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Sellars Week 2 Notes
1. Introductory comment for IM: WS loved the mystery story form of organizing our peculiar
genre of creative nonfiction writing. It contrasts with the journalistic form of organization.
In the former, you don’t know what the main thesis that will be defended is until the very
end. In the latter, you tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them
what you’ve told them.
2. Roughly, IM introduces crucial elements of an inferentialist semantics, and SRLG
introduces crucial elements of a normative pragmatics.
3. Themes for IM:
a) Material Inference
b) Inference vs. mere association. The difference is in part the normative character of
inference, about which more in SRLG (plus account there of language-language
transitions).
c) Material: Logic, substitution, and form (logical, theological, and geological forms).
Bolzano-Frege method for moving from material goodness of inference to logical
goodness of inference (need a way to identify logical vocabulary: cf. two classical issues
of philosophy of logic). Materially good inferences essentially depend on the occurrence
of nonlogical vocabulary. Premises from which to reason vs. Principles in accordance
with which to reason. Lewis Carroll, Achilles and the Tortoise point on the side of logic.
Its analog for material case.
d) Subjunctive conditionals, and what they express. WS’s claim seems to be: need to
acknowledge material proprieties of inference in order to underwrite reasoning from
counterfactual or subjunctive premises. Q: But why are these different from inferences
underwritten simply by contingent regularities? The former can be understood as
enthymematic, by supplying so-called (confusingly, in this context) “material”
conditionals (that is, two-valued, classical, truth-functional conditionals). Then modus
ponens is the only rule of inference. That is formally elegant, but implausible for brutes
and children—cf. the attribution of mastery of disjunctive syllogism to dog who sniffs
one fork of a road, not finding what he seeks, and immediately, without checking, dashes
down the other fork. But the latter can also be understood enthymematically, by
supplying a suitable counterfactual conditional. What is the difference that makes a
difference between these cases?
e) Q: What kind of inferentialism is Sellars endorsing? Candidates include at least weak,
strong, and hyper-inferentialism. (The last is ruled out by SRLG’s discussion of
language entry and exit transitions.)
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4. Themes for SRLG:
a) Needed: a middle way (via media) between regularism and regulism. Regularism misses
out on the norms. Sellars does not explicitly formulate the gerrymandering objection,
which is in essence the same as disjunctivitis. But his insistence on the “rulishness” of
rules makes it clear that he takes it to be a key criterion of adequacy that we make sense
of the possibility of incorrect moves, according to a rule. Mere regularities won’t support
that. Furthermore, though again this criterion of adequacy is not explicit, the account
must be compatible with arbitrary degrees of incorrectness of actual performance.
Millikan’s different version does this (the sperm story, the magnetosome story). So does
WS’s: the rule that the teachers had in mind (explicitly represented to themselves when
teaching) is what determines correctness. Regulism generates a regress (which Kant had
already noticed).
b) WS’s idea: need a notion, not just of pattern-governed behavior, which Millikan develops
much more thoroughly. Need also a notion where a representation of the rule plays a
causal role in producing the regularity. So WS really has four kinds of behavior in his
botanization:
i.
Merely regular (patterned)
ii.
Pattern-governed
iii.
Pattern-governed with a representation of the rule playing a causal role,
mediating between antecedent pattern and subsequent pattern
iv.
Rule governed
c) Sellars’s middle way, his solution to the challenge he has set, is diachronic, and social.
(Think Hegel.)
d) Language-language transitions, language entry transitions, and language exit transitions.
Why this does not commit WS (as McD complains that it does) to seeing an outer
boundary to the conceptual: transitions are just from something that is not the taking up
of a position in the game to something that is. No further commitments regarding the
nature of what is not itself the taking up of a position in the game are needed for this
botanization.
5. Beginning of SRLG:
It seems plausible to say that a language is a system of expressions, the use of which is subject
to certain rules. It would seem, thus, that learning to use a language is learning to obey the rules
for the use of its expressions. However, taken as it stands, this thesis is subject to an obvious
and devastating objection.
The objection is that taking 'correct' to mean 'correct according to a rule' generates a familiar sort
of regress:
The refutation runs as follows: Thesis. Learning to use a language (L) is learning to obey the
rules of L. But, a rule which enjoins the doing of an action (A) is a sentence in a language which
contains an expression for A. Hence, a rule which enjoins the using of a linguistic expression (E)
is a sentence in a language which contains an expression for E--in other words, a sentence in a
metalanguage. Consequently, learning to obey the rules for L presupposes the ability to use the
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metalanguage (ML) in which the rules for L are formulated. So that, learning to use a language
(L) presupposes having learned to use a metalanguage (ML). And by the same token, having
learned to use ML presupposes having learned to use a metametalanguage (MML) and so on
But, this is impossible (a vicious regress). Therefore, the thesis is absurd and must be rejected.
The metalanguage expresses rules for the proper application of concepts of the object language.
But these rules, too, must be applied. So the metametalanguage expresses rules for applying
the rules of the metalanguage, and so on.
If any talk is to be possible, there must be some meta...metalevel at which one has an
understanding of rules that does not consist in offering another interpretation of them (according
to rules formulated in a metalanguage), but which consists in being able to distinguish correct
applications of the rule in practice. The question is how to understand such practical normative
know-how. Although he, like Wittgenstein, uses 'rule' more broadly than is here recommended,
Sellars is clearly after such a notion of norms implicit in practice:
We saw that a rule, properly speaking, isn't a rule unless it lives in behavior, rule-regulated
behavior, even rule-violating behavior. Linguistically we always operate within a framework of
living rules. (The snake which sheds one skin lives within another.) In attempting to grasp rules
as rules from without, we are trying to have our cake and eat it. To describe rules is to describe
the skeletons of rules. A rule is lived, not described.
6. Kant's acknowledgement of the possibility of a regress of rules appears in his discussion of the
faculty of judgment [Urteilskraft]:
If understanding in general is to viewed as the faculty of rules, judgment will be the faculty of
subsuming under rules; that is, of distinguishing whether something does or does not stand
under a given rule (casus datae legis). General logic contains and can contain no rules for
judgment...If it sought to give general instructions how we are to subsume under these rules, that
is, to distinguish whether something does or does not come under them, that could only be by
means of another rule. This in turn, for the very reason that it is a rule, again demands guidance
from judgment. And thus it appears that, though understanding is capable of being instructed,
and of being equipped with rules, judgment is a peculiar talent which can be practised only, and
cannot be taught. [Critique of Pure Reason, A132, B171.]
The regress of rules argument is here explicitly acknowledged, and the conclusion drawn that
there must be some more practical capacity to distinguish correct from incorrect, at least in the
case of applying rules. Very little is made of this point in the first two Critiques, however. Kant's
own development of this appreciation of the fundamental character of this faculty of
acknowledging norms implicit in the practice of applying explicit rules, in the third Critique, has
an immense significance for Hegel's pragmatism, but only his formulation of the issue seems to
have influenced Wittgenstein's.
7. In discussing SRLG:
a) Discuss what Millikan made of §§12-16.
b) Introduce regulism and regularism, with their dual problems: the regress of regulism, and
the loss of norms of regularism, showing up with the gerrymandering problem
(“disjunctivitis”).
c) Language-entry transitions, language-exit transitions, and language-language transitions
(moves).
d) In §§25-26, “auxiliary positions” are free positions, which can properly be occupied at
any time, without having either moved there by inference, or gotten there by an
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observational language-entry transition. “We note a certain equivalence between
auxiliary positions and moves.” Since auxiliary positions can license moves. Q: It is a
very strong claim, not argued for here but apparently endorsed, that all auxiliary positions
are equivalent to moves. Sellars’s example is “All A is B,” which fits his paradigm. But
isn’t Quine’s “There have been black dogs,” also an auxiliary position? And if so, and
the claim is that it licenses moves, then surely so does “There is a black dog,” and,
indeed, any claim. This is a semantic inferentialist position. Q2: Is that position ever
endorsed in IM?
e) “We also notice that while it is conceivable that a language game might dispense with
auxiliary positions altogether [BB: of the “All As are Bs” sort, perhaps. But also of the
“There have been black dogs” sort? Not according to a default-and-challenge
understanding of positive justificatory status or entitlement.], although at the cost of
multiplying moves, it is not conceivable that moves be completely dispenses with in
favor of auxiliary positions. A game without moves is Hamlet without the Prince of
Denmark indeed!” Here is the Lewis Carroll “Achilles and the Tortoise” point extended
from logic to material inferences licensed by positions.
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