Editing Donald Davidson (philosopher) (section)

===Third dogma of empiricism<!--'Scheme-content dualism' redirects here-->===
In his 1974 essay ''On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme'',<ref name=":2">{{Cite journal |last=Davidson |first=D. |date=1974 |title=On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/3129898?origin=crossref |journal=Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association |volume=47 |pages=5–20 |doi=10.2307/3129898 |issn=0065-972X|url-access=subscription }}</ref> Davidson critiques what he calls the "third dogma of empiricism". The term is a reference to the famous 1951 essay ''[[Two Dogmas of Empiricism]]'' by his graduate teacher, [[W. V. O. Quine]], in which he critiques two central tenets, or "dogmas", of [[logical positivism]] (and empiricism more generally): the [[analytic–synthetic distinction]] and [[reductionism]]. Davidson identifies an additional third dogma present in logical positivism and even in Quine's own work, as well as the work of [[Thomas Kuhn]], [[Benjamin Lee Whorf]], and others, and he argues that it is as untenable as the first two dogmas.

Davidson's third dogma refers to '''scheme–content dualism''', which is the idea that all knowledge is the result of one's scheme of concepts being imposed upon empirical content from the world. The content is objective because it simply exists in the world or is simply given in experience, while the scheme is subjective because it is a person or community's way of making sense of that content according to some set of criteria. One consequence of scheme–content dualism is conceptual relativism, which is the idea that two different people or communities could have radically different, [[commensurability (philosophy of science)|incommensurable]] (Kuhn's term for untranslatable) ways of making sense of the world. On this view, truth is relative to a conceptual scheme rather than objective.<ref name=":2" />

The general argumentative structure of the essay is as follows:<ref name=":2" />

:#The idea of a conceptual scheme is only intelligible if there can be many different conceptual schemes, as the existence of one implies that there could be others, otherwise the term does not refer to anything in particular.
:#There can only be many different conceptual schemes if they are incommensurable, whether completely or partially, otherwise they would simply be different ways of speaking.
:#We can only recognize a conceptual scheme as a conceptual scheme if it is commensurable with our own (this premise is what Davidson attempts to prove in his essay).
:#Thus, the criterion for distinguishing alternative conceptual schemes, and thus the criterion for their identity, seems to be both incommensurability and commensurability.
:#Thus, the very idea of a conceptual scheme is incoherent.
:#If we lack criteria for identifying conceptual schemes, then we lack criteria for distinguishing scheme from content, and thus criteria for identifying empirical content.
:#Thus, scheme–content dualism is incoherent.

The upshot of Davidson's argument is that there is no strict boundary between subjective and objective knowledge. Knowledge of one's own scheme of concepts is necessarily inseparable from one's knowledge of the world, which undermines the longstanding idea in philosophy that one's own subjective knowledge is fundamentally different than what objectively exists in reality. This also undermines conceptual relativism, as the above argument demonstrates that two different conceptual schemes must be commensurable if they are to even be recognized as different conceptual schemes, and so truth is not relative to a conceptual scheme, but is rather objective insofar as we all have unmediated access to the world.<ref name=":2" />

For Davidson, in order for one's own point of view to be intelligible as a point of view, one must acknowledge the existence of other points of view, and they all must pertain to the same objective reality, which means they must be translatable (he further develops this idea in his 1991 essay ''Three Varieties of Knowledge'').<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Davidson |first=D. |date=1991 |title=Three Varieties of Knowledge |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S1358246100007748/type/journal_article |journal=Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement |language=en |volume=30 |pages=153–166 |doi=10.1017/S1358246100007748 |issn=1358-2461|url-access=subscription }}</ref> In Davidson's own words, "Different points of view make sense, but only if there is a common coordinate system on which to plot them."<ref name=":2" />

Unlike the first two dogmas, which can be rejected by empiricists, Davidson claims that the third dogma of empiricism is "perhaps the last, for if we give it up it is not clear that there is anything distinctive left to call empiricism."<ref name=":2" /> [[Richard Rorty]] and [[Michael Williams (philosopher)|Michael Williams]] have even said that the third dogma is necessary for any study of [[epistemology]] (Rorty in particular uses Davidson's critique to advance his own [[neopragmatism|neopragmatist]] critique of philosophy-as-epistemology).<ref name=":4">{{Cite journal |last=McGinn |first=M. |date=1981 |title=The Third Dogma of Empiricism |url=http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544981 |journal=Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society |volume=82 |pages=89–101 |issn=0066-7374}}</ref>