Terence Rajivan Edward

There is someone I used to work with, who has gone to Germany to study a PhD on Thomas Mann. He asked me, "Why do you like short stories? Defend yourself." He likes novels. I spent a bit of time coming up with defences. And this is a good one, I believe. "I am interested in realistic characters (by my intuitive standards anyway). And there are some such characters who are in short stories but not in novels. So I am interested in short stories." Well, I should be more careful actually, because I have not read all novels. I would not depend on the assumption that every realistic character in a short story is also in some novel.

I doubt you would like to receive a communication from me. I too would rather not communicate to you. But I wonder if it is imperative that I do. There was, and probably still is, widespread opposition to Nancy Rothwell within the student body: the set of students that is. What to do about this? I just walked through the University of Manchester. By Brunswick Park, I noticed a set of hexagons, each having a distinguished name within it. At the centre was a hexagon with the name Nancy Rothwell. (I am not even sure if the hexagon is a good shape, but my inquiries are at a very preliminary stage on this matter.) Also there is The Nancy Rothwell Building (for engineering!). If I were a discontent student, I would interpret these items as trying to prompt an argument in me: "If Nancy Rothwell is so bad, why do the authorities here value her so much? The best explanation is that there must be something really impressive about her work!" I am writing because I am not convinced that this is a good way of communicating to the student body. In my experience, they regard themselves as the adults in the place, however childish their behaviour seems. For example, when I was teaching, some of them seemed to have the impression "This class is run by a child." This was despite my qualifications and the fact that I was regularly paid for this job. The discontent student may well dare a modus tollens: "If Nancy Rothwell is great, her greatness would be evident from my point of view as it is. This is not evident. Therefore she is not great." (Wyndham Lewis in his contribution to Beginnings said, if a great poet painted, something would come through.) I am not sure if the problem of getting the student to appreciate Nancy Rothwell can be overcome. I regard it as belonging to philosophy of science. But you have lost your best philosopher of science, haven't you?

Listen T. Parent, I do whatever I want, whenever I want! But I read your paper "Ontology and Acceptance" and because I am feeling extremely kind, I will let you know this information. Quite late on in Rose Macaulay's essayistic 1923 novel Told by an Idiot, the character Rome Garden says, "One must make a million unwarrantable assumptions, such as that the sun will rise to-morrow, and that the attraction of the earth for our feet will for a time persist, and that if we do certain things to our bodies they will cease to function, and that if we get into a train it will probably carry us along, and so forth. One must assume these things just enough to take action on them, or, as you say, we couldn't get through life at all. But those are hypothetical, pragmatical assumptions, for the purposes of action; there is no call actually to believe them, intellectually. And still less call to increase their number, and carry assumption into spheres where it doesn't help us to action at all. For my part, I assume practically a great deal, intellectually nothing." A few years ago, 2021 it must have been, I was thinking about whether this position is even coherent. I doubt I am the first. It seems you need to dig up your predecessors and find out what happened to them. But it is obvious. They ran into people such as myself, who put them out of business!

I was planning to take a break from writing today, as advised. I decided to read Timothy Williamson's "Is Logic about Validity?" Reading it, I came across a baffling passage. At the beginning of it, Williamson writes: "Anyway, no logical truth is too simple to be denied by a sufficiently perverse metaphysician." He then appears to give an example in which some people deny that everything is self-identical. He uses his intuition to interestingly guess their argument. He soon says, "They did not mean something different from the rest of us by ‘identical’. They were just not very good at logic." Are they actually perverse then? Prima facie, there is a difference between arriving at an erroneous conclusion against a simple logical truth because one is not good at logic and arriving at such a conclusion because one is a perverse metaphysician. A starting point for defining the case of the perverse metaphysician attacking a simple logical truth is one who is good at logic and presents an attack on a simple logical truth which they themselves do not accept, because they believe there is an error in the attack.

I read some analytic philosophy of art and it sometimes includes commentary on art works. My intuition, if I may share it, is that the professional art critic will, rightly or wrongly, react like this: "I already have someone who can state local commonsense responses to artworks; maybe you do so in a more polished way but the difference is negligible in my eyes. I am looking for very 'out of the box' thinking which is worth pursuing: zany, crazy even." I am not sure if the philosophers of art that I know are suited to meeting this demand. To illustrate what would meet it: in my "Joseph Conrad and Kundera's taxi driver: amusing perspectives" I introduce the view that Milan Kundera can be reduced to Conrad. A detailed fleshing out of this view, drawing on the resources of the analytic tradition on reduction, is the sort of thing that literary critics would be interested in (I intuit).

The title is a bit misleading. Imagine that a leading figure in the English analytic tradition of philosophy tells "his people" the following: you do not need to trouble yourself with trying to achieve a style with literary value. He might have one of two very different rationales for saying this, the second of which is not so apparent. (A) If you want to try and achieve a style with literary value, you can, but it is up to you. It is not a requirement for being an analytic philosopher. (B) Writing good analytic philosophy is so demanding that you have to focus on that and not try to achieve a style with literary value. If what you produce has literary value, all well and good; but don't pursue this goal intentionally. When you write, you need to focus entirely on meeting the requirements of analytic philosophy: being clear and suitably precise and responding to relevant objections, etc. Did you get that? You need to concentrate your energies fully on fulfilling your philosophical duties. Now let me say that one more time, just in case...

H.L.A. Hart argues that Rawls's liberty principle does not account for why we restrict freedom of speech during debates. Hart is debating with Rawls, but is he moving too fast, given this point of his? If Rawls accepts the liberty principle and the principle does not account for why we restrict freedom of speech during debates, then it is rational to ask this question: does Rawls even accept the rules of debate that Hart accepts? (Observe how Rawls debates with Habermas, by the way.) Once again progress on the Hart-Rawls debate made by the supposedly insane!

Early on in the first volume of On What Matters, Derek Parfit praises the little-known utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick: a distant third behind Bentham and Mill. He quotes Sidgwick's criticism of F.H. Bradley: "really penetrating criticism, especially in ethics, requires a patient effort of sympathy which Mr Bradley has never learned to make, and a tranquillity of temper which he seems incapable of maintaining." Given the high praise he gives Sidgwick, it is difficult not to take Parfit as approving. But I saw Parfit speak, in what was perhaps the last lecture before he died. And he did not seem tranquil at all. To my intuitive assessment, he is the most excitable person I have ever met. (I was at the back of the lecturer and I was shuffling a bit. I had decided not to go to the toilet before the lecture. After the lecture, during the question and answer session, he looked at me very aggressively. If he does that, I leave. I could not shake the intuition that he already knew me - or knew of me or whatever. I suspect Parfit kept large league tables of ethics, scoured all the journals himself, and even I figured on his table. To psychiatrists: if I don't write, I will fall back in the league table. I am surely struggling already.)

O: In recent papers, you have identified three requirements that have been presented to you while working in the philosophy discipline area. Earlier you wrote about underrepresentation. Do you think there is also a requirement to be of a certain race? ME: There may be quasi-racism: we can get all the benefits to us of a racist system without any racial requirement. You have to go back to the nineteenth century to comprehend why this is a plausible proposal. I believe many philosophers, psychologists, and psychiatrists at that time accepted that there was such a thing as the English temperament, the French temperament, the Scottish temperament, and so on. Each temperament (supposedly) correlated with different type of body: a different brain and different nervous system. You can read about it in George Eliot's essay "Women in France." The Victorian philosopher Sidgwick says that the Scot Bradley does not have the temperament for ethics and readers of his time would surely have inferred that this is because he is a Scot. Sidgwick is considered a predecessor to analytic philosophy. In the twentieth century, in his essay on inferences in politics, C.D. Broad describes the English temperament as phlegmatic. The rules of analytic philosophy, which have hardly changed, may have been set up to select for a certain temperament: one designed to exclude philosophers of various nations (or many of them anyway). In theory, anyone can meet the requirements. In practice, others cannot get in. I was looking into underrepresentation in analytic philosophy and probably you cannot look into this topic without taking the old nineteenth century temperament system seriously. (I wonder whether the objection some analytic philosophers have to Foucault is not obscurity, rather "There is nothing wrong with old lunatic asylums, based on the temperament system.") O: A psychiatrist working in the old system would say that you cannot do analytic philosophy and stay sane.

O: In your second letter to Thomas H. Smith and Joel Smith, you talk about the requirement not to laugh at the seminar giver in the research seminar. You ask whether if you meet this requirement, there will be another requirement, and a third, and a fourth, etc. Do you have any examples of other requirements or is this just a thought you entertained? You are not trusted and you are sure to be asked this. ME: Yes, two come to mind. I was told in the early 2010s to publish in better journals. My worry is that doing so would have prevented me from writing my paper "On the citation of John Rawls." In that paper I compare my citations with that of Rawls and ask, is Rawls properly global? That must be one of the most satisfying papers ever, more satisfying than anything you have experienced O. I think the better journals requirement is insane. O: In Europe, we have to take a proportion of European people as sane. You have a reason for thinking that the European man who asserted this requirement is insane, but it has to be ignored in Europe. If you build a system of psychiatry in which the person who asserted this requirement is insane, you would produce a non-European system. It would be considered a danger to European civilization. ME: I think the requirement has been withdrawn now. O: What is the other requirement? ME: Specialization!

I presume there are men who approach attracting a woman as if it were, or significantly resembles, applying for a job: you meet the requirements and you are competent for this job; otherwise you are not. But then these lines from a song sung by the popular singer Sabrina Carpenter are a paradox: “And I like my men all incompetent.” To be competent for the job of being this person’s man one has to be incompetent. I present a solution which I have presented before - “incompetent” means more fully “incompetent by normal standards” - and also raise the problem of how a society in which Carpenter’s preference is pervasive among women can survive. Won’t competent men leave, jeopardizing the long-term stability of the society? Perhaps the problem can be overcome by some revision: there is a scale of competence and the women there prefer borderline males, maybe just below the line of competence. But I identify two risks: risk of mistakes; risk of take over by a neighbouring society. And I consider how to avoid the second risk at least.

As I understand him, Bergson thinks that we laugh at human beings when they behave in a mechanical way. I find this perspective strange. I am tempted to offer many counterexamples. But here is an attempt to appreciate Bergson, apart from that this giving of counterexamples is so mechanical. "If you were to abandon various kinds of laughter, this would be the last kind left." He might be right. For example, I would give various courses at a nearby university to much the same standard as the lecturer but for only 20 pence (maybe pretend you don't know which university): the ethics course, the political theory courses, the philosophy mind course, even the jurisprudence course, etc. The university management either knows this or assumes that I would do it for free. Yet they continue to pay lecturers thousands of pounds to give these courses. They behave mechanically. And that is the ultimate in funny.

Hildred Geertz, wife of Clifford Geertz, is little known compared to her husband Clifford Geertz, standard reading on probably every undergraduate anthropology curriculum and several social science courses. I present a paradox concerning Hildred Geertz: surely anthropologists get titles, climb up the ranks in their departments, and publish books because they are ambitious, and pay the price of doing fieldwork because it is better for realizing their ambitions long-term - “you studied this disappearing people or people whose lives were about to undergo dramatic transformation through contact with Western societies”; but Hildred Geertz ended up more or less “hidden” compared to her husband, or ex-husband. A solution is that she is probably the subject of intense attention but it is not very public: amongst feminists academics and female academics in general. I consider this and another solution.

Why read post-colonial literature? An obvious answer is because you are interested in the former colonies. But what if you are not? In my experience, post-colonial literature contains a variety of characters who are a problem for development, such as Rose and Amaka from Flora Nwapa's novels. (I am very impressed.) You can find similar characters in the UK and from other backgrounds, I intuit. They don't feature in prestigious British literature, to my knowledge. "Why not?" I propose this: because prestigious British literature is written by experts in getting rewards from prize committees and elite universities, and the people giving out the rewards just don't have to deal with these characters. They are not of much interest to them. To assume the developed and developing distinction: the rewarders are already in developed institutions! (I recall an author describing large parts of the UK as like the third world: Irvine Welsh. I seem to be converging with him!)

Mainstream economics failed to predict the 2008 financial crash. It has been under strong pressure to change because of that. What is its future? Maybe other social sciences provide a clue. This paper presents two very different lessons one might take from British social anthropology. (A) The structural-functionalist school which dominated British anthropology from the 1930s (if not before) to the 1960s came in for severe criticism in the late 40s and 50s: for ignoring the histories of the peoples studied and colonial relations. That memorable criticism(s) does not appear to have ended its dominance. A late stage structural-functionalism developed. (It is unclear what ended the dominance. Parties interested in the question might have to just try structural-functionalism again.) The mainstream economics will continue, despite not predicting the crash. (B) Economics might be revolutionized, but that won't mark the end of the mainstream models. Some of these models (and other things) that economists have made can float out into other disciplines and become the centre of a research literature. For example, Adam Smith on the origins of money is at the centre of a literature in social anthropology. Anthropologists don't accept the account but they continuously engage with it. (Adam Smith is not a contemporary mainstream economist, but there are models based on his account.)

O: I read your "Serial killers and social structure". Why did you even write this? You write of how some peculiar liberal societies prefer to incorporate a known serial killer over a Chairman Mao. You are going to be asked, "How can a liberal society incorporate a serial killer and be liberal?" Or someone is going to have this question. And then you will have to define all your terms: liberal society, incorporate, serial killer, known, even can. And you will have to consider the answers that different clarifications lead to. That's one long task. It will tire you out. ME: You are getting stressed by this conversation, it seems to me, and its length is not why I am avoiding the task! Anyway, I am thinking to tell them this: a liberal society is usually defined by certain legal rights, such as freedom of speech and movement, but in the definition itself there is no specification of the punishments if you violate someone's rights; so a society can count as liberal and release a serial killer. O: You just cannot resist making that point, can you? Anyway, this will be fun for you: cannot any professional liberal political philosopher detect the point by themselves? ME: They are selected by 1500 word essays and longer. To be confident that they can detect the point by themselves, you would need some other kind of assessment, to check their problem-solving skills, I think. There is a risk anyone will get in who scores well on the other assessment. That might produce protests.

Imagine some children in a field. Two children are the captains of two football teams and they are picking players for their respective teams. Captain 1: I choose John. Captain 2: I choose James. And so on. Towards the end there are two players left. Neither wants to be picked last, of course. Strangely, they are talented players. Is there are some problem with them? They are too selfish perhaps. Now imagine a variation on this familiar scene. The people of a nation are picking individuals to be part of it. The last one left will not be part of the nation. The final pair are a dictatorial figure, such as Chairman Mao (or the current president of China?) and a known serial killer, such as Ted Bundy. The sensible choice is the dictatorial figure, it seems. To get that far, he must actually be a reasonable fellow in many respects, smart, and a good PTA member even. But some liberal nations (or towns, to vary the thought experiment further) just pick Ted Bundy. They are not racist. They just prefer that kind of person. That is how their social structure works even: it incorporates this kind of person over that kind! A disturbing but liberal social system. (A lot of people seem to love Bundy and this is an explanation, I suppose.)

The Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt believes that legal systems are unsuited to dealing with some political problems. Notably, one should suspend the law (partly or wholly?) to better combat an enemy: a threat to the shared way of life in a nation. I have a worry about implementing Schmitt's legal and political philosophy. I am not sure how major the worry is. Probably major. Some legal specialists, I presume, are experts in patching up a legal system. It did not look as if it could cope with a certain problem, but once patched up it can keep going. (They are like the trainers in the Balinese cockfight?) These people will not feel valued if you implement Schmitt's legal and political philosophy. There is not enough value on rule of law. And they will leave the nation for one which values rule of law to a greater extent. Then, in their former nation, these suspensions of the law Schmitt recommends will happen too frequently. They are meant to be infrequent, I suppose. But the intelligence is now just lacking to deal with various problems within a legal system. "Once again, we have to suspend the law to deal with this problem we are facing." (All the other nations laugh at it for that even.)

ME: In a paper uploaded yesterday, I presented an objection to Carl Schmitt which I believe is already known in some circles. I cannot find it in the literature though. The objection is that if a government suspends the law to better combat an enemy, but with the aim of returning to a period with rule of law, there is a reasonable chance that they will not return to this. Instead a dictatorship with poor rule of law is established. Surely people who study political regimes have thought of this. O: Your objection sounds obvious once you say it. You only need to watch the news to have this objection, it seems. But it is possible that it was not known already by anyone before and the possibility is not extremely unlikely. When reading Carl Schmitt (or a presentation of him), there are a lot of things which might distract a person from making the objection, such as vagueness in Schmitt's claims, for example is the law wholly or partly suspended? (The former option seems unrealistic and the latter requires us to withdraw from the histrionic claim that the legal system has been suspended.) Now there is indeed a person who can get past all these distractions and make your objection to Schmitt, if they only knew his work. You are not special! But they are unlikely to engage with Schmitt. The research world is not full of free spirits. We direct students here and there. "Why don't you write on the law of the excluded middle?" "Why don't you write on Carl Schmitt?" "Why don't you write a psychiatric literary case study?" Etc. And we just don't direct the kind of person who can get past all the distractions to work on Carl Schmitt. There is a kind of streaming even. If you continue to work on Carl Schmitt, you will just have a long party of making objections until his philosophy is completely dead! Just leave him be. There is better stuff for you to work on. ME: I am not convinced. The objection I made is surely known! Maybe in Germany.

I am surprised by the large amount of interest in the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. Schmitt is not a contemporary. Are there not a number of known objections to Schmitt? Is there not a big list somewhere? Perhaps the objections are only known in narrow circles and not in wider circulation. I wish to present one objection, which I believe is known to some people, even if it is not in the Schmitt literature. Schmitt divides the life of a nation into normal periods and extraordinary periods. In normal periods, there is rule of law. In extraordinary periods, there is not. Schmitt is especially interested in extraordinary periods in which the law is (partly or wholly?) suspended to better combat an enemy to the nation, to the shared way of life in that nation. Schmitt recommends such suspensions but the aim should be to return to a new normal period. The objection is from political science. There are just lots of cases where rule of law is suspended and the nation does not get back to a normal period (assuming Schmitt's distinction), so by induction this political and legal philosophy is a bad idea to implement. A group of politicians decides to suspend the law and what you get is an evil dictatorship rather than a return to a normal period. "Can you give examples?" I am not a political scientist, but I suppose there are lots of national histories which suggest this objection. Maybe Chile! "If you don't have examples, why did you write this?" I have read the Schmitt literature and there does not seem to be awareness of the objection, even though some people surely know it. If I don't tell the participants, maybe no one will. Upon reading this, they can ask others or find examples themselves. My apologies for a half-baked objection. Please still cite, if I am the first to put it in writing.

O: Why are you writing for the psychiatrist? You're going to tire yourself out. Just imagine you and the psychiatrist in school. You get much the same grades. Maybe they are slightly better, maybe you are. The difference is negligible. But the psychiatrist decides to become a doctor. Why don't they become a historian or an artist? Some of them can draw, many of them like history. Why don't they? Because they want a job and are afraid of not getting one! So they are very risk averse compared to you. (And you are very risk averse compared to me!) How are you going to communicate across such a large difference in temperaments? They will give you advice. And you will have to explain ABCs of why this is not good advice for someone such as yourself. (Why you don't take your phone to the phone shop, etc. It's an experiment in finding out what the advantages are of not doing so.) Their whole discipline is affected by high risk aversion. ME: The difference between us is not negligible in school! The psychiatrist doesn't even know what the cell membrane is. I may be rusty but I am good at the school game. One hour a day work and I can beat these people at that! Anyway, why shouldn't I interact with them and they can write a literary psychiatric case study on me? O: Two problems, Golden Stockings! They only know famous literature, like VIrgin Woolf. They are very unsuited to dealing with a person who has published just 5 lines of poetry. And if the psychiatrist is sensible, they need to find out what happened to someone like them in the past or they will just repeat the same mistakes. (And that's very difficult for them to find out.)

Simon Baron-Cohen says that the extreme female brain is very good at empathizing and very bad at systematizing. Why pervert Baron-Cohen and say that the extreme female brain is very good at systematizing and very bad at empathizing? The answer lies in my previous paper "Disgust and the gender of the brain." Females on average are more prone to disgust reactions than males. Disgust reactions are systematic, as we know from Mary Douglas. The extreme female brain overrides all empathy in destroying what disgusts it!

I have been contemplating the topic of "What is Cornell?" for a while and gathered various responses from friends, insofar as I have friends. This is my hypothesis. Assume you are in Cornell. If you ask for anything from another person there and it is logically and naturally possible for them to provide it, they will do so. "Shall we..." "Yes!" (Don't query this example please.) You only have to ask! But their system of student and staff selection is so good that no one asks for various things. It is a university for the well-bred.

In The Story of O, O is subject to beatings in France before moving to England and being subject to even more severe beatings. She is beaten by Sir Stephen. It is natural for most readers to assume that Sir Stephen is a sadist and a specialist in beating. I wish to offer a different interpretation, by elaborating the novel slightly. (I have been "inspired" by a paper uploaded yesterday.) Sir Stephen and O are locked in a room together. O says, "I would like to talk about logic." Sir Stephen says, "So would I. I am an expert logician. I am also a peaceful feminist. I think women can do logic as well. You seem to be a clever woman. I would like to talk about logic with you." O begins to offer her point of view on conditionals. Sir Stephen listens and becomes increasingly angry. He becomes violent and gives O the worst beating of her life. During the beating, she coquetishiy says, "Feminist you?" He keeps beating her.

John Searle is interested in extending his influence into social anthropology. (He has written for the journal Anthropological Theory.) But how to extend his influence? Despite probably having one of the best advisory networks ever, he doesn't appear to know how. I will tell him how! There is an old debate in British social anthropology (a debate which some American anthropologists are also interested in). The debate is over whether social structures are real or not. Founding father Radcliffe-Brown takes them to be real. Later anthropologist Edmund Leach takes the social structures anthropologists describe to be useful models: social structures are not real. Searle should start by referring to this "old" debate. Then he can say, "What you need is my distinction between ontologically subjective and epistemically objective. Social structures are ontologically subjective: they are dependent on human agreement, e.g. we agree that this organization has a head. They are brought into existence and maintained by performative language, e.g. we hereby declare that Nancy Rothwell is the vice-chancellor. But they are epistemically objective: there can be right and wrong descriptions of the social structure." I don't accept that social structures are real. I accept Leach's position. Earlier today (before the vague answer!), I wrote of actual social structure, because it was too complicated there to introduce anti-realism about social structure. Anyway, above is my recommendation to Searle.

Some people believe that the premises that mainstream British psychiatry relies on are severely faulty. Lacanians believe this and so do I. But (unlike Lacanians) I suspect British psychiatry achieves a passable level with their conclusions. How can that be? The answer I vaguely propose is this. The British psychiatrist learns a system, which is useful for them to get going at an early stage and for communicating to outsiders with little knowledge of psychiatry, such as law courts. But they don't mechanically apply the system. As they progress, they are heavily reliant on knowledge of past cases (and also unteachable diagnostic talent). "This case is similar to that case, we saw." My worry is this. Someone is going to say, "Talent?! Is this a good system then? We will send you a student. They are not the most talented but if your system is good, they will turn into a good psychiatrist and if it is bad, they will not. A good system reduces the reliance on cleverness, on individual talent." The psychiatrist is going to face severe problems with teaching this student. They don't class cases as similar and different in the way the psychiatrist does. Some psychiatrists leave because the student's judgments of similarly and difference are only slightly off and there is no way to block this dangerous new psychiatrist. (No Asians psychiatrists left?)

In my journal publication "Are individuals a problem for British structural-functionalist anthropology?" I introduce an important idea. An organization has an official structure of roles and duties, for example this is the head of the organization, that is the cleaner, etc. But sometimes one encounters a person who officially occupies a certain role but does not fit with the expectations of that role: for example, they cannot do various things which the role requires. They seem out of place. In this situation, I proposed that the anthropologist can make a radical move: they can look into whether the actual structure of the organization is different from the official structure and whether in the actual structure, the seemingly out of place individual fits. In September 2023, I was forced into the psychiatric unit of a Manchester hospital and I ended up trying my idea out. When I met the consultant psychiatrist, I asked him whether he was a doctor and, to check, I asked him to tell me what is inside a cell. He listed some items, including the cell membrane. I didn't think the cell membrane is inside the cell. So I decided to contemplate alternative organizational structures to the official structure, according to which he is a consultant doctor. I gave up after about a month and just accepted the official structure. I came to three conclusions. (i) The anthropologist in a new setting has no practical option but to accept the official structure presented to them. It just takes too long to get going otherwise and you risk looking very mad. My idea is for later at best. (ii) It took me so long to accept the official structure that I must be having a mental difficulty. I was weekly asked to accept that I had one by the medical team and I eventually did, for this reason (which is very different from their reason). (iii) The premises the psychiatrist appeals to in diagnosis are faulty in my eyes, but it is best to assume they have some way of achieving a passable level of reliability regarding their conclusions. (There is no adequate basis for me to interact with them if I don't assume this. A Lacanian psychiatrist is going to say, "The premises of British psychiatry are faulty and, consequently, the system is dangerous regarding its conclusions. And Lacan was a great doctor. He knows something." My worry is Lacan has a tantrum upon encountering other systems.)

Let's take "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme" as an example. I guess it is not written for someone like you, despite how good at philosophy you are, all your family are, etc. It is written for two kinds of reader. One is highly sensitive to the text's structure and wording (and even literary value), and likely has a degree from Oxford University, such as P.M.S. Hacker or H.J. Glock. The other is not very sensitive at all. They read some of the paper and register that Davidson is attacking an anthropologist claiming that others have an alien conceptual system, and then they take such claims as Davidson's main target. They read on for pages until they encounter talk of radical interpretation. "Finally, Davidson is going to apply his system to attack his target," they think. They register Davidson's claim that the radical interpreter cannot interpret others as having an alien conceptual system. Then, having noticed these things, they make a reasonable guess at his argument. "He is saying that if we cannot verify that others have such a system, then they don't!" (The specific location of the radical interpreter material in the structure of the paper is ignored.)