Ⅲ．Back to Davidson: A Successful Way to Avoid Skepticism Against Pyrrho?

i．Fogelin's Challenge to Davidson

Fogelin posed three challenges to Davidsonian coherenism, and Davidson's response will inevitably question-begging.

(1) The alternative coherent system objection. There may be many belief systems in the world that are internally integrated but incompatible with each other. On the surface, Sumerians and ancient Egyptians seem to have quite different beliefs, but these beliefs are integrated in their respective systems. For example, the belief that the Egyptians worship scarabs is integrated in the belief system of Egypt, but it is difficult for Sumerians to understand it. Kuhn also believes that scientists in the field of modern quantum mechanics can't really understand the mechanics of the Galileo-Newton era. The paradigm of the two eras has undergone a fundamental transformation. Kuhn named the cognitive gap between quantum mechanics and Newtonian mechanics as “incommenurability of paradigms”. If Kuhn is right, then people will fall into the dilemma of relativism and can't choose the only coherent system that is true.

(2) Input objection. Davidsonian coherenism seems to have made the mistake of internalism. It seems to contain the following absurd conclusion:we can form a perfectly integrated system without the external world and any experience. The refuter can ridicule that an imaginative person can even conceive a belief system about the world with his eyes closed, and Davidson will even be forced to admit the legitimacy of this system, which is obviously absurd.

(3) The problem of truth. Davidson's principle of charity seems to presuppose that people's belief itself is true. Davidson's most important proposition is the principle of charity (one should believe that most of one's beliefs are true). In the principle of charity, Davidson has presupposed that the world is not the world of representation suspected by Descartes skepticism. Similarly, in the process of radical translation, Davidson finally completed the translation of “behavior-language” correlation of others. To make it true, Davidson seems to presuppose that his world is not Descartes'world of representation, but a real world. This is exactly what he needs to justify. So, Davidson made a question-begging argument here.

ii．Why Did Fogelin's Objection Fail?

In response to (1), Davidson pointed out in On the Very Idea of the Conceptual Scheme that there is no fundamentally insurmountable conceptual scheme (the way people organize, know, and view the world) or paradigm (the meanings of conceptual scheme and paradigm can be equated here). We can reconstruct his argument as:

P1: If there are fundamentally incommensurable paradigms or conceptual schemes, then the languages between paradigms and conceptual schemes cannot be translated into each other.

P2: Languages between paradigms and conceptual schemes can be translated into each other.

C: There is no truly incommensurable paradigm or conceptual scheme.

Davidson understood incommensurability as failure of intertranslatability.In other words, the reason why we can translate English into Chinese or Chinese into English is that we share the same way of looking at the world.This doesn't necessarily mean that the Americans and the Chinese people are completely consistent in their specific beliefs, and this is not the case. To complete mutual translation, Americans and Chinese only need to enjoy the same or at least no fundamental difference in cognitive structure on the basic cognitive framework of conceptual scheme.

This view can be traced back to Wittgenstein's private language argument. Wittgenstein pointed out the publicity of language through this argument. In Wittgenstein's view, if a person A claims to have a feeling that no one can understand except himself, and expresses it in a sentence or vocabulary that no one can understand, then it is called a private feeling.However, in order to become a language, this private feeling must be understood by others, otherwise there will be no way to follow the rules by judging A's language. It is the publicity of conceptual scheme and language that guarantees the establishment of itself.

Davidson pointed out that since there is no fundamental untranslatability in human language, there is no fundamentally incomprehensible conceptual scheme (or, in Kuhn's words, incommensurable paradigm), so the challenge (1) is unreasonable.

For (2), this view simply regards Davidson as a BonJour's internalist,which is a misunderstanding. In Davidsonian coherenism, he believes that semantics is endowed by an objective truth condition. The truth condition is tested by coherence. Therefore, meaning is explained by coherence.However, note that the truth condition is established in Davidsonian coherenism, but only through the test of coherence. Going back to the example of “Gavagai” and “rabbit”, the linguist is able to translate the meaning of Gavagai not because he arbitrarily imagines countless possibilities of integration in his brain, but because he notices the causal relationship between indigenous language and real behavior and establishes the justification of this causal explanation through indigenous affirmative propositional attitudes (such as nodding). Without this causal relationship, it is impossible to establish a correct translation. Through this observation of behavior, people inevitably come into contact with the world in the process of translation, so they can grasp the world in an indirect way and avoid input objection.

Objection (3) is the most interesting and profound objection in my opinion, which is related to the core understanding of Davidson's interpretation. At first glance, if Cartesian skepticism is still adopted,Davidson's theory does seem to be a question-begging argument, and therefore it is attacked by skepticism. For example, imagine a Cartesian skeptic insisting that, yes, the translation of another language and a series of views on the world have been established through radical translation,but all these may be an illusion created by an evil devil. This illusion is so real that people firmly believe it is true. From the perspective of Cartesian skepticism, Davidson didn't solve the problem at all. He just developed a methodology of how to build a knowledge system based on the assumption that the world is true. Indeed, if Davidson made a question-begging argument, then we have the reason to agree with Fogelin's conclusion that coherence is also a failed attempt.

I have to admit, it is very difficult to answer this question, because Davidson's own position has become ambiguous here. Strictly speaking,he himself doesn't call his coherence theory the truth theory, but only the coherence theory of truth. There are generally two ways of explanation here. One way is to strengthen the external constraints of Davidsonian coherenism, and put forward a methodology that can avoid or solve Descartes 'challenge on the epistemological level. Obviously, this path will force Davidson to return to the dilemma of correspondence theory. It not only leads to the argumentation obligation, but it also does not correspond to Davidsonian coherenism.

The other way is the interpretation of new pragmatism. In On the Very Idea of the Conceptual Scheme , Davidson pointed out that our beliefs and desires have intentionality. In other words, they themselves are about the world. “The world itself doesn't make sentences true, nothing makes them true.” Therefore, skepticism has no ground. In the system of coherence theory, there is no thing-in-itself in Kant's sense, and there is no mind independent reality. It is where the vast majority of common beliefs that make up the truth lie in the world.

In other words, there is no binary opposition between representation and reality in Davidson's system. What we have is just a common world, a human world. Therefore, there is no room for Cartesian skepticism.

To sum up, Fogelin's three challenges to the coherence theory of truth can all be reasonably answered by Davidson.

iii．Conclusion: New Pragmatism? A Brand-New Picture

In this paper, Phyrronism, as a tool to judge the rationality of epistemology, examines two mainstream truth theories. The above discussion illustrates the following conclusions: (1) The truth view of correspondence theory is difficult to meet Agrippa's Five Modes.(2) Coherence theory provides a way to respond to Pyrrho's skepticism.

we can now see how Davidson's different attacks on skepticism are combined. The theory of biconditional on truth aims to show how we can keep the truth without confrontation, thus avoiding finding a reasonable way to compare two completely different fields: thought and reality. The purpose of the principle of charity is to strictly limit the scope of beliefs that we can clearly belong to, so as to exclude the possibility of competition between belief systems that are completely different from ours. The purpose of externalism semantics is to ensure the close correspondence between the meaning and truth of a group of important beliefs (i.e. accidental beliefs),thus indicating that all or most of these beliefs cannot be wrong. Finally,the call for the coherence of truth aims at doing at least two things:(1) providing a foundation for the concept of argument needed by knowledge,and (2) providing a way to explain how sometimes beliefs are proved wrong despite strong assumptions against this.

Although some beliefs in radical translation are wrong, people can eliminate some mistakes through long-term dialog with each other. The more developed the dialog, the more common knowledge we have, and the more truth we will finally establish.

In last part, we realize that Davidson doctrine may contain a new pragmatic path when responding to the skepticism of the outside world.Richsrd Werner pointed out that in order to completely transcend the binary opposition between “subject-object” and “representation-reality”, people must admit that there is only one world: the world of human beings. All our languages are about the world, and in turn, the world itself is laid in language.

It should be realized that this view is different from metaphysical robust realism, which does not advocate that the world we know is absolute reality. In fact, in Davidson's view, robust realism still falls into the trap of Cartesian binary opposition, which presupposes the binary opposition between reality and representation. On the contrary, what Davidson advocates is a world of meaning. People's understanding of the world is indeed an understanding of meaning. This idea has moved towards new pragmatism.

It is not Davidson's initiative to regard the world as a world of meaning. In Kant ’ s Transcendental Idealism , Allison proposed that Kant finally established a world about meaning. Kant thinks that we can't know the thing itself, but we can still establish “legitimate” knowledge through innate comprehensive judgment. In Allison's view, this legitimacy can be used. Of course, Kant himself still made concessions: he still admitted the opposition between the world of representation and the world of reality. S. Peirce, the pioneer of pragmatism, also believes that knowledge must be tested through practice. If a belief is compatible with experience and practice in life, then it has “meaningful” truth. Dreyfus and Taylor made it clear that the world is a world of meaning. In this sense, these great philosophers have the tendency of new pragmatism. Davidson's theory is a relatively thorough transcendence, successfully surpassing Cartesian binary opposition and integrating two opposing worlds into one world of meaning.

This transcendence is of great signif icance. Wittgenstein said,“An image imprisoned us (Ein Bild hielt uns gefangen).” Almost all epistemology since Descartes 'time has been influenced by this image.People are struggling to prove that their system can legally establish that knowledge can reach reality and surpass representation. However,the strong Descartes 'trap itself makes it impossible for people to find an epistemological method that can reasonably solve skepticism in this context, which also leads to the failure of the traditional correspondence theory. Therefore, Davidsonian coherenism provides a possible way out and a foundation for a new epistemology.

Davidson himself left the foundation and framework of a huge system, but he did not complete the construction of the internal content of the framework. Therefore, a lot of follow-up work is still needed. For example, the establishment of the Davidson system requires people to further think about the compatibility between the coherence theory and the current scientific methods, what kind of connection is the causal connection between sensation and behavior, how to deal with the priority of body in cognition put forward by Merleau-Ponty (M.P.) and how to deal with the ethical problem of the coherence theory: moral relativism. But there is no doubt that Davidsonian coherenism is worthy of further consideration and development.