Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind Paperback – March 25, 1997

The review is just on Sellars' essay. Rorty as usual hasn't said much about things. So if you know Sellars via Rorty, drop this one and read Derrida instead. Brandom is still quite interesting, but there are many others who want to talk about him.From the first time I read the essay, I was wondering why Sellars's text is so ambiguous and incomprehensible. He studied mathematics before he came to study philosophy. But unlike Quine, you saw not even a vestige of mathematical elegance in his clumsy writing. His way of reasoning is just way too un-analytical. Soon I came to the conclusion that he knew very little of contemporary logic. Philosophy is a very funny discipline. Sometimes, the difficulty in understanding a philosophical argument points to the difficulty at the heart of the real philosophical problems and sometimes, it results from a confused way of thinking about matters. It takes time for readers to be able to determine from which the difficulty originates. Initially, I thought the difficulty in reading Sellars is a genuine one, but I found later that most of the time it wasn't.In many cases, as one reviewer below says, he simply mis-reasons and in an awkward way. The way he construes regress argument in memory judgment is one such example.Other times, he simply confuses himself or omits argument all together. In SS20 for example, after a long discussion on conceptual priority of the "is" over the "looks" , he proposes and defends conceptual holism against adverbial theory; which is a variant of epistemological foundationalism. Adverbialists such as Chisholm characteristically endorse the foundationalist thesis that there are some basic beliefs which justify all other non-basic empirical beliefs. They think perceptual beliefs of the kind "x looks R to me", "x appears R to me" are candidates for such basic beliefs. This thesis, problematic as it may sound too Cartesian, by itself doesn't lead them to commit to conceptual atomism. It only tells us that the belief statements of the form " x looks R" are justificatory prior to belief statement of the form " x is R". The thesis about epistemic justification doesn't tell us anything about the conceptual priority of one term over the other, so defending conceptual holism can be perfectly compatible with the position Sellars argues against. Sellars seems to conflate epistemological question with conceptual question here. There are mistakes of this kind here and there in this essay. In another place, he simply didn't argue well enough. He commits to a semantic thesis that a word's meaning is its functional role to defend his "psychological nominalism". This thesis which is now called "functional semantic theory" is itself a very controversial thesis and you need a book-length argument to just defend the view.( btw, which is what Brandom was trying to do in recent years) But Sellars simply sketched out the basic idea and did no defense on his claim.Even though Sellars' original presentation is far from clear, the idea of "myth of the given" is quite interesting nontheless. The idea is roughly that any mental items (propositional or non-propositional) that play epistemically justificational role in justifying empirically significant statements couldn't be independently given. It depends for its justification on other propositions. No candidate of the given could serve the role it was meant to serve. So on this construal, not only sense-data can't be given, but judgments such as "it looks red to me" or "I have a pain in my stomach" can't be given as well. So his critique on the myth of the given is clearly broader than any arguments against sense-data theory and probably broader than private language argument. The problem is that it may be too broad. If you endorse Sellars' critique of MOG along with his psychological nominalism which states that any kind of awareness (conscious or unconscious) is linguistic affair, then you need to deny any awareness of pain on the part of creatures who don't use language-like systems like us. Not only that he also had to expel sensations all together from the realm of reasons, hence from objects of awareness. (he prefers to use the term "sense impression" or "direct experience" instead of sensation in this text) and thinks of it as "postulated" instead of "directly experienced". According to this view, then, phenomenal quality such as pain has obviously no place in our realm of reasons because it contains no propositional content, let alone linguistic content, but can we seriously claim that we are not even aware of them because all awareness is propositional in form?Warning: The text doesn't include the footnotes Sellars added in 1960's. The added footnotes are significant enough for undertanding subsequent debates between Sellars and his critiques (Chisholm, Firth etc). If you want a full text of this essay with added footnotes, get "Science, Perception and Reality" instead.

Although I'm quite interested in the modern pragmatic approach, which traces its roots backward to the American Pragmatists (and even further back according to philosopher Robert Brandom, who offers a study guide at this book's end, to Hegel and Kant), Wilfrid Sellars is no easy read.I have started and stopped the book several times. Based on Brandom's work elsewhere and his "study guide" in this book, I tend to agree with its thesis that our ideas of things rest on our operation within a "space of reasons" (what we commit ourselves to and authorize others to do based on what we take to be justificatory in our discourse). And yet Sellars is painfully hard to get through. He is precise to the point of didacticism and tiresomely repetitive. Yet, thanks to Brandom (no great literateur himself, given his penchant for verbosity) I think I get where Sellars goes. But I will have to go back to the book a lot more before I feel qualified to definitively comment on its arguments (largely about how we think and so live within a conceptual framework which determines what we see and know rather than, as the early twentieth century analytical empiricists thought, relying on "atomic" percepts as the source of the knowledge we take ourselves to have).I suspect that this book by Sellars, which appears to be more highly regarded in today's academic circles than when it was first written, deserves the respect now accorded to it. But until I can spend a great deal more time with it I am relying on the second hand accounts of people like Brandom and my initial superficial reading of its text.

I do not understand why it is always said that Sellars' language was so difficult. I found his philosophical style quite straight-on. Unfortunately, Sellars' main work is punctuated by some passages of superficial and/or incorrect reasoning, at which passages some may assume that they do not understand Sellars' argumentation - though it "has to be profound" (because of Sellars' reputation). The most important issue in this essay is the impossibility of reporting sense impressions without using language (with all implications that come along with that), and the repercussions of this circumstance on the philosophy of logical empiricism in its early stage (though Sellars obviously thinks his ideas impact on all forms of empiricism, which is not true). Along that line, Sellars has many good points that should be considered in the philosophy of science and in common sense reasoning, yet his reputed final dismantling of the "myth" of the given never takes place; in Sellars intentions, maybe, but his arguments are a far cry from being a stringent refutation. They are simply too superficial and too colloquial for that. (Cf. Putnam's model-theoretic arguments against realism, for a contrast.) What is really unfortunate for Sellars' essay is that, in this edition, it is framed by Rorty and Brandom. The philosophical humorist Rorty has contributed a foreword in an attempt to assimilate Sellars serious philosophical project into his radical-relativist historicizing outlook of philosophy, thus completely misleading the unknowing reader. The bright, but misguided, Brandom offers a study guide, which is no study guide, but an attempt to direct the reader at those aspects of Sellars' essay, which Brandom's own inferentialist philosophy is supposed to stem from. Unfortunately, these aspects are exactly the most questionable. So, while Sellars' essay is a profitable classic of analytic philosophy, the reader should be warned to read Rorty's foreword and Brandom's study guide cautiously and critically and to thoroughly consider, if these really reflect Sellars' essay correctly.

Pietra miliare ricca di frutti fecondi. Consigliato a coloro che desiderino prendere contatto con una tappa importante della svolta della filosofia analitica degli anni '50.