Sellars – Language as Thought and as Communication
0. Preamble: Recall that on a Gricean picture, thoughts are prior to, and in principle independent of, the speech acts which are often said to express those thoughts. In that sense, Grice can be said to be archly Cartesian. The realm of thought is a private, “inner” realm, which we may choose to express to others when we act so as to communicate with them. Sellars first finds reason for why we might want to challenge this highly intuitive picture, and then assembles the means for doing so.
1. Suppose we thought of linguistic rules primarily as rules of action (or, in Sellars’ parlance, “ought to do’s”):
(The P-Rule) Say “P” when and only when the P-conditions are met.
[Example: Say “Lo, a Rabbit” when and only when there’s a rabbit about, and an audience around who should be informed of the presence of the rabbit. – As an aside, the latter bit of this specification of appropriate utterance would seem to involve what have come to be known as Gricean conversational maxims.]
To hold oneself subject to such a rule, one must have be able to recognize when those various and myriad p-conditions are met, and also recognize what counts as a saying of “p.”
2. But conceptual activity (the capacity for recognizing things) itself seems similarly rulish. Indeed, the single best model for understanding thought seems to construe it something like an “inner dialogue of the soul.” [This is the famed language of thought hypothesis.] Like language, there are rules governing thought, such as:
(The Rule of entailment) If P entails Q, then one ought to think that Q whenever one thinks that P.
So should such rules of conceptual activity (or laws of reasoning) similarly be thought of as rules of action? The obvious problem with such a proposal is that if adherence to rules of action presuppose conceptual activity, then conceptual activity itself cannot be understood as implemented by rules of action.
For Sellers, then, the question is “How can we understand ourselves as bound by rules of thought in a way that doesn’t already presuppose that we are bound by rules of thought?”
How, then, are we to understand the rulishness of conceptual activity?
3. One thing one could do is simply to insist that the rules of reasoning are to be construed on the model of Laws of Nature, or that they are simply innate (Fodor sometimes appears to go this direction). But
Sellars is keen to reject any such “myth of the given.” We cannot simply take our being bound by rules of thought “for free.” Principles of reasoning are not simply innate in us, but rather something that conceptual beings like us must learn to apply correctly.
4. So what’s the way out? Here Sellars notes that not all rules need to be construed as “ought-to-do’s.”
Consider an alternate formulation of the P-rule:
(P-Alternate) Persons should utter “P” whenever the P-conditions are met.

This is not an “ought-to-do,” but rather an “ought-to-be.” The difference consists in who we should regard as responsible for enforcing the rule. Think of animal training. What we are doing is shaping a creature’s responsive dispositions so that they respond in a certain way when conditions are such-nsuch. It is the trainers, not the trained, who have a prior conception of the relevant conditions and responses.
5. But how can conformity to rules of thought be a product of external training? After all, aren’t thoughts “inner episodes,” which are only indirectly expressed by overt behavior (paradigmatically linguistic behavior). Sellars’ radical proposal is that linguistic behavior is not merely a manifestation or expression of unobservable inner episodes. Instead, linguistic behavior itself is itself the primary form of thought – thinking out loud, and that conceptual norms or rules of thought really are linguistic rules.
(This is why Sellars links the view he is promoting to behaviorism.)
6. So the picture that emerges (p. 512) is that concept-mongering or reasoning creatures like us are initially trained by others to spontaneously utter (and so think!) things like “P” whenever the relevant Pconditions are met. Thinking out loud is thus not best conceived of as a form of action at all. Later on, we come to gain a measure of self-control over these spontaneous responsive dispositions, and so the capacity to refrain from saying what we would otherwise spontaneously utter. In this sense, we come to
“say” things – both to others, and also merely to ourselves.
The other important transition is when we come not to be just subjects of “ought-to-be’s,” but also subjects of “ought-to-do’s,” and thus capable of enforcing linguistic norms.
7. As an empirical point, this might account for why it is much harder to lie than to speak the truth.
Truth-telling is much more spontaneous.