrutability theses.

I do think that he established that you can work at understanding each other and, in fact, that an extreme cultural relativism (or absolutism) is untenable. And if that would not be useful outside the field of philosophy, what would be useful outside of it? Certainly given the humanities are in many cases the field where culture relativism and absolutism are at the center of debate.

This is far too neat to be accurate and we need to examine the gray areas where translation is only partially successful and we are left with both a shift in meaning and elements that remain incommensurable. Literature as the highest form of human expression in language can serve as an extreme example, of what is actually very commonplace in ordinary communication. Whenever a poet tries to translate his feelings, experiences and thoughts into written language, a reader tries to translate a text into a something that he can connect with or a translator tries to translate a text from one language to another, something gets lost in the process and there are shifts in meaning.

These gray areas of only partially successful translation are pervasive, the norm rather than the exception, and they cannot be explained away by the notion of an imagined omniscient interpreter. And while hilzoy points out that “translation” in these debates has a wider meaning than that of our ordinary language use of the word, I would still hold that the act of translating a text from one language to another is the closest we can get to actually experiencing and really understanding how shifts in meaning occur and what incommensurability means.

My god, I hope you mean it this time!

I’ll toss in another example which might push things along. Psychologists seem quite happy to have lots of models of different aspects of human behavior, cognitive processes and so on. Economists, even behavioral economists, very strongly prefer a unitary model, at the (much-remarked on) cost of oversimplification. That affects what counts as an adequate explanation of observed outcomes.

If I can get some free time (hah!), I’ll try and work up a proper post on this while Michéle is visiting.