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2/8/2016
Sellars Week 5 (“Naming and Saying”) Notes
1. LW in Tractatus: Two alternatives, either complex objects represent (don’t say ‘name’)
facts, or facts about names do. Facts vs. complex objects. Jumblese.
2. “Of particular interest in this connection would be the Jumblese translation of Appearance
and Reality.” [105] Q: Why? A: Because of his regress-of-relations argument (compare:
Lewis Carroll): If we say that R relates a and b, then we can ask how a and b are related to R.
Let us suppose the answer is R’, a matter of their standing to the relation as its relata. But
what is the relation between relations and their relata? In particular, how are a and b related
to relation R’, the relation of being relata of a relation? Call this relation R’’. This is a
vicious regress, Bradley argues, because we can’t understand any of the earlier relational
statements without already understanding the later ones. He takes it to show that the idea of
external relations is incoherent. WS is claiming that this argument cannot be formulated in
the perspicuous language of Jumblese. Indeed, at [122] WS says what he means by
“perspicuous language” for the purposes of this essay: “in a perspicuous language, i.e. a
language which had a built-in protection against Bradley’s puzzle…”.
3. Discuss world-of-facts (LW, me) vs. world-of-objects (WS). One cost of former is that facts
are about objects. So one needs an objective, mind-independent notion of aboutness. I think
one can get that by substitution. One cost of the former is that one must treat facts as
arrangements or configurations of objects, and that only seems to work for (at most) atomic
facts. All others will need to be given some other analysis. And monadic facts seem
particularly troubling. The issues about universals—nominalism, realism, conceptualism—
are related to this question in complex ways.
4. Sellars’s idealism: Sellars seems to think that all universals, all properties, all repeatables
(cf. psychological nominalism) are ultimately to be understood in terms of linguistic
functional repeatables. This is also a pragmatism.
5. WS starts off the essay by agreeing with and enforcing LW’s point that facts picture facts.
But in the end, Sellars does not believe in facts, at least, not in the pictured ones, only in the
picturing ones—the linguistic ones. That is the ‘idealism’ I accuse him of (take him to
endorse) in (4) above.
6. What I’m shaping up to at this point is the accusation that Sellars is implicitly depending on
far too simple a picture of the relation between pragmatics and semantics—or a failure to
appreciate that his arguments address the former, but he immediately draws conclusions
about the latter, conclusions that follow only given some very contentious collateral
premises. For he has a nice account of what we are doing when we use various
expressions—an account he describes, in a way that systematically blurs the distinction
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between pragmatics and semantics, as “metalinguistic”. But he concludes immediately
(or at least without further argument or discussion) that because we are doing that, we are not
(also) describing how things are. We can agree that we are not describing things in the
narrow sense, just because there is also a “metalinguistic” pragmatic component that is
absent in the paradigmatic ground-level case of basic matter-of-factual empirical
descriptions. But he seems to think that that means that there is not also a wider notion of
description (indeed, empirical description) that these cases (modal, ontological) fall under—
at least, not any that is not as broad as saying, understood in declarativist terms. I think
there is middle ground between (narrow) descriptivism and declarativism.
7. Green/triangular:
a) Sellars’s point that color examples are bad, because there is only one word, ‘green’, to do
the two jobs needed in i) a is green, and ii) green is a color (property), which invites the
thought that since in (ii) ‘green’ is apparently and arguably functioning as a name, it must be
doing so in (i) as well, while there are distinct words in iii) a is triangular and iv)
triangularity is a shape (property), which does not invite that confusion. Thinking that the
adjective in (i) and (iii) is a name in turn invites the exemplification reading of Bergmann.
b) re Bergmann: discuss the sense in which his view is heterodox, in that he avoids the
Bradley regress, but by stopping one move up, insisting that exemplification, and only
exemplification, is perspicuously thought of as shown but not said—the same view Sellars
(agreeing, he claims, with LW) says holds of all predicates, one level down. (This is the
Saul/Paul, but a heterodox Saul passage.)
8. Facts: WS agrees with LW that it is the fact that names are so configured that pictures
(represents, expresses) the fact that objects are configured thus. But both facts must be
treated metalinguistically. The former, representing, fact, must be metametalinguistic, since
it is already, on the face of it, metalinguistic, in a strict, mentioning expressions not using
them way, not the different—at best falling under a broader notion of of metalinguistic—
pragmatic one that applies to the latter, represented fact.
9. Discuss the semantic point at the end:
a) Analogy between “the fact that p” and “that p is true.”
b) Don’t see a distinct semantic fact in the world about truth. Rather, that fact is
metalinguistic on its face.
c) In fact, WS reads T-sentence equivalences as displaying facts about the activity of
inferring, as expressing a commitment to do something. This is an interesting view on its
own.
d) It is also connected to the stuff about conceptual change (which I did not get around to
discussing) from the end of CDCM.
10. Explicitly discuss both a) the threat of a meta-meta-meta…linguistic regress, given WS’s i)
metalinguistic treatment of modality, universals, ‘truth’-talk… and ii) his classification under
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functional-normative universals (does it matter that grammatically they are DST’s?
Presumably not: “the lion” is going to have to be treated metalinguistically itself) account of
what we are doing metalinguistically when we talk about properties and facts, apparently in
the object language. And b) The question of whether progress is made and the regress is
defused by going normative-pragmatic. c) Idea: Perhaps this is the point where going
pragmatic, talking about commitments to do something (as in (9c) and (9d) above) offers
an opportunity to break out of the otherwise-threatened regress.
11. This is in fact a rich and complicated essay, deceptively simple, even if we ignore the
digression on the hermeneutic-textual question of whether the Tractatus countenances
monadic atomic facts.
12. Sketch the realism/nominalism/conceptualism about universals medieval debate, with names:
Ockham is nominalist, Scotus is conceptualist…. Perhaps mention Peirce in this connection.
13. Some options:
a) WS is committed to a vicious regress, as resulting from the two commitments retailed in
(10a) above.
b) i) WS breaks out of the regress by taking it that though there are no objective universals,
there are subjective ones. (This is a kind of idealism, and one kind of pragmatism: a
vulgar pragmatism.) He is a nominalist who thinks that out of all the infinite number of
respects of similarity, some are privileged by our activities: a kind of pragmatism.
ii)Tell the story about how anything is objectively similar to anything else in an infinite
number of respects—shares properties with it, however that claim is understood, i.e.
nominalistically-metalinguistically or in a more realistic fashion—and dissimilar from it
also in an infinite number of respects. Privilege-pragmatism, a kind of nominalism in the
medieval sense, then says that what privileges some of those respects of similarity is their
importance to us. There is a threat of regress-paradox here, of the finite minds carving up
an infinite undifferentiated Absolute kind. This is certainly not all that is going on with
WS—at a minimum, he has a distinctive “metalinguistic” version. But it might be one
strand of thought he is moved by, one element of his solution of the problems.
iii) The story in (ii) would traditionally be told, I think, assuming that what we do is fix
meanings, by privileging some respects of similarity. Then the world (somehow) settles
what is true given them. It is, perhaps, more of a challenge to maintain a view of this
stripe (kidney) in a post-Quinean shape. But that might well be what WS is doing.
c) WS breaks out of the regress by removing the issues from the ground-level empirical
descriptive realm into the normative realm. He is, crucially, a normative nominalist.
(This could be thought of as a distinctive variant of the view in (b).
d) WS breaks out of the threatened regress by appeal to practice, to what we do, to our
commitments. A variant of this move would look to the importance he places on
changing our modally expressed commitments, hence our concepts. (“Hitherto
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philosophers have sought to understand our concepts, but the point is to change them.”—
though it is the scientists who actually change the most important ones, and philosophers
try to understand what they are doing when they do that.) This is a higher form of
pragmatism than the vulgar pragmatism of (b-i) above.
14. Is there a tension between WS’s scientific realism and his normative nominalism? (One
reason to say No is if his normative nominalism allows him to say everything
nonphilosophical, e.g. scientific, about “the electron” (DST) or being an electron, that
scientists would want to say, just understanding it differently, i.e. in his portmanteau sense
“metalinguistically”.) What about when we throw his various claims about the two images
from PSIM? There is a potential for a three-way difficulty here.
15.
16.
17. t
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