Preproceedings 2006 - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

Davidson on Intercultural Dialog
Cristina Borgoni, University of Granada, Spain
1. There are some different ways to look into questions
about intercultural dialog; I begin emphasizing two of them
for the interesting features its conclusions can hold.
One possible way is to ask about the conditions that
structure and take part in the conversational interaction
among cultures. It would be possible, for example, to
indicate how the gap in power determines the very
existence of such a dialog in an intercultural context. In an
extreme situation, one could conclude that dialog is
impossible even in a trivial sense of the term.
Another direction of enquiry can be taken by asking
about the consequences which other philosophical issues
have for the final picture of the scenario of culture
interacting. One could, for instance, depart from some
theory of language and try to find answers to matters such
as the significance of different languages and cultures
existing at the same time. Here also the other extreme
situation could be that different languages mean different
cultures and therefore, different worlds not accessible to
one another. In other words, we would once again be
facing the possibility of inexistence of a dialog between
different cultures.
Both extreme conclusions from both ways of
reasoning strike me as being not just neutral conclusions.
Rather, there are a sign that something is really going
wrong in some part of our philosophy. However
illuminating it may be to show that power plays a vital role
in a dialog, to accept that it is impossible to think about
dialog practices without this variable is not the same as to
declare that we must cease our efforts to improve dialog
conditions. Similarly, although it is very beautiful to
understand how each language and each culture has its
own treasures, it could even be detrimental to conclude it
is worthless trying to understand anyone else who does
not share our natural language because those treasures
are assumed to be inaccessible.
I take it that any philosophy which is able to banish
that kind of conclusion I have pointed as extreme ones has
something important to say about dialog between different
cultures.
This paper focuses on what I have exposed as the
exercise of asking about the consequences that other
philosophical issues have on a theme such as Intercultural
Dialog. I am concerned with what Davidson could say
about interacting cultures, departing from some of his
conclusions on language and interpretation.
2. The conclusions from Davidson’s philosophy I have in
mind are:
1. Once someone is recognized as interpretable, a lot of
beliefs must be shared between the interpreter and the
speaker.
2. A large part of those beliefs must be true beliefs.
The arguments I am citing as some conclusions of
Davidson’s philosophy stem from an overall picture of how
we cope with the world and from how we can understand
our practices of language and interpretation. Davidson’s
well-known attack on what he calls the third dogma of
empiricism plays an important role here. Regarding that
context he argues against the distinction between
conceptual scheme and empirical content. This will be an
important step in the construction of what I have
mentioned as a different picture of the relation between
mind and world.
In a nutshell, that distinction is viewed by Davidson
as the main source of conceiving our cognitive and
linguistic abilities as organizing activities of a raw material
offered by the world and captured by our senses. To deny
this distinction is, in a sense, to deny that there is pure
stuff in the world waiting to be captured by a scheme and
then being constitutive of concepts. On the other hand, to
maintain this dualism is all one needs to affirm the
existence of various conceptual schemes sharing a
common content which may not be translated one to
another. About this, Davidson says:
“Given the dogma of a dualism of scheme and
reality, we get conceptual relativity, and truth relative to a
scheme. Without the dogma, this kind of relativity goes by
the board. Of course truth of sentences remains relative to
language, but that is as objective as can be. In giving up
the dualism of scheme and world, we do not give up the
world, but re-establish unmediated touch with familiar
objects whose antics make our sentences and opinions
true of false.” (Davidson 1974, p. 198)
Davidson is clear about the implication of his
rejection. He is rejecting the distinction between
conceptual scheme and empirical content but through this
he can deny the dualism existing between scheme and
reality. There are not several schemes that deal differently
with the same worldly content; by the same token, there is
also not just one general human scheme that is at risk of
being detached from what the world really is. Once we
have something as a world view the world has to be part of
it. And it is because of this that differences have to be
understood and explained already within this picture of
general agreement.
3. The reasons Davidson has to reject this dualism are
basically the same ones that lead us to the theses (i) and
(ii) presented in the previous sections. Besides the fact
that we could just discard the picture of a raw material in
the world waiting to be conceptualised, the point for
Davidson is that it is just inconceivable that such a thing is
an alternative conceptual scheme .
In order to conceive an alternative conceptual
scheme (and by doing so to allow for the dualism) we
should be ready to accept that we can recognize someone
as a linguistic being without being able to understand
anything of their linguistic behaviour.
The pecularity of this picture appears when one
realizes that recognizing something as someone is already
a big task: once we recognize sounds as meaningful acts
we are inexorably assigning a mind and a language to that
creature in the sense that she has intentional acts.
In other words, we cannot recognize someone as a
linguistic being that has a world view unless we consider
her as having an intelligible language, i.e., an accessible
world view. In Davidson’s words: “The interdependence of
belief and meaning springs from the interdependence of
two aspects of the interpretation of speech behaviour: the
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