Child - On The Dualism of Scheme and Content

On the Dualism of Scheme and Content
Author(s): William Child

Source: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol. 94 (1994), pp. 53-71
Published by: Wiley on behalf of Aristotelian Society
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IV* ON THE DUALISM OF SCHEME AND
CONTENT
by William Child
Donald Davidson tells us that the 'dualism of scheme and
content, of organizing system and something waiting to be
organized'1 is unintelligible. Since that dualism has 'dominated and
defined the problems of modem philosophy', its rejection promises
a 'revolution in our ways of thinking about philosophy'.2
But what exactly is the dualism of scheme and content, and what
is supposed to be wrong with it? Is there just one position under
attack, one sort of philosophical mistake being identified? Or are
there a number of different positions? If so, how are those positions
related? And how is scheme-content dualism connected to the
problems of philosophy it is said to define, and to the other philo-
sophical positions with which it has been associated?
There has been a shift in the emphasis of Davidson's own
discussions which makes these questions especially pressing. The
context of his initial discussion of scheme-content dualism was an
investigation of conceptual relativism-the view that there could be
conceptual schemes which differ so massively that they are
'mutually unintelligible or incommensurable, or forever beyond
rational resolve'.3 The suggestion was that 'something like the
notion of uninterpreted content [is] necessary if we [are] to make
sense of conceptual relativism':4 something would count as a
conceptual scheme if it organized this neutral content; that would
*Meeting of the Aristotelian Society, held in the Senior Common Room, Birkbeck College,
London, on Monday, 22nd November, 1993 at 8.15 p.m.
1 Davidson (1974) p. 189.
2 Davidson (1989a); the first quotation is from p.163, the second from p.167.
3 Davidson (1989a) p. 160.
4 Davidson (1989b) p.69 emphasis added.
54 WIALLAM CHILD
make room for conceptual relativism, since two schemes might
organize the same neutral content, but organize it so differently that
they were mutually unintelligible. Since the focus was conceptual
relativism, the main target of Davidson's early discussion was the
idea of a dualism of conceptual scheme and neutral, or uninterpreted
content. In his more recent discussions, the emphasis has moved to
questions about the possibility of thought and knowledge: if we
conceive of experience as inhabiting a purely internal, subjective
realm, can we explain how it is possible to have thoughts and
knowledge about an objective, mind-independent world? Here, the
dualism of scheme and content is a dualism of conceptual scheme
and purely subjective, world-independent content.5 Is this just a
difference in emphasis; or are there actually two different, and
independent, dualisms under discussion?
Two metaphors have been used to explain the idea of a dualism
of conceptual scheme and empirical content: there is the idea of the
dualism of a conceptual scheme and what it organizes, and the idea
of a scheme and what itfits.6 I shall concentrate on the first. Now
we can classify versions of scheme-content dualism in terms of the
nature of the content which our schemes or theories are said to
organize. There are two key distinctions. One distinction is between
versions in which the content which schemes organize is reality,
nature or the world, and versions in which the content is experience.
(For short, I will talk of the dualism of scheme and world, and the
dualism of scheme and experience.) A second distinction, which
cuts across the first, is between views on which the content is
neutral, or uninterpreted, and those on which it is not. Davidson is
explicit that someone can be committed to a dualism of scheme and
experience without thinking of the content as uninterpreted: 'what
matters... is not whether we can describe the [content] in a neutral,
theory-free idiom [but rather] that there should be an ultimate
source of evidence whose character can be wholly specified without
reference to what it is evidence for'.7 (I shall distinguish between
5 This is not to say that questions about truth and reference are absent from the early
discussion, nor that questions about conceptual relativism are absent from the later
discussions. For the first point, see Davidson (1974) pp. 192 and 198. For the second, see
Davidson (1989a) pp.159-60 and (1989b) p.69.
6 See Davidson (1974) p. 191.
7 Davidson (1989a) p. 162.
ON THE DUALISM OF SCHEME AND CONTENT 55
the dualism of scheme and neutral experience, and the dualism of
scheme and world-independent experience.) And, I will suggest,
there is a related distinction between two versions of scheme-world
dualism.
What is supposed to be wrong with that dualism (or, those
dualisms)? I think we can identify four main themes in the David-
sonian polemic. First, opposition to the idea that our beliefs and
theories result from the organization of a neutral or uninterpreted
content. Second, opposition to the idea that the world has an
intrinsic structure, absolutely independent of all concepts and
theories. Third, opposition to the idea that our beliefs and meanings
are based on evidence afforded by a class of world-independent
experiences. Fourth, the claim that there could be no such thing as
a view of the world achieved from outside all concepts: any
investigation of the world is, necessarily, conducted 'from a stand-
point of engagement'.8
II
One way of thinking of the dualism of scheme and content, is as a
'dualism of total scheme (or language) and uninterpreted content';
the content, on this view, is 'something neutral and common that
lies outside all schemes' .9 And, as I said, we can think in these terms
whether we think of conceptual schemes as organizing the world
or as organizing experience. So we can think of the neutral content
as 'an uninterpreted reality', 'a theory-neutral reality';1O or we can
think of it as 'an element in the mind untouched by conceptual
interpretation', 'the uninterpreted given, the uncategorized contents
of experience'. I (I think, in fact, for various reasons, that it is
infelicitous to talk of schemes organizing an uninterpreted or
unconceptualized content.12 So I prefer to describe this form of
scheme-content dualism as a dualism of scheme and neutral, or
unstructured, content.)
8 McDowell (1986a) p.381.
9 Davidson (1974) pp. 187 and 190 (emphases added).
10 Davidson (1974) pp. 198 and 195 respectively.
11 Davidson (1989a) pp. 160 (emphasis added) and 161.
12 Mark Sainsbury brought this point home to me.
56 WILLIAM CHILD
I start with the idea that the formation of beliefs involves the
interpretation of a neutral reality. Here, the idea is that the world is
completely unstructured; a bare something, a mass of undiffer-
entiated stuff. So no description or conception of the world can
characterize the world as it is in itself. Any description must be
structured, for it must exploit concepts and categories. And since
the world itself is unstructured, there is bound to be some distortion
when we represent it in thought or language.
A different version of the same view allows that the world has
an intrinsic structure, but agrees that no description or conception
can capture the world as it really is, without distortion. Any con-
ception we can form is shaped by our capacities and interests; so it
cannot reflect the objective structure of the world, the structure
which the world has absolutely independent of us.
Now according to the anti-dualist, the idea that all descriptions or
systems of concepts distort reality is unintelligible. The basic thought
is one I have already mentioned: that there is no such thing as a view
achieved from outside all concepts. The corollary, according to the
anti-dualist, is that we cannot form a concept of reality which allows
us to understand the idea that our concepts distort reality. To do so,
we would need to get outside our concepts and 'grapple without
distortion with the real'.13 But to contemplate the world without the
'distortion' of our own concepts, we would have to contemplate it
without the benefit of 'categories and concepts' at all. And that is a
contradiction in terms; to think just is to employ categories and
concepts.
We can put the same point in a different way. Suppose we try to
make sense of the idea of a neutral world by thinking of the world,
simply, as that which is organized by conceptual schemes.
Something can only be organized by a scheme if it contains, or
consists in, things or objects; it must be a plurality. But 'whatever
plurality we take [reality] to consist in... we will have to individuate
according to familiar principles'.14 A world consisting of objects
13 Davidson (1974) p.185, from where the quotation in the next sentence of text is also
taken.
14 Davidson (1974) p.192. Davidson actually formulates this as a claim about the idea of
uninterpreted experience. But it is clear from the context that he would be prepared to
use the formulation in both cases.
individuated according to familiar principles will be the familiar
world of rocks and stones and trees, of atoms, molecules, electrons
and the rest. And that conception of the world does not sustain the
idea that our descriptions distort or misrepresent it.
Now there is an obvious objection to the claim that the idea of a
neutral reality is unintelligible. 'What has been shown is that we
cannot form a detailed conception of the world without using our
concepts; any detailed description of reality must see in the world
the structure implicit in our concepts. But it does not follow from
that that we cannot form the bare idea of the world as it is in itself
without reading structure into it: we just do understand the idea of
the world as it is in itself; and, using that bare idea of the world, we
can make sense of the thought that our descriptions distort the
world.'
Thomas Nagel has objected in just this way to the view that '[w]e
do not possess a completely general concept of reality that reaches
beyond any possible filling in of its content that we could in
principle understand'.'5 To show that we do have a completely
general concept of reality of that sort, he appeals to an 'obviously
intelligible possibility'. We can imagine a species of beings who
all have the permanent mental age of ordinary human nine-year-
olds. Those beings ('the nine-year-olds') could not understand
'Maxwell's equations or the general theory of relativity or Godel' s
theorem... [But they] could have a language, and might be similar
enough to us so that their language was translatable into part of
ours'.16 Now by the same reasoning, it is perfectly intelligible that
there should be 'higher beings, related to us as we are related to the
nine-year-olds, and capable of understanding aspects of the world
that are beyond our comprehension' .1 The fact that that hypothesis
is intelligible shows that we understand the claim that there could
be aspects of reality which we are constitutionally incapable of
conceiving.
Suppose we agree that Nagel's 'obviously intelligible possibil-
ity' is indeed intelligible: our conception of the world allows us to
understand the claim that there are aspects of reality of which we
15 Nagel (1986) pp. 93-4.
16 Nagel (1986) p.95.
17 ibid.
58 WILLIAM CHILD
cannot, even in principle, form any detailed conception. That does
not support the dualism of scheme and neutral world, for it does
not show that we have a conception of the world which sustains
the idea that our descriptions distort the world. What we are
conceding is that the higher beings could discern levels of struc-
ture in the world to which we are blind. That does not support the
idea that our descriptions distort the world by imposing structure
on a reality which is intrinsically unstructured, or whose intrinsic
structure is inscrutable to us. The additional structure which the
higher beings are able to discern will be finer-grained or more
complex than the structure we discern. But that is no reason to say
that the structure they discern is, alone, the real structure of the
world; nor that the world does not really have the structure dis-
cerned by our concepts.
So Nagel's thought experiment does not show that we have a
concept of reality of the sort which the scheme-world dualist
requires. But to say that is not to show that we could not have such
a concept. For that, we would need some more explicit defence of
an account of what determines the content of our concept(s) of the
world. There may well be something to be said by the anti-dualist
at this stage. But I think it is fair to say that Davidson has not
provided enough, by way of an explicit theory of what determines
the content of our concept of the world, to demonstrate that the
dualist's conception of the world must be empty. This is one point,
then, at which I think there is a lacuna in the anti-dualist case.
Someone might suggest that Davidson could appeal to the
principle of charity (or, if you prefer, humanity) to give us the
account of content required. But I do not see how that appeal can
do all the work required. If the suggestion is that a thinker has only
the concepts which we could ascribe on the basis of charitable
interpretation, it begs the question to suppose that that could show
that no thinker has the bare concept of an unstructured world;
everything depends on the question whether we, the interpreters,
have that concept. Alternatively, the suggestion might be that we
should appeal to an idea which helps to ground the principle of
charity-the idea that the concepts a thinker has are partially
determined by the character of the things and kinds with which she
interacts causally. But it is not clear how that helps. For one thing,
as Davidson himself allows, those causal relations only partially
detennine our concepts, and do so directly only in the most basic
and primitive cases;18 so it is open to the scheme-world dualist to
suggest that other concept-forming resources are involved in
reaching the very general concept of the world. For another thing,
there is no need for the dualist to deny that we have the bare concept
of a neutral world partly in virtue of our causal interactions with
that world. So charity alone will not fill the lacuna.
III
The versions of scheme-world dualism we have been considering
involve the idea that our descriptions distort reality. And the attack
on that idea, I said, is one main theme of the case against scheme-
content dualism. But the idea of distortion seems inessential. The
other central element in the versions of dualism I have been con-
sidering is the idea that the world has an intrinsic structure (or lack
of structure) wholly independent of the structure of the concepts we
use to describe it. That suggests a third version of scheme-world
dualism, which keeps this idea, but drops the idea of distortion. In
this third view, the structure we discern in things is itself the structure
which is really there in the world, absolutely independent of us. And
a natural version of the view would equate the world as it is in itself
with the world as characterized by science. Scientific concepts (by
contrast with our more subjective, non- scientific, concepts) capture
the world in a perspective-free way. So the structure discerned by
those concepts is a structure which is there in the world as it is in
itself, absolutely independent of us and our concepts. On this view
'the enterprise of describing the "furniture of the world", the "things
in themselves" apart from our conceptual imposition' is simply the
enterprise of doing science. 19
Is there any objection to this new version of scheme-world
dualism? Central to the Davidsonian argument of the previous
section was the point that any conception of the world we form must
display it as structured in the ways implicit in our descriptions. But
that point can be no objection to the current view. If our scientific
concepts directly reflect the intrinsic structure of the world, the fact
18 See, e.g. Davidson (1983) pp. 317-8.
19 Putnam (1983) p.208.
60 WILLIAM CHILD
that we are constrained to use those concepts in describing reality
does not show that we cannot describe reality as it is in itself; in
using our scientific concepts, that is precisely what we are doing.
To counter this view, we would need to show that no set of
concepts, including our scientific concepts, can be thought of as
transparently representing the world as it is in itself-that we do
not understand the idea that the world has an intrinsic structure,
absolutely independent of all concepts. How might we show that?
Whatever may be implicit in Davidson, it seems to me that he
himself has nothing directly to say about this issue. But claims in
Wittgenstein's later philosophy are very much to the point.
The picture of the relation of mind and world which emerges in
the Tractatus embodies the sort of scheme-world dualism we are
considering.20 The world has an absolutely objective structure
which our concepts simply pick up and reflect. There is something
arbitrary involved in setting up a language; for it is up to us to
choose which names to attach to which objects. But that is the only
contribution we make: the world itself supplies the things and
categories to which our words attach; so once the attachment is
made, in a momentary christening, the world itself determines what
counts as going on using a word in the same way.
Wittgenstein's later reaction against this view is, in effect, a
reaction against scheme-world dualism. One area in which the
reaction is explicit is his discussion of following a rule.21 Wittgen-
stein argued that the world does not have a determinate structure,
in virtue of which one thing (or one use of a word) is, absolutely
objectively, the same as another or not. So it is a mistake to think
that what counts as going on in the same way is determined by the
real nature of things, absolutely independent of what we find it
natural to class together, once trained; how we find it natural to go
on plays some part in determining the categories we grasp and,
therefore, in fixing what counts as going on in the same way.
Another manifestation of Wittgenstein's rejection of scheme-
world dualism is his rejection of the thought that 'certain concepts
are absolutely the correct ones, and that having different ones would
20 See Wittgenstein (1961).
21 See Wittgenstein (1958) sections 143-242, and (1978) part VI.
mean not realizing something that we realize'.22 Descriptions
employing one set of concepts have no more claim to capture the
real, intrinsic structure of the world than do descriptions employing
a different set of concepts.
Now there is a familiar difficulty in expressing the anti-dualist
view. For in denying the scheme-world dualist's claims we sound
as if we are denying commonsense truths. And 'naturally we don't
want to deny' anything.23 Consider our scientific concepts. One sort
of dualist says that the structure those concepts discern is merely
an artifact of the way we see things; it is imposed by us on the world.
Reacting from that, but retaining the dualism, the other sort of
dualist says that the structure discerned by our scientific concepts
is absolutely objective, a feature of the world as it is in itself; our
concepts passively reflect what is there in the world. The anti-
dualist opposes the picture of mind and world implicit in both
views. But it is difficult to express opposition to either version of
the dualism without sounding as if we are simply embracing the
other. If we reject the first version, by saying that the world really
does have the structure our scientific concepts discern, that that
structure is not a mere artifact of our way of seeing things, it sounds
as if we are endorsing the second form of the dualism. If we reject
the second version, by saying that the structure our scientific
concepts discern is not an absolutely objective feature of the world,
we sound as if we are endorsing the first form of the dualism.
But the anti-dualist insists that there is a third position available.
The dualism of scheme and world is unintelligible; we must reject
both versions. So we must reject the idea that our scientific concepts
immediately reflect the absolutely objective structure of reality. But
having done so, there is a quite unobjectionable sense in which we
can say that the structure we discern with our scientific concepts is
indeed an objective feature of the world, that the world would have
had that structure even if there had never been any concept-users,
and so on. (And, we can add, the structure we discern with our
non-scientific concepts is, equally, an objective feature of world.)
The dualist wanted to get beyond those ordinary claims and invest
22 Wittgenstein (1958) p.230.
23 Wittgenstein (1958) section 308.
62 WILLIAM CHILD
his similar-sounding claims with a special, metaphysical sense. But
if the dualist's claims are not even intelligible, we need not, in
rejecting the dualism, deny anything. (Similar observations apply
to Wittgenstein's comments about following a rule. There is an
unobjectionable sense in which it is perfectly correct to say, for
example, that someone who follows a rule is, objectively, going on
in the same way; or that the things we class together are, objectively,
similar to one another. Whlat Wittgenstein objects to is not those
sorts of claims themselves, but a platonistic misconstrual of them.)
IV
There are two ways of thinking of the dualism of scheme and
experience. On the one hand, there is the idea of a dualism of
organizing scheme and neutral or uncategorized experience; that
is an idea which is natural when we think of the content as
something like 'Hume's impressions and ideas, sense data,
uninterpreted sensation, the sensuous given'.24 On the other hand,
there is the idea of a dualism of scheme and world-independent
experience; the content consists of experiences which constitute a
'source of evidence whose character can be wholly specified with-
out reference to what it is evidence for' ,25 which inhabit 'a self-
contained subjective realm, in which things are as they are
independently of external reality (if any)'.26 The two ways of
thinking of scheme-experience dualism are not mutually exclusive:
the sensory given, for example, would plausibly be both theory-
neutral and world-independent. But it seems that we could have one
form of the dualism without the other: Quine's 'patterns of sensory
stimulation', for example, are world-independent without being
neutral or unstructured.27
Now corresponding to the two forms of scheme-experience
dualism, there are two sorts of anti-dualist argument: an argument
against the idea that beliefs are formed by interpreting or organizing
something neutral; and an argument against the idea that beliefs
24 Davidson ( 1989a) p. 160.
25 ibid. p.162.
26 McDowell (1986b) p. 151.
27 See Davidson (1989a) p.162.
result from organizing or conceptualizing something world-
independent. We get an argument of the first sort if we apply to this
case the general claim that we can make no sense of the idea of a
scheme's organizing something uninterpreted and theory-neutral.28
I shall concentrate here on arguments of the second sort (which are
plainly the focus of Davidson's rnore recent discussions of scheme-
experience dualism).
The point of Davidson's opposition to the dualism of scheme and
experience, and the strategy he adopts, again strike me as thoroughly
Wittgensteinian-an echo of Wittgenstein's opposition to the
traditional philosophical conception of the mind as 'inner' and
behaviour as 'outer'. His discussion has two strands: a description
of the phenomena, which aims to show that the conception of the
mental implicit in the dualism thoroughly misrepresents its actual
character; and a demonstration that, if we did accept it, there would
be unsustainable consequences for epistemology and semantics. I
will illustrate that strategy for the case of the external world; (there
are symmetrical considerations concerning other minds).
The dualism of scheme and world-independent experience has
an epistemological and a semantic aspect. There is the epistemo-
logical doctrine that all our beliefs about the world are based on
evidence afforded by world-independent experience. And there is
the semantic doctrine that the contents of our utterances and beliefs
are fixed ultimately by their relations to world-independent
experiences. The anti-dualist's first claim is that those doctrines are
simply false. It is not true, Davidson claims, that we justify our
ordinary empirical beliefs by appeal to more basic beliefs about
sense-data or sensory stimulation. Of course, my belief that a is F
may be based on perception, and I can justify such a belief by
saying, 'I saw that a is F'. But that does not imply that the belief
that a is F is justified by another belief about the nature of a purely
subjective experience. Similarly, the semantic doctrine implicit in
scheme-experience dualism is falsified once we attend to 'obvious
facts about language learning and to facts about how we interpret
words and languages with which we are unfamiliar' :29
28 For such an argument, see Davidson (1974) p.192.
29 Davidson (1989a) p.164.
64 WILLIAM CHILD
[I]n the simplest and most basic cases words and sentences derive
their meaning from the objects and circumstances in which they
were learned. A sentence which one has been conditioned by the
learning process to be caused to hold true by the presence of fires
will be true when there is a fire present; a word one has been
conditioned to be caused to hold applicable by the presence of
snakes will refer to snakes.30
And what goes for words and sentences also goes for the beliefs
one expresses by using them.3' In sum, the contents of sentences
and beliefs are fixed not by their relations to something world-
independent-whether sense-data, patterns of sensory stimulation
or anything else-but by subjects' relations to environmental things
and kinds.
But suppose we accepted a dualism of scheme and experience.
The second strand of the anti-dualist case is that that would make
it impossible to have knowledge of, or to think or talk about, the
world. If all our evidence were world-independent, it could not
justify beliefs about the world it was independent of:
if the basic beliefs [did] not exceed in content the corresponding
[subjective] sensation they [could not] support any inference to an
objective world.32
And similar considerations apply to semantics:
If the ultimate evidence for our schemes and theories, the raw
material on which they are based, is subjective... then so is
whatever is directly based on it: our beliefs, desires, intentions, and
what we mean by our words.33
Now not everyone shares this pessimism about the consequences
of scheme-experience dualism. One thought is that we could justify
beliefs about the world beyond experience by an inference to the
best explanation, or by constructing some other sort of theory. But
the anti-dualist's semantic point blocks that thought: if the basis for
our beliefs is wholly world-independent, then we are not in a
30 Davidson (1989a) p.164.
31 See for example Davidson (1983) pp. 317-8.
32 Davidson (1983) p.310.
33 Davidson (1989a) p.162.
position to formulate the theory about a world beyond experience
which the evidence would be supposed to support.34
A second common suggestion (which tries to meet this point) is
that an appeal to causation can show how experience conceived on
the dualist's model could ground thoughts about the external world.
How would the appeal to causation go? One proposal is this. 'If
world-independent experiences of a given type are regularly caused
by worldly things of a given sort (Fs, say), then those experiences
will be experiences as of Fs; so, by appeal to facts about their causal
relations, we can show how an experience of that type can count as
an experience as of an F.' But that seems wrong: it is very plausible
that experiences whose intrinsic mental character is world-
independent cannot acquire contents concerning the world merely
by virtue of the fact that they stand in causal relations with things
in the world (however complex a causal relation we invoke).
Consider this analogy. Suppose I have experiences in which it looks
to me as if people have spots of a certain kind. Those spots, and
hence the experiences, are reliably caused by measles. But the fact
that such a causal relation obtains cannot by itself bring the concept
of measles into a specification of the content of my experience; it
does not mean that, where I have such an experience, it looks to me
as if someone has measles. Of course, if someone knows of the
causal relation between measles and spots of this kind, she may
have experiences which would be accurately reported by saying,
'It looks to S as if that person has measles'. But that case crucially
depends on the fact that the subject already has the concept of
measles; it is not the mere fact that experiences of this type are
regularly caused by people with measles that makes an experience
of that type an experience as of someone with measles.
A different way of appealing to causation is this: 'We can use
our concept of causation to think of things in the external world as
the causes of our experiences'. But if we are starting from wholly
world-independent resources, there is a real question how we could
so much as possess a concept of causation as a relation holding
between our experiences and the world beyond. Such a concept
34 See McDowell (1982) p.477.
66 WILLIAM CHILD
seems to be part of what we lose in confining ourselves, at the
starting point, to world-independent resources.
The reader may want to protest that what I have just said is
incompatible with my own reliance on causation in an account of
content (a reliance which came out in the quotations from Davidson
above). But there is in fact no incompatibility; for in the anti-dualist
account (which I am advocating) and the dualist account (which I
am rejecting) causation figures in quite different ways. In the
dualist's account, an experience is conceived in world-independent
terms; its intrinsic mental character can be specified without
reference to any things or kinds in the world beyond experience.
Causation is then introduced to show how experiences, thus con-
ceived, are tied to the rest of the world. My claim is that once the
intrinsic mental nature of an experience is allowed to be world-
independent, no amount of extrinsic causal relatedness to the world
can remedy the defect and bring concepts of worldly things into an
account of the content of experience. According to the anti-dualist
position I mentioned above, by contrast, causation is not a relation
between a world-independent experience and something in the
world beyond. The most basic, intrinsic, mental characterization of
an experience is already world-involving; and what makes it intel-
ligible that subjects can have experiences with contents about the
world is that subjects causally interact with the world. But those
causal interactions are already implicit in the most basic mental
characterization of an experience; by contrast with the dualist's
account, there is no level at which we can employ the concept of
experience, of how things are for a subject, but at which causal
relations between subject and world are not already in the picture.
Now the case against scheme-experience dualism, like the case
against scheme-world dualism, rests on views within the theory of
content. Thfe central idea in this case is that once the existence of
experiences is allowed to be world-independent, as the dualist
insists, it is not intelligible how the content of those experiences
could be anything other than world-independent too. The under-
lying principle which supports that idea is this: in the simplest and
most basic cases, the content of an intentional state is partially
determined by the actual character of the things which normally
cause states of that type. Now that principle applies directly only in
the most basic cases. In less basic cases, someone might have the
concept of an F by having a primitive theory which specifies what
it is to be an F in other terms. The issue between the scheme-
experience dualist and the anti-dualist is how far this procedure can
go; where do we reach a point at which the data are so impoverished
that no theory constructible on the basis of those data could give
someone the concept of an F? The core of the anti-dualist argument
is the thought that, if we started from thoughts about things which
would be as they are however things were in the world beyond, we
could not form concepts of things existing outside the mind. That
claim rests on particular, and disputable, views about content. And
I think this is a second point at which there is a lacuna in Davidson's
argument; he has very little to say about why the anti-dualist's core
claim must be accepted-why we could not put together a concept
of an independently-existing material object, say, from purely
world-independent resources. I think resources to fill this lacuna
are available;35 but as far as I can see, Davidson does not supply
them.
Are scheme-world dualism and scheme-experience dualism two
quite different dualisms? Or are they, rather, two different sides of
the same coin, two aspects of a single philosophical picture?
The idea that the two dualisms are different aspects of a single
picture of the relation of mind and world goes as follows. 'There is
a dualism of mind and world: on one side is the world, which has
an intrinsic structure (or is intrinsically unstructured) absolutely
independent of us; on the other side is the mind, which has its
thoughts and concepts completely independent of anything in the
world beyond. The realms are related in two ways: inhabitants of
the mental realm, beliefs, are true in virtue of how things are in the
other realm, the world; and inhabitants of the two realms may be
causally related to one another.' The general picture could be
undermined by showing either side of the dichotomy to be
incoherent: we might show that the idea of a world-independent
mind was incoherent; or we might show that the idea of a neutral
35 See, for example, Evans (1980).
68 WILLIAM CHILD
world (or an intrinsically structured world) was incoherent; either
way, the overall picture collapses.
That picture of the relation between the two dualisms is sup-
ported by the following thought. To accept scheme-experience
dualism is to think of the mind as constructing a conceptual scheme
from world-independent resources. If we accept the conclusions of
the previous section, the beliefs and theories which result from that
construction must be as subjective and world-independent as the
data on which they are based. What conception can we have, then,
of the world lying beyond thought and experience? We can con-
ceive of the world, at best, as a something we know not what; we
have the bare idea of reality, of which nothing more can be said.
And that seems to be the neutral, unstructured world of scheme-
world dualism.
The suggestion, in effect, is that if one accepts the dualism of
scheme and experience, one cannot avoid the dualism of scheme
and world. On the other hand, it is not obvious that someone who
accepts the dualism of scheme and world is thereby committed to
the dualism of scheme and experience. Consider the view that the
world has an absolutely objective, intrinsic structure which is
directly reflected by our scientific concepts. That is consistent with
rejecting the dualism of scheme and experience; for our scientific
concepts at least, being dictated by the world, would be thoroughly
world-involving. Or again, consider a version of scheme-world
dualism according to which the world as it is in itself is causeless;
causality is simply an artifact of the way we represent the world.
Someone might hold that view, whilst accepting that the specific
concepts we form are world-involving: the concepts we form, for
example, apply to the things and kinds on Earth; the concepts Twin
Earthians form apply to the Twin Earth analogues. Again, on the
face of it, that gives us a way of accepting scheme-world dualism
without accepting scheme-experience dualism.
The case against each dualism, I have stressed, rests ultimately
on a claim in the theory of content. Against (one version of)
scheme-world dualism, the claim was this:
[A] We can form no concept of the world which would allow us to
make sense of the idea that our thoughts involve some distortion
of the world.
And against scheme-experience dualism there was this:
[B] If the content of our thoughts were determined, ultimately, by
reference to something world-independent, we could form no
concept of the world beyond experience.
One way of asking about the relation between scheme-world
dualism and scheme-experience dualism is to ask about the relation
between these two claims about content.
There is a simple view (which is, I think, Davidson's) which
brings these two claims together. 'In fixing the contents of our
thoughts and experiences certain basic cases play a key role. The
basic cases are ones in which simple properties and kinds are
manifestly instantiated. Concepts of those properties and kinds
figure directly in the characterization of our most basic thoughts
and experiences; other concepts must be constructed from those
resources.' If we accept that view, we will think the following.
Concerning [A]: if our concepts of the world are constructed from
concepts of properties and kinds which are manifestly instantiated,
we cannot make sense of the thought that the world itself does not
really have such properties. And, concerning [B]: if the basic
properties and kinds were entirely world-independent (phenomenal
colour and shape, perhaps), our possessing concepts of them could
not put us in a position to form concepts of things and kinds in the
world beyond experience.
So there is an account of our concept-forming resources which
would validate both [A] and [B]. But [A] and [B] are not obviously
inextricable; for on the face of it, someone might accept [B] but
reject [A]. Such a person would think that we have concept-forming
resources adequate to form a general concept of the world which
allows us to make sense of the thought that the world really has a
structure very different from the structure we represent it as having.
But they would accept that there is no way of getting from ex-
periences whose contents do not involve concepts of enduring,
mind-independent things and kinds to thoughts about an objective
world. I do not say that this is, ultimately, a coherent position. But
we need more argument if we are to be convinced that it is not.
The upshot is this. There does seem to be a close association
between scheme-world dualism and scheme-experience dualism:
there is a philosophical view of the relation of mind and world
70 WILLIAM CHILD
which involves both dualisms; and there is a simple view of content
which supports the two key anti-dualist claims about content.
But the dualisms do not seem to be inseparable: and, to underline
that, the two anti-dualist claims about content are, on the face of it,
different claims. Even if acceptance of scheme-experience dualism
implies acceptance of scheme-world dualism, it is not clear that
scheme-world dualism requires scheme-experience dualism.
Perhaps it could be shown that the dualisms are in fact inseparable.
But as far as I can see, nothing that Davidson has yet said has shown
why they must be.36
University College
Oxford
OX] 4BH
REFERENCES
Davidson, D. 1974: 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme', reprinted in his
Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Davidson, D., 1983: 'A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge', reprinted in
Truth and Interpretation: Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson,
edited by E. LePore, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986.
Davidson, D., 1989a: 'The Myth of the Subjective', in Relativism: Interpretation
and Confrontation, edited by M. Krausz, Notre Dame: University of Notre
Dame Press.
Davidson, D., 1989b: 'Meaning, Truth and Evidence', in Perspectives on Quine,
edited by R. Gibson and R. Barrett, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Evans, G. 1980: 'Things Without the Mind', in Philosophical Subjects: Essays
Presented to P.F Strawson, edited by Z. van Straaten, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
McDowell, J. 1982: 'Criteria, Defeasibility and Knowledge'. Proceedings of the
British Academy, 68, pp. 455-79.
McDowell, J., 1986a: 'Critical Notice: Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy by
Bernard Williams'. Mind, 95, pp. 377-86.
McDowell, J., 1986b: 'Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space', in
Subject, Thought, and Context, edited by P. Pettit and J. McDowell, Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Nagel, T. 1986: The View from Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Putnam, H. 1983: 'Why there isn't a ready-made world', in his Realism and
Reason, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
36 Earlier versions of this paper have been read in Dubrovnik, Canberra and to David
Charles' Oriel discussion group. I benefited greatly from discussion on those occasions.
My thanks, particularly, to Justin Broackes, Richard Holton and Adrian Moore, who
helped to stimulate the paper, and to Mark Sainsbury and Tim Williamson, who offered
detailed comments on a previous draft.
Wittgenstein, L. 1958: Philosophical Investigations, Second Edition, edited by
G. E. M. Anscombe, R. Rhees and G. H. von Wright, translated by G. E. M.
Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wittgenstein, L. 1961: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D. F. Pears
and B. F. McGuiness. London: Routledge.
Wittgenstein, L. 1978: Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Third
Edition, edited by G. H. von Wright, R. Rhees and G. E. M. Anscombe,
translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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On the Dualism of Scheme and Content

Author(s): William Child

IV* ON THE DUALISM OF SCHEME AND

Donald Davidson tells us that the 'dualism of scheme and

content, of organizing system and something waiting to be

organized'1 is unintelligible. Since that dualism has 'dominated and

defined the problems of modem philosophy', its rejection promises

a 'revolution in our ways of thinking about philosophy'.2

is supposed to be wrong with it? Is there just one position under

attack, one sort of philosophical mistake being identified? Or are

there a number of different positions? If so, how are those positions

related? And how is scheme-content dualism connected to the

problems of philosophy it is said to define, and to the other philo-

sophical positions with which it has been associated?

There has been a shift in the emphasis of Davidson's own

discussions which makes these questions especially pressing. The

context of his initial discussion of scheme-content dualism was an

investigation of conceptual relativism-the view that there could be

conceptual schemes which differ so massively that they are

'mutually unintelligible or incommensurable, or forever beyond

rational resolve'.3 The suggestion was that 'something like the

notion of uninterpreted content [is] necessary if we [are] to make

sense of conceptual relativism':4 something would count as a

conceptual scheme if it organized this neutral content; that would

London, on Monday, 22nd November, 1993 at 8.15 p.m.

1 Davidson (1974) p. 189.

3 Davidson (1989a) p. 160.

4 Davidson (1989b) p.69 emphasis added.

make room for conceptual relativism, since two schemes might

organize the same neutral content, but organize it so differently that

they were mutually unintelligible. Since the focus was conceptual

relativism, the main target of Davidson's early discussion was the

idea of a dualism of conceptual scheme and neutral, or uninterpreted

content. In his more recent discussions, the emphasis has moved to

questions about the possibility of thought and knowledge: if we

conceive of experience as inhabiting a purely internal, subjective

realm, can we explain how it is possible to have thoughts and

knowledge about an objective, mind-independent world? Here, the

dualism of scheme and content is a dualism of conceptual scheme

and purely subjective, world-independent content.5 Is this just a

difference in emphasis; or are there actually two different, and

independent, dualisms under discussion?

Two metaphors have been used to explain the idea of a dualism

of conceptual scheme and empirical content: there is the idea of the

dualism of a conceptual scheme and what it organizes, and the idea

of a scheme and what itfits.6 I shall concentrate on the first. Now

we can classify versions of scheme-content dualism in terms of the

nature of the content which our schemes or theories are said to

organize. There are two key distinctions. One distinction is between

versions in which the content which schemes organize is reality,

nature or the world, and versions in which the content is experience.

dualism of scheme and experience.) A second distinction, which

cuts across the first, is between views on which the content is

neutral, or uninterpreted, and those on which it is not. Davidson is

explicit that someone can be committed to a dualism of scheme and

experience without thinking of the content as uninterpreted: 'what

matters... is not whether we can describe the [content] in a neutral,

theory-free idiom [but rather] that there should be an ultimate

source of evidence whose character can be wholly specified without

reference to what it is evidence for'.7 (I shall distinguish between

Davidson (1989a) pp.159-60 and (1989b) p.69.

6 See Davidson (1974) p. 191.

7 Davidson (1989a) p. 162.