On the Very Good Idea of a Conceptual Scheme

Abstract

richard rorty has argued that Donald Davidson can be classified as a neopragmatist. To this end, Rorty has tried to show that Davidson’s views share important similarities with those of Peirce, James, and Dewey. Davidson, for his part, has tended to resist Rorty’s attempts to classify his views in this way. Interestingly, the reasons for Rorty’s classification and the reasons for Davidson’s resistance share a common trait: an appeal to the elimination of the dualism of conceptual scheme and experiential content on the basis of an assumed background of shared beliefs. According to Rorty, Davidson’s background of shared beliefs is closely related to the notion of funded experience found in those thinkers often classified as Classic American Philosophers or pragmatists (13). But Davidson rejects pragmatism along with the relativisms and empiricisms that fall when the scheme-content dualism is eliminated (Davidson, Inquiries xviii). It is my contention that Rorty errs in including Davidson with Classic American Philosophers in virtue of his assumed background of shared beliefs, and Davidson is wrong to flatly reject the scheme-content distinction as the third and final dogma of empiricism. I intend to show that Davidson’s background of shared belief differs significantly from the corresponding notion in the works of John Dewey, and that Dewey’s position provides resources for eliminating the incoherence that Davidson finds in the scheme-content distinction without the outright rejection of a helpful tool of inquiry. This contributes to a defense of Dewey’s empirical philosophy against Davidson’s supposed defeat of empiricism.