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Abstract
Sellars was committed to the irreducibility of the semantic, the intentional, and the normative. Nevertheless, he was also committed to naturalism, which is prima facie at odds with his other theses. This paper argues that Sellars maintained his naturalism by being linguistically pluralistic but ontologically monistic. There are irreducibly distinct forms of discourse, because there is an array of distinguishable functions that language and thought perform, but we are not ontologically committed to the array of apparently non‐natural entities or relations mentioned in the metalanguage. However, there is an underlying relation between language and world presupposed by all empirically meaningful language. In his early work Sellars sought to describe this relation in linguistic terms as a form of ‘pure description’, but inadequacies in that notion drove him towards the naturalistic relation between language and world that he came to call ‘picturing’.
Notes
1 Of course, this oversimplifies. There is a notion of ‘mirroring’ that appears in Sellars’s earliest essays, for example, ENWW 647–8 (PPPW 33–4): ‘we are led to the notion of this language as mirroring the world by a one‐to‐one correspondence of designations with individuals’; RNWW 426 (PPPW 55): ‘our language claims somehow to contain a designation for every element in every state of affairs, past, present and future; … in other words, it claims to mirror the world by a complete and systematic one‐to‐one correspondence of designations with individuals’. But mirroring here is not yet the later idea of picturing. (1) It is focused on designations and is not yet combined with a theory of predication; it does not yet appreciate the primacy of the sentence over its parts. (2) In these early essays Sellars tries to explicate the normative status of an atomic sentence in terms of ‘co‐experiencing’ a token of the sentence and the state of affairs it means. This puts the language–world tie inside experience or the mind, whereas picturing ultimately puts it outside, as I will argue below. In this sense ‘mirroring’ is still too Cartesian.
2 John Herman Randall, ‘The Nature of Naturalism’, in Yervant H. Krikorian (ed.) Naturalism and the Human Spirit (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944), p. 357.
3 See, for instance, the Introduction to Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (eds) Naturalism in Question (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 2ff.
4 First, Sellars thinks of science as engaged in discovering or constructing the ideal description of the world; furthermore, he rejects any reduction of the ‘ought’. Yet he says ‘not all knowing is knowing how to describe something. We know what we ought to do as well as what the circumstances are’ (CDCM §107: 306). Thus, science is not the paradigm of all knowledge. Second, Sellars’s theory of truth as (ideal) semantic assertability is not tied to a view that science is the sole authority concerning or method for fixing the rules that determine assertability. Third, Sellars provides space in several of his articles for transcendental inquiries or disciplines, one of which is philosophy. But while he thinks of philosophy as in important ways continuous with the sciences, he doesn’t think that philosophy is just another kind of science.
5 As an aside, I think that Sellars’s rejection of epistemic naturalism together with his epistemic pluralism ought to absolve him of the charges of scientism that are sometimes levelled against him. Scientism is an inordinate faith in science as The Answer to almost every question of importance. For Sellars, science is the means to a limited end, empirical knowledge, which is crucial for, but not constitutive of, knowledge of any other kind. Attempts at other kinds of knowledge often depend on our getting the empirical facts right.
6 Originally stated in W. V. O. Quine, ‘On What There Is’, Review of Metaphysics, 2(5) (September 1948), p. 21–38, reprinted in From a Logical Point of View: Nine Logico‐Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), pp. 1–19 at p. 15.
7 For such a review, see Chapter 4 of my Wilfrid Sellars (Chesham, Bucks: Acumen Publishing, and Montreal and Kingston: McGill‐Queen’s University Press, 2005).
8 This oversimplifies, by making it sound as if these terms are in the metalanguage of some specific language. But that is, of course, false. As Sellars says, ‘For our present purposes, it is sufficient to say that the claim that modal expressions are “in the metalanguage” is not too misleading if the peculiar force of the expressions which occur alongside them … is recognized, in particular that they have a “straightforward” translation into other languages, and if it is also recognized that they belong not only “in the metalanguage”, but in discourse about thoughts and concepts as well’ (CDCM §81: 284). Also notice that this strategy leaves it open to Sellars to make sense of God‐talk and tales of the supernatural as material‐mode metalinguistic discussion of rules and evaluations aimed at base‐level behaviour.
9 ‘Now, once it is granted … that empiricism in moral philosophy is compatible with the recognition that “ought” has as distinguished a role in discourse as descriptive and logical terms, in particular that we reason rather than “reason” concerning ought, and once the tautology “The world is described by descriptive concepts” is freed from the idea that the business of all non‐logical concepts is to describe, the way is clear to an ungrudging recognition that many expressions which empiricists have relegated to second‐class citizenship in discourse, are not inferior, just different’ (CDCM, §79: 282).
10 ‘[M]icrotheories themselves characteristically postulate micro‐thing‐kinds which have fundamentally the same logic as the molar thing‐kinds we have been considering. And if they do take us on the way to a process picture of the world, they do not take us all the way. For even if a “ground floor” theory in terms of micro‐micro‐things were equivalent to a pure process theory by virtue of raising no questions concerning the causal properties of these micro‐micro‐things to which it could not provide the answer, it would not for that reason be a pure process theory. For the logical form of a thing theory is, after all, characteristically different from that of a theory whose basic entities are spatio‐temporally related events, or overlapping episodes’ (CDCM §51: 264). I believe that Sellars is pointing here to the idea of a framework in which the basic entities are not complex things that belong to thing‐kinds with articulable conceptual structures, but ultimately simple (though not bare) particulars. He tries to spell these ideas out in ‘On the Logic of Complex Particulars’, Mind, 58 (1949), pp. 306–38, reprinted in PPPW; and ‘Particulars’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 13 (1952), pp. 184–99, reprinted in SPR. I do not claim to understand these articles.
11 Sellars grants that ‘Such an “ideal” description would no longer, in the ordinary sense, be in causal terms, nor the laws be causal laws; though philosophers have often muddied the waters by extending the application of the terms “cause” and “causal” in such a wise that any law of nature (at least any nonstatistical law of nature) is a “causal” law’ (CDCM §50: 263). The manifest image conception of causation must ultimately be left behind in the march of science, though the notion that there are good material inferences from the occurrence of some event or episode to the occurrence of some other(s) is a necessary part of any empirically useful conceptual framework.
12 Do I need to argue that the subjunctive mood is modal? All the recent attempts to analyse subjunctive conditionals, from Stalnaker, Lewis, Kvart, etc., treat the subjunctive as a modal context.
13 Is it an accident that Sellars’s epigones McDowell and Brandom, who are repulsed by Sellars’s naturalism, especially his scientific realism, find Hegel so attractive?