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Sellars Week Four “Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities”
The essay is (as Sellars says in its Introduction) in two parts. I’m not going to say anything
about Part One, save for the following observations:
1. Sellars uses Principia Mathematica dot notation in lieu of (most) parentheses, which makes it
difficult for us to read today. And his use of it is not flawless. (I think he leaves a dot out of
the last formula in §43, for instance.) Bernard Linsky’s Stanford Encyclopedia article on the
Notation of PM offers a good primer.
2. He carefully distinguishes between subjunctive conditionals (“if x were [phi]d it would
[psi]”) and counterfactual conditionals (“if x had been [phi]d it would have [psi]d”).
3. His analysis of dispositional talk essentially involves distinguishing four kinds of
expressions: thing-kinds (sortals, not just predicates, which typically do not take temporal
qualifications), conditions (predicates which do take temporal qualifications), interventions
([phi]ing) and results ([psi]).
4. He distinguishes between dispositions and capacities: capacity claims say that there is a
condition and an intervention that will have a result, while disposition claims presuppose that
the condition obtains.
Plan for discussion of Part Two:
1. Sellars’s motivation for his inferentialism (rationalism) concerns the meaning of
modal vocabulary.
2. Kant’s insight about concepts that articulate features of the framework of empirical
description and explanation.
3. From labeling to describing, by placing labels in a “space of implications”.
4. Those “implications” essentially, and not just accidentally, include material
inferential relations that are counterfactually robust, and would be made explicit by
the use of modal vocabulary. [From beginning of Ch. 4 of BSD.]
5. The Kant-Sellars thesis about modality
6. Causal vs. logical or metaphysical modalities. (3 waves of modal revolution)
7. Sellars’s CDCM argument as retailed in PIMSAE
8. K-S Thesis Incompatible with Description in Wide Sense?
9. Revision of the argument in terms of pragmatic metavocabularies and pragmatic
dependences, MUDs, as in middle of Ch. 4 of BSD.
10. Premises from which to reason vs. Principles in accordance with which to reason
11. Closing sections of CDCM on conceptual change.
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1.
Sellars:
In an autobiographical sketch, Sellars dates his break with traditional empiricism to his Oxford
days in the thirties. It was, he says, prompted by concern with understanding the sort of
conceptual content that ought to be associated with “logical, causal, and deontological
modalities.” Already at that point he says that he had the idea that
what was needed was a functional theory of concepts which would make their
role in reasoning, rather than supposed origin in experience, their primary
feature.1
This telling passage introduces two of the master ideas that shape Sellars’s critique of empiricism.
The first is that a key criterion of adequacy with respect to which its semantics will be found
wanting concerns its treatment of modal concepts. The second is that the remedy for this
inadequacy lies in an alternative broadly functional approach to the semantics of these concepts
that focuses on their inferential roles—as it were, looking downstream to their subsequent use, as
well as upstream to the circumstances that elicit their application.
Somewhat more specifically, he sees modal locutions as tools used in the enterprise of
…making explicit the rules we have adopted for thought and action…I shall be
interpreting our judgments to the effect that A causally necessitates B as the
expression of a rule governing our use of the terms 'A' and 'B'.2
In fact, following Ryle3, he takes modal expressions to function as inference licenses, expressing
our commitment to the goodness of counterfactually robust inferences from necessitating to
necessitated conditions. If and insofar as it could be established that their involvement in such
counterfactually robust inferences is essential to the contents of ordinary empirical concepts,
then what is made explicit by modal vocabulary is implicit in the use of any such concepts. That
is the claim I am calling the “Kant-Sellars thesis.” On this view, modal vocabulary does not just
add to the use of ordinary empirical observational vocabulary a range of expressive power that is
extraneous—as though one were adding, say, culinary to nautical vocabulary. Rather, the
expressive job distinctive of modal vocabulary is to articulate just the kind of essential
semantic connections among empirical concepts that Sellars (and Quine) point to, and
whose existence semantic atomism is principally concerned to deny.
2.
Kant:
At the center of Kant’s thought is the observation that what we might call the framework of
empirical description—the commitments, practices, abilities, and procedures that form the
necessary practical background within the horizon of which alone it is possible to engage in the
theoretical activity of describing how things empirically are (how empirical things are)—
essentially involves elements expressible in words that are not descriptions, that do not
perform the function of describing (in the narrow sense) how things are. These include, on
the objective side, what is made explicit as statements of laws, using alethic modal concepts to
1
In Action, Knowledge, and Reality, H. N. Castaneda (ed.) [Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1975] p 285.
Sellars, "Language, Rules, and Behavior" footnote 2 to p. 136/296 in PPPW.
3
Gilbert Ryle, “ ‘If’, ‘So’, and ‘Because’ ”, pp. 302-318 in Black, Max (ed.) Philosophical Analysis [Prentice Hall,
1950].
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relate the concepts applied in descriptions. Kant addresses the question of how we should
understand the semantic and cognitive status of those framework commitments: are they the sort
of thing that can be assessed as true or false? If true, do they express knowledge? If they are
knowledge, how do we come to know and justify the claims expressing these commitments? Are
they a kind of empirical knowledge? I think that the task of crafting a satisfying idiom for
discussing these issues and addressing these questions is still largely with us, well into the third
century after Kant first posed them.
Now Kant already realized that the situation is much more complicated and difficult than is suggested by this way of
putting the issue: as though all that were needed were to distinguish framework-constitutive commitments from
commitments that become possible only within the framework (what becomes the dichotomy between language and
theory, meaning and belief, that Carnap endorses and Quine rejects). For it is one thing to acknowledge that the
existence of “lawlike” relations among concepts or properties (that is, ones that support counterfactually robust
inference) that are expressed explicitly by the use of alethic modal vocabulary is a necessary part of the framework
of empirical description, that (as Sellars puts the point) no description is possible except in a context in which
explanation is also possible, and that the function of the modal vocabulary that expresses those explanatory
relations is not descriptive in the narrow sense whose paradigm is the statement of particular empirical facts. That is
granting the claim that there must be laws (reflected in rules of inference) governing the properties (reflected in
concepts) used in empirical descriptions is part of the framework of description(-and-explanation). That claim will
not itself be an empirical claim, in the sense of one that can only be established by investigating what descriptions
actually apply to things. If it is true and knowable, it is so, we could say, a priori. It is, we would be tempted to say
in Kant’s hylomorphic terms, a matter of the form, rather than the content of empirical knowledge. But the further
point must then be granted that which lawlike statements express genuine laws (are “objectively valid”) and which
do not is an empirical question. So we need a way of talking about broadly empirical claims that are not in the
narrow sense descriptive ones, codifying as they do explanatory relations among ground-level particular
descriptive applications of determinate empirical concepts. Responding to this challenge (and to its analog on the
side of practical activity) is one of the central animating and orienting themes of Kant’s and Hegel’s work (as it
would be later for Peirce’s and Sellars’s).
3. From Labels to Descriptions:
Labeling, nominalism, and the classificatory theory of consciousness:
a) What I’ll call “semantic nominalism” was the universally held semantic theory until Kant, and is
still probably dominant. It holds that:
i.
Proper names are labels, stuck onto or otherwise associated with the objects named. This is the
‘Fido’/Fido theory.
ii.
Predicates are like names, but they are general labels, labels that are stuck onto or otherwise
associated with many objects (those they are true of), via the properties of those objects. They
are general in that we stick them onto more than one thing. These labels specify properties of
labelable objects, or their kinds. (Depending on whether they are sortals or not, that is, whether in addition to
criteria of application—see below—they have criteria of identity and individuation—as Frege taught us in the
Grundlagen. Cf. Sellars claim here: “The point is the more radical one that the relation of a thing-kind word to the
criteria for belonging to that kind of thing is different in principle from the relation of words for characteristics of
things to the criteria for the presence of these characteristics. "Lemon" and "bald" may both be vague, but they are
so in radically different ways.” [§46] [But bracket all these considerations.])
Semantic nominalism is the view that the relation between a name and its bearer, what is a name
of, construed on the model of labeling, is the paradigmatic semantic relation. Predicates name
(label) properties, and sentences name possible states of affairs.
b) Complex labels are descriptions. So something can be described by pinning on it (associating
with it in whatever the way distinctive of semantic association is) the labels ‘red’, ‘juicy’, ‘apple’.
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c) Language, accordingly, consists of a bunch of descriptive terms, labels. And what one does with
language is to describe things. The result is a picture of language as essentially a system of
classification. The idea that this is what language is is descriptivism.
d) So semantic nominalism is a principal route to descriptivism about language: the view that
what language is for is to describe the world.
e) Notice that the language-as-labeling view is semantically atomistic: Applying the label ‘red’
is independent of applying the label ‘apple’. Even though there turn out to be, as a matter of fact,
connections between applying the labels ‘ripe’, ‘Macintosh’, and ‘red’, that sort of fact is not an
essential feature of the semantic connection between the labels and what is labeled. For the
relation between one label and what it labels does not depend on the relation between any other
label and what it labels.
f) Mere labels: Consider a tray of disparate objects, each of which is labeled with either a
blue or a red dot. They have been labeled. Have they been described? Evidently not. For
what have they been described as?
g) One way of seeing that such mere labels don’t mean anything (or at least, that we don’t understand them) is that we
have no idea how to go on labeling things with red and blue dots. If a few more objects are added to the tray, we
don’t know which, if either, label is appropriate. The mere labeling of some objects does not establish a standard,
norm, or practice we can appeal to in determining how it would be correct to continue labeling new objects. (This
is one of the threads Wittgenstein is pursuing in his discussion of “going on in the same way” in the PI.)
h) Be that as it may, for our purposes, we may conclude that the only labels that have any prospect of counting as
descriptions are those associated with reliable differential responsive dispositions to apply them to new cases. These
are projectable labels. They must be associated, explicitly or implicitly, with standards, or norms, or at least
learnable-teachable practices that settle when it is and when it is not correct to apply the label to new cases. At the
least, some notion of mislabeling must have been put in place, for labels to be even candidate descriptions.
Descriptive terms, unlike mere labels in the thinnest sense, must at least come with circumstances of appropriate
application.
i) So, if we have such RDRDs embodying standards of appropriate application, will such labels be
descriptions? It is not hard to see that they will not. ‘Gleeb’. Consider possession of an
infallible ‘gleebness’ tester. Point the device at something, and it lights up if and only if the
thing is gleeb. This, by hypothesis, is projectible. It establishes a standard, with respect to which
things can be mislabeled as ‘gleeb’. But when one has found out that something is gleeb, what
has one found out? (One can know what is a K without knowing what a K is.) One has not
described it, but merely labeled it. One knows what things are gleeb, but has not thereby found
out anything about them, since one does not, we want to say, yet know what gleebness is. Once
again we can ask: What is it you are describing things as when you label them as ‘gleeb’? The
conclusion is that it is not enough to have a description of something that one have not only a
label that has in the past been applied to some things and not to others, but also a reliably
differential responsive disposition to discriminate things to which the label is and is not correctly
applied.
j) What more is needed? Consider a parrot who can respond to the visible presence of red things
by uttering tokens of “Awrk! That’s red!” And suppose that he does so in just the same
circumstances in which we do. He reliably differentially responds to red things by correctly
applying a vocalized label. [Kvetch about ‘vocal’ vs. ‘verbal’.] Is he describing things as red?
The noise he makes is just a noise to him, as ‘gleeb’ was to us. For the parrot, that label is not
something that contrasts with other labels in that it excludes their proper applicability. And the
applicability of that label does not have any further consequences, for instance, making further
labels such as ‘colored’ appropriate.
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k) Conclusion: For a description, we must have both circumstances of appropriate application
and appropriate consequences of application.
l) “It is only because the expressions in terms of which we describe objects, even such basic expressions as words for the perceptible characteristics of molar objects, locate these objects in a
space of implications, that they describe at all, rather than merely label.”4
m) We saw that Sellars says [§107] that what is needed is that the description be put in a “space of
implications”. We need inferential articulation to have description. To be more than a mere
label, the label must be one that one can offer reasons for applying in one case and withholding
in another (corresponding to the circumstances of appropriate application) and whose
applicability can itself offer reasons for the application of other characterizations (corresponding
to the appropriate consequences of application). This is what a parrot lacks, who can reliably
differentially respond to red things by saying “That’s red” in the same circumstances we do, but
who does not, just on that basis, count as describing anything as red, or reporting or observing
that something is red. To be a description, the label must be situated in a web of connections to
other labels/descriptions. And those connections are broadly inferential: a matter of what is
evidence or reason for or against what, of what obliges one to apply further labels/descriptions,
or precludes one from doing that. Absent that context, labels are not descriptions. That is what
Sellars means by saying:
“It is only because the expressions in terms of which we describe objects, even such basic expressions as words for the perceptible characteristics of molar objects locate these objects in a
space of implications, that they describe at all, rather than merely label.”
n) Since every expression must have both circumstances of appropriate application and
appropriate consequences of application, each incorporates an inference: an inference from
the obtaining of the circumstances to the obtaining of the consequences.
4. Counterfactual robustness of the ‘implications’:
a. And that must be a counterfactually robust inference. That is, the commitment involved in
using the descriptive expression in question is that if anything were to satisfy the
circumstances of its application, it would satisfy the consequences. For otherwise, the term
cannot be applied to new cases. For one would need to find out in advance if the inference
held in that case. But the point is that the circumstances of appropriate application need not
include checking whether the consequences also obtain.
b. In general, one cannot count as understanding any descriptive expression (or the concept
it expresses, what it describes something as being) unless one distinguishes at least some
of the inferences it is involved in (some of the connections within the “space of
implications” it is situated in) as counterfactually robust, at least in the sense that they
would remain good inferences if some further premises were added that do not in fact
obtain. Thus one must know such things as that a lion would still be a mammal if the
lighting were slightly different, it were a different day of the week, it was transported to a
zoo, we clipped its fur….
Pp. 306-307 (§107) in: Wilfrid Sellars: “Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and Causal Modalities” In Minnesota
Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Volume II: Concepts, Theories, and the Mind-Body Problem, ed. Herbert Feigl,
Michael Scriven, and Grover Maxwell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1958), p.225-308.
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c. Hume found that even his best understanding of actual observable empirical facts did not
yield an understanding of rules relating or otherwise governing them. Those facts did not
settle which of the things that actually happened had to happen (given others), that is, were
(at least conditionally) necessary, and which of the things that did not happen nonetheless
were possible (not ruled out by laws concerning what did happen). Though initially couched
as an epistemological question about how one could know what rules or laws were in play,
Hume’s worries run deeper, raising the semantic question of what it could so much as mean
to say that the facts are governed or related by rules or laws. Hume (and, following him,
Quine) took it that epistemologically and semantically fastidious philosophers faced a stark
choice: either show how to explain modality in nonmodal terms or learn to live without it, to
do what we need to do in science without making such arcane and occult supradescriptive
commitments. But that challenge is predicated on the idea of an independently and
antecedently intelligible stratum of empirical discourse that is purely descriptive and involves
no modal commitments, as a semantically autonomous background and model with which
the credentials of modal discourse can then be invidiously compared.
d. One of Kant’s most basic ideas, revived by Sellars, is that this idea is mistaken. The ability
to use ordinary empirical descriptive terms such as ‘green’, ‘rigid’, and ‘mass’ already
presupposes grasp of the kind of properties and relations made explicit by modal
vocabulary. Sellars summed up the claim admirably in the title of one of his early papers:
“Concepts as Involving Laws, and Inconceivable Without Them.” 5 This slogan is a good place to
start in thinking about Kant’s point, but in fact Sellars’s own view is subtly but importantly different from
Kant’s. For Sellars, the laws determining the truth of counterfactuals involving the application of a concept are
part of the content of the concept. For Kant, modal concepts make explicit not something implicit in the content
of determinate concepts, but something implicit in their empirical use, in applying them to make empirical
judgments. That is why the pure concepts of the understanding—what he calls ‘categories’, such as possibility
and necessity—both are to be understood in terms of the forms of judgment (the table of categories derives from
the table of judgments) and express synthetic, rather than analytic necessities. From Kant’s point of view, a
better slogan than Sellars’s would be “The Use of Concepts in Empirical Judgments as Involving Laws and
Inconceivable Without Them.”
e. Kant was struck by the fact that the essence of the Newtonian concept of mass is of
something that by law force is both necessary and sufficient to accelerate. And he saw that
all empirical concepts are like their refined descendants in the mathematized natural sciences
in this respect: their application implicitly involves counterfactual-supporting dispositional
commitments to what would happen if…. Kant’s claim, put in more contemporary terms,
is that an integral part of what one is committed to in applying any determinate concept
in empirical circumstances is drawing a distinction between counterfactual differences
in circumstances that would and those that would not affect the truth of the judgment
one is making. One has not grasped the concept cat unless one knows that it would still be
possible for the cat to be on the mat if the lighting had been slightly different, but not if all
life on earth had been extinguished by an asteroid-strike.
f. Grasp of a concept is mastery of the use of a word, Sellars says. And for descriptive
concepts, that use includes not only sorting inferences (however fallibly and incompletely)
into materially good and materially bad ones, but also, among the ones one takes to be
materially good, to distinguish (however fallibly and incompletely) between counterfactual
5
Reprinted at pp. 87-124 in J. Sicha (ed.) Pure Pragmatics and Possible Worlds: The Early Essays of Wilfrid Sellars
[Ridgeview Publishing Company, Reseda CA, 1980]—hereafter PPPW.
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circumstances under which they do, and counterfactual circumstances under which they do
not, remain good. Part of taking an inference to be materially good is having a view about
which possible additional collateral premises or auxiliary hypotheses would, and which
would not, infirm it. Chestnut trees produce chestnuts—unless they are immature, or
blighted. Dry, well-made matches strike—unless there is no oxygen. The hungry lioness
would still chase the antelope if it were Tuesday or the beetle on the distant tree crawled
slightly further up the branch, but not if lioness’s heart were to stop beating. The point is not
that there is any particular set of such discriminations that one must be able to make in order
to count as deploying the concepts involved. It is that if one can make no such practical
assessments of the counterfactual robustness of material inferences involving those concepts,
one could not count as having mastered them.
g.
h.
Sellars says (in the Introduction to CDCM), that “the framework [note the word] of what objects of
a certain kind K would do in circumstances C is basic.” (Q: In what sense ‘basic’? And why?) We
have seen, in effect, that the implications in which genuine descriptive terms (as opposed to mere
labels) are involved are counterfactually robust. That is, they must extend to possible cases. This is
just another way of saying that there must be a norm or standard for the correct application of the
term in cases that have not actually arisen. We are seeing the general shape of an argument that
modality (what is expressed by modal vocabulary, such as that used to express subjunctive
conditionals—one kind of counterfactually robust conditional, as we shall see) is implicated in
the framework that makes description possible. Cf. Sellars’s essay “Concepts as Involving Laws,
and Inconceivable Without Them.” And it is this same line of thought that will implicate explanation
with description.
There are two kinds of counterfactually robust conditionals, which Sellars distinguishes [ref.] as:
Genuine subjunctive conditionals, and
Subjunctive identicals.
[Explain this difference:]
Consider the difference between:
Copper (all samples of copper) melts at 1084º C.. and
All the coins in my pocket are copper.
The first, (iii), supports the subjunctive conditional:
If this coin (which is in fact a nickel) were copper, it would melt at 1084º C..
The second, (iv), does not support the corresponding subjunctive conditional:
If this coin (which is in fact a nickel) were in my pocket, it would be copper.
(iv) does, however support the claim
If I were to choose a coin at random from my pocket, it would be copper.
So we cannot distinguish between the “accidental generalization” or “contingent regularity” (iv) and the
“lawlike statement” (iii) by saying something like “only laws support counterfactuals”. (Though you do hear
things like that a lot.)
Rather, we must distinguish what kinds of counterfactuals they support. Sellars does that by introducing the idea of
“subjunctive identicals”. The idea is that all the counterfactuals supported by statements such as (iv) must be
derived via identities of the objects they concern with some of the members of the class actually picked out by the
description in the generalization. The generalization (iv) supports counterfactuals concerning objects identical with
one of the coins that in fact are in my pocket. It does not support counterfactuals concerning what would happen if
other things did fit that description, i.e. were in my pocket. So, if any coin at all, in any possible world, were
identical to one of the coins that is actually in my pocket, it would be copper. For all those coins, the ones actually
in my pocket are copper. But the generalization in (iv) tells us nothing at all about any coins in other worlds just on
the basis of the fact that in that world, their world, the description “coin in Bob’s pocket” applies to them. Sellars
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gets at this difference in the significance of the two sorts of claims—genuine subjunctive conditionals and mere
subjunctive identicals—by saying that the former, but not the latter, tell us something about what follows from the
applicability of a description “just on the basis of the applicability of that description.”
Sellars’s distinction between subjunctive identicals and subjunctive conditionals is not nearly as straightforward as
he suggests.
When it is drawn, as I did, in terms of the example of “All of the coins in my pocket are copper,” and “Copper
melts at 1084 C.,” it seems sharp enough. Though both do support counterfactuals, the former supports
counterfactuals about objects that are in fact in my pocket, and the latter about any copper.
b) But if we look at generalizations such as “The Baltic is less salty than the Atlantic,” and “Homeotherms have higher
metabolic rates than poikylotherms,” we seem to have intermediate cases. Past, probable-future, and at least some
non-actual water samples drawn from the two oceans will conform to the former. And the latter, while almost
certainly not an exceptionless generalization across possible species (and perhaps not even for some actual
dinosaurs) is true of more than just the currently extant species.
c) But it seems to me I did—briefly—say the right thing about this distinction, while not emphasizing that saying that
involves conceiving of it somewhat differently from the way Sellars presents it. The issue is whether there is some
specification, typically a description, such that one proceeds by determining what things actually satisfy that
description, and then looking at counterfactuals that are true of them in other worlds. That is a de re procedure. Or
whether one looks at what things satisfy that specification in other worlds, and then at the counterfactuals true of
them. That is a de dicto procedure. Almost any given generalization can be read either way—that is, is subject to
both kinds of readings. We can think of the distinction, accordingly, not so much as concerning the generalization
as concerning the connection between it and counterfactuals that it supports. Sellars is just pointing out that his
claims—paradigmatically about what induction supports—are intended to address only the counterfactuals de dicto
that a generalization supports.
d) This is a distinction of the order in which two operations are performed (so, using the precise word for such an issue,
a “scope distinction”). If the generalization is x[Fx()Gx]:
i.
One can first figure out which things are F in this world, and then follow them to other possible worlds in order to
assess the truth-values of counterfactuals involving them—the de re method of assessing counterfactuals on the basis
of that generalization; or
ii.
One can first move to the world with respect to which one wants to assess the truth-value of some counterfactual,
and then see what things are F in that world.
e) Carnap (and Russell, I think)—Hempel discusses this view in Aspects of Scientific Explanation—argues that
genuine laws, of the kind (the best sort of) science aims at and employs in its explanations, do not make any
reference to particular objects, events, and so on. Thus, they do not refer to the Earth, to North America, to Julius
Caesar, to me, or to now. The point is sometimes put by saying that they are “purely universal”. But the distinction
aimed at could be the one above—or rather, the distinction between extracting counterfactuals from generalizations
in the de re way and in the de dicto way could be what lies behind the thought Carnap (and Russell, and others—
Reichenbach, Nagel?) were expressing. For what they forbid, in the statement of laws, is the use of proper names,
demonstratives, and indexicals, all of which are (and are paradigms of) rigid designators. And that is to say that
they must be read de re (and so have problematic A-intensions, in Jackson’s sense). If this is right, then there is a
progression of interpretation:
i.
Carnap (and the others) offer as a necessary condition of being a “law-like” rather than an “accidental”
generalization, that proper names, demonstratives, and indexicals, as expressions picking out particular things, do
not occur in the statement of law-like generalizations.
ii.
Sellars renders this distinction in terms of that between “subjunctive identicals” and “subjunctive conditionals”,
namely, in terms of whether counterfactual consequences can only be derived via identities linking the objects of the
counterfactual with objects the antecedent predicate of the generalization actually applies to.
iii.
I then read Sellars’s point in terms of the order of application (hence scope) of two operations: moving to a
counterfactual world, and applying the predicate of the antecedent.
f) The next question, then, is: when the distinction is read as I suggest above, in what sense is it true that induction
supports only de dicto counterfactuals?
g) The idea is that if we look not at the probability of all of the coins in my pocket being copper being increased by
checking them, one-by-one (since finding that the 9 checked so far of the 10 are does increase the probability that all
of them are, assuming independence, and regardless of the antecedent probability of each), but at the probability that
the next coin in my pocket that we check will be copper, if the generalization is really accidental, then we can look
a)
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to the case where each is independent, and there is some antecedent probability for each, and finding that the first 9
checked of the 10 are copper says nothing about the probability of the 10th. To think that it does is the gambler’s
fallacy. (Compare coin-flipping.)
h) But does this point really generalize as it is claimed to (on the reading I offered) to de re and de dicto
counterfactuals supported by generalizations generally?
5. The Kant-Sellars Thesis about Modality:
As I would like to formulate it, the Kant-Sellars thesis begins with the claim that in
using ordinary empirical vocabulary, one already knows how to do everything one needs to
know how to do in order to introduce and deploy modal vocabulary. If that is right, then one
cannot be in the position the atomist (for instance, empiricist) critic of modality professes to find
himself in: having fully understood and mastered the use of non-modal vocabulary, but having
thereby afforded himself no grip on the use of modal vocabulary, and no access to what it
expresses. The Humean-Quinean predicament is accordingly diagnosed as resulting from a
failure properly to understand the relation between modal vocabulary and what one must do in
order to deploy non-modal, empirical, descriptive vocabulary.
Sellars’s general recommendation for resolving this painful tension (felt particularly
acutely by, and one of the principal issues dividing, the members of the Vienna circle) is to relax
the exclusivism and rigorism he traces to empiricism’s semantic descriptivism:
“[O]nce 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 secondclass citizenship in discourse are not inferior, just different.”
The Humean-Quinean empiricist semantic challenge to the legitimacy of modal vocabulary is
predicated on the idea of an independently and antecedently intelligible stratum of empirical
discourse that is purely descriptive and involves no modal commitments, as a semantically
autonomous background and model with which the credentials of modal discourse can then be
invidiously compared.
The argument turns both on the pragmatism that looks to what one is doing in deploying the
candidate base vocabulary—here “purely descriptive” vocabulary—and on the nature of the
inferential articulation of that vocabulary necessary for such uses to play the expressive role
characteristic of that vocabulary. The argument in this case is subtler and more complex than the
others however. For one thing, I take it that Sellars does not deny the intelligibility-inprinciple of purely descriptive discourse that contains no explicitly modal vocabulary.6 For
6
Sellars is, frustratingly but characteristically, not explicit about his attitude towards the pragmatic autonomy in
principle of such purely descriptive discourse. He says:
The idea that the world can, in principle, be so described that the description contains no modal
expression is of a piece with the idea that the world can, in principle, be so described that the
description contains no prescriptive expression. For what is being called to mind is the ideal of
statement of ‘everything that is the case’ which, however, serves through and through only the
purpose of stating what is the case. And it is a logical truth that such a description, however many
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another, there are special difficulties involved in, and corresponding delicacies required for,
working out the general pragmatist-inferentialist strategy so as to apply it to this case, by
specifying the relation between the expressive role distinctive of modal vocabulary, on the one
hand, and what one is doing (in particular, the inferential commitments one is undertaking) in
using ordinary, non-modal, descriptive vocabulary itself, on the other.
The pragmatic dependency relation that lies at the base of Sellars’s argument is the fact
that:
…although describing and explaining (predicting, retrodicting,
understanding) are distinguishable, they are also, in an important sense,
inseparable. It is only because the expressions in terms of which we describe
objects, even such basic expressions as words for perceptible characteristics of
molar objects, locate these objects in a space of implications, that they describe at
all, rather than merely label. The descriptive and explanatory resources of
language advance hand in hand….7
Descriptive uses of vocabulary presuppose an inferentially articulated “space of
implications,” within which some descriptions show up as reasons for or explanations of
others. Understanding those descriptions requires placing them in such a space. This
pragmatist claim about what else one must be able to do—namely, infer, explain, treat
one claim as a reason for another—in order for what one is doing to count as describing
connects to the use of modal vocabulary via the principle that:
To make first hand use of these [modal] expressions is to be about the business of
explaining a state of affairs, or justifying an assertion.8
That is, what one is doing in using modal expressions is explaining, justifying, or endorsing an
inference. So what one is doing in saying that As are necessarily Bs is endorsing the inference
from anything’s being an A to its being a B.
Against the background of this pragmatist-inferentialist claim about what is involved in
the ordinary descriptive use of concepts, Sellars’s claim, as I am reading him, is that explicitly
modal “lawlike” statements are statements that one is committed or entitled to whenever one is
committed or entitled to endorse such patterns of counterfactually robust inference, and
commitment or entitlement to which in their turn commit or entitle one to the corresponding
patterns of inference. Saying that about them settles what one needs to do to use such modal
statements. It does not say how one is thereby describing the world as being when one does. It
does not, in particular, describe a pattern of inference as good (though that saying does, in its
own distinctive way, express endorsement of such a pattern). It does not do those things for the
simple reason that the use of modal expressions is not in the first instance descriptive.9 It
modal expressions might properly be used in arriving at it or in justifying it, or in showing the
relevance of one of its components to another, could contain no modal expression. [Section 80]
Sellars’s view about this ideal is complex: there is sense in which it is intelligible, and a sense in which it is
not. Such a discourse would be unreflective and unself-conscious in a way ours is not. For reasons that
will emerge, it would belong to what at the end of the essay he calls the stage of human language “when
linguistic changes had causes, but not reasons, [before] man acquired the ability to reason about reasons.”
[Section 108].
7
CDCM Section 108.
8
CDCM Section 80.
9
Sellars says:
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codifies explicitly, in the form of a statement, a feature of the use of descriptive expressions that
is indissolubly bound up with, but not identical to, their descriptive use. Nonetheless, in
knowing how to use vocabulary descriptively, one knows how to do everything one needs to
know how to do in order to use modal vocabulary. And that is enough to show that one cannot
actually be in the Humean predicament presupposed by the empiricist challenge to the
intelligibility of modal vocabulary. For one cannot know how to use vocabulary in matterof-factual descriptions (“The cat is on the mat,”) and not have any grip on how to use
modal, counterfactual, and dispositional vocabulary (“It is necessary for live cats to
breathe,” “The cat could still be on the mat if the mat were a slightly different shade of
blue, but not if it turned into soup,” “The cat would leave the mat if she saw a mouse,”).
Although explicitly modal vocabulary is an in-principle optional superstructure on practices of
deploying descriptive vocabulary, what it expresses cannot be mysterious in principle to those
who can engage in those base-level practices.
The thought is that the expressive role characteristic of alethic modal vocabulary is to
make explicit semantic or conceptual connections and commitments that are already
implicit in the use of ordinary (apparently) non-modal empirical vocabulary.
6.
Causal vs. Metaphysical or Logical Modalities:
Objection: Didn’t Kripke’s semantic investigations of modally rigid designators reveal the sort of necessity they
articulate as being metaphysical, specifically by contrast to the sort of conceptual necessity that Quine, for instance,
had worried about and rejected?
As to the first objection, the philosophical phase of the modal revolution (developing the earlier logical and
semantic phases of that revolution) that Kripke precipitated in “Naming and Necessity” did indeed use the semantic
phenomenon of the modal rigidity of some non-descriptive vocabulary to articulate a kind of necessity that is
knowable only a posteriori. The conclusion that such necessity should not be understood as conceptual necessity
follows only if one either identifies conceptual content with descriptive content (by contrast to the causallyhistorically acquired content of proper names and demonstratives) or takes it (as Quine, following the tradition, had)
that conceptual connections must be knowable a priori by those who have mastered those concepts. But both of
these are optional commitments, which can and should be rejected by anyone trying to follow out the Kant-Sellars
line of thought about modality. McDowell has argued, to my mind, convincingly, that the content expressed by
demonstrative vocabulary should be understood as thoroughly conceptual (and that Frege already took it to be so). 10
And in Making It Explicit, I articulate a broadly inferential notion of the conceptual that incorporates the indirectly
inferential roles of substitution and anaphora—including the anaphoric phenomenon that is modal rigidity. 11
On the other point, Sellars’s forthright response to Quine’s pragmatic challenge in “Two Dogmas…”—to
say what it is about the use of expressions that distinguishes inferences underwritten by necessary conceptual
relations from those underwritten by contingent matter-of-factual ones—is to identify the concept-articulating
inferences as those that are counterfactually robust.12 He cheerfully embraces the consequence that to discover what
is contained in the concept copper one needs empirically to investigate the laws of nature. (This is a kind of
semantic ‘externalism’ that does not need to take on the dangerous and difficult task of making sense of a notion of
[Mr. E.] conceives of induction as establishing principles in accordance with which we reason,
rather than as major premises from which we reason. [CDCM Section 83]
“De Re Senses” in John McDowell Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality [Cambridge, MA Harvard University
Press, 2001].
11
Robert Brandom Making It Explicit [Cambridge, MA Harvard University Press 1994] Chapters 6, 7 (especially
Sections III and IV), and 8 (Section V).
12
“Is There a Synthetic A Priori?” Philosophical Studies 20 (1953) pp. 121-38.
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the ‘internal’ with which to contrast.) The issue about conceptual necessities here is not an empirical one: who is
right about the conceptual? The Kant-Sellars thesis about modality requires deploying a concept of the conceptual
that differs in important ways from the traditional one. As long as such a notion can be intelligibly developed and
consistently applied, those differences need only be kept firmly in mind, not counted as fatal flaws.
7.
Argument of CDCM:
One principal difficulty stems from the fact that although Sellars may be right that what one is
doing in making a modal claim is endorsing a pattern of inference, it is clear that one is not
thereby saying that an inference is good. When I say “Pure copper necessarily conducts
electricity,” and thereby unrestrictedly endorse inferences from anything’s being pure copper to
its conducting electricity, I have nevertheless said nothing about any inferences, explanations,
justifications, or implications—indeed, have said something that could be true even if there had
never been any inferences or inferrers to endorse them, hence no describers or discursive
practitioners at all.13 These two observations set the principal criteria of adequacy both for
Sellars’s positive working-out of the pragmatist-inferentialist treatment of modal vocabulary, and
for his argument that the purely descriptive base vocabulary invoked by the empiricist critic of
the semantic credentials of modal vocabulary lacks the sort of discursive autonomy the
empiricist criticism presupposes and requires.
Sellars’s central rhetorical strategy in this essay is to address the issue of what is
expressed by modal claims about necessary connections by offering:
…a sympathetic reconstruction of the controversy in the form of a debate
between a Mr. C (for Constant Conjunction) and a Mr. E (for Entailment)
who develop and qualify their views in such a way as to bring them to the
growing edge of the problem.14
Officially, he is even-handed in his treatment of the vices and virtues of the empiricist, who
denies that the use of modal vocabulary can express any legitimate semantic content beyond that
expressed by a descriptive, extensional universal generalization, and the rationalist, who
understands that content in terms of entailments expressing rules of reasoning. In fact, however,
as becomes clear when he launches into his own account, he is mainly concerned to develop a
version of the rationalist account. As the second half of the essay develops, Sellars’s marks his
abandonment of the disinterested pose by an uncharacteristically explicit expository shift:
It is now high time that I dropped the persona of Mr. E, and set about
replying to the challenge with which Mr. C ended his first critique of the
entailment theory. 15
13
Sellars connects this obvious fact with the observation that:
Idealism is notorious for the fallacy of concluding that because there must be minds in the world
in order for us to have reason to make statements about the world, therefore there is no sense to the
idea of a world which does not include minds. [CDCM Section 101]
14
CCDM Introduction.
15
CDCM Section 85. In fact, Sellars’s ‘defense’ of Mr. C (see the passage from Section 82 quoted in
note 3 above) consists of showing what concessions he needs to make to Mr. E. This proceeds first by Mr.
C’s qualification that “‘A causes B’ says that (x)[AxBx] and implies that he latter is asserted on inductive
grounds” [62], followed by the necessity of conceiving “of induction as establishing principles in
accordance with which we reason, rather than as major premises from which we reason.” [83] As will
appear, the former concession, introducing the notion of what is contextual implied by contrast to what is
explicitly said, is then dialectically made available to be pressed into service by Mr. E. This bit of dialectic
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Doing that requires careful investigation of the differences between and relations among four
different sorts of item:
 Practical endorsement of the propriety of an inference from things being A to their
being B;
 The explicit statement that one may infer the applicability of ‘B’ from the
applicability of ‘A’;
 The statement that A physically entails B;
 The statement that As are necessarily Bs.
The first is the sort of thing Sellars takes to be pragmatically presupposed by the activity of
describing, that is, deploying descriptive vocabulary. The second fails to capture such practical
endorsements, because of the possibility of asserting such statements regarding the expressions
‘A’ and ‘B’ without understanding what they express.16
The third sort of statement expresses Mr. E’s initial stab at an analysis of the fourth. It is
the answer to the question: what sort of entailment is it that modal statements are supposed to
express?:
Mr. E has a ready answer. …it might…be called ‘natural’ or ‘physical’
entailment, for while any entailment is a logical relation, we can distinguish
within the broad class of entailments between those which are, and those
which are not, a function of the specific empirical contents between which
they obtain. The latter are investigated by general or formal logic (and pure
mathematics). Empirical science, on the other hand, to the extent that it is a
search for laws, is the search for entailments of the former kind. (Putative)
success in this search finds its expression in statements of the form ‘It is
(inductively) probable that A physically entails B.’”17
The virtue of statements like “A physically entails B” is that they do plausibly codify the
practical endorsement of an inference that is implicit in what one does in the form of something
one can explicitly say, without bringing in irrelevant commitments concerning particular
expressions, the activity of inferring, or discursive practitioners. The remaining difficulty is that
they seem plainly not to have the same content, not to say the same thing, as explicitly modal
statements of objective necessity.
Sellars’s response to this problem is to acknowledge that modal statements do not
say that some entailment holds, but to distinguish between what is said by using a bit of
vocabulary and what is ‘contextually implied’ by doing so. Sellars says very little about this
latter notion, even though it bears the full weight of his proposed emendation of the rationalist
account. It is recognizably the same distinction he had appealed to earlier, in “Inference and
Meaning”, as the distinction between what one says by making a statement and what one thereby
is a pretty rhetorical flourish on Sellars’s part, but I doubt that in the end it reflects any deep feature of the
confrontation between the empiricist and rationalist approaches to modality.
16
As Sellars says:
But one can know that Turks, for example, ought to withdraw ‘…’ when they commit themselves
to ‘---‘ without knowing the language, whereas the statement that ‘p entails q’ contextually implies
that the speaker not only knows the language to which ‘p’ and ‘q’ belong, but, in particular, knows
how to use ‘p’ and ‘q’ themselves. [CDCM Section 81]
17
CDCM Section 56.
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conveys. There his example is that in asserting “The weather is fine today,” I say that the
weather is fine today, but convey that I believe that it is fine.18 That otherwise uninterpreted
example suggests to me that what Sellars has in mind is the distinction between semantic and
pragmatic inferences. That is the distinction between inferences underwritten by the contents of
what is said or asserted, on the one hand, and inferences underwritten by what one is doing in
saying them, on the other. The inference from “The weather is fine,” to “It is not raining,” is of
the first sort; the inference from my asserting “The weather is fine,” to “Brandom believes the
weather is fine,” is of the second sort. Inferences of these two kinds may generally be
distinguished by the Frege-Geach embedding test: look to see whether those who make the
inference in question also endorse the corresponding conditional. “If the weather is fine, then it
is not raining,” is generally true, while “If the weather is fine, then Brandom believes it is fine,”
is not generally true. (Compare the inference from my saying “That is an ugly tie you are
wearing,” to “Bob is annoyed with me.”)
If that is in fact the distinction Sellars is after, then it seems to me that the view he is
expounding and defending can be put less paradoxically if we do not take a detour through
entailment statements, but concern ourselves directly with the relation between the
endorsement of patterns of inference and modal statements. The underlying rationalist
insight is a pragmatist-inferentialist one: what one is doing in making a modal claim is
endorsing a pattern of inference. Modal vocabulary makes possible new kinds of sayings
that have the pragmatic effect of endorsing inferences. To say that is not yet to say what
they say, it is only to say what one is doing by saying them. [Cf. Section 8 below.] But it does
settle the pragmatic significance of such modal claims, in the sense of their appropriate
circumstances and consequences of application.
It is the attempt to specify this peculiar and distinctive sort of pragmatically mediated relation
between vocabularies that leads Sellars to say things like:
It is sometimes thought that modal statements do not describe states of affairs in
the world, because they are really metalinguistic. This won’t do at all if it is
meant that instead of describing states of affairs in the world, they describe
linguistic habits. It is more plausible if it is meant that statements involving
modal terms have the force of prescriptive statements about the use of certain
expressions in the object language. Yet there is more than one way of to ‘have
the force of’ a statement, and failure to distinguish between them may snowball
into a serious confusion as wider implications are drawn. [CDCM Section 81]
and
Shall we say that modal expressions are metalinguistic? Neither a simple ‘yes’
nor a simple ‘no’ will do. As a matter of fact, once the above considerations are
given their proper weight, it is possible to acknowledge that the idea that they are
metalinguistic in character oversimplifies a fundamental insight. 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 (represented by the ‘p’ and the ‘q’ of our example) is
recognized, in particular, that they have ‘straightforward’ translation into other
Sellars, “Inference and Meaning”, p. 280/332 in in J. Sicha (ed.) Pure Pragmatics and Possible Worlds: The
Early Essays of Wilfrid Sellars [Ridgeview Publishing Company, Reseda CA, 1980]—hereafter PPPW.
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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
Section 82]
and
We must here, as elsewhere, draw a distinction between what we are committed
to concerning the world by virtue of the fact that we have reason to make a certain
assertion, and the force, in a narrower sense, of the assertion itself. [CDCM
Section 101]
If one practically endorses the pattern of inference that treats classifying or describing
anything at all as an A as sufficient grounds (“all on its own”, as Sellars says, in order to capture
the way the pattern of inferences in question is counterfactually robust) for concluding that it is a
B, then one is committed to the claim that all As are necessarily Bs. And commitment to that
claim is commitment to practically ratify that pattern of inference. Assuming, as Sellars has
claimed, that using ordinary, non-modal, descriptive vocabulary requires practically endorsing
such patterns of inference (“situating descriptions in a space of implications”), that means that
anyone who has the practical ability to deploy “purely descriptive” vocabulary already
knows how to do everything he needs to know how to do to deploy modal vocabulary as
well. He need not actually do so, since practically undertaking those inferential commitments
does not require that one have available a language with vocabulary permitting one to do that by
saying something. But all a practitioner lacks in such a circumstance is the words to hook up to
discriminative and responsive abilities he already possesses. In this precise sense, the ability to
deploy modal vocabulary is practically implicit in the ability to deploy non-modal descriptive
vocabulary.
8. K-S Thesis Incompatible with Description in Wide Sense?
Sellars correctly wants a view that will entitle him to say both:
a. Modal claims do not just describe regularities; and
b. Modal claims do not describe proprieties of inference.
While also being entitled to say:
c. It is the correctness of inferences connecting descriptive terms, inferences without which those
terms could not mean what they mean, that makes modal claims true. [But cf. quote #19 from
§91.]
His way of doing that is to say that modal claims do not have the job of describing how the world
is. This gets him (a) and (b). To get (c) without denying (b), he must talk about what is
“conventionally implied by” modal claims, rather than what is “said by” such claims.
d. But even if he is entirely right in this, it leaves wholly open the question of what is said by modal
claims.
e. Should we think that this is settled by the claim that they do not describe? This would require
that the only sort of saying that is a describing as. But that seems to be precisely the sort of
descriptivism about the discursive that he is principally concerned to deny.
f. Further—though Sellars does not discuss this issue explicitly—modal claimables embed
perfectly well as antecedents of conditionals, complements of propositional attitude ascriptions,
and so on. We don’t have to be declarativists about description (the converse of the claim in (e))
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g.
i.
ii.
h.
i.
j.
k.
l.
to be declarativists about what is said—in the sense of taking it that declarative sentences do say
something.
In any case, why isn’t it both
open to Sellars; and
The best line to take here,
to say that the modal claim x[FxGx] says that something’s being G follows from its
being F? That is, why can’t we treat possession of one property’s following from possession
of another property, one kind of fact following from another kind of fact, as being part of
how the world is and can be described as being? Compare: facts about what is incompatible
with what. Surely these are things we can discover, as we can the ground-level facts that are
incompatible with or consequences of others.
To do that is not in the first instance to describe any possible acts of inferring or uses of
linguistic expressions as appropriate or inappropriate, correct or incorrect. It is true that, when
combined (as auxiliary hypotheses or collateral premises) with further claims about what some
linguistic expressions mean, the claim in (g) has consequences of this sort. But those
consequences are not part of what is said by a claim of the form “that something melts at 1083.4
C. is a consequence of, follows from, its being pure copper.”
Such a line, in effect, is what the idiom of possible worlds does when applied in the way of
intensional semantics (the second phase of the modal revolution). For it says that in saying
x[FxGx] we are saying that every causally or physically (or ‘scientifically’) possible world
in which something is F is a world in which it is G (that for every x, the set of Fx-worlds is a
subset of the set of Gx-worlds). This is thought of as a straightforward description of the modal
space of possibilities.
In order to take this line about what is said by modal claims, we need not deny Sellars’s
claim that in uttering such a claim we are doing something more than describing things,
that we are also endorsing an inference. As we have seen, I do that when endorse any claim.
So doing that “something more” is compatible with also saying that things are thus-and-so, in the
narrow sense of describing things as being thus-and-so (‘narrow’ because there is a wider sense
of ‘saying’ that is not restricted to any sort of description). And we can grant that the description
in question is more than a mere description of this world—thus denying the claim of Mr. C that
Sellars is most concerned to deny.
Viewed this way, the second phase develops the first phase of the modal revolution in such a
way as to broaden the notion of description beyond the use that empiricists had permitted. Its
license to do so is precisely the Kant-Sellars thesis about modality: description in the narrow,
actualist, empiricist sense depends for its intelligibility on the possibility of doing something
more, of inferential connections among such narrow, actualist descriptions that are made explicit
by modal vocabulary. But once that point is taken on board, there is no reason remaining not to
take that modal vocabulary as descriptive, albeit in a broader sense than that term was employed
in before, but one that still does not extend to all declarative sayings.
But Sellars does not and cannot take the line I am recommending here. He does not
because of his nominalist views about universals: he does not believe that properties exist—
so, a fortiori, he cannot accept that they stand in consequential and incompatibility relations to
one another. In this way, his views about the metalinguistic character of modal vocabulary are
hostage to his views about the metalinguistic character of talk about properties. (His view is,
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roughly, that “Triangularity is a property,” means …is triangulars are unary predicates.) That,
of course, is our next topic.
9. In the idiom of Between Saying and Doing:
We are in a position to be a little clearer about what Sellars is after with his dark notion
of what an utterance ‘conveys’. The view is that what I am doing when I say that it is causally
necessary that if this piece of copper is heated to 1084 C., it will melt, is endorsing a certain
kind of inference. I am not saying that that inference is good; the facts about copper would be as
they are even if there were no inferrers or inferrings. When Sellars says “the language of
modality is…a ‘transposed’ language of norms,” he is saying in my terms that normative
vocabulary codifying rules of inference is a pragmatic metavocabulary for modal vocabulary.
His ‘transposition’ is just this pragmatically mediated semantic relation between deontic
normative and alethic modal vocabulary. The corresponding meaning-use diagram is:
"The language of
modalities is a 'transposed'
language of norms."
VModal
Res 1:VV-1,2
VNorm
2: VP-suff
1: PV-suff
PModal
This claim is merely part of the background of what I have been calling the “Kant-Sellars
thesis” about modality, however. That thesis comprises two claims:
a) In using ordinary empirical vocabulary, one already knows how to do everything
one needs to know how to do in order to introduce and deploy modal vocabulary;
and
b) The expressive role characteristic of alethic modal vocabulary is to make explicit
semantic, conceptual connections and commitments that are already implicit in
the use of ordinary empirical vocabulary.
The first says that some practices that are PV-necessary for the use of any empirical
vocabulary are PP-sufficient for practices that are PV-sufficient to deploy modal
vocabulary. The second says that that modal vocabulary then makes explicit those
aspects of practices-or-abilities that are implicit in the use of any empirical vocabulary.
In fact, these are ways of saying that modal vocabulary stands to ordinary empirical
vocabulary in the complex, pragmatically mediated semantic relation I have already
identified (in my second lecture) as elaborating-explicating: the meaning-use relation
called ‘LX’ for short. The corresponding MUD is:
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The Kant-Sellars Thesis:
Modal Vocabulary is
Elaborated-Explicating (LX)
Res1:VV 1-5
VModal
1: PV-suff
5: VP-suff
4: PV-suff
VEmpirical
2: PV-nec
PAlgEl 3: PP-suff
P Modal
P Counterfactually
Robust Inference
P ADP
Combining these claims yields a MUD asserting relations among modal, normative, and
empirical vocabularies:
Modal, Normative, and
Empirical Vocabulary
VModal
Res2:VV 4,6
4: PV-suff
Res1:VV 1-5
5: VP-suff
VEmpirical
1: PV-suff
2: PV-nec
VNorm
P Modal
PAlgEl 3: PP-suff
PCounterfactually
Robust Inference
6: VP-suff
PADP
10. Premises from which to reason and principles in accordance with which to reason:
Subjunctive conditionals express “principles in accordance with which (PAWW) we reason,
rather than premises from which we reason (PFW). How should we understand this
distinction? What kind of a distinction is it?
a. Any particular PAWW can be treated as a PFW. It is a claim, and we can add it
to our premises. That, presumably, is the reason we need to be warned not to
make this mistake.
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b. Of course, we can’t do that to all our PAWWs. That is what Lewis Carroll’s
argument in “Achilles and the Tortoise” shows. [Expound.] First level account
of LC’s A&T: need rules of inference—in accord with which we reason—and
can’t treat those in general as just more premises from which we reason.
c. Nonetheless, we always can put any particular rule of inference into the form of a
conditional premise, as long as we are left with at least some rules in the form of
rules.
d. There is a line of thought that says that unless we do, our inferences will be
enthymemes. That is, they will have ‘suppressed’ or ‘missing’ premises. This
view depends on formalism about the goodness of inferences: the claim that the
only sort of good inferences are formally good inferences: inferences that are
instances of some formally valid pattern or form of reasoning. An inference is
“enthymematic” if it is not formally valid, but seems to be a good inference. The
‘missing’ premises are those that must be supplied—those it is taken that those
committed to the propriety of the inference must implicitly be endorsing—to turn
the result into a formally valid one. Of course, we can always do that (subject to
assumptions of finiteness, or at least compactness) in the context of a system with
the rule of modus ponens or detachment from conditionals, by supplying a
suitable conditional.
e. But there are problems with formalism about the goodness of inferences—a kind
of totalitarianism that says formal goodness is the only kind of goodness
inferences can have. For instance: Massey’s “Are There Any Good Arguments
that Bad Arguments Are Bad?”
f. And there is an alternative: allow primitive material proprieties of inference.
Sellars insists that the inference from “It just rained,” to “The streets will be wet,”
or from “Lightning now,” to “Thunder soon,” and from “Philadelphia is to the
East of Pittsburgh,” to “Pittsburgh is to the West of Philadelphia,” are not
enthymemes.
g. And there is this to be said for acknowledging the existence of such material
proprieties of inference: Given such material inferences, one can define formal
validity of inference. An inference is formally good, good in virtue of its logical
form, just in case:
i. It is a materially good inference; and
ii. It cannot be turned into a materially bad inference by substituting nonlogical for non-logical vocabulary.
But there is no converse road, permitting the definition of materially good inferences
from formally good ones.
h. Notice that nothing in this definition turned on the privileged vocabulary held
fixed upon substitution being logical vocabulary. The same trick can be used to
define inferences good in virtue of their theological, or astrological form.
Q: What about going in the other direction? Can we transform PFWs into PAWWs? A:
Yes. At least, we can get exactly the same effect as any PFW by looking instead at some
pattern according to which we reason.
i. For any actual premise p, in a field of material inference, we can always replace p
by a principle that, for any inference in which it appears as a premise, …p___q,
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j.
k.
l.
m.
n.
simply add …___q as a primitively good material inference. The collection of
all of them will then be an inference principle equivalent inferentially to the
presence of p. Then instead of premises we take true, we’ll have inferential
principles we endorse.
Q: But is the collection, possibly infinite, of inferences we get by doing that a
‘principle’ of inference? A: It is at least a pattern of inference.
Q: So what are the rules of this game? If we insist that each inference be an
instance of a formally valid scheme (cf. “Are There Any Good Arguments That
Bad Arguments Are Bad?”), then we can’t do this move, because the resulting
inference will be logical enthymemes. (Another related question: outside the
logical framework, once we allow material inferences, what does it even mean to
call something an ‘enthymeme’?) But if, as Sellars wants, we allow primitive
material proprieties of inference, then this move is not available.
Q: Can we make this premisepattern, PFWPAWW move for all the
sentences of the language? (We have seen that we can do it for each.) A: In
some abstract sense, Yes. But really No. (Let’s assume all the inferences have a
finite number of premises.) Think of the field of materially good inferences as
being sentences of the form p1&p2&…pnq, and Ramsify on everything but .
Then get an expression of pure inferential functional roles of all sentences in the
language. Are they all PAWWs, patterns, (pure patterns)? But there is pretty
clearly no content left here: all we get are functional roles w/res to inferential
relations.
Q: What if ‘p’ expresses a conclusion? A: The Ramsification trick is indifferent
to that. But the ‘PAWW’ characterization does not seem apt.
Q: Is it an issue that the pattern I get by the PFWPAWW move to patterns
cannot, at least not smoothly, be codified, formulated, or expressed as a principle?
A: Since we can formulate modal claims, if they are PrinAWWs, then they are
different from what we get if we arbitrarily apply the mechanical procedure for
transforming PFWs into PattAWWs. It is only for the latter kind that the issue:
PFW or PrinAWW? arises. So, to restate the problem: in the sub-case, how do we
tell (not an epistemic issue: what does the difference consist in?) whether we have
a PFW or a PrinAWW?
o.
So we can’t turn all principles according to which we reason into premises from which
we reason, or vice versa. But as long as we don’t try to do it with everything, we can
trade off between the two categories, according to general, systematic technicques. So
what is the force of the claim that some particular sort of expression belongs in one or the
other category?
p. Example: My treatment of normative vocabulary as codifying patterns of
practical reasoning. [Explain.]
q. My account of the role in practical reasoning distinctive of normative vocabulary
(including ‘desire’ and ‘preference’). One can treat ‘ought’ of various sorts as
PrinAWWs (not just PattAWWs) rather than PFWs.
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r. Could replace: “I desire to stay dry” by “if X will (help) keep me dry, then do X”:
“Bank employees are obliged to wear neckties” by “if X is a bank employee and
goes to work, X should wear a necktie.”
s. Q: Can I replace ‘X is an acid’ by ‘X is, if sour, then red’? No, because
everything is that. (cf. McD) ‘X tastes sour, so it is red.’ x[sour(x)red(x)] is
a presupposition of the applicability of that concept: So acid(t)  sour(t) &
x[sour(x)red(x)]
11. Conceptual Change:
To take the causal modalities at their face value, that is to say, to interpret statements
concerning what is physically necessary or possible or impossible as belonging to the object
language of scientific (and everyday) discourse, which statements, however intimately they
may be related to such metalinguistic statements as they may, in some sense, imply, are
nevertheless not themselves 'really' metalinguistic, is certainly to court serious philosophical
perplexity. Even a dyed in the wool empiricist might be willing to go along with the idea that
specific statements of the form 'A P-entails B' are non-descriptive statements which
contextually imply that the speaker feels entitled to infer that something is B, given that it is
A; it is when he is confronted with statements of the form
There is a property which P-entails B
or, above all, by such statements as
There exist causal connections which have not yet been discovered
and
For every kind of event E there is a kind of event E' such that the occurrence of E' P-entails
the contiguous occurrence of E
that his anxiety is likely to reach serious proportions.
It is as though someone who had taken the early emotivist line in ethics had been carefully
talked into the idea that 'ought' is a perfectly good concept, though not a descriptive one, and
that 'Everybody ought to keep promises' contextually implies a wish, on the speaker's part,
that promise keeping were a universal practice, and was then confronted with such statements
as
There are obligations which have not yet been recognized
and
Some of the things we think of as obligations are not obligations.
103.
It is therefore important to realize that the presence in the' object language of the
causal modalities (and of the logical modalities and of the deontic modalities) serves not only
to express existing commitments, but also to provide the framework for the thinking by
which we reason our way (in a manner appropriate to the specific subject matter) into the
making of new commitments and the abandoning of old. And since this framework
essentially involves quantification over predicate variables, puzzles over the 'existence of
abstract entities' are almost as responsible for the prevalence in the empiricist tradition of
'nothing-but-ism' in its various forms (emotivism, philosophical behaviorism,
phenomenalism) as its tendency to assimilate all discourse to describing.
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The solution of this puzzle lies in the fact that the logic of variables and quantification
involves not only the momentary crystallized content of the language at a cross section of its
history, but also its character as admitting—indeed demanding—modification, revision, in
short, development, in accordance with rational procedures. In the case of variables the
values of which are descriptive constants, these rational procedures can be summed up in the
single word 'Induction.' But the point is of more general import, as can be seen by reflecting
on the logic of number variables in the context of the history of mathematics since, say, 1600.
[§105]
Is the idea that every change has a cause a super-hypothesis? An induction from inductions?
Or is it, perhaps, an a priori truth? It is certainly not the latter if we mean by an a priori truth
the sort of thing that could be established by induction but is fortunately exempt from having
to run the inductive gauntlet because of our progress at rational intuition. For the 'Causal
Principle' isn't the sort of thing that could be established by induction. It isn't a hypothesis
about the world—not because it is about nothing, but because it no more has the business of
describing than do specific causal propositions. Not that it is like specific causal propositions,
only more abstract; its force, as we shall see, is of quite another kind. [§107]
The first thing to see, is that it is a logical truth that there can be no descriptive statement
which stands to 'Every event has a cause' as "This A is B,' 'That A is B,' etc. stand to 'All A is
B.' That is to say, there can be none if our analysis of lawlike statements is correct. And if so,
then the idea of an inductive argument of which the conclusion is '. . . So, (in all probability)
every event has a cause' is logical nonsense. And once one abandons the idea that the causal
principle is a super-description of the world, one is no longer confronted by the need to
choose between the alternatives, (a) that it is an induction from inductions (thus implicitly
committing ourselves to the regularity analysis of lawlike statements), and (b) that it is a
rational intuition. And we find ourselves in a position to acknowledge the truth in the claim
that we know a priori—i.e. other than by induction—that every change has a cause. For not
all knowing is knowing how to describe something. We know what we ought to do as well as
what the circumstances are. [§107]
For the causal principle gives expression to features of our language (indeed, of our mind)
which are independent of success or failure, of optimism or pessimism, of the economics of
intellectual effort. Among other things, it gives expression to the fact that although
describing and explaining (predicting, retrodicting, understanding) are distinguishable, they
are also, in an important sense, inseparable. It is only because the expressions in terms of
which we describe objects, even such basic expressions as words for the perceptible
characteristics of molar objects locate these objects in a space of implications, that they
describe at all, rather than merely label. The descriptive and the explanatory resources of
language advance hand in hand; and to abandon the search for explanation is to abandon the
attempt to improve language, period. [§108]
Once the development of human language left the stage when linguistic changes had causes,
but not reasons, and man acquired the ability to reason about his reasons, then, and this is a
logical point about having the ability to reason about reasons, his language came to permit
the formulation of certain propositions which, incapable of proof or disproof by empirical
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methods, draw, in the heart of language militant, a picture of language triumphant. Kant's
conception that reason is characterized by certain regulative ideals contains a profound truth
which empiricism has tended to distort into the empirical psychology of the scientific
enterprise. [§108]
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