This chapter explores the relation between Sellars and Carnap by focusing on Sellars’s reception of Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language. It claims that Carnap’s book was an important source of inspiration for Sellars. He saw promise in some of Carnap’s ideas to further a theory of meaning free of the Myth of the Given, while objecting that Carnap neglects the normativity of meaning. It is argued that this neglect leads to tensions internal to Carnap’s system. Three problems are (...) formulated which arise for any theory of meaning compatible with Carnap’s syntax. The remedy for these problems lies in a normative account of meaning. (shrink)

Foundationalism about intentionality parallels foundationalism about epistemic justification. Reassessing Sellars’s attack on the Myth of the Given, the author argues that both views are inadequate, and for similar reasons. She explores the relation between meaning and knowledge, develops a new argument against the Given, and sketches how Sellars and Carnap perform the linguistic turn differently. -/- Wie ist Wissen begründet? Wie bezieht sich Geist auf die Welt? Nach der hier ausgearbeiteten neuen Interpretation von Wilfrid Sellars’ Kritik am „Mythos (...) des Gegebenen“ gehören beide Fragen zusammen. Dieses Buch möchte zeigen, dass sich fundamentalistische Antworten auf beide Fragen der Idee des Gegebenen bedienen, eine gemeinsame Struktur besitzen und aus den gleichen Gründen zurückzuweisen sind. Die Autorin vertritt eine weite Lesart des Mythos vom Gegebenen und entwickelt im Ausgang von Sellars ein neues Argument gegen das Gegebene. Auch diskutiert sie mit Sellars’ Theorie sprachlicher Bedeutung eine alternative Antwort auf die Frage nach der Beziehung zwischen Geist und Welt. (shrink)

The work of the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars continues to have a significant impact on the contemporary philosophical scene. His writings have influenced major thinkers such as Rorty, McDowell, Brandom, and Dennett, and many of Sellars basic conceptions, such as the logical space of reasons, the myth of the given, and the manifest and scientific images, have become standard philosophical terms. Often, however, recent uses of these terms do not reflect the richness or the true sense of Sellars (...) original ideas. This book gets to the heart of Sellars philosophy and provides students with a comprehensive critical introduction to his lifes work. The book is structured around what Sellars himself regarded as the philosophers overarching task: to achieve a coherent vision of reality that will finally overcome the continuing clashes between the world as common sense takes it to be and the world as science reveals it to be. It provides a clear analysis of Sellars groundbreaking philosophy of mind, his novel theory of consciousness, his defense of scientific realism, and his thoroughgoing naturalism with a normative turn. Providing a lively examination of Sellars work through the central problem of what it means to be a human being in a scientific world, this book will be a valuable resource for all students of philosophy. (shrink)

Inference and meaning -- Some reflections on language games -- Language as thought and as communication -- Meaning as functional classification : a perspective on the relation of syntax to semantics -- Naming and saying -- Grammar and existence : a preface to ontology -- Abstract entities -- Being and being known -- The lever of Archimedes -- Some reflections on thoughts and things -- Mental events -- Phenomenalism -- The identity approach to the mind-body problem -- Philosophy and the (...) scientific image of man -- "...this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks..." -- Some remarks on Kant's theory of experience -- The role of imagination in Kant's theory of experience. (shrink)

APA PsycNET abstract: This is the first volume of a two-volume work on Probability and Induction. Because the writer holds that probability logic is identical with inductive logic, this work is devoted to philosophical problems concerning the nature of probability and inductive reasoning. The author rejects a statistical frequency basis for probability in favor of a logical relation between two statements or propositions. Probability "is the degree of confirmation of a hypothesis (or conclusion) on the basis of some given evidence (...) (or premises)." Furthermore, all principles and theorems of inductive logic are analytic, and the entire system is to be constructed by means of symbolic logic and semantic methods. This means that the author confines himself to the formalistic procedures of word and symbol systems. The resulting sentence or language structures are presumed to separate off logic from all subjectivist or psychological elements. Despite the abstractionism, the claim is made that if an inductive probability system of logic can be constructed it will have its practical application in mathematical statistics, and in various sciences. 16-page bibliography. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

The most important work by one of America's greatest twentieth-century philosophers, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is both the epitome of Wilfrid Sellars' entire philosophical system and a key document in the history of philosophy. First published in essay form in 1956, it helped bring about a sea change in analytic philosophy. It broke the link, which had bound Russell and Ayer to Locke and Hume--the doctrine of "knowledge by acquaintance." Sellars' attack on the Myth of the (...) Given in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind was a decisive move in turning analytic philosophy away from the foundationalist motives of the logical empiricists and raised doubts about the very idea of "epistemology." With an introduction by Richard Rorty to situate the work within the history of recent philosophy, and with a study guide by Robert Brandom, this publication of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind makes a difficult but indisputably significant figure in the development of analytic philosophy clear and comprehensible to anyone who would understand that philosophy or its history. (shrink)

Two chief problems of the theory of knowledge are the question of meaning and the question of verification. The first question asks under what conditions a sentence has meaning, in the sense of cognitive, factual meaning. The second one asks how we get to know something, how we can find out whether a given sentence is true or false. The second question presupposes the first one. Obviously we must understand a sentence, i.e. we must know its meaning, before we can (...) try to find out whether it is true or not. But, from the point of view of empiricism, there is a still closer connection between the two problems. In a certain sense, there is only one answer to the two questions. If we knew what it would be for a given sentence to be found true then we would know what its meaning is. And if for two sentences the conditions under which we would have to take them as true are the same, then they have the same meaning. Thus the meaning of a sentence is in a certain sense identical with the way we determine its truth or falsehood; and a sentence has meaning only if such a determination is possible. (shrink)

Two chief problems of the theory of knowledge are the question of meaning and the question of verification. The first question asks under what conditions a sentence has meaning, in the sense of cognitive, factual meaning. The second one asks how we get to know something, how we can find out whether a given sentence is true or false. The second question presupposes the first one. Obviously we must understand a sentence, i.e. we must know its meaning, before we can (...) try to find out whether it is true or not. But, from the point of view of empiricism, there is a still closer connection between the two problems. In a certain sense, there is only one answer to the two questions. If we knew what it would be for a given sentence to be found true then we would know what its meaning is. And if for two sentences the conditions under which we would have to take them as true are the same, then they have the same meaning. Thus the meaning of a sentence is in a certain sense identical with the way we determine its truth or falsehood; and a sentence has meaning only if such a determination is possible. (shrink)

This collection of new essays on the systematic thought and intellectual legacy of the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989) comes at a time when Sellars’s influence on contemporary debates about mind, meaning, knowledge, and metaphysics has never been greater. Sellars was among the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and many of his central ideas have become philosophical stock-in-trade: for example, his conceptions of the ‘myth of the given’, the ‘logical space of reasons’, and the ‘clash’ between (...) the ‘manifest and scientific images of man-in-the-world’. This volume of well-known contemporary philosophers who have been strongly influenced by Sellars – Robert Brandom, Willem deVries, Robert Kraut, Rebecca Kukla, Mark Lance, John McDowell, Ruth Millikan, James O’Shea, David Rosenthal, Johanna Seibt, and Michael Williams – critically examines the groundbreaking ideas by means of which Sellars sought to integrate our thought, perception, and rational agency within a naturalistic outlook on reality. Topics include Sellars’s inferentialist semantics and normative functionalist view of the mind; his attempted reconciliations of internalist and externalist aspects of thought, meaning, and knowledge; his novel nominalist account of abstract entities; and a speculative ‘pure process’ metaphysics of consciousness. Of particular interest is how this volume exhibits the ongoing fruitful dialogue between so-called ‘left-wing Sellarsians’, who stress Sellars’s various Kantian and pragmatist defenses of the irreducibility of normativity and rationality within the space of reasons, and ‘right-wing Sellarsians’ who defend the plausibility of Sellars’s highly ambitious and systematic scientific naturalism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT When a philosopher and a dog play Frisbee, do they cognize the same Frisbee? Is Fido subject to the “myth of the given”? The questions are not silly, for as Marjorie Grene quipped, “Epistemology is a branch of ethology.” What follows accepts what is usually called a “correspondence” theory of truth and a “realist” account of human knowledge. Nothing new, but what will be distinctive is that it seeks to exploit an unusual naturalism deriving from the American philosophical (...) tradition. It will particularly address the epistemic relation of sensing to knowing. A currently widespread view among those who object to realism can be traced to Wilfrid Sellars's 1956 critique of the “myth of the given.” Sellars argued that the normative “order of reasons” in which beliefs are adjudicated is discontinuous with the causal order of sensation or perception, so the former cannot be grounded in the latter. My claim will be that Sellars was half wrong, and the wrong half can be addressed by contemporary cognitive science and anthropology. The permission to employ the latter is granted by a special version of naturalism, “ordinal naturalism,” formed from the American philosophical tradition. (shrink)

[p.225] Introduction (i) Although the following essay attempts to deal in a connected way with a number of connected conceptual tangles, it is by no means monolithic in design. It divides roughly in two, with the first half (Parts I and II) devoted to certain puzzles which have their source in a misunderstanding of the more specific structure of the language in which we describe and explain natural phenomena; while the second half (Parts III and IV) attempts to resolve the (...) more sweeping controversy over the nature of the connection between 'cause' and 'effect,' or, in modem dress, the logical status of 'lawlike statements.' (ii) The essay begins with a case analysis of a puzzle, taken from recent philosophical literature, relating to the analysis of counterfactual conditionals, statements of the form "If that lump of salt had been put in water, it would have dissolved." The diagnosis of this puzzle, which occupies the whole of Part I, shows it to rest on a misunderstanding of the conceptual framework in terms of which we speak of what things do when acted upon in certain ways in certain kinds of circumstance. Although the puzzle is initially posed in terms of examples taken from everyday life, the logical features of these examples which, misunderstood, generate the puzzle, are to be found in even the more theoretical levels of the language of science, and the puzzle is as much at home in the one place as in the other. For the framework in which things of various kinds (e.g. matches, white rats) behave ('respond') in various ways (catch fire, leap at a door) when acted upon ('submitted to such and such stimuli') under given conditions (presence of oxygen, 24 hours of food deprivation) is far more basic than the distinctions between metrical and non-metrical concepts, molar and micro-things, [p.226] observable and unobservable.. (shrink)

Intentionality is one of the central problems of modern philosophy. How can a thought, action or belief be about something? Sachs draws on the work of Wilfrid Sellars, C. I. Lewis and Maurice Merleau-Ponty to build a new theory of intentionality that solves many of the problems faced by traditional conceptions. In doing so, he sheds new light on Sellars’s influential arguments concerning the ‘Myth of the Given’ and shows how we can build a productive discourse between American (...) pragmatism, analytical philosophy and European phenomenology. (shrink)

German: Unter den nichtlogischen Konstanten der Wissenschaftssprache werden zwei Arten unterschieden, die Beobachtungsterme (z. B. « blau ») und die theoretischen Terme (z. B. « elektrisches Feld »). Die letzteren werden nicht durch Definitionen eingeführt, sondern durch Postulate zweier Arten, nämlich theoretische Postulate, zum Beispiel Grundgesetze der Physik, und Korrespondenzpostulate, die die theoretischen Terme mit Beobachtungstermen verbinden. Wie schon Hilbert gezeigt hat, können in dieser Weise sowohl die Mathematik als auch die theoretische Physik als ungedeutete Kalküle aufgestellt werden. Es wird (...) hier kurz erklärt, dass durch diesen Aufbau auch den mathematischen Termen eine Bedeutung (in einem weiteren Sinne) beigelegt wird. Die theoretischen Terme erhalten durch die Korrespondenzpostulate wenigstens eine unvollständige Deutung. Es wird gezeigt, wie die Unterscheidung von analytischen und synthetischen Sätzen auch für die theoretische Sprache definiert werden kann. -/- English: Among the non‐logical constants of the language of science two kinds are distinguished, the observation terms (e.g., « blue ») and the theoretical terms (e.g., « electric field »). The latter terms are introduced, not by definitions, but by postulates of two kinds, theoretical postulates, e.g., basic laws of physics, and correspondence postulates which connect the theoretical terms with observation terms. As Hilbert has explained, both mathematics and theoretical physics can in this way be constructed in the form of uninterpreted calculi. It is here briefly indicated that by this method of construction also the mathematical terms have meanings (in a wider sense) assigned to them. The theoretical terms obtain at least an incomplete interpretation by means of the correspondence postulates. It is shown how the distinction between analytic and synthetic sentences can be defined also for the theoretical language. (shrink)

A summary of Sellars' argument that the Given is a myth--there is no such thing as a given in our knowledge.

This is identical with the first edition (see 21: 2716) except for the addition of a Supplement containing 5 previously published articles and the bringing of the bibliography (now 73 items) up to date. The 5 added articles present clarifications or modifications of views expressed in the first edition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved).

In the wake of Wilfrid Sellars’ philosophy, John Locke’s theory of ideas is often taken to fall prey to the so-called Myth of the Given. The main charge is that Locke appeals to passively received sense impressions to justify knowledge claims and ultimately confuses natural processes with normative conceptual activity. In this paper, I will argue that the accusations are founded on a faulty reading and that Locke’s account does indeed circumvent Givenism without having to abandon the foundationalist (...) ambitions that drive his theory of ideas. I will begin by exploring the attractions and pitfalls of the Myth. Secondly, I will show how the Sellarsian objections can be launched against Locke’s theory of ideas. Thirdly, I will present my interpretation of Locke’s take on ideas and show how they fare in relation to the crucial features involved in the discussion of the Myth. By way of conclusion, I will discuss whether Locke’s way of avoiding the Myth limits his foundationalist approach. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars's "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" begins with an argument against sense-datum epistemology. There is some question about the validity of this attack, stemming in part from the assumption that Sellars is concerned with epistemic foundationalism. This paper recontextualizes Sellars's argument in two ways: by showing how the argument of EPM relates to Sellars's 1940s work, which does not concern foundationalism at all; and by considering the view of H.H. Price, Sellars's teacher at Oxford and the only (...) classical datum theorist to receive substantive comment in EPM. Timm Triplett has claimed that Sellars's discussion simply begs the question against Price, but this depends on the mistaken assumption that Sellars's concern is with foundationalism. On the contrary, Sellars's argument concerns the assumption that the innate capacity for sensory experience counts as "thinking in presence" in the way needed for empiricist accounts of content acquisition. Price's distinction between noticing universals and being aware of them encapsulates the tensions empiricists face here. (shrink)

Wilfrid Sellars’ “myth of the given” had a momentous influence on 20th-century epistemology, putting under pressure the internalist foundationalism so prominent in early analytic philosophy. In this paper, I argue that the core themes in Sellars’ argument are anticipated in the work of the London philosopher and psychologist Beatrice Edgell (1871-1948). Indeed, in some respects Edgell’s argument against the myth of the given is even more compelling than Sellars’. The paper logically reconstructs and historically contextualizes Edgell’s line (...) of argument, as emerging out of a critique of Russell’s epistemology, with the goal of showing that the “myth of the given” effectively predated Sellars by four decades. (shrink)

"This book is valuable as expounding in full a theory of meaning that has its roots in the work of Frege and has been of the widest influence.... The chief virtue of the book is its systematic character. From Frege to Quine most philosophical logicians have restricted themselves by piecemeal and local assaults on the problems involved. The book is marked by a genial tolerance. Carnap sees himself as proposing conventions rather than asserting truths. However he provides plenty of matter (...) for argument."-Anthony Quinton, Hibbert Journal. (shrink)

The Metaphysics of Practice brings together Wilfrid Sellars's writings on topics to do with action, community, and obligation: published essays, manuscripts, and correspondence. Sellars's practical philosophy was absolutely central to his overarching philosophical project of situating persons as practically rational, norm-governed animals within the world as described by an ideal science. The Editors' Introduction offers an overview of Sellars's metaethics, detailing its key features and explaining how these features are supposed to solve outstanding metaethical problems that not only faced (...) Sellars's contemporaries, but continue to create lively debate among contemporary theorists. And the editors give chapter summaries indicating the main lines of argument and showing where each piece fits into Sellars's overall picture. (shrink)

Available for the first time in 20 years, here is the Rudolf Carnap's famous principle of tolerance by which everyone is free to mix and match the rules of ...

Wilfrid Sellars’ denunciation of the Myth of the Given was meant to clarify, against empiricism, that perceptual episodes alone are insufficient to ground and justify perceptual knowledge. Sellars showed that in order to accomplish such epistemic tasks, more resources and capacities, such as those involved in using concepts, are needed. Perceptual knowledge belongs to the space of reasons and not to an independent realm of experience. Dan Hutto and Eric Myin have recently presented the Hard Problem of Content (...) as an ensemble of reasons against naturalistic accounts of content. In a nutshell, it states that covariance relations—even though they are naturalistically acceptable explanatory resources—do not constitute content. The authors exploit this move in order to promote their preferred radical enactivist and anti-representationalist option, according to which, basic minds—the lower stratum of cognition—do not involve content. Although it is controversial to argue that the Hard Problem of Content effectively dismisses naturalistic theories of representation, a central aspect of it—the idea that information as covariance does not suffice to explain content—finds support among the defenders of classical cognitive representationalism, such as Marcin Miłkowski. This support—together with the acknowledgment this remark about covariance is a point already made by Sellars in his criticism of the Myth of the Given—has a number of interesting implications. Not only is it of interest for the debates about representationalism in cognitive science, where it can be understood as an anticipatory move, but it also offers some clues and insights for reconsidering some issues along Sellarsian lines—a conflation between two concepts of representation that is often assumed in cognitive science, a distinction between two types of relevant normativities, and a reconsideration of the naturalism involved in such explanations. (shrink)

1. The lever in question is, of course, that with which, provided that an appropriate fulcrum could be found, Archimedes could move the world. In the analogy I have in mind, the fulcrum is the given, by virtue of which the mind gets leverage on the world of knowledge.

"This book is valuable as expounding in full a theory of meaning that has its roots in the work of Frege and has been of the widest influence.

In a previous issue of this journal, Michael Hicks challenges my critique of Wilfrid Sellars’s arguments against the given and against the foundationalist epistemology that relies on the idea of a sensory given. I had argued that Sellars’s well-known claim that the given is a myth does not succeed because at a critical juncture he misconstrued sense-datum theorists such as Bertrand Russell and H. H. Price. In his response to my argument, Hicks makes the striking claim that Sellars (...) was not targeting foundationalism at all in his discussion of the myth of the given. Hicks reconstructs a key argument in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (EPM) in a way intended both to avoid any reference to foundationalism and to do a more effective job than does Sellars’s original argument in uncovering a dilemma for traditional empiricism. The present paper challenges Hicks on two fronts. First, it argues that Hicks’s reconstruction is not more successful than Sellars’s original argument. Second, a review of relevant passages in makes clear that the critique of foundationalism is a prominent aspect of Sellars’s multi-faceted attack on the given. The conclusion reasserts the significance of Sellars’s place in the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. (shrink)

The term ‘functionalism’ is usually heard in connection with the philosophy of mind or cognition. The functionalism of Wilfrid Sellars, however, is in the first instance as response to the worries about the metaphysics not of mental states, but of meaning. Only late in his career did Sellars explore the possibility of extending his functionalism into an account of cognition. It has been suggested, though, that Sellars’ extension of his functionalist theory into subpersonal territory is not successful. In particular, (...) there is a worry abroad that in order to be a functionalist about cognitive states, Sellars must succumb to a special form of the Myth of the Given. In this essay I will review and elucidate what I take to be the structure of Sellars’ functionalism, defending it from this worry. I will suggest a resolution of some apparent textual contradictions based in part on the chronology of Sellars’ writing, with the assumption that later writings express Sellars’ more nuanced views. -/- Draft of 2009. (shrink)

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. Under 'things in the broadest possible sense' I include such radically different items as not only 'cabbages and kings', but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to 'know one's way around' with respect (...) to all these things, 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. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: In this chapter I argue that Sellars’s philosophy was deeply pragmatist both in its motivation and in its content, whether considered conceptually, historically, or in his own estimation, and that this is the case even in the important respects in which his views differ from most pragmatists. However, this assessment has been rejected by many recent pragmatists, with “classicalist” pragmatists frequently objecting to Sellars’s analytic-pragmatist privileging of language at the alleged expense of experience, while many analytic pragmatists themselves emphasize (...) that Sellars’s philosophy arguably runs against the grain of pragmatism in central respects, with Brandom for instance recently remarking that “Sellars never explicitly identified himself with pragmatism.” Part I explores the classical pragmatist influences on the development of Sellars’s philosophy, with reference to aspects of the intellectual background in which those views formed. Part II then outlines more abstractly some of the enduring pragmatist themes in Sellars’s philosophy, including his conceptions of the myth of the given, the space of reasons, and his normative-inferentialist theory of meaning. I conclude in Part III with Sellars’s views on truth and “picturing,” which present a complex case for the question of “how pragmatist” Sellars’s views both were and ought to be. (shrink)

In this paper I make some critical comments on John McDowell’s Mind and World and offer suggestions as to how it might be possible to solve John McDowell’s problem of finding a safe passage between the Scylla of the “Myth of the Given” (Sellars) and the Charybdis of a Davidsonian linguistic coherentism. McDowell’s defense of a minimal empiricism depends on the largely unargued and ultimately untenable assumption that epistemic justification can only operate at the level of conceptual or propositional (...) entities. Drawing on contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and continental philosophy of subjectivity, I try to show that epistemic normativity already comes into play at two levels of experience—sensory observation and self-knowledge—that are more basic than the conceptual. What McDowell needs is a philosophy of subjectivity that would allow him to identify primary sources of epistemic normativity that are both subjectcentered and pre-conceptual. (shrink)

'My endeavour in these pages is to explain the main features of the method of philosophizing which we, the Vienna Circle, use, and by using try to develop further. It is the method of the logical analysis of science, or more precisely, of the syntactical analysis of scientific language.... The purpose of the book -- as of the lectures -- is to give a first impression of our method and of the direction of our questions and investigations to those who (...) are not yet acquainted with them.' -- From the Preface. (shrink)

I argue that phenomenology should take seriously what Wilfrid Sellars calls “the Myth of the Given”. Phenomenologists have either ignored this idea or misunder-stood it. I argue that the Myth of the Given, if understood correctly, could be an objection to phenomenological method. Specifically I argue that Husserl’s static phenomenology is vulnerable to a Sellarsian criticism. However, I also show that Merleau-Ponty is not vulnerable to a Sellarsian criticism because of how he navigates the relationship between phenomenology (...) and science. This shows that the question as to whether phenomenology is vulnerable to the Sellarsian criticism is more complicated than has been assumed by phenomenologists or their critics. (shrink)

1. It seems plausible to say that a language is a system of expressions the use of which is subject to certain rules. It would seem, thus, that learning to use a language is learning to obey the rules for the use of its expressions. However, taken as it stands, this thesis is subject to an obvious and devastating refutation. After formulating this refutation, I shall turn to the constructive task of attempting to restate the thesis in a way which (...) avoids it. In doing so, I shall draw certain distinctions the theoretical elaboration of which will, I believe, yield new insight into the psychology of language and of what might be called “norm conforming behavior” generally. The present paper contains an initial attempt along these lines. (shrink)

Western philosophy. The crucial point of these discussions was the connection between conceptual and non-conceptual elements of our relation to the world. The core of this problem can be also formulated as the question of connection between semantic and syntactical rules of our epistemic relation to the world. Could we know anything about some state of affairs by us-ing only syntactical rules, which relate logical terms to one another, or we also need semantic rules, which connect the formal syntax of (...) our epistemic relation to the world with extra-conceptual characteristics of each state of affairs? Wilfrid Sellars’ approach to this problem is a critical reaction to the traditional theories of rules. The main point of his criticism of the traditional theories of rules, whose origins Sellars attributed to Kant’s conception of rules, could be summed up as follows: the difference between syntactical and semantic rules of our epistemic relation to world is founded on the Myth of the Given. In his Inference and Meaning Sellars elaborated a theory of material rules of inference which tries to neutralize the traditional approach to the problem. I am of the opinion – and it is my major claim in this paper – that Sellars’ argument in IM sug-gests a way of avoiding the Myth. I argue that Sellars’ argument consists in three basic steps: irreducibility as well as operative normativity of the material rules of inference and linguisticality of descriptive terms. (shrink)

Studies in Wilfrid Sellars' philosophy: Aune, B. Sellars on practical reason.--Castañeda, H.-N. Some reflections on Wilfrid Sellars' theory of intentions.--Donagan, A. Determinism and freedom: Sellars and the reconciliationist thesis.--Robinson, W. S. The legend of the given.--Clark, R. The sensuous content of perception.--Grossmann, R. Perceptual objects, elementary particles, and emergent properties.--Rosenberg, J. F. The elusiveness of categories, the Archimedean dilemma, and the nature of man: a study in Sellarsian metaphysics.--Turnbull, R. G. Things, natures, and properties.--Wells, R. The indispensable word (...) "now."--Van Fraassen, B. C. Theories and counterfactuals.--Harman, G. H. Wilfrid Sellars' Theory of induction.--Sellarsiana: Sellars, W. Autobiographical reflections.--Sellars, W. The structure of knowledge. Lecture I, perception. Lecture II, minds. Lecture III, epistemic principles.--Wilfrid Sellars' Philosophical bibliography. (p. 349-353). (shrink)

Una tesi che è stata ultimamente discussa dai filosofi analitici del linguaggio è la tesi della normatività del significato linguistico (TNS). Secondo TNS, i significati delle espressioni delle lingue naturali hanno una componente normativa: essi fissano uno standard di correttezza per l’applicazione o l’uso (da parte dei parlanti) delle espressioni stesse e, in conseguenza di ciò, impegnano i parlanti a determinati obblighi semantici nell’applicazione o nell’uso delle espressioni. In questo articolo, ricostruisco e difendo alcune riflessioni di Wilfrid Sellars a (...) favore di questa tesi. In particolare, mi concentro sulle riflessioni contenute in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (1956) e sviluppate in “Language as Thought and as Communication” (1969) e “Meaning as Functional Classification. A Perspective on the Relation of Syntax to Semantics” (1974). La struttura dell’articolo è la seguente. Nella prima sezione, presento TNS nella sua versione più generale. Nella seconda sezione, mostro alcuni casi di enunciati descrittivi che sono in grado di trasmettere, in determinati contesti di proferimento, una forza normativa: sostengo che un fenomeno simile sia caratteristico anche degli enunciati semantici – enunciati della forma “L’espressione linguistica e significa M”. Questo è il cuore della versione di TNS che vado a discutere. Nella terza, quarta e quinta sezione, discuto l’analisi di Sellars degli enunciati semantici. La conclusione della sua analisi è che un enunciato semantico predica l’identità dei ruoli funzionali di due parole. Mostro come Sellars arrivi a questa analisi, dedicando ampio spazio alla critica ad un’analisi alternativa, secondo la quale gli enunciati semantici sono enunciati descrittivi che predicano una relazione di associazione tra un’espressione linguistica e un oggetto o proprietà. Mi soffermo sulle ragioni teoriche che giustificano il rifiuto di Sellars di questa analisi, concentrandomi su alcune tematiche classiche del progetto epistemologico sellarsiano. Nella sesta sezione, dopo aver argomentato che la nozione di pragmema proposta da Capone (2005, 2018) può aiutare a comprendere e ampliare la nozione sellarsiana di ruolo funzionale, mostro come tale analisi possa essere sfruttata per sostenere che gli enunciati semantici sono enunciati metalinguistici che hanno delle conseguenze normative sui comportamenti linguistici dei parlanti. Accenno infine al dibattito contemporaneo e alla formulazione di un argomento oggi discusso a favore di TNS, a partire da una rivisitazione della nozione di ruolo funzionale. (shrink)

Sellars and McDowell, among others, attribute a prominent role to the Myth of the Given. In this paper, I suggest that they have in mind two different versions of the Myth of the Given and I argue that Kant is not the target of one version and, though explicitly under attack from the other, has resources sufficient to mount a satisfactory response. What is essential to this response is a proper understanding of (empirical) concepts as involving unifying functions (...) that can take sensations as input and deliver normative representations as outputs. By understanding concepts in this way, one need not, as the second version of the Myth of the Given maintains, take sensations to be both natural and normative. Instead, they can be understood as the natural effects of external objects on us, but natural effects that can nonetheless play a role in a normative process because the concepts that are responsible for the normativity of the results can require that such natural effects be present as inputs into the process. (shrink)

It is not the aim of the present essay to defend the principle of empiricism against apriorism or anti-empiricist metaphysics. Taking empirism for granted, we wish to discuss, the question what is meaningful. The word ‘meaning’ will here be taken in its empiricist sense; an expression of language has meaning in this sense if we know how to use it in speaking about empirical facts, either actual or possible ones. Now our problem is what expressions are meaningful in this sense. (...) We may restrict this question to sentences because expressions other than sentences are meaningful if and only if they can occur in a meaningful sentence. (shrink)

In a recent article in this journal, Marc Champagne leveled an argument against what Wilfrid Sellars dubbed “the Myth of the Given.” Champagne contends that what is given in observation in the form of a sensation must be able to both cause and justify propositionally structured beliefs. He argues for this claim by attempting to show that one cannot decide which of two equally valid chains of inference is sound without appeal to what is given in experience. In (...) this note, I show that while this argument is sound, the conclusion he draws is far too strong. Champagne’s argument shows only that our empirical beliefs are determined through experience. It does not license the stronger claim that, in order for us to have empirical knowledge, bare sensations must be able to justify beliefs. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: I argue that Sellars’s metaconceptual theory of the categories exemplifies and extends a long line of nominalistic thinking about the nature of the categories from Ockham and Kant to the Tractatus and Carnap, and that this theory is far more central than has generally been realized to each of Sellars’s most famous and enduring philosophical conceptions: the myth of the given, the logical space of reasons, and resolving the ostensible clash between the manifest and scientific images of the (...) human being in the world. Sellars’s distinctive contribution to this longstanding (if currently on the defensive) metaconceptual approach to the nature of ontological categories was to interpret and reconstruct it in terms of his own ‘meaning as use’ or norm-governed inferential role semantics. With these resources Sellars sought to preserve the genuine insights in the ‘realist’ or broadly platonic traditions while simultaneously defending the idea that in the end, as he puts it, “a naturalistic ontology must be a nominalistic ontology” (1980a NAO IV §129). (shrink)

Formal implication is usually represented by symbolization such as ‘ φx ⊃ Ψx,’ which may be read, “for all values of ‘x’, φx implies Ψx.” If the values of the variable ‘x’, in ‘φx’ and ‘Ψx’ be ‘x1’ ‘x2’ ‘x3’, etc., then … ‘φx’ formally implies ‘Ψx’ if and only if, whatever values of ‘x’, ‘xn’, be chosen, ‘φxn’ materially implies ‘Ψxn’ …However, this still leaves it doubtful which of two possible interpretations of expressions having the form ‘ φx ⊃ (...) Ψx’ is to be taken as correct. … It means one thing to say, “Every existent having the property φ … has also the property Ψ,” and it means quite a different thing to say, “Every thinkable thing which should have the property φ must also have the property Ψ.” The second of these holds only when having the properly φ logically entails having the property Ψ; when ‘Ψx’ is deductible from ‘φx’. … The first of them, however, holds not only in such cases … but also in every case where among existent things, one property is universally accompanied by another. (shrink)

Among the various meanings in which the word ‘probability’ is used in everyday language, in the discussion of scientists, and in the theories of probability, there are especially two which must be clearly distinguished. We shall use for them the terms ‘probability1’ and ‘probability2'. Probability1 is a logical concept, a certain logical relation between two sentences ; it is the same as the concept of degree of confirmation. I shall write briefly “c” for “degree of confirmation,” and “c” for “the (...) degree of confirmation of the hypothesis h on the evidence e“; the evidence is usually a report on the results of our observations. On the other hand, probability2 is an empirical concept; it is the relative frequency in the long run of one property with respect to another. The controversy between the so-called logical conception of probability, as represented e.g. by Keynes, and Jeffreys, and others, and the frequency conception, maintained e.g. by v. Mises and Reichenbach, seems to me futile. These two theories deal with two different probability concepts which are both of great importance for science. Therefore, the theories are not incompatible, but rather supplement each other. (shrink)

1. The lever in question is, of course, that with which, provided that an appropriate fulcrum could be found, Archimedes could move the world. In the analogy I have in mind, the fulcrum is the given, by virtue of which the mind gets leverage on the world of knowledge.

A survey of the literature on the problem of the synthetic a priori soon reveals that the term “analytic” is used in a narrower and a broader sense. In the narrower sense, a proposition is analytic if it is either a truth of logic or is logically true. By saying of a proposition that it is logically true, I mean, roughly, and with an eye on the problem of the relation of logical categories to natural languages, that when defined terms (...) are replaced by their definientia, it becomes a substitution instance of a truth of logic. And a truth of logic can be adequately characterized for present purposes as a proposition which occurs in the body of Principia Mathematica, or which would properly occur in a vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage of this already monumental work. If we now agree to extend the convenient phrase “logically true” to cover truths of logic as well as propositions which are logically true in the sense just defined, we can say that an analytic proposition in the narrower sense is a proposition which is logically true. (shrink)

Among the deeper strata of Rorty’s philosophy is what I call his aversion to normative violence. Normative violence occurs when some specific group presents itself as having a privileged relation to reality. The alternative to normative violence is recognizing that cultural politics has priority over ontology. I trace this Rortyan idea to its origins in Nietzsche and Sellars. Rorty’s contribution is to combine Nietzsche on the death of God and Sellars on the Myth of the Given. However, I conclude (...) with a suggestion that Rorty ultimately goes too far in thinking that avoiding normative violence requires abstaining from metaphysics and epistemology as such. (shrink)

The essay adopts the Tractarian view that configurations of objects are expressed by configurations of names. Two alternatives are considered: The objects in atomic facts are (1) without exception particulars; (2) one or more particulars plus a universal (Gustav Bergmann). On (1) a mode of configuration is always an empirical relation: on (2) it is the logical nexus of 'exemplification.' It is argued that (1) is both Wittgenstein's view in the Tractatus and correct. It is also argued that exemplification is (...) a 'quasi-semantical' relation, and that it (and universals) are "in the world" only in that broad sense in which the 'world' includes linguistic norms and roles viewed (thus in translating) from the standpoint of a fellow participant. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungUnter den nichtlogischen Konstanten der Wissenschaftssprache werden zwei Arten unterschieden, die Beobachtungsterme und die theoretischen Terme . Die letzteren werden nicht durch Definitionen eingeführt, sondern durch Postulate zweier Arten, nämlich theoretische Postulate, zum Beispiel Grundgesetze der Physik, und Korrespondenzpostulate, die die theoretischen Terme mit Beobachtungstermen verbinden. Wie schon Hilbert gezeigt hat, können in dieser Weise sowohl die Mathematik als auch die theoretische Physik als ungedeutete Kalküle aufgestellt werden. Es wird hier kurz erklärt, dass durch diesen Aufbau auch den mathematischen Termen (...) eine Bedeutung beigelegt wird. Die theoretischen Terme erhalten durch die Korrespondenzpostulate wenigstens eine unvollständige Deutung. Es wird gezeigt, wie die Unterscheidung von analytischen und synthetischen Sätzen auch für die theoretische Sprache definiert werden kann.Among the non‐logical constants of the language of science two kinds are distinguished, the observation terms and the theoretical terms . The latter terms are introduced, not by definitions, but by postulates of two kinds, theoretical postulates, e.g., basic laws of physics, and correspondence postulates which connect the theoretical terms with observation terms. As Hilbert has explained, both mathematics and theoretical physics can in this way be constructed in the form of uninterpreted calculi. It is here briefly indicated that by this method of construction also the mathematical terms have meanings assigned to them. The theoretical terms obtain at least an incomplete interpretation by means of the correspondence postulates. It is shown how the distinction between analytic and synthetic sentences can be defined also for the theoretical language. (shrink)