by Prof. Michele Marsonet (University of Genoa)

Strangely enough, when one gets involved in the contemporary debate on conceptual schemes he very rarely finds mention of Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. However, the theses of the Polish philosopher in this regard are quite important, and we deem his contribution to be no less original – and no less controversial – than those of Quine, Davidson and Rorty. Let us note from the onset that even for Ajdukiewicz conceptual schemes are languages. Furthermore, we would like to point out that Ajdukiewicz wrote his main essays on this topic in the 1930’s, i.e. half a century before the debate on conceptual schemes started following the publication of Davidson’s paper in 1974. This confirms, we believe, the originality of his approach. Wolenski rightly notes that Ajdukiewicz’s approach is linguistic all the way down, and that he devised no evolutionary structure in language. But this, of course, is no reason for denying the importance of his theses for the contemporary debate: Ajdukiewicz’s limits, after all, are the limits of analytic philosophy itself.
Jan Wolenski writes in this regard that “Ajdukiewicz treated cognitive processes as inseparably connected with language: we always think in some language, and our statements are meanings which are attributes of sentences in some language L. Hence cognition, or, to put it more rigorously, cognition as a product, can be identified with the meaning of sentences. This is the essential methodological intention of Ajdukiewicz’s semantic epistemology”. In the Polish philosopher’s works the expression “conceptual apparatus” replaces “conceptual scheme”. Ajdukiewicz’s notion of conceptual apparatus is strictly tied to close and connected languages, and thus has a more technical connotation than what is meant today by the expression “conceptual scheme”. Wolenski tells us that “the class of meanings of a closed and connected language was termed by Ajdukiewicz the conceptual apparatus of that language. It follows from the appropriate definitions that two conceptual apparatuses are either identical or have no element in common. And a consequence […] is that if two conceptual apparatuses have at least one element in common, then they are identical. Thus conceptual apparatuses never overlap. Ajdukiewicz held that every meaning belongs to some conceptual apparatus. Hence open languages are mixtures of various conceptual apparatuses”.
Let us note, at this point, that Ajdukiewicz’s theses are subject to the same criticisms one can address to Davidson and Rorty. Laudan’s remark that only a full endorsement of the linguistic turn’s main tenets may explain why so many philosophers insist on equating conceptual schemehood to languagehood apply to Ajdukiewicz as well. Only now, following the rise of post-analytic philosophy and the rediscovery of pragmatism, the basic tenet according to which linguistic behavior is the sole behavior that really matters has openly been challenged. We all know, of course, that Ajdukiewicz’s conception of language is an autonomous one, since he took language to be a product which is independent of action. Wolenski reminds us that “[…] the problem is clarified immediately when we consider the fact that Ajdukiewicz was not interested in the origins of a language, but in language as a product. The thesis on the autonomy of language acquires meaning when we bear in mind the difference between actions and their products (taken over by Ajdukiewicz from Twardowski). An objective assignment of meanings to expressions is possible only when language is treated as a product”.
Yet, this fact does not distinguish Ajdukiewicz’s ideas from the mainstream of the linguistic philosophy of the past century. What makes Ajdukiewicz’s thought so appealing is the fact that he cleverly anticipated, in the 1930’s, many theses that are commonly discussed today. So we find out that his “radical conventionalism”, despite its several shortcomings, has many precious insights too, because in a famous paper dating back to 1934 he wrote: “Of all the judgments which we accept and which accordingly constitute our entire world-picture, none is unambiguously determined by experimental data; every one of them depends on the conceptual apparatus we choose to use in representing experiential data. We can choose, however, one or another conceptual apparatus which will affect our whole world picture”.
Subsequently Quine became famous for saying more or less the same thing, while Ajdukiewicz’s contributions are still ignored by most Western philosophers. Quine remarks that there are many implicit background assumptions which make all the difference to how we interpret our experiences, and how we make our final evaluation of statements. This means that we cannot simply get meaning from experience, since there are no “neutral” observations available to men. And it is precisely because our conceptual judgments meet experience as a body that we must allow for possible revisions at any place within that body, so that “no statement is immune to revision”. And, if this is right, we must even allow for the possibility of changes in our verdicts on what is experienced itself.
Compare Quine’s statements with the following by Ajdukiewicz: “No articulated judgment is absolutely forced on us by the data of experience. Experiential data do indeed force us to accept certain judgments if also we are based on a particular conceptual apparatus. However, if we change this conceptual apparatus, we are freed of the necessity of accepting these judgments despite the presence of the same experiential data”. It is clear that what Quine defines as our “conceptual sovereignty” plays a key role even in this context, although the words used by the two authors are not the same. In any event, the striking similarity between the two philosophers is clearly detectable, once again, in the following statements by Ajdukiewicz (written in 1935): “Even the epistemologist cannot speak without a language, cannot think without a conceptual apparatus. He will thus make his decision as to truth in a way which corresponds to his world-perspective”.
Not only that: even logic is, according to the Polish philosopher, “relative to” a particular conceptual apparatus, and a change in the conceptual apparatus means a change in logic, too. On his part, Quine claims that “revision even of the logical law of the excluded middle has been proposed as a means of simplifying quantum mechanics; and what difference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift whereby Kepler superseded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin Aristotle?”.
In the final analysis we deem it necessary to point out that conceptual schemes are neither born out of nothing nor established on aprioristic bases. Their aim is to provide us with means for thinking about – and for speaking of – a reality which includes ourselves. We can add four partial definitions of “conceptual schemes” to the ones provided in the opening section. In a first sense they are (A) sets of socially codified beliefs, that is to say belief-structures that are warranted by social use. In a second sense conceptual schemes are (B) sets of logically interconnected beliefs, i.e. structures in which our conceptual sovereignty above nature plays an essential role. In a third sense conceptual schemes are (C) world-views, i.e. interpretations of the world. In a fourth sense they are (D) operational perspectives on the world, i.e. means by which men interact with the surrounding environment. Meanings (A), (B), (C) and (D) are related to one another. In each case, conceptual schemes are instruments devised for practical purposes. By stressing this fact we wish to rule out any attempt to reify conceptual schemes, to conceive of them as self-subsistent and metaphysical entities which exist independently of human subjects and social structures. In our view they are primarily tied to the dimension of human action, and must be seen as elements of the agent/environment interaction.
As a matter of fact data concerning non-verbal action and behavior can lead us to ascribe beliefs in quite a plausible way. No doubt translatability helps a great deal, but certainly it is not an a priori condition for ascribing beliefs. These remarks pave the way towards understanding what conceptual schemes really are. They are a sort of practical metaphor which is supposed to convey the outcome of our categorization of reality. One should always be careful not to ascribe to them any metaphysical or self-subsistent feature: in other words, we must produce no reification of conceptual schemes, because their real nature is practical and functional. In order to understand what a conceptual scheme is we must not have recourse to abstract idealizations, because the comprehension of its nature can only be achieved by looking at how it works. Dewey’s idea that our explanatory mechanisms are themselves the products of inquiry, in turn, opens the door to another key notion: “conceptual innovation”. If we look at the history of science, for example, it is easily understandable that we, men living in the twentieth century, form our conception of the sun in quite different terms from those of Aristotle, or our conception of the heart in terms very different from those of Galen. The presence of different conceptual schemes may thus be explained by the process of conceptual innovation which – at least thus far – never came to an end in human history.
We should thus challenge Davidson when he says that “we get a new out of an old scheme when the speakers of a language come to accept as true an important range of sentences they previously took to be false.” The point at stake is in fact different, since a change of scheme is not just a matter of saying things differently, but rather of saying different (in the sense of new) things.
In other words, a scheme A may be committed to phenomena that another scheme B cannot even envisage: Galenic physicians, for instance, had nothing to say about viruses because those entities lay totally beyond their conceptual dimension. This means that our classical logic based on the principle of bivalence is not much help in such a context. Some assertions that are deemed to be true in a certain scheme may have no value in another scheme, so that we need to formalize this truth-indeterminacy by having recourse, say, to a Lukasiewicz-style many-valued logical system in which, besides the classical T and F, a third (Indeterminate) value I is present. We have, in sum, a much more complex picture than the one contained in Davidson’s paper. It is important to note, once again, some hints contained in Ajdukiewicz’s works. Jerzy Giedymin writes that “If different world-pictures cannot be compared either logically […] or experimentally, are they equally good or can they not be compared in any way whatever? – They can be compared and evaluated in the process of ‘human understanding’ […] or from an ‘evolutionary’ point of view”. In other words, we can understand Galenic medicine, but a Galenic physician would lack the conceptual apparatus for understanding ours.
So, to deny that different conceptual schemes exist is a little absurd. Of course, as we said previously, the expression “conceptual schemes” is a metaphor: we cannot see or touch them as we do with physical objects. Their presence, however, is detectable from human behavior, and this means that they are tied to the dimension of human action. Conceptual schemes, in sum, evolve, because they are processes and not immutable structures.
One should always take into account the broader models (conceptual schemes, cultural traditions) by means of which we judge our sentences – including, for example, the mythological ones – to be true or false. They are part of the “framework of conceptual thinking” and, as long as men are concerned, they can think because they are able to measure their thoughts by having recourse to standards of correctness and of relevance. The aforementioned “framework of conceptual thinking” somehow transcends the individual thought of individual thinkers. This explains why there is truth and error with respect to it, even though we may talk of entities which do not exist in the physical world. There is indeed a correct and an incorrect way to describe this framework.
As it was said previously, we must not take conceptual schemes to be independent and metaphysical entities detached from any form of life. This fact gives them a sort of opacity which makes any kind of definition unsatisfactory from a purely logical point of view. Every time we try to overcome the metaphorical level of discourse we run into trouble, and any attempt at defining precisely what a scheme is, apart from the practical and functional role it plays in our cognitive endeavors, seems doomed for failure. We seem somehow to be prisoners of the metaphor we ourselves have devised.