Can two people’s experiences and outlooks on life be so different that meaningful communication between them is impossible? Recent events suggest so; from the incredulity of those in Britain voting to remain in the EU that anyone might have voted to leave, to the shock many Democrats experience when realising that some women did, in fact, support Trump. It is easy to get the impression that we are shouting at each other across a great divide scarred by our disagreement over what ‘fairness’ or ‘justice’ or ‘equality’ mean. Despite this, philosopher Donald Davidson gives us good reasons why this distance need not inhibit constructive discussion and provides us with the tools to argue well.
Conceptual relativism
Conceptual relativism is the idea that different groups of people have genuinely different ways of seeing the world; so much so that we might think of them as living in different worlds to our own. Examples include cultures that are supposed to have entirely different concepts to our own; it remains a matter of debate whether the Hopi, a Native American tribe, have a concept of time. But issues of conceptual relativism also arise when people use the same words, but with radically different meanings, as is the case when people on both sides of the abortion debate use the word ‘murder’.
Davidson’s first move is to suggest that if conceptual schemes differ then so do languages, because we express ourselves in language. While this might sound complicated, it needn’t be. Many languages do reveal differences in the way people think about the world. For example, the Japanese word ao denotes a colour that includes what we call blue and green. We can also include non-verbal communication if we want to take a wider interpretation of ‘language’. The problem of making sense of different conceptual schemes is therefore a problem of translation. If conceptual schemes are relative, translation should be impossible. Our words, even if we use the same ones, literally mean different things.
One of the main ways in which Davidson tries to refute this view is to begin with the idea that language organises the world and our experiences of it. He notes that the world, and our experiences of it, contain many things and some of these things will be common to us both. A language that includes feet, hands, food, and heat, must share many terms with our own. By virtue of the fact that we are human, these categories will be important. Sure, there may be some un-translatable terms, but this does not make a language untranslatable.
This appears unsatisfactory because we began with disagreements about ‘justice’ and ended up agreeing that we all have hands. Agreeing on the second gets us no closer to agreeing on the first. Davidson is right though- even if we have vastly different ways of seeing the world, we do share a variety of basic needs, …
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