Abstract
Over the last three decades, non-adaptationism has developed as an alternative model to more traditional, adaptationist approaches within Evolutionary Epistemology (EE). Despite its great explanatory strength, non-adaptationist EE finds a potential Achilles heel in its adherence to conceptual relativism, namely the idea that empirical content can be relative to many different and radically incommensurable conceptual schemes. In his seminal essay “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” (1974), Donald Davidson did in fact prove the unintelligibility of an analogous form of conceptual relativism. Although Davidson’s original intent was to debunk a conceptual relativist position which he discerned in the works of authors such as Kuhn, Quine, and Whorf, given the apparent similarity between the conceptual relativism supported by non-adaptationist EE and the one criticised by Davidson, one might well wonder if Davidson’s objections would have the same debunking effect if applied to non-adaptationist EE. In this paper I propose to answer this question by directing Davidson’s critiques of conceptual relativism to non-adaptationist EE and by testing to what extent the latter is de facto undermined by Davidson’s attacks. I demonstrate that Davidson’s arguments do not detract from the reliability of non-adaptationist perspectives and, to some extent, they appear to substantiate the non-adaptationist evolutionary epistemological cause anew.
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Notes
Parts of this article have been submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the M.Sc. in History and Philosophy of Science at Utrecht University and have been extrapolated from my Master’s thesis “Evolution, Knowledge, and Reality: A Defence of Non-Adaptationist Evolutionary Epistemology”, https://dspace.library.uu.nl/handle/1874/353294.
The discrimination between “specific” and “species-specific” hints at the existence of two distinct acknowledged forms of “complete incommensurability” among differing worldviews within non-adaptationist EE. As I will explain in Sect. 4, one form admits the possibility of completely incommensurable worldviews among the members of a same species, while the other acknowledges this possibility only among organisms with radically different biological phenotypes. As I will point out, whereas the former concerns “specific” (or particular) worldviews of different human beings who employ differing cognitive tools but present the same biological constitution, the latter regards “species-specific” worldviews of organisms belonging to different species which display different “species-specific” cognitive and biological sets.
Just as “…the internal realism proposed by Hilary Putnam some years ago… strictly speaking is no realism at all…” (Vollmer 2004, 200), it must be noticed that although Wuketits and Ruse (whose position extensively draws upon Putnam’s internal realism [cf. Lemos 2002, 793]) variously resort to the term “realism” when defining their respective positions (“common-sense realism”, “internal realism”, and “functional realism”), their views are actually much closer to non-realism than realism. Their positions are indeed similarly characterized by the pragmatic rejection of a world-in-itself and by the idea that there is no world beyond our experience and thinking.
In this article I intend to evaluate neither the accuracy of Davidson’s critiques against Kuhn, Quine, and Whorf nor the global coherence of Davidson’s discussion about conceptual schemes. For a detailed analysis of Davidson’s 1974 paper, the reader may refer to Beillard (2008) and Brons (2011, 2016).
Whereas Brons (2016, 60) distinguishes between a general scheme idea (the “very idea”) and a particular one (the idea of “untranslatable schemes”) and claims that Davidson was concerned only with the latter, Beillard (2008, 10) argues that Davidson attacked the idea of untranslatable conceptual schemes in order to dismantle the “very idea”. According to Beillard (2008, 10–11), Davidson was convinced of the inherent dependency of the “intelligibility” of the “very idea” on the “intelligibility of the idea of a difference in scheme”. I prefer to follow Brons (2016) in this specific case, because, as he reports, Davidson did not completely dismiss the idea of a conceptual scheme as a whole, but he happened to use it, for example when he later admitted the possibility of tracing “differences or provincialisms in our conceptual schemes” (Davidson 1997, 128, quoted by Brons 2016, 61).
“Complete incommensurability” identifies the impossibility of translating one conceptual scheme into the terms of another, while “partial incommensurability” admits the possibility of translating some parts of a scheme, albeit not all, into those of another. Although non-adaptationist thinkers do never resort to the expression “complete incommensurability”, I think we have good reasons for identifying the kind of untranslatability between schemes they support with a “complete” form of untranslatability. Diettrich (2001) excludes any prospect of meaningful communication between humans and aliens and, as framed in the words of Riegler (2012, 244), indicates the impossibility of “communication with beings equipped with…alternative [cognitive] operators”. Riegler (2012, 244) highlights the possibility of “a profound incommensurability among human beings”, while Clark, as reported by Vlerick (2017), supports the likelihood of “inaccessible” (48) or “unintelligible” (49) points of view (in this regard, since Ruse endorses Clark’s view, the same reading can be applied to his position [cf. footnote 7]). In light of this, since all the authors acknowledge the possibility of incommensurable schemes, without however pointing at the eventuality of a partial untranslatability, I take their positions as only endorsing the idea of a “complete incommensurability” and not that of a “partial incommensurability”.
Ruse and Riegler are intended to support a weak form of incommensurability in so far as they respectively endorse Clark’s and Diettrich’s points of view on this matter.
Whereas the weak form of incommensurability is explicitly acknowledged by Diettrich and Riegler, this point remains implicit in the works of Clark and Ruse. I follow Vlerick’s (2017) reading of Clark’s “hypothesis of the alien scientist” (41) as supporting the possibility of “inaccessible” (48) or “possibly unintelligible” (49) points of view. The same point can be applied to Ruse, since he endorses Clark’s view. That said, however, I am not entirely sure whether Vlerick’s overall interpretation of Clark’s position does agree with mine.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Nathalie Gontier for providing constructive criticism of the paper.
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Facoetti, M. Donald Davidson’s Critiques of Conceptual Relativism Applied to Non-adaptationist Evolutionary Epistemology and Refuted. Found Sci 25, 357–374 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-019-09606-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-019-09606-7