ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Davidson's powerful and influential paper, 'On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme'. This paper does rest on an impossibility argument, about intelligibility and the limits of intelligibility, and the argument has complex implications, far beyond the issue of conceptual relativism. It largely ended a prolonged discussion of the rationality of other cultures, undermining particularly the claim argued at the time that there was a universal, nonculture-relative core of rationality and protocol sentence-like description that provided grounds for judging the rationality of other cultures. Davidson's problem involves the problem of intelligibility, not the problem of supposed binding norms. Explicable error is intelligible error. Translation, which incorporates a hypothesis that accounts for the error and makes it intelligible, extends the limits of intelligibility extends them as far as they go. Anthropologists face a problem which grew into the problem that in the philosophy of social science was part of the context of 'On the Very Idea'.
