by Professor Michele Marsonet.

The existence of the so-called “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 foster, this theme has a very important bearing on many related questions, among which the problem of scientific realism, 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 fundamental only for philosophy. According to Niels Bohr’s “principle of complementarity” we have, on the one side, a sort of Kantian world-in-itself which is both unknowable and indescribable, and on the other side an “us” which, unlike in Kant’s picture, is not stable and determined. This means that, in our inquiries about the world, different questions can all receive coherent answers, with the disquieting effect that a comprehensive and coherent image of reality cannot be achieved. It is as if, conducting different experiments, we were to change conceptual schemes: the world experienced will in any case be diverse, and there is no way to combine the world of our experience with the various, differing conceptual schemes. For example, the peculiar form of quantum effects entails that ordinary classical ideas about the nature of the physical world are profoundly incorrect, and some contemporary physicists endorse in this respect views which recall William James’ characterization of consciousness as a “selecting agency”. So conceptual schemes are neither born out of nothing nor established on aprioristic (and substantially unexplainable) bases. Their aim is to provide us with means for thinking about – and for speaking of – a reality which includes ourselves: they are sets of socially codified beliefs.

As is well known, in 1974 Donald Davidson published an influential paper on the problem of conceptual schemes which stirred a great deal of discussion and called for many challenges and replies. Davidson begins his paper by challenging 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.” However, this is simply the contemporary way of dressing the Kantian distinction between the contents that the noumenal world sends to us and the forms that we alone – as human beings – place upon them thanks to the particular structure of our categorial system. In Davidson’s approach, as in Kant’s, there is a real dichotomy between these two elements, in the sense that the (conceptual) scheme is “other than” the (non-conceptual) content that is practically opposed to it. This conception, obviously, is subject to the same criticisms that Sellars, Quine, and other contemporary authors addressed to the so-called “myth of the Given.”

According to such a myth, there are, on the one side, effects that the external world produces on our senses. We cannot, so to speak, defend ourselves from those effects: the fact that we are in the world means that we are inevitably “bombarded” by external reality. These are episodes experimented through our senses, and only later we are able to place them into a conceptual framework. The scheme/content dualism is thus explained: such a dualism works only in so far as the scheme is given a conceptual character, while the content is totally different, with no mediations and interchanges. Scheme and content are opposed elements, and their ontological status is obviously diverse. All this means that Kant’s heritage is surely present, even though it is not frequent to find Kantian references in their works. It is worth noting that, for Kant, there is no prevalence of sensible intuition over rational understanding. These two faculties presuppose each other: thoughts without content are empty, while intuitions without concepts are blind.

Now, Davidson’s rejection of the scheme-content distinction is supported by a whole set of arguments purporting to reject, first of all, the thesis that totally different conceptual schemes can actually exist. To put things in a very sketchy manner, he equates having a language with having a conceptual scheme, so that:

Here we have all the required elements: language as the organizing force, not to be distinguished clearly from science; what is organized, referred to variously as “experience”, “the stream of sensory experience”, and “physical evidence”; and finally, the failure of intertranslatability (“calibration”). The failure of intertranslatability is a necessary condition for difference of conceptual schemes: the common relation to experience or the evidence is what is supposed to help us make sense of the claim that it is languages or schemes that are under consideration when translation fails. It is essential to this idea that there be something neutral and common that lies outside all schemes. This common something cannot, of course, be the subject matter of contrasting languages, or translation would be possible (…) 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). The problem is to say what the relation is, and to be clearer about the entities related.

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, then, “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 accepts his arguments and gives up the dualism of scheme and world, he will not give up the the world, but will instead be able to “re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true.”

It is worth noting that Davidson’s solution is indeed radical: since we got this notion of the scheme-content distinction that worries us a great deal, because it places a wedge between us and the “real world,” let us simply get rid of it. But, of course, we must ask at this point what “real world” means for Davidson. Sometimes he seems inclined to identify it with the world of common sense which, as he states, is formed by the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false. And, in turn, these familiar objects are nothing but tables, chairs, houses, stars, etc., just as we perceive them in our daily life. One is not entitled to ignore, however, that all current discussions on the problem of scientific realism arise just because there is a strong asymmetry between the common sense view of the world and the scientific one (the “manifest” and the “scientific” images, to put it in Sellarsian terms. For instance, the table that we see with our eyes is not the same table that we “see” with the eyes of scientific instruments, and this fact certainly is not trivial. It is rather easy to reach a high level of intersubjective agreement among the individuals present in a room about the colour, size and weight of a table, and it can also be granted that we form our beliefs in this regard by triangulating with our interlocutors and the surrounding environment. Such an agreement, however, becomes rather problematic when we try to reconcile our common sense vision with what science tells us.

So, being in touch with such familiar objects as tables, chairs and stars “all the time” (as Davidson says) has no fundamental bearing on our ontology, since science shows that a completely different representation of those same objects can actually be provided. 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 chair that our eyes see in daily life? After all, we can conduct our life well enough even ignoring what science discovers (just like our ancestors did for many thousand years). This, however, looks like a serious under evaluation of the scientific enterprise, and we think that the importance of conceptual schemes in shaping our image of reality cannot be easily dismissed.

It should be noted that the complexities of the relations between human mind and the world must be taken into serious account, without looking for short cuts, and the problem of the conceptual schemes is nothing but the contemporary formulation of an old question, i.e., that of cognitive adequacy from the standpoint of an entirely different sort of cognitive beings. 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 experiencesLet us now resort to the contemporary formulation of the problem. First of all Davidson, as we saw before, associates conceptual schemes with languages, and then he adopts linguistic intertranslability as the identity criterion for conceptual schemes themselves. Subsequently comes the key passage of his essay, because 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: while we assumed it was, it turns out to be something different (but we are not told “what” L0 could be, given that it is not a language). So, Davidson goes on,

We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement (…) Where does this leave the case for conceptual relativism? The answer is, I think, that we must say much the same thing about differences in conceptual scheme as we say about differences in belief: we improve the clarity and bite of declarations of difference, whether of scheme or opinion, by enlarging the basis of shared (translatable) language or of shared opinion. Indeed, no clear line between the cases can be made out. If we choose to translate some alien sentence rejected by its speakers by a sentence to which we are strongly attached on a community basis, we may be tempted to call this a difference in schemes; if we decide to accommodate the evidence in other ways, it may be more natural to speak of a difference of opinion. But when others think differently from us, no general principle, or appeal to evidence, can force us to decide that the difference lies in our beliefs rather than in our concepts. We must conclude, I think, 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.

At this point one can observe that it would be much better to focus on “interpretation” rather than on translation in this context because, whenever we assume that some sounds or writings represent the use of a language, we actually engage in some sort of theory-building, i.e., we need a good deal of interpretive reconstruction. For instance, archaeologists are always able to know from the factual context that some inscriptions represent writing before any kind of decodification takes place, and in most cases we are able to ascertain that a language is used although no translation is actually available.

The fact is that Davidson resorts to a sort of “pansemanticism” which sees linguistic behavior as the only behavior that really counts, while the functional role of language, i.e. the way it is used, looks important too. It is not translatability as such that really matters but, rather, the functional equivalency of languages, and the latter, in turn, is both a semantic and a sociological issue. The above mentioned pansemanticism endorsed by Davidson clearly transpires when he tells us that “if all we know is what sentences a speaker holds true, and we cannot assume that his language is our own, then we cannot take even a first step towards interpretation without knowing or assuming a great deal about the speaker’s beliefs. Since knowledge of beliefs comes only with the ability to interpret words, the only possibility at the start is to assume general agreement on beliefs.” But data concerning non-verbal action and behavior can, in suitable circumstances, 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, so that our languages qualify as such not necessarily because what they say is something that we can say in our own terms, but because what they do – their communicative task – is something we can understand as a linguistic process, i.e., something that can be made intelligible to us on some kind of analogy with our own language-using processes. What is at issue, in sum, is a matter of different ways of going at a common job. To make plausible the idea of functional equivalency, we must, of course, have some conception of the functions at issue: some insight into the relevant structure of purpose and teleology.

Such remarks really pave the way towards understanding what conceptual schemes 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 what it does and how it works. Conceptual schemes are inherent in the way concepts work, but concepts, in turn, are themselves laden with factual and empirical commitments. Schemes thus differ in just this regard – in undertaking different sorts of factual commitments. On such a view it comes out that all our concepts are factually committal – i.e., theory-laden – and that language is not an empirically neutral vehicle for making substantive commitments, but itself reflects such substantive commitments.

The 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 instance, 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 ancient Greeks did not know a great deal of facts regarding the surrounding world that we now know. Their ignorance in this regard was due to the 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 – at least thus far – never came to an end in human history. And so we can see that a conceptual scheme for operation in the factual domain is always correlative with a particular view of the world – a view of how things work in the world. And the issue of historical development becomes involved at this juncture, seeing that such a fact-committal scheme is clearly a product of temporal evolution. Our conceptions of things are a moving rather than a fixed target for analysis. The conclusion is that thare are assertions in a conceptual scheme A which are simply not available in another conceptual scheme B, because no equivalent in it may be found. This view also allows us to 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, in fact, is different, since a change of scheme is not just a matter of saying things differently, but rather of saying altogether different things. In other words, a scheme A may be committed to phenomena that another scheme B cannot even envisage: Galenic physicians, for instance, had absolutely nothing to say about bacteria and viruses because those entities lay totally beyond their conceptual dimension. Where one scheme is eloquent, the other is altogether silent. This means, moreover, that our classical and bivalent logic of the True and False is not much help in such a context. Some assertions that are deemed to be true in a certain scheme may have no value whatsoever in another scheme, so that we need to formalize this truth-indeterminacy by having recourse, say, to a many-valued logical system in which, besides the classical T and F, a third (Indeterminate) value I is present. 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. If we fully endorse Davidson’s program, what are we likely to achieve? The answer is that we obtain a picture of reality in which all we know is that the (radical) interpreter gets to understand, just by watching the behavior of another person, when she holds true some sentences. Perhaps someone may deem this kind of explanatory model satisfactory, probably judging that we can come to know nothing else about our social world and its relationships with the natural one. The objects we think of as actually existing in the world are conceptualized by us as having features that transcend experience. If we do not take this fact into account, we are not likely to understand what is at issue here. Furthermore, we must bring the distinction “actuality vs. potentiality” into the picture, and namely the difference between sentences actually dealt with, and those which a person would deal with if certain circumstances occurred. The ancient Greeks did not know the truth-status of some sentences because they fell outside their conceptual horizon, and this is the conceptual scheme difference with which we are concerned.

How the world manifests itself to an agent will depend on that agent’s operational perspective in the world. What this means is that the objects, properties, relations, and so forth which play a central role in semantic theory (in interpreting language or stating truth conditions for sentences) should be treated as elements of our experience, i.e., as products and tools of inquiries, not as things given prior to or independent of experience. This is the “spectator theory of knowledge”, namely, the view that we can say something about the world (as it “really” is) independent of our participation in it. Russell, for instance, ignores the interactive character of “paying attention” to things. Indeed, many scientific disciplines, following the precedent established by Newtonian physics, take for granted a clean detachment between observer and the subject matter of observation. Putnam does not lose a direct handle on reality by asserting that facts as such are relative to (or internal to) some conceptual scheme. Consider an analogy. As you drive down the freeway, you note that the car next to you is moving roughly zero miles per hour relative to you. That is a simple and straightforward fact, as “real” as anything is real, though you are not in a position to say how fast the car is “really” going from some absolute reference frame. That the speed of the car is zero relative to you is no less a fact because you adopt your own position as the origin of reference. Conceptual schemes and operational perspectives in general are similar in this regard to kinematic reference frames. As long as a proposition contains at least an implicit reference to the operational perspective employed in its formulation, there is no way one can have any more of a fact than that. One cannot describe reality any more concretely than that (though one may describe it more and more extensively). There is no reason to think you are falling short of describing things as they really are by describing them from the perspective of a given conceptual scheme. There is no other way to do it and there never has been. This should be no more difficult to grasp than the claim that the Earth is not flat, or that humanity does not exist at the center of the cosmos. We do not mean to deny that there is a world out there independent of our participation in it, but he also hold that men have epistemic access to it only through such participation. Any reliable description of the world on our part is going to be determined by our operational perspective on it, that is, by our ways of participating in it. What we say about the world – what we talk about – are the actual things in our experience or in the possibilities extrapolated therefrom. The meanings of our terms are going to be determined by things as they do or might occur in experience. We can always question what is really out there independent of our experience, but our experience itself is all that is ever immediately given to us. It is just for this reason that one needs to distinguish “existential facts” from “reality”. We do indeed have direct access to existential facts – by paying attention to details of situations, that is, to the details of our “transactions” with the world – but it begs important epistemological questions to generally assume that such “facts” are unassailably true to reality by virtue of our attending to them. Such facts constitute in large part our grasp of reality; but our grasp of reality may fall short of complete and precise comprehension. It therefore makes sense to distinguish the world in its absolute reality from the world as revealed to us by virtue of our particular ways of operating in it.

We cannot say much of anything for certain about the former in much detail, even if we may rationally speculate about it on the basis of the great amount we can say, and in significant detail, about the latter. We do not deny that the world is out there by holding that we can know and say nothing reliable about it except as mediated through our transactions with it. Objects, properties, relations, etc., as they figure in a theory of semantics are, for Dewey, elements of our experience of the world, geared no doubt to the world in its absolute and independent reality, but also to our particular ways of operating in it. This is precisely why ontology and epistemology cannot, at least as long as we are concerned, be separated with a precise border line.

We may be entirely objective in our grasp of the facts of a given case, eliminating subjective factors of preference, interest, etc., but we cannot eliminate the operational perspective that is built-in the very nature of experience. There is no way to step outside of a situation to absolutely check these facts against the way things really are in some absolute sense, an ability the spectator theory of knowledge seems to unwittingly take for granted or otherwise tries to hold up as a practicable standard, but which is no more possible than is stepping outside of oneself in order to look oneself in the face.

There is, however, another thinker whose ideas turn out to be important if one wants to understand Davidson’s (and Rorty’s) theses: Wilfrid Sellars. Sellars tells us that, whenever taking into account the world of concepts, one must not forget that it is essentially formed by rational relations. In his most famous essay, he claims that when we describe the “states” that lead us to knowledge we not only describe them empirically, but also locate them in a logical space which has a rational character. And only within this logico-rational space are we able to justify what we say.

At this point a serious problem arises. Only human beings enjoy this logico-rational space. On the one side it guarantees both their freedom and an high level of autonomy from the natural world. On the other, however, it turns out to be a short-cut towards idealism. In this sense many thinkers developed Kant’s heritage in a certain direction, claiming that our thought is totally free. It is clear that the (alleged) complete freedom in the conceptual dimension poses the following problem. If our thought is not somehow conditioned by something which is external to the conceptual sphere, then one must conclude that our statements, including the empirical ones, are not connected to a reality which is independent of thought (and language). If so, why should we assume that experience is the foundation of our cognitive processes? And, furthermore, why should we claim that thanks to conceptual activity human beings can pronounce meaningful statements about the “world”? Any kind of world external to thought (and language) slowly vanishes, and the philosopher can only talk to himself: it is like playing chess with ourselves.

Quine on Conceptual Schemes

How, then, do our beliefs bear on the world? If we read carefully what Quine says in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, and in particular his well-known rejection of the second dogma, it is clear that he relates the empirical significance of our statements about the world with their possibility of being subject to what he calls, in Kantian terms, “the tribunal of experience”. So, it turns out that when we want to verify whether a belief of ours reflects what there is – or how things in the world really are – the recourse to experience is always necessary. In other words, beliefs may be accepted if, and only if, the judgement on their validity ultimately rests on experience itself. However Quine, like most thinkers of our century, deems language, too, very important, and this means that language must be accommodated into the picture if the picture purports to be coherent enough. “It is obvious” – he states – “that truth in general depends on both language and extralinguistic fact”. On the one hand extralinguistic reality and language are not identified but, on the other, Quine’s thesis is that they cannot be separated with a neat border line, because “Taken collectively, science has its double dependence upon language and experience; ”. but this duality is not significantly traceable into the statements of science taken one by one. The basic unity of empirical significance is, in sum, “the whole of science”. It goes without saying that, starting from these premises, once the second dogma is rejected, also the first one is: no statement can ever be free from an ultimate reference to experience.

All this means that conceptual schemes or world-views, like the ones provided, say, by Newtonian mechanics or today quantum theory, are the primary bearers of truth. The truth of a statement strictly depends from the particular conceptual scheme one currently adopts. Hilary Putnam, criticizing Hacking’s brand of realism, has recently observed that when Hacking pronounces the statement “positrons are real”, our believing in their reality (and consequently our deeming that statement true) has a conceptual content only because we have a conceptual scheme (quantum theory) – a very strange, one which we don’t fully understand, but a successful one nonetheless – which enables us to know what to say about positrons. He concludes that “Hacking’s attempt to draw a sharp line between fact and theory, and to say that one should be a realist about facts and a non realist about the theories, founders on precisely the interpenetration of fact and theory. As James might have put it, the word isn’t a copy of a reality, but a , and it is the theory that instructs us in the use of the notation. Again the theory and the fact (positrons were sprayed) are not even notionally separable”..

It is worth noting that in Quine’s “empiricism without dogmas” both language and experience play a key role. Not only is truth – which can be primarily predicated of a conceptual scheme – dependent on both language and experience, but language itself appears to be a factor which cannot be equated totally with experience: it manages to maintain somehow a certain independence. When dealing with the formation of beliefs, we must take into account an “external” element (experience) and an “internal” one (language). The question, of course, is to find out how this internal factor can be properly accommodated into the Quinean picture, because it is not difficult to see that “language” plays here the same role that “meaning” used to play in the analytic/synthetic dualism (the “first dogma”) that Quine rejects in his famous paper of the 1950s. So in Quine’s holistic picture the dichotomy between statements true in virtue of meaning alone, and statements whose truth depends also on how the external world is, is not overcome completely: it is given, rather, a new formulation.

In the conceptual scheme we find ourselves located, we can appeal to something outside the system, i.e. the world, so that beliefs are somehow controlled by external constraints. The story with language is, however, different, since language, in Quine’s thought, does not seem to be a factor whose ultimate legitimacy relies on something outside the conceptual system, and this in turn means that we face once again a dualistic situation. Despite the many oscillations present in Quine’s writings, we obviously have a real distinction which works for whole systems: the empirical content of a conceptual system or world-view never determines, just by itself, its empirical significance, because in any case we also need the contribution of language in order to make our picture coherent.

What objects, then, are we allowed to admit into our ontology? Since according to Quine we cannot admit possible objects, meanings, intentional and abstract entities, what remains to be done is to determine the scope of our ontological commitment. Quine’s answer is the following: the existence of any object is relative to the language we speak. If this is the situation, it would seem to follow that there are no objects independent of the language we use to talk about them and that, furthermore, there are no objects independent of the linguistic terms which denote them. Physical objects become postulated entities that help us organize the flux of experience.

We already ruled out the possibility that language and reality are the same thing, while it looks more plausible to state that in the Quinean view language and reality, even though they do not coincide completely, are so inextricably connected that it is impossible to distinguish one from the other. Ontology is thus internal to language, which means that it is internal to a conceptual scheme or world-view. In an important essay entitled “Existence”, our author makes the following claims: “Which ontology to ascribe to a man depends on what he does or intends with his variables and quantifiers. This second appeal to language is no more to be wondered at than the first; for what is in question in both cases is not just what there really is, but what someone says or implies that there is. Nowhere in all this should there be any suggestion that what there is depends on language.” This means that, if we adopt his strategy, we remain at the linguistic level without touching the properly ontological one, in the sense that we just cannot step outside the barrier posed by our language; and, in fact, Quine’s ontological commitment is not about what there is, but about what a true theory claims that there is. In any event, Quine in the essay mentioned above recognizes, although confusedly, that there is an ontological level which cannot be identified with the linguistic (logical) one. This is confirmed by what he claims soon afterwards:

What are we to say of the ontic commitment of a New Guinea aborigine – what are the purported values of his variables? I hold that there is in general no unique translation, not even unique in respect to ontic commitment, let alone logical style. I hold that our distinctively referential apparatus (…) belongs in an essential respect to the theoretical part of our language: namely, it is underdetermined by all possible sensory stimulation. A result, or really another way of stating the point, is that our referential apparatus is subject to indeterminacy of translation. That is, translations not equivalent to each other could be reconciled with all behaviour (…) It may in this sense be said that ontological questions are parochial to our culture. This is not to say that a thing may exist for one culture and be non-existent for another. Existence is absolute, and those who talk of existence can say so. What is parochial is the talking of it.

We can find there two different concepts of reality; neither of them, however, is defined in clear terms.

(1) In a first sense, reality is composed by objects which, although not well-defined, are similar to common sense objects that we perceive through our sensory apparatus. The task of language is to differentiate reality into particular objects, and from this it follows that, whenever talking about reality, we always do it relatively to language.

(2) In a second sense, however, reality appears less determined and more confused, since it may be assimilated to a sort of raw material that produces the flux of experience or, to put it in another way, a sort of substratum that supports the sensible qualities of material things.

In Quine’s view ontological talk rises when the human mind gives an order to the disordered fragments of raw experience which, in turn, are given to us by the just mentioned “substratum”. This notion closely recalls a concept of non-differentiated reality similar to the Kantian one. We know, however, that Quine rejects any distinction between a priori and a posteriori: he believes that any kind of ordering whatsoever cannot be separated by the act of theorizing (which, in his view, is tantamount to talking). In fact, he claims in “On What There Is”:

Our acceptance of an ontology is, I think, similar in principle to our acceptance of a scientific theory, say a system of physics: we adopt, at least insofar as we are reasonable, the simplest conceptual scheme into which the disordered fragments of raw experience can be fitted and arranged. Our ontology is determined once we have fixed upon the over-all conceptual scheme which is to accomodate science in the broadest sense; and the considerations which determine a reasonable construction of any part of that conceptual scheme, for example, the biological or the physical part, are not different in kind from the considerations which determine a reasonable construction of the whole. To whatever extent the adoption of any system of scientific theory may be said to be a matter of language, the same – but no more – may be said of the adoption of an ontology

We deem it correct to claim that the famed metaphor of the “conceptual ship” introduced by Otto Neurath plays an absolutely fundamental role in Quine’ thought. Let us see what the American philosopher claims in an essay which first appeared in 1950 in the Journal of Philosophy:

The fundamental-seeming philosophical question, How much of our science is merely contributed by language and how much is a genuine reflection of reality? is perhaps a spurious question which itself arises wholly from a certain type of language. Certainly we are in a predicament if we try to answer the question; for to answer the question we must talk about the world as well as about language, and to talk about the world we must already impose upon the world some conceptual scheme peculiar to our own special language. Yet we must not leap to the fatalistic conclusion that we are stuck with the conceptual scheme that we grew up in. We can change it bit by bit, plank by plank, though meanwhile there is nothing to carry us along but the evolving conceptual scheme itself. The philosopher’s task was well compared by Neurath to that of a mariner who must rebuild his ship on the open sea. We can improve our conceptual scheme, our philosophy, bit by bit while continuing to depend on it for support; but we cannot detach ourselves from it and compare it objectively with an unconceptualized reality.

There is a clear Kantian heritage here: we can never know reality-in-itself , but can nonetheless know reality as we say it is. If we assume that we can never reach reality-in-itself, it is obvious that our conceptual schemes are only bound to determine what reality is for us, and it is clear, too, that the language we speak becomes something much more important than a simple instrument for referring to a reality which is non-linguistic in character. Quine, for instance, claims that our ontology is always relative to the language we speak, so that the adoption of an ontology is a largely arbitrary operation. From this follows, among other things, that there is no absolute ontology, but as many ontologies as we like.

Language thus becomes the factor that guarantees our (human) autonomy from the natural world. It is a limited kind of autonomy, but its limited range is sufficient for somehow granting us a “special” status in the natural order of things. And just at this point we meet some difficulties in Quine’s theoretical building. As is well known, the American philosopher rejects the old notion of “meaning”, but at the same time he underlines “the extent of man’s conceptual sovereignty” in the formation of conceptual schemes or world-views:

Analyze theory-building how we will, we all must start in the middle. Our conceptual firsts are middle-sized, middle-distanced objects, and our introduction to them and to everything comes mid-way in the cultural evolution of the race. In assimilating this cultural fare we are little more aware of a distinction between report and invention, substance and style, cues and conceptualization, than we are of a distinction between the proteins and the carbohydrates of our material intake. Retrospectively we may distinguish the components of theory-building, as we distinguish the proteins and carbohydrates while substisting on them. We cannot strip away the conceptual trappings sentence by sentence and leave a description of the objective world; but we can investigate the world, and man as a part of it, and thus find out what cues he could have of what goes on around him. Subtracting his cues from his world view, we get man’s net contribution as the difference. This domain marks the extent of man’s conceptual sovereignty – the domain within which he can revise theory while saving the data. In a general way, therefore, I propose (…) to ponder our talk of physical phenomena as a physical phenomenon, and our scientific imaginings as activities within the world that we imagine.

This amounts to saying that the so-called empirical significance is something more than mere empirical content: we somehow have a creative role in the elaboration of conceptual schemes. Let us see, then, some other Quinean characterizations of the notion of conceptual scheme:

It is rather when we turn back into the midst of an actually present theory, at least hypothetically accepted, that we can and do speak sensibly of this and that sentence as true. Where it makes sense to apply ‘true’ is to a sentence couched in the terms of a given theory and seen from within the theory, complete with its posited reality (…) That the statements are about posited entities, are significant only in relation to a surrounding body of theory, and are justifiable only by supplementing observation with scientific method, no longer matters; for the truth attributions are made from the point of view of the same surrounding body of theory, and are in the same boat. Have we now so far lowered our sights as to settle for a relativistic doctrine of truth – rating the statements of each theory as true for that theory, and brooking no other criticism? Not so. The saving consideration is that we continue to take seriously our own particular aggregate science, our own particular world-theory or loose total fabric of quasi-theories, whatever it may be. Unlike Descartes, we own and use our beliefs of the moment, even in the midst of philosophizing, until by what is vaguely called scientific method we change them here and there for the better. Within our own total volving doctrine, we can judge truth as earnestly and absolutely as can be; subject to correction, but that goes without saying.

The interlocked conceptual scheme of physical objects, identity, and divided reference is part of the ship which, in Neurath’s figure, we cannot remodel save as we stay afloat in it. The ontology of abstract objects is part of the ship too, if only a less fundamental part. The ship may owe its strcture partly to blundering predecessors who missed scuttling it only by fools’ luck. But we are not in a position to jettison any part of it, except as we have substitute devices ready to hand that will serve the same essential purposes.

The question what there is is a shared concern of philosophy and most other non-fiction genres. The descriptive answer has been given only in part, but at some lenght. A representative assortment of land masses, seas, planets, and stars have been individually described in the geography and astronomy books, and an occasional biped or other middle-sized object in the biographies and art books. Description has been stepped up by mass production in zoology, botany, and mineralogy, where things are grouped by similarities and described collectively. Physics, by more ruthless abstraction from differences in detail, carries mass description farther still. And even pure mathematics belongs to the descriptive answer to the question what there is; for the things about which the question asks do not exclude numbers, classes, functions, etc., if such there be, whereof pure mathematics treats. What distinguishes between the ontological philosopher’s concern and all this is only breadth of categories (…) it is scrutiny of this uncritical acceptance of the realm of physical objects itself, or of classes, etc., that devolves upon ontology. Here is the task of making explicit what had been tacit, and precise what had been vague; of exposing and resolving paradoxes, smoothing kinks, lopping off vestigial growths, clearing ontological slums. The philosopher’s task differs from the others’, then, in detail; but in no such drastic way as those suppose who imagine for the philosopher a vantage point outside the conceptual scheme that he takes in charge. There is no such cosmic exile. He cannot study and revise the fundamental conceptual scheme of science and common sense without having some conceptual scheme, whether the same or another no less in need of philosophical scrutiny, in which to work. He can scrutinize and improve the system from within, appealing to coherence and simplicity; but this is the theoretician’s method generally. He has recourse to semantic ascent, but so has the scientist. And if the theoretical scientist in his remote way is bound to save the eventual connections with non-verbal stimulation, the philosopher in his remoter way is bound to save them too. True, no experiment may be expected to settle an ontological issue; but this is only because such issues are connected with surface irritations in such multifarious ways, through such a maze of intervening theory

The key point here is the following: the content of the world (reality) and the content of a conceptual scheme (world-view) are different, and this happens because of the just mentioned conceptual sovereignty we exert. The conceptual sphere is not reducible to the natural order of things: it is the realm of rationality and of meaning. An obvious temptation arises at this point. In other words, we might be tempted to say that the content of conceptual schemes is a pure product of our mind, a mind that operates more or less freely, a mind which is not controlled by external constraints (i.e., reality as such). It is worth noting, too, that with a further step we might arrive to the following conclusion: language is the transcendental condition of experience. This is a Kantian-like conclusion, of course, and a little effort will suffice to show that, behind it, we find again a Kantian-like dualism according to which we face both a reality-in-itself about which we can say very little, and a reality-for-us which is the result of the conceptual sovereignty we exert through the production of conceptual schemes or world-views. In Quine we surely have a picture of this kind, but the real nature of the conceptual sphere remains somehow mysterious: Quine’s behaviorism does not explain its presence, and we are led to conclude that, for the Harvard philosopher, it is unexplainable. Quine meant to get rid of the notion of “meaning”, but it can be argued that the notion of “language” plays in his thought the same role. “In contrast, is an intellectually respectable notion, because it is explicable entirely in terms of the law-governed operations of receptivity, untainted by the freedom of spontaneity. To put it in a more Quinean way, can be investigated scientifically. , the extent to which the content of a world-view goes beyond its , is just the extent to which such a notion of content lies outside the reach of science, and therefore outside the reach of first-rate intellectual endeavour”.

Now, it is interesting to note that Donald Davidson is not far away from such a stance. In a recent essay of his, in fact, he wrote that:

In communication, what a speaker and the speaker’s interpreter must share is an understanding of what the speaker means by what he says. How is this possible? It would be good if we could say how language came into existence in the first place, or at least give an account of how an individual learns his first language, given that others in his environment are already linguistically accomplished. These matters are, however, beyond the bounds of reasonable philosophic speculation. What as philosophers we can do instead is to ask how a competent interpreter (…) can come to understand the speaker of an alien tongue. An answer to this question can reveal essential features of communication, and will throw indirect light on what makes possible a first entry into language.

Even Davidson, just like Quine, makes us reflect on the fact that not everything can be investigated scientifically: there is, here, room for a return of the a priori to the stage. Language is something whose comprehension lies outside the domain of science. In Quine, however, this position does not fit well the rest of his speculative building. If we conceive experience as the stimulation of sensory receptors, as Quine does, we rule out the possibility of rational links between experience itself and beliefs (conceptual schemes). Conceptual schemes (or world-views) are systems of beliefs. Since today science makes us reflect on the contrast between the manifest and the scientific image of the world (just to use a Sellarsian dichotomy), we ought to find such rational relations, otherwise we are led to idealistic positions.

Ontology and Epistemology

Scientific discovery, Galileo notwithstanding, is not a matter of simply “reading” what is written in the book of nature, but is rather the outcome of the interaction between nature on the one side, and human mind on the other. It is a sort of two-sided story, since the contribution that mind gives to the construction of our science is at least as important as that provided by nature: No science – as we know it – would be possible without the specific contribution of the mind. Another important consideration relates to Kant and his transcendental idealism. On the one hand we accept the Kantian view that our knowledge is strongly determined by the a priori elements present in our conceptual schemes, and that they indeed have an essential function as long as our interpretation of reality is concerned. On the other hand, however, we tend to see these aprioristic elements as resting on a contingent basis, and validated on pragmatic – rather than necessitarian – considerations. The mind certainly makes a great contribution towards shaping reality-as-we-see-it, but the very presence of the mind itself can be explained by adopting an evolutionary point of view.

Given these facts, are we allowed to draw a neat border line between ontology and epistemology? However attractive this perspective may turn out to be at first sight, anyone wishing to clarify the distinction between the ontological and epistemological dimensions – without having recourse to unwarranted dogmas – should recognize that it is quite difficult to be pursued. The separation between factual and conceptual (synthetic/analytic), in fact, is not sharp and neat, but rather fuzzy. To this recognition another fact should be added. As long as we (humans) are concerned, the world is characterized by a sort of “ontological opacity ” which makes the construction of any absolute ontology very difficult (to say the least). All this has important consequences on both the question of scientific realism and the debate realism/anti-realism.

We may even admit that a distinction can be drawn between the natural world on the one hand, and the socio-linguistic world on the other. However, it should not be difficult to understand that, from an historical viewpoint, we began to identify ourselves and the objects that surround us only when the socio-linguistic world emerged from the natural one, and this in turn means that our criteria of identification are essentially social and linguistic. Since truth is geared to human interests, we need an intersubjective criterion giving rise to the notion of a world which is both objective and mind-independent. In other words, the distinction subject/object cannot be found in nature: It arises when men have such an intersubjective criterion, i.e., within a social world created by men themselves. It is important to note that these remarks do not entail the total identification of the aforementioned two worlds. The conclusion is rather that, of the natural world as such, very little can be said. What can we claim, for instance, about a dog as such, independently from all the specific characteristics that the mind attributes to it? We can suppose that a border line between ontology and epistemology really exists but, at the same time, as long as we are concerned, such a distinction looks less important today than it was usually thought to be.

There are two main reasons which explain why things are so. On the one hand conceptualization gives us access to the world, while, on the other, it is the most important feature of our cultural evolution (which is distinct from – although not totally separated from – biological evolution). This does not mean to diminish the importance of the latter, which is specifically geared to the natural world and, after all, is supposed to precede our cultural development from the chronological viewpoint. However, it is cultural evolution that distinguishes us from all other living beings that happen to share our planet with us. While the thesis according to which the mind produces natural reality looks hardly tenable, it is reasonable to claim that we perceive this reality by having recourse to the filter of a conceptual apparatus whose presence is, in turn, geared to the development of language and social organization. This is the reason preventing the aforementioned neat distinction between ontology and epistemology. For example, it might be stated that ontology’s task is to discover what kinds of entities make the world up (“what there is,” in Quine’s terms), while epistemology’s aim is to ascertain what are the principles by which we get to know reality. It is obvious, however, that if our conceptual apparatus is at work even when we try to pave our way towards unconceptualized reality, our access to it entails anyhow the involvement of the mind. Resorting to a paradox, it might be said that any unconceptualized reality turns out to be an image of the mind (even though, it is worth repeating it, this recognition does not force us to deny the mind-independent existence of unconceptualized reality). But this is not the correct formulation of the problem, because there is a line of continuity between the mind and the so-called unconceptualized reality.

At this point we have to face a very important 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 existence of alternative ways of conceptualizing the world. As we shortly mentioned before, the basic importance of such a question was understood by William James. At the beginning of our century, in fact, he wrote that “It is possible to imagine alternative universes to the one we know, in which the most various grades and types of union should be embodied. Thus the lowest grade of universe would be a world of mere witness, of which the parts were only strung together by the conjunction . Such a universe is even now the collection of our several inner lives (…) we can imagine a world of things and of kinds in which the causal interactions with which we are so familiar should not exist”. James went on saying that “The true, meaning what no farther experience will ever alter, is that ideal vanishing-point towards which we imagine that all our temporary truths will some day converge (…) meanwhile we have to live to-day by what truth we can get to-day, and be ready to-morrow to call it falsehood”. The conclusion of this line of reasoning is that the great scientific and metaphysical theories of the past were adequate for centuries but, since human experience “has boiled over those limits”, we now call these theories only relatively true. Those limits were in fact casual, and “might have been transcended by past theorists just as they are by present thinkers”.

Naturally James was not the first to note that our world-view can never be absolute, and that intelligent creatures whose experiential modes are substantially different from our own are bound to conceptualize reality in a diverse way. James, however, gave us a picture which is both very clear and anticipates the contemporary debate on conceptual schemes. He claimed in this respect that “In practical talk, a man’s common sense means his good judgement, his freedom from exentricity (…) In philosophy it means something entirely different, it means his use of certain intellectual forms or categories of thought. 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. It might be too (we cannot dogmatically deny this) that such 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 over evaluated. However, 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. 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 the cultural type of evolution mentioned above. Rescher’s work is of great help here, because rationality is for him a matter of idealization. Although we must admit our natural origins and evolutionary heritage, we must give way as well to the recognition that there is indeed something that makes us unique. Only human beings are able to to “gaze towards idealities” and to somehow detach themselves from the actualities on an imperfect world. Rationality is thus 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. The concept of possibility plays, indeed, a key role here. The rational guidance of human affairs involves a constant recourse to possibilities: we try to guard against them, to prevent them, to bring them to realization, etc. The theory of possibility thus represents a significant part of our understanding of man’s ways of thought and action.

At this point it should also be clear that the dimension of possibility must anyhow make reference to some kind of agent, and the agent itself is thus an inevitable point of departure. We are compelled to adopt such a stance, because this is the only way we have at our disposal for gaining accessibility to the world. No one denies that it would be good to transcend our conceptual machinery to glimpse at how the world really is, independently of any view we can hold about it. This, however, cannot be done because of the very way we, men, happen to be made. Unlike some forms of classical idealism, we can recognize the presence of things that are real in the sense of being mind-independent but, on the other hand, a specification is needed to the effect that human beings have access to those things via their conceptual apparatus.

A follower of scientism might now be tempted to state the unconditioned superiority of the scientific world-view over the image of the world that Wilfrid Sellars used to define the “manifest image of the world”, i.e. the common sense image which is shared – at least theoretically – by all men qua men. But is it really plausible to claim that science deserves the primary role in assessing any kind of conceptual scheme? What guarantees can science offer in this regard? And, above all, which science are we talking about in this context? No doubt the real world contains those entities which would be posited by an “ideally complete” science such as the one envisioned by Charles S. Peirce. But this ideal completeness is not available, and we are therefore compelled to work with what we have at our disposal here and now. This takes us back to the current scientific world-view, that is to say, the one provided by today science. We must face, in sum, a notion of truth which is essentially “relative”.

If we adopt the terminology of the philosophy of language, the true perceptual sentences may be viewed as correct opening moves within a linguistic game whose main function is the description of the world. But the validity of such a description is, once again, relative. In order to obtain a definitive kind of truth, we should have at our disposal a set of correct moves allowing us to close the aforementioned linguistic game. And those moves necessarily rely on the presence of a sort of Peircean ideal community of scientific researchers who are supposedly able to attain the “real truth” about the world. It follows that espousal in the long run within an ideally projected community of scientific inquirers is both a necessary and sufficient condition for the truthfulness of generalizations in the factual (world-oriented) domain. For Peirce, the decisive consideration in the determination of truth is stability (…) the mark of a true belief, one constrained by an external and independent reality, is that it is destined or, as he put it, “fated” to be underwritten by the operation of scientific method. Of course we cannot rule out the possibility that such an ideal community will exist in the future, but the history of science should at least prompt us to be pessimistic in this regard.

The fact is that scientific world-views continuously evolve, which means that the scientific enterprise has an essentially historical character. Science always is the result of the encounter between natural world on the one side, and human conceptions and practical interests on the other. Conceptual schemes determine our comprehensive world-view, but things do not change that much if we shift to the scientific vision of the world (even though some philosophers of science keep talking of the latter as if it were absolute). The appeal to mental experiments is very useful in the scientific domain, too, because in this case science itself makes us understand that it permits us to know the world from a particular viewpoint, which is in turn geared to the way we happen to be made and to the specific relationships we entertain with the environment which surrounds us. John Dewey used the term transaction to denote this encounter, where the respective contributions of the observer and of observed reality cannot be rigidly distinguished.

Any “absolutely objective” ontology is then left in the background, because precious little can be known about it and it represents a via negativa that does not take us very far. It should be noted that not only philosophers, but even many professional scientists have often denied the validity of the picture that the man of the street takes more or less for granted. In our century uncertainty about the content of our theories has grown fast, together with the feeling that there are alternative theories that can account equally well for all possible observations. Clearly the threat of relativism arises at this point, even though many authors nowadays no longer take relativism to be a threat, but just a fact of the matter. A good definition of it has been given by Larry Laudan, who writes in this regard: “Relativism (…) can be defined, to a first order of approximation, as the thesis that the natural world and such evidence as we have about that world do little or nothing to constrain our beliefs. In a phrase, the relativists’ slogan is It is this view that many current writers take away from the study of philosophy of science.”

It is thus necessary to replace Charles S. Peirce’s “long-run convergence” theory of scientific progress by a more modest position geared to increasing success in scientific applications, especially in matter of prediction and control. This dimension of applicative efficacy is something real, and can hardly be denied from a rational point of view. In matters of practical and applicative control we can always achieve significant improvements. But it must also be said very clearly that “perfection” (i.e.: the completion of the project) is, in principle, unfeasible. This means to oppose all those scientific projects whose aim is the search for a “final theory,” a good case in question being that of the physicist Steven Weinberg. Existential and descriptive claims can indeed be made, but the spirit of these assertions must always be provisional, tentative and, above all, hypothetical. All we are entitled to say is that if the science of the day (our science) is correct, then the so-called theoretical entities exist and possess the characteristic features that it envisions. No science would be possible without this basic realistic attitude, because its very aim is to provide an ontologically founded picture of reality. In understanding this fact, a philosopher of science has to recognize, on the one side, the descriptive and explanatory role that science purports to play, while, on the other, he must also stress that science is bound to be imperfect and fallible in its execution of such a role.

At this point we are confronted by another crucial question: Given the fact that we oppose instrumentalism and stress the necessity that substantive existential and descriptive claims are appropriate in the scientific context, what kind of realism are we actually endorsing? If someone objects that, in order to provide realism with a solid foundation, we need recourse to a reality that is totally independent of thought (and let alone of language), our reply runs roughly as follows. What can we possibly think about this reality, and how can we say what it is like? Even for imagining a world totally devoid of human presence, we must use human concepts. As we said previously, conceptualization is not an optional we can get rid of, but a built-in component of our nature of human beings. This means that we can never assume that a particular scientific theory gives us the true picture of reality, since we know perfectly well from the history of science that, in a future we cannot actually foresee, it will be replaced by a better theory. And it should be noted, moreover, that this future theory will be better for future scientists, but not the best in absolute terms, since its final destiny is to be displaced by yet another theory. All this prompts Rescher to claim that the current state of scientific knowledge is simply one state among others that share the same imperfect footing of ultimate correctness or truth. The “science of the day” must be presumed inaccurate no matter what the calendar says. We unequivocally realize there is a strong prospect that we shall ultimately recognize many or most of our current scientific theories to be false and that what we proudly flaunt as ‘scientific knowledge’ is a tissue of hypotheses – of tentatively adopted contentions many or most of which we will ultimately come to regard as quite untenable and in need of serious revision, or perhaps even abandonment. It is this fact that blocks the option of a scientific realism of any straightforward sort. Not only are we not in a position to claim that our knowledge of reality is complete (…) we are not even in a position to claim that our of reality is correct (…) Such a position calls for the humbling view that just as we think our predecessors of a hundred years ago had a fundamentally inadequate grasp on the , so our successors of a hundred years hence will take the same view of our purported knowledge of things.

Science, in sum, is not a stable system, but a dynamic process, and this fact leads us to view as problematic all those conceptions that place on the shoulders of future science the burden of perfection. We have a realism which is initially founded on a fundamentally idealistic basis, and this happens because the dichotomy realism/antirealism assumes that we are able to see the world from an external point of view. The strong version of scientific realism ignores a basic fact: we can never trust completely and in detail what our actual scientific theories claim, since history shows that, sooner or later, they will be dislodged. This is the reason why the history of science plays a key role, and in this regard we think that something more can be said. Even the history of the philosophy of science is important, since it makes us understand how the models by which philosophers interpret science (and reflect on it) change. We should be skeptical about any proposal which aims at distinguishing in a rigid manner science from metaphysics. There is no atemporal “scientific image of the world”, but many images located in the flux of time. The very image of common sense which, apparently at least, is quite stable, continuously evolves and incorporates elements coming from the scientific image. Any absolute scientific realism is, thus, untenable. If we claim that the science of our day provides the true picture of how the world really is, we seriously risk (given the concrete situation in which we happen to live) to hypostatize something that simply is a contingent and historically determined product of our action. This product is valid in a particular period of our cultural evolution, and an approach such as the one previously envisioned should prevent us from claiming that the ontology of today science is the absolute ontology that so many metaphysicians were looking for in the past.The preceding remarks prompt us to conclude that relativism and fallibilism are not ghosts of which we should be afraid, but just inevitable factors of our relationship with the surrounding environment. Richard Rorty is – at least in this case – right when he notes that natural science is not a natural kind, since it is essentially geared to historical and cognitive values. Our science is bound to be imperfect because we, humans beings who build it up, are imperfect creatures. In order to obtain final and metaphysically strong answers we should be able to detach ourselves from contingency, and this we can never do. We get to know the natural environment using scientific instruments and formulating scientific theories, but the history of the natural world with which we are acquainted is always an history that refers to human beings, because we develop it by having recourse to our conceptual schemes. We can imagine a world in which no conceptual scheme is at work because we are able to run the paths of possibility. But even in this case conceptualization plays a fundamental role, and putative truth is the best result we can achieve.

University of Genoa, Italy
Philosophy Department