Some have claimed that people with very different beliefs literally see the world differently. Thus Thomas Kuhn: ‘what a man sees depends both upon what he looks at and also upon what his previous visual—conceptual experience has taught him to see’ (Kuhn 1970, p. ll3). This view — call it ‘Perceptual Relativism’ — entails that a scientist and a child may look at a cathode ray tube and, in a sense, the first will see it while the second won’t. The (...) claim is not, of course, that the child’s experience is ‘empty’; but that, unlike the scientist, it does not see the tube as a cathode ray tube. One way of supporting this claim is to say that one cannot see something as an F unless one has the concept F. Since the child plainly lacks the concept of a cathode ray tube, it cannot see it as a cathode ray tube. Although Perceptual Relativism is hard to believe, this supporting suggestion is not so implausible. After all, when we see (and more generally, perceive) the world, the world is presented to us in a particular way; so how can we see it as being that way unless we have some idea or conception of the way it is presented? We need not be committed to a representative theory of perception to think that perceptions in some sense represent the world. We can express this by saying that perceptions have content. Now it is a commonplace that the contents of beliefs and the other propositional attitudes involve concepts. The belief that this thing is a cathode ray tube involves, in some sense, the concept cathode ray tube. So the line of thought behind Perceptual Relativism may be expressed thus: seeing an F as an F is a state with content. (shrink)

This work combines two early pamphlets by F. H. Bradley , the foremost philosopher of the British Idealist movement. The first essay, published in 1874, deals with the nature of professional history, and foreshadows some of Bradley's later ideas in metaphysics. He argues that history cannot be subjected to scientific scrutiny because it is not directly available to the senses, meaning that all history writing is inevitably subjective. Though not widely discussed at the time of publication, the pamphlet was influential (...) on historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood. The second pamphlet is Bradley's critique of Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics. Sidgwick was the first to propose the paradox of hedonism, which is the idea in ethics that pleasure can only be acquired indirectly. Published in 1877, this work is divided into three parts, treating Sidgwick's definitions, arguments, and his view of ethical science. (shrink)

This work combines two early pamphlets by F. H. Bradley, the foremost philosopher of the British Idealist movement. The first essay, published in 1874, deals with the nature of professional history, and foreshadows some of Bradley's later ideas in metaphysics. He argues that history cannot be subjected to scientific scrutiny because it is not directly available to the senses, meaning that all history writing is inevitably subjective. Though not widely discussed at the time of publication, the pamphlet was influential on (...) historian and philosopher R. G. Collingwood. The second pamphlet is Bradley's critique of Henry Sidgwick's The Methods of Ethics. Sidgwick was the first to propose the paradox of hedonism, which is the idea in ethics that pleasure can only be acquired indirectly. Published in 1877, this work is divided into three parts, treating Sidgwick's definitions, arguments, and his view of ethical science. (shrink)

Davidson attacks the intelligibility of conceptual relativism, i.e. of truth relative to a conceptual scheme. He defines the notion of a conceptual scheme as something ordering, organizing, and rendering intelligible empirical content, and calls the position that employs both notions scheme-content dualism. He argues that such dualism is untenable since: not only can we not parcel out empirical content sentence per sentence but also the notion of uninterpreted content to which several schemes are relative, and the related notion of a (...) theory ”fitting the evidence’, can be shown to lack intelligibility too. Davidson argues further that belief in incommensurable schemes or non-intertranslatable languages is possible only on violating a correct understanding of interpretability : if we succeed in interpreting someone else then we have shown there is no need to speak of two conceptual schemes, while if we fail ”there is no ground for speaking of two.’. (shrink)