Second Study Questions for EPM
IV. Explaining Looks.
1. What puzzles Sellars about the relation between the redness that things (physical objects) have, the
redness that they sometimes look to have, and the redness of sensations or sense contents?
2. What two sorts of explanation does Sellars consider as possible answers to questions like, ‘Why does this
object look red?’ (150)
3. What is the objection that leads Sellars to set aside one of these for now?
4. What is the alternative sort of explanation that Sellars turns to instead? (151)
5. What does Sellars mean by the ‘descriptive content’ of experiences (as opposed to their propositional
content)?
6. What is the question that (Sellars’ account of) ‘looks talk’ leads us to but provides no answer for?
7. What makes it difficult to apply the word ‘red’ to characterize the common descriptive content of the
three experiences Sellars is considering here? (The experiences are laid out on 151; this worry arises on
152.)
8. Why does Sellars reject the view that colour properties apply primarily to truly 2-dimensional ‘surfaces’
(some of which might be independent of the ordinary 3D ‘objects’ that they are typically ‘attached to’) ?
V. Impressions and Ideas. A logical point.
9. What is the ‘ing/ed ambiguity’ of ‘experience’?
10. Why is having a predicate we can use to express the descriptive content of our experiences not enough
for Sellars? (154)
11. What is the logical feature Sellars attributes to the context ‘sensation of a red triangle’ that makes it
possible for there to be such a sensation without there being a red triangle?
12. What other sorts of contexts share this logical feature?
13. What widely-accepted assimilation of ‘sensation’ contexts to another type of context does Sellars reject
as mistaken?
14. What problem remains unaddressed at the end of this section?
VI. Impressions and Ideas. A historical point.
15. How does the ‘given’ come into the account presented here (156-7) of our ability to ‘grasp’ the
descriptive content of our experiences?
16. What account does Sellars give of the common element in various forms of the myth of the given?
17. What is the difference between a determinate and a determinable?
18. What is a ‘sense repeatable’?
19. What is Berkeley’s argument for the impossibility of a purely generic idea (i.e. an idea of the genus that
is not of any species of that genus)?
20. What ‘innate ability’ does Sellars tell us Locke, Berkeley and Hume all agreed the human mind has?
21. What is ‘psychological nominalism’?
22. What does Sellars want to ‘purge’ sensations and images of? What does this allow us to say about
basic word-world relations?
VII. The logic of ‘means’
23. What presupposition about language learning does Sellars warn against at the outset here?
24. What is the ‘thermometer view’ of meaning (with respect to predicates like ‘red’ or ‘C#’)?
25. What is Sellars’ account of ‘the rubric ‘ “…” means ---’?
26. What does this imply about the potential complexity of what we need to know in order to understand
the meaning of a word like ‘red’?
VIII. Does Empirical Knowledge Have a Foundation?
27. What form of the myth is involved in the view that there is such a foundation?
28. What is ‘intrinsic credibility’?
29. What are ‘token’ and ‘type’ credibility?
30. What does ‘following a rule’ (when taken seriously) require regarding what brings the action in
question about? What does this imply about the idea that, in correctly reporting “This is green”, we
are following the rules for using these words?
31. How does Sellars adjust the “thermometer view” to provide a tenable alternative to this “following the
rules” view of observation reports?
32. What are the conditions an observer must meet in order both to utter a report authoritatively, and to do
so while the observer herself recognizes this authority? (168)
33. Describe how a kind of holism regarding knowledge emerges from the second requirement above.
34. What makes this picture of observation so strange for a traditional empiricist?
35. Describe the regress that threatens this account of observational knowledge.
36. How does Sellars escape the regress? (What do you think of this move?)
37. Explain how Sellars retains a kind of foundation for empirical knowledge while regarding the metaphor
of foundation as misleading.
IX. Science and Ordinary Usage.
38. What worry does Sellars raise about the (recent) development of a recognized, labeled subfield of
philosophy called ‘philosophy of science’?
39. What broader worry does he raise about philosophical specializations in general?
40. What is Sellars’ reason here for supposing that the scientific description of the world should/can
supersede the ‘descriptive ontology of everyday life’?
41. What does Sellars mean by the ‘unchallengeable authenticity’ of the categories of the common
sense picture of the world? Does he endorse this authenticity?
42. How does this view relate to the ‘positivistic conception’ of science?
43. How is the myth of the given related to this conception of science?
X.
Private Episodes: The Problem.
44. What are the two ways in which seeing something φ, seeing something that seems φ, and seeming
to see something φ, are all similar to each other as states of a perceiver?
45. What two sorts of explanation for the second similarity does Sellars raise here?
46. What are the two features of ‘inner episodes’ that make them so puzzling?
47. What are the two uses of sentences asserting such episodes’ occurrence that distinguish their
public and private characters?
XI.
Thoughts: The Classical View.
48. What is the tension Sellars opens this section by describing?
49. What is a hypothetical (and what is a ‘mongrel hypothetical-categorical’) fact?
50. What is the classical tradition’s claim here?
51. What is the version we get when this classical view is ‘purged’ of certain confusions?
52. What are the confusions that Sellars wants to purge the classical view of?
XII.
Our Rylean Ancestors.
53. What is a ‘Rylean language’?
54. What are the questions Sellars is raising here?
55. What does Sellars add to the Rylean language before he continues with his myth (or science
fiction)?
56. Why does this addition move the project forward substantially?
57. What is the alternative to a view that treats talk of thoughts as a kind of shorthand?
XIII.
Theories and Models.
58. What does a good theory do with respect to ‘established empirical laws’?
59. How are the ‘fundamental assumptions of a theory’ usually developed?
60. What sort of status is Sellars proposing for ‘inner episodes’ here?
61. What is the next ‘enrichment’ of the Rylean language here?
XIV.
Methdological vs. Philosophical Behaviourism.
62. What sort of behaviourist is Jones?
63. What is ‘analytical’ or ‘philosophical’ behaviorism?
64. What is methodological behaviourism?
65. What does Sellars say is wrong with philosophical behaviourism?
66. What regulative ideal governs the relations between different scientific accounts of human beings?
67. What is a ‘pure’ theoretical concept? What is it distinguished from here?
XV.
The Logic of Private Episodes: Thoughts.
68. What is Jones’ theory?
69. What feature of overt speech episodes carries over to Jones’ ‘inner speech’ immediately?
70. In what sense are Jonesian thoughts nonempirical or unobservable? (What’s the comparison
Sellars makes here?)
71. Is it open for us, later, to identify these thoughts with certain physiological goings-on? Explain.
72. Which comes first for Sellars, the intentionality/semantic characterization of thoughts, or of overt
speech?
73. What transition in the use of this theory makes the ‘theory’ more than just a theory?
74. What two apparently conflicting ideas does Sellars claim to have reconciled here?
XVI. The Logic of Private Episodes: Impressions.
75. What remains to be added to the extended Rylean language Jones has arrived at, in order to fill out
the last part of Sellars’ own myth?
76. What does Jones postulate in building his theory of perception?
77. What is the model on which this ‘ur-theory’ is based?
78. What does their theoretical status allow for these ‘impressions’ (that would otherwise be
inexplicable)?
79. What is an impression of a red triangle analogous to, on this theory? (What is essential to this
analogy?)
80. How does an ‘ostensive’ approach to the intrinsic features of impressions lead back to the myth of
the given?
81. What is the key question to ask about how these impressions fit in the over-all scientific picture of
sentient organisms?
82. What is important about Jones’ being able to teach his fellows to make a reporting use of the
language of impressions? (See section XV above…)
83. How is it that this account of impressions gives us an ‘explanation of, and not just a code for, such
facts as that there looks to me to be a red and triangular physical object over there’?
84. How is it that the sense datum theorist speaks of the given ‘in the very act of taking’?