The idea of a "conceptual scheme"

I came across a line from one of M. Vater's essays, "Heidegger and Schelling: The Finitude of Being" that is worth repeating.

"System is not a mold for thought, a form somehow imposed on a hitherto amorphous stuff which, for all its lack of definition, is supposed to be "thought." System is the heart of thought itself." M. Vater, "Heidegger and Schelling: The Finitude of Being" in Idealistic Studies, vol. 5, No. 1, January, 1975.

This is, I think, a nice way of describing the situation we are in with regards our language and the reality that we seek to describe. Our language, our conceptual scheme, is coextensive with what we take to be reality. Language, thought, and reality are inextricably forged in the creation of our experience.

But let's put some heat on this idea of a "conceptual scheme". Maybe some of its imprecision can be burned off. Perhaps the very idea will need to be scrapped.

Donald Davidson's essay, "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme", challenged the relativism of conceptual scheme language by arguing against one of its chief supports. It is often said that the failure to translate between one language and another suffices to show that there are conceptual schemes that can be radically different. Donald Davidson writes, "we may identify conceptual schemes with languages, then, or better, allowing for the possibility that more than one language may express the same scheme, sets of intertranslatable languages. Languages we will not think of as separable from souls; speaking a language is not a trait a man can lose while retaining the power of thought. So there is a chance that someone can take up a vantage oint for comparing conceptual schemes by temporarily shedding his own. Can we then say that two people have different conceptual schemes if thes speak languages that fail of intertranslatibility?" "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" (1973).

With regards to cases of total or partial failure of intertranslatibility, Davidson is less than optimistic that we have discovered true cases of distinct "conceptual schemes" that might not overlap in deeper ways. "So what sounded at first like a thrilling discovery--that truth is relative to a conceptual scheme--has not so far been shown to be anything more than the pedestrian and familiar fact that the truth of a sentence is relative to (amongst other things) the language to which it belongs." Scheme, p. 11.

But in order to identify what is truly unique to a conceptual scheme such that some sentence in it would not be translatable into another conceptual scheme, requires a coign of vantage that is not ours. "Neither a fixed stock of meanings, nor a theory-neutral reality, can provide, then, a ground for comparison of conceptual schemes...in abandoning this search, we abandon the attempto to make sense of the metaphor of a single space within which each scheme has a position and provides a point of view." p. 17. And with that, the third dogma of empiricism (the thesis of a scheme/content dualism) is cast down.

While it may be true that we cannot now clearly demarcate our own conceptual scheme from itself, and while this may also be true of countless other failures to precisely identify wherein the ultimate criterion of difference lies, it cannot be said that conceptual schemes and all of their cognate ideas (system, Geist, language, "soul", lebensform, categorial knowledge, etc.) do not describe broad enough differences in social context, behavior, and other adaptations specific to the form of life of a language group, so as to be a convenient shorthand for saying "hey, this is really a very different system of thinking here!" and so on. It is a way of expressing the fact that there is another perspective, another way of approaching, reality.

But the point of Davidson's argument is one which I think is easy enough to accept: there can be no ice-clear demarcation between content and scheme. Or, as Vater describes it, "system is not a mold for thought...system is the heart of thought itself." To which I feel free to add: neither is reason to be thought of as independent of thought: reason just is thought itself.