Reference, Truth and Conceptual Schemes: A Defense of Internal Realism

168 Pages·2001·5.959 MB·English

by  Gábor Forrai (auth.)

REFERENCE, TRUTH AND CONCEPTUAL SCHEMES
SYNTHESE LIBRARY
STUDIES IN EPISTEMOLOGY,
LOGIC, METHODOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Managing Editor:
JAAKKO HINTIKKA, Boston University
Editors:
DIRK VAN DALEN, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
DONALD DAVIDSON, University of California, Berkeley
THEO A.F. KUIPERS, University of Groningen, The Netherlands
PATRICK SUPPES, Stanford University, California
JAN WOLEN-SKI, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland
VOLUME 296
GABOR FORRA!
University of Miskolc, Hungary
REFERENCE, TRUTH AND
CONCEPTUAL SCHEMES
A Defense of Internal Realism
SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.
A c.I.P. Catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-90-481-5677-1 ISBN 978-94-017-2868-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-2868-3
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved
© 200 I Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
Originally published by Kluwer Academic Publishers in 2001
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has grown out of my PhD dissertation written at the University of
Notre Dame under Gary Gutting's supervision. I am very grateful to him for his
advice and encouragement. I have also benefitted from the conversations with
Marian David and Michael Kremer. In the following years I also had a chance to
discuss the issues treated here with Ferenc Altrichter, Marta Feher, Ferenc
Huoranszki, Tihamer Margitay, Howard Robinson and Marta Ujvari. Katalin
Bimbo, Katalin Farkas and Zoltan Szabo have read parts of the original manuscript,
and their comments were extremely valuable. Peter Sullivan and Jose Luis
Bermudez have read the complete manuscript and have given me excellent advice
about how to restructure the material to make it more like a book rather than a PhD
dissertation.
Much of section 4.3 was published in Dialectica Vol. 50, Fasc. 4 (1996), pp.
259-74 under the title "Internal Realism, Metaphyiscal Realism, and Brains in a
Vat". It is reproduced here with the permission of the publisher.
A different form of thanks is due to my wife and daughter who accepted without
complaints that I often devoted more time to the book than to them.
Gabor Fo rrai
CONTENTS
CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION
1.1. Historical Background I
1.2. The Plan of the Book 8
CHAPTER 2 METAPHYSICAL REALISM AND INTERNAL REALISM 10
2.1. Metaphysical Realism 10
2.2. Internal Realism 23
CHAPTER 3 REFERENCE 40
3.1. An Internal Realist Account of Reference 41
3.2. Quinean Indeterminacy and MiscIassification 51
3.3. Twin Earth and Mental Content 62
CHAPTER 4 TRUTH 73
4.1. Truth Within a Conceptual Scheme 74
4.2. The Adequacy of Conceptual Schemes 83
4.3. Global Skepticism and Brains in a Vat 96
CHAPTERS CONCEPTUAL PLURALISM 110
5.1. On Sharing a Domain 110
5.2. Davidson's Challenge 117
5.3. Physicalism, Naturalism, and Relativism 123
Notes 133
References 139
Index 147
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
1. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
The purpose of the book is to develop internal realism, the metaphysical-episte
mological doctrine initiated by Hilary Putnam (Reason, Truth and History,
"Introduction", Many Faces). In doing so I shall rely - sometimes quite heavily - on
the notion of conceptual scheme. I shall use the notion in a somewhat idiosyncratic
way, which, however, has some affinities with the ways the notion has been used
during its history. So I shall start by sketching the history of the notion. This will
provide some background, and it will also give opportunity to raise some of the most
important problems I will have to solve in the later chapters.
The story starts with Kant. Kant thought that the world as we know it, the world
of tables, chairs and hippopotami, is constituted in part by the human mind. His cen
tral argument relied on an analysis of space and time, and presupposed his famous
doctrine that knowledge cannot extend beyond all possible experience. It is a central
property of experience - he claimed - that it is structured spatially and temporally.
However, for various reasons, space and time cannot be features of the world, as it is
independently of our experience. So he concluded that they must be the forms of
human sensibility, i. e. necessary ingredients of the way things appear to our senses.
Consequently, the world as it is independently of experience should be distinguished
sharply from the world we experience. The former, the non-temporal and non-spatial
world of 'things in themselves' or 'noumena', cannot be known; since human
experience is spatial and temporal, the world of things in themselves outstrips the
bounds of possible experience. The latter, the world of 'appearances' or
'phenomena', can be known and is known to some extent; but it is partly our own
making, because space and time are additions by the human mind.
The constitution of the world of knowledge by the human mind is not accom
plished solely by space and time. Space and time have to do with 'receptivity', the
passive faculty of the mind. In virtue of this faculty, the mind is like a surface which
is altered as a result of the changes which take place in the environment. By
suffering transformations, it provides information about the forces which act on it.
But this information is not yet knowledge. It is just a 'sensory manifold', a series of
impressions, chaotic, unorganized, and accidental. It does not yield anything like a
picture of a relatively stable and law-governed environment. It is, therefore, just the
raw material for knowledge. The task of 'spontaneity', the active faculty, is to
2 CHAPTER 1
transform this raw material into knowledge by imposing on it divisions,
classifications, and various kinds of ordering. This systematization is accomplished
through the application of concepts. Kant distinguished between two kinds of
concepts, a priori and a posteriori. The latter are contingent; they are introduced to
cope with the impressions the mind happens to receive. So Kant, whose
transcendental project was to unearth the necessary preconditions of human
knowledge, had no interest in them. The a priori concepts, such as 'cause' and
'substance', are different. They are not introduced on a case by case basis depending
on what sort of impressions the mind receives through its passive faculty: the mind
possesses them prior to any experience. They are necessary if we are to construct the
picture of a stable and law-governed world out of the chaos of impressions. Without
them there would be no orderly world, which could be known. Like space and time,
they contribute to the constitution of the world we know.
Putting it tendentiously and imprecisely, Kant held that the world as we know it
is constituted, in part, by a conceptual scheme. This is tendentious, because Kant
like many other authors mentioned or hinted at in this sketch - never used the term
'conceptual scheme'. It is also imprecise, because it lumps together two things: the
forms of sensibility - space and time -, which are not conceptual and play part in
shaping the sensory manifold, and the a priori concepts, the 'categories', which
create the world of appearances out of the sensory manifold. Nevertheless, the view
to be developed here is a distant descendant of Kant's view, and the notion of con
ceptual scheme, as I shall understand it, is indeed rooted in his work. I shall maintain
that there is a distinction between the world as it is and the way it appears to us, the
noumena and the phenomena, in Kant's terms. The world as we know it is consti
tuted by conceptual schemes. What conceptual schemes do is thus roughly similar to
what Kant's forms of sensibility and a priori concepts do. So let me continue with
the history of the notion.
In Kant's view there is but one conceptual scheme, which is shared by the whole
of humankind. This assumption was challenged by the next generation of German
philosophers, notably by Herder and Humboldt, who put the notion to a rather dif
ferent use. They were more sensitive to historical and cultural differences, and came
to regard these differences as incompatible with the Kantian assumption of one uni
versal conceptual scheme. They held that if another group of people think in ways
which seem odd to us and which are difficult to make sense of, they have to be cred
ited with a conceptual scheme different from our own. So they changed the notion
into a hermeneutic device, which could be invoked in cases of cultural
confrontation. Suppose there is an ancient text or an alien people which or who we
find difficult to understand. We are trying to make sense of what is written or said,
but what we come up with seems strange, irrational, or outright crazy. If there is no
clear evidence to the contrary, we prefer to regard the other as a sensible being. But
then the oddity calls for an explanation. If the other isjust as sensible as we are, how
come her ways seem so weird? It is at this point that the notion of conceptual
scheme comes in. The weirdness is due to the fact that she is using a different
conceptual scheme. Once we manage to explore her conceptual scheme, we shall
INTRODUCTION 3
find that, viewed from within her scheme, her opinions are reasonable and well
motivated - or, at least, her mistakes are not that numerous or serious. Thus Kant's
universal scheme was dissolved into a plurality of historically and culturally bound
schemes. This transformation cannot be reconciled with the Kantian sense of a
priori. Kant's a priori concepts are indispensable for any sort of human knowledge.
If some people did not share this set of a priori concepts, this would entail that they
cannot have knowledge. Hence, at the hands of the post-Kantian generation the
conceptual scheme has lost its a priori status. Nevertheless, it has remained
fundamental in the following sense. It has come to signify the constitutive elements
of some worldview, the elements which together endow it with a particular sort of
unity or cohesion which distinguishes it from other worldviews; the sort of elements
which are all-important for understanding the view, without the grasp of which the
view is fragmented into incongruous bits and pieces.
This historical and cultural notion of conceptual scheme has had serious reper
cussions throughout the humanities and the social sciences, partly because it has
captured something of the experience of those who study alien cultures, like histori
ans, field linguists and anthropologists. However, it has also made it easy to arrive at
two rather worrying conclusions. The first is a strong form of relativism. Suppose
that the dissimilarities between conceptual schemes are so huge that thoughts from
one scheme cannot be translated into or interpreted in another scheme; i. e., the re
sources of different conceptual schemes are so disparate that each is incapable of
expressing what can be expressed in other schemes. This would make it impossible
to judge a claim formulated within a conceptual scheme from outside the scheme.
Within scheme A we could not evaluate the claims formulated within scheme B,
since the claims could not be reformulated within A without distortions so serious
that the reformulations could no longer be considered identical to the original
claims. For the same reasons, there would be no hope for the construction of a
common frame of reference within which the relationship between different schemes
could be clarified, and we could examine their compatibility and truth. If this were
the case, the idea of truth as a universal notion which ranges over all conceptual
schemes would become empty and superfluous. It would have to be replaced by a
notion of truth which is relativized to conceptual schemes. Instead of truth we
would have to speak of truth within a conceptual scheme. This would be relativism,
straight and simple. To sum it up, if the hermeneutic notion of conceptual scheme is
supplemented with the idea that there can be no translation between conceptual
schemes, the likely result is relativism.
The second and even more drastic conclusion emerges only if we add two more
premises. The first one is that conceptual schemes are constitutive of the world as it
appears to us, just as Kant thought. The second one is the un-Kantian thought that
the only notion of the world which makes sense is the world as it appears to us. In
other words, the phenomena are retained but the noumena are dismissed. If the
world of appearances is different within different conceptual schemes, and the
notion of a common, neutral world, which is the same even though it appears
differently, is rejected as unintelligible, we end up with the thought that there are
4 CHAPTER 1
several different worlds. As it were, each conceptual scheme would constitute its
own world. This would be something like idealism with many worlds instead of one.
This is even more worrying than relativism. Relativism raises barriers in the way of
communication and prevents us from viewing the whole of humankind as
participating in the same cognitive and moral enterprise. The many world view adds
this: we do not even have anything to communicate about. People with different
conceptual schemes are as if they were locked into separate universes in some weird
science fiction story.
These conclusions do not automatically follow from the historical-cultural notion
of conceptual scheme. But this notion has never been worked out in sufficient detail
to see what exactly it involves. A much better developed notion emerges from the
work of the logical positivists. The logical positivists did not follow Kant, and they
were not interested in cross-cultural understanding either. They were concerned with
the rational reconstruction of our knowledge, especially of scientific theories. As
radical empiricists, they believed that all knowledge comes from the senses; in fact,
all knowledge is about what can be observed. Consequently, all that there is to know
could be formulated in observational terms, at least in principle. In practice,
however, descriptions couched exclusively in observational terms would be far too
complicated to use. It takes a vast number of purely observational sentences to
express very simple things. It would be very difficult to obtain predictions and
explanations. This is why we introduce theories. Theoretical terms are merely
abbreviations intended to express complex observable conditions concisely. Since
what the theories say can in principle be put in observational terms alone, theoretical
terms do not have surplus meaning, which does not come from observation. (In fact,
all surplus meaning would be banished by the principle of verifiability, which asserts
that all meaning is observational meaning.) It follows from this that the sentences
which link theoretical terms to observational terms, the 'correspondence rules' or
'coordinative definitions', are analytic. They do not provide factual information
about how two different sorts of things are related. Rather, they are conventions,
which merely record abbreviations. In addition to these analytic sentences, science
contains two sorts of synthetic sentences. First, observation reports, which contain
only observational terms. These can be used to test scientific theories. Second,
sentences containing only theoretical terms, such as the laws of a theory.
To sum it up, the logical positivists considered scientific knowledge as a twO
level structure. The lower level is that observation, the upper level is that of theory,
and the two are connected by correspondence rules. The sentences on the lower and
the upper level are synthetic, the sentences which connect the two levels are analytic.
This picture is related to the idea of conceptual schemes in the following way.
What the theoretical terms accomplish is somewhat similar to what the a priori con
cepts do in Kant. They organize what is given to the senses in such a way that they
make it a suitable subject for knowledge. Of course, they transform it into a suitable
subject for knowledge in a different way. In Kant, the application of categories is
necessary for any kind of empirical knowledge. According to the logical positivists,
there can be empirical knowledge without theoretical terms, but this knowledge