According to Hilary Putnam, in his “Why Reason Can’t Be Naturalised”(1982), the very fact that we can “criticise” our “conceptual schemes”casts doubt on any closed-universes notions of such potentially deterministic abstract structures.Take Michelle Foucault’s escape from what he called the “contemporary episteme”, or, for that matter, the Marxist’s escape from “false consciousness” (or Marx’s own escape from his background of “bourgeois ideology”). These examples must also cast doubt on the omnipotent and deterministic closed-universes – or the abstract entities we call “conceptual schemes”.
The very fact of recognising, let alone criticising or rejecting, a CS, or an “episteme”, means that it has, to some extent, been “transcended” . There is, then, external truth (but not to all CSs).
Perhaps some people do not actually want to escape or “transcend” their CS/s or “episteme”.They may have reflected on its concepts and not found them wanting.I assme that Foucault assumed that because people were, as it were, happy with their “episteme” or CS, then they must not in fact have recognised that they are working and thinking within one.
Foucault, mentioned but not actually quoted by Putnam, defines “epistemes” thus:
…the historical a priori which is a given period, delimits the totality of experience a field of knowledge, defined the mode of being of the objects that appear in that field, provides man’s everyday perception with theoretical powers, and defines the conditions in which he can sustain a discourse about things that is recognised to be true.(1970)
And yet Foucault himself miraculously escaped these epistemes:
…I am trying to grasp the implicit systems which determine our most familiar behaviour without our know it…to show the constraints they impose upon us.I am therefore trying to place myself at a distance from them and to show how one could escape.(1971)
Clearly Foucault in the above has a view of CSs which makes them deterministic. That is, we don’t adopt them. We don’t know they determine our experience and “behaviour”. They are, or “epistemes” are, “the historical a priori”. This means, if this term is taken in its strict Kantian sense, the CS comes literally before experience and therefore forms and shapes experience. Of course not all CSs are like this. Foucault may have accepted that.
Without going into a general exegesis of Foucault, it is a strange use of the term “a priori”. For example, one cannot “escape” from Kant’s a priori structures and concepts of the mind. One, for instance, couldn’t stop seeing objects as objects. One couldn’t stop seeing things in terms of cause and effect. And one certainly couldn’t stop seeing things in terms of internal time and external space. One can say all this and not, of course, accept the Kantian CS. So, in a strict sense, some of the examples I will offer in my diagrammatic representation cannot be a priori in the Kantian sense. Freud’s Unconscious can’t be a priori. How did Freud “escape”? The same is true of “class” and “false consciousness” (as I said earlier). The closest which some come to the Kantian a priori are Chomskian faculties, the “depth grammar” of Lacan and Levi-Strauss and, perhaps, Collingwood’s “presuppositions”. All these examples would come before “epistemes”, the contents of the Unconscious and “class consciousness” – as would Kant’s a priori concepts. (Again, I can say all that without accepting the truth of any of the examples.)
So how did Foucault (and the others) “escape”? Perhaps this isn’t a philosophical question. Perhaps it is a question about the psychology of Foucault. The psychology may not tell us how he philosophically transcended the episteme, but why he thought he had transcended it. There have been many people with such special powers in the past. Again, as I’ve said, there were no alternative ways of escape other than Foucault’s (or Marx’s or Freud’s etc.) own. If you thought you had escaped via another route, you would not really have escaped. It wouldn’t be an "episteme” (or the Unconscious, or class consciousness) otherwise. It's no use stressing a CS’s deterministic features if people can escape them willy-nilly. However, the question will remain: how did the philosopher himself escape?
Yet Foucault’s “episteme” is far more all-encompassing than Kant’s. That is if one doesn’t take Kant’s accretion to the mind’s a priori structures and concepts (for example, Kant’s ethical system). Part of Foucault’s episteme has Kantian resonances. For example, the episteme defines “the mode…of the objects that appear”; it “determines the totality of experience” and so on. However, he appears to overstep the Kantian mark when he said that the episteme provides us with “theoretical powers” for perception, and also determines certain epistemic constrains about “discourse” and truth. And, of course, the fact that the episteme was a historical a priori would have shocked Kant (as it still shocks certain philosophers).
Marxists and Foucault escaped by choosing the correct path of escape. If we don’t choose the correct path, specified by Foucault or Marxists, we can’t, by definition, escape our CS or episteme. You can even be self-consciously aware of your CS. Perhaps they would allow that, but unless one is aware of it in the correct way, one cannot escape or transcend it. It is not enough to have knowledge, insight and intelligence, one must have the correct knowledge, insight and intelligence. Alternatively, even if a Marxist or follower of Foucault was an intellectual imbecile, he could still escape his CS if he had embraced Foucault’s structuralism or Marxism.
The following is my schematic representation of some CSs and their implications:
Determining and Self-enclosed CSs
Depth grammar (e.g. Lacan, Levi-Strauss)
Epistemes (Foucault)
Class consciousness (Marx)
False consciousness (Marx)
The Unconscious (Freud)
Ideologies
Presuppositions (e.g. Collingwood)
A priori structure (e.g. Kant)
Chomskian faculties
↓
Can be shaken off
One’s class-consciousness
One’s ideology
Can’t be shaken off
One’s Unconscious
One’s episteme
One’s depth grammar
One’s a priori structures
One’s presuppositions
One’s Chomskian faculties
(One’s brain!)
The conceptual determinist claims that we “mechanically apply cultural norms”.In actual fact, according to Putman, we “interpret” and “criticise” them.
Putnam’s critique of self-enclosed CSs could be expressed thus:
Of course someone may ask why we can’t transcend all CSs. I think I cover that point enough elsewhere in this paper not to bother with the problem here.
Putnam’s internal anti-realist reflection on CSs can also be expressed this way:
Position A (“language-determined”)
↓
gives rises to
↓
position B (which is also “language determined”)
…we make new versions [of language] out of old ones…
One could ask that if CSs are so easy to “transcend” then why talk in terms of “conceptual schemes” at all? Well, I don’t think Putnam says that it is easy to transcend a CS. And I certainly don’t. It may take a lot of hard work. Alternatively, such transcendence may be partly fortuitous. The point is, however, that not all the CSs are equivalent to Kant’s CS or Chomsky’s faculties. In Kantian terms, they are “contingent”. However, it is also a contingent fact that millions of women wear high-heel shoes. But that’s not likely to change in the future. There are lots of contingent phenomena that are long lasting and hard to “escape” from. This doesn’t make them any less contingent. One could, of course, make a kind of a priori connection, or genetic connection, between women and their penchant for high-heel shoes. But the fact that not many women wear high-heel shoes in central African tribal villages, or even in parts of the UK, means that the a priori status of high heels is very thin indeed. However, many things which seem necessary or a priori turn out, in time, to be no such thing. Foucault’s “historical a priori” has itself become victim of history. And, of course, in philosophy itself we have questioned the very existence of any form of the a priori, any form of necessity and any form of essentialism.
A very interesting chapter ("Scepticism, Naturalism and Transcendental Arguments") on what I call micro a prioriCSs can be found in Strawson's book Scepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties (1985). In this chapter Strawson offers many examples of what could be a priori micro CSs, or at least quasi-a priori micro CSs. For example, according to Strawson's Hume, a belief in the body, a belief in induction, and a belief in the existence of other people, form part of Hume's quasi-a priori micro CS. Such beliefs are "inescapable". Strawson then goes on to tackle Wittgenstein who proposed certain beliefs which acted as a "scaffolding or framework" for the rest of our beliefs (but not in the traditional empiricist sense of "basic beliefs" resting on direct experience). Indeed, it is an interesting sport deciding what beliefs or concepts etc. are bona fide a priori and which are in fact contingent. Indeed, we should bear in mind Quine's animadversions against the very existence of the a priori.
The thing is that if CSs really are self-enclosed closed universes then there wouldn’t be a possibility of real communication between them.Does this ever occur?Well, many people do appear to be at loggerheads with each other, but is this always – or ever - to do with being members of rival CSs?We do, after all, share the same world; we are often within the same country (if not the same culture); we share cognitive faculties and sensory receptors; many of us share a language or inter-translatable languages.Think of what we share in our everyday lives.Everyone uses inductive logic (i.e., outside the study).Almost everyone protects themselves from rain, hurt and illness.Nearly everyone learns from experience (possibly, or necessarily, via inductive logic).Everyone believes in self-identity.Many believe in identity over time.Everyone believes that there aren’t round squares.No-one believes that some object can be both red all over and white all over.No one believes – but cannot prove – that the universe came into existence five minutes ago…So do less obvious truths follow from these?And do they do so logically?And perhaps the acceptance of one logical strategy may lead to the acceptance of another one and so on.Indeed, may logicians possibly wouldn’t be interested in their basic truths or axioms if they didn’t lead somewhere more exotic.
CSs and External Truth
…the Yoruba do not have a distinction corresponding to our distinction between knowledge and (mere) true belief. (Stitch, 1988)
Apart from the fact that Stitch’s distinction belongs to slightly esoteric philosophy, would one distinction necessarily mean we don’t share a CS or CSs with the Yoruba (assuming, for argument’s sake, this is the only substantive, if it is substantive, difference)?This leads to the question: How many differences make a different and incompatible CS?And if a distinction were made between two different CSs, the boundary between them may well be vague.How deep must conceptual variance go before something is christened a “new self-contained CS”? And would it necessarily mean that a new CS would or could never look out at other possibly competing CSs?A Christian, for example, clearly looks out of the Christian CS at the/a scientific CS, despite the fact that according to a minority of Christians, humans have only existed for just over 4,000 years, and yet according to a/the scientific CS humans have existed for a lot longer.For a long period of history, many beliefs offered by the/a scientific CS contradicted those offered by the Christian CS.This to and fro is part of our history.
Clearly differences in beliefs can’t themselves constitute differences in CS. If it did, we’d all belong to different CSs. In fact, we’d all have our own CS. It’s when concepts and/or beliefs begin to link up that is when they entail, imply each other or are inferred from one another that the question of – micro – CSs arises. In the Stitch example, it would be a question of whether not having the notion “knowledge” rather than “true belief” itself entails, implies or generates other concepts which form a micro CS. Clearly a belief in “true belief” is not itself a singular belief. It is a macro belief made up of other beliefs. Of course we could ask if this is just a philosophical distinction that not even members of our own culture share.
The question is whether or not we can stand outside our CS or CSs. And judge, for example, the Yoruba.Thompson Clarke believes we can:
“Each concept or the conceptual scheme must be divorceable intact from our practices, from whatever constituted the essential nature of the plain…observers who usually by means of our senses, ascertain, when possible, whether items fulfil the conditions legislated by concepts.” (Note 37+39, pg 555 in Williams)
This is quite a difficult passage to understand because of its over-laden with metaphors.
Does Clarke step outside his CS/s into another one?Or does he adopt a God’s-eye view of “the plain”?There is a hint in the above that he becomes free from concepts and CSs when he asks “whether items [sensory items] fulfil the conditions legislated by concepts”.So these sensory “items”, contrary to Davidson’s (19?) position (amongst others), seem to come first, at least on this occasion.He is certainly committed to the world’s “essential” nature when he talks of “the essential nature of the plain”.
Someone may ask what “truth is in all discourses?”, and therefore if it is external to CSs.But what if each CS has its own version of truth?(Michael Williams)However, if different so-called CSs can accept the same things, for example, that 2+2=4 and that Napoleon was the Emperor of France, then why can’t they agree on other more esoteric, recondite or controversial things?Indeed, it could be that from accepting the non-contentious that one must accept the contentious (as many logicians are keen to argue).If we can talk and ever agree about the weather, then perhaps we could talk and agree about more contentious issues.Are there language-games about the weather?Perhaps there are.Or perhaps things like the weather are of a different status.
We could say that all the disputes are about higher levels. And a logician could say, You really mean the emotional and/or political/religious levels. We can, indeed, derive the contentious from the uncontentious, but our emotions, in some cases, don’t allow us to do so. We should be suspicious, prima facie, that there is wide agreement in certain areas and not so in other areas. This is not always a result of complexity or technicality that explains the disagreements at higher levels. Some very high levels of technicality and complexity, in many disciplines, also bring about general agreement. However, all this has brought the psychological into the arena. But it’s worth thinking about.
If a CS is chosen, rather than, say, born into, then it will be so, self-evidently, for reasons of truth external to the CS the person is committing himself to.Similarly, a person may reject his – or a – CS for reasons external to the CS.
I am using the word “truth” as shorthand for reasons, evidence, facts etc external to a CS which cause its rejection. (See my position on truth in the section “Truth…”)
“Bleeding radiators! Bleeding radiators!…I’m not cursing. I’m being funny.”
Let’s be naïve here:
A=A in all CSs (Perhaps even in quantum physics and Buddhist logic A=A, despite the fact that, bizarrely enough, I think that Buddhists, in their denial, misinterpret the self-identity schema.)
A=B=CA=C in all CSs
Or modus tolens:
P ÌQ
P
Q
And, similarly, does
“Snow is white” if and only if snow is white.
belong to only one CS?
Of COURSE ONE COULD CLAIM that these are all logical schema, therefore uncontentious. However, a philosopher of logic would say that a lot could be derived from these schemas that are not so uncontentious. For a start, the Buddhists I parenthesised above deny, in some cases, that even A=A. And they do so for profound – if misplaced – ontological reasons of identity. Similarly with A=B=Ctherefore A=C. All we need to do is substitute “A”, “B” and “C”with something other than schematic letters to see that it could be relevant outside logic.
The “Snow is white” example is not simply logical, it is also semantic. So semantic facts (if there are such things) may also transcend all CSs and, also, belong to all CSs. (This is a possibility. I’m not saying that I think that there are semantic facts or even that the semantic schema above is correct.)
And if everyone, or almost everyone, believes that Napoleon was the Emperor of France, then they must also believe many other things which are derived from or dependent upon such a belief. For example, that France once existed. That France did indeed have an Emperor. That there was a time when France didn’t have an Emperor (this one isn’t logically derived from the initial belief). And if we believe that Napoleon was the Emperor of France, we must also believe that there were reasons why he became such a leader. And so on.
These simple bits of logic are intended to show that the contentious can be derived from the uncontentious. This itself hopefully shows that if CSs share the uncontentious, there is nothing to stop them – logically – from sharing the contentious too. And this in turn cats doubt on the incommensurability and non-translatability theses of CSs. However, again, it doesn’t imply the possibility of an escape from all CSs into the wilderness of Nowhere, the view from which we can see the world As It Is.
There is, of course, a problem with these examples of uncontentious reasoning.For example, we could start agreeing with THE METAPHYSICAL realist Nagel. He believes that the obsession with language and CSs has “contributed to the devastation of reason” (1997, 37).He goes on to say that if we stress the importance of language and CSs generally, which are, after all, contingent, we are in effect stressing the contingencies of psychology too.And it is this approach that “leads to relativism” (1997, 37).That is, in my sense, of the denial of truth external to CSs.
Conceptual Relativism and External Truth
There may be some kind of truth external to CS for simple logical reasons.Take this conversation between a conceptual scheme relativistand what I call a “truth externalist”:
CR: There is no such thing as truth external to CSs.
E: Really? But in order to make that statement, you must have externalised yourself from your own CS. After all, you are talking about other CSs. In order to know that there is no truth external to CSs, you need to transcend your own CS. And if you can transcend your own CS, perhaps you can transcend others too – all others. Indeed, the statement that “There is no such thing as truth external to CSs” is, self-evidently, internal to your CS alone, therefore not applicable to other CSs, let alone to the possibility of truth external to all CSs. So while attempting to emphasise the self-enclosed nature of CSs, you have only done so by commenting on other CSs. And by doing this you have opened up your own CS and therefore, possibly, others CSs too. You can allow the possibility that truth is internal to CSs, but you cannot say that it is internal to all CSs. You could, of course, make your own CS a meta-CS or a second-order CS. A CS that overlooks all other CSs. But if your CS can escape the putatively self-enclosed nature of all CSs, perhaps others can too. What’s to stop other CSs becoming meta- or second-order CSs that come to different conclusions about, say, truth?
So you believe in at least one truth is external to CSs: the truth that there are no truths external to CSs.
Similarly, I could ask you whether or not it is true that there are no truths separate from CSs.
CR: This begs the question in favour of there being truth external to CSs. It could be true according to one CS “That there are truths external to CSs”, but that one would still be a truth internal to that CS. You affirm the consequent when you ask, “Is it true that there are no truths separate from CSs?”. That is, the consequent is affirmed in the first clause. Therefore it assumes that there are truths external to CSs by asking whether or not it is true that there are truths external to CSs. All such anti-deflationary, or anti-nominalist, questions on truth affirm the consequent. For example, “Is it true that A corresponds with B?” This assumes that truth is something over and above correspondence (which it may be). However, it shouldn’t be assumed within the question itself. The same is the case with: “Is it true that S is warranted assertible?” It assumes without argument that truth is separate from all alternatives to truth.
E: I partly agree with you. I use the word “truth” as shorthand for evidence, facts, data, warranted assertibility etc. Something is external to CSs that can have an effect on CSs. In effect “truth” is a term which bundles together all these alternatives, but which itself may have no object, reference or extension. It’s a bit like the word “nation” which, according to some, is nothing over and above its parts and yet has instrumental or pragmatic utility as a word and even a concept. Even on this qualified sense of the word “truth” my arguments still hold against the internal determination of truth and the self-enclosed natures of CSs.
CR: But my original statement, that there is no such thing as truth external to a CS, is a second-order or
meta-statement about truth.And it is itself legitimised by a third-order statement in Tarskian style.
E: And as I’ve already said, if your CS can allow meta- or second-order status, so too can other CSs.
And I can still ask whether it is true that your second-order statement about truth was itself true?”
How could there be a second-order or meta-statement within a CS which says that all truths are relative to a CS?Wouldn’t this be begging the question?You can’t accept this quasi-Tarskian hierarchy of levels of truth, for the simple regress problem.
Also, why doesn’t the second-order truth share anything with first-order truths?For example, if all first-order truths were truths of correspondence, legitimised by the CS, then what does the second-order statement or truth about truths of correspondence itself correspond to?A fact in the world?No. A statement about the world is not itself a fact in the world.Therefore the second-order statement is not corresponding with a fact in the world even if it may correspond with an abstract object – the statement about a fact in the world.
All this shows us that truth is different in different arenas. And this works against the truth externalist’s (E) narrow version of truth, and the conceptual relativist’s (CR) self-contradictory and self-defeating positions on CSs. We could say that if truth is different in different arenas, why use the same word, “truth”, for all of them? (I cover this elsewhere.)
In fact, what the second-order statement about first-order “truths” share with first-order truths about the world, is not truth, but correspondence. The second-order statement corresponds with first-order statements. And first-order statements correspond with facts in the world. This can be accepted while accepting that correspondence is itself a problematic notion. For example, can a second-order statement correspond with a first-order statement in the same way in which a first-order statement corresponds with facts in the world? That is, can an abstract object (a statement) correspond with another statement (therefore another abstract object), in the way a statement corresponds with a fact in the world that is a concrete object?
To clarify.The conceptual scheme relativist says that
Truth is relative to a CS.
The above, therefore, must also be relative to a CS.If it is true, then this particular statement or truth is only true relative to a particular CS (or itself), then it may not be true relative to another CS.So, indeed, it may be false relative to another CS.It may even be false simpliciter.If it is the case that truth is relative to a CS, then the statement that truth is not relative to a CS is also true.Therefore conceptual scheme relativism is false by its own standards.The conceptual scheme relativist can only say
Truth is relative to the conceptual scheme in which it is asserted that truth is relative to a CS.
So clearly there is an acknowledgment that truth is not internal to all CSs, but only to that one which states that truth is internal to itself. This does not appear self-contradictory, but it does appear to be a very truncated version of all the earlier pronouncements. It means essentially that its version of truth is internal to itself, which, of course, allows other versions – even versions which claim that truth can’t be the property of a single CS. (This, again, highlights the diffuseness of truth.) Indeed, if this CS’s version of truth is particularly peculiar, it may well be internal to itself and itself alone.
This clearly allows for the possibility of non-relativist options or truths external to CSs (other than its own).And if it allows this, what’s the point of its internalist arguments on truth? Truth internalism for one single CS is not much of an example of truth internalism. Perhaps it’s not saying anything much about either truth or the relation of truth to CSs. (Having said that, there may not be anything to say about truth if truth is taken as a meaty…thing.)
Indeed, we can question the very acceptability of such a thing as truth relative to a CS.What CS is the truth 2+2=4 relative to?If “All truths are relative to a CS”, then this too is relative to a CS.
Of course I could make the deflationary point that adding “is true” to “2+2=4” is not really to add anything. Perhaps 2+2=4 stands on its own two feet. (However, this isn’t the place to go into detail about truth when I’m discussing truth vis-à-vis CSs and the possibility of external truth vis-à-vis CSs.)
None of the arguments above presuppose that the anti-relativist has necessary and sufficient criteria for a notion of truth or an adequate theory of truth. He may not have any criteria for truth. Indeed, it could even be said that one can accept a truth substitute like warranted assertibility or a deflationary notion of truth and still not recoil from criticism of conceptual scheme relativism.
As I said earlier, there are things, of whatever kind, external to CSs which can be used against individual and perhaps all CSs (which is not the same as saying that we can escape all CSs). These things I have bundled together and called “truth”. This is not a theory of truth. Or even a concept of truth. The word “truth” is used as a tool and a guide. It is like “the highest prime number” or the “round square”.
My acknowledgment of truth external to CSs is not an acknowledgement of truth external to all CSs. I’m not a metaphysical realist. What I’m not, I suppose, is a CS determinist (though this isn’t a rejection of determinism altogether). I don’t think that all CSs are enclosed universes. And even the micro CSs I mentioned elsewhere are not all encompassing, even if they do necessarily determine experience at certain rudimentary levels. Unlike, say, Nagel earlier, I may be “obsessed” with CSs in the sense that I don’t think we can escape them all. Or perhaps it’s just individual concepts we can’t escape. As to the “devastation of reason” and the contingencies of psychology, these are arcane metaphysical realist points that I can’t tackle here.
