Incommensurability in Gadamer and Davidson

12 Incommensurability in Gadamer and Davidson Barbara Fultner Understanding the other is the most difficult of human tasks. —Hans-Georg Gadamer1 Conceptual relativism is a heady and exotic doctrine, or would be if we could make good sense of it. —Donald Davidson2 The term “incommensurability” has entered a wide range of philosophical discussions from philosophy of science to moral theory and does not mean the same thing to all people.3 Its original home is mathematics: The hypotenuse of a right-angled isosceles triangle, for instance, is incommensurable with its sides; there is no common measure for them. This has been taken to mean that incommensurability implies incomparability. My primary concern here is with semantic incommensurability: roughly, the idea that the meanings of one language cannot be mapped without remainder onto the meanings of another. In this context, incommensurability usually means untranslatability. In the wake of the linguistic turn, semantic incommensurability can be understood to imply conceptual incommensurability and hence relativism. Truth or truths are seen as relative to conceptual schemes, perspectives, or worldviews. Different schemes or perspectives presumably give rise to different truths, which, in turn, are incommensurable. In these discussions, incommensurability often also stands for incompatibility. Donald Davidson has famously argued against the idea of incommensurable theories, languages, or conceptual schemes, as has Hans-Georg Gadamer. Neither Davidson nor Gadamer denies that people speak different languages and hold different—and often incompatible—beliefs. What they deny is that these languages and belief systems could be in principle mutually inaccessible or unintelligible. For them, incommensurability thus takes on the meaning of unintelligibility. Although there are parallels between 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 219 2/2/11 1:47 PM 220 Barbara Fultner Davidson and Gadamer’s arguments against incommensurability, there are some significant differences as well. Both reject the scheme–content distinction, as I show in section 1, albeit on somewhat different grounds, and endorse meaning–belief holism. Although both are critical of semantic conventionalism, however, I argue in section 2 that Davidson’s outright rejection of conceptual schemes needs to be supplemented by Gadamer’s concept of horizon and the conception of understanding as a fusion of horizons in order better to account for linguistic and cultural difference in the absence of incommensurability. In section 3, I turn to the tension between convention and invention in language, which both authors acknowledge, and consider the extent to which the later Davidson’s emphasis on idiolects and Gadamer’s recognition of an individualizing tendency in language respectively represent limit cases of translatability and hence vestiges of incommensurability. 1 Rejecting the Scheme–Content Distinction Davidson’s Formal Argument Davidson’s argument against incommensurability is intended as an argument against “the heady and exotic doctrine” of conceptual relativism. Conceptual relativism, he argues, presupposes a distinction between a conceptual scheme and content (experience) to which the scheme is applied. But since no clear sense can be made of this distinction, the position is incoherent. For Davidson, the metaphor underlying conceptual relativism, that of differing points of view, is inherently paradoxical: Different points of view only make sense in the context of a common coordinate system, but the latter is at odds with the claim of “dramatic incomparability.” Calling for an account of the “limits of conceptual contrast,” he writes, “There are extreme suppositions that founder on paradox or contradiction; there are modest examples we have no trouble understanding. What determines where we cross from the merely strange or novel to the absurd?”4 Is the difference between these merely a matter of degree for Davidson? Are the sorts of (cultural) differences that persuade others of the truth of conceptual relativism differences of the sort “we have no trouble understanding”? Are they, as Davidson seems to think, philosophically uninteresting? These are questions to which I shall return in section 2. Davidson wants to allow for differences between languages, but he does not think such differences can be made intelligible in terms of divergent conceptual schemes. Having identified conceptual schemes with mutually translatable languages, he considers the possibilities of complete and partial 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 220 2/2/11 1:47 PM Incommensurability in Gadamer and Davidson 221 failure of translatability. First, he argues that complete failure is incoherent. The argument rests on rejecting the “third dogma of empiricism,” the scheme–content distinction. That distinction, so Davidson, underlies a Kuhnian conception of conceptual relativism, according to which different conceptual schemes give rise to multiple points of view or perspectives on a single world.5 If, Davidson argues, we follow Quine in rejecting the first dogma of empiricism, the analytic–synthetic distinction, and accept that all sentences have empirical content, we can “retain the idea of language embodying a conceptual scheme” only at the cost of subscribing to a “new dualism between conceptual scheme and uninterpreted empirical content.”6 He considers two ways of cashing out this dualism, namely, in terms of language organizing or fitting experience. The former has to do with a language’s referential system, the latter with whole sentences—that is, truth. Neither gives a robust sense to the notion of incommensurable conceptual schemes. On the one hand, if languages or conceptual schemes organize experience (or reality or the Given), this presupposes a common ontology of things being organized. If there is a common ontology, we have no radical incommensurability. On the other hand, to say that the sentences of a language “fit” experience is just to say that they are true, and Davidson holds that we cannot make sense of truth independently of translation.7 Hence the notion of a language whose sentences are (largely) true but not translatable is meaningless. Since untranslatability is criterial for incommensurability, the idea of fitting experience is no more help in making sense of the idea of incommensurable conceptual schemes than that of organizing it. Thus, Davidson rejects the idea of the possibility of total failure of translation as a criterion for difference of conceptual schemes. He concludes: Neither a fixed stock of meanings, nor a theory-neutral reality, can provide, then, a ground for comparison of conceptual schemes. It would be a mistake to look further for such a ground if by that we mean something conceived as common to incommensurable schemes. In abandoning this search, we abandon the attempt to make sense of the metaphor of a single space within which each scheme has a position and provides a point of view.8 Otherwise, we would return to the paradox with which Davidson began. Pace Davidson, a committed relativist might agree that there could be no basis of comparison between incommensurable schemes. This would render different conceptual schemes radically mutually unintelligible. On this view, an alien scheme, from our perspective, would not be anything we could recognize as a human, perhaps even intelligent, form of life. Yet this 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 221 2/2/11 1:47 PM 222 Barbara Fultner kind of relativism would be far removed from cultural relativism as normally conceived. In encounters with other cultures, our challenge seems to be not total but partial failures of translation. Davidson at first appears sympathetic to this problem. When arguing against total failure of translatability, he writes, We can be clear about breakdowns in translation when they are local enough, for a background of generally successful translation provides what is needed to make the failures intelligible. But we were after larger game: we wanted to make sense of a language we could not translate at all.9 This suggests that we may consider different conceptual schemes, as long as we do not regard them as dramatically or radically but merely partly incommensurable. Partial failure of translation “introduces the possibility of making changes and contrasts in conceptual schemes intelligible by reference to the common part.”10 Even when discussing partial untranslatability, the conceptual relativist appeals to the scheme–content distinction. Now, however, she runs up against the problem of meaning–belief holism. Davidson argues that even if we grant partial failures of translatability between languages, we cannot get a firm hold on conceptual relativism because, once we give up the analytic–synthetic distinction, there is no principled way of distinguishing between differences in beliefs (content) and differences in concepts (scheme). “Given the underlying methodology of interpretation, we could not be in a position to judge that others had concepts or beliefs radically different from our own.”11 Whether and how we are able to judge differences in belief at all is a question to which I return below. Because of the inability to assess whether others have radically different beliefs, Davidson rejects the idea of conceptual scheme(s) wholesale; there are neither many different conceptual schemes nor a single one we all share. Instead, he opts for a direct realism according to which we have “unmediated touch with the familiar objects” that make up our world. Gadamer’s Phenomenological Argument: Toward a Fusion of Horizons Like Davidson, Gadamer rejects the scheme–content distinction. His rejection of the distinction, however, is grounded in the phenomenology of hermeneutic experience. Gadamer, like Humboldt, takes languages to be “particular view[s] of the world.”12 Yet he criticizes Humboldt for abstracting “the linguistic faculty down to a form that could, presumably, be applied to any content: anything that could be thought,” in other words, for 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 222 2/2/11 1:47 PM Incommensurability in Gadamer and Davidson 223 distinguishing between form and content. In contrast, Gadamer maintains, “Linguistic form and the content that is passed on cannot be separated in hermeneutic experience. If every language is a view of the world, it is so not primarily because it is a particular type of language (in the way that linguists view language) but because of what is said or handed down in this language.”13 What differentiates languages from one another, in other words, is not merely that they conceptualize the same world differently, but that they say something different about different things; these two aspects are inseparable. The point can be seen as a kind of onto-phenomenological analogue to Davidson’s meaning–belief holism. For Gadamer, there is really no difference between the notion of a worldview and a “language-view”; the world we encounter is linguistically constituted, and in that sense, we have no “unmediated contact” with reality. This may make him appear to be a kind of linguistic idealist. However, he also maintains that “The world is the common ground, trodden by none and recognized by all, uniting all who talk to one another.”14 The very fact that this common ground is linguistically constituted makes communication and indeed learning about the world (and the worlds of others) possible: It is true that those who are brought up in a particular linguistic and cultural tradition see the world in a different way from those who belong to other traditions. It is true that the historical “worlds” that succeed one another in the course of history are different from one another and from the world of today; but . . . [a]s verbally constituted, every such world is of itself always open to every possible insight and hence to every expansion of its own world picture, and is accordingly available to others.15 This position is grounded in a rejection of the distinction between a linguistic scheme and uninterpreted, nonlinguistically constituted reality (“the world in itself”) and, with that, of relativism: “Those views are not relative in the sense that one could oppose them to the ‘world in itself,’ as if the right view from some possible position outside the human, linguistic world could discover it in its being-in-itself.”16 The idea of a linguistic scheme organizing or fitting nonlinguistic experience or reality does not make sense to Gadamer any more than it does to Davidson as a means of shoring up conceptual relativism. However, for Davidson the world is not linguistically constituted as it is for Gadamer; a view that insists on unmediated contact with reality allows no room for it. Simon Blackburn has suggested that Davidson sets up a false dichotomy in how he frames his argument against conceptual schemes and “ignores [a] natural third account” of the relationship between conceptual schemes and content according to which “conceptual schemes neither organize nor fit experience, 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 223 2/2/11 1:47 PM 224 Barbara Fultner but rather shape experience.”17 Something like this third option seems to be what Gadamer has in mind: He allows for traditions or cultures to shape our views of the world. Gadamer contrasts the linguistic constitution of the world with perception: As with perception we can speak of the “linguistic shadings” that the world undergoes in different language-worlds. But there remains a characteristic difference: every “shading” of the object of perception is exclusively distinct from every other, and each helps co-constitute the “thing-in-itself” as the continuum of these nuances—whereas, in the case of the shadings of verbal worldviews, each one potentially contains every other one within it—i.e., each worldview can be extended into every other. It can understand and comprehend, from within itself, the “view” of the world presented in another language.18 Different perspectives or worlds are not in principle mutually “exclusive” or unintelligible. In other words, they are not incommensurable. This means, here, that they can enter into conversation with each other. Because Gadamer’s argument is grounded in the phenomenology of hermeneutic experience rather than being formal or conceptual in nature as is Davidson’s, perhaps also because he seems to be more impressed than Davidson by difficulties of translation and cross-cultural communication as philosophically significant, he replaces the idea of conceptual schemes with that of horizons.19 The fusion of horizons is Gadamer’s foundational metaphor for reaching mutual understanding among two interlocutors.20 The notion of horizon is crucial to Gadamer’s contextualist conception of situated understanding: We define the concept of “situation” by saying that it represents a standpoint that limits the possibility of vision. Hence essential to the concept of situation is the concept of “horizon.” The horizon is the range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point.21 Yet a horizon is not “a rigid boundary but something that moves with one and invites one to advance further.”22 It is a “boundless space.”23 One might say that one’s horizon is constantly receding from one as one seeks to reach it. A horizon is thus starkly different from a conceptual scheme or web, in which one is caught. Unlike a conceptual scheme, a horizon is not a closed system; the metaphor conveys both the limits of what is visible and the openness of what is beyond the horizon. Invoking Robinson Crusoe, Gadamer writes, just as the individual is never simply an individual because he is always in understanding with others, so too the closed horizon that is supposed to enclose a culture is an abstraction. The historical movement of human life consists in the fact that it is never 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 224 2/2/11 1:47 PM Incommensurability in Gadamer and Davidson 225 absolutely bound to any one standpoint, and hence can never have a truly closed horizon. The horizon is, rather, something into which we move and that moves with us. Horizons change for a person who is moving. Thus the horizon of the past, out of which all human life lives and which exists in the form of tradition, is always in motion.24 The relativism and incommensurability theses rest precisely on this kind of abstraction—and indeed reification—of a culture or conceptual scheme. By contrast, the openness and fluidity of horizons make their fusion possible. Davidson holds that if we cannot make sense of multiple incommensurable conceptual schemes, we cannot make sense of a single one, either. Similarly, Gadamer maintains that even though it doesn’t make sense to speak of neatly distinct horizons, we cannot not just talk about a single one. However, Gadamer holds on to a plurality of horizons precisely because he conceives understanding as a fusion thereof. There is a “manifold of horizons that we ought not to reduce by means of some kind of particular unifying mechanism,” he writes in the 1980s: Our pluralistic world, in which we find ourselves, is like the new Babel. But this pluralistic world presents us with tasks, and these consist not so much in rational planning and overplanning [Verplanung], but in the perception of the open spaces of human togetherness, even beyond what is alien or other.25 What unifies the manifold for Gadamer, one might say on analogy with Kant, is the universality of hermeneutic experience. To recapitulate, whereas Davidson emphasizes the logical incoherence of the very idea of conceptual schemes, Gadamer focuses on the phenomenology of hermeneutic experience. Though their arguments differ, both subscribe to meaning–belief holism. Davidson rejects incommensurability on formal grounds because the incommensurability thesis presupposes the scheme–content distinction; Gadamer rejects incommensurability because of the open nature of horizons of intelligibility. To deny incommensurability is not to deny that there can be significant differences between cultures and individuals. In the next section, I address the diverging ways in which Gadamer and Davidson handle such differences. 2 Toward an Understanding of Difference Arguing against a wholesale dismissal of conceptual schemes, Charles Taylor concurs with Davidson’s argument against radical incommensurability insofar as it shows that “total unintelligibility of another culture is not an 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 225 2/2/11 1:47 PM 226 Barbara Fultner option. To experience another group as unintelligible over some range of their practices, we have to find them quite understandable over other (very substantial) ranges.”26 If something is a language it must be in principle intelligible. This is consistent with a key component of the Davidsonian view, namely, the principle of charity. We get interpretation off the ground by holding belief constant and, indeed, maximizing agreement (in beliefs) while solving for meaning. Taylor argues, however, that the argument is in effect too powerful and doesn’t help us deal with the everyday situations of “partial and (we hope) surmountable noncommunication.”27 Taylor himself is reluctant to give up the idea of conceptual schemes altogether. He maintains that in dealing with the real, partial barriers to understanding, we need to be able to identify what is blocking us. And for this we need some way of picking out the systematic differences in construal between two different cultures, without either reifying them or branding them as ineradicable. This is what Gadamer does with the image of the horizon. . . . It is what Davidson’s position as yet lacks. Without this, Davidson’s principle of charity is vulnerable to being abused to ethnocentric ends.28 His worry is that the interpretive maxim of the principle of charity, to maximize agreement, leads an interpreter falsely to project her own beliefs onto the other. Although Taylor appeals to the notion of horizon here, he does not acknowledge any differences between conceptual schemes and horizons. Moreover, he addresses neither Davidson’s arguments regarding the scheme–content distinction nor his meaning–belief holism. As a result, he overlooks the extent to which the (Gadamerian) notion of conceptual scheme he defends in fact differs from the one Davidson rejects. “Systematic differences in construal” between cultures may be differences in conceptual scheme or differences in belief content. If we grant that we cannot draw a clear line between the two, according to Davidson’s argument, we must abandon the idea of conceptual schemes. As indicated above, Davidson does not aim to eliminate the concept or intelligibility of disagreement when differences are “local enough.” For him, the systematic differences Taylor has in mind may well be local relative to the vast background of agreement our theories of interpretation postulate. “Local,” in other words, may boil down to “articulable.” Hence Taylor’s criticism of Davidson misses its mark. That said, he is right that Davidson tends to pay insufficient attention to differences that are “real barriers to understanding.” Since incommensurability appeals to conceptual relativists insisting on irreducible differences between perspectives, what happens to difference absent (radical) incommensurability? 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 226 2/2/11 1:47 PM Incommensurability in Gadamer and Davidson 227 Difference in Dialogue “Understanding the other,” Gadamer claims, “is the most difficult of human tasks.”29 The fusion of horizons—though it may go “beyond what is alien”—must both preserve the voice of the other (and of self) while at the same time transforming them. Gadamer’s interpreter relies on a constellation of prejudices, preconceptions, and preunderstandings when approaching any interpretive situation. These prejudices constitute our horizon. In a passage reminiscent of Quine and anticipating Davidson, he writes, “the horizon of the present is continually in the process of being formed because we are continually having to test all our prejudices.” In contrast to Quine, for Gadamer the “tribunal of experience” is not limited or reducible to sense experience, but explicitly involves engagement with one’s past and one’s tradition; understanding for him is always already historical. “There is no more an isolated horizon of the present in itself than there are historical horizons which have to be acquired. Rather, understanding is always the fusion of these horizons supposedly existing by themselves.”30 Gadamer argues that the goal of genuine conversation is not simply to place oneself in the other’s position, but to develop a shared position with her, for in a true conversation we seek to reach agreement about something with someone. A real conversation “is a process of coming to an understanding” and of opening oneself to the other.31 In this sense, dialogue incorporates the notion of difference as well as the possibility of overcoming difference: For interlocutors engage one another as other in order to reach a shared understanding. If we converse with another simply in order to find out “where she is coming from,” Gadamer tells us, we may acknowledge her otherness, but in a way that effectively silences her by our “fundamental suspension of [her] claim to truth.”32 Such an articulation of difference is, as it were, impotent. Neither we nor our interlocutor is affected by it. In conversation, “something is expressed that is not only mine or my other’s, but common.”33 This means that for Gadamer, quite unlike for Davidson, language is inherently something shared: Language in which something comes to speak is not a possession at the disposal of one or the other of the interlocutors. Every conversation presupposes a common language, or better, creates a common language. . . . to reach an understanding in a dialogue is not merely a matter of putting oneself forward and successful asserting one’s own point of view, but being transformed into a communion in which we do not remain what we were.34 Conversation, in other words, is a phenomenon whereby both speaker and interpreter are transformed and where something new is created that is shared between them. This is something that Kuhn fails to appreciate 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 227 2/2/11 1:47 PM 228 Barbara Fultner sufficiently and Davidson barely seems to take into account. This is evident in the latter’s account of communication in terms of prior and passing theories (see below). For Gadamer, the resulting language will rise “to a higher universality that overcomes not only our own particularity but also that of the other.”35 This can be achieved neither by mere empathy for the other nor by imposing one’s own standards on her, but rather requires the application of “the true productivity of language” whereby we seek to attain “real solidarity” in the midst of a manifold of linguistic cultures and traditions .36 For Gadamer, then, it is the very nature of language to make it possible for us to reach mutual understanding. Difference as Anomalous Details To what extent is Davidson able to account for difference in light of his argument against incommensurability? As we have seen, he links translatability with intelligibility: The more we can translate, the more we can understand difference. Difference is intelligible only against a background of agreement (which, for Davidson, is ultimately based on the fact that human beings share needs and interests and the fact that we live in the same objective world). The function of the principle of charity is analogous to that of Gadamer’s horizon in the sense that both provide a background of intelligibility and operate quasi-transcendentally. Recall that Davidson’s interpreter, faced with the problem of meaning–belief holism, holds belief constant (i.e., attributes to the interpretee beliefs that she herself holds true) and solves for meaning. Whatever differences there are, then, between the interpreter and interpretee will presumably be cashed out in terms of differences between sets of sentences they respectively hold true. We will still be able to identify these differences, even though we may not be able to determine whether these are differences between beliefs or concepts. Davidson describes the differences between interlocutors as “anomalous details” and provides the “undramatic” example of someone using the term “yawl” for what the interpreter takes to be a ketch so that the interpreter cannot tell whether the speaker has misperceived a ketch for a yawl or whether he understands the term differently. How do we handle the “interpretation of anomalous details”? We are able to work things out “off the cuff” because the “interpretation of anomalous details” happens against a background of common beliefs and a going method of translation. Davidson claims: The method is not designed to eliminate disagreement, nor can it; its purpose is to make meaningful disagreement possible; and this depends entirely on a foundation—some foundation—in agreement. This agreement may take the form of 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 228 2/2/11 1:47 PM Incommensurability in Gadamer and Davidson 229 widespread sharing of sentences held true by speakers of “the same language,” or agreement in the large mediated by a theory of truth contrived by an interpreter for speakers of another language.37 Such a theory is “contrived” by applying the principle of charity—which rests on the interpreter presuming agreement with the interpretee. Practically in the same breath, Davidson then weds intelligibility to agreement, yet asserts the greater intelligibility of difference against a greater background of agreement: We make maximum sense of the words and thoughts of others when we interpret in a way that optimizes agreement (this includes room, as we said, for explicable error, i.e., differences of opinion). . . . we improve the clarity and bite of declarations of difference, whether of scheme or opinion, by enlarging the basis of shared (translatable) language or of shared opinion. Indeed no clear line between the cases can be made out.38 It is, presumably, precisely these details that give rise to the heady doctrine of relativism. Davidson is at least partly correct in that the same kinds of considerations that apply to the ketch/yawl case also apply to more “exotic” cases such as Eskimo infanticide. What at first appears to be a radically incommensurable value system turns out to be a function of beliefs about one’s environment.39 Notwithstanding, what are we to understand by the improved “clarity and bite of declarations of difference” if not decreased unintelligibility or untranslatability? Davidson has created a tight conceptual circle between commensurability, translatability, and intelligibility. What room is there in this circle to distinguish between false belief, nonsense, and poetic license? 3 Malaprops, Poetry, and the Limits of Translation The later Davidson continues to be deeply impressed by the ease with which we interpret others so as to make them intelligible. The development of Davidson’s thought is foreshadowed in “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme.” With reference to the ketch/yawl example, which he uses to illustrate meaning–belief holism, he says, “We do this sort of off the cuff interpretation all the time, deciding in favour of reinterpretation of words in order to preserve a reasonable theory of belief. As philosophers we are particularly tolerant of systematic malapropism, and practised at interpreting the result.”40 In “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” he uses our ability to interpret malaprops and other linguistic gaffes or jokes to argue that there is no such thing as a language in the sense of a set of linguistic 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 229 2/2/11 1:47 PM 230 Barbara Fultner conventions that we must share in order to be able to communicate.41 This is a—perhaps the most—significant difference between him and Gadamer, who takes conventions to be an inherent part of language. Davidson conceives communication as a constant flux of “prior” and “passing” theories. He writes: “For the hearer, the prior theory expresses how he is prepared in advance to interpret an utterance of the speaker, while the passing theory is how he does interpret the utterance. For the speaker, the prior theory is what he believes the interpreter’s prior theory to be, while his passing theory is the theory he intends the interpreter to use.”42 Although each interlocutor approaches an interaction with her own prior theory of interpretation (for a speaker), that theory need not be shared with the other. In the course of conversation, the interpreter may adjust her theory of interpretation in order to understand the speaker, and vice versa. But, though it may be shared, such a passing theory is not something learned and is geared to the moment. The flux of prior and passing theories of interpretation can be seen as a truncated version of the Gadamerian shifting of horizons, one that lacks any dialogical dimension or emergence of a shared language. The fact that speakers do, as a matter of fact, speak the same language is a mere contingency, not required for communicative success.43 Davidson famously turns against the idea that language is a system of shared rules or conventions that determine meaning and make possible mutual understanding. He denies that what makes communication possible is that interlocutors share (prior to communicating) a convention- or rule-governed language. Even if the result of communication may be that interlocutors come to share a passing theory, and even though communication may be helped if they happen to share a prior theory, this account privileges idiolects and distorts the social aspects of language.44 For Davidson, understanding (or agreement) is a matter of degree, perfect agreement being a regulative ideal. This is simply an empirical fact: We all have different beliefs, most of us use at least some terms idiosyncratically, and our theories of interpretation are always fallible. So perhaps the best we can hope for in successful communication is converging passing theories. Nevertheless, it is worth asking whether Davidson overestimates the ease with which we adjust to the idiolects of others. Consider, for instance, the passage about Ace Goodman that he cites from the New Yorker. It is chock-full of examples like this one: “he will maneuver until he selects the ideal phrase for the situation, hitting the nail right on the thumb.” Do we really do it justice by taking “thumb” to mean “head”? That kind of reinterpretation—or passing theory—would surely take all the humor out of the passage. But taken literally (in our conventional sense of the term), 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 230 2/2/11 1:47 PM Incommensurability in Gadamer and Davidson 231 is it fully intelligible? Or rather, is it translatable? (Some, maybe most, jokes cannot be paraphrased.) Is it not the element of nonsense that makes it funny? One might say at this point that nonsense is indeed untranslatable—there is, after all, no meaning to be rendered. Nonetheless, do we not here have a limit case of translatability or, at any rate, of the “strange and novel” having turned “absurd”? Indeed there are slips of the tongue, where easy “repair” work is possible for the interpreter. But there are instances where an idiolect geared to a particular occasion will lose at least some of its particularity of meaning when interpreted into another idiom. While Gadamer is famous for holding that understanding is essentially an interpretive process—which, after all, is a chief reason for bringing him and Davidson into conversation—it is important to remember what he says about translation in Truth and Method and elsewhere. Although he claims that “every translation is at the same time an interpretation,” if only because translation must preserve meaning,45 the process of translation draws our attention to the fact that language as medium of understanding is itself created through mediation. This sounds very much like Davidson. Translation by itself, however, cannot produce understanding. It is a process going from one known language to another known language and therefore represents neither what happens in standard conversation nor how foreign languages are best learned. Moreover, perfect translation is impossible: “Where a translation is necessary, the gap between the spirit of the original words and that of their reproduction must be taken into account and cannot be completely closed.”46 By contrast, “where there is understanding there is not translation but speech. To understand a foreign language means that we do not need to translate it into our own. When we really master a language, then no translation is necessary—in fact, any translation seems impossible.”47 In short, although good translation requires interpretation, not every interpretation is a translation.48 To understand a language, rather, is to live it. Someone who learns a language by immersion may well not be able to translate between her first and second languages. Are the two languages therefore incommensurable for her? As any experienced translator knows, translation is always a balancing act of compromises. Finally, literal translation taken to the extreme is either humorous (as when my bilingual son says “tooth meat” in English to refer to his gums [Zahnfleisch]) or intellectually frustrating (as when reading some Heidegger translations). Translation, in other words, is a skill added on to our fundamental linguistic (interpretive) competence. Hence Gadamer sunders the tight conceptual connection between translatability and intelligibility that we saw Davidson forge. 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 231 2/2/11 1:47 PM 232 Barbara Fultner Elsewhere Gadamer aligns untranslatability with the unique and individual in language. He argues that poetry is the most individualized form of language since, by its very nature, there is but one right word or way of putting it. Yet, he asks rhetorically, is the difference in word choice between what we would describe as synonymous terms (e.g., home vs. abode) really a semantic difference (Sinndifferenz)? “Is it not merely an aesthetic difference with emotional or euphonic valence? . . . Indeed, it is difficult to find a better definition for the sense [Sinn] or reference [Bedeutung] or the meaning of an expression than its substitutability.”49 The question assumes that meaning (or reference) is a purely cognitive, rational, or denotative value, distinct from conative or connotative aspects of communication, and I take it that Gadamer rejects such an assumption. For Gadamer, a semantics that explains meaning purely in terms of substitutability and correspondence relations is limited. Whatever equivalence relations there are among expressions, they are “not unchanging mappings; rather they arise and atrophy, as the spirit of the times is reflected from one decade to the next in semantic change.”50 Language is a living thing—a thing that we live. To understand a language, once more, is to live it. And that is to say that language and meaning are always tied to other human practices. Davidson appears to make a similar argument when he explicitly rejects commonly held theories of meaning (including ones to which he has himself subscribed). He asserts in “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs” that there is no “boundary between knowing a language and knowing our way around in the world generally,” and that we “must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases. And we should try again to say how convention in any important sense is involved in language; or, as I think, we should give up the attempt to illuminate how we communicate by appeal to conventions.”51 This final conclusion, however, is at odds with Gadamer’s position. Gadamer identifies a tension in language between an individualizing and a conventionalizing tendency. Echoing Wittgenstein, he writes, Someone speaking a private language that no one understands does not speak at all. Yet on the other hand, someone who only speaks one language the conventional nature of which in vocabulary choice, syntax, and style has become absolute, loses the power of address and of evocation which is accessible only by means of the individualization of the linguistic vocabulary and other linguistic means.52 He exemplifies this tension with reference to the relationship between theoretical vocabulary and ordinary language, in particular, the scientific use of the term Kraft in German Romanticism, which he claims to be individualized to the point of untranslatability. Parallels with Kuhn surface once 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 232 2/2/11 1:47 PM Incommensurability in Gadamer and Davidson 233 again. There is a deep semantic contextualism at work in Gadamer here, comparable to that of Derrida and Davidson. Poetry is the perfect realization of this individualization: The untranslatability that marks the extreme case of lyric poetry so that it cannot be translated from one language into another at all without losing its entire poetic expressiveness [Sagkraft], clearly implies the failure of the idea of substitution, of replacing one expression by another. This seems to hold more generally, independently of the special phenomenon of highly individualized poetic language. If I’m right, substitutability runs counter to the individualizing moment in language [Sprachvollzug] as such.53 Intended meaning (Sinnmeinung) develops in the course of speaking, in the course of substituting expressions for one another. Conversation takes the form, as Gadamer puts it here, of a fluid uniqueness. Thinking that we can substitute one term for another with the same meaning breaks the flow and constitutes an abstraction that distorts the reality of lived language. For Gadamer, the true nature of language (the “productivity of speech”) is the fact that we are able to communicate without having to rely on rigid systems of rules that govern how to make correct and incorrect distinctions.54 To that extent, he is in agreement with Davidson’s critique of semantic conventionalism. Yet whereas Davidson rejects conventionality as philosophically insignificant, Gadamer takes this tension to be emblematic of language. As a result, I believe, he is able to account philosophically for a wider range of our linguistic intuitions than Davidson. In particular, he is better able to account for the social aspects of language. For even if there is no “clearly defined shared structure” or “rigid system of rules” that accounts for how we manage to communicate, this does not mean that rules or conventions play no role at all in explaining communication. Perhaps nowhere is Davidson’s appreciation of linguistic and literary creativity more evident than in his essay on Joyce,55 where he asks how Joyce was able to “fly by the net of language.” He writes, “Flying by the net of language could not . . . imply the unconstrained invention of meaning, Humpty Dumpty style.” Rather, “[i]n speaking or writing we intend to be understood. We cannot intend what we know to be impossible; people can only understand words they are somehow prepared in advance to understand. No one knew this better than Joyce.”56 One might say, pace Davidson, that Joyce is able to break with tradition or convention only by appealing to them. Even where he is annihilating and re-creating language, he does so by playing with semantic and literary conventions, by implicit references to history or mythology, and so on. To be sure, this transcends any alleged boundary between language and “other ways of getting around 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 233 2/2/11 1:47 PM 234 Barbara Fultner in the world.” Someone who knew only the semantics and syntax of English would not “get” Joyce (or much else). Davidson argues persuasively that reading—and understanding—Joyce requires a much broader cultural knowledge. He goes so far as to acknowledge that there is a “tension between invention and tradition,” but he claims that Joyce “resolves” it in favor of invention.57 The following passage is emblematic of both the kinship between Davidson and Gadamer and their divergences: All reading is interpretation, and all interpretation demands some degree of invention. It is Joyce’s extraordinary idea to raise the price of admission to the point where we are inclined to feel that almost as much is demanded from the reader as of the author. . . . By fragmenting familiar languages and recycling the raw material Joyce provokes the reader into involuntary collaboration, and enlists him as a member of his private linguistic community. Coopted into Joyce’s world of verbal exile, we are forced to share in the annihilation of old meanings and the creation—not really ex nihilo, but on the basis of our stock of common lore—of a new language. All communication involves such joint effort to some degree, but Joyce is unusual in first warning us of this, and then making the effort so extreme. Joyce takes us back to the foundations and origins of communication; he puts us in the situation of the jungle linguist. . . . The center of creative energy is thus moved from the artist to a point between the writer and the audience. The engagement of the reader in the process of interpretation, forced on him by Joyce’s dense, unknown idiom, bestows on the author himself a kind of invisibility, leaving the interpreter alone with the author’s handiwork, absorbed in his own creative task.58 Davidson may come as close here as anywhere in his writings to a Gadamerian position. For Gadamer, interpretation is also a creative enterprise involving both author and reader. But whereas Gadamer regards hermeneutic engagement with a text as a dialogue, Davidson frames it as a solitary struggle: The reader is “forced” against her will, it seems, into Joyce’s “private linguistic community” and is like Quine’s “jungle linguist” who may assume no shared meanings. The center of creative energy may be moved to a place between author and audience, but it remains in the control of the author until, that is, in the end, the author abandons his reader—never an interlocutor—leaving her to her own devices. Davidson’s essay leaves little doubt that interpreting Joyce has rich rewards indeed and can be a transformative experience. By the same token, although Gadamer writes that understanding another is the most difficult of human tasks, on Davidson’s account it may be an impossible one. If Gadamer is right that individualization implies untranslatability and untranslatability implies incommensurability, then we find vestiges of incommensurability in both Gadamer’s and Davidson’s individualized 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 234 2/2/11 1:47 PM Incommensurability in Gadamer and Davidson 235 languages. To be sure, it is not the “heady and exotic” incommensurability between different conceptual schemes. It is a usually highly localized form of incommensurability. But it does present a limit case of intelligibility, on the one hand, and, on the other, challenges our notions about the parameters or limits of a philosophical account of meaning.59 Acknowledgments I thank Jonathan Maskit for comments on an earlier draft of this essay, Jeff Malpas for reminding me of the importance of “James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty,” and audiences at the 2007 Eastern APA and North American Society for Philosophical Hermeneutics meetings for their feedback. I am grateful for the support of a University of Connecticut Humanities Institute Faculty Research Fellowship and a Denison University R. C. Good Fellowship. Notes 1. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die Vielfalt der Sprachen und das Verstehen der Welt,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 8 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), p. 346. 2. Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 183. 3. Thomas Kuhn reminds us that he and Paul Feyerabend adopted the term at simultaneously in 1962, i.e., two years after the first edition of Gadamer’s Truth and Method was published. Davidson flatly asserts it is their term for “not intertranslatable” (Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” p. 190—the essay was originally published in 1974). Kuhn further insists that this does not mean they are incomparable. See Thomas Kuhn, “Commensurability, Comparability, Communicability,” in Thomas Kuhn, The Road Since Structure: Philosophical Essays, ed. James Conant and John Haugeland (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000). Kuhn’s own view thus stands in direct opposition to that of James Griffin who, writing about value incommensurability, defines it in terms of incomparability. See James Griffin, “Incommensurability: What’s the Problem?” in Incommensurability, Incomparability, and Practical Reason, ed. Ruth Chang (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 35–51. 4. Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” p. 184. 5. Davidson contrasts this with a Strawsonian model of conceptual relativism, according to which we describe alternative worlds from a single point of view, that is, in our language. The Strawsonian metaphor, he writes, “requires a distinction within language of concept and content: using a fixed system of concepts . . . we describe 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 235 2/2/11 1:47 PM 236 Barbara Fultner alternative universes” (“On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” p. 187). The two models, he claims, are not inconsistent, but rejecting the Strawsonian model (on the grounds of rejecting the analytic–synthetic distinction) can push one toward the Kuhnian—and thus to a commitment to a scheme–content distinction. 6. Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” p. 189. 7. This claim, to be sure, rests on accepting Davidson’s overall semantic framework. 8. Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” p. 195. 9. Ibid., p. 192. 10. Ibid., p. 195. 11. Ibid., p. 197. Davidson illustrates meaning–belief holism with the “undramatic” example of the ketch/yawl where the interpreter cannot tell whether the speaker has misperceived a ketch for a yawl (false belief) or whether he understands the terms differently (different concept). More on that below. 12. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1994), p. 441. 13. Ibid., trans. mod. 14. Ibid., p. 446. 15. Ibid., p. 447. 16. Ibid. 17. Simon Blackburn, “Relativism and the Abolition of the Other,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 12, no.3 (2004): 249. Along similar lines, John McDowell speculates that the idea of a linguistically constituted self never really occurred to Davidson. See John McDowell, “Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism,” in Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 173–193. 18. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 448. Once more anticipating Kuhn, Gadamer points out that our language has managed to reconcile our everyday view of the world with a Copernican view: The sun still sets for us, even though we know that the Earth rotates around it. 19. Perhaps this difference is due in part by the extent to which each lived in a multi- vs. monolingual environment. Jeff Malpas has argued that horizonality also plays an important role in Davidson. See J. E. Malpas, Donald Davidson and the Mirror of Meaning: Holism, Truth, Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. part II. 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 236 2/2/11 1:47 PM Incommensurability in Gadamer and Davidson 237 20. I should note that there may be important differences between communication between interlocutors belonging to the same culture and interlocutors from different cultures. 21. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 302. 22. Ibid., p. 245. 23. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Die Vielfalt der Sprachen,” p. 345. The essay was originally published in 1988. 24. Ibid., p. 304; emphasis added. 25. Ibid., p. 348. 26. Charles Taylor, “Understanding the Other: A Gadamerian View of Conceptual Schemes,” in Gadamer’s Century: Essays in Honor of Hans-Georg Gadamer, ed. Jeff Malpas, Ulrich Arnswald, and Jens Kertscher (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 291. This general point is consistent with Wittgensteinian private language arguments. Taylor also emphasizes that the resulting language “will not be the same language in which members of that culture understand themselves . . . [but] a language that bridges those of both knower and known,” p. 287. In earlier writings, he referred to this as a “language of perspicuous contrast.” 27. Ibid., p. 291. 28. Ibid., pp. 291–292. 29. Gadamer, “Vielfalt der Sprachen,” p. 346. 30. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 306. 31. Ibid., p. 385. 32. Ibid., p. 303. For a critique of Gadamer’s account of otherness that brings him in many ways much closer to Davidson, see Marie Fleming, “Gadamer’s Conversation: Does the Other Have a Say?” in Feminist Interpretations of Gadamer, ed. Lorraine Code (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003), pp. 109–132. 33. Gadamer, “Vielfalt der Sprachen,” p. 389. 34. Ibid., pp. 378–379. 35. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 305. Gadamer’s description of the goal of conversation is clearly reminiscent of Benjamin’s account of the task of the translator in relation to universal language. See Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, trans. H. Zorn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), pp. 69–82. 36. Gadamer, “Vielfalt der Sprachen,” p. 346. 37. Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” pp. 196–197. 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 237 2/2/11 1:47 PM 238 Barbara Fultner 38. Ibid., p. 197. 39. See Paul K. Moser and Thomas L. Carson (eds.), Moral Relativism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 40. Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” p. 196. 41. Donald Davidson, “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” in Truth, Language, and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 89–107. 42. Davidson, “A Nice Derangement,” p. 101. 43. Donald Davidson, “Communication and Convention,” in Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 278–279. 44. See Davidson, “The Social Aspects of Language,” in his Truth, Language, and History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 109–125. Cf. John McDowell, “Gadamer and Davidson on Understanding and Relativism,” pp. 173–193. 45. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 384. In “Semantik und Hermeneutik,” he writes that the truth of hermeneutic enlightened consciousness is “the truth of translation. It superiority lies in its ability to make what is alien one’s own, not simply by critically untangling it or reproducing it uncritically, but by interpreting it with its own concepts it its own horizon and thus making it relevant [zur Geltung bringen]. Translating allows what is alien and what is one’s own to merge in a new form by maintaining the truth [Wahrheitspunkt] of the other relative to oneself,” p. 183. Note that Gadamer takes translation here to be an interpretive process. 46. Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 384. 47. Ibid., p. 385. The wording, to be sure, leaves it open that translation is possible nonetheless. 48. The way in which Gadamer here distinguishes between translation and interpretation is uncannily similar to how Thomas Kuhn defends the notion of incommensurability in 1982. For Kuhn, translation is almost a mechanical process of rendering or rather substituting sentences from one language in another based on a translation manual, that is, by someone who knows both languages. He reserves the term “interpretation” for the process of making a foreign language intelligible, something that historians and anthropologists do. Interpretation is thus more like learning a foreign language than translating from one known language into another. In fact, he refers to interpretation recently being discussed “under the rubric of hermeneutics,” citing not Gadamer but Charles Taylor. It is in interpretation, according to Kuhn, that we are liable to run up against untranslatable and hence incommensurable terminology. See Kuhn, “Commensurability, Comparability, and Communicability,” p. 38. Similarly, Gadamer says that simultaneous interpretation [dolmetschen] is closer to real conversation than translation, in “Vielfalt der Sprachen,” p. 347. 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 238 2/2/11 1:47 PM Incommensurability in Gadamer and Davidson 239 49. Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Semantik und Hermeneutik,” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999), p. 175. 50. Ibid., pp. 176–177. The passage is followed by a discussion of metaphor, which, too, would be interesting to compare to Davidson’s theory of metaphor, particularly as it relates to the conventionality of meanings. 51. Davidson, “A Nice Derangement,” p. 107. 52. Gadamer, “Semantik und Hermeneutik,” p. 176. 53. Ibid., p. 177. 54. Gadamer, “Vielfalt der Sprachen,” p. 345. 55. Donald Davidson, “James Joyce and Humpty Dumpty,” in Midwest Studies in Philosophy 16 (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), pp. 1–12. 56. Ibid., p. 4. 57. Ibid., p. 8. 58. Ibid., p. 11. 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 239 2/2/11 1:47 PM 12 MIT MalpasDialogues ch12.indd 240 2/2/11 1:47 PM