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Language and Conception of Reality: An Intervention on Conceptual Scheme Relativism

Language, Literature and Culture
Vol.2 , No. 3, Publication Date: Jun. 19, 2019, Page: 93-101

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Authors

[1]	Adesanya, Department of Philosophy, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria.
[2]	Oreoluwa Idris, Department of Philosophy, University of Ibadan, Ibadan, Nigeria.

Abstract

The link between language and reality is considered by some philosophers as that of an “unbreakable bond”, “tyrannical hold”, or an “unbridgeable gap”, which depends on certain conceptions of language as categorizing, organizing and fitting reality or experience. These views as expressed by the likes of Benjamin Lee Whorf, Edward Sapir, Willard Van OrmanQuine, Thomas Khun and Paul Feyerabend, who are considered by Donald Davidson as conceptual relativists: are opposed to the realist doctrine in metaphysics that reality exists independently of the human mind, that is, of human conception and categorization in terms of thought and speech. However, these views have been considered as expressing various strands of conceptual scheme relativism, which is a doctrine radically rejected by Donald Davidson. Davidson devises various arguments and metaphors to challenge the very idea of a conceptual scheme and the relativism which apparently comes with it in his paper, entitled: On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme. According to Davidson, conceptual schemes can be associated with language and the relation between conceptual schemes and language could be expressed by illustrating how language performs the same role that conceptual schemes perform in categorizing, conceptualizing, and perceiving experience or reality, as such, translatability into a familiar tongue, is conceived by Davidson as a criterion of languagehood, with the implication that any language which is not translatable into another cannot be said to be a language at all. Therefore, speakers of two different languages that fail of mutual translation must be users of two distinct conceptual schemes, going by Davidson’s interpretation. In defense of his assumption that there can be no language at all that is not translatable into another, Davidson appropriates Tarski’s Convention T, which is a theory of truth for formalized languages as a theory of meaning for natural language. This paper, upon an interrogation of Davidson’s major arguments against conceptual relativism, therefore avers that Davidson misappropriatesTarsky’s theory of truth for formalized languages as a theory of meaning for natural languages, thereby, directly reducing “meaning” to “truth”. The paper therefore confronts the basic assumptions underlying Davidson’s notion of conceptual schemes and his rejection of conceptual scheme relativism, while also considering his more recent convictions about the very notion of language.

Keywords

Conceptual Schemes, Scheme-Content Dualism, Conceptual Relativism, Language, Reality, Experience

Reference

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