by Michele Marsonet.

The existence of conceptual schemes is one of the most controversial issues in today philosophy. Its importance lies in the fact that, depending upon what strategy one chooses to adopt, this theme has a fundamental bearing on many related questions, among which ethical and social problems, the relations between ontology and epistemology, and the role that our conceptualization of the world plays in a realist vs. idealist outlook on reality. It would be wrong, however, to assume that the issue is important only for philosophy. If we take into account quantum mechanics, we find out that according to some interpretations there is, on the one side, a world which is essentially unknowable and undescribable, and on the other an “us” which is not stable and determined. This means that, in our inquiries about the world, different questions can all receive coherent answers, with the effect that a comprehensive image of reality cannot be achieved. It is as if, when conducting different experiments, we were to change conceptual scheme: the world experienced will in any case be different, and it is hard to combine the world of our experience with the various conceptual schemes. For example, the form of quantum effects entails that ordinary ideas about the nature of the physical world are incorrect.
A short and precise definition in this regard has been provided by Harold I. Brown, who claims that a conceptual scheme is

[…] a set of concepts and propositions that provide a framework for describing and explaining items of some subject-matter along with criteria for recognizing which phenomena are to be considered deviant and in need of explanation. For example, ancient astronomers thought of planets as moving in circular paths at constant speed and attempted to reduce observed non-circular motions to systems of underlying circular motions that appear non-circular from our perspective. Newton introduced a new conceptual scheme that viewed physical objects as moving in straight line unless acted on by some force. Planetary orbits were then explained as resulting from the interaction of straight-line motion and gravitational forces. In epistemology Quine has sought to eliminate the traditional conceptual scheme that treats every proposition as either analytic or synthetic.

Conceptual schemes, thus, 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 give four partial definitions of conceptual schemes. 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 sovereignity 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 from the onset 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. Their aim is to provide us with means for thinking about – and for speaking of – a reality which includes ourselves: in a word, we are not outside this picture. As Rescher points out, they are tissues of beliefs socially codified, so that their nature is not aprioristic, but a posteriori.
Davidson’s famous paper of 1974 is a natural starting point for any discussion on this argument. He challenges the scheme-content dualism, and mentions both “a dualism of total scheme (or language) and uninterpreted content”, and “a dualism of conceptual scheme and empirical content.” All this may be seen as the contemporary way of dressing the Kantian distinction between the contents that the noumenal world sends to us and the forms that we place upon them thanks to the particular structure of our categorial system. What we have here is a real dichotomy between these two elements, in the sense that the (conceptual) scheme is “other than” the (non-conceptual) content that is opposed to it. It goes without saying that the characterization Davidson takes into account and criticizes is subject to the attacks that Sellars, Quine, Davidson himself and others addressed to the so-called “Myth of the Given.”
According to such a view, there are effects that the external world produces on our senses. We cannot, so to speak, defend ourselves from these effects: the fact that we are in the world means that we are inevitably affected by external reality. They are episodes experimented through our senses, and only later we are able to locate them into a conceptual framework. The scheme/content dualism is thus explained: such a dualism works in so far as the scheme is given a conceptual (and independent) character while the content is something totally different, with no mediations at all. Scheme and content are indeed opposed elements, and their ontological status is obviously diverse.

Now, Davidson’s rejection of the scheme-content distinction is supported by a set of well-known arguments purporting to reject, first of all, the thesis that totally different conceptual schemes can actually exist. To put things in a sketchy manner, he equates having a conceptual scheme with having a language, so that we face the following elements: (1) language as the organizing force; (2) what is organized, referred to as “experience”, “the stream of sensory experience”, “physical evidence”; and finally (3) the failure of intertranslatability. It follows that “It is essential to this idea that there be something neutral and common that lies outside all schemes […] The idea is then that something is a language, and associated with a conceptual scheme, whether we can translate it or not, if it stands in a certain relation (predicting, organizing, facing, or fitting) with experience (nature, reality, sensory promptings.)”
If this is the situation, Davidson goes on, then we could say that conceptual schemes that are different in a radical way from each other correspond to languages that are not intertranslatable. How can we, however, make sense of a total failure of intertranslatability among languages? For sure “we could not be in a position to judge that others had concepts or beliefs radically different from our own.” Davidson’s conclusion is that if one gives up the dualism of scheme and world, he will not give up the world, but will instead be able to “re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true.”
Davidson’s solution is radical, but we are bound to ask at this point what the expressions “reality” and “world” mean for him. Let us assume that they can be identified with the world of common sense which is formed by the familiar objects whose antics – as he says – make our sentences and opinions true or false. These familiar objects are tables, chairs, houses, stars, etc., just as we perceive them in our daily life. One is not entitled to ignore, however, that the current discussions on the problem of scientific – and metaphyisical – realism arise because there is a strong asymmetry between the commonsense view of the world and the scientific one (the “manifest” and the “scientific” images of man-in-the-world, to put it in Wilfrid Sellars’ terms). For instance, the table that we see with our eyes is not the same table that we “see” through the mediation of scientific instruments, and this fact is not trivial. It is rather easy to reach a high level of inter-subjective agreement among the individuals present in a room about the color, size and weight of a table, and it can also be granted that we form our beliefs in this regard by triangulating – in a Davidsonian sense – with our interlocutors and the surrounding environment. Such an agreement, however, becomes problematic when we try to reconcile this vision of the world with what present science tells us about it.
So, being in touch with such familiar objects as tables, chairs and stars “most of the the time” (as Richard Rorty adds) has a fundamental bearing only on the ontology of common sense, since our actual science shows that quite a different representation of reality can actually be provided (or, even better, it shows that those objects might not exist as men perceive them). Naturally, one can always resort to an objection of the following kind: why should we deem the table viewed as a collection of subatomic particles more important than the table that our eyes see in daily life? After all, we can conduct our life well enough even ignoring what science claims (just like men did for many thousand years). This, however, might look like a serious underevaluation of the scientific enterprise.
It may be noted at this point that the contemporary approach to the problem of conceptual schemes is nothing but the reformulation of an old question, i.e., that of cognitive adequacy from the standpoint of an entirely different sort of cognitive beings. Today most authors seem to exclude this possibility from the onset, but one need not follow them on such a path. For example, William James wrote in this regard that:

Were we lobsters, or bees, it might be that our organization would have led to our using quite different modes from these of apprehending our experiences.

Davidson, as we saw before, associates conceptual schemes with languages, and then adopts linguistic intertranslability as the identity criterion for conceptual schemes themselves. Subsequently we are told that, in order to call something “a language,” say L0, we must be ready to accept the idea that the statements of L0 can be translated into those of our own language (let us call it L1). It easily follows from this line of reasoning that, if this cannot be done, L0 is not a language at all. So, Davidson goes on,

[…] we must conclude […] that the attempt to give a solid meaning to the idea of conceptual relativism, and hence to the idea of a conceptual scheme, fares no better when based on a partial failure of translation than when based on total failure. Given the underlying methodology of interpretation, we could not be in a position to judge that others had concepts or beliefs radically different from our own.

One may point out, however, that linguistic intertranslatability cannot be such an absolute criterion because, as Rescher notes, in certain circumstances we are able to realize that some sort of language is used even though we cannot translate it into our own language. Furthermore, Larry Laudan remarks that there is no reason to assume the presence of different world-views only when there are no criteria of intertranslatability among them. “Only with the so-called linguistic turn” – he claims – “have philosophers supposed that conceptual schemehood is to be understood in terms of non-translatability. Aristotle’s cosmos and Einstein’s universe represent very different world-views. With Davidson, I believe that each can be made intelligible to adherents of the other. But only someone as wedded to the translation thesis as Davidson is would imagine that the latter fact (viz., intertranslatability) constitutes grounds for denying that they represent different conceptual schemes.” The absolute primacy that Davidson places on translatability should thus be rejected, hence Laudan’s proposal to identify conceptual schemes on ontological, axiological and methodological (and not exclusively linguistic) criteria.
Here we have to face a problem, because the question arises whether it is more appropriate to speak of “scheme” (singular) or of “schemes” (plural). This is not a rhetorical question, as it might seem at first sight. What lies behind it is, rather, the question of ontological pluralism, which is in turn connected to the possibility of alternative ways of viewing the world. Once again it was James who realized that it is possible to imagine alternative universes to the one we know and that our world-view can never be absolute. Intelligent creatures whose experiential modes are substantially different from our own are bound to interpret reality in a diverse way, and he remarked that different “categories, unimaginable by us to-day, would have proved on the whole as serviceable for handling our experiences mentally as those which we actually use.”
Someone might object that these are only mental experiments, whose importance cannot be overevaluated. We think that two answers may be given to such an objection. First of all, mental experiments play a key role in both philosophy and science. No doubt they are merely hypothetical devices, but they also allow us to enter the dimension of possibility. By resorting to them, we are able to imagine how the world could have been in the past, could be today, or could turn out to be in the future. Rescher points out that we live in a world – our world – in which potentiality turns out to be as least as important as actuality. This is a specific characteristic of our relationship with the world, which is strictly geared to our cultural evolution: idealization plays indeed a key role in all human endeavors. Rationality is the expression of mankind’s capacity to see not only how things actually are, but also how they might have been and how they could turn out to be if we were to take some courses of action rather than others.
But, secondly, we must recognize that the natural environment in which we live (and of which we are a substantial part) has an essential bearing on conceptualization. In other words, we would not conceptualize the world the way we do were we not sensitive to some physical parameters like, for instance, light or heat. Science provides reliable information on the world, but this information is always relative to a particular framework, and it is a mistake to think that the limits of our cognitive capacities only have an aprioristic character. We are mainly bound by empirical limits, due to the fact that we inquire into nature by means of an apparatus which answers certain stimuli, but not others. We have been able to formulate theories on electromagnetism because this phenomenon, on our planet, is essential, and the development of optics is due to the importance of light in our life. However, nothing in our actual science leads us to rule out the hypothesis that, in other natural environments, the development of science might have taken quite a different course. In order to give plausibility to this hypothesis, we must only admit the existence of worlds whose natural environment is substantially diverse from our own, and certainly this is not mere science fiction.
By saying this, we leave the domain of mental experiments to enter that of hypotheses which are – at least in principle – empirically verifiable. No doubt our science today is the only science we know, but this should not lead us to exclude the possibility that there are other ways of investigating nature. After all, science tells us that there are many aspects of reality that we cannot get in touch with by means of our sensory apparatus (which is the product of a process of evolution which took place in particular environmental conditions). Therefore we should not uncritically accept Davidson’s statement that “since there is at most one world, these pluralities are metaphorical or merely imagined.” Davidson concentrates on the failure of intertranslatability between conceptual schemes in order to show that this same idea is meaningless. However, Kuhn subsequently loosened up this factor, and we may admit that total failure of intertranslatability is not likely to occur among subjects who share the same natural environment. But this does not rule out the possibility we have previously mentioned.
Let us go back now to the partial definitions of conceptual schemes provided before. The notion of “conceptual scheme” is a sort of practical metaphor which is supposed to convey the outcome of our conceptualization of reality. As we previously hinted, one should always be careful not to ascribe to it any metaphysical or self-subsistent feature. In other words, we must produce no reification of conceptual schemes, because their nature is practical and, above all, functional. A comprehension of what a conceptual scheme is can be achieved by looking at how it works.
If we follow this path, conceptual activity has no mysterious essence that waits to be explained, but is rather a product of our inquiry directed to investigate the surrounding environment. And this is precisely the reason why the notion of “conceptual innovation” plays a key role in such investigation. If we look at the history of science, it is easily understandable that our predecessors did not know a great deal of facts regarding the world that we now know. But their ignorance in this regard was due to the practical circumstance that those very concepts had not yet been formulated in their days. The presence of different conceptual schemes may thus be explained by the process of conceptual innovation which never came to an end in human history. So we can see that a conceptual scheme always is a particular view of the world: our conceptions of things – Rescher claims in many of his works – are a changing rather than a stable object of analysis.
It follows that the presence of different conceptual schemes is hardly deniable. 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.
What we have not shown is the presence of alternative conceptual schemes, i.e., schemes for which the failure of intertranslatability actually occurs. If we claim, in line with what was said before, that many of our actual concepts fall outside the cognitive range of our predecessors, we have not shown the existence of alternative schemes but, rather, their temporal evolution. Of course an ancient Greek could not possibly know about quantum mechanics. But we have no reason to rule out that, provided he could be brought into life again, he might be trained. In other words, we have no reason to assume that he would be unable to learn. A Davidsonian philosopher might note, in fact, that instead of showing the existence of really alternative schemes, this mental experiment simply makes us understand that the class of sentences that we assent to is not the same class that the untrained ancient Greek would hold true. And, as Davidson would put it, this is not enough to retain the excitement in the idea of alternative schemes.

Michele Marsonet
University of Genoa, Italy
Philosophy Department