Notes on the Myth of Jones:
1.
Sellars’ Myth begins with section XII of EPM, ‘Our Rylean Ancestors’. The aim of
this section is to lay out the resources that Jones will have available to him at the
outset. This includes, we soon discover, not only a language for describing ‘the
properties of public objects located in space and enduring through time’ (178), but
also logical apparatus including truth functions, quantification and subjunctive
conditionals (conditionals describing what would happen if something else were to
occur or be done), and the ‘vagueness’ and ‘open texture’ of a natural language.
2.
The puzzle, for Sellars, is how a language like this could come to include talk of ‘inner
episodes and immediate experiences’. His view is that this apparatus, together with
semantical discourse (which our Rylean ancestors apply to overt language), is enough
to allow our ancestors to invent, as a kind of theory, an account of inner episodes
corresponding to thoughts and immediate experience (sensations). (Recall here that
for Sellars talk of meanings, denotations, naming, etc. is primarily translational in
force, linking words and sentences whose roles in the normative system of a language
correspond in a certain way. This is the material we need to be able to talk about
intentionality, which brings us very close to talking of thoughts. )
3.
Contemporary Ryleans have drawn the line here, and declared that talk of thoughts is
just (complex, hypothetical/subjunctive) talk about overt speech. But the classical
tradition has instead made thoughts and their intentionality primitive, and relegated
overt speech’s intentionality to secondary status: language, the tradition holds, is
intentional only because it expresses thoughts, which are truly, intrinsically
intentional. Sellars aims towards an account that differs from both of these, one which
accepts thoughts (and sensations) as real (occurrent/categorical) inner episodes, but
which holds the intentionality of language comes first and is not derivative from the
prior intentionality of thoughts.
4.
Here Sellars turns to an account of ‘Theories and Models’. His reasons for this short
aside are pretty straightforward. There is a sense in which Sellars regards thoughts
and sensations as theoretical entities—but there is also a sense in which they are
clearly not theoretical entities. As I see it, the line is drawn at the straightforward use
of talk of thoughts and sensations in reports (i.e. claims made without inference or use
of bridge rules). When a ‘theory’ acquires a well-fleshed out reporting use, it is no
longer merely a theory.
5.
Two important points about theories are made along the way. First, with analogy (and
metaphor) we use systems of familiar objects interacting in familiar ways to construct
(with the help of commentaries qualifying the resemblances and differences involved)
to construct theories (rather than construct pure, abstract structures by explicit
postulation). Second, Sellars believes that this sort of theorizing is nothing new, but
rather a (refined) version of something that has been going on in ordinary language
and thought forever. The upshot is that, if we think of these inner episodes not as
occurrent ghosts of hypothetical/dispositional properties, but as theoretical entities
posited to explain certain facts about human behaviour (and later acquiring the
reporting use they now have), we are clearly not confused or making a category
mistake (as we might be if we reified the mere dispositions involved in a strictly
Rylean account of talk about thinking).
6.
Another aside follows, this time about behaviourism. It’s in this section that we first
meet Jones, the hero of Sellars Myth. Jones is explicitly identified here as a
behaviourist. But Sellars’ methodological behaviourism is not nearly as restrictive as
some other forms that behaviourism has taken.
7.
First, philosophical or analytical behaviourism has held that common-sense mental
discourse (talk of thoughts and of sensations) should be analysed in terms of
behaviour (both actual behaviour and hypothetical/conditional behaviour).
Methodological behaviourism does not demand such an analysis. Neither does it hold
that introspection (i.e. the ability to report our own thoughts and sensations without
needing to observe our own behaviour) is somehow fishy and to be rejected as a
source of knowledge. But it does note that the resulting reports make use of a
vocabulary that we learned at mothers’ knee, and that is not the product of a refined,
critical scientific effort to understand human behaviour. So the methodological
behaviourist adopts a reserved stand, and proposes to make only guarded use of
ordinary mentalistic discourse while developing concepts that can be part of a more
scientific account of human behaviour.
8.
On the other hand, behaviourism does require that these new, scientific concepts have
some sort of connection to behaviour. Some suppose that they, at least (if not ordinary
mentalistic discourse) should be analysable in terms of behaviour. But Sellars regards
this requirement as far too restrictive. Physics, in particular, does not require that its
theoretical concepts all be analysable in terms of the concepts we use to report the
phenomena physical theories aim to explain. Instead, Sellars declares, ‘The
behaviouistic requirement that all concepts should be introduced in terms of a basic
vocabulary pertaining to overt behaviour is compatible with the idea that some
behaviouristic concepts are to be introduced as theoretical concepts.’ (185)
9.
Not only are these theoretical concepts not defined in terms of behaviour, they are also
not defined in physiological terms. While we expect some relation to emerge in the
long run, connecting behavioural concepts to the details of neurophysiology, these
concepts begin as part of a distinct and separate science (see the discussion of
reduction and relations between different sciences in PSIM on page 21f) and don’t
include any assumptions about this in their own right. In this regard, considered as
‘pure’ concepts for a theory concerning human behaviour, there is no assumption here
at all regarding how they will relate to the concepts of other theories we employ to
describe human beings in other respects.
10.
Finally, we’re ready for Jones’ theory, ‘according to which overt utterances are but the
culmination of a process which begins with certain inner episodes. And let us suppose
that his model for these episodes which initiate the events which culmjinate in overt
verbal behaviour is that of overt verbal behaviour itself. In other words, using the
language of the model, the theory is to the effect that overt verbal behaviour is the
culmination of a process which begins with ‘inner speech’.’ (Nb. This ‘inner speech is
not verbal imagery—at this point verbal imagery is not even a concept Jones, or his
fellows, has.) These inner episodes are then invoked to account for intelligent
behaviour in general, not just speech. And one feature that carries over from the
model (overt speech) to the theory (thought episodes) is the semantical characters of
speech. So thoughts have meanings, may denote or name things, and so forth:
thoughts, in broad, are intentional—but not because they have some special magic
about them; they are intentional because they are modeled on overt speech, which we
already recognize and treat as intentional.
11.
Finally, when we begin to describe ourselves in terms of this language, we find that
individuals can learn to describe themselves successfully (here various predictions
/vindications come in) in its terms without requiring the (full) behavioural evidence
that others require to arrive at the same descriptions. That is, it turns out (as a matter
of fact) that (in practice) individuals have a kind of privileged access to their own
thoughts. ‘What began as a language with a purely theoretical use has gained a
reporting role’ (189).
12.
The upshot is that the privacy of thought is not the puzzling fundamental sort of
privacy that underwrites skepticism regarding other minds. The concepts of these
inner episodes are intersubjective first, and come to have a private aspect as a matter
of (vindicated, successful) practice evaluated in terms of these intersubjective criteria.
‘(T)he fact that overt behaviour is evidence for these episodes is built into the very
logic of these concepts, just as the fact that the observable behaviour of gases is
evidence for molecular episodes is built into the very logic of molecule talk.’ (189)
13.
Finally Sellars turns to impressions (or sensations), which he regards (as you should
recall from PSIM and BBK) as modeled on the sensible features of ordinary (MI)
objects. This is Sellars’ answer to the question, what (aside from what he has called
the propositional content) is in common between “I see a red triangle over there”, “I
see a triangle over there that looks red”, and “It looks as though there is a red triangle
over there”, i.e. what is the common descriptive content of these reports? The answer
is (in the same in-between sense as for thoughts) a kind of theory, a theory according
to which ‘replicas’ of objects perceived occur in us when we look at/touch/etc things
in the public world under standard conditions, and such replicas can also occur under
non-standard conditions, when objects ‘similar or corresponding to’ the replicas are
not actually present. (Sellars emphasizes that these replicas are what occur in us, not
seeings of such replicas, which would lead us to assimilate sensations to cognitive
states & thoughts in general.)
14.
Since impressions are introduced as theoretical entities, they are taken to have their
own intrinsic characteristics (modeled on, but certainly not to be confused with, the
sensible characteristics of MI objects). So they are not just picked out by definite
descriptions as “the sort of sensory state caused in standard conditions by ___ and in
other conditions by …, ---, ***, etc”. But the way in which the theory is built on and
connected to the Rylean language that Jones starts with ensures that there is a logical
connection between the language we use to describe these impressions and the
sensible properties of objects viewed (sensed) under standard conditions.
15.
Sellars rejects again the appeal to ‘ostensive definition’ as the source of our
understanding of these intrinsic characteristics of impressions. Once again, this notion
is just the myth of the given all over again. (Recall here Descartes’ notion that our
awareness of our own states of mind is in terms of adequate conceptions/ ideas of
them, which Sellars rejects in BBK. The fact that as with thoughts, we find ourselves
able to report these states in ourselves without needing the overt behavioural evidence
our fellows need to reach the same conclusions provides a reporting use for this
theory, and makes it more than just a theory for us. But this does not show that we
have a better grasp of these characteristics (let alone an absolute and fixed and
indispensable set of concepts in terms of which to describe our impressions) than we
have of the sensible properties of public objects. Quite the reverse is true, in fact—our
concepts of these features of our impressions are grounded in our prior grasp of these
features of public objects, and our understanding and use of them is, like our
understanding and use of ‘thought-talk’, grounded in the public realm where
interaction with our fellows can put the requisite norms in place.
16.
How these impressions relate to science, and in particular to micro-physics, is
considered on pages 193f. We’ve already seen some aspects of this story in PSIM,
and there’s not much more to say about it here. The story finishes with Sellars final
diagnostic remarks on sense-data theory and the myth of the given. The idea there is
that the sense-datum theorist learns to report (with greater and greater detail and
refinement) the features of these impressions (as we all can do), but ‘confuses his own
creative enrichment of the framework of empirical knowledge, with an analysis of
knowledge as it was’ (and goes on to try to reconstruct ordinary sensory knowledge of
the world on the thin basis of these descriptions of his impressions). Sellars concludes
‘It is in the very act of taking that he speaks of the given.’
17.
In the end, Sellars endorses his own myth: ‘does the reader not recognize Jones as
Man himself in the middle of his journey from the grunts and groans of the cave to the
subtle and polydimensional discourse of the drawing room, the laboratory, and the
study,…’ (196).