Experience fundamentally needs a material-base, whether impotent or potent is unnecessary to the
necessity as rocks can be felt and seen but at both moments for the subject the rock is impotent.
Furthermore, the subject gives dynamism out of imposition, whether being embossed into the retina and
through a neurocomputation conceiving of its existence ‘as’; or providing a forceful impact via wind etc.
onto the limb of the subject via neurophysiological registering experientially ‘felt by’ providing the rock’s
‘as-ness’.
“A hyperbolic reading of Graham Harman becomes a retrospective recapitulation of Kant’s noumena and
phenomena and the ascription of transcendental mystery coined as “unknowable”.”
Ray Brassier “The Myth of the Given” Video Notes:
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The relation between language and reality in terms called “methodological materialism”
Problem of genuine post-Kantian ontology, critical ontology:
o Ontology is the attempt to answer “what is there” but cannot be done by “naming
entities” (table, tree, etc. are mere particular and common nouns)
o One of the implications of epistemic finitude is that we do not have divine names of
things; human names of things are not necessarily the essence of the thing-linked to the
things.
Names signify ‘material processes and patterns’ not ‘things in essence’
Critical Ontology seeks to identify :
o What a name is and how it relates to what it names
 Answer: a name is a sign design, i.e. a natural linguistic object, with empirical
characterisitics – phonetic or graphic – whose tokenings are correlated with
patterns of objects in accordance with “ought to be rules”: rules which must be
obeyed by anyone being inducted into linguistic or conceptual order. Ought to
do’s are correlated with ought to be’s. Freedom is when one comes into their
own rationally autonomous agency. You don’t need to be told what to do
because you know what to do.
o Why there is a difference between Names/Things = Words/Objects
 Answer: Because names are equivocal entities operating in two distinct but
intimately connected dimensions, i.e. the difference between names and things,
falls from the fact that names are equivocal. They have a semantic dimension
and a causal dimension. Names signify by virtue of their rule-governed
linguistic role but names are also asignifying objects that picture other objects in
the world through their sensible characteristics.
o What ‘kinds’ of things there are and what ‘kinds’ are – as ‘categories’: what is a
category?
 Answer: First, ‘kinds’ are metalinguistic sortals and these, in turn, correspond to
distinct patterns of rule-governed tokenings. As to what kinds really or
ultimately exist, ultimate real kinds will be identified by the absolute picture of
the world; which is the regular ideal of empirical inquiry.
 “Are they mind-independent or are they mind-dependent?”
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Categories are for Sellars’ metalinguistic functions: a mode of representing reality.
Representation itself is not a conceptual relation, or a relation between concepts and things;
stress on non-conceptual representation. (Relations of thoughts and things and thus pictorially
reciprocated.)
Categories, for Sellars do not represent or designate any ‘apparent feature’ of the world, they
are not phenomenologically intuitable. They cannot be read off the structure of language or
reality, to assume otherwise would be to fall prey to the myth of the given.
The myth of the given has two forms:
o 1. Epistemic
 Crystallized in the following inconsistent triad of premises (empiricism
unwittingly committed too but it is internally contradictory)
 1. X senses red sense-content S entails that X knows non-inferentially
that S is red.
 2. The ability to sense sense-content is unacquired.
 3. Ability to know facts of the form X is acquired
 However, knowledge is initially unacquired but becomes acquired; this renders
knowledge as knowledge of facts: state of affairs.
 If one is to assert that knowledge is unacquired because it is innate then one is
asserting propositional content exists in the world exterior to the mind. This
then situates an isomorphy between the structure of the mind and the structure
of the world – i.e. pre-established harmony (a la Leibniz)
 Non-inferential perception is mediated by initial complex conceptual
machinery. There is a distinction between ‘sensing’ and ‘perceiving’
 A. sensing is not-knowing
 B. perceiving is knowing
 Sensation is of the real but cannot be about the real
 Thinking is about the real but cannot enter into direct contact with it
 “Of-ness of thought” and the “of-ness of sensation” are fundamentally
different and cannot be fused together. This is the core of the myth of
the given. The failure to distinguish these two leads straight to the
categorial aspect.
o 2. Categorial
 The categorial structure of reality impresses itself upon the mind the way the
seal impresses itself upon wax.
 This cannot be the case because thinking depends upon language and the
structure of language does not simply reflect the structure of reality.
 How ought we to think about ‘thinking’?
 Skepticism buys into the epistemic myth of the given because it has to
presupposes the attainment/knowledge of appearances and their determinate
nature, even as it presumes to casts doubt on their projection of reality.
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Skeptics cannot explain why there are appears or answer what is it that appears
and can we know? due to a problematic regress.
 Sensing-as already presupposes knowledge of a structure of domain of
interrelated objects existing in a spatiotemporal framework: otherwise known
as Sellars manifest image.
 A. A collective cognitive achievement of the human species
 B. Not an innate conceptual structure
 C. Laboriously wrested from phenomena of millennia contribution
 D. Indispensability of a certain feature of the manifest image in order to
prosecute the project of categorial invention, or rather to prosecute
metaphysical speculation.
 The mind is not a private inner sanctum that it is externalized in the world and
this externalization is a consequence of its connection to linguistic activity which
is social and collective activity.
 Thinking and language use is essentially activities, forms of doing.
 Inner thought episodes are modelled on publically observable sayings-out-loud.
 “Ability to apperceive our own mental states is acquired and not innate.
Introspection is a correlate of extrospection. The ability to introspect
and perceive that one is thinking X and that one is feeling Y presupposes
conceptual capacities rooted in linguistic practices.”
 Speaking is prior to thinking in the order of knowing.
 Thinking is prior to speaking in the order of being.
 Ability to apperceive we are thinking is conceptually and linguistically mediated,
though ability to have mental events is perfectly real. Access to ‘inner reality’ is
just as mediated as access to so-called ‘outer reality’.
o Empiricism and Cartesianism are not the only tributaries of the myth. An important
strand of Phenomenology is also as well: transcendental intentionality.
 Intentionality of thought derives from the intentionality of discourse. Thought is
not the locus of originary intentionality that is subsequently transmitted to
language; it is primarily a property of candid public speech established via the
development of metalinguistic resources.
 A. “It is a reflexive conceptual achievement.”
 Sellars rejects transcendental intentionality. Intentionality is primarily a
‘linguistic phenomena’.
‘Meaning’ of the name is not the designation of a thing’s essence.
Theory of Meaning: Sellars defends a metalinguistic nominalism
o Semantic statements are ‘mean’ statements.
 Operators: means, designator, stands for.
 Distributive singular term correlates to an instrumental sortal.
 Red ‘means’ rot (French Red)
o In other words it is a special form of the copula:
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 Red ‘is’ rot
Dot quotations are dealing with instrumental, illustrative sortals only.
Terms are: distributive singular.
Metalinguistics consists of illustrative sortals
o Thus: distributive singular terms are connected to an illustrative sortal via a ‘means’
copula.
Nominalism in its empiricist form is anti-realism: you deny something exists; there is no more to
something than the words we use to talk about them.
Sellars is a Transcendental Realist
o What is the connection, then, between Sellars ‘metalinguistic sortals’ and the ‘extralinguistic reality’?
o The crux of the explanation is his theory of picturing.
 Metalinguistic properties of sign-design tokens picture the non-linguistic
properties of objects, but picturing is not a semantic relation. Picturing does not
play the correlational role of conceptual order—i.e. order of signification—but it
is non-conceptual correspondence which exists within the natural physical order
and is therefore non-signifying. It has nothing to do with semantics or meaning,
it is a non-signifying representation. Representation is not a relation between
concepts and objects but between objects and other objects. Natural linguistic
objects with natural non-linguistic objects.
o Syntactical concatenation plays the role of representing the physical property of objects
within the natural world.
 Properties are not named by the sign-design token instead it is pictured by its
syntactical rule: the concatenated sign-design token.
o “Metalinguistic properties picture real properties via the syntactical configuration of
sign-design tokens.”
 This is how metalinguistic operators are correlated with non-linguistic reality.
You can show the pattern of inscriptions and marks are correlated with a system
of objects in extra-linguistic reality. We are graphing objects NOT signifying
expressions.
 The world does not consist of any facts, a la Wittegenstein, it is consisted of
objects – ergo: Sellars materialism.
Can we have a language ‘devoid’ of predicates?
o Fundamentally, predicates do not play an independent role within linguistic expressions,
but rather there is a primacy in sentential structure, and cannot allocate an independent
function to predicative expressions, they only function within sentential blocks.
Predicates are dispensable; the very function is dispensable as well.
o Predicative role should not be reified and turned into an abstract entity called a
‘property’ which is hypostasized and turned into an ontological attribute existing
independently of sentential context. Ontological properties are not independent of
thought.
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Sellars says: “The extra-linguistic domain consists of objects not facts. To put it
bluntly: propositional form belongs only in the linguistic and conceptual orders.”
Picturing is a second-order isomorphism between objects and objects in the natural order. It is a
structure of structure. Think of CD encoding from one physical object to another physical object.
The core of Sellars nominalism is: conceptual representation ‘bottoms-out’ in picturing.
Language is embedded in non-linguistic, asignifying reality. A reality devoid of conceptual
structure.
o This is the embracing of naturalism and materialism (not equivalent) linked together by
a nominalism.
 Naturalism: linguistic practice in which thinking is a variety of natural process
and natural science investigates these processes. Thinking is a distinct and
unique, ergo one type of process.
 Not all natural processes can be understood using the same conceptual
resources; because the variety of natural processes cannot be read off
our available conceptual resources: this is the ‘myth of the categorial
given’ to claim that there are these different kinds of things. We have to
understand how our conceptual process is embedded and conditioned
by natural, material processes as well.
 Materialism: because of his insistence of the varieties of natural process extend
well beyond those comprehend within the organic realm. To be a materialist is
to refuse to organicize nature. To use the organism as an explanatory paradigm
for the whole of nature. Linguistic function is ultimately rooted in inorganic as
well as organic patterns.
Animal representational machinery is ubiquitous. There are two levels that humans have:
representation and conceptualization.
o Representation is not conceptualization, conceptualization is not representation.
 Representation works through propositional form and has two aspects:
referring and characterizing.
 Thus, propositional form is non-conceptual and pre-linguistic and more
fundamental than logical and conceptual form.
o Logical form is inaugurated once representational systems are capable of representing
relations of association, compatibility, and incompatibility between representations.
o Full-blown conceptual form is only achieved at the meta-representational level when
propositional structures endowed with the rich predicative resources of a natural
language are relayed.
 Conceptual forms supervene on but are irreducible to the coding procedures of
representational systems.
“Ultimately, categories are to be explained in terms of their metalinguistic role, metalinguistic role is to
be explained in terms of correct representing, and correct representing is to be explained in terms of
picturing.”
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