Wilfrid Sellars

Willem A. DeVries

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317494119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Wilfrid Sellars (1912-89) has been called "the most profound and systematic epistemological thinker of the twentieth century" (Robert Brandom). He was in many respects ahead of his time, and many of his innovations have become widely acknowledged, for example, his attack on the "myth of the given", his functionalist treatment of intentional states, his proposal that psychological concepts are like theoretical concepts, and his suggestion that attributions of knowledge locate the knower "in the logical space of reasons". However, while many philosophers have begun to acknowledge Sellars's inspiration in their work, their interpretation of his thought has not always been the most accurate. His writings are difficult. Individually, his essays are complex and sometimes rely on doctrines and arguments he put forward elsewhere. Each of his articles is deepened and strengthened by seeing it in its systematic context, but he never wrote a unified exposition of his system, which therefore has to be pieced together from numerous disparate sources. Willem deVries addresses these difficulties specifically and provides a careful reading and remarkable overview of Sellars's systematic philosophy that will become the standard point of reference for all philosophers seeking to understand Sellars's hugely significant body of work.

Chapter 1

Sellars’s philosophical enterprise

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 in SPR: 1)

Twentieth-century analytic philosophy is distinctive, in part, because it treated philosophy as piecework. Philosophy, it was thought, consists of puzzles, each of which could be attacked on its own and solved or dissolved, usually either by paying attention to the way language is used or by constructing a formalism that clarifies an ideal of language. Some very valuable philosophical work was accomplished in this way, but it leaves many hungering for a broader view: a philosophy that attempts to see the world as a whole and understand how it all hangs together.

Wilfrid Sellars, almost alone, was both analytic and systematic. He utilized the full panoply of analytic tools and methods, including careful attention to ordinary language and the sophisticated deployment of formalisms, but he did so in the service of a unified vision of the world and our place in it. Because of its systematicity, Sellars’s philosophy is both more difficult to grasp initially and more rewarding in the long run than that of any other analytic philosopher.

Sellars exercised a profound influence on American philosophy in the latter half of the twentieth century. Some of his influence was institutional: Sellars was an important figure in several of the leading philosophy departments in the US (Universities of Minnesota and Pittsburgh, and Yale University); he co-founded, along with his colleague, Herbert Feigl, the first American journal expressly devoted to analytic philosophy, the well-regarded Philosophical Studies; and he co-edited several anthologies that were, in their day, canonical.¹ Sellars was also an inspiring teacher; even those students who disagree with him philosophically still hold him and his philosophical efforts in the highest regard. But his true measure is his philosophical work: a wide-ranging collection of essays and lectures dealing with virtually every aspect of philosophy.

Analytic philosopher that he was, Sellars was also a sensitive and thoughtful interpreter of the history of philosophy, making important contributions to our understanding of Plato, Aristotle, the early moderns, and especially Kant. He also willingly engaged non-analytic philosophers in fruitful discussions, triangulating their positions by reference to the historical philosophical background shared by all.² Breadth of vision and historical depth are likely to keep Sellars’s work relevant for many years to come, however philosophical fashion may shift.

This chapter has three sections: a brief overview of Sellars’s background and biography to place his work in context; a discussion of Sellars’s understanding of the role and methodology of philosophy; and, finally, a discussion of Sellars’s most basic substantive philosophical commitments. This is all preliminary orientation; substantive, critical engagement awaits the later chapters.

A life in brief

The emphasis in setting Sellars in context has to be on the richness and depth of his training in philosophy. He absorbed influences from many different traditions, melding and transforming them into a unique vision. Sellars, born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on 20 May 1912, was an early and rabid reader. His father, Roy Wood Sellars, was a significant philosopher in his own right, teaching at the University of Michigan from 1905 until his retirement in 1950, and remaining philosophically active for several decades after that. Roy Wood published numerous books and articles and was one of the leaders of the Critical Realist movement in the early twentieth century. There are only two essays of Wilfrid’s in which he discusses his father’s work at some length, but there can be no doubt that his father’s influence was profound.³ Father and son shared, for instance, deep commitments to naturalism, to the rationality and ontological probity of scientific method, and to a complex analysis of perception.

Never a terribly social person, Sellars made friends with difficulty, but the friendships he made were long-lasting. Although born in the Midwest, his upbringing was cosmopolitan: when he was nine, the family spent a year in New England, a summer at Oxford, and the subsequent year in Paris, where Sellars attended the Lycée Montaigne. He then attended the high school run by the University of Michigan’s School of Education, becoming deeply interested in mathematics. Although he took a summer course in mathematics at the University of Michigan after his high-school graduation, he postponed his full-time entrance to accompany his mother and sister back to Paris in September 1929 (his father would follow in the spring). He enrolled in a science-orientated programme at the Lycée Louis le Grand, and it was there that he had his first encounter with philosophy, for, according to his own testimony, he had not discussed it previously with his father. Sellars’s original encounter with philosophy was twofold: he took a survey of philosophy course at the lycée, which we can assume dealt with the canonical writers of the Western tradition, and he acquired friends with whom he read and discussed “Marx, Engels, Lenin, and, in general, the philosophical and quasiphilosophical polemical literature which is the life blood of French intellectuals” (AR: 275), his principal influences being Boris Souvarine and Leon Trotsky. When his father arrived in spring 1930, Wilfrid began discussing philosophy seriously with him, quickly losing the pseudo-Hegelian jargon of Marxist Naturphilosophie, but retaining sympathies with Hegelian forms of social and historical interpretation. After his year in Paris, Sellars spent another six months in Munich, learning German and attending classes at the university.

Sellars returned to Michigan in 1931 and commenced his formal studies in philosophy. The University of Michigan, then as now, had an excellent philosophy department, including C. H. Langford and DeWitt Parker. Alongside more home-grown influences from his father’s Critical Realism and other American philosophical movements, Sellars was also impressed by the analytic methodology of G. E. Moore and the logic of Russell and Whitehead, especially as extended by Langford and C. I. Lewis. Although modern logic seemed incredibly powerful, most attempts to capture philosophically interesting concepts and principles in the logical forms then available seemed “wildly implausible” to him. Nevertheless, he “regarded the strategy as a sound one and believed that the crucial question concerned the manner in which the technical apparatus of Principia would have to be fleshed out in order to do justice to the conceptual forms of human knowledge” (AR: 282). Lewis and Langford’s treatment of the logical modalities seemed a paradigm case of such enrichment. Sellars wanted to extend their strategy to the causal modalities as well. Since he was still in the grips of an empiricist abstractionism at the time:

The result was an immediate sympathy with the causal realism of C. D. Broad and, later, W. C. Kneale. Yet I was puzzled by what it could mean to say that necessity (logical or causal) was in the world, which, it seemed, must surely be the case, if modal concepts are genuine concepts and any modal propositions true. Was negation in the world? I was tempted by the approach to negation which grounds it in a “real relation of incompatibility”, and it was years before I sorted out the confusions (and insights) involved. Was generality in the world? I saw this as one aspect of the problem of universals, which was never far from my mind. It can be seen that my early reading of the Tractatus had had but little effect.

(AR: 282–3)

Sellars went through the University of Michigan quickly, for he was able to demonstrate by examination that he had already covered some of the required courses. He then went to the University of Buffalo, where he studied Kant and Husserl with Marvin Farber. Besides becoming well versed in Husserlian phenomenology, Sellars took inspiration from Farber’s naturalism and came to believe that important structural insights usually stated in non-naturalistic terms could nonetheless be reconciled with naturalism. He took an MA there with a thesis on time titled “Substance, Change and Event” (1934).

Sellars won a Rhodes Scholarship and enrolled in the Philosophy, Politics and Economics degree course at Oriel College, Oxford, in autumn 1934. W. G. Maclagan was his tutor, and the Oxford Realists John Cook Wilson, H. A. Prichard, and H. H. Price were among his major influences.⁴ Sellars came to favour Prichard’s deontological approach to ethics over Moore’s ideal utilitarianism. The rise of emotivism, however, kept him from slipping into ethical realism, although he felt that emotivism was wrong-headed. Still, there was something to it and “[s]omehow intuitionism and emotivism would have to be aufgehoben into a naturalistic framework which recognized ethical concepts as genuine concepts and found a place for intersubjectivity and truth” (AR: 285). By this time Sellars had abandoned his earlier empiricist abstractionism and was starting to grope his way towards a functional theory of concepts that makes “their role in reasoning, rather than a supposed origin in experience, their primary feature” (AR: 285). Once more working through Kant, this time under the direction of Price, proved important. It was at this point that Sellars saw:

that by denying that sense impressions, however indispensable to cognition, were themselves cognitive, Kant made a radical break with all his predecessors, empiricists and rationalists alike. The ‘of-ness’ of sensation simply isn’t the ‘of-ness’ of even the most rudimentary thought. Sense grasps no facts, not even such simple ones as something’s being red and triangular. Abstractionists could think of concepts as abstracted from sense, because they thought of sensation in conceptual categories. This enabled me to appreciate that Kant wasn’t attempting to prove that in addition to knowing facts about immediate experience, one also knew facts about physical objects, but rather that a skeptic who grants knowledge of even the simplest fact about an event occurring in Time is, in effect, granting knowledge of the existence of nature as a whole. I was sure he was right. But his own question haunted me. How is it possible that knowledge has this structure? The tension between dogmatic realism, and its appeal to self-evident truth, and transcendental idealism, in which conceptual structures hover over a non-cognitive manifold of sense, became almost intolerable. It wasn’t until much later that I came to see that the solution of the puzzle lay in correctly locating the conceptual order in the causal order and correctly interpreting the causality involved.

(AR: 285)

Sellars took a first-class degree at the University of Oxford in 1936, which became in due course an MA and was to be the last degree he earned. In autumn 1936 he commenced work at Oxford on a DPhil, attempting a thesis on Kant under the direction of T. D. Weldon. Although Sellars knew what he thought was wrong with other interpretations of Kant, he could not articulate his own interpretation clearly enough. Abandoning his studies at Oxford, he enrolled in the PhD programme at Harvard University in autumn 1937, taking courses with C. I. Lewis, W. V. O. Quine, R. B. Perry, and C. L. Stevenson, among others. He passed his preliminary examinations in the spring of 1938. That summer he married Mary, an English literature student from West Yorkshire, whom he had met at university in Oxford.

In autumn 1938, Sellars began his teaching career at the University of Iowa, where he was responsible for all the history of philosophy courses. He never did return to graduate school or finish his PhD, and he suffered a significant writer’s block during the early years of his career. At Iowa, Sellars continued working out his own slightly idiosyncratic, but sweeping, coherent and powerful interpretation of the history of philosophy, a foundation on which he would build throughout his career. He also formed a lifelong friendship with Feigl, originally a member of the Vienna Circle.

The Second World War interrupted Sellars’s career, taking him to Rhode Island to serve in Naval Intelligence anti-submarine warfare. After the war, Sellars moved to the University of Minnesota, rejoining Feigl, who had moved there several years earlier. Realizing a need to break the log jam and start publishing, Sellars struck a bargain with his wife, an aspiring short-story writer, that they would write for ten hours a day, no matter how little they produced. After 17 drafts, his first completed work, “Realism and the New Way of Words” (1948) was done, and the floodgates were open. Having found a writing method, he wrote prolifically thereafter.

The rest of Sellars’s career can be followed in his essays. He left Minnesota to become a visiting professor at Yale in 1958, moving there as a tenured professor in 1959. He did not, however, remain at Yale long: the department became factionalized, and Sellars felt that the internal politics were obstructing his ability to do philosophy. In 1963 he moved to the University of Pittsburgh, which quickly assembled a number of rising stars in philosophy and became one of the leading departments in the US. Sellars remained at Pittsburgh until his death in 1989, although he visited and lectured at a number of other universities. He also accrued a number of honours, giving the John Locke Lectures in 1965, the Matchette Foundation Lectures in 1971, the John Dewey Lectures in 1973 and the Carus Lectures in 1977, and served as President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association in 1970.

Sellars was always a systematic philosopher, and each of his essays is a perspectival glimpse of a more thoroughly worked-out, broader philosophical position. This seems to encourage some readers to think that Sellars’s philosophical position was not itself amenable to change. In fact, Sellars’s “system” was never set in stone. While his fundamental commitments did not waver, he revisited major portions of the system repeatedly, revising and refining his positions throughout his career.

Philosophy: its role and methods

Sellars’s considered statement on the place of philosophy among the disciplines of the intellect is contained in his inaugural lecture at Pittsburgh, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (1962), reprinted as the initial essay in Science, Perception and Reality (1963). There is not much direct argument in the paper, perhaps, but it is a compact presentation of the underlying framework that pervades his thought. The major themes that emerge are the following:

• Philosophy is universal in scope.

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. Under “things in the broadest possible sense” I include such radically different items as not only “cabbages and kings”, but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to “know one’s way around” with respect to all these things, not in that unreflective way in which the centipede of the story knew its way around before it faced the question, “how do I walk?”, but in that reflective way which means that no intellectual holds are barred.

(PSIM in SPR: 1)

• Philosophy’s ultimate aim is practical; a form of know-how.

Knowing one’s way around is, to use a current distinction, a form of “knowing how” as contrasted with “knowing that”.

(PSIM in SPR: 1)

• Philosophy is distinct from any special discipline, although it presupposes such disciplines and the truths they reveal.

Philosophy in an important sense has no special subject-matter which stands to it as other subject matters stand to other special disciplines.

(PSIM in SPR: 2)

• Philosophy is reflective, both in the sense that it is second-order knowledge that puts all our other knowledge into perspective, and in the sense that it must itself be pursued reflectively.

It is this reflection on the place of philosophy itself, in the scheme of things which is the distinctive trait of the philosopher as contrasted with the reflective specialist; and in the absence of this critical reflection on the philosophical enterprise, one is at best but a potential philosopher.

(PSIM in SPR: 3)

• Philosophy cannot be called analytic in a sense that contrasts to synthetic.

… while the term ‘analysis’ was helpful in its implication that philosophy as such makes no substantive contribution to what we know and is concerned in some way to improve the manner in which we know it, it is most misleading by its contrast to ‘synthesis’.

(PSIM in SPR: 3)

For Sellars, philosophy is neither a pure a priori enquiry to be conducted without regard to our empirical knowledge of the world, nor just another special science or a discipline ultimately to be replaced by the sciences. Rather, Sellars viewed philosophy as an ongoing enterprise of understanding how we fit into the world of which we are a part. Philosophy is essentially dialectical: it presupposes that we live in a world in which we act and of which we have some knowledge, so it always engages in medias res, and yet it is reflective and critical, so no element of our current conceptual framework is absolutely beyond question – we must remain open to new experience and new ways of organizing experience. Philosophy ought not presuppose that there is a static, once-and-for-all vision of humanity-in-the-world, for two reasons: we are constantly learning new things that necessitate revisions in our overall view, and there is no reason to think that the way we fit into the world is itself static. The unitary vision of how things hang together functions only as a regulative ideal in Sellars’s philosophy.

There is, of course, plenty of room for disagreement about how things hang together that shows up in arguments concerning, inter alia, the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Sellars’s philosophical enterprise
• 2 Sellars’s philosophy of language
• 3 Categories, the a priori, and transcendental philosophy
• 4 Sellars’s nominalism
• 5 Knowledge and the given
• 6 Science and reality
• 7 Intentionality and the mental
• 8 Sensory consciousness
• 9 Practical reason
• 10 The necessity of the normative
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index