The Partial Exam of the Life relies on your support to find out how to help in ways that are cheap or even free for you.

Please visit partialexaminalife.com slash support.

Hey, you're listening to Partial Exam of the Life episode of 191, talking about Donald Davincense on the very idea of a conceptual scheme.

And we will eventually get to Rudolph Karnab's empiricism, semantics, and ontology.

We're still finishing up Davidson. Where are we at?

So I want to turn us back to the fitting part of his argument.

We got to the point of the argument where he talks about what he calls conceptual scheme in empirical content, dualism.

And that dualism is important because when people want to talk about different conceptual schemes, they have to be able to sort of appeal to some outside frame to say that these schemes are different.

We can't talk about those differences unless there's this sort of neutral ground outside the schemes that we can use to adjudicate the difference.

And that neutral ground he talks about as either we could call it experience or evidence or nature or something like that.

And then we could think about the relation that determines whether translation is possible as involving either organizing which we talked about or predicting slash fitting.

And so my gloss on the fitting argument is basically that when you when we get to the point where we're talking about fitting, we're talking about predictive sentences.

And the sentences that predict are just the sentences that are true.

And then truth it turns out inherently involves the concept of translate ability.

So if we're thinking about conceptual schemes as doing this fitting and if truth cannot be untangled from translate ability,

then we can't make sense of conceptual schemes that cannot be translated into other conceptual schemes.

Right.

To briefly fill out a little bit why truth essentially involves translate ability on Davidson's story.

The idea is that to understand what truth is, we have to have what Davidson calls a theory of truth and our best clue.

And this itself is is not a definition of truth, but a kind of he thinks and intuition that we can all agree on about truth is that however truth is to be defined, it must be such that we can say that if the sentence say this desk is black is true, just in case this desk is black.

And we need to be able to construct statements like that for any sentence that is true.

But ultimately if the sentence that we're checking the truth of is a sentence say in French, right, we're going to say this French sentence is true, just in case.

...