Brandom

9/2/09

Sellars Intro Plan

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On the 20 anniversary of his death in 1989

1. Claim: Wilfrid Sellars is the greatest American philosopher of the 20th century. Put this way,
Brits are out of contention (Russell etc.), as are Germans and Austrians (Wittgenstein,
Heidegger, Carnap). Competitors might be:
a) Dewey
b) Quine
c) Davidson
d) Kripke
e) David Lewis
f) Rawls

2. Q: Why? A:
a) He was essentially alone in his generation (and among the contestants above) in his deep
knowledge of and the importance he attached to the history of philosophy. The world-
spirit is moving his way.
b) He was essentially alone in his generation (and among the contestants above) in his
systematic ambitions (“the synoptic vision”). Davidson and Lewis ended up being
systematic philosophers, but it was a surprise to them that things evolved that way. (The
same could be said of Searle, and maybe Quine.) Again, there is at least hope that Sellars
was ahead of his time in this respect.
c) His aim was, he said, “to move analytic philosophy from its Humean into its Kantian
phase.” This is a move beyond empiricism and naturalism (as it were, from logical
empiricism to logical kantianism). Rawls, too, with Strawson, contributed greatly to the
reappropriation of Kant by the analytic tradition. It is easy to forget that Kant was
anathema to the founders of the analytic movement. To Russell and Moore, not to
mention later folks like Ayer and Quine, he was where the idealist rot set in. (Kripke is
an interesting exception—but he’s never written about Kant, and it’s a good question
what he understands of him.) They saw, I think correctly, that one could not open the
door wide enough to let Kant in, and shut it quickly enough to keep Hegel out. Sellars is
officially, and in fact, on the Kant side of the Kant/Hegel divide, but has serious Hegelian
sympathies. Rorty describes me as aiming to move analytic philosophy from its incipient
Kantian to its inevitable Hegelian phase.
d) It is above all Sellars’s appreciation of Kant’s lesson about the essentially normative
character of intentionality—of mind, meaning, and rationality—that sets him apart from his
(20th century) cohort. [Tell my Kant story in brief, from first Woodbridge lecture (in RiP).]
Wittgenstein, too, appreciated this point, as Sellars acknowledges. The transition to a
“Kantian phase of analytic philosophy” is the replacement of a cartesian framework with a

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kantian one, from certainty to necessity, from mind/body problem to prescription/description

or norm/fact problem

3. Aim of the course: to try to see how Sellars views, in the largest sense of the term, hang
together, in the largest sense of the term.

4. I want to address this issue by putting trying to characterize Sellars’s views in the context of
an understanding of the classical project of analytic philosophy, and of its principal core
programs (from BSD):
a) Classical project of analytic philosophy: to understand the meanings expressed by
potentially problematic target vocabularies in terms of presumptively unproblematic
base vocabularies. The desired relations between them have been variously construed:
analysis, definition, translation, paraphrase, reduction of various kinds, supervenience,
truth-making…to name just a few.
b) Core programs:
i) Empiricism
ii) Naturalism
iii) Functionalism (a late comer).
c) So the large shape of the question is: what is Sellars’s attitude towards these core
programs? What distinctive transformation of our understanding of them does he aim at
and accomplish?

5. Picture 1: Here is a story about the large structure of Sellars’s views. He was pulled in two
directions:
a) Against empiricism. Slogan (space of reasons passage): “In characterizing an episode or
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 36].
b) For naturalism. Slogan (scientia mensura): “In the dimension of describing and
explaining, science is the measure of all things: of those that are, that they are, and of
those that are not, that they are not.”
So: Allying himself with the Neurath, rather than the Schlick wing of the Vienna Circle.
c) He is also the one who introduces functionalism (though hardly anyone notices): in
semantics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and ontology (his treatment of
universals).

6. The question is, how these views “hang together.”

a) Besides the notion of the Myth of the Given, Sellars is perhaps best known for his
distinction, in “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” between the scientific
image, and the manifest image, with his claim that it is the principal, defining job of

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philosophy (at least modern philosophy) to explain the relations between them. [Explain
in general terms the distinction.]
There are two worries about how things stand with his own approach:
b) First, there is the worry that he ends up replacing one dualism (the cartesian dualism of
mind and body) with another (the kantian dualism of fact and norm). As I use the term, a
distinction becomes a dualism when it is drawn in such a way as to make the relations
between the distinguished items unintelligible. What is, in the end, his account of the
relation between the norms that articulate the manifest image and the regularities or laws
that articulate the scientific image?
c) Alternatively, there is the worry that his “scientific realism,” epitomized in the scientia
mensura, ends up committing him to a reductive naturalism, according to which the
manifest image is ultimately mistaken, and must eventually be replaced by successor
concepts within the scientific image. This is the lesson his student Paul Churchland
explicitly draws. This suspicion is reinforced by Sellars’s (relatively late) obsession with
“sensa”, that is, with the issue of what the successor in a “Peircean” scientific framework
of sensations conceived of as of continuous colors: the infamous pink icecube. He
endorses some truly astonishing conclusions in this vicinity. Again, his discussion of
“picturing” (in “Naming and Saying,” and in Chapter 4 of Science and Metaphysics,
“Truth and Picturing”) and in general his account of how matter-of-factual regularities
track norms raises the worry that he thinks that it is concepts of these that will be the
successor concepts of the normative concepts of the manifest image, in a “Peircean”
eventual scientific image. His student Ruth Millikan draws the inspiration for her
naturalistic program in semantics (see her Language, Thought and Other Biological
Categories) from Sellars’s “Some Reflections on Language Games.” On this reading,
Sellars’s scientific realism drives him to a reductive naturalism that puts him in the same
box with Quine or Fodor.

7. The result of these worries has been a sociological division among Sellars’s admirers:
a) “Right-wing” Sellarsians (Rorty’s terminology), such as Rosenberg, Churchland, and
Millikan see his scientific realism, epitomized in the scientia mensura and PSIM
(where he talks about the “primacy of the scientific image,” as the axial commitment,
and privilege his naturalism over his rejection of empiricism.
b) “Left-wing” Sellarsians, such as Rorty, Brandom, Williams, and McDowell, see his
normative Kantian insight, epitomized in the “space of reasons” passage in EPM, as
the core insight. We see the scientific realism as a throwback—a “pre-Sellarsian
remnant” as I called it, to Sellars’s irritation—to commitments Sellars inherited from
his father Roy Wood Sellars, without ever realizing that the semantic and
epistemological insights of EPM were incompatible with them.
c) Our hope, of course, is that the disagreements between right- and left-wing
Sellarsians can be worked out more amicably than those between right- and left-wing

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Hegelians, which were settled only after an intensive years-long seminar called the
battle of Stalingrad.

8. Picture 2: Besides his appreciating and adapting Kant’s insight into the normative
character of concepts and concept-use, he also takes from Kant a transcendental
perspective, transposing it into a (meta-)linguistic key. Here the key point they share is a
realization that there are essential features of the framework that makes empirical
description and explanation possible that are expressed in kinds of vocabulary whose
principal office is not empirical description or explanation. Their role is rather, in a
broad (and confusingly elastic) sense, metalinguistic. (Cf. Kant on categories, pure
concepts, paradigmatically modal ones.) Sellars talks about the “tendency to assimilate
all discourse to describing” as principally “responsible for the prevalence in the
empiricist tradition of 'nothing-but-ism' in its various forms (emotivism, philosophical
behaviorism, phenomenalism)” [CDCM §103]

9. On this picture, at the core of Sellars’s thought, in addition to the normative insight that
informs his distinction of the two images, is i) his nonrelational, functionalist semantics, and
ii) his view that every vocabulary of philosophical interest—modal, normative, semantic,
intentional, logical, and ontological—is to be understood in terms of its functionalist,
metalinguistic expressive role.
a) Sellars is an empirical naturalist (the scientia mensura), but a transcendental non-
naturalist (cf. Kant's empirical realism and transcendental idealism). His empirical
naturalism is what he (and following him, others such as Rosenberg) call his “scientific
realism”.
b) His transcendental non-naturalism is a matter of his appreciation of the normative
character of semantics (and so epistemology) and intentionality.
c) That normative character is what, in turn, underwrites the distinction between the two
“images”. The scientific image is non-normative; the manifest image comes with the
norms in.
d) This bifurcation provides the twist that he puts on the analytic core programs of both
naturalism and empiricism.
e) As pointed out in (6) above, there is a danger at this point of replacing a cartesian dualism
with a kantian one: the dualism of mind and body with that of norm and empirical
descriptive fact. To be entitled to the distinction without its becoming a dualism, he has
to have an intelligible story about the relation between the 'images'.
f) This is the point at which Sellars's other master idea is wheeled in. This is the idea that
normativity, modality, semantics, intentionality, logic, and universals and abstract entities
[which Sellars puts in a box, though it is not clear that they should be assimilated]—
basically all the phenomena that philosophers have traditionally been concerned to
address—are fundamentally metalinguistic phenomena, whose surface grammar invites

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us to assimilate them to the bits of discourse that describe and explain empirical
descriptive facts.
g) His idea is that rather than describing or explaining, what these transcendental
discourses do is functionally classify discursive (linguistic-conceptual) expressions and
their use.
h) This is his way of working out the Kantian insight (cf. (1) above) that some bits of
discourse do not describe or explain empirical matters of fact, but rather express (make
explicit) essential features of the discursive framework that makes describing and
explaining possible.
i) “Transcendental grammar” (I think “semantics” might be a better term) is the discipline
that studies those essentially metalinguistic tropes. It is WS's version of philosophy.
This is his specific metaphilosophy: philosophy as doing transcendental grammar,
examing the use of expressions that play the metalinguistic expressive role of making
explicit essential features of the framework of describing and explaining (cf the scientia
mensura) that are not themselves descriptive or explanatory.
j) So for Sellars (cf. (a)), there are at root only two things one can do, cognitively: science,
and philosophy. That is, empirically describing and explaining natural, non-normative
phenomena, on the one hand, and examining the functioning of bits of discourse that
make explicit essential elements of the discursive framework within which describing
and explaining are possible in the first place.
k) The dualism that threatens (cf. (e)) is thus manifested also in the danger of a
science/philosophy dualism. Sellars's response to that threat is not the Quinean
naturalistic one that assimilates philosophy to science. One move is to expand the notion
of philosophy to a second level: it comprises not only transcendental grammar, but also
the relation between transcendental grammar and the empirical scientific enterprise of
describing and explaining. (Cf the “fusion of the images”.)
l) His theory of the metalinguistic—an elastic, catch-all category—sees it as generically a
matter of functional classification.
m) And that fact provides the next twist: functional classification is itself a normative
concept. In functionally classifying linguistic expressions, one is not describing or
explaining how things empirically are. One is doing something else.
n) Among the expressions whose use one can systematically functionally classify are those
whose office or functional role is describing and explaining.
o) In this sense, philosophy is the more capacious enterprise, and science the less capacious.
Thinking normatively about what subjects do is the necessary framework for thinking
about the objects they (we) describe and explain. In this sense, Sellars belongs in a box
with the later Wittgenstein and the early Heidegger, and is a conceptual idealist in the
sense I have given to that term in thinking about Hegel's idealism. This is what
distinguishes his way of thinking about the science/philosophy distinction (and keeping it
from being a dualism) from Quine's naturalistic reductionism. (Cf (k).)

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p) This fact about the overall shape of Sellars's view has been masked by his “scientific
realist” (cf (a) and (o): Sellars's scientific realism is compatible with conceptual idealism,
with transcendental non-naturalism) approach to sensa. This is his engagement with a
version of what Chalmers calls “the hard problem” of (sensuous) consciousness: the
“location problem” (Jackson) with respect to phenomenological properties of sensory
consciousness, what red things look like to us. Here it looks as though Sellars is being a
naturalist in Quine's sense: what is real (but: in the narrow sense) is what empirical
natural science can tell us (all) about. If sensory consciousness is real (in the narrow
sense), then it must have an ultimately empirical natural-scientific successor concept (cf.
Sellars's concern with conceptual change and progressive development). But, I claim, the
key thing to realize here is that this is an issue of sentience, not of sapience. Sensa are in
the causal order, postulated as things that trigger sapient responses, namely perceptual
judgments. They are not the sapient responses themselves. Sellars is not a “scientific
realist” (naturalist) about the use of normative or (therefore) 'metalinguistic' expressions.
He does not envisage the absorption of the manifest in to the scientific image, nor its
replacement by the scientific image. That is not the context in which he speculates about
the scientific successor concepts of sensa.
q) The other piece of Sellars that invites the reductive Quinean reading of his “scientific
realism” [perhaps I should also mention, to begin with, misreading the scientia mensura
passage by ignoring its protasis] is his story about picturing: about how norms can be
reflected by regularities that track them, and so form a non-normatively characterizable
'shadow' of them within the realm of the narrowly natural. My ultimate view about this is
that it belongs in a box with account of sensa. Picturing is not meant as a reductive
account of what norms are or why they matter, not part of a scientific account of them. It
is a supplement, to indicate that science need not have nothing to say about us, just
because it cannot encompass the normative dimension of our lives. Picturing is to norms
as sign-designs are to linguistic-expressions-in-use.

10. Sellars’s claim is that all philosophically interesting vocabularies are metalinguistic in
character. All are part of what he sometimes calls “transcendental grammar.” Semantic,
intentional, modal, normative, logical, universal-abstract, even terms like ‘time’ come in for
such treatment. This claim is never made explicitly with this generality. Rather, for each
vocabulary he considers, this is the form of his analysis. All of them turn out to express
essential features of the framework of describing and explaining that are not themselves in
the business of describing or explaining in the narrow sense.

11. Two large questions about the nature of this claim (before we start to worry about its truth,
and its justification—what reasons there might be to think it is true) are these:
a) What does he mean by ‘metalinguistic’ in this claim? The notion of transcendental
grammar will be important to consider in this connection. This is not only a very

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capacious notion, it is elastic, and clearly encompasses a considerable variety of

substantially different offices or expressive roles. Hope: meaning-use analysis can be of
help here.
b) What can we say about the “wider” sense in which expressions performing these
framework-expressing (explicitating), transcendental, “metalinguistic” roles can be
considered as descriptive-explanatory? This question picks up the aspects of Gibbard-
Blackburn post-Geach expressivism (which allows for a descriptive dimension to bits of
discourse whose primary meaningfulness is to be understood in expressive terms) and the
generalization of it that Huw Price is promoting. This issue becomes particularly acute
when we look at modally rich statements of natural law, which we can only come to
justify empirically, and with moral principles. But versions of it arise for all of the
vocabularies that fall within the scope of the claim in (1)—Sellars’s metalinguistic master
idea.

12. In keeping with the though expressed at the end of (2a), one of my projects as we go through
these texts will be assess the extent to which a MUA (with accompanying MUD) can be
offered of each vocabulary Sellars addresses, and to what extent the metatheoretic apparatus
of BSD would need to be altered to accommodate his claims.

13. Summary:
a) Sellars’s Big Idea I: Normativity of Semantics and Intentionality. This insight shapes
and transforms his versions of empiricism and naturalism.
b) Sellars’s Big Idea II: Empirical-Naturalistic framework of describing and explaining (cf.
scientia mensura) involves many linguistic expressions that articulate features of the
framework, rather than themselves describing or explaining (in the narrow sense). (Kant)
Much of our discourse is actually metalinguistic. (Carnap) This includes: Semantic and
(therefore) intentional discourse, (some) logical discourse, normative discourse, modal
discourse, talk of universals and abstract entities, (with some waffling) talk about time…
But Sellars has a protean, plastic, elastic notion of the metalinguistic, which he never
properly clarifies.
c) Sellars’s Big Idea III: Metalinguistic functional classification, rather than relational
semantics. Inferentialism as a way of working that out.
d) Sellars’s Big Idea IV (not explicit): Look at pragmatic dependences between the use of
various kinds of expression, in order to underwrite claims about conceptual dependences
between the meanings that they express. Paradigm: account of ‘looks’-talk.
e) Sellars’s Big Idea V (not explicit): conceptual change as key to functionalist semantics
and epistemology. For it provides the answer to the key question for one (like Kant
himself) who makes the Kantian transcendental move—above all with respect to
modality. That is: lawfulness in general might be a necessary feature of all empirical
descriptive-explanatory frameworks, but the particular laws seem to be in a generic sense

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contingent, and also a posteriori. We need to discover the laws of nature empirically,
and at least the low-level ones could in some intelligible sense, have been different. That
suggests that in a broad sense, they are empirical-descriptive. What can one say about
how these features can be combined? Sellars’s approach to a response is in terms of an
account of what happens when we change concepts.

14. Among important things that we are not going to be reading:

a) Pure Pragmatics and Possible Worlds
b) EPM
c) Science and Metaphysics
d) Two Kant essays
e) Naturalism and Ontology
f) “Time and the World Order”
g) Linley lectures (Kansas)
h) Carus lectures

15. Resources linked from website:

a) Notre Dame lectures
b) “Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities” (the only principal reading
that is not in In the Space of Reasons)
c) Chrucky central Sellars website, with bibliography
d) Sellars archive at Pitt
e) Recommendations for books, including recent monographs, on Sellars.
f) Syllabus

16. Close by describing the tragic arc of Sellars’s career (and some of the contingent reasons
why he couldn’t recover, after about 1965), as I have come to conceive and understand it.

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