Davidson's Conceptual Dualism

http://sohdan.blogspot.com/2009/02/davidsons-conceptual-dualism.html

A citation from a post from a while back at "Frame/Sing":

Here I want to refer to my friend and former colleague at Warwick University Tim Thornton, a Wittgensteinian. He told me years ago that he never understood why Davidson was a conceptual dualist. Why stop at two conceptual spheres or modes of description? Why is the distinction between the mental and the physical so much more compelling than any other way that we can think of to describe the world? Would it not be sensible to say that all situations can, in some way, be described as moral? Tim Thornton thought that conceptual pluralism made more, Wittgensteinian, sense. (footnote, p. 27, Davidson and Spinoza: Mind, Matter and Morality, Floris van der Berg)

This actually comes up in one of the "Davidson in Conversation" interviews, with Stuart Hampshire. Here's a quote from Davidson:

I certainly think that we have more than two ways of conceiving reality. I often sound as if I think there are just two, natural science and psychology or something, but, no, there are a lot of natural sciences, and they have different ways of describing things, perhaps irreducibly different…. I don’t know how you’d count potential conceptual schemes, so I don’t see that one should boggle at them [like Spinoza did].

So ,it seems that Thornton’s point was appreciated by Davidson. He just wrote as if he hadn’t thought of it a lot of the time, because the only relevant schemes in the context were the mental & the physical (the rational and the nomic).

Incidentally, this is a nice instance of Davidson talking about "conceptual schemes" in a way that doesn't involve the scheme-content dualism. Later in the same interview, he notes that in physics we plausibly "don't have the best conceptual scheme for the task" (of formulating laws with no exceptions etc.) and that we can advance by changing our scheme. So it seems that Davidson was fine with talking about "conceptual schemes" in a basically Kuhnian way. Which is interesting. Certainly a lot of people have worried about a tension between the two. (I know I have.) Davidson doesn't seem to feel a tension -- he just uses "conceptual schemes" here, without comment.

There's a lot of interesting things in the "In Conversation" videos. I wish they were more easily accessible; only the Rorty one is online, as far as I can tell.