Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

This picture of holism ceasing to apply at the point at which reference is least problematic—at the interface between language and the world where demonstratives do their work—is one way to get the scheme-content distinction going. If we think of language in this way, we will be struck by the thought that somebody else (the Galactics, say) will have “cut up” the world differently in their original acts of ostension and thus given different meanings to the individual words in the “core” of their language. The rest of their language will thus be infected by this divergence from our way of giving meaning to the “core” of English, and so there will be no way for us to communicate—no common points of reference, no possibility of translation. Davidson’s attack on these metaphors parallels Max Black’s Wittgensteinian criticism of the so-called inverted-spectrum problem—the possibility that some people may (for colors and presumably all other perceptual “quality spaces”) start off on the wrong foot. Black points out that we can “divide through” by the difference for all purposes of communication—language will, of course, go through equally well no matter what we were ostending.38 Similarly, Davidson can say that if a difference in the original ostension does not show up at the holistic level—in the use of the sentences that contain the word—then the theory of meaning for the language can divide through by that difference.

December 2, 2020. Page 305.