The Adequacy of Conceptual Schemes

Of course, conceptual schemes are always used for the formulation of claims. If they were not, they would be completely useless. What would be the whole point of distinguishing between icks and ucks, if the concepts were not put to use If I could do nothing more than say whether a certain person is an ick or an uck, I would not be better off than without the distinction. The distinction would run idle. However, the situation changes if the distinction is used for the formulation of claims. For example, if it turns out that the icks are much more likely to contract certain infectious diseases, the distinction will have a chance of contributing to medical knowledge. But then we have more than just a distinction we would have a description formulated in terms of the distinction. 

But the notion of adequacy is in a sense broader than that. Adequate conceptual schemes get us something more than truths. Let us see an example. The Danis of New Guinea have only two basic color terms, mili and mola . The former stands for dark, cool colors (e.g. black, blue and green), the latter stands for light, warm 

Practices have vague boundaries. Does peeling potatoes belong to cooking, or is it merely a prerequisite that does not belong to the practice itself It is difficult to say, the practice of cooking is not sufficiently well-defined. Another sense of vagueness is that it is unclear how much variation is permissible in the practice so 

The ideas of success and choiceworthiness interact in the following way. The idea of success involves a kind of causal independence of us. To be sure, whether a practice is successful or not depends on our actions. If we are stupid and careless, our practice will be less successful than it would be if we were clever and careful. But once we perform certain actions, it does not depend on us any more if the practice they belong to turns out to be successful or not. For example, you formulate 

Besides, metaphysical realism does not fare any better in practice. In real life, the question concerns the adequacy of particular conceptual schemes. Suppose there are two competing conceptual schemes in a given domain. Which one is right The idea of a mind-independent structure is of little help here. The advocates of the two schemes claim that it is their own scheme that captures that structure. But they have only epistemic criteria to substantiate their claims. Adequacy - in the metaphysical realist view - is completely non-epistemic, so there might be no way of knowing which scheme is adequate. To say that one of the schemes is adequate but we do not know which one leaves the situation completely symmetrical. To put it differently, 

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If adequacy is understood in this way, (MR3) is a straightforward consequence of (MR1). It takes two steps to see this. First, according to (MR1), boundaries are inherent features of reality. Criteria of individuation and classification are simply facts about the world. If someone accepts this, it is natural for him to say that the adequacy of a conceptual schemes consists in mirroring the real boundaries, i. e. the joints of reality. In other words if adequacy has to do with the right divisions, and one believes that there are real divisions out there, it is difficult to refrain from concluding that the right divisions are those which match the real divisions. Notice also that this connection stands from the other way around as well. If someone believes that the right boundaries are the real boundaries, he is likely to believe that... 

Internal realism, on the other hand, can easily deploy this natural answer. The adequacy of a conceptual scheme does not depend on the possibility of other conceptual schemes. So if a theory, conceived as a practice driven by theoretical considerations, is choiceworthy and successful, we can believe in its truth and the adequacy of its conceptual scheme. It does not matter if there could be other... 

Now suppose that there are more than one conceptual schemes of a given domain, as it is often the case. Reality has a given structure. If adequacy means mirroring that structure, all adequate schemes must mirror it. If a scheme fails to do that, it is inadequate (or adequate in a qualified sense only). The fact that all adequate schemes match the same structure seriously constrains the way they can be related to one another. They must express the same distinctions. They must draw the boundaries of individuals and of classes in exactly the same way. If something is recognized as an individual in one conceptual scheme, it should be recognized as an individual in the other scheme. If the criteria of membership in a particular class in one scheme pick out certain individuals as members, the other scheme must have a corresponding class-concept whose criteria pick out exactly the same individuals. In other words, there should be token-token and type-type correspondences between the different schemes. Type-type correspondence implies token-token correspondence. This is why I included it only the former in (MR3). It should be clear now why there is a natural path from (MR1) to (MR3). 

Partially here is a different sort of qualification than the one I talked about four paragraphs earlier. In this case we have partial adequacy in the strict sense of adequacy. On the other hand, a conceptual scheme may be - at least in principle - completely adequate for all intents and purposes , without being even partially adequate in the strict sense. 

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