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A Thinker for Theorist: Conceptual Schemes and Structuralism




Donald Davidson’s 1973 essay “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme” has been widely applied due to the epistemological range of its thesis. At its core, Davidson’s notion of a conceptual scheme captures a certain way of thinking, that common experience requires intellectual framing in order to be intelligible. Conceptual schemes are languages or vocabularies which semantically limit experiential content for use in utterances. By analyzing the thought of Paul Feyerabend, Thomas Khun, and Benjamin Whorf, Davidson observes two metaphors which attend arguments for the existence of conceptual schemes. Conceptual schemes, it is said, “… either organize something, or they fit it.” (Davidson 14) Of the metaphors that promote organization, conceptual schemes are that which “…systematize [or] divide up… the stream of experience…” while metaphors that promote fit understand them to “predict, account for, [or] face… the tribunal of experience…” (ibid) Therefore “conceptual schemes… are ways of organizing experience; they are systems of categories that give form to the data of sensation; they are points of view from which individuals, cultures, or periods survey the passing scene.” (5) Based on this definition, Davidson points out some implications of conceptual scheme thinking, using them to deploy his critique.


Some literary theories fall within Davidson’s definition. The thought of Ferdinand de Saussure is an important example. His Course in General Linguistics, though a collection of lecture notes, is essential reading, the insights of which Paul Fry has argued, are “…crucially formative for a great many of the developments in literary theory…” (Fry) In what would come to be known as Structuralism, Saussure develops an account of language that extends past a mere survey of lexicons into an explanation of linguistic meaning, drawing together semiotics, psychology, and philosophy. The result is a semantic which emphasizes the arbitrary relationship between words and thoughts, signs and their signifieds. The breadth of Structuralism’s application suggests it could fall into the purview of Davidson’s definition of a conceptual scheme, and thus under the condemnation of his critique.


A core concept of Structuralism is that any given language system—with all its signs and structures— is generated by the historical-cultural development of relationships between signs and signifieds, a virtual library Saussure termed langue. This theoretical lexicon is drawn upon by speakers in discourse, that which Saussure termed parole. In either case, Saussure insists that any relation of a sign to its signified is arbitrary, a given lexeme being meaningful only in relation to the system of which it is a member. This feature of Saussure’s thought is underwritten by a central thesis: that language is not the mere expression of thought, but the chief organizer of it, that which makes it intelligible to the speaker themself. As Saussure notes, words relate to thoughts as one side of a piece of paper relates to its opposite; to cut one side is simply to cut the other. The role of language is,


…not to supply the material phonetic means by which ideas may be expressed. It is to act as intermediary between thought and sound, in such a way that the combination of both necessarily produces a mutually complementary delimitation of units. Thought, chaotic by nature, is made precise by this process of segmentation. (Saussure 146)


Though thoughts are expressed in words, words organize, and bring into being, thoughts. Therefore, thought-sounds are meaningful, not because of some necessary correspondence to the world, but simply because they are distinct. The word cat derives its meaning from being not-dog, the word tree derives its meaning from being not-grass, and so on. “What takes place is a somewhat mysterious process by which thought-sound evolves divisions, and a language takes shape with its linguistic units in between those two amorphous masses.” (ibid)


These and other Saussurian distinctions would be taken up by important theorists like Claude Levi Strauss, Roland Barthes, Michelle Foucault, Judith Butler, and many others. The virtue of Structuralism is its ability to account for the whole act of meaning making. However, that Structuralism claims to offer a framework which is logically prior to the speaker’s ideas and experience, suggests Saussure has fashioned a Davidsonian conceptual scheme. Further, this is suggested by Davidson’s insistence that conceptual schemes lead to problems of conceptual relativism, that is, the doctrine that “…reality itself is relative to a scheme: what counts as real in one system may not in another.” (Davidson 5) This applies even to thinkers who insist there is only one conceptual scheme, like Saussure, because anytime “…someone sets out to describe ‘our conceptual scheme,’ his homey task assumes, if we take him literally, that there might be rival systems.” (ibid) Here, we understand the holder of a conceptual scheme to believe that their experience of reality and thought is reliant upon, relative to, the existence of a structure or concept which organizes thought itself. Therefore, a consequence of this view is to see an incomprehensible gulf between those who hold to one scheme and those who hold to another.


In Saussurian terms, the problem arises when two speakers, drawing upon differing langue, successfully interpret each other’s parole. If, as Structuralists insist, language is the socio-historical construction of, not just words, but thoughts, how can two speakers establish enough conceptual grounds to successfully communicate? Or, as Davidson poses the problem,


…we cannot take even a first step towards interpretation without knowing or assuming a great deal about a speaker’s beliefs. Since knowledge of beliefs comes only with the ability to interpret words, the only possibility at the start is to assume general agreement on beliefs. (19)


Here, Davidson points out that interpretation is not simply the act of understanding the beliefs of others, rather, the act of understanding beliefs requires general agreement on many things ex ante. In other words, to understand the beliefs of others uttered in a sentence, is to already share beliefs in the first place—beliefs which could not have been decided in prior conversation. Here, Davidson is suggesting that environment, that from which we distil our beliefs, plays a role in the meaning making process. In this, he argues for a commonsense notion of thought grounding belief; not in a conceptual scheme positing Saussurian thought-sounds, but in content supplied to us by experience. As Davidson argues elsewhere in his essay “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” this is what makes possible communication (albeit limited) between those who do not share the same language at all.


Davidson’s definition of conceptual schemes as intellectual frames needed to organize and fit our thoughts and concepts, sheds light on Structuralism as Saussure defined it. Through terms like thought-sounds and the paper metaphor, Saussure argued for the necessity of a conceptual scheme which is logically prior to thought and language, making it intelligible. By meeting Davidson’s definition, Structuralism leaves itself open to Davidson’s critique of conceptual relativism, which, in turn, works as a rubric, confirming that Saussure did, in fact, develop a conceptual scheme. To understand meaning as relative to, not the background knowledge of environment, but the system of language itself, is to say that language organizes thought in the same way Davidson’s definition of conceptual schemes requires. We know this by using Davidson’s notion of conceptual relativism as a test, gauging the extent to which Structuralism makes interpretation theoretically impossible. Considering the extent to which Saussure influenced the history of literary theory, from “…deconstruction, to Lacanian psychoanalysis, to French Marxism, and to binary theories of race, colonization, and gender…” (Fry), the application of Davidson’s critique of conceptual schemes could have wide ranging effect on the work of contemporary theoretical practice. If, as Stephen Knapp and Walter Ben Michaels have argued, theory just is “…the attempt to govern interpretations of particular texts by appealing to an account of interpretation in general,” (Knapp and Michaels 1) then many literary theories are subject to Davidson’s analysis.






Bibliography

Davidson, Donald. “On the Very Idea of A Conceptual Scheme.” Proceedings and Addresses

of the American Philosophical Association, n.d.

Fry, Paul. “Semiotics and Structuralism.” Yale, n.d. https://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-

300/lecture-8.

Knapp, Steven, and Walter Benn Michaels. “Against Theory.” Critical Inquiry 8, no. 4 (1982):

723–42.

Saussure, Ferdinand de, and Roy Harris. Course in General Linguistics. Bloomsbury

Revelations. London ; New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

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