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You are listening to the partially examined life podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for living but then thought better of it.

Our question for episode 155 is something like, what assumptions underlie these search for a theory of knowledge?

We read Richard Roarty's philosophy and the mirror of nature parts two mirroring. Specifically chapters three and four published in 1979.

To get the reading and more information, please check out partiallyexaminedlife.com. My name is Mark Linton Meyer, appealing only to the judgment of my peers in Madison, Wisconsin.

This is Wes L.One epistemically privileged and Cambridge, Massachusetts. This is Dylan Casey, just a perceptual metaphor in middle to Wisconsin.

Why this episode is a sequel more or less to the last two?

The first of which 153 we started talking about this book about chapter one mostly and then we took a detour into talking about Wilfred Sellers argument against the myth of the given, which plays a central part in the critique here as does quine and we did a quine episode, but the stuff about quine is actually about essays that we didn't read.

So I had to do a little outside reading.

The dogmas of empiricism. Yes. But you write it's not the focus of it. What do you mean? There's a whole, there's a whole section on quine but Mark saying that we didn't read the stuff that Roarty focuses on.

Oh, I see.

The stuff that we did read, a major point about that just to refresh had to do with the notion of linguistic meaning as in this word is synonymous with this other word.

And this word means something else. He thought was kind of bogus and the way it's discussed in this reading is in terms of indeterminacy of translation.

So let's say you're you meet somebody that you don't know their language and they try to teach it to you. So you're ET learning the human language and they point to something and say, rabbit, you know, but using a word that you don't know.

You don't actually know whether they're referring to that animal or to a stage of that animal at this slice of time. You don't know how they're carving up the world and the only way you can find that out is by asking them more questions.

So you kind of have to come up with a theory of well, okay, I think they're referring to this animal something that they have approximately the same conceptual scheme that I do and then you can figure out more.

There's always going to be something indeterminate about that. There are always going to be multiple possible ways to translate that if you kind of apply that across the board.

One thing to talk about is any set of data in science. There's always going to be more than one theory more than one conceptual scheme more than one net that you could use to explain or to even describe that set of data.

The alternative to just figuring out based on context based on asking more questions based on coming up with a theory that could always be challenged is by somehow fixing at least some point right to reality.

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