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ABSTRACT
Wilfrid Sellars argued that Kant’s account of the conceptual structures involved in experience can be given a linguistic turn so as to provide an analytic account of the resources a language must have in order to be the bearer of empirical knowledge. In this paper I examine the methodological aspects of Kant’s transcendental philosophy that Sellars took to be fundamental to influential themes in his own philosophy. My first aim here is to clarify and argue for the plausibility of what I claim is Sellars’ interpretation of Kant’s ‘analytic’ transcendental method in the first Critique, based ultimately on non-trivial analytic truths concerning the concept of an object of our possible experience. Kant’s ‘transcendental proofs’ thereby avoid a certain methodological trilemma confronting the candidate premises of any such proof, taken from Sellars’ 1970s undergraduate exam question on Kant. In part II of the essay I conclude by highlighting in general terms how Kant’s method, as interpreted in the analytic manner explained in part I, was adapted by Sellars to produce some of the more influential aspects of his own philosophy, expressed in terms of what he contends is their sustainable reformulation in light of the so-called linguistic turn in twentieth-century philosophy.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to two BJHP referees for their helpful queries and insightful requests for further clarification, and my thanks also to Gabriele Gava and to Michael Beaney.
Notes
1 I address the general topic of Kant's relationship to twentieth-century analytic philosophy in general in O’Shea, ‘Conceptual Connections’, and then with particular focus on Sellars in O’Shea, Sellars and His Legacy and ‘Kant’s Theoretical Philosophy’; the present quotation and a couple of short passages will also appear in the latter publication.
2 I will follow the standard practice of referring to Sellars’ works by means of their abbreviations and with section or paragraph numbers where possible. In this case ‘OAPK’ refers to Sellars’ ‘Ontology, the A Priori and Kant’, collected in Sellars (Kant’s Transcendental Metaphysics) KTM by Jeffrey Sicha. Sicha explains (261) that OAPK was an unpublished typescript from the mid-1960's (apparently revised by Sellars in 1970) which was to be ‘Part One’ of a longer piece, ‘Part Two’ of which was published as ‘Kant's Theory of Experience’ in 1967 (KTE, also in Sellars Kant’s Transcendental Metaphysics).
3 Sellars uses our linguistic behaviour as his model for understanding the nature of inner conceptual thinking, whereas Kant's focus is directly on the logical form of concepts and judgments themselves. However, given that in all relevant respects what Sellars wants to say about language he also wants to say, by analogy, about inner conceptual thinking, I will assume, at least for the purposes of this paper, that no obstacles arise from Kant's primarily non-linguistic methodological approach to the nature and role of concepts in our cognition.
4 What I am calling Sellars’ ‘analytic reading’ of Kant is thus to be understood as referring to Sellars’ embrace of the second horn, mentioned in the main text here, of his own exam question trilemma to be discussed below. That is, I argue in favour of Sellars’ view that the ultimate premises of Kant's transcendental ‘proofs’ are conceptual analyses in the sense of consisting of non-trivial analytic a priori truths or judgments. On Sellars’ reading, as we shall see, such ‘philosophical’ knowledge roughly speaking consists in ‘analytic knowledge about synthetic knowledge’ (involving the complex analysis, in particular, of the concept of an object of possible experience), while nonetheless also avoiding the other two ‘synthetic’ horns of the trilemma. The resulting ineliminable ambiguity in Kant between relatively trivial analyses of given concepts (e.g. ‘bodies are extended’) and significantly non-trivial conceptual analyses (such as those characteristic of Kant's transcendental analytic in general, which Kant also describes as an analysis of the faculty of understanding (A65–66/B90–91)), will be noted as the argument proceeds.
5 Sellars’ analytic reading of Kant's transcendental method as discussed in this paper does not refer to, though it can be squared with, Kant's well-known methodological distinction between the ‘analytic method’ he is following in the Prolegomena as opposed to the ‘synthetic method’ that he indicates he followed in the first Critique (see Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, 4.263–4; 4.274–5). A careful recent analysis of the latter distinction is Gava (‘Kant’s Synthetic and Analytic Method’), building on Bird (‘Kant’s Analytic Apparatus’) and other commentators, which I take to be consistent with Sellars’ interpretation of Kant's method in the first Critique. Along one dimension of that distinction, Kant in the Prolegomena assumes more directly the validity of the SAP principles to be found in mathematics and natural science than he does in the a priori synthesis-revealing analyses of the pure forms of sensibility and understanding provided in the first Critique. Sellars’ reading is also consistent with Gava's further argument that both of Kant's analytic and synthetic methods are to be found within the first Critique as a whole.
6 All boldfacing in quotations from Kant is as found in the Guyer-Wood translation.
7 See especially Sellars (Science and Metaphysics, Chs 1–2). See also deVries (Wilfrid Sellars), Haag (Analytic Kantianism), Landy (Kant’s Inferentialism), McDowell (Having the World in View), O'Shea (Sellars and His Legacy, ‘Sellars’ Interpretive Variations’), Rosenberg (Accessing Kant), and Westphal (‘Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason’). See also, for a substantial investigation of many of the topics I will be exploring in this chapter, Jeffrey Sicha's book-length introduction to his edition of Sellars (Kant’s Transcendental Metaphysics). For recent work on Kantian conceptualism/nonconceptualism debates, see especially Schulting (Kantian Nonconceptualism).
8 Sellars is among those interpreters of Kant who hold that the transcendental aesthetic cannot fully adequately accomplish its tasks, including in particular the explication of the nature of our singular intuitions, until the results of the subsequent transcendental analytic are in hand (Rosenberg, Accessing Kant, 62–3: ‘The understanding turns out to be implicated in all cognition, singular as well as general’). As Sellars puts it informally in his undergraduate Kant lectures, the ‘trouble is that Kant never went back and re-did everything that should have been re-done to bring the Aesthetic into keeping with the requirements of the theory of experience as he develops it in the Analytic’ (Sellars, Kant and Pre-Kantian Themes, 124; though he also remarks informally (KPT 178n): ‘What the Aesthetic does is to establish the noninferential character of our consciousness of spatial objects. What the Principles do is to establish that the objects do have the kind of structure which entitles us to call them a physical world.’). For recent contrasting discussions of how to approach Kant on sensible intuition in the Aesthetic in relation to the Deduction, see Allais (‘Transcendental Idealism and the Transcendental Aesthetic’) and Conant (‘Kant’s Critique of the Layer-Cake Conception’). For the idea that Sellars represented a complex middle way on the current Kantian ‘conceptualism vs. non-conceptualism’ controversies, differing in important ways, for example, from John McDowell's conceptualist outlook, see O'Shea (‘Kant’s Theoretical Philosophy’, §3), as well as Landy (Kant’s Inferentialism).
9 There are of course many closely related discussions by earlier generations of commentators concerning the question of Kant's starting points and what premises he might be relying on in his transcendental proofs and in the transcendental deduction. To mention just three: Stephan Körner's, ‘The Impossibility of Transcendental Deductions’ (see also ‘Transcendental Tendencies in Recent Philosophy’) would have been well-known to Sellars and raises an interestingly related trilemma objection, to which Körner (unlike Sellars) famously argues that Kant has no good answer (see Westphal, Kant’s Transcendental Proof of Realism, 16–17); Kemp Smith's earlier 1923 commentary, which Sellars admired, raises partly related queries concerning the nature of Kant's starting point (see 241–2, for example); and much earlier, the post-Kantian Jakob Friedrich Fries had raised what came to be known (via Karl Popper) as Fries’ or the Friesian Trilemma, and which has recently been examined carefully by Sperber (‘Solving the Regress Puzzle’). See also Marshall (‘Does Kant Demand Explanations’) for what he calls the ‘Regress Argument’ concerning Kant's explanation of synthetic a priori judgments, which is laid out in terms of what amount to the same basic choices as Sellars’ exam trilemma, along with helpful citations to earlier literature. In many cases this sort of challenge has led to the conclusion that Kant failed to ground his own philosophy adequately at this fundamental level (e.g. Forster, Kant and Skepticism, Chs 11–12). In addition, of course, there is a voluminous literature concerning the nature and fortunes of ‘transcendental arguments’ in general: for a start, see Stern (Transcendental Arguments) and Ameriks (Interpreting Kant’s Critiques, Chs 2–3). For my present purposes here I will focus primarily on the question of how Sellars interpreted and appropriated Kant's transcendental method. (My thanks to Willem deVries for a copy of Sellars’ undergraduate exam questions on Kant.)
10 The analyses of the a priori concepts (categories) of the faculty of understanding in its ‘pure use’ as making experience possible are thus to be distinguished, for example, both from the analysis of concepts given a posteriori, and also from the traditional analyses of the concepts ‘that present themselves’ in rational metaphysics as allegedly given a priori without the need for any prior investigation of their possibility or of the objective validity of their ‘pure use’ in relation to the objects of experience.
11 These notes were published by Benno Erdmann (Nachträge zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft) and were translated and included in the Guyer and Wood translation of the Critique listed in the references. The Erdmann and Akademie reference here is E XXXIII, 21–2; Ak. 23:24–5. Kant's overall analysis of the concept of an object of possible experience here begins with an analysis of the nature of judgment and attempts to clarify the functional role of concepts ‘as predicates of possible judgments’ (A69/B94), thereby exposing by means of the analysis the pure a priori forms of judgment and conception that make our a posteriori empirical cognitions of objects possible.
12 See also Sellars (Kant’s Transcendental Metaphysics) KTM, 483–4 (= Sellars’ ‘Cassirer Lecture Notes’, CLN B38–41).
13 The full sentence in the Guyer/Wood translation is: ‘Philosophical cognition is rational cognition from concepts, mathematical cognition that from the construction of concepts.’
14 See R5645, 18:290, in Kant, Notes and Fragments, 273.
15 An indication of this is that one can conduct the analysis in the transcendental deduction, as Kant himself does, both ‘starting from below’ with the concept of an object of our successive apprehensions, and ‘starting from above’ with the transcendental unity of the ‘I think’ in any experience (see O’Shea, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: An Introduction and Interpretation, 132–49 for an introductory clarification of each direction of analysis in the Deduction).
16 Rosenberg (The Thinking Self, 5–6):
What Kant argued, in his ‘Transcendental Deduction’, was that such an objective ‘synthetic unity of apperception’ was not a mere phenomenological given but was, in fact, correlative to the (subjective) ‘transcendental unity of apperception’. In other words, the conditions according to which an experienced world was constituted as an intelligible synthetic unity were at the same time the conditions by which an experiencing consciousness was itself constituted as a unitary self. That an experiencer represents the encountered world as categorially structured in space and time, Kant claimed to show, was a condition of the very possibility of his representing himself as a unitary subject of his world at all.
17 For further biographical and philosophical aspects of Kant's influence on Sellars, see Brandom, From Empiricism to Expressivism, Ch. 1; O'Shea, Sellars and His Legacy, 4–7; and Sellars’ 1974 Autobiographical Remarks (AR).
18 Obviously the relevant sense of inferability here is inferability within the objective domain, and not the misconceived Cartesian or ‘problematic idealist’ attempt to infer from the subjective to the objective (see Kant's Refutation of Idealism). Note also that Sellars is not rejecting non-inferential or direct perceptual knowledge of physical objects: one can ‘recognize the essential and irreducible role of inference without denying the existence of non-inferential knowledge of the here-now’, which in fact Sellars accepts in his own Kantian account of our perceptual knowledge (TTC §51). Sellars repeatedly stresses that non-inferential knowledge with inferential semantic and epistemic presuppositions is not the same as the Myth of the (presuppositionless) Given that he famously rejects (EPM I §1 and VIII §32). He also does not reject the idea that something is ‘given’ to our passive sensibility in sense experience, but of what sort depends on Kant's enduring insight that the categories are already involved even in our most basic singular sensible intuitions themselves: ‘To be able to have intuitive representings, then, is to have all the conceptual apparatus involved in representing oneself as acquiring empirical knowledge of a world one never made’ (KTE §36).
19 I have offered an elaboration of the grounds for this form of argument, as exhibited in a line of thinking that runs from Kant through C. I. Lewis to Sellars and Brandom, in O’Shea (‘Concepts of Objects as Prescribing Laws’). So I will not pursue it further here, though it is central to Sellars’ (and, for example, Brandom's) Kantian methodological heritage.
20 As Kant puts it in the Paralogisms:
At the ground of this doctrine we can place nothing but the simple and in content for itself wholly empty representation I, of which one cannot even say that it is a concept, but a mere consciousness that accompanies every concept;
consciousness in itself is not even a representation distinguishing a particular object, but rather a form of representation in general, insofar as it is to be called a cognition; for of it alone can I say that through it I think anything.
21 Note, also, that I have left entirely aside for present purposes Sellars’ grapplings with the problem of qualitative sensory consciousness, or the ‘hard problem’ as it is called today. There is of course a Kantian dimension to this aspect of Sellars’ philosophy, by way of Kant's views on sensibility (see Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, Ch. 1).
22 For recent assessments of Sellars’ famously divided philosophical legacy in general, which has unfortunately but not unreasonably ossified into an often misleading distinction between ‘left-wing vs. right-wing Sellarsians’, see all the contributions to the Sellars and His Legacy volume (O'Shea, Sellars and His Legacy).