Empiricism and the
Philosophy of Mind 1
Dispensing with the given– sense
data first.
The project
• Sellars’ aim here is to sort out his philosophy of mind
while retaining an empiricist epistemology.
• Issues:
– The ‘given’: Sellars rejects the notion that anything is
immediately apprehended in propria persona– there is no
‘transparent’ awareness of anything.
– Sense-data talk and the relation between our use of ‘seems’ and
ordinary observation reports.
– How induction can be used to justify our claims (as individuals)
to be reliable observers.
– Relations between rationalism and empiricism in our
philosophical tradition. Sellars wants to reconcile these,
recognizing the importance of empirical evidence while also
recognizing the crucial role concepts play in all knowledge.
The Given
• So what is the given?
• Not just something that we observe directly, i.e. a claim
we accept without inferring it from other claims we’ve
accepted.
• “Many things have been said to be given: sense
contents, material objects, universals, propositions, real
connections, first principles, even ‘givenness’ itself.”
• A ‘framework’ that is part of many different philosophical
positions.
• Among the first forms to be criticized were intuited first
principles, synthetic necessary connections.
• Sellars aims to root it out entirely, not just some
particular forms of it.
Why attack the given?
• Cognitive psychology: our accounts of what and how we
know need to fit with our natural understanding of what
humans can learn to detect and discriminate.
• The ‘neo-Hobbesian’ picture of humans that ends
“Phenomenalism” is incompatible with a view of
knowledge involving an immediate link between a
logically simple subject and some fact about the world.
• All knowledge is expressed in language, and language
can shift and change in many ways.
• Our relation to the community and the conceptual
capacities that arise through language instruction are
indispensable elements in any knowledge we have, no
matter how ‘direct’ (i.e. non-inferential) it is.
First target: Sense data
• “For x to be sensed is for it to be the object of an act.”
• A sense content is a possible object for such an act.
• Kinds of sensing may just reduce to the kinds of sense
content that are their objects.
• The point of these acts is to serve as a starting point
(foundation) for empirical knowledge.
• But sense contents are particulars, the objects of some
sensings (i.e. acts of sensing).
• And knowledge is about facts, not particulars. (Broadly, it
needs a subject-predicate form: That this object is
characterized in some particular way.)
The dilemma
• The SD theorist has to choose between:
– Sense contents are particulars, and sensing is not knowing.
– Sensing is a form of knowing; facts, not particulars, are sensed.
• Even if she adopts the first, she can still say that sensory
knowledge is logically dependent on sensings.
• But SD theorists typically want to have their cake and eat
it too.
• This can be done, with a little slippery move:
– To sense a sense content is to sense it as having a certain
character.
– When we sense a content as having a certain character, we
know that it has that character.
– When we sense a sense content, we can say now that we know
it, without specifying the character we sense it as having.
Acquaintance
• This line gets comfort from the familiar fact that we often
do speak of knowing particulars, as in: “I know Fred.”
• But the proposal before us links this to non-inferential
knowledge by the brute force of a contextual definition:
To know x (where x is a sense content) just is to know
that x has some character.
• Sometimes this is ignored in accounts of the givenness
of sense contents– but if sensings are analyzable, we
can recover the link to knowledge if the analysis matches
that of non-inferential knowledge of some ‘sensed’ fact
about the sense content.
The given part
• Descriptive accounts of sense contents have to
smuggle this link back in…Again, Sellars rejects
any reduction of the normative to the descriptive.
• The main point here is that the sensing of sense
contents is not taken to require any learning,
setting up of associations, etc. It is a primitive
epistemic capacity built into us at the outset.
• As primitive, it is the starting point for the rest of
our knowledge: Knowledge is acquired first in
this form, and then extended to wider sorts of
knowledge…
But categorization is acquired
• There’s a strong tendency in the field to regard
knowledge that x is Y requires learning to tell Y’s
from non-Y’s, the acquisition of the concept of a
Y, perhaps even the use of symbols for Yness &
other components of this bit of knowledge.
• The triad:
– A. x senses red sense content s entails x noninferentially knows s is red.
– B. The ability to sense sense contents is unacquired.
– C. The ability to know facts of the form x is  is
acquired.
The SD theorist’s choices
• Give up the first (A). Sensings now can be
involved in knowings, but they aren’t really
knowledge themselves.
• Give up the second. Now sensings aren’t
really an account of sensations, which we
can have without learning…
• Give up the third. This is ‘to give up the
nominalist proclivities of the empiricist
tradition.’
The diagnosis
• Sensings look to be a ‘mongrel’ concept
combining ideas about sensations (states
that play a critical role in sensory
knowledge and are ‘possible’ states for us
from the outset, but are not knowings in
themselves) with ideas about noninferential knowings that are at the heart of
our empirical knowledge about the world
around us.
Sources of the confusion
• A scientific explanation of the facts of
perception (and misperception) justifies
the postulation of inner states that are
normally brought about by objects with
various sensible characters under normal
conditions. But there is nothing epistemic
about such states– their role, thus far, is
causal.
Second source
• The argument from security: If our
knowledge of particular matters of fact
starts with the things we normally report as
observations (this is red, that’s triangular,
etc.) then it starts with commitments some
of which are false; there is no ‘mark’ we
can introspect that separates the veridical
ones from the non-veridical. This seems
to undermine the very idea of empirical
knowledge.
The slide
• ‘looks’ or ‘seems’ talk has an apparent
advantage here. If we want certainty, we can
retreat (by degrees), getting:
– There is an object over there that’s red and triangular
on the facing side.
– There is an object over there that looks red and
triangulary on the facing side.
– There looks to be an object over there that’s red and
triangular on the facing side.
– Each is increasingly secure; the last seems almost
perfectly so.
Describing the ‘inner states’
• Now it becomes tempting to take the third of these as a
description of one’s inner state (it’s the sort of state
normally produced by objects that are red and triangular
on the facing side).
• And this state is harder to be fooled about (it’s more
intimately linked to our ‘faculty of judgment’ than the
properties of an external object).
• Further, it just doesn’t make sense to talk about an
‘unveridical’ sensation.
• Here’s the key mis-step: This implies that they aren’t
part of the space of reasons at all (they are causal- we
simply have sensations, i.e. they occur ‘in’ us and that’
all). Making them the foundation of knowledge takes a
position, rather than report what is ‘given’ to us.
The sense-datum code
• If we introduce sense datum talk as a ‘code’ for
seems talk, we need to be very careful not to
treat the ‘code’ as though it were a language
with internal logical structure that we can
‘unpack’ to identify theoretical commitments.
• The inferences we make in a sense-datum code
must follow those that are allowed when the
code is translated back into the language it is
code for.
• Theories are not just codes; they are proper
languages, which add content to the assertions
they are linked to by ‘bridge rules’.
A successful code
• If the illuminates our understanding of
knowledge and ordinary things, it’s because it
leads us to recognize that in fact we can ‘trade
in’ talk of ordinary objects for ‘seems’ talk in its
most non-commital sense: There ‘looks to be’…
• Then ordinary things turn out to be
‘constructions’ out of lookings or appearings.
• But this is untenable, says Sellars
The Logic of ‘looks’
• Is ‘looks’ a relation (between the subject, a thing and a
quality in ‘x looks  to s’)?
• Broad: something elliptical must be ‘before our minds’
when a round penny ‘looks’ elliptical. Sense data (which
have the characters things look to have) are an
explanation of such ‘appearings’.
• Some resist such analyses, though, saying that there
need be nothing red involved when something looks red
to someone.
• Sellars starts here with the point that, when we say
something looks red, we seem to be using red in the
familiar way, as a property of some external objects.
Logical priority
• For Sellars, being red is logically prior to looking
red.
• So we can’t analyze ‘is red’ in terms of ‘looksred’.
• But: ‘X is red iff X would look red to normal
perceivers under normal conditions’ is
necessarily true. If this isn’t an analysis of ‘is red’
in terms of ‘looks-red’, what is it?
• For Sellars, ‘looks’ is not a relation (or, it’s a
relation if you like to say so, but we shouldn’t
assumed the inferences that would follow with
other relation words go through for ‘looks’).
The tie shop
• Another vivid example here, of how someone
who has ordinary colour concepts can come to
learn to use ‘looks’ talk.
• John learns to say ‘it looks green’ rather than ‘it
is green’ (and ‘it looks to be blue’ rather than ‘it
is blue’).
• But what he’s learned to report is not a new kind
of fact about the world.
• What does ‘it looks green’ report?
Experiences and propositions
• When I report, I see that that is green, I don’t just report
an experience– I commit to (endorse) a claim closely
related to the experience.
• This is to apply the concept of ‘truth’ to the experience.
• When I say, instead, I seem to see that that is green, I
report the experience but I withhold the commitment to
truth.
• One experience can be a seeing that x is green; an
intrisically similar experience can be merely a seeing that
x looks green.
• ‘See that’ and ‘looks’ talk both make the issue of
‘endorsement’ explicit.
What looks come to
• To say that x looks green to s is to say that x is
having an experience which, if endorsed, we
would report by saying s sees x to be green.
• But this makes the difference between normal
reports and ‘looks’ talk a matter of ‘backing
away’ from commitments that would normally be
associated with the experience being had.
• And it puts in doubt the view that ‘looks’ talk is a
way of describing the experience itself.
Explaining the link
• Now we can explain the connection between looks talk
and is talk.
• ‘X is  iff X would look  to standard observers in
standard conditions’ is necessary because standard
conditions are conditions under which things look as they
are to standard observers.
• These conditions are only vaguely specified, but that’s
the way it is with ordinary talk…
• This undermines logical atomism, the idea that basic
concepts are all fundamentally independent of each
other. On this view we need a lot of other concepts
(pertaining to standard conditions, in particular) before
we can have (e.g.) colour concepts.
Conditions for knowledge
• We don’t have even these very basic empirical
concepts, for Sellars, unless we can not only
report accurately (this is green, that is red, etc.)
but are also aware of, and able to detect and
report, the conditions under which such
spontaneous reports are reliable.
• Logical atomists can move to sense data reports
to defend their position. But their commitment to
sense contents is not supported by anything in
Sellars’ treatment of looks talk, so these folk will
have to haul their own water if they want to
defend this position.
Looking red
• Can we go from something’s ‘looking red’ to
there being something red that we’re ‘aware of’?
• First challenge: Univocity. The red things look to
have is the very red some things do have– so to
say that it’s a ‘sense content’ that is red when
something ‘looks red’ to us is peculiar– sense
contents are very different from physical objects,
but this line forces on them all the sensible
properties we ordinarily attribute to physical
things.
Explanations
• If we want to explain why x looks red to s, we
can often do it by saying, well, s is in C
circumstances, and x is orange, and in C
circumstances orange things look red.
• But we can give other sorts of explanation,
which bring us closer to the heart of sense
content and sense data talk.
• Such an explanation would focus on sensations
(the inner postulated entities Sellars has already
accepted). But this makes the most nontheoretical items (for sense-data theorists) into
theoretical items, driving the wedge too early.
A more sympathetic account
• Experiences can have ‘shared propositional
contents’ that receive varying degrees of
endorsement (full all the way to none at all).
• The shared content of all these is the
‘descriptive’ content of this account of an
experience.
• But ‘looks’ talk only specifies this description of
our experience indirectly (as in, if conds were
standard, it would be a seeing that x is red).
• So we have an open question: What is the
shared intrinsic character of these experiences?
Invoking ‘red’ talk
• The obvious trick here is to invoke talk of ‘red’ to
describe this content.
• But we need to separate red from physical things to do
this.
• Here we run into the familiar analogy Sellars has already
invoked in other papers.
• The ‘red’ of experiences here is not the red of physical
things, but it is analogous to it.
• Some try to avoid this by separating things from their
surfaces, and invoking ‘wild’ surfaces in cases of ‘mere
looking’.
• But we don’t really think things have ‘surfaces’ as this
two-dimensional, detachable account proposes.
Impressions and Ideas– Logical
Concerns
• ‘Ings’ and ‘eds’: An experience is often thought of as a
process that occurs ‘in’ us– this is an experiencing, the
having of an experience.
• But experiences are also thought of in terms of what is
experienced in them (the object of the experience).
• Sellars is concerned here that we not move too quickly
from a description of an experiencing to conclusions
about what it is that is experienced in that experiencing.
• In particular, what he calls the ‘common (= shared)
descriptive component’ of our descriptions of
experiences may well not be what is experienced– for
instance, if a red item is part of this CDC, we may not in
fact have experienced anything red.
Names, labels etc.
• So the question arises: Do we really have a name for such
experiences?
• What about ‘of’ here? Can’t we describe these experiencings as
experiences of red? Can’t we add ‘sensation’ talk here, and talk
about sensations of red?
• An objection: if ‘red’ is always properly read as a property of
physical objects, an experience or sensation of red demands
something red just as much as a red experience would.
• But the ‘of’ we use in talk of ideas, the intentional ‘of’, doesn’t imply
the existence of the thing an idea is of (nor does ‘believes in’)
• This logical feature shared by ‘sensation of’ and ‘believes in’ does
not require further parallels between sensation talk and intentional
contexts.
• And this is despite the fact that historically the assimilation of
sensations to ideas was widely endorsed.
Objective existence
• So for Descartes and many other early moderns,
just as ‘red’ was said to have objective existence
in the idea of a red triangle, it was also said to
have objective existence in the sensation (or
impression, in Hume’s terminology) of a red
triangle.
• Sensations were simply thought of as more
detailed and specific than the ‘abstract’ thoughts
we form.
• But this is clearly a mistake, and the nonextensionality that makes it tempting does not
give us any real argument for it.
Still looking
• So we’re still looking for an intrinsic
description/label for these experiences.
• But historically many have taken the view that
this is just wrong-headed: we know exactly what
kind of experience this is, through our privileged
inner awareness of it.
• This leads to the problem of other minds, of
course.
• But it’s also a clear instance of the ‘given’– this
time, what is said to be given is the ‘kinds’ to
which our sensations belong.
Two questions
• How do we become aware of the ‘sorts’ that our
experiences fall under?
• How do we communicate/share the categories each of
us has for their experiences?
• The view Sellars is criticizing here thinks the ‘given’ is an
answer to the first, and accepts that there is no answer
to the second.
• This answer to the first assumes that our awareness of
the sorts under which our experiences are to be
classified is given, a feature of immediate experience.
• Recall here Sellars’ earlier invocation of the empiricist
notion that all categorization of items under sorts
requires learning.
Universals, repeatables and
determinables
• For Sellars a universal is a repeatable (this is the std.
view today).
• Thus even a very specific/determinate sort of experience
(my current visual field’s character, for instance) can be
a ‘universal’, since this arrangement of colours etc. can
be repeated in a later experience.
• But the tradition (Locke et al.) thought of universals as
‘generic’, i.e. as abstracting from these details, and
passed over the problem of repeatables to focus on the
formation of such more general ideas. (Note the nice
discussion of the need for both conjunctive and
disjunctive ideas to cope with the phenomena here.)
The key point again
• LBH all agree that merely by having sensations we have the idea of
determinate repeatables or sorts.
• A nominalist alternative: suppose we think of the awareness of a
red sensation as the awareness of a red particular, rather than as
the awareness of its being red.
• Then the formation of ideas of repeatables would proceed by the
association of words (‘red’) with a range of ‘resembling particulars’.
• But the association needs to be handled carefully: If we think of it as
grounded on a prior awareness of the particulars as resembling or
even as red then the myth of the given rises again.
• If we instead reject these, and simply say that it is the group of
particulars that is associated with the word, then we get a kind of
nominalism– it is only from the later point of view, where we have a
language in which to pick out classes of resembling particulars, that
we are aware of their resemblance– before that, all we have are a
range of patterns of response that we can be trained in.
The upshot
• This is not Sellars’ nominalism– it’s pretty crude, really.
• But it does break the link between sensations and
thought-contents, freeing up the direct perception
account according to which words are directly linked to
the external world and its features, not to our sensations
or impressions.
• The essential causal role of ‘red’ sensations is not
undermined by this– but it is not an inferential role in
which our awareness of the immediately available
‘redness’ of some sensations provides the facts and
ideas out of which we somehow arrive at the idea of
redness as a feature of physical things.
The logic of ‘means’
• The object here is to provide more material for Sellars’
psychological nominalism, the view that we have no
awareness of ‘logical space’ prior to/independent of
learning a language.
• But Sellars rejects the crudely associative view of how
words are linked to the things they apply to.
• On this view, ‘red’ means what it does because it has the
‘syntax’ (grammar) of a predicate and is a response to
red things.
• This isn’t nearly enough (it’s too atomistic) for Sellars.
• But it wouldn’t even be tempting if it weren’t for the naïve
word-world view of ‘means’ contexts.
Recalling BBK
• Here we find points familiar from BBK: ‘means’
for Sellars invokes translation (and a rich
normative parallel between the two items joined
by ‘means’ as in “‘Rot’ (in German) means red.”)
• This covers the ground in a way that the more
common view cannot, since it equates the force
of ‘means’ in
– ‘Und’ means and.
– ‘Rot’ means red.
Simple association is not enough
• So the mere invocation of ‘means’ contexts does
not generate a theory of how a word comes to
play a role sufficiently similar to that of another
for us to say that they have the same meaning.
• In fact, this standard is rich and flexible–
translation is a complex art, and its demands
vary with our communicative aims/concerns…
• In particular, understanding ‘red’ requires quite a
bit more than the grammar of a predicate and an
association with red things. Linguistic
‘thermometers’ are not enough to capture
meanings.
Foundations
• A foundation for empirical knowledge, for
Sellars, is a pretty specific thing.
• The myth requires that the foundation be
facts that are
– Non-inferentially known.
– Such that knowledge of them presupposes no
other knowledge.
– Such that all knowledge of empirical matters
of fact is ultimately ‘decided’ by reference to
knowledge of these foundational facts.
Something emphasized
• Some argue that, if a piece of knowledge
depends on having some other knowledge, it
must in fact depend on inference in some way.
• For Sellars this is a mistake, and it’s part of the
myth. The kind of dependence that his holism
invokes does not make all our knowledge a
product of inference.
• But it does make its content dependent on our
grasping its inferential relations to other claims.
Details
• Observation reports seem to have
authority, without being inferred from other
claims we already believe.
• How shall we understand this authority?
• One key is the link between reports and
circumstances.
• This point turns on the distinction between
fact-stating uses of sentences and reportmaking uses.
Token-reflexives
• Words like ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘this’ or ‘that’ are tokenreflexive– they link up to their circumstances of utterance
in ways that lead the same sentence to make different
assertions in different circumstances.
• Tensed verbs have much the same effect, since they are
tied to times of utterance too.
• Reports regularly, though not necessarily, make use of
these sorts of linguistic device to link the report made to
the circumstances it is a report about.
• A report must have some kind of direct link to the
circumstances it reports about
• Fact-stating doesn’t depend on circumstances in the
same way.
Two sources of credibility
• Some sentence tokens are credible
because they are tokens of a type all
tokens of which have authority.
• But some sentence tokens are credible
because of how they are linked to the
circumstances in which a token is
produced: The token came to be through
a certain process under certain
circumstances.
Authority for sentence types
• Sellars says some sentence types are
intrinsically authoritative: some analytic
sentences belong to this group.
• Some get authority by inferential links to others.
• But empirical knowledge will not reduce (without
some residue) to these two groups. (No
empirical sentence type has intrinsic authority,
and inferential links to such won’t do the trick
either.)
• So we need sentence types whose authority
comes from tokens that are produced in the right
way and in the right circumstances.
The flow of credibility
• These two sources of credibility flow in
opposite directions:
• Credibility for analytic sentences flows
from types to their tokens, and then via
inference to some other sentence types.
• Credibility for observation sentences flows
from tokens to types, and then again via
inference to other sentence types.
Sellars on Empiricist Dogmas
• Conflating the authority of analytic and
observational sentences: An attempt at a unified
theory of credibility leads to trouble.
• The idea is to appeal to rules– just as the rules
for ‘using’ the concepts in an analytic sentence
ensure that it must be true, the rules for using
the language involved in an observation report
are such that, if they are followed when the
report is made, the observation report is true.
Prefatory points
• Reports can be thought of as stripped of their ‘action’
and ‘interpersonal’ aspects—a mere, spontaneous
thinking that p can be a report.
• But thinking of them as actions has influenced the
tradition here, which construes the rightness of a report
as a special case of the rightness of actions (under some
system of rules).
• When we think of them this way, we have to construe
them as deliberate followings of these rules (otherwise
the ‘rule’ is a mere regularity).
• That is, we have to judge that the circumstances were
such that the rule requires the report and make the
report for that reason.
The given again
• This leads directly to the given again, since
these observation-actions are correct only when
they are made in the course of following a rule,
which requires that we be able to judge that the
circumstances are such that the rule
requires/endorses the report.
• Such judgments depend on a primitive
awareness of the matters of fact necessary to
apply the rules for using these words.
• Recall that we are talking here about the
foundational judgments that are at the root of all
empirical knowledge– so there is no escape...
But is there a way out?
• Begin with mere reliable reporting– the
thermometer account.
• Now, can we extend this to cover something
more properly like knowledge?
• The key question is authority–but authority for
what?
• Actions are not what we need here– mere
behaviour of a type that it’s reasonable to
endorse is enough (action presupposes too
much deliberateness here).
Being a knower
• The key, however, is the subject’s own ability to
recognize that she is in a position of authority
with respect to such reports.
• That is, she must be in a position to recognize
that she is a standard observer in standard
conditions, so that her inclination to report ‘this is
green’ is indeed reliable.
• This requires quite sophisticated conceptual
grasp of the place of such reports in the world
• It also seems to require a kind of induction.
The threat of a regress
• The idea is that to make a report that expresses
observational knowledge, one would have to know that
such overt verbal performances are reliable indicators of
the facts reported.
• And this means that all observational knowledge
depends on a fair bit of knowledge that. In fact, we need
to know things like: X is a reliable symptom of Y.
• So observations don’t ‘stand on their own feet’
individually.
• Worse, it seems to run counter to the empiricist notion
that the sort of general knowledge we have when we
know X is a reliable symptom of Y depends on having a
lot of knowledge of particular cases where X is
correlated with Y.
Responding to the regress
• This seems to be a regress- before we can
actually know, by observation, that we have a
case of Y, we need to know that X is a reliable
symptom of Y.
• But we need to know cases of Y (and cases of
X) to justify the claim that X is a reliable
symptom of Y. OUCH!
• But when we classify an episode or event as a
case of knowing, we are locating it in a
normative space. It’s possible to establish the
normative status of an episode retrospectively.
The regress dissolves (p. 169).
Rejecting the foundation
• Sellars rejects the idea of observational responses that
are both direct and immediate.
• Such observations would be ‘self-authenticating’, that is,
they would stand on their own– but they are, at root,
non-verbal, internal episodes.
• And this authority is transmitted to linguistic acts
(reports) because of an awareness of ‘the rules’
governing how these episodes are to be characterized in
words.
• Once we have the force of these episodes cast in
linguistic terms, inference connects them to other
sentences, so that these episodes become the
‘foundation’ for all our empirical knowledge.
Launching the constructive phase
• The point of the rest of the paper is to explain Sellar’s
own views on the nature and role of inner episodes.
• The sense in which they are non-verbal does not (says
Sellars) lend any support to the idea of the ‘given’.
• But Sellars’ rejection of this particular view of the
‘foundation’ of empirical knowledge is not a rejection of
the broader idea that there are observation-reporting
sentences that serve as the touchstone for empirical
knowledge. It is aimed at the idea of the given (which is
related to the demand that the foundation be ‘locked in’
and independent of any other knowledge).
• The active element of self-correction is crucial here.
Philosophy of science
• Sellars is concerned about the effects of specialization–
in particular, the recognition of philosophy of science as
a distinct specialization in philosophy.
• The worry seems to be that specialization may lead
other philosophers to leave science to the philosophers
of science, and lose track of the need for all philosophers
to respond to the development of the scientific world
view.
• Science is the ‘flowering’ of an aspect of discourse that
is part of the ordinary world view, and which may be lost
sight of if we don’t attend to science and how it works in
our philosophical thinking.
Evaluation
• To evaluate features of our conceptual
frameworks requires an appreciation of science
as revealing standards of evaluation and
alternative frameworks that may well do better in
terms of those standards.
• This needs care: the tendency to say things like
‘physical objects are not really coloured’ is a
confused way of recognizing that a framework
that includes such objects has deficiencies that
are put right in a different framework, now under
construction in the scientific enterprise.
• On these questions, science is the measure.
The given as a barrier here
• If we take some aspect of the manifest image as
‘given’ then this kind of critique is blocked; a
framework anchored in the given is one we’re
stuck with (we can alter it in various ways, but
the basics are fixed).
• This anchor is sometimes thought of as an
‘ostensive tie’ linking the concepts of the
framework to a aspect of reality. But consider
the oddity of the idea of an ‘inner ostension’.
• This goes with the idea that science is not a
complete framework in its own right, but a mere
‘auxiliary’.
As if
• The suggestion is that the unquestionable
nature of the ‘given’ locks us into any framework
that it arises in.
• The upshot is that an alternative framework
which outperforms the ‘given’ framework must
be treated in terms of ‘as if’, that is, the things of
the given framework can be thought of as
behaving ‘as if’ some other framework were
true– but we can never dispense with the given
framework in favour of this new (and superior)
one.
The other error
• The other barrier to what Sellars sees to a
correct appreciation of the scientific framework is
the reification of a methodological distinction
between theoretical and non-theoretical
discourse into a substantive distinction.
• The contrast:
– Science as a peninsular offshoot of ordinary
discourse vs.
– Science as an expression of a fundamental aspect of
discourse which is central and ultimately
transformative.
Private episodes
• We still have no take on how it is that the
experience that is a seeing that x over there is
green is similar to one that is merely a seeing
that x over there looks green.
• Two routes:
– Introduce inner episodes as theoretical posits and
develop an account of the similarity within that theory.
– Posit these similarities as ‘given’.
• The second is now ruled out, so we need to turn
to the first, however peculiar it may seem.
Applying the critique of the given
• ‘red’ etc. apply to physical objects first, so while we tend to describe
these experiences using such words, this use of those words cannot
be univocal.
• If we just use these words to link the experiences to standard
occasions on which such experiences occur, then we have a
‘definite description’ of such experiences that picks them out, but
nothing to say about what they are really like.
• To be able to notice a certain kind of thing (as being of that kind) is
already to have a concept of that kind of thing. (176)
• One central puzzle: The combination of privacy (only I can report
my ‘inner’ states) with intersubjectivity (others can know about them
in other ways/ inferentially). Sellars says we can have both!
• But before dealing with sensations, Sellars turns to consider
thoughts.
Thoughts
• Even if we take the view that thoughts are linguistic, the
number of cases where overt linguistic behaviour
accompanies behaviour that it seems to explain is too
few– the sorts of behaviour that we explain in terms of
thoughts are often unaccompanied by any overt linguistic
behaviour.
• And when that behaviour is not habitual (more or less
automatic), we can hardly resist invoking thoughts to
explain it.
• The classical account holds that there are inner episodes
called thoughts, and linguistic behaviours are meaningful
insofar as they express those thoughts. Further, these
episodes are introspectible and even transparent (selfrevealing/ known whenever they are had).
The core of the notion
• We each have a stream of these inner episodes.
• We have privileged, but not infallible or
complete, access to them.
• They occur, sometimes, without overt verbal
behaviour.
• We don’t need a performance to be going on
that we ‘perceive inwardly’ here.
• Thoughts are a sort of ‘linguistic episode’, that is,
they are modeled on over speech.
The Ryleans
• Here we imagine our ‘ancestors’, speaking a
somewhat limited language.
• The language describes external objects in
terms of their sensible features.
• Sellars also supposes that it has semantic
concepts– so they can speak of ‘meanings’
(read in terms of the roles of words & phrases)
• The aim is to explore how a language like this
can come to have the means to talk of inner
episodes.
On semantics again
• The force of semantic talk includes implications about
the typical causes and effects of certain utterances.
• But it is not exhausted by these implications.
• More importantly here, having semantical talk allows us
to say a lot of things about utterances that are also
commonly said about thoughts (that they are about, or
refer to, something, etc.)
• We could try, then, to capture thoughts just by appeal to
a conditional/hypothetical link to overt language and its
semantics.
The Alternative?
• Inner episodes (rather than
conditional/hypothetical speech).
• The classical notion also makes these
episodes the primary vehicles of meaning–
but Sellars will reject this aspect of the
classical view.
• So the challenge is to combine a ‘speech
first’ view of meaning with an account of
thoughts as real inner episodes.
Theories and Models
• Here we encounter the philosophy of science again, which Sellars
will draw on to explain his view of the status of these inner episodes.
• We typically develop a theory by positing certain entities and certain
postulates about how they behave.
• These are then linked to some observable phenomena (regularities
or empirical laws): in effect, we propose that the phenomena are as
they are because they involve these items in a certain way.
• But in fact theories are typically developed in a very different way.
• We generally draw on known behaviours of familiar objects (waves,
for example), and present these as a model of what is ‘going on’
with respect to some phenomena.
• Such models are qualified (we don’t propose that electromagnetic
waves are just like waves in water, but that they are similar in some
respects, while different in others….)
Continuity
• Further, common-sense is not limited to
induction. (Unlike the idealized MI, it can invoke
postulated entities too– and for Sellars, the MI
does contain ‘fossilized’ posits, despite its
limitation to inductive methods.)
• So our Ryleans will have the ability to develop
postulational explanations for similarities and
differences in the behaviour of physical things.
Behaviourism
• Note that this was a major influence in psychology when
Sellars was writing EPM.
• Sellars rejects narrow forms of behaviourism, while
being perfectly happy with methodological behaviourism.
• This does not require that psychological concepts be
analyzable into behavioural terms, but only that
assertions in our new, scientific psychological language
be justified by behavioural evidence.
• So, while we introduce these concepts by means of their
links to behaviour, we do not suppose that their meaning
is exhausted by this link to behaviour– they can be fully
fledged theoretical concepts.
Expectations
• Of course we expect any such theory to link up
to our physiological understanding of the
nervous system and its role in behaviour.
• But this does not mean that the behaviourist’s
concepts are physiological at the outset…
• It does mean that our concepts are both linked
to behaviour and linked to our expectations of
how they will fit in with other aspects of our
understanding of the world.
Back to Jones
• Jones proposes a theory of inner episodes, modeled on
overt speech.
• These explain intelligent behaviour that goes on even
when no overt commentary accompanies it.
• The episodes carry the semantic force of the speech
acts they are modeled on.
• And they are taken as the real, ‘proximate’ causes of
intelligent behaviour, even when accompanied by an
overt explanatory discourse.
• Think here of how we accompany demonstration with
commentary when instructing people in how to do
something…
More details
• The commentary follows, explaining the parallels
between speech and thought and where the two differ.
• One important point: Nothing in the theory requires that
we have thoughts first and language second– the ability
to have thoughts may depend on learning a language.
• Another: The theory does not imply that thoughts are
the ‘truly’ semantic items, with utterances only semantic
in a derivative sense, as expressing certain thoughts.
• Finally, these inner episodes need not be construed as
immediate experiences– no perceptual model of them is
implied here.
Introspection
• Having been taught to use this theory, people find that
they can sometimes report their thoughts without relying
on the overt behavioural evidence others need to reach
the same conclusion.
• Now the theoretical language has a reporting role, and
it’s one that recognizes a kind of privileged access.
• But the concepts involved are still public, and their link to
behaviour is still part of their meaning– so the ‘privacy’
involved here is not absolute or incorrigible.
Inner perceptual episodes
• Now we’re ready for Jones’ second theory: inner
episodes modeled on the perceptible features of objects,
which are invoked to explain illusions and related
perceptual phenomena.
• This provides us with a theory in which we really do have
a description of the inner episode that is the same when
we see a red triangle, see a triangle that looks red, see
something that looks like a red triangle and merely seem
to see a red triangle.
• The price, of course, is to accept that these inner states
are postulated, not ‘given’.
Details
• These are episodes (goings-on) not particulars.
• They should not be construed in
perceptual/epistemological terms: The model is
not, ‘a seeing of a red triangle’ but a red
triangular surface.
• In general, we have the occurrence of ‘inner
replicas’– a matter of a description of what’s
going on in us, not normative matter at all.
• The terms the theory provides give us a
substantive description of these states, rather
than the mere definite descriptions used so far.
The content of the description
• The content of the description is a matter of the
theoretical language and the inferences it
supports.
• Thus we know that the relations of compatibility,
incompatibility, etc. grounded in the ways
objects’ sensible properties can be arranged are
shared by these theoretical predicates
describing our impressions/sensations.
• But the limits of the parallel are not clearly
specified yet, and can be worked out/explored in
a pretty open-ended way.
Contentless form?
• Sellars objects to the view that such concepts
(characterized by their ‘internal’ inferential
relations and by a ‘link’ to certain observational
circumstances) are themselves contentless.
• For him they are no more contentless than any
other theoretical predicate,
• And the view that all such predicates are formal/
contentless is a part of the myth of the given
(according to which only the predicates that are
part of the given have ‘real’ (ostensive) content.
Expectations
• What is the relation between these states of perceivers
and physiological models of ourselves?
• In the long run we expect them to fit together, giving a
physiological account of these states.
• But our present physiology does not have the resources
to do this (homogeneity again).
• And Sellars doesn’t believe that the physics of non-living
things has the resources either– something unique to
organisms (ones sufficiently like us) needs to turn
up…we need a micro theory of sentient organisms, he
says, to find the micro-states corresponding to these
posited molar states.
The tradition and the sequel
• The modern view that objects aren’t really
coloured, and colour is in the mind of the
perceiver, is a confusion of this scientific
anticipation with a feature of the manifest image.
• The upshot of Jones’ work is that we have a
notion of both thoughts and impressions that
allows introspection (individuals are the
‘reporters’ for their own states) but also makes
the link with observable behaviour (and thus
training by our linguistic seniors as we grow up)
part of the meaning of this language.
The order of things
• The language of impressions is no more the result of
antecedent noticings of impressions than the language
of molecules is the result of antecedent noticings of
molecules.
• The phenomenologist, in describing these states, fails to
recognize her own creative role:
• She takes herself to be analyzing human knowledge as it
already was, when she is actually contributing to an
entirely new body of knowledge whose projected links to
a scientific micro-theory of sentient organisms point
towards a unified science including impressions.