Hacking Davidson

Scheme,” Donald Davidson argues against the logical possibility of conceptual schemes. Believing it a remnant of the incomplete eradication of dogma in the empiricist tradition, Davidson wishes to undermine what he believes is the source of talk of conceptual relativism: the third dogma of scheme-content duality. Building on Quine, he constructs an argument intended to illustrate the peculiar paradox of being a conceptual scheme: it must be simultaneously translatable and untranslatable into a familiar tongue. Claiming that the translation dichotomy is indefensible, he concluded that the very notion of a conceptual scheme, much less multiple schemes, is unintelligible. In this article, I cursorily review Davidson’s argument with particular attention to his discussion of the criteria for languagehood. I turn next to the Quinean project that underlies Davidson’s work and note a crucial flaw that I believe is also present in Davidson’s work. I conclude with a Hacker-inspired discussion of Davidson’s confusion of language and grammar. Aporia Vol. 15 number 1—2005