Final Exam Topic
VII. RORTY
Consider the following related passages printed below from Rorty’s “The World Well Lost.” What is the point he is trying to make here in support of Davidson’s account regarding the possibility or impossibility of “alternative conceptual schemes” in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”? In the course of this essay, say something very general about Davidson's original use of Tarski's account of truth (though you need not worry excessively about the technical logical details).
"So, if Davidson is right, ascribing personhood and ascribing mostly the right beliefs and mostly the appropriate desires go hand in hand. This means that we shall never be able to have evidence that there exist persons who speak languages in principle untranslatable into English or hold beliefs all or most of which are incompatible with our own."
"Despite this, however, we can extrapolate to a story about how just such persons might come into existence. So it seems that the world may come to be full of persons whom we could never conceivably recognize as such. We can now see that, for all we know, our contemporary world is filled with unrecognizable persons. Why should we ignore the possibility that the trees and the bats and the butterflies and the stars all have their various untranslatable languages in which they are busily expressing their beliefs and desires to one another? Since their organs suit them to receive such different stimuli and to respond in such different ways, it is hardly surprising that the syntax and the primitive predicates of their languages bear no relation to our own."
"Let the notion of a person be as complex and multiply criterioned as you please, still I do not think that it will come unstuck from that of a complex interlocked set of beliefs and desires, nor that the latter notion can be separated from that of the potentiality for translatable speech."