## 1. Life


Wilfrid Stalker Sellars was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on 20 May
1912, to Roy Wood and Helen Stalker Sellars. His father was a
significant philosopher in his own right, a professor at the
University of Michigan and a founder of American Critical Realism.
Wilfrid's childhood in Ann Arbor was interrupted for two years
when he was 9: the family spent a year in New England, the summer at
Oxford, and the subsequent year in Paris, where Wilfrid attended the
Lycee Montaigne. Returning to Ann Arbor, Sellars then attended
the high school run by the University's School of Education,
where he particularly enjoyed mathematics. Following his graduation
in 1929, the family returned to Paris. Sellars entered the
Lycee Louis le Grand, where philosophy was in the curriculum
and Marxism was in the air. Not having discussed philosophy
previously with his father, he began in philosophy as a French
Marxist, although his father's influence soon took precedence. (For a partial account of their philosophical connections, see F. Gironi 2017, 2018.)
He followed his year at the Lycee with six months in Munich,
polishing his German.


In 1931 Sellars returned to Ann Arbor as an undergraduate
philosophy major, studying with his father, DeWitt Parker,
C.H. Langford and others in Michigan's excellent department.
Among other things, he studied the work of Russell and Moore, modal
logic with Langford, and continued the dialogue with his father that
had begun in Paris. At the height of the depression, Sellars was also
involved in left-wing politics, campaigning for the socialist Norman
Thomas. Because of his Lycee background, Sellars tested out of
a number of requirements, graduating college with his high school cohort in
1933. He then enrolled at the University of Buffalo for an M.A., where he
studied Husserl and Kant with Marvin Farber. 


Sellars was a competitive athlete in college and won a Rhodes
scholarship, which took him in the fall of 1934 to Oriel College at
Oxford, where he enrolled in the PPE program. W. G. Maclagan was his
tutor, and he came under the influence of H. A. Prichard and
H. H. Price, and, through them, Cook Wilson. He took first class
honors in 1936 and returned that fall for a D. Phil., attempting a
dissertation on Kant under T. D. Weldon. While at Oxford, he also
met his first wife, Mary Sharp, who was born in Yorkshire and to
whom he was married in 1938. Unable to articulate his new
interpretation of Kant sufficiently well to complete the degree,
Sellars returned to the U.S. in the fall of 1937, entering the
graduate department at Harvard and passing his prelims in the spring
of 1938. 


Newly married, Sellars was offered a job in 1938 at the University
of Iowa by Herbert Feigl. The department there was small, and Sellars
took charge of teaching the history of philosophy courses, working out
the view of the history of philosophy that informed his work
thereafter. But he never finished the dissertation at Harvard and was
plagued for a number of years by an inability to get his thoughts down
on paper. World War II interrupted his career; he served in the Navy
from 1943-46. When the war ended, Sellars had no choice
but to publish, and began a program of writing up to 10 hours a day,
however much (or little) he produced. Draft after draft of his first
attempt slowly evolved into "Realism and the New Way of
Words." Once he established a writing process, Sellars began
publishing steadily. For a thorough interpretation of Sellars' earliest publications, see P. Olen (2016, 2016).


In 1946, Sellars moved to the University of Minnesota, where he
rejoined Feigl. Together they published *Readings in Philosophical
Analysis* (1949), a classic early collection of analytical
philosophy, and founded *Philosophical Studies*, a leading
journal of analytic philosophy. With his colleague John Hospers,
Sellars published *Readings in Ethical Theory* (1952), which also
became an industry standard. Sellars chaired the department at
Minnesota from 1952-59, a time which also saw the flowering of the
Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science.


In the 1950s Sellars laid the groundwork for his systematic
approach to philosophy in such path-breaking essays as "Some
Reflections on Language Games" (1954, expanded in 1963) and
"Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," (1956) which
Tyler Burge (1992: 33) has called "the most influential paper of
the period." He visited at Yale in 1958, moving there as a
tenured professor in 1959. But Yale became factionalized, and Sellars
thought the internal politics disrupted his ability to do philosophy.
In 1963 he moved to the University of Pittsburgh, which was in the
process of reconstructing its philosophy department, becoming
a top-ranked department. Sellars remained at Pittsburgh until his
death in 1989, though he visited and lectured at a number of other
universities. He also accrued a number of honors, giving the John
Locke Lectures in 1965, the Matchette Foundation Lectures in 1971, the
John Dewey Lectures in 1973, and the Carus Lectures in 1977. Sellars
was elected President of the Eastern Division of the American
Philosophical Association in 1970. He published many books and
articles and also left his mark on the profession by training a large
number of graduate students (this author included). He was productive
into the early 1980s, when a stroke slowed him down; he died 2 July
1989. Following a lull in interest in his philosophy in the late
1980s and early 1990s, his work has garnered steadily increasing attention in the U. S. and abroad. 


## 2. The Philosophical Enterprise and the Images of Humanity-in-the-World


In "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" [PSIM],
Sellars lays out his view of philosophy and its current situation.
"The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand
how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in
the broadest possible sense of the term" (PSIM, in SPR:1; in
ISR: 369). "To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a
contemporary turn of phrase, to 'know one's way
around' ..., not in that unreflective way in which the
centipede of the story knew its way around before it faced the
question, 'how do I walk?', but in that reflective way
which means that no intellectual holds are barred"
(loc. cit.). Thus, philosophy is a reflectively conducted higher-order
inquiry that is continuous with but distinguishable from any of the
special disciplines, and the understanding it aims at must
have *practical force*, guiding our activities, both theoretical
and practical.


PSIM describes what Sellars sees as the major problem confronting
philosophy today. This is the "clash" between "the
'manifest' image of man-in-the-world" and "the
scientific image." These two 'images' are
idealizations of distinct conceptual frameworks in terms of which
humans conceive of the world and their place in it. Sellars
characterizes the manifest image as "the framework in terms of
which man came to be aware of himself as man-in-the-world"
(PSIM, in SPR: 6; in ISR: 374), but it is, more broadly, the framework
in terms of which we ordinarily observe and explain our world. The
fundamental objects of the manifest image are persons and things, with
emphasis on *persons*, which puts normativity and reason at
center stage. According to the manifest image, people *think*
and they do things for reasons, and both of these "can occur
only within a framework of conceptual thinking in terms of which
[they] can be criticized, supported, refuted, in short,
evaluated" (PSIM, in SPR: 6; in ISR: 374). In the manifest
image persons are very different from mere things; things do not act rationally, in accordance with normative rules, but only in accord with laws or perhaps habits. How and why
normative concepts and assessments apply to things is an important and contentious
question within the framework. 


The manifest image is not fixed or static; it can be refined both
*empirically* and *categorically*. Empirical refinement by
correlational induction results in ever better observation-level
generalizations about the world. Categorial refinement consists in
adding, subtracting, or reconceptualizing the basic objects recognized
in the image, e.g., worrying about whether persons are best thought of
in hylomorphic or dualistic categories or how things differ from
persons. Thus, the manifest image is neither unscientific nor
anti-scientific. It is, however, methodologically more promiscuous
and often less rigorous than institutionalized science. Traditional
philosophy, *philosophia perennis*, endorses the manifest image
as real and attempts to understand its structure. 


One kind of categorial change, however, is excluded from the
manifest image by stipulation: the addition to the framework of new
concepts of basic objects by means of theoretical postulation. This
is the move Sellars stipulates to be definitive of the scientific
image. Science, by postulating new kinds of basic entities (e.g.,
subatomic particles, fields, collapsing packets of probability waves),
slowly constructs a new framework that claims to be a
complete description and explanation of the world and its processes.
The scientific image grows out of and is methodologically posterior to
the manifest image, which provides the initial framework in which
science is nurtured, but Sellars claims that "the scientific
image presents itself as a *rival* image. From its point of view
the manifest image on which it rests is an 'inadequate'
but pragmatically useful likeness of a reality which first finds its
adequate (in principle) likeness in the scientific image" (PSIM,
in SPR: 20; in ISR: 388). 


Is it possible to reconcile these two images? Could manifest
objects *reduce* to systems of imperceptible scientific objects?
Are manifest objects ultimately real, scientific objects merely
abstract constructions valuable for the prediction and control of
manifest objects? Or are manifest objects appearances to human minds
of a reality constituted by systems of imperceptible particles or something even more basic, such as absolute processes (see FMPP)?
Sellars opts for the third alternative. The manifest image is, in his
view, a phenomenal realm a la Kant, but science, at its
Peircean ideal conclusion, reveals things as they are in themselves.
Despite what Sellars calls "the primacy of the
scientific image" (PSIM, in SPR: 32; in ISR: 400), he ultimately
argues for a "synoptic vision" in which the descriptive
and explanatory resources of the scientific image are united with the
"language of community and individual intentions," which
"provide[s] the ambience of principles and standards (above all,
those which make meaningful discourse and rationality itself possible)
within which we live our own individual lives" (PSIM, in SPR:
40; in ISR: 408). 


Norms are not reduced away in Sellars's naturalism; he
accommodates normativity, not as a basic, ontologically independent
feature of the world, but rather as a conceptually irreducible,
indispensable aspect of distinctively human activity grounded in the
collective institution of principles and standards. We will return to
the question of norms later in this article.


Sellars boldly proclaims that "in the dimension of describing
and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of
what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not" (EPM
SS41; in SPR: 173; in KMG: 253). But understood in the context of
his system, this is not the proclamation of a harsh, reductive
scientific realism, for (1) he does not believe that describing and
explaining are the only significant dimensions of human activity. In
particular, he recognizes that *prescription*
and *proscription* are (a) different from description and (b)
indispensable to human activity. And (2), his conception of ontology
is *object-oriented*; the presence of normative truths does not
belie his fundamental naturalistic nominalism. To begin to unpack
these claims, we need to look at Sellars's philosophy of
language and his ontology.


## 3. Language and Being


### 3.1 Semantics


Sellars takes an unorthodox approach to language, but it is also
crucial for his naturalistic metaphysics. The key to his view is that
semantic terms and descriptions provide functional classifications of
linguistic tokens. His analysis of meaning statements such as 



> 
> '*Rot*,' in German, means *red*
> 


 or 



> 
> 'Brother' means *male sibling*
> 


treats them as statements that convey the information that the word
mentioned on the left-hand side has a relevantly similar usage to the
phrase on the right-hand side. These meaning statements, however, do
not explicitly *say* that the two expressions they each contain
have the same usage. Rather, each sentence presupposes that the
person it is directed at already understands the background language,
in this case English, and uses the expression on the right-hand side
as an *illustrating sortal* to form an indexical predicate
(forming a predicate by giving an example bearing the relevant
property), which is then applied to the tokens picked out by
the expression on the left-hand side of the sentence. Sellars
invented a device, dot-quotation, to express this formally. Dot
quotation forms a common noun (not a name) that applies to every item in any
language that functions in a relevantly similar way to the quoted
expression. *Red* is a common noun true of any expression
that functions like the English word 'red.' Thus, Sellars
analyzes 



> 
> '*Rot*,' in German, means *red*
> 


as



> 
> '*Rot*'s, in German, are *red*s.
> 


"According to this analysis, *meaning is not a relation*
for the very simple reason that 'means' is
a *specialized form of the copula*" (MFC: 431). 


Reference is also given a functional analysis. Reference, unlike meaning,
is extensional. While we can say that
both



> 
> '*Venedig*' (in German) refers to Venice
> 


and



> 
> '*Venedig*'s are German *Venice*s
> 


are true, we can't say that both



> 
> '*Die Konigin der Adria*' (in German) refers to Venice
> 


and



> 
> '*Die Konigin der Adria*'s are German *Venice*s
> 


are true. The first member of each pair is true, but '*die
Konigin der Adria'* has a different sense from
'Venice,' because it is a descriptive phrase and has an
internal syntactic and semantic complexity that the proper name
'Venice' does not. Sellars guarantees the extensionality
of reference by introducing a quantifier into his analysis of
'refers' statements. He takes reference statements to
quantify implicitly over senses, that is, functions of expressions,
and then defines an extensional relation of material or extensional
equivalence between senses (see SM III SS63: 84). Our example
sentences are then analyzed, where 'S' is variable over
senses (so that 'S' is a higher-order substitutional variable whose substituends are sortals such as *Venice*), as 



> 
> For some S, '*Venedig*' (in German) stands for S,
> and S is materially equivalent to *Venice*
> 


and



> 
> For some S, '*Die Konigin der Adria*'(in
> German) stands for S, and S is materially equivalent to
> *Venice*.
> 


The idea of a reference relation is the heart of orthodox semantic
theory in contemporary logic and the philosophy of language, but
Sellars denies that reference is a relation, just as he denies that
meaning is a relation. The same goes for truth, which classical
theories try to understand through some correspondence relation
purported to hold between sentences and the world. Sellars endorses
instead a pragmatist conception of truth:



> [F]or a proposition to be true is for it to be assertible,
> where this means not
> *capable* of being asserted ... but *correctly*
> assertible; assertible, that is, in accordance with the relevant
> semantical rules, and on the basis of such additional, though
> unspecified, information as these rules may require... .
> 'True', then, means *semantically* assertible
> ('S-assertible') and the varieties of truth correspond to
> the relevant varieties of semantical rule (SM, IV, SS26:
> 101).


The "varieties of truth" Sellars speaks of include
empirical truth (which involves the picturing relation mentioned
below), mathematical truth, legal truth, moral truth, etc. 


This is a version of a use theory of meaning. Sellars
distinguishes three different generic dimensions of usage:
language-entry transitions, intralinguistic transitions, and
language-exit transitions. Some examples: Contexts of perception and
observation are those in which one *enters* a language in
response to some form of sensory stimulation. The announcement of a
resolution followed by an action that attempts to carry it out is a
case of *exiting* a language. Intralinguistic transitions
include inferences and responses of one kind or another. In
contrast to Quine's emphasis on occasion sentences, Sellars puts
particular emphasis on the importance of intralinguistic connections,
an aspect of his view that has been further developed in Robert
Brandom's inferentialism. Sellars distinguishes *formal*
inferences, which are a matter of the syntactic rules of the language,
from *material* inferences, which are not a function of syntactic
structure alone. The inference from 'This is red' to
'This is colored' is one example of a material inference,
but, in Sellars's view, so is the inference from 'It is
raining' to 'The street will be wet'. Material
inferences are not merely enthymemes ultimately to be made good by
supplying an explicit principle: the web of material inferences an
expression is involved in, especially the subjunctives it sustains,
determines its core meaning.


Sellars has a complex view of what ties language to the world. In
the first instance, language is tied to the world, not by a single
reference (or 'satisfaction') relation, but by the
multitude of relationships -- causal (in both directions),
spatio-temporal, and normative -- between tokens of linguistic
expressions and the world. Sellars does, however, single out for
special attention a relation he calls *picturing*. Though the
notion of picturing is inspired by early Wittgenstein, in
Sellars's version it is a natural, non-semantic relation
between *objects*, not facts. The relata are, on the one hand,
what Sellars calls 'natural linguistic objects,' tokens of
linguistic expressions, and, on the other hand, objects in the world.
The basic idea is that in any empirically meaningful language, the
occurrences of a certain class of linguistic events (namely,
first-level, atomic, matter-of-factual statements playing roles in
observational and volitional contexts) have to constitute a *map*
or *picture* of the surrounding environment in virtue of an
isomorphism between the properties of worldly objects and counterpart
properties of the linguistic events. Sellars thinks this is a
condition on *any* empirically meaningful language, but he also
believes that one of the tasks of science is to improve the accuracy
and refine the grain of such an isomorphism. Sellars's notion
of picturing has puzzled many, but we can see an influence on Ruth
Millikan's biosemantics, as well as Huw Price's recent
(2011, 2013) distinction between e-representation and
i-representation. 


### 3.2 Ontology


Sellars often described his realistic naturalism as
'nominalistic,' but the point is not so much to deny that
there are abstracta as to tell us what language that uses abstract
singular terms is doing for us and how differently it functions from
language using concrete singular terms. If we understand how abstract
singular terms function, the claims of the Platonist metaphysician
seem an elaborate (and perhaps misleading) way to make a simpler, more
pragmatic point. First, Sellars argues that the then-prevalent
standard of ontological commitment --being the value of a
variable of quantification-- is mistaken (GE, NAO). Such a
criterion makes the indeterminate reference of quantified variables
more primitive than any form of determinate reference. This is
incompatible with Sellars's understanding of naturalism, and he
claims it also gets the grammar of existence claims wrong. (Sellars
construes quantification substitutionally; see Lance 1996.) Sellars
proposes a different standard: we are committed to the kinds of things
we can explicitly name and classify in the ground-level, empirical,
object-language statements we take to be true.


In ordinary language we often talk about meanings, properties,
propositions, etc., thus apparently committing ourselves to the
existence of such abstracta. Sellars interprets such talk as material
mode metalinguistic speech about the functional roles of
expression-kinds. Thus, a sentence such as



> 
> Euclidean triangularity entails having angles that sum to two right angles
> 



conveys information about the function of the *triangle*,
namely, that its use (in Euclidean contexts)entitles one to a
*has angles summing to two right angles*. Similarly,
Sellars interprets fact-talk as material mode metalinguistic speech
about truths. The only things to which we are ontologically committed
by the use of abstract singular terms are linguistic items:
specifically, expression-tokens that participate in complex causal
systems which involve, inter alia, normatively assessable interactions
between language users and the world. In Sellars's
reconstruction of it, talk of abstract entities does not have
*explanatory* force, but is involved in making explicit certain
linguistic norms.


Platonic realists are often moved by the belief that the most basic
linguistic structure, predication itself, involves a commitment to
abstracta, for common explications of predication make essential
mention of properties, relations, and such. Sellars argues that this
gets the order of explication exactly wrong: apparently purely
descriptive claims about property instantiation are, in fact,
misleading ways of communicating norms of linguistic
correctness. Sellars offers a different explication of predication,
according to which the focus is not on any relation between an object
and some abstract entity, but qualifying and arranging names to suit
them for certain linguistic purposes. So understood, the Platonist's
treatment of predication seems, again, to be an elaborate and
misleading way to make a simpler, more pragmatic point. At the most
basic, atomic level, predication is a matter of endowing names
with counterpart characteristics of the objects they purport to name,
enabling some true atomic sentences to 'map' or
'picture' objects in the world. Predication thus commits
one only to natural objects potentially correlated with each other.
NAO, chapter 3, contains the most complete statement of this view. 


Sellars gives a unified treatment of the alethic, causal, and
deontic modalities as (once again) material mode metalinguistic speech
expressing the inferential commitments and priorities embedded in the
language. Thus, using modal language in talking about the world and
our agency in the world does not commit us to recognizing
independent, metaphysically real necessary connections or the existence of moral
facts independent of moral agents. It does commit us to prescribing
and proscribing certain linguistic or conceptual transitions, including
language-exit transitions that emerge in action. As Robert Kraut
describes it, "metaphysical claims that initially appear to
state language-world connections--claims about the relation
between predicates and properties, for example--are, on
Sellars's theory, construed as normative claims about
appropriate linguistic usage" (Kraut 2010: 601).


## 4. Epistemology


In his theory of knowledge Sellars attempts to balance competing
insights in several different dimensions --
empiricist-rationalist, foundationalist-coherentist,
externalist-internalist, realist-phenomenalist-idealist -- while
also keeping an eye on the deep connections between epistemology and
the metaphysics of mind. His attack on the 'myth of the
given' is renowned, so we begin there. 


Antecedent to epistemology, Sellars's treatment of semantics
essentially constitutes a denial of what can be called a *semantic
given*--the idea that some of our terms or concepts,
independently of their occurrence in formal and material inferences,
derive their meaning directly from confrontation with a particular
(kind of) object or experience. Sellars is anti-foundationalist in
his theories of concepts, knowledge, and truth.


Traditional epistemology assumed that knowledge is hierarchically
structured. There must, it was believed, be some cognitive states in
direct contact with reality that serve as a firm foundation on which
the rest of our knowledge is built by various inferential methods.
This *foundationalist picture* of knowledge imposes two
requirements on knowledge: (1) There must be cognitive states that
are *basic* in the sense that they possess some positive
epistemic status independently of their epistemic relations to any
other cognitive states. I call this the Epistemic Independence
Requirement [EIR]. Positive epistemic statuses include *being
knowledge, being justified*, or just *having some presumption in
its favor*. (It was popular to claim that basic cognitions must
possess an *unassailable* epistemic warrant -- certainty,
incorrigibility, or even infallibility -- but this is not as
common today.) Epistemic relations include deductive and inductive
implication. (2) Every nonbasic cognitive state can possess positive
epistemic status only because of the epistemic relations it bears,
directly or indirectly, to basic cognitive states. Thus the basic
states must provide the ultimate support for the rest of our
knowledge, which I call the Epistemic Efficacy Requirement [EER].
Such basic, independent and efficacious, cognitive states would be
the *given*. Many philosophers have believed that there has to
be such a given, if there is to be any knowledge at all. 


Some commentators on Sellars take his attack on the given to turn
on rejecting the belief that any cognitive state could
have *unassailable* warrant or certainty. Although Sellars was a
fallibilist and believed that any cognitive state could be challenged,
his argument against the given does not worry about this issue. If
the foundationalist picture of the structure of knowledge is itself
wrong, the strength of foundational warrant is irrelevant.


Sellars denies not only that there *must* be a given, but that
there *can* be a given in the sense defined, for nothing can
satisfy both EIR and EER. To satisfy EER, a basic cognition must be
capable of participating in inferential relations with other
cognitions; it must possess propositional form and be truth-evaluable.
To meet EIR, such a propositionally structured cognition must possess
its epistemic status independently of inferential connections to other
cognitions. No cognitive states satisfy both requirements.


The standard candidates for basic empirical knowledge either fail
EER (e.g., knowledge of sense-data), or presuppose other knowledge on
the part of the knower, and thus fail EIR (e.g., knowledge of
appearances). Such states count as
*cognitive* states only because of their epistemic relations
to other cognitive states. Because he argues by cases, it is unclear
whether some other candidates might satisfy both requirements. There
is no exhaustive list of all possible candidates for the given. Thus,
the argument is not a conclusive, once-and-for-all refutation of
foundationalism, but it is a significant challenge to it, putting the
burden of proof on the defenders of a given. If it works, one has to
abandon any picture of knowledge acquisition as piecemeal and
incremental. Sellars's argument, in combination with arguments
by Quine and Davidson, among others, has put foundationalism on the
defensive since, roughly, the mid-point of the 20th
century.


A reconstruction of Wilfrid Sellars's Argument that the given is a myth, from
"Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind".




|  |  |
| --- | --- |
| 1. | A cognitive state is *epistemically independent* if it
possesses its epistemic status independently of
its being inferred or inferrable from some other
cognitive state. |
|  | [Definition of epistemic independence] |
| 2. | A cognitive state is epistemically efficacious -- is capable
of epistemically supporting other cognitive states -- if the
epistemic status of those other states can be validly inferred
(formally or materially) from its epistemic status. |
|  | [Definition of epistemic efficacy] |
| 3 | The doctrine of the given is that any empirical knowledge *that
p* requires some (or is itself) basic, that is, epistemically
independent, knowledge (*that g*, *h*, *i*, ...)
which is epistemically efficacious with respect to *p*. |
|  | [Definition of doctrine of the given] |
| 4. | Inferential relations are always between items with
propositional form. |
|  | [By the nature of inference] |
| 5. | Therefore, non-propositional items (such as sense
data) are epistemically inefficacious and cannot
serve as what is given. |
|  | [From 2 and 4] |
| 6. | No inferentially acquired, propositionally structured
mental state is epistemically independent. |
|  | [From 1] |
| 7. | Examination of multiple candidates for non-inferentially acquired,
propositionally structured cognitive states indicates that their
epistemic status presupposes the possession by the knowing subject of
other empirical knowledge, both of particulars and of general
empirical truths. |
|  | [From Sellars's analyses of statements about
sense-data and appearances in Parts 1-IV of EPM and his analysis of
epistemic authority in Part VIII] |
| 8. | Presupposition is an epistemic and therefore an
inferential relation. |
|  | [Assumed (See PRE)] |
| 9. | Non-inferentially acquired empirical knowledge that
presupposes the possession by the knowing
subject of other empirical knowledge is not
epistemically independent. |
|  | [From 1, 7, and 8] |
| 10. | Any empirical, propositional cognition is acquired
either inferentially or non-inferentially. |
|  | [Excluded middle] |
| 11. | Therefore, propositionally structured cognitions,
whether inferentially or non-inferentially
acquired, are never epistemically independent
and cannot serve as the given.  |
|  | [6, 9, 10, constructive dilemma] |
| 12. | Every cognition is either propositionally structured
or not. |
|  | [Excluded middle] |
| 13. | Therefore, it is reasonable to believe that no item of
empirical knowledge can serve the function of a
given. |
|  | [5,11, 12, constructive dilemma] |


Rejecting the myth of the given is not yet a positive epistemology.
Sellars can abandon the myth of the given only if he gives us a
positive theory of non-inferential knowledge to replace it. (There
must be non-inferential knowledge, that is, knowledge that is
not *acquired* by inference, even if its epistemic status depends
on its inferential connections to other knowledge.)


The paradigm cases of non-inferential knowledge are introspection,
perception, and memory [IPM] beliefs (see MGEC). According to
Sellars, such beliefs have epistemic status because, given the
processes by which language and beliefs are acquired, they are likely
to be true. IPM beliefs are reliable indicators, like the temperature
readings on a thermometer. This is a reliablist or externalist
condition on such knowledge. A chain of empirical justification can
properly start with IPM beliefs because they are noninferential
reliable indicators of the truth of their contents. Thus, their occurrence licenses an
inference to the likely truth of their contents, and thence to other
consequences by formal or material rules of inference.


But Sellars is not, in the end, a reliablist. Thermometers may be
highly reliable, but they have no knowledge. Sellars adds another
condition: the subject must *know* that her IPM belief is
reliable. This imposes a reflexivity requirement on knowledge.



> [T]o be fully a master of his language, Jones must know
> [some] facts about what is involved in learning to use perceptual
> sentences in perceptual contexts. Thus, Jones too must know that other
> specifiable things being equal, the fact that a person says 'Lo!
> Here is a red apple' is a good reason to believe that he is
> indeed in the presence of a red apple. Thus, Jones, too, can reason:
> 
> 
> > I just thought-out-loud 'Lo! Here is a red
> > apple'  
> >  (no countervailing conditions obtain);  
> >  So,
> > there is good reason to believe that there is a red apple in front of
> > me. (SK II SS40: 325)
> > 
> 
> 
> 


The point is not simply that knowers are capable of metajudgments.
Sellars has a larger condition in mind: "The essential point is
that in characterizing an episode or a state as that
of *knowing*, we are not giving an empirical description of that
episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons,
of justifying and being able to justify what one says" (EPM:
SS36, in SPR: 169; in KMG: 248). This dictum needs to be combined
with another well-known Sellarsian pronouncement: "Now the idea
that epistemic facts can be analysed without remainder--even
'in principle'--into non-epistemic facts, whether
phenomenal or behavioural, public or private, with no matter how
lavish a sprinkling of subjunctives and hypotheticals is, I believe, a
radical mistake--a mistake of a piece with the so-called
'naturalistic fallacy' in ethics" (EPM: SS5, in
SPR: 131; in KMG: 209). 


In order to operate within "the logical space of
reasons," one must be at home with normative discourse,
responsive to reasons as such, sensitive to standards of correctness
and appropriateness. This requirement imposes a
coherentist/holist condition that precludes the possibility of
atomistically isolable cognitive states: any cognitive state,
including bottom-level, non-inferential IPM beliefs, can be cognitive
only as one element in a complex, reflexively structured system of
such states responsive to epistemic norms and goals.


Such a holism of cognitive states raises an obvious problem: how
could one *start* acquiring cognitive states without falling into
circularity or regress? The normativity of the cognitive is crucial
to Sellars's answer: we can acquire piecemeal by natural, causal
pathways the individual habits and dispositions that, when present in
sufficient numbers and appropriately interrelated, warrant the
application of the normative language of cognition.


Even so, Sellars rejects the traditional forms of both
foundationalism and coherentism.



> One seems forced to choose between the picture of an
> elephant which rests on a tortoise (What supports the tortoise?) and
> the picture of a great Hegelian serpent of knowledge with its tail in
> its mouth (Where does it begin?). Neither will do. For empirical
> knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational, not
> because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting
> enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once
> (EPM SS38, in SPR: 170; in KMG: 250).


## 5. Philosophy of Mind


Sellars's philosophy of mind is deeply Kantian in the sense
that he draws a sharp distinction between thought and sense. The intentionality-body problem requires a different solution from the sensorium-body
problem. His philosophy of mind
abandons many of the assumptions taken for granted by the Cartesian
tradition (e.g., the transparent or self-intimating nature of the
mental), moving towards a naturalism that respects the normative
dimension of mind. His key idea is that psychological concepts are like
theoretical concepts in the sciences. Mentalistic concepts
are thus as compatible with naturalism as any well-grounded scientific
concept.


Sellars defends these claims in his classic article, EPM. The
"Rylean myth" narrated in parts 12-16 of EPM is a
thought experiment aimed to convince us that the Cartesian story is
not the only possible story about our knowledge of the mental. The thought experiment
hypothesizes a community of proto-humans who lack concepts of inner
psychological states, although they possess a complex language for
describing and explaining objects and events in the world. Sellars
calls them 'Ryleans' in honor of Gilbert Ryle, the Oxford
philosopher whose book, *The Concept of Mind*, argues eloquently
for a version of logical behaviorism. This community possesses a
behaviorist's ability to explain human behavior as well as
metalinguistic abilities to describe and prescribe linguistic
behavior. Thus, the community has semantic concepts at its disposal.
Sellars claims that such a community can reasonably increase its
explanatory resources by postulating unobservable states internal to
each person that modulate that person's responses to the world.
Moreover, there is motive to postulate two different kinds of internal
states: one kind--thoughts--has properties modeled on the
semantic properties of overt linguistic events, while the
other--sense impressions--has properties modeled on the
properties of perceptible objects. Thoughts are postulated to explain
how the members of the community can engage in complex patterns of
reasonable behavior even when silent. Sense impressions are
postulated to explain why members of the community acquire conceptual representations of objects as before them, even, at times, when such objects are not present. If Sellars's story
is coherent, then the traditional view that our concepts and knowledge
of the mental are simply *given* is not compulsory, and a
naturalistic treatment of the mental is potentially viable.


### 5.1 Intentionality


The fundamental thought behind Sellars's treatment of
intentionality is that our concepts of intentionality and intentional
states are derived from concepts pertaining to linguistic behavior.
Notice, this is not the claim that we always think in language or that
we learn to speak before we learn to think, which claims have
mistakenly been attributed to Sellars. Sellars is not engaged in
armchair psychology but with what legitimates our use of psychological
concepts. 


This approach to intentionality mobilizes Sellars's
functionalist treatment of meaning. Attributing a thought (hope,
regret, desire ...) that *p* to someone is a complex affair.
In the first instance, such an attribution locates the relevant state
of the person "in the logical space of reasons." This is to place the
state-type of the person within a vast network of possible intentional
state- and action-types related to each other by normative relations
of inference, exclusion, relevance, and propriety. But actual
intentional state-types must be embodied in physical tokens, so
attributing an intentional state to someone effectively attributes to
that person as well a behavioral control system that is so structured
that something analogous to theoretical and practical inference goes
on within it and, in this case, has a **p** active in
it in the appropriate way. Being active "in the appropriate
way" within someone's behavioral control system will
include participating in patterns of dispositions to infer and be
inferred from other intentional states that mirror the patterns of
relationships in the logical space of reasons, as well being tied to
sensory input and to output activities in appropriate ways.


This approach is incompatible with the traditional view that the
meaning of linguistic items is to be explained in terms of the
thoughts they express. This issue is the heart of Sellars's
correspondence with Roderick Chisholm, published as
"Intentionality and the Mental" [ITM]. Chisholm
maintained that reference to mental states is always implicit in
semantic statements and in our ability to comprehend the meanings of
utterances. Sellars demurs:



> The argument presumes that the metalinguistic vocabulary
> in which we talk about linguistic episodes can be analysed in terms
> which do not presuppose the framework of mental acts; in particular
> that
> 
> 
> > "..." means p
> 
> 
> 
> is not to be analysed as
> 
> 
> > "..." expresses t and t is about
> > p
> 
>  where t is a thought. (ITM: 522)


In Sellars's view, thought is prior to language in the order
of being, but language is prior to thought in the order of knowing.
That is, linguistic utterances are normally the product of internal
thinking activity, which they express. The Ryleans in Sellars's
myth *have* thoughts that are expressed in their utterances, but
they don't realize that they have such inner states. They have
the notion of a meaningful utterance *before* generating the
notion of a meaningful *thought*, modeled on the former notion.
Thus, language is prior to thought in the order of knowing.


In his early work (see, e.g., EPM SS29), Sellars takes a hard
line equating language possession and the ability to think, thereby denying thought to
infralinguals, but in later pieces, most notably SK and MEV, he
modifies this position. He makes room for non-linguistic thought in
humans, recognizing that visual perception and imagination are
"in a sense most difficult to analyze, a thinking in color about
colored objects" (SK I SS37: 305). Then, in "Mental
Events," Sellars introduces a distinction
between *propositional form* and
*logical form* that he did not utilize earlier. "To have
propositional form, a basic representational state must represent an
object and represent it as of a certain character" (MEV: 336).
Items in many non-linguistic representational systems such as maps
possess propositional form by this characterization. Logical form,
however, is possessed by items that belong to representational systems
that include distinct symbols for logical operators. In this late
essay, Sellars acknowledges that animals possess representations with
propositional form and can make, correspondingly, what Sellars calls
"Humean inferences," that is, material inferences that
employ no explicit generalization or logical principle. His example
is the move from "Smoke here" to "Fire
nearby." Human representational systems possess logical form;
they enable us to engage in what he calls "Aristotelian
inferences" in which a general principle is explicitly
represented: "Smoke here. Wherever there's smoke,
there's fire. So, Fire nearby." This, Sellars claims, is
the crucial difference between animal and human: full-fledged thinkers
can recognize conditionality and generality *as such*, because
they possess explicit symbols for *if...then*, *all*,
and *some*. 


Sellars's treatment of intentionality has implications for
first-person authority and the "problem of other minds."
Reports of one's own mental state cannot
have an intrinsic or absolute, apriori warrant, nor can privileged
accessibility be the defining trait of the mental, as some have
claimed. The extent and strength of first-person warrant rests
ultimately on the empirical reliability of such reports, just as the
warrant of observation reports does. This extends as well to
observation reports concerning the mental states of others, for are
not we able, upon occasion, to *see* someone's joy or
misery? The "problem of other minds" never really gets
off the ground in the context of Sellars's philosophy, for the
"concepts pertaining to such inner episodes as thoughts are
primarily and essentially inter-subjective, as inter-subjective as the
concept of a positron, and ... the reporting role of these concepts
-- the fact that each of us has a privileged access to his
thoughts -- constitutes a dimension of the use of these concepts
which is built on and presupposes this intersubjective status"
(EPM: SS59; in SPR: 189; in KMG: 269).


Sellars's treatment of mentalistic concepts as similar to
theoretical concepts has been cited as an inspiration for the
"theory-theory" in developmental psychology. This is the
notion that the mechanisms we utilize to detect and attribute thoughts
in ourselves and others operate via a kind of tacit theory application
and that there is a developmental stage in children during which they
acquire a "theory of mind" and learn to apply it. (See
Astington *et al*. 1988; Gopnik and Wellman, 1994; Wellman, 1990;
Garfield *et al*., 2001.) This creative extension of Sellars's
proposal is not something he is committed to; he is not engaged in
empirical theorizing. 


Sellars's treatment of mentalistic concepts has also inspired
eliminativist philosophies of mind such as that espoused by the
Churchlands. The idea is that if folk psychology is like a theory,
then, like any theory, it could be superseded and replaced by a better
theory as scientific psychology and neuroscience progress. Sellars
himself, however, was unmoved by this idea, because the concepts of
folk psychology (of the manifest image) are not focused solely (or
maybe even principally) on the description and explanation of
phenomena. In the course of science, better descriptions of what is
going on in our heads when we think and sense will be developed, but
such descriptions could have only a part of the function of mentalistic
language. The language of agency, to which we will shortly return, is
indispensable and cannot be replaced by the language of any scientific
theory. 


### 5.2 The Sensory


Sellars's treatment of the sensory is particularly complex;
this article can only summarize. The context is, again, the idea that
our concepts of sensory states are, in some important ways, like
theoretical concepts. Concepts of sensory states, however, are
introduced to explain different phenomena from those that concepts of
intentional states are introduced to explain. They are originally
introduced to explain illusions, hallucinations and such, cases in
which people sincerely report and behave as if perceiving something
that is not there. Once introduced for those purposes, however, such
concepts must be applied generally: we cannot think that we have
sensations *only* in cases of illusion and hallucination. A
philosophically satisfactory theory of the sensory must account for
the complexity and peculiarities of the language of sensory
experience, both illusory and veridical.



> It is therefore crucial to my thesis to emphasize that
> sense impressions or raw feels are common sense theoretical constructs
> introduced to explain the occurrence not of white rat type
> discriminative behavior, but rather of perceptual propositional
> attitudes, and are therefore bound up with the explanation of why
> human language contains families of predicates having the logical
> properties of words for perceptible qualities and relations. (IAMB in
> PP: 387; in ISR: 366)


Sellars then argues that the language of perceptible qualities and
relations cannot be reduced to or replaced by any vocabulary we
currently project to be adequate to the behavior of mere physical
objects.


The argument for this claim is complex. There is a
quasi-historical story about how the conception of the proper and
common sensibles has been transformed over the course of human history
and an argument that this story is constrained in a particular way
that blocks a reductive interpretation of our concepts of the sensory
(the so-called 'grain argument'). Nonetheless, Sellars
argues that, in the end, sensory states will turn out to be physical
states of a very particular ilk that exist only in the context of
living organisms. They are, in the terminology Sellars developed with
his colleague Paul Meehl, physical1 but not
physical2, where 



> *Physical1*: an event or entity
> is *physical1* if it belongs in the space-time
> network.



> *Physical2*: an event or entity
> is *physical2* if it is definable in terms of
> theoretical primitives adequate to describe completely the actual
> states though not necessarily the potentialities of the universe
> before the appearance of life. (CE: 252)


Sensory states are, thus, historically emergent in the universe,
but nonetheless physical: the effort to provide a complete description
and explanation of the physics of sentient beings will expand the
theoretical primitives utilized in that science, relocating the
logical space of the proper and common sensibles within physics as a
primitive vocabulary. 


The quasi-history of our sensory concepts starts with a mythical
beginning in which the concepts that *we* think of as concepts of
sensible qualities are taken to be concepts of the very substance of
things. 'Blue triangle' is construed as we would now
construe 'metal triangle'. But treating sensibles as
substantive cannot go very far; it does not provide a useful way of
classifying, explaining, and predicting the behavior of the things we
encounter. The sensibles soon become treated as
occurrent *qualities* of substances with complex causal profiles.
The view that the sensibles are modifications of substances is then
supplemented with the notion that they possess a subsidiary and
analogous being-for-mind that explains our ability to apprehend them
directly (unlike causal dispositions) and to be sometimes mistaken
about their presence. In the current manifest image, this is how we
think of sensible properties, according to Sellars. Physical objects
are colored, odorous, etc., but 'color,'
'odor,'etc. also apply in an analogous way to our sensory
states. The rise of a new, atomistic science has started to push our
conception of the sensibles in new directions. First, it encourages a
reinterpretation of the distinction between the common and the proper
sensibles. The common sensibles, those available to more than one
sense, include such geometric and dynamic properties as shape and
motion; these apply to physical objects and their microconstituents,
because physical explanations exploit such properties. The proper
sensibles are the qualities available only to specific senses,
including colors, odors, etc., and they do not apply to the
microconstituents of physical objects, because they do no explanatory
work in physical laws. Primary and secondary qualities are distinct
in kind, and secondary qualities are demoted to second-class,
subjective status. They exist only in the mind, as states of the
perceiver. The next move seems clear: the mind itself is subjected to
scientific investigation and becomes increasingly identified with the
brain or central nervous system. But the proper sensibles can no more
exist in the brain than in any other kind of matter. This brings us
to our current predicament: we are unable to find a place in the world
for the proper sensibles, which have been brutually (and
metaphysically) severed from the common sensibles, even though color
and extension, for example, seem intrinsically related.


This streamlined historical view is combined with the 'grain
argument', which encapsulates the reasoning that led to the
denial that physical objects are really colored. This argument poses
a challenge to materialism by purporting to show that the proper
sensibles cannot be reduced to properties or relations of more basic
physical particles that lack these properties. 


Before considering the grain argument *per se*, however, we
need to look at Sellars's phenomenology of perceptual and
imaginative experience. Sellars carefully distinguishes between
propositional seeing and objectual seeing, and between seeing an
object and what we see *of* the object. All perceptual
experience, in his view, has *conceptual* content, which shows up
in the propositional content of a seeing or in what we see an
object *as*. But he is also firmly convinced that not everything
in perception is present as conceptual content, as something thought
of or believed in. "We see not only
*that* the ice cube is pink, and see it *as* pink, we
see *the very pinkness* of the object; also *its very shape*
-- though from a certain point of view" (SSOP SS25:
88). What we see *of* the ice cube is present to us in a
different way from that in which the (merely) conceptual content of
our experience is present to us. What is needed is:



> an analysis of the sense in which we see of the pink ice
> cube its very pinkness. Here, I believe, sheer phenomenology or
> conceptual analysis takes us *part* of the way, but finally lets
> us down. How far does it take us? Only to the point of assuring us
> that
> 
> 
> > *Something, somehow* a cube of pink in physical space
> > is present in the perception other than as merely *believed in*
> > (SSOP SS26: 89).
> 
> 


Sellars takes it that this claim states a structural feature of the
manifest image. It is, note, incompatible with views that reject the idea that
there is a nonconceptual component in perception--which Sellars
would think are confused about the place of sensible qualities in the
manifest image. The real challenge is filling in the placeholders in
the above claim: what kind of thing that is in what kind of way a cube
of pink in physical space is present in one's perception, and
how can it be present in a way other than as believed in? 


The grain argument is meant to cut off reductive replies to these
questions. Sellars's commentators have often taken it to be a
very complex and obscure argument, but Sellars seems to think it is
fairly straightforward. The grain argument works only against
attempts to reduce sensory phenomena to more basic
atomistic/mechanistic entities. If the world does not have an
ultimate 'grain,' then the argument won't apply.
The notion of a reduction must also be specified, for it is
notoriously multivalent. Sellars's notion of reduction is
fairly straightforward:



> if an object is in a strict sense a system of objects,
> then every property of the object must consist in the fact that its
> constituents have such and such qualities and stand in such and such
> relations or, roughly,
> 
> 
> > every property of a system of objects consists of
> > properties of, and relations between, its constituents (PSIM in SPR:
> > 27).
> 
> 


But the proper sensibles are not reducible in this way to the
properties and relations of micro-objects.



> Pink does not seem to be made up of imperceptible
> qualities in the way in which being a ladder is made up of being
> cylindrical (the rungs), rectangular (the frame), wooden, etc. The
> manifest ice cube presents itself to us as something which is pink
> through and through, as a pink continuum, all the regions of which,
> however small, are pink. It presents itself to us as ultimately
> homogeneous; and an ice cube variegated in colour is, though not
> homogeneous in its specific colour, 'ultimately
> homogeneous', in the sense to which I am calling attention, with
> respect to the generic trait of being coloured (PSIM in SPR:
> 26).


In a world that science teaches us is a blooming, buzzing confusion
of unobservable submicroscopic entities, there seems to be no room for
the smoothly homogeneous, either 'out there' or 'in
the head.' The dense, continuous, homogeneously colored objects
of the manifest image are *appearances* of systems of
imperceptible particles. Sense impressions are posited to explain how
systems of particles appear the way they do; they cannot themselves
turn out to be another kind of system of particles, or the explanation
fails.


If this argument is right, then the postulation of sense
impressions must differ in some important ways from the kind of
theoretical postulation that typically results in a belief in new
microentities. And this is what Sellars argues.



> [T]he theory of sense impressions does
> not *introduce*, for example, cubical volumes of pink. It
> reinterprets the *categorial* status of the cubical volumes of
> pink of which we are perceptually aware. Conceived in the manifest
> image as, in standard cases, *constituents* of physical objects
> and in abnormal cases, as somehow 'unreal' or
> 'illusory', they are *recategorized* as sensory
> states of the perceiver and assigned various explanatory roles in the
> theory of perception... .  
>  47. The pinkness of a pink
> sensation is 'analogous' to the pinkness of a manifest
> pink ice cube, not by being a *different quality* which is in
> some respect analogous to pinkness (as the quality a Martian
> experiences in certain magnetic fields might be analogous to pink with
> respect to its place in a quality space), but by being the same
> 'content' in a different categorical 'form'
> (FMPP III: 73).


Sellars holds, then, that the logical space of the sensible
qualities has been successively recategorized in different stages of
human development. He proposes that this history will take one more
turn as science develops further: unable to reduce or eliminate the
sensibles, science will postulate a distinctive set of
entities, *sensa*, to be the final embodiment of the sensible
qualities, physical1 but not physical2. Sellars
is a physicalist about color, not because he thinks colors can be
reduced to more basic properties and relations of physical objects,
but because physics will have to expand to accommodate the sensible
qualities, color included, as primitive entities. 


There are still further twists and turns in Sellars's
treatment of the sensory. (See Rosenberg (1982) and deVries (2005),
Chapter 8, for more exploration of this issue.) 


## 6. Science and Reality


Sellars was a significant philosopher of science and a staunch
defender of scientific realism. He often couched his discussions in
the terms made common by the logical empiricists, but he was in many
ways a subversive philosopher of science, undermining the irenic
instrumentalism popular in the 1950s and '60s (e.g., the views defended by Ernest Nagel)in favor of a
position that might seem oxymoronic: a pragmatic realism. 


We can start with the distinction between observational
and theoretical vocabularies. Many empiricists were
wedded to the myth of the given, assuming that there is a privileged
observation vocabulary. The meanings of observation terms were
determined by their relation to what is given and were thus
unrevisable or incorrigible. This vocabulary grounds the meaning of
all empirical language. Two kinds of generalizations were recognized:
(1) empirical generalizations formulated in the observation language
and justified by straightforward inductive methods, and (2)
higher-level generalizations formulated in a more abstract,
theoretical idiom including novel theoretical posits. This
theoretical language consists of terms invented in order to better
organize, generalize, and make connections among the assertions and
generalizations made in the observation language. The ideal would be
a formal axiomatic structure that would allow a deduction of the
empirical generalizations which, combined with statements of initial
conditions, permit a deduction of particular empirical facts (thus
explaining their truth). 


The observational/theoretical vocabulary distinction, thus
conceived, was taken to have ontological implications. We are
committed to the existence of the given, for that is what ties thought
to reality. Theories, however, are merely tools to enable us to
explain observation-level empirical generalizations. Presumably, some
empirical generalizations may be first derived with the help of a
theory, but they are subject to more direct investigation and
corroboration, so the theory is not *essential* to it. Thus,
there is no ontological commitment to any entities that theories
postulate; they can be viewed as convenient fictions, devices of
calculation. 


Sellars thinks that this instrumentalist picture gets almost
everything wrong. In his view the observation vocabulary/theoretical
vocabulary distinction is merely methodological and is, moreover,
highly malleable; it therefore possesses no particular ontological
force. There is no given, so it can play no semantic role. Meanings
are functional roles in language usage, and nothing in principle
prevents a term that might originally have arisen as part of a theory
from acquiring a role in observation reports. The well-trained
physicist "just sees" an alpha-particle track in a cloud
chamber as directly and non-inferentially as the well-trained child
just sees a dog. Furthermore, what is observable depends on the
techniques and instruments employed, and these are often loaded with
theoretical baggage. "Pure" observation uncontaminated by
theory is outside our reach. A good theory, according to Sellars,
does not just explain the observation-level empirical generalizations,
it also explains why those empirical generalizations are as good (and
as wrong) as they are. The Boyle-Charles ideal gas law works well in
most conditions, but does not predict the behavior of gasses under
extreme temperatures or pressures. The van der Waals equation,
explicitly formulated with the theory of statistical thermodynamics in
mind, allows us to see why the Boyle-Charles law is as good as it is
and why it breaks down where it does. Sellars therefore rejects the
"layer-cake" view that there are three distinct levels of
assertion in the empirical sciences: observation level claims of
particular fact, empirical generalizations using the observation
vocabulary, and, finally, claims using a theoretical vocabulary which
function to systematize the empirical generalizations. In the
"layer-cake" view, theories are ultimately dispensable in
favor of observation-level empirical generalizations; in
Sellars's view, it is the observation-level empirical
generalizations that are ultimately dispensable in favor of the better
explanations made available by theory. Thus, to have good reason to
accept a theory is to have good reason to believe in the existence of
those entities it postulates.


This is the basic reasoning behind Sellars's scientific
realism. His bold claim, "In the dimension of describing
and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of
what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not" (EPM:
SS41, in SPR: 173; in KMG: 253) needs proper
interpretation, as mentioned above. Sellars does not believe, for instance, that
describing and explaining are the only "dimensions" of
linguistic activity. Prescribing, evaluating, and negotiating are
equally indispensable dimensions of language use that go beyond the descriptive brief of science. It is science's job to limn the structure of
empirical reality, the causal nexus within which we live, but, as his
own call for a "synoptic vision" that unites a
science-generated picture of empirical reality with "the
language of community and individual intentions" indicates,
Sellars would never hold that all our questions are to be settled by
scientific investigations. 


Sellars also has a distinctive treatment of scientific laws. Laws
are standardly treated as generalizations; they are distinguished
from *accidental* generalizations because laws have a modal force
capable of supporting counterfactuals. In Sellars's view, laws
are better understood as *inference tickets.* Though they have
descriptive content, statements of laws serve a different function in
our language. As mentioned above, Sellars treats modals uniformly as
material-mode metalinguistic speech expressing the inferential
commitments and priorities embedded in the language. So, saying that
it is a law of nature that e.g., the angle of incidence equals the
angle of reflection, endorses a certain set of inferences using those
concepts. Furthermore, Sellars does not think of language as a fixed
entity. Indeed, in his conception, the job of the sciences is to
methodically revise and replace the resources available for
description and explanation. Conceptual change is the very essence of
science. In his view, laws of nature are proposed connections among
concepts or terms that, pending possible empirical disconfirmation,
can be rationally attached to the concepts.



> [S]cientific terms have, as part of their logic a
> 'line of retreat' as well as a 'plan of
> advance' -- a fact which makes meaningful the claim that in
> an important sense A and B are the 'same' properties they
> were 'before.' ... The motto of the age of science
> might well be: natural philosophers have hitherto sought to understand
> 'meanings'; the task is to change them (CDCM:
> 288).


Thus, I call his philosophy of science a 'pragmatic
realism' because he insists on our commitment to the reality of
the *objects* to be posited by Peircean ideal science, while
explicating most of the *structural* features of science in terms
of the pragmatic force of their linguistic expression. 


## 7. Practical Reason: Intentions, Rules, and Normativity


### 7.1 The Logic of Intentions


Epistemology tries to make intelligible the acquisition, growth,
and change of belief. It thus tends to focus on the input to and
internal interactions of our cognitive states. Action theory, in
contrast, focuses on the output side, accounting for the
intelligibility of action. Sellars has a sophisticated and systematic
approach to action theory, metaethics, and normativity that has not been widely
appreciated. 


The central problem is understanding the relation between belief and action. Normative judgments, e.g., judgments about what's good or what's right, are supposed to bridge the apparent gap between what one believes is the case and what one does to transform the world. Normative judgments thus need to interface smoothly with our beliefs, because we often seem to reason to our normative judgments and use them in reasoning further to our decisions to act. They must also, however, motivate action in a way that mere belief cannot. In mid-20th century philosophy, cognitivists emphasized practical reasoning, while non-cognitivists focused rather on the practical, that is, the motivational aspect of norms. According to the cognitivists, normative and especially ethical claims are truth-evaluable and participate in the same kinds of logical relations as other truth-evaluable claims. Cognitivists were thus in a position to attack the problem of how ethical and other normative claims function in our practical reasoning, but they had difficulty saying how normative beliefs are any more deeply connected to action than other beliefs. Non-cognitivists, in contrast, denied that ethical and normative claims are, in general, truth-evaluable. Their role, instead, is to motivate, either encouraging or discouraging particular actions. That role does not require truth-evaluability. One of Sellars' teachers was C. L. Stevenson, who proposed that ethical judgments are actually expressions of pro or con attitudes towards actions, a position that came to be known as emotivism. Sellars also paid close attention to the metaethics of R. M. Hare, who proposed that normative statements be analyzed as imperatives, commanding or forbidding an action. But Sellars believed that there is no logic of imperatives, so Hare's analysis could not capture the role norms play in our practical reasoning. 


Instead, Sellars proposes an analysis of norms in which the central role is played by the notion of an intention. An
intention is a thought that motivates one to realize its content.
'I shall eat a light dinner later' can be a mere
prediction (suppose, e.g., that I know my cupboards are bare), but it
can also express my intention, in which case it has motivational force
within my behavioral control system. A volition is an intention that
has come to fruition: it has an intentional content but also causally affects my behavior: 'I shall eat a light
dinner *now*' expresses my volition and is usually
accompanied by at least the first stirrings of activity. 


*Expressing* an intention or volition is not the same as
*(self-)ascribing,* an intention or volition, nor are such expressions
descriptions of intentions or predictions of action. Expressions of
intention are always first-personal in form and essentially tied to
motivational force. Sellars reserves 'shall' to serve as
an operator-like marker of intention expressions, and this convention
will be observed here as well. Sellars recognizes two forms of
'shall'-statements: 'I shall do A' and
'It shall be the case that *p*'. 'Shall
be's' must ultimately imply 'shall's with
direct implications for action, even if they are highly conditioned on
other circumstances. 


Sellars wrote extensively on the logic of intentions, for "An
ideally rational being would intend the implications of his
intentions, just as he would believe the implications of his
beliefs" (SM VII SS16: 183). The major principle governing intentions is 



> PLI: 'Shall (*A*)' implies 'Shall
> (*B*)' iff '*A*' implies
> '*B*'.


This principle, note, is in the metalanguage in which we talk about intentions, not in the object language in which we express intentions. Sellars also stipulates that logical connectives and operators can
occur inside the scope of a 'shall' operator, but not
outside it. This is because 'shall' statements are
construed as *expressions of intentions*. 



> Shall [I will not do *A*]


expresses a negative intention -- the intention to refrain
from doing A. But there is no expression of the *lack* of an
intention to do A, so



> Not shall [I will do *A*] 


is ruled out as nonsensical, though, of course, one
can *describe* oneself as lacking the intention to do *A*. A
description of an intention, however, is different from an expression
of it. For Sellars, "The implications pertaining to matters of fact concern only the content of intentions and not their status as intentions" (ORAV P52: 86), so the practical reasoning involving intentions must focus on the content of those intentions. 


Sellars invokes a principle that governs how the facts of the world
are to be taken up into our practical reasoning. He calls it
"So-be-it":



> So-be-it: "Shall be [ph]" and
> "*p*" imply "Shall be [ph
> and *p*]" where 'ph' is a formula which may
> or may not be logically complex (ORAV P66: 88).


Sellars needs a principle like this, since logical connectives (by his stipulation) cannot show up outside the scope of a 'shall,' implications can be drawn only within the scope of a 'shall,' so practical reasoning is viewed in terms of the compounding and simplification of the contents of one's intentions. 


To use "So-be-it" properly, one must be able to
distinguish between what is "up to one", symbolized by '[ph]', and what is not, captured in the symbolism by '*p*'.
A fairly straightforward picture of practical reasoning emerges.



> 
> 94. Thus C[onjunction] I[ntroduction] together with
> So-be-it, takes our separate purposes and relevant beliefs and puts
> them together into encompassing alternatives:
> 
> 
> 1. Shall be [I do *A* at *t*, which means that ...]?
> 2. Shall be [I do *B* at *t*, which means that ...]?
> 3. Shall be [I do *C* at *t*, which means that ...]?
> 
> 
> The successive steps are
> 
> 
> 1. elaboration by CI and So-be-it, and the drawing of
> implications
> 2. choice, e.g. (2), or, continuing indecision
> 3. simplification. Shall be [I do *B* at *t*]
> 4. intention to act. Shall [I do *B* at *t*]
> 
> 
> which, when time t comes (and I do not change my mind), generates
> a doing (or an attempt to do) *B*.
> 
> 
> 95. This picture is one according to which practical reasoning is
> essentially the process of elaborating alternative scenarios for a
> choice (ORAV P94: 91).
> 
> 
> 


Clearly, the elaboration of alternatives is a rational process. Is
making the ultimate choice among these alternatives also a matter of
reason? In what sense is the choice among fully elaborated
alternatives anything other than an arbitrary, personal choice? For
answers, we need to look at Sellars's views on the nature of
oughts and the normativity they express.


### 7.2 Oughts


Sellars's unified treatment of the modalities as material
mode expressions of our inferential endorsements and commitments has
been mentioned above. It applies to the deontic modalities as well:
they signal the endorsement of certain *practical* inferences and
principles. We can see this clearly in his treatment of hypothetical
oughts. An important fact about statements of the form



> If *X* wants *A*, he ought to do B


is that they do not permit what we might call unconditional
detachment. Suppose



> If Harry wants his inheritance now, he ought to kill his
> father


and suppose



> Harry wants his inheritance now.


We do not draw the unalloyed conclusion



> Harry ought to kill his father.


The reasonableness of killing his father remains strictly relative
to Harry's desire and does not achieve the objective status
signaled by unconditional detachment. The choices we make are,
effectively, always of encompassing alternatives, but the
considerations we bring to bear on those choices are always only
partial.



> 
> [A]lthough the 'ought' of
> 
> 
> 
> > If *X* wants *A*, he ought to
> > do *B*
> 
> 
> looks as though it concerned the propriety of doing *B* on a
> certain hypothesis, it actually concerns the logical propriety or
> impropriety of certain complex valuings. To offer advice of the
> form
> 
> 
> 
> > If you want *A* you ought to do *B*
> 
> 
> is not to offer substantive advice as does
> 
> 
> 
> > You ought to do *X*
> 
> 
> It is to give logical advice (OMP: 8).
> 
> 
> 


To give substantive advice, to be able to detach the
'ought' statement, we need to eliminate the subjectivity
of the condition in the hypothetical; we need at least something that
would make a coherent all-things-considered option. For a
*moral* ought, we would seek a *categorically reasonable*
intention, one that would be reasonable for anyone and everyone to
have. 


Sellars approaches the search for a categorically reasonable
intention in several steps. A hypothetical intention that is at least
universal in content takes an important step towards an
'ought' that we can count as objectively moral. Sellars
asserts that "the hypothetical imperative which comes closest to
capturing the moral point of view is that of impartial
benevolence" (SM VII SS100: 212). Such an intention
duplicates the universality of *content* that he thinks
full-fledged moral 'oughts' must have, but it still lacks
the universality in *form* a moral 'ought' needs,
because it depends on the possession of a particular desire (impartial
benevolence) on the part of the agents. Intending impartial benevolence lacks universal form to the extent that such an intention remains the subjective possession of separate individuals who may have parallel intentions without yet having a *shared* intention. 


In order to make intelligible such universality in form, Sellars
introduces the notion of a we-intention, an intention that is not the merely
subjective possession of an individual, but an intention had as a member of
a group that constitutes *us*. There can be things I intend, as
one of *us*, that I do not (or would not) intend, speaking on my
own behalf. For instance, I might intend, as a citizen of the U.S.,
that the representatives duly elected in the last election take
office, even though, speaking for myself, I am horrified at the
prospect. Sellars thus suggests that the we-intention



> It shallwe be the case that our welfare is
> maximized


constitutes a categorically reasonable intention. This intention



> does seem to have an authority which is more than a mere
> matter of its being generally accepted. It is a conceptual fact that
> people constitute a community, a we, by virtue of thinking of each
> other as one of us, and by willing the common good not under the
> species of benevolence -- but by willing it as one of us, or from
> a moral point of view (SM VII SS132: 222).


This is Sellars's reconstruction of the basic logic of moral
judgments. What remains is to construct an argument demonstrating the
reality of the moral community, that there really is an appropriate
'we' to invoke. Sellars thinks this could be done if the
following claims can be justified (SM VII SS144: 225):


1. To think of oneself as rational being is (implicitly)
to think of oneself as subject to epistemic oughts binding on rational
beings generally.
2. The intersubjective intention to promote *epistemic* welfare
implies the intersubjective intention to promote welfare *sans
phrase*.


While he thinks the first is plausible, Sellars does not claim to
have an argument for the second, so the question of the reality of the
moral community remains problematic. For further examination of Sellars' ethics and an argument that the moral community is real enough, see Koons (2019).


### 7.3 Rules and Normativity


We can see from his reconstruction of moral judgment that Sellars
thinks that things like normativity and rules exist only in a social
context, for real 'oughts' require a community. The
concept of a rule plays a central role in Sellars's philosophy,
for he thinks of both languages and well-ordered societies as
rule-governed systems. Rules, he thinks, are distinctively human. 



> To say that man is a rational animal, is to say that man
> is a creature not of *habits*, but of *rules*. When God
> created Adam, he whispered in his ear, "In all contexts of
> action you will recognize rules, if only the rule to grope for rules
> to recognize. When you cease to recognize rules, you will walk on
> four feet." (LRB SS16, in PPPW: 138)


The language of individual and community intentions that Sellars
claims must be preserved in the Peircean scientific millennium is the
language that enables us to make sense of rules. Sellars has
interesting things to say about rules, so this overview finishes with
a look at this significant aspect of his work.


Rule-governed behavior exhibits a pattern, but it contrasts with
habitual behavior, which also exhibits patterns. Here Sellars is
worried particularly about linguistic behavior, but the points apply
generally:



> The key to the concept of a linguistic rule is its complex
> relation to pattern-governed linguistic behavior. The general concept
> of pattern governed behavior is a familiar one. Roughly it is the
> concept of behavior which exhibits a pattern, not because it is
> brought about by the intention that it exhibit this pattern, but
> because the propensity to emit behavior of the pattern has been
> selectively reinforced, and the propensity to emit behavior which does
> not conform to this pattern selectively extinguished. (MFC:
> 423)


Pattern-governed behavior is present wherever there is learning,
but that includes learning bad habits. Some pattern-governed
behavior, however, exists *because of rules*. 



> 
> 
> If patterned governed behavior can arise by "natural"
> selection, it can also arise by purposive selection on the part of
> trainers. They can be construed as reasoning.
> 
> 
> > Pattern-behavior of such and such a kind ought to be
> > exhibited by trainees, hence we, the trainers, ought to do this and
> > that, as likely to bring it about that it is exhibited (MFC:
> > 423).
> 
> 
> 


Sellars distinguishes two different kinds of 
'oughts' or rules. There are
*ought-to-dos*, aka rules of action. The basic form of such a
rule is a conditional imperative: "If in circumstances C, do
A!" This is the kind of rule involved in what I
call paradigmatic rule-obeying. Paradigmatic rule-obedience requires
complex cognitive and conative capacities on the part of the agent:
knowledge of the rule, recognition of the circumstances as appropriate
to the application of the rule, and conative structures that motivate
one to apply the rule and act on it. Sellars denies
that all rule-governed behaviors, behaviors that occur *because of the
rules* are cases of paradigmatic rule-obedience. 


Sellars's other 'ought' is
the *ought-to-be*, aka rules of criticism. For example, it ought
to be the case that dogs come when their masters call. Such a rule
speaks to no agent in particular, and it is certainly not a rule that
dogs *obey* in the paradigmatic sense. It simply endorses a
particular state of affairs without regard for any mode of achieving
it. Still, dogs can exhibit a pattern of behavior that accords with
the rule, and they can do so *because* of the rule, if their
masters train them to come when called because the masters have
reasoned along the following lines:



> It ought to be the case that dogs come when their masters
> call.  
>  Therefore, it ought to be the case that my dog comes when
> I call.  
>  My dog will come when called only if I train it to do
> so.  
>  Therefore, I ought to train my dog to come when
> called.


This reasoning moves from an ought-to-be to a relevant ought-to-do
and comes to full fruition not in a belief about one's
obligations, but in a set of actions that result in one's dog
learning to come when called. Ought-to-be's imply
ought-to-do's; and ought-to-do's typically lead to
action.


This last point is crucial. According to Sellars, rules of
criticism (ought-to-be's) have no way of being realized in the
world (other than merely accidentally) except insofar as there
are *agents* who recognize them, infer rules of action from them
and thereupon undertake the requisite actions. Unless there are
agents cognizant of and acting on some rules of action, talk
of *any* rules, including the apparently less committal rules of
criticism, turns out to be empty. We are rule-governed creatures
because we conceive of ourselves as rule-governed creatures. And, as
long as we do conceive of ourselves as governed by rules and train
ourselves and our progeny to recognize and live in accordance with
rules, it is *true* that we are rule-governed creatures. By *taking* ourselves to be persons, agents acting for reasons in accordance with rules, we *make* ourselves persons. 


## 8. The Stereoscopic Vision


Sellars thinks that science's aperspectival description of
the empirical world is the measure of reality, but he is also
committed to the indispensability of the concepts built into the
first-person perspective that makes agency possible. If those
concepts were not involved in the regulation of our behavior, we would
not be *persons* and could not engage in such activities as moral
behavior or scientific research. This is why Sellars calls for
a *stereoscopic vision* in which the descriptive resources of the
sciences are united with the language of individual and community
intentions and the dualism of the manifest and scientific images is
transcended. 


Sellars possessed a broad vision, but did not shy away from detail
work. He was a "philosopher's philosopher;" his
essays are complex and difficult pieces, challenging but rewarding to
master. Beginning in 1994 with Sellars-inspired publications by his erstwhile colleagues John
McDowell and Robert B. Brandom, interest in Sellars' work has increased steadily, both in the U. S. and abroad. Publications and conferences focused on or inspired by Sellars are now common. In
2015, for instance, significant conferences devoted to Sellars were
held in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. The literature on Sellars has grown appreciably since the last revision of this article. Sellars's
philosophy is rich enough to provide a framework within which
otherwise distinct philosophical tendencies can find sufficient common
ground to engage each other fruitfully. Sellars
studies has been dominated by a clash between the "right-wing
Sellarsians" (e.g., Patricia and Paul Churchland, Ruth Millikan, Jay
Rosenberg), who emphasize Sellars's scientific realism and
nominalism, and the "left-wing Sellarsians" (e.g., Rorty,
McDowell, and Brandom), who emphasize instead Sellars's
insistence on the irreducibility and sociality of rules and norms. Sellars's expressivism has garnered increasing attention in both camps. Lately, a younger generation has begun constructing a finer-grained story of Sellars's development. This will likely enable a better articulation of the structure of Sellars's philosophy and, perhaps, a new sense of its potential.