Wilfrid S. Sellars
Introductory Remarks; Notes on
Philosophy and the Scientific
Image of Man
A couple of pictures
Topics
• Two images of the world: Scientific and
‘manifest’.
• Objects and thoughts about them.
• Perception and the senses.
• Theoretical entities.
• The concept of mind.
An overarching theme
• Untangling norm and description:
Since Hume and Kant, the divide between norm and
description has been at the centre of philosophical
reflections.
What we say about the way things are and the way they
ought to be reflect two very different forms of
engagement with the world and with each other.
Both seem indispensable to our self-understanding: From
a descriptive point of view, we are natural parts of a
natural world. From a normative point of view, we are
agents, pursuing goals, subject to norms and essentially
social beings.
PSIM
• Philosophy aims to understand how things hang
together.
• A linguistic gloss on this: we use language in many
ways, for many sorts of purposes; what we want to know
is, how do these uses ‘hang together’?
• This is a question about coherence: what are the
relations between our talk of “numbers and duties,
possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and
death”? How do these ways of talking fit together in our
lives?
• To answer this question, we need a reflective, articulate
account of these relations: “no intellectual holds barred.”
Know how vs. Knowing that
• The contrast here is between doing and
being able to describe what’s done.
• Most human know how requires a fair bit
of knowing that as well; this is especially
clear for the kind of reflective knowledge
philosophy aims for.
Subject matter
• Given this aim of philosophical activity,
what can we say about the subject matter
of philosophy?
• In a sense, there is none.
• If philosophy is about how the various
disciplines do (or should) ‘hang together’,
it’s a kind of meta-discipline, with a metasubject matter.
Being a real philosopher
• A specialist (physicist, historian etc.) who
is concerned about how her field relates to
others is properly said to be
philosophically-minded.
• But a real philosopher must take a further
step, reflecting not just on how the special
fields are related, but on how philosophy
can (and we hope does) explore and
interpret those relations.
Analysis
• Not an entirely bad metaphor for philosophy, but
it suggests a certain myopia and even triviality in
the business.
• ‘Focus’ says more in favour of what philosophy
can contribute. But it suggests that the
specialist doesn’t quite understand her own field,
which just isn’t so. It also suggests we already
have an overall view of things, which is
supposed to be the product of philosophy, not an
initial input for it.
How many pictures?
• Two “in principle”;
• Many, “in fact”.
• A crucial duality/ call for ‘stereoscopic
vision’.
• The manifest and scientific images (not
presupposing here that either or both are
illusions…)
• “Projections of man-(sic)in-the-world”
Idealizations
•
•
•
•
Ideal gases
Frictionless bodies
Ideal types
Illumination is the aim here, “as scientific
idealizations illuminate the development of
physical systems”
• These images have histories of their own,
and the scientific image (at least) is still in
the process of being developed.
The manifest image
• The image in terms of which we first became
aware of ourselves, i.e. the image within which
(since self-awareness is the key step in our
emergence as human beings) we first became
human.
• This is linked to conceptual thinking: conceptual
thinking is a complex whole that is prior to its
parts, i.e. its parts (as understood within the
system) presume the existence of the system
they are parts of.
Norms
• Here a crucial point about conceptual thinking
emerges:
• It is a normative matter– “To be able to think is to
be able to measure one’s thoughts by standards
of correctness, of relevance, of evidence.”
• This makes the transition from pre-conceptual
behaviour to conceptual thinking look like a
“holistic…jump to a level of awareness which is
irreducibly new”
A bold claim
• “The attempt to understand this difference
turns out to be part and parcel of the
attempt to encompass in one view the two
images of man-in-the-world which I have
set out to describe. For, as we shall see,
this difference in level appears as an
irreducible discontinuity in the manifest
image, but as, in a sense requiring careful
analysis, a reducible difference in the
scientific image.” (p. 6)
Distinguishing the images
• Empirical refinement and correlational
science: Mill’s methods & the
development of the manifest image.
• Postulation of entities is ruled out here by
fiat– these are taken to belong exclusively
to the scientific image.
• In fact, of course, these two methods have
interacted, so the division is somewhat
artificial (but, for Sellars, illuminating).
The perennial philosophy
• Casting a wide net: This includes
continental philosophy, but also AngloAmerican work in the ‘ordinary language
(usage)’ tradition.
• The ‘Platonic tradition’ as a label for these
& related views:
• Key shared point: The manifest image is
endorsed as real in these philosophies.
Aiming for a synthesis
• Sellars contrasts this monoscopic view of
things with a monoscopic view on the
other side (Spinoza), and presents his aim
as a balanced, ‘stereoscopic’ view of
things, which will somehow combine both
the scientific and the manifest image.
• First, though, he will explore/develop his
account of the two images.
Original & Manifest
• The kinds of things the manifest
framework recognizes: “persons, animals,
lower forms of life and ‘merely material’
things…”
• The primary objects here are persons.
• In the original image, ‘all the objects are
persons’ (p. 10)
• Gradual refinement ‘de-personalized’ other
objects.
Interpretation
• “This means that the sort of things that are said
of objects in this framework are the sort of things
that are said of persons.”
• Important aside: “We shall see that the essential
dualism in the manifest image is not that
between mind and body as substances, but
between two radically different ways in which the
human individual is related to the world.” (p. 11)
• Range of activities: What the objects of the
original framework are and do are the things
persons are and do.
Behaviour and other Doings
• Two contrasts: actions that express character
vs. actions that do not; habitual actions vs.
deliberate actions.
• Action, whether impulsive, habitual or deliberate,
requires the ability to deliberate.
• ‘In character’ applies only to actions predictable
on the basis of a person’s past behaviour and
beliefs about the circumstances.
• Other predictable behaviour can be a matter of
ones’ ‘nature’ rather than ones’ character.
Original image again
• All objects of the original image are
capable of the full range of personal
behaviour, from impulsive to habitual to
deliberate actions. (Links here to
anthropology/ animistic belief systems…)
• Pruning as the main process by which
we’ve arrived at the refined categories of
the manifest image.
Another aside: Cause vs.
Prediction
• Roughly, ‘caused’ applies first to actions that are
only predictable when we include some kind of
intervention or exceptional event in the
circumstances.
• Thus we speak (in the pruned manifest image)
of a cause for the change in course of one
billiard ball (its collision with another) while never
asking for the cause of its predictable
continuation on its path when no collision or
other intervention occurs.
The objectivity of the Manifest
Image
• This image is intersubjective, and so we
can get it right or wrong.
• Some philosophical errors about the MI
– Objects are ‘complexes of sensations’
– Apples really aren’t coloured
– To say ‘x is good’ is to say that one likes x
• Analytic philosophy is (on the way to)
getting it right.
Thought and object
• “…somehow the world is the cause of the
individual’s image of the world.”
• The standard approach: ‘a direct causal
influence of the world as intelligible on the
individual mind’ (p. 16)
• The social element (anti-Robinson Crusoe);
Hegel’s grasp of the social group as mediating
factor in the development of thought.
• “(T)here is no thinking apart from common
standards of correctness and relevance, which
relate what I do think to what anyone ought to
think. (p. 17)
The Game Metaphor
• We don’t learn to think conceptually by
being told the rules!
• Conceptual thought does what it does for
us by providing the means for representing
the world.
• The dependence on a group does not rule
out isolated humans– it’s that conceptual
thought is inseparable from the idea of/
contrast between self and others.
A gap in the manifest image
• While the MI is committed to the group as
mediator, putting the individual (as she
grows up) ‘in touch’ with the ‘intelligible
order’ of the world (in the course of
language learning…), Sellars holds that it
does not have the resources to explain
how this mediation works.
• The scientific image, which has grown out
of the MI, offers insight into this transition.
Two kinds of causal impact
• Ordinary cases: I fall out a window, or bump into
something, or… These causal impacts treat me
as simply one thing among many in the natural
world.
• The other side: I look at a tree and conclude,
‘there’s a maple tree there.’ Here the world
causes me to adopt a position in a normative
system of claims and justifications. This can’t be
reduced to ordinary cases (holism, I think, is
involved in this point).
Survival of the MI
The main question is re-put:
• To what extent/ in what way does the MI
survive the transition to a scientific view of
how the world is to be described?
• That is, do humans as we conceive them
survive the transition, and in what sense?
• More colourfully, does the shift to a
synoptic view lead us out of, or into
bondage?
Strategy
• Sellars rejects a ‘piecemeal’ approach to
joining the SI and MI together.
• Instead, he favours developing each as
thoroughly as possible, and then
considering how each, as a full image of
humans in the world, might be combined
with the other into a stereoscopic image.
The SI
• Is still in process of being built.
• Is (in principle, by fiat) distinguished from
the MI by including items from
postulational theorizing, rather than just a
process of categorial/correlational
refinement that began with the Original
Image.
The Many Sciences
• The SI itself is an idealization, conceived as an
integrated image combining the views of the
special sciences.
• Each special science is rooted in/supported by
the MI.
• This dependence is methodological, but Sellars
resists the suggestion that it leads to an inprinciple dependence of SI categories on the
categories of the MI: The SI purports to be a
rival to the MI, complete in its own terms.
Uniting the Sciences
• Ontologically: we may see the objects of one
science as identical to combinations of the
objects of another science.
• Of the sciences themselves: this would
requiring re-reading/ shifting all the methods and
practices of one science in terms of another.
• Of the theoretical principles of two sciences:
This requires deriving the principles of one from
those of the other.
Behaviour
• Perceptible behaviour is already the only
evidence for mental events in the MI.
• Behaviourism in this sense is mild as milk.
No ruling out of non-behavioural states, so
long as behavioural evidence rules…
• Stronger form of Behaviourism: No
concepts aside from descriptions of
behaviour, environment and their
correlations.
Limits of Behaviour
• The attempt to arrive at such a correlational
science meets limits, in that only a small range
of what an organism ‘does’ under a small range
of circumstances (standard conditions) really
counts as behaviour.
• The ‘iffiness’ of states in behavioural science.
• A hint at the special (linguistically modeled) iffy
states of human beings during normal human
behaviour.
Inner speechlike processes
• An account of where the notion of thought
comes from.
• A useful way of thinking of
humans/interpreting their behaviour.
• Behavioural thinking breaks down when
we get outside standard conditions in
various ways.
The scientific image of man
• ‘…the scientific image of man turns out to
be that of a complex physical system.’
Back to some history
• Earlier efforts to connect scientific image to
manifest image: Descartes et al.
The alternatives:
• MI objects are (collections of) SI objects as
forests are collections of trees.
• MI objects are real, SI objects are inventions
useful in capturing/organizing facts about MI
objects.
• MI objects are (mere) appearances, to humans,
of what are in fact SI objects (systems of
imperceptible particles).
Eddington’s Table
• Sellar’s ice cube.
• The problem: Every property of a system
of objects consists of properties of and
relations between its components.
• Given this claim, the ice cube is not just a
collection of atoms arranged in a ‘cubelike’ way, since its pinkness (as an MI
object) does not reduce in this way.
Rejecting a framework
• That MI objects have certain perceptible
properties is an MI framework truth.
• But if we’re rejecting the MI framework as, in
fact, false (a mere appearance), then this is not
a fact that an opponent can hold against us.
• Similarly, responding to critiques of a framework
from within its assumptions is inadequate…
• The MI criticized here by contrasting it with a
better image, the SI.
Still to come
• Section V ends with a back and forth with
Descartes over features of thoughts and
ordinary MI objects and whether they can
be reconciled with the SI view of human
beings.
• The upshot is some insight into the
temptation to refuse to allow that the SI is
the ‘real’ image of how things are.