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Концептуальные схемы и релятивизм: критические аргументы Дональда Дэвидсона
The idea of conceptual schemes is one of the most influential
and widely used notions in contemporary philosophy. Within
the analytic tradition the idea occupies a fundamental position
in positivist views as well as in replacing them post-posi -
tivist conceptions. Outside the analytic tradition a similar idea
is of key importance in structuralist and post-structuralist theories.
Despite the broad applicability of the notion of a conceptual
scheme, its precise sense is far from being evident
in the context of various philosophical trends. Moreover, the
well-known American philosopher Donald Davidson's position
is that any clear, non-metaphorical meaning cannot be as -
cribed to that notion at all – the statement which he tried to
substantiate in his famous paper On the Very Idea of a Conceptual
Scheme published in 1974.
The present paper is aimed, firstly, at outlining the historico-philosophical
evolution of the idea of conceptual scheme, concentrating
on its development in logical positivism and post-positivist theories
of such philosophers as Quine, Sellars, Kuhn, et al., and, secondly, at
examining Davidson's criticism of both the idea and the position of
conceptual relativism which was raised on its ground, revealing
the assumptions which that criticism relies on and which concern
relations between language and thought, truth and translation, as
well as the role of the scheme-content dualism for empiricism
and the place of extensionalism in semantics, etc. Our purpose,
on the one hand, is to evaluate the historico-philosophical significance
of Davidson's criticism; on the other hand, it is to show that
his critical arguments remain to be actual since they shed a new
light on the idea of conceptual schemes and allow us to determine
their place in tackling the fundamental philosophical question of
a relation between reality, thought and language.