Was Sellars an error theorist?

Synthese 193 (7):2053-2075 (2016)
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Abstract

Wilfrid Sellars described the moral syllogism that supports the inference “I ought to do x” from “Everyone ought to do x” as a “syntactical disguise” which embodies a “mistake.” He nevertheless regarded this form of reasoning as constitutive of the moral point of view. Durkheim was the source of much of this reasoning, and this context illuminates Sellars’ unusual philosophical reconstruction of the moral point of view in terms of the collective intentions of an ideal community of rational members for which the syllogism is empirically valid. The reconstruction also sheds light on the question of the status of common sense and normativity in Sellars’ naturalistic metaphysics.

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Stephen Turner
University of South Florida

Citations of this work

Wilfrid Sellars and the Foundations of Normativity.Peter Olen - 2016 - London, England: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Wilfrid Sellars.Willem deVries - 2011 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Sellars’ metaethical quasi-realism.Griffin Klemick - 2020 - Synthese 197 (5):2215-2243.

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References found in this work

Empiricism and the philosophy of mind.Wilfrid Sellars - 1956 - Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 1:253-329.
The Language of Morals.Richard Mervyn Hare - 1952 - Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
The language of morals.Richard Mervyn Hare - 1952 - Oxford,: Clarendon Press.
Philosophy and the scientific image of man.Wilfrid S. Sellars - 1962 - In Robert Colodny (ed.), Science, Perception, and Reality. Humanities Press/Ridgeview. pp. 35-78.

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