Colour does not have fixed values. Instead it gains its value from the neighbouring colours. Colour is thought to be infinitely configured through its borders.
Contact improvisation is about borders: the physical space between the dancers. Too close/too intimidating/too far away/I can't dance, I can't improvise. It is about keeping the correct distance.
Environmentally directed beliefs mobilise:
Colour borders
Natural borders
Land borders
Country borders
Political borders
Conceptual schemes comprise of a set of concepts for organising and systematising accounts of reality. Conceptual schemes may be shared, as long as at least partial translatability is a necessary condition. For example, concerning envionmentally directed beliefs, for one to be able to interpret another, two agents must have the same object in mind.
Another example is colour's configurability. Since colour in painting takes its value from adjacent colours, it is configured in its shared world. Borders provide the liminal spaces for configurability, as long as interpretation and truth are correlated in our descriptions.
This is not the case with colour-coded geographical maps, where colour serves a symbolic function to demarcate strictly set borders.
Different interpreters will disagree, only if they have different positions on how things are in their shared world. Borders can offer the liminal spaces, as long as interpretation and truth are correlated.
On the cognitive aesthetic claim,
art is thought to be non-propositional. Yet art as a system can be taken as propositional. Environmentally directed beliefs and conceptual schemes organise to account for art's propositionality.
Davidson (1976: 38-39) was primarily interested in ascertaining what determined the existence and contents of belief. It is for this reason that Davidson proposed coherence together with correspondence theory in his environmentally directed theories of conceptual schemes. Belief utterances are propositional attitudes suggesting that meaning and reference must be preserved. Therefore, fixing the semantics of belief utterances is a significant task. In order to repose the problem whether and how the belief is justified by the sensation, Davidson (1983: 142-144) dismissed the empiricist position in tracing meaning back to experience as sensory stimulation. Truth is not derived empirically, because the world could be very different to a person's sensory stimulations (Davidson, 1983: 145). In Davidson's view, the relation between belief and sensation is not logical but causal. Nevertheless, although Davidson accepts there are causal intermediaries between beliefs and objects of belief, he also recognises that a causal explanation of belief does not prove that the belief is justified. As Davidson (1983: 138) claims: "Beliefs [...] are states of people with intentions, desires, sense organs; they are states that are caused by, and cause, events inside and outside the bodies of their entertainers". Davidson (1983: 144) is particularly aware of the danger in allowing for intermediaries between belief and the object of belief, since intermediaries might not be truthful;
as it is, for instance, the case of epistemic intermediaries.
As an example, Davidson (1974a: 186-187) compares scientists working in different scientific traditions or paradigms, arguing that they are working in different worlds. Language here has a secondary, yet significant, role in determining conceptual schemes. Another Davidsonian example is speakers of different languages, who may share a conceptual scheme, while there is the possibility of translation between languages. Nevertheless, as Davidson (1974a: 190) explains, "[...] the failure of intertranslatability is a necessary condition for difference of conceptual schemes." Davidson allows for partial translatability in introducing the possibility of making changes on the basis that any assumptions are held about shared beliefs, concepts and meanings on a universal conceptual scheme and ontology.
To illustrate the above further, Davidson introduces the notion of the second person, as someone that recognises an agent's response to an object, in recognition of his or her own response to be similar to an agent's. This is not a process of verification of the objects one responds to, but rather a process in which, without the second person's response to the first, the question of what language one speaks and how communication is established cannot be answered. Davidson (1992: 121) explains that, for one to be able to interpret another, the agent and the second speaker must have the same object in mind. Davidson emphasises that, like language, propositional attitudes such as belief and intention are also social. However, their truth is intersubjective rather than objective; hence it is dependent upon one's shared world and one's knowledge about a shared world with another.
Blackburn (1984: 60) has pointed out that Davidson stated we can’t make any sense of fundamentally divergent conceptual schemes. Blackburn argues so with Wittgenstein, who wanted to connect the fact of a term being governed by a genuine rule, determining correctness and incorrectness of application, with its use, a custom, a technique or practice; it is the existence of a practice or technique that makes the difference (1984: 82, 92). Wittgenstein admitted to the possibility of knowing truths about sensory data and physical objects (OC §426, §§429-430, §481). His claims to the possibility of such knowledge are not inferred from other or others’ claims to knowledge (OC §488). Neither it is significant whether those latter claims take the form of empirical propositions, which have referential status with regard to a frame of reference (OC §83); nor they are meant as psychological remarks of inner experience (OC §447, §569), or put forth by persons with claims to authority regarding knowledge claims (OC §34, §91, §488). What is important to consider is the nature itself of the language-game, which, for Wittgenstein, is the use of words in language, or terms and concepts say in the visual arts. Wittgenstein construes physical objects as logical concepts, for which we use words without doubting their meaning. This become all the more obvious when considering the Davidsonian conceptual scheme in the visual arts, and specifically in painting, where it can help us evaluate the practice of painting-as-discourse.