Wilfrid Sellars

Naturalism with a Normative Turn

James O'Shea

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781509500864
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

The work of the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars continues to have a significant impact on the contemporary philosophical scene. His writings have influenced major thinkers such as Rorty, McDowell, Brandom, and Dennett, and many of Sellars basic conceptions, such as the logical space of reasons, the myth of the given, and the manifest and scientific images, have become standard philosophical terms. Often, however, recent uses of these terms do not reflect the richness or the true sense of Sellars original ideas. This book gets to the heart of Sellars philosophy and provides students with a comprehensive critical introduction to his lifes work.

The book is structured around what Sellars himself regarded as the philosophers overarching task: to achieve a coherent vision of reality that will finally overcome the continuing clashes between the world as common sense takes it to be and the world as science reveals it to be. It provides a clear analysis of Sellars groundbreaking philosophy of mind, his novel theory of consciousness, his defense of scientific realism, and his thoroughgoing naturalism with a normative turn. Providing a lively examination of Sellars work through the central problem of what it means to be a human being in a scientific world, this book will be a valuable resource for all students of philosophy.

1
The Philosophical Quest and the Clash of the Images

There is no better entryway into Sellars' philosophical system than to begin with his reflections on what he characterized in ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’ (1962) as “the philosophical quest” (PSIM 1). This first chapter will include a hefty sampling of quotations from Sellars in order to convey a sense of the shape of the key problems as he characterized them. Later chapters will provide the more detailed and critical analyses.

The quest for a stereoscopic fusion of the manifest and scientific images

In one of his most frequently quoted passages, Sellars wrote that the “aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term” (PSIM 1). In his 1971 Matchette lectures on ‘The Structure of Knowledge’ he put it this way:

The ideal aim of philosophizing is to become reflectively at home in the full complexity of the multi-dimensional conceptual system in terms of which we suffer, think, and act. I say ‘reflectively’, because there is a sense in which, by the sheer fact of leading an unexamined, but conventionally satisfying life, we are at home in this complexity. It is not until we have eaten the apple with which the serpent philosopher tempts us, that we begin to stumble on the familiar and to feel that haunting sense of alienation which is treasured by each new generation as its unique possession. This alienation, this gap between oneself and one's world, can only be resolved by eating the apple to the core; for after the first bite there is no return to innocence. There are many anodynes, but only one cure. We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize. (SK I.3)

The aim of this stage-setting chapter is to gain a sense of what Sellars means by the “alienation, this gap between oneself and one's world” that comes to light only as a result of philosophical reflection, and which he thinks “can only be resolved by eating the apple to the core”: that is, only through further sustained and systematic reflection in which “no intellectual holds are barred” (PSIM 1).

Sellars has chosen his words carefully in referring to “the multi-dimensional conceptual system in terms of which we suffer, think, and act.” As we shall see, he wants to structure the issues raised by our loss of intellectual innocence in terms of certain difficulties that stand in the way of our becoming “reflectively at home” with our understanding of our own nature as (1) passively sensing, (2) conceptually thinking, and (3) rationally active beings. Ironically, it is one of our greatest intellectual achievements in opening up the nature of reality to us – the development of the modern natural sciences since the sixteenth century – which has by its very success threatened to alienate us intellectually from that same natural world. Sellars' overarching philosophical aim is firstly to articulate the nature and sources of our loss of intellectual innocence, and then to cure our resulting sense of intellectual alienation by eating the apple to the core.

The philosopher or the philosophically inclined, according to Sellars, strives for “a reflective insight into the intellectual landscape as a whole,” attempting to grasp in one overall “synoptic vision” how it all hangs together (PSIM 2–3). Since it is clearly impossible for any thinker to competently know her way around all the different specialized fields of human knowledge, Sellars recognizes that the idea of “the synoptic vision of true philosophy” is what Kant would have called a regulative ideal of reason. We seek “to approximate to the philosophical aim” (PSIM 2–3) through a sustained ‘second-order’ reflection on the general principles, methods, and assumptions that characterize the ‘first-order’ practices and results of the various other disciplines and dimensions of human experience.

In fact, however, Sellars argues that the most important tasks facing the synoptic philosopher may be brought together in terms of two idealized conceptual frameworks that he calls the manifest image and the scientific image of ‘man-in-the-world.’ Thus he contends that there is

a crucial duality which confronts the contemporary philosopher at the very beginning of his enterprise. Here the most appropriate analogy is stereoscopic vision, where two differing perspectives on a landscape are fused into one coherent experience.

For the philosopher is confronted not by one complex many-dimensional picture, the unity of which, such as it is, he must come to appreciate; but by two pictures of essentially the same order of complexity, each of which purports to be a complete picture of man-in-the-world, and which after separate scrutiny, he must fuse into one vision. Let me refer to these two perspectives, respectively, as the manifest and the scientific images of man-in-the-world. (PSIM 4–5)

The synoptic vision aimed at by the philosopher may in this way be conceived as the achieving of a synoptic, stereoscopic fusion into one coherent picture of two global or all-comprehensive ‘images’ of the nature of the human-being-in-the-world. What we need to consider now is in what sense and why Sellars holds that this is so.

Sellars indicates that he is “using ‘image’ in this sense as a metaphor for conception” (PSIM 5). Contemporary philosophy thus has as its primary aim a comprehensive understanding of how the two different conceptual frameworks of the manifest image and the scientific image may be integrated into one coherent conception of the nature of the human person within the natural world.¹ While the manifest image and the scientific image both exist concretely in the form of various actual historical conceptual practices (“as much a part and parcel of the world as this platform or the Constitution of the United States”), Sellars explains that they

are both ‘idealizations’ in something like the sense in which a frictionless body or an ideal gas is an idealization. They are designed to illuminate the inner dynamics of the development of philosophical ideas. […] The story is complicated by the fact that each image has a history, and while the main outlines of what I shall call the manifest image took shape in the mists of pre-history, the scientific image, promissory notes apart, has taken shape before our very eyes. (PSIM 5)

Sellars regarded it as an indispensable method in philosophy to attempt to construct relatively clear, ideal types or models – for example, ‘empiricism’ and ‘rationalism’ as types of approach in the theory of knowledge – while recognizing that one will gradually need to complicate and significantly revise the initially oversimplified, tidy distinctions as the investigation proceeds to the details. The manifest and scientific images are idealized conceptual frameworks that reflect real historical intellectual developments, each framework offering a characterization of the nature of reality that may be evaluated as to its ultimate adequacy as a representation of how things really are.

In upcoming chapters we shall be examining in greater detail the complex and evolving conceptual structure of Sellars' manifest and scientific images themselves. However, in order to introduce in a general way the fundamental question of the ostensible conflict or ‘clash’ between the two images, we may begin with Sellars' characterization of the manifest image as “the conceptual framework in terms of which man experienced himself and the world long before the revolution in physics was even a twinkle in the eye of Democritus,” the ancient Greek ‘atomist’ philosopher (SK I.22). It is potentially misleading but useful for many purposes to think of the manifest image as the world of ‘common sense’ (Sellars himself often uses the two phrases interchangeably, as at SM V.64). It is misleading because Sellars intends the manifest image to include various highly sophisticated conceptual refinements that have been painstakingly articulated within what he calls the “perennial” tradition in philosophy.² Another respect in which it is misleading simply to equate the manifest image with common sense is due to the fact that the former is conceived to include whatever observational or empirical refinements have been generated by the inductive statistical methods of the natural and social sciences. The story of the emergence and development of the manifest image would be the story of humanity's own complex and evolving intellectual history (see PSIM parts I–III, about which more in a moment).

Granting these and other important qualifications, however, it will be useful to begin by thinking of Sellars' distinction between his two global images in terms of what philosophers have often contrasted as the world as conceived by common sense in terms of manifest sense-perceptible properties – the colors and shapes (or, more generally, the ‘proper and common sensible properties’) of ordinary persisting physical objects, for example – as opposed to the often strange and colorless scientifically postulated world of swarming microphysical atoms and subatomic particles that is imperceptible to our unaided senses.³ Thus the key distinction between Sellars' idealized manifest and scientific images ultimately turns out to be the following:

There is […] one type of scientific reasoning which [the manifest image], by stipulation, does not include, namely that which involves the postulation of imperceptible entities, and principles pertaining to them, to explain the behaviour of perceptible things. […] And, indeed, what I have referred to as the ‘scientific’ image of man-in-the-world and contrasted with the ‘manifest’ image, might better be called the ‘postulational’ or ‘theoretical’ image. (PSIM 7)

In our investigation of Sellars' scientific realism in chapter 2 we shall explore in detail the nature of postulational theoretical explanation in science that is appealed to in this passage. The general idea, however, may be brought out by considering the philosophical reaction by Descartes and other early modern philosophers to the “revolution in physics” that had been initiated by Galileo and other ‘natural philosophers’ since the sixteenth century (cf. PSIM part V). In broad form consideration of this simplified atomistic or ‘corpuscularian’ scientific picture will bring out the central issues with which we shall be grappling throughout this book.

The clash of the images and the status of the sensible qualities

Following Sellars, let us take as our central case one of the most famous difficulties that arose within the new Galilean and Newtonian scientific frameworks, according to which, we shall suppose, every material object is entirely composed of complex swarms of very tiny, imperceptible atoms. This was the problem of the place of color and other sensible qualities within this new ‘particulate’ or atomistic ontology.⁴ In ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man’ Sellars re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Key Contemporary Thinkers
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1: The Philosophical Quest and the Clash of the Images
• 2: Scientific Realism and the Scientific Image
• 3: Meaning and Abstract Entities
• 4: Thought, Language, and the Myth of Genius Jones
• 5: Knowledge, Immediate Experience, and the Myth of the Given
• 6: Truth, Picturing, and Ultimate Ontology
• 7: A Synoptic Vision: Sellars' Naturalism with a Normative Turn
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement