Kant, Davidson, and Conceptual Schemes (B53-B91)

From Kant’s Concluding Thoughts on the Transcendental Aesthetic up to the analytic of Concepts

Contents

• The Myth of the Given
• The Objectivity of Objects
• The Argument of “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”
• Schema & Foundation
• Concluding Thoughts
• Notes
• References

The Myth of the Given

The notion of a perceptual “given” as something questionable, even impossible in a certain sense, has had a wide influence on recent philosophy. It’s importance as a philosophical concept began to be seen primarily through C.I. Lewis’ Mind and the World Order and Wilfrid Sellars’ Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind and gained wider currency by way of the influential writings of Quine, Davidson, Rorty, Brandom, McDowell and others. To understand why it claimed philosophical interest for these authors is to make an important gain in understanding the spirit of their arguments. Its central claim is that all perceptions, even those that might stand as our most basic and immediate sensory experience of the world, cannot be treated as objective “data” about the world, but must be regarded as always bound up with some way of perceiving the world. In other words, our perceptions cannot be taken to give us a neutral, pre-theoretical foundation for knowledge, an unproblematic, objective basis for building our ideas into an internally consistent set of concepts “from the ground up” as it were.

Sellars, who could be considered the most influential writer on this topic, noticed that there has been a very widespread tendency in the history of philosophy to conflate two very different ideas: perceiving and thinking. The tendency has been to regard our bare perceptual apprehension of objects as itself involving a way of knowing objects in their givenness. One might, for example, unproblematically claim to be perceiving an object, without actually thinking anything about it (or making any judgment about it) in a propositional sense (e.g. this is a pineapple, it tastes good/bad on pizza, etc.). But what has not been recognized is that in the transition to the thought “this is a pineapple” we do not arrive at a basic foundational element of knowledge, but one that necessarily presupposes “a world” of relationships to other concepts, or in other words, a conceptual scheme. Once this point is properly appreciated, it can be seen how the kind of move Sellars has in mind yields a more precise sense according to which our most basic ideas should be seen as “theory-laden.”¹

This kind of mistake can be seen in Locke’s treatment of perceptible objects as analyzable into simple ideas (for example, patches of red making up our perception of an apple). With such simple ideas we might be said to acquire the phenomenal building blocks of our knowledge of them. But to say that such ideas are the epistemologically basic starting points of our knowledge is to misunderstand where statements such as “this is a red patch” fall in the order of knowledge, to confuse, it would seem, what is prior in the order of experience “for us,” to use an Aristotelian locution, and what is epistemologically prior in general, relative to a schema of beliefs about the world within which we are constrained to operate.

Such factual claims about our perception of the world should not, therefore, be thought of as providing a foundation for knowledge. But the lack of any absolutely objective starting point does not leave us without a basis for developing a conceptual scheme that can be utilized to our benefit. As Sellars writes,

Above all, the picture is misleading because of its static character. One seems forced to choose between the picture of an elephant which rests on a tortoise (What supports the tortoise?) and the picture of a great Hegelian serpent of knowledge with its tail in its mouth (Where does it begin?). Neither will do. For empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once.”

Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, p.78-79

Observation statements do not yield a return to a pre-theoretical point of view about apples or red patches, but may lead us to assess their place within a web of beliefs not necessarily grounded in our own experience. Hence, their true value is corrective of what might be called a “pre-theoretical bias” within the way we think about what we perceive and believe to be true about what we perceive. Inasmuch as our immediate experiences can always be placed within the logical space of a reasons, they will always be interpretive in some respect. Going beyond the perception/proposition framework that Sellars uses to construct his argument it might be said that even our non-propositional interactions with objects may involve a scheme of pre-propositional beliefs about them. Even in the act of picking up an object, it might be reflected, we are already interpreting it as something that can be picked up. In doing so, we place it in a logical space of ideas that involves forming concepts about what kinds of things they are and a certain way of identifying them as those kinds of things, extending to a further field of potential judgments that are more or less appropriate to it.

The recognition that our involvement with the world might always involve an interpretation or theory of some kind sets writers like Kant apart from his predecessors. His discussion of schema formation in the Critique provides a basis for thinking beyond the field of language that so immerses contemporary philosophy. But what is important for our more general purpose is the recognition that Kant also recognizes the way in which even our most direct apprehension of perceptible objects becomes “theory-laden” once we turn to think about them, even to the point of merely stating facts about what we perceive. The opposition between Kant’s view of the mind as containing conceptual forms prior to our engagement with the world and Locke’s notion of our consciousness as a blank slate,² for example, sets Kant apart from the empiricist tradition. Rorty describes this opposition as follows, in a way that echoes Sellars:

taking Kant’s point that intuitions without concepts are blind is the first step toward abandoning a bad philosophical habit which the British empiricists took over from Descartes–the habit of asking whether mind ever succeeds in making unmediated contact with world, and remaining skeptical about the status of knowledge-claims until such contact can be shown to exist.”

From the Introduction to Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, p. 9

Rorty attributes the kind of confusion about the foundational claims our perceptions can be used to make to Hegel, whom Sellars also recognizes as predecessor. Here the point is that Hegel recognizes Kant as having been on the right track at least to the extent that he understood that to think about what we perceive is to think about it in a certain way. But the connection the broader connection to an implicit web of concepts may also be drawn out, inasmuch as our interpretation of objects ultimately leads us back to the ultimate basis of their intelligibility, the categories.

And yet, as Rorty also notices, it seems that some notion of givenness must be retained if we are to be able to engage in the project of schema building.³ In a way that is again consistent with Sellars’ point that empirical fact-finding is nevertheless genuinely productive for the growth of knowledge, Rorty writes, “I have been arguing that without the notions of ‘the given’ and of ‘the a priori’ there can be no notion of ‘the constitution of experience.'” Kant recognized the difficulty of taking our perceptions as “given,” but also did not want to abandon empiricism altogether as a pathway to knowledge. Davidson who also accepts the myth of the given finds himself situated in a similar way. Such philosophers do not wish to abandon the idea that we have a direct first personal awareness of sensory appearances and that such appearances can be used to develop theories about our experience in some reliable way. Their philosophical challenge might therefore be understood as similar to Kant’s: as an attempt at a reconstruction of traditional empiricism without the need for a purely objective foundation in the sensible-objective sense required by traditional empiricism.⁴

In what follows, we will briefly explore how Kant manages to resolve the conflict mentioned above between the need for some kind of sensory objectivity and the challenge the recognition of the myth of givenness poses to the development of theories about reality. We will do this as part of an effort to arrive at a greater clarity about what Kant has actually done in the Transcendental Aesthetic transitioning to the Transcendental logic. Because of the very pervasive influence of Davidson’s way of advancing the pragmatist version of knowledge, we will discuss his “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” as a way of illuminate some deeper issues in the Critique relative to understanding knowledge in terms of self-supporting conceptual schemes.

Kantian Objectivity

Reconsidering Kant’s “Copernican turn” can help bring out what is implied in his turn toward transcendentally grounded foundations for our ideas. The traditional orientation of realist epistemology was based upon an attempt to “fit” or “adequate” our concepts of objects to the objects they attempt to describe, an effort captured by the pervasive search for a λο΄γος in Aristotle’s treatises and in the Plationic dialogues.⁵ The extent to which our concepts might be adequate to express the objectively accessible features of objects marked the degree to which they could be held to represent “reality” as such. It was the objective accessibility of objects that made them the basis for the correction and improvement of our concepts.

For classical Empiricists, the merely “subjective” was a source of error. What empiricists such as Locke sought and thought they had found in our basic sensory experience was an objective foundation for knowledge and understanding of the world about us that could be paired with another source of objective knowledge, the light of reason, to yield a deductive schema of reality–or at any rate one that begins with a claim to represent the reality of things that strives for further adequation.⁶ Yet the two were recognized as incompatible inasmuch as one type of knowledge was a knowledge of matters of fact, the other of the truths of reason. Hume famously exploited the consequences of this unacknowledged rift that furthermore separates reason from the world of our experience. Yet traditional empiricism and empirical science is founded upon the recognition of two foundations. The “sensible-objective” for such theorists has the virtue of being at least a touchstone for the correction of error.⁷ On the other hand, the “natural light of reason” delivers a type of objectivity that appears even more secure and self-supporting, inasmuch as reason cannot dismiss its claims as being false. But in either case, the empiricist tradition looks to self-evidence to illuminate our path toward further discovery.⁸ As Locke put it, where the light of self-evident truth is not present, other forms of persuasion may take hold of our contemplation, such as our passions, interests, and affections (in other words, our biases).⁹

Kant’s position has greater nuance. Kantian transcendentalism takes the objective “reality” of objects to have two possible senses. They may be considered either as representations or as objects “in themselves,” i.e. apart from any representation. The “reality” of objects apart from any representation we might have of them is inaccessible to us, and so cannot serve as an epistemic foundation for developing further knowledge. This kind of representationalist idealism was not unknown to the empiricist tradition. But the former sense in which the reality of objects may be understood, the reality of our representations as representations gives us a true basis, not only for the correction of error and improvement of our concepts, but also for a priori reasoning. There is a guaranteed fit and way toward adequation, hence a foundation, in Kant’s way of aligning the categories, our basis for a priori reasoning, with the way our representations are structured by the forms of perception. This is because whenever we consider the objects of our perception we find them already “prepared,” as it were, for our understanding by the forms of sensibility.

Thus, Kantian transcendentalism might be seen as carrying with it a shift away from the discovery of the “reality” of objects in the traditional empirical sense, toward discovering a cognitive basis for the objectivity of our representations of objects in the senses discussed in relation to traditional empiricism above, sensory and ideal objectivity. What Kant accomplished was the reinstatement of these two bases that empiricism itself had shown to be in consistent with its own principles. The “objective” basis for knowledge, it might be said, becomes “subjective,” (i.e. makes the “Copernican turn” discussed in the second edition of the Critique) or more precisely, becomes a positive outcome of the subjective conditions of our understanding inasmuch as they align with the forms of perception.

All this appears to collide with the consideration that Kant recognized that we way we perceive objects is never simply a matter of taken them to be “given” in the sense sought for by traditional empiricism as a foundation for the process of developing a schema of knowledge on the basis of a program of ongoing conjecture and refutation. As was said in the section above on the myth of the given, there is a genuine sense in which Kant recognizes that when we think about an object, and so attempt to bring it into the “space of reasons” as Sellars might say, we cannot do so except by applying the categories of our understanding to it, to say nothing of the associations one might have or prior experience that would lead to the formation of a schema as discussed Kant’s exploration of the “Transcendental Doctrine of Judgment.” But this appears to mean that the givenness of objects should be thereby recognized as having been compromised. Just as the door was taken by Sellars and others to be shut to givenness for traditional empiricism, so, it might be thought, it should be for the objectivity of Kantian objects.

And yet, a moment’s reflection should be enough to see that the transcendental turn sets Kantian objectivity on a radically different footing. For Kant, the basis for the ultimate truth of objects in our experience has a cognitive basis rather than a strictly empirical one. To grasp their truth is simply to grasp the way in which our mind provides us with the foundations for further research, discovery, and correction from error on the basis of the way the mind itself structures reality. The structural principle of reality is the mind: yet this does not mean that we arrive immediately at the truths of the world as we encounter it, which experience must further reveal to us if we are to make progress in comprehending it. Nor does it mean that we already possess the principles of empirical science necessary for developing a schema of knowledge that reflects reality as we find it. It simply means that we have a basis for claiming that we do in fact have a basis for the development of such a schema whose givenness is not necessarily compromised by its own concepts. The turn toward transcendentalism means that there is, in fact, a basis for the objectivity of the fundamental structural concepts we use to think about objects. This, in turn, means that their givenness is genuinely available to us.

Hence, the structured object, when intuited, can act as a foundational starting point of its own intelligibility. Therefore, (A) Kant confirms what Sellars and others took to be an impossibility: the pre-theoretical givenness of the given. Simply put, Kant relocates the “given” that traditional empiricism took to be the underlying basis for objectivity (since it was, in a sense simply “neutral”) to the realm of things in themselves. He does so by paying the price for the only kind of objectivity we may have in relation to objects. By making our representations of objects rather than some more ineffable notion of bare sensation a touchstone for the correction and development of our knowledge of things, he establishes a sense of truth as relative to a conceptual scheme, delimited by the capacity of our understanding to comprehend its true objects.

Thus, (B) Kant’s transcendental turn provides the basis for the discovery of a fundamentally intelligible objective reality in our representations of objects, so that, in discovering the principles of the natural world or, in general, by developing scientifically adequate conceptual schemes, we may make our way past Humean skepticism toward the discovery of the structure of reality as it can only be for us in combination with the raw material of sensation. As we make our way toward more and more adequate conceptual schemes on the basis of further empirical discoveries (by means of new instruments, for example) the intelligibility as well as the corrigibility of such frameworks will be based upon what we can know on the basis of our own inner structuring principles. Thus, any schema we might develop must be based upon a set of background conditions that make human knowledge possible. Those conditions could be said to provide us with a transcendental conceptual scheme that could be found reflected in any empirical schema as the basis for whatever intelligibility it may have.

Thus, we arrive at the consideration that for Kant, all empirical knowledge us ultimately based upon an a priori, transcendental conceptual scheme that “rules all” attempts at a posteriori knowledge Such a scheme would be transcendental in the following sense: it would provide an ultimate framework within which our understanding would be capable of operating, so that it could arrive at such notions as a priori true statements, axioms of deductive reasoning, and the objectivity space and time as a framework for our perception of objects. Its guiding “maxim” would be that only such schemes of empirical knowledge as are open to testing may be admitted as genuine schemes of knowledge.¹⁰ The goal of the Critique of Pure Reason could be understood as the development of such a transcendental scheme that grounds the possibility of genuine knowledge of things as representations according to a priori principles. Its pragmatic value could be seen in that it provides us with a schema of human understanding that, by delimiting what can from what cannot be understood, helps prevent us from pursuing philosophical blind alleys and cul-de-sacs. For Davidson, by contrast, the rejection of Kantian transcendentalism, as well as traditional empiricism, means that we are left without any means of certifying whether there might be one scheme of knowledge for all users of a language or many, based simply upon the possibility of inaccessible semantic differences among different language-schema users.

The Argument of “On the very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”

Let’s begin by getting clear about Davidson’s argument. There are many ways to misunderstand Davidson’s essay, or otherwise feel that its meaning has slipped through one’s fingers somehow. One way is to not fully grasp the import of translation itself. Translation from one scheme into another relies upon what Davidson, Sellars, and others believe there cannot be: a truly objective, theory-neutral ground between schemes. What is required is “some foundation” so that disagreement (falsifiability) will be possible on the way to approximating truth by the discovery of error. This amounts to the development of a lexicon that indicates where any two statements can be considered to mean the same thing, whether by synonymy or by referring to the same thing.

When Davidson ultimately arrives at the conclusion “we have found no intelligible basis on which it can be said that schemes are different”¹¹ he is not questioning the functional viability of translation, but whether any empirically grounded effort at translation can be said to truly yield any certainty that what we believe a particular statement means in our language corresponds to the intended meaning of a speaker in our own language. This is ultimately because there is no ultimate basis for objectivity where questions of meaning are concerned. We arrive at Davidson’s conclusion, which harkens back to the myth of the given: no basis can be given, even in cases where we are referring to everyday objects such as rocks, stones, and trees, as a theory-neutral foundation for any ultimate kind of objectivity itself. It is on this basis that he rejects the dualism of scheme and world as a dualism that cannot be adequately supported.¹²

This reasoning applies as much to differences of scheme as of belief. If any two people, say a believer and a non-believer, do not share the same belief, there must be a way of discovering mutual understanding between them on the meaning of certain words (e.g. the meaning of belief itself, of agnosticism perhaps, or of the trinity as the case may be) so that they can make genuine sense of their disagreement. Davidson’s point is not that this is simply impossible in a purely functional sense, but that if we are to arrive at a genuine idea of the truth of what each speaker means, “What we need is a theory of translation or interpretation that makes no assumptions about shared meanings, concepts, or beliefs.” However, we are constrained to use a method that must necessarily make assumptions:

What matters is this: if all we know is what sentences a speaker holds true, we cannot even take a first step towards interpretation without knowing a great deal about the speaker’s beliefs. Since knowledge of beliefs comes only with the ability to interpret words, the possibility at the start is to assume general agreement on beliefs.”

On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, 196

In other words, we are constrained to use the principle of charity in the construction of a theory of belief in order to get at a valid interpretation of the speaker’s meaning. But of course, the principle of charity involves assumptions–guesses about a basis for shared meaning–that cannot themselves yield us any more than a working theory about how to interpret a speaker’s belief, but does allow us to arrive at a progressively better understanding of what a speaker means. This process is, for Davidson, the only basis we have of arriving at a progressively better understanding/interpretation of what a speaker means. But it is not one that ultimately yields an a-perspectival “truth” about the “meaning” a speaker might have had on a particular occasion of utterance.

This model of interpretation becomes a model for the development of knowledge of the world in general, a model that can be better understood in relation to his concept of truth. The concept of truth Davidson has in mind is the one given by Tarski, which can be explicated given the example, “‘Snow is white’ is true if and only if snow is white.” The example shows us that truth is a matter of connecting a statement taken to be true to a reality it to which it corresponds. Davidson writes,

Our attempt to characterize languages or conceptual schemes in terms of the notion of fitting some entity has come down, then, to the simple thought that something is an acceptable conceptual scheme or theory if it is true.

Ibid., 194

The way the sentences in a scheme do, in fact, come out true is not part of the account. The theory itself does not tell us whether this is an outcome of a coherence or a correspondence theory of truth, although it will ultimately involve both.¹³ In fact, what it does not say is an important aspect of its success as a theory. It does not tell us how statements ought to hook up with reality; it merely says that truth is a matter of recognizing that they do when we are willing to say they do.

This helps explain the pragmatic possibility that truth might be merely a matter of linguistic usage in many cases, rather than the consequence of a developed theory or of some notion of objective “reality itself.” For example, someone very committed to the “reality” of white as the true referent of “white,” would likely run into difficulty explaining where or when statements about white things would actually come out true in relation to the idea of “true white,” which (even if we could make sense of it) is not likely to be a property of any mass of snow anywhere in the world.

That some statements are recognizable as true for us is, for Davidson, the only basis we have for the development of our conceptual schemes. This is as much a linguistic fact as it is a fact about our way of interpreting the world in terms of our own schemas. But it is not a theory of truth that requires a reference to an “external” objective schema or a world of uninterpreted objects that stands as the ground of truth of any scheme. While apparently simplistic, Tarski’s T-theory allows for a view of truth as schema-without-foundation, that does not rely upon a world-schema dualism that he ultimately arrives at as the basis for the kind of knowledge available to us. It defines the truth of a statements in a way that is pragmatic, helps us move beyond the antinomy of correspondence and coherence theories of truth, and fits in perfectly as a definition of truth that could make sense in relation to a foundationless conceptual scheme.

Schema & Foundation

It might be noticed that the potential for a regress is always present whenever talk of foundations is heard, unless some sense can be made of the notion of a self-starting beginning. Arguably both Kant and Davidson have been able to accomplish the feat of doing so. An assessment of the relative strengths of their theories ought to include some consideration of what such “bootstrapping” moments have working for them in their favor and what might be said about their relative merits.

In giving up the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the world, but re-establish unmediated touch with the familiar objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions true or false.” ¹⁴

On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme, p. 198

Or again,

In giving up the dependence on the concept of an uninterpreted reality, something outside all schemes and science, we do not relinquish the notion of objective truth–quite the contrary.

Ibid., p. 198

Thus, if we were to finally compare the results of Kantian transcendentalism and Davidson’s reservations about conceptual schemes, we would arrive at the following:

1. Kant has a transcendental foundation for the objectivity of knowledge that Davidson can do without.
2. This is because Davidson has a very minimalistic truth theory that can accommodate the notion of a conceptual scheme that is not related to anything else as its objective foundation.
3. But ultimately, for both Davidson and Kant, the scheme we have serves as the only kind of foundation for knowledge we may have.
4. For Davidson (as for Quine, as quoted above), the scheme we have is the foundation for its own development and corrigibility. For Davidson, there is no path to “true” knowledge except by way of the corrigibility of what we take to be true.
5. For Kant, the foundation for our knowledge lies in a transcendentalism that begins with the idea that, while reality as it may be in itself is not accessible for us, our own evident capacity for a priori thinking shows us that we do have a basis within ourselves for a genuinely grounded objectivity, hence for the realization of a schema that serves to define the contours of what we may know.

Concluding Thoughts

Thus, what we find in Kant, but not in Davidson is the idea of a conceptual scheme based upon some notion of foundational objectivity. This might be understood as their most significant differentiating property. Davidson does, (as will be seen), admit the idea of a scheme, but it is one that sees itself as provisional rather than ultimate. The true foundation for any such scheme is the pragmatic consideration of its adequacy, not to an ultimate reality, but simply to the concerns that we take into our engagement with reality. This way of understanding what a conceptual scheme ought to be allows for a consideration of schemes as motivated by our interests, whether they be motivated by metaphysical concerns or more earthly and bodily concerns, such healing or the alleviation of poverty.

This brings up the possibility of understanding a Kantian transcendental schema as a schema motivated by a concern to establish the possibility of knowledge and truth conceived in terms of those core ideas or principles that must hold at the center of any scheme if it is to be a conceptual scheme at all. Such a scheme would be a transcendental one. The realization that such a scheme is a possible extension of our understanding of a Davidsonian scheme introduces the possibility that there might be a scheme that would transcend pragmatism and yet allow for the open-ended development of further schemas within a transcendental framework. Thus, we may notice that while a transcendental schema could be cast as pragmatism’s “other” in the same sense that non-being is the “other” of being, the possibility also exists of seeing them as mutually implicated antagonists.

Notes

1. See Sellars’ Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, sections 3-6. ↩︎
2. See Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 2.1.9 ↩︎
3. See “The World Well Lost,” in Consequences of Pragmatism, p. 5. His point is made in the service of moving on from Kant rather than taking us back to a world/scheme dualism. He takes Davidson to be working on the results of the dualism in his “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” and how it might be possible to do so. ↩︎
4. One might have said, “without the dogmas” to echo Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” ↩︎
5. Consider Categories 1.25: καὶ ὁ λόγος δὲ τοῦ ἀνθρώπου κατὰ τοῦ τινὸς ἀνθρώπου κατηγορηθήσεται, —ὁ γὰρ τὶς ἄνθρωπος καὶ ἄνθρω-(25) πός ἐστιν·— ὥστε καὶ τοὔνομα καὶ ὁ λόγος κατὰ τοῦ ὑποκειμένου κατηγορηθήσεται. In this case, the name, logos, and hypokeimenon all align with the subject of predication, which is a substance. In such cases, a predication can be made that tells us what a thing is. But such a thing is also the individual particular. The traditional formula, “veritas est adequatio rei et intellectus” this kind of thinking. ↩︎
6. Locke’s Essay, 4.4.4, for example, reads “First, the first are simple ideas, which since the mind, as has been showed, can by no means make to itself, must necessarily be the product of things operating on the mind in a natural way, and producing therein those perceptions which by the wisdom and will of our maker they are ordained and adapted to. From whence it follows, that simple ideas are not fictions of our fancies, but the natural and regular productions of things without us, really operating upon us, and so carry with them all the conformity which is intended, or which our state requires: for they represent to us things under those appearances which they are fitted to produce in us, whereby we are enabled to distinguish the sorts of particular substances, to discern the states they are in, and so to take them for our necessities, and to apply them to our uses. Thus the idea of whiteness, or bitterness, as it is in the mind, exactly answering that power, which is in any body to produce it there, has all the real conformity it can, or ought to have, with things without us. And this conformity between our simple ideas, and the existence of things, is sufficient for real knowledge. ↩︎
7. See Essay 4.4.11, which describes our ideas of substances as having archetypes outside of us, an interesting inversion of the Platonic position. ↩︎
8. It was Aristotle, after all who wrote: “since nothing admits of greater truth than deductive knowledge or pure intellect (nous), pure intellect would be the faculty of principles, both because contemplation of them is proper to it and because the starting point of deductive reasoning is not deduction (since it would follow that there is no scientific knowledge (episteme) of deductive knowledge (episteme)). Therefore, if we have no other kind of truth apart from deductive knowledge, our intellect will be the first principle of deductive knowledge.” (Posterior Analytics, II.19, 100b11-15 (Trans. is mine)) ↩︎
9. See Essay 4.19.1 where Locke writes, “Whatsoever credit or authority we give to any proposition, more than it receives from the principles and proofs it supports itself upon, is owing to our inclinations that way, and is so far a derogation from the love of truth as such: which, as it can receive no evidence from our passions or interests, so it should receive no tincture from them.” ↩︎
10. See Bxviii, footnote “a.” ↩︎
11. “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” 198 ↩︎
12. On 195 Davidson writes, “Neither a fixed stock of meanings, not a theory-neutral reality, can provide, then, a ground for comparison of conceptual schemes. It would be a mistake to look further for such a ground if by that we mean something conceived as common to incommensurable schemes. In abandoning this search, we abandon the attempt to make sense of the metaphor of a single space within which each scheme has a position and provides a point of view.” ↩︎
13. Davidson seems to embrace a pragmatic theory of truth, inasmuch as truth is simply “what works” insofar as the case is applicable to Tarski’s model. ↩︎
14. 198 ↩︎

References

• Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in Truth and Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
• Immanuel Kant, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1929), trans. Norman Kemp Smith, Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, Boston, 1965. Available online here.
• David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Oxford University Press, 1975.
• Locke, John. The Works, vol. 2 An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London: Rivington, 1689.
• Richard Rorty, “The World Well Lost” in Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.
• Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, edited by Robert Brandom, (Harvard University Press.; Cambridge, MA; 1997).