Repr. as Essay 14 in Davidson, Donald, _Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation_, 2nd ed. Oxford, UK (Clarendon, 2001). 215-226.

" This is a key book for understanding the effort that a major philosopher has made a large part of his life's work: to naturalize epistemology in the twentieth ...

Davidson’s 1974 argument denying the possibility of incommensurable conceptual schemes is widely interpreted as entailing a denial of metaphysical pluralism. Speakers may group objects differently or have different beliefs about the world, but there is just one world. I argue there is tension arising from three aspects of Davidson’s philosophy: the 1974 argument against conceptual schemes; Davidson’s more recent emphasis on primitive triangulation as a necessary condition for thought and language; and Davidson’s semantic approach to metaphysics, what he calls ‘the (...) method of truth in metaphysics’. After elucidating the tension, I argue the tension can be resolved while preserving at least two major tenets of Davidson’s philosophy: conceptual schemes do not carve an uninterpreted reality into different worlds and truth is objective and non-epistemic. I argue Davidson is implicitly committed to a plurality of worlds. (shrink)

A discussion of Quine and Davidson, as interpreted and criticized in Scott Soames' "Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume II".

A discussion of Quine and Davidson, as interpreted and criticized in Scott Soames’ Philosophical Analysis in the Twentieth Century, Volume II.

In this paper I consider the 'disappearing we' account of Wittgenstein's attitude to other ways of thought or other 'conceptual schemes'. I argue that there is no evidence that Wittgenstein expected the 'we' to disappear, in the manner of Davidson, and that his affinities with relativistic trains of thought in fact go much deeper.