Abstract
In this paper, first, I will focus on the divergent interpretations of two leading Sellars’ scholars, Willem deVries and James O’Shea, as regards Sellars’ view on the being of the normative. It will be suggested that this conflict between deVries’ and O’Shea’s viewpoints can be resolved by the provision of an account of what I shall call ‘ready-tohand’ normativity (i.e. the phenomenological presence of normativity in our everyday practical dealings with the world), which incorporates the insights of both deVries’ and O’Shea’s interpretive perspectives, while at the same time going beyond them. It shall be further argued that the resulting ‘phenomenologically’ informed view of normativity, pointing as it does towards its ideal integration not only with practical action but also with perceptual experience, in the form of what I shall call ‘kinaesthetic’ normativity, can potentially pose problems to Sellars’ own view on the matter, and, in particular, to the way normativity can allegedly be ‘stereoscopically fused’ with the ultimate ontology of the ideal scientific image. However, I shall argue that these problems are not unsurpassable: although the possibility of a specifically ‘kinaesthetic’ form of normativity seems to have eluded Sellars’ grasp, his views about the way in which the productive imagination is implicated in perceptual experience, do indeed provide the conceptual resources that make possible the stereoscopic fusion of this kind of normativity with the ontology of the ideal scientific image.
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Notes
It should be stressed here right away that the term ‘qualitative’ is used in two importantly different senses throughout this paper (whose conflation is exactly what makes it seem impossible to integrate ‘ready-to-hand’ normativity with a radically non-normative scientific image of the world). According to the first (as is used above), an experience has ‘qualitative’ character if it has non-relational, strictly occurrent properties (restricted to proper and common sensibles of sensory and affective experience). However, it will be argued that there is another sense in which an experience can qualify as having a qualitative character in a relational (though not inferential) sense of the term -that is, in a sense which is not limited to strictly occurrent qualitative properties, but can be extended to causal and dispositional properties of objects. See sections 6 for a further elaboration of this crucial distinction (and also section 10 for the description of yet another case of ‘qualitative presence’ -namely ‘kinaesthetic presence’- which is distinguishable both from the ‘qualitative-relational’ and from the ‘qualitative-non-relational’ forms of presence mentioned above).
Notice that Sellars intimately connects the descriptive role of a proposition with its explanatory role (and, so far as I know, deVries accepts this Sellarsian view). He argues that no description is possible except in a context in which explanation is also possible (Sellars 1957, §108). A necessary condition for an expression having a descriptive role in language is being situated in a ‘space of implications’, which, moreover, for Sellars, must be counterfactually robust ones -that is, they must extend to possible cases (for otherwise the putatively ‘descriptive’ term could not be applied to new cases). And it is an essential feature of this ‘space of (counterfactually robust) implications’ that to endorse a counterfactually robust inference in it (e.g. ‘these tomatoes are ripe’ → ‘these tomatoes are red’, ‘the struck is dry’ (no countervailing conditions obtain) → ‘the match lights up’), that is, an inference which is valid not only for actual but also for possible cases of applying the descriptive terms involved, is something that can be appealed to in explaining the applicability of one description on the basis of the applicability of another (e.g. “the tomatoes are red because they are ripe”, “the match lights up because it is dry”) (see e.g. Brandom 2015, pp. 178–82).
There is a tendency among philosophers of mind (sometimes including Sellars) to use ‘phenomenological’ in a way that primarily concerns conscious qualitative experiences -in contrast to the ‘practical’. As is obvious, I am concerned to use ‘phenomenological’ in a broader, and, I think more accurate and interesting sense, that does not exclude the ‘practical’.
deVries cites, in support of his interpretation as regards Sellars view on ‘ready-to-hand’ normativity, a passage taken from Sellars’ paper “Scientific Realism and Irenic Instrumentalism” (1965) in which Sellars concedes that while the framework of common sense is radically false (there are really no such things as the physical objects and processes of the common sense framework) this view is to be clarified in terms of the concepts of its being reasonable at some stage to abandon the framework of common sense and use only the framework of theoretical science, suitably enriched by the dimension of practical discourse (189, emphasis mine). And Sellars goes on to suggest that “this aspect of the situation […] is illustrated by the practical dimension of such common sense concepts as that of what it is to be a hammer” (n. 4). However, as we shall see, the Sellarsian view developed here is compatible with another reading according to which ‘ready-to-hand’ normativity can be descriptively and explanatorily reduced to scientific-image concepts and objects while at the same time retaining its irreducible normative character.
And, even more interestingly, as Heidegger puts it, these networks of ‘in-order-to’ relations “ultimately go back to a ‘towards-which’ in which there is no further involvement -that is, to a ‘for-the-sake-of-which’” (Heidegger 1962, pp. 116–118). The ‘for-the-sake-of-which’ is not itself another aim or goal but a possible way of being a self. For example, I may hammer nails in order to secure boards, but such action has a self-referential dimension as well, in that, I perform this action as a way of trying to be a carpenter (i.e. as a way of trying to live up to the standards of a certain practical identity) (Crowell 2013, pp. 244–245). In this sense, for Heidegger, the ultimate foundation of normativity lies in the fact that Dasein’s being is always already an issue for it. Interestingly, this can further elucidate the sense in which, as we shall see in a moment, for Sellars, persons have intrinsic value while artifacts have only derivative value.
Notice that here ‘intrinsic’ contrasts with ‘extrinsic’, not with ‘relational’. The fact that persons have ‘intrinsic’ value does not preclude the latter from being an essentially relational property. Moreover, the fact that the intrinsic value of persons is a relational property does not preclude the latter from having a ‘qualitative’ character, at least in a broad sense of the term in which relational (e.g. dispositional) properties can be phenomenologically present in an experience (see n.1).
It is true that, for Sellars, the intrinsic value of persons is a relational matter of the normative institution of certain kinds of ‘collective’ commitments and entitlements (what he calls ‘we-intentions’), which is surely not what one would think as a ‘phenomenology of value’. However, 1) I do not see any reason not to use ‘phenomenological’ in a broader sense that does not exclude the practical domain (see n. 3), and 2) I think that -along with what I take to be deVries’ interpretation of Sellars on this matter- we can indeed attribute a commitment to an irreducibly normatively-laden phenomenological description of what it is like to be a person to Sellars (by this I mean -again, I think, in line with deVries- that this is what Sellars ought to be saying given his other commitments, not what he himself would accept as a correct interpretation of his own view on the matter). For example, direct evidence for this claim (which, however, is not cited by deVries) can be provided by the fact that Sellars himself holds that a norm (and therefore, a person) is something which, when recognized as such, has a unique resonance in one’s affective life in the sense that it is an essential fact about normative properties that we care or are concerned about what they describe (this is why normative properties have a claim in our conduct and in the attitudes and choices which manifest themselves in our conduct) (Sellars 1967b, pp. 223–224). In this sense, to say that normativity or personhood goes hand in hand with a certain phenomenology (as expressed by the notions of ‘care’ and ‘concern’) is not at all unSellarsian (thought, as was mentioned above, this is not to say that Sellars himself would accept this as a correct interpretation of his views on the normativity of persons). Yet, for all that, I would not side completely with deVries’ interpretation of what Sellarsian normativity of persons really comes down to. In what follows (section 6), I will argue that, pace deVries, even this more radical (phenomenological, not just logical or conceptual) irreducibility or irreconcilability of the normative to non-normative scientific-image contents is compatible with the possibility of a stereoscopic fusion of ‘manifest-image’ normative contents with the non-normative contents of the Sellarsian scientific-image.
Notice that since persons are ‘practically real’ it follows that if one occupies that perspective then “it is objectively true that there are people around one who believe and desire, people with whom one shares a language and some intentions, with whom one can (and must) negotiate in the course of one’s life” (deVries 2005, p. 279).
Note that the describings are, of course, norm-governed in any image; it is the realities described that are claimed to be exhaustively non-normative here.
The fact that deVries’ takes the irreducible character of normativity (including ‘ready-to-hand’ normativity) to be preserved only if the scientia mensura principle is violated or seriously qualified is also confirmed by another argument of his to the effect that since, as Sellars himself concurs, no language could be purely descriptive, independent of all normative, prescriptive, or practical elements, we are no less committed to our ‘prescriptive’ ontology (i.e. the ontology implicit in the language we use to deliberate about and act within the world) than we are to our descriptive ontology (the ontology implicit in the language we use to describe and explain the phenomena in the world) (deVries 2012, p. 15). Now, the existence of a ‘prescriptive ontology’ would certainly violate the scientia mensura principle since it would imply that there are certain (‘prescriptive’) phenomena in the world which cannot -as a matter of principle- be described and explained by concepts and methods of empirical inquiry and its sophisticated extension, science. I do not have the space to properly address the issue here but I think that what goes wrong in this argument is that deVries has actually conflated the issue of the evaluation of explanation (the standards of correct explanation, i.e. the conception of explanation as an ‘epistemic mechanism’ that is at the heart of empirical inquiry and scientific discourse in particular), which is indeed a resolutely normative matter (and, in this sense, it is true that “no language could be purely descriptive, independent of all normative, prescriptive, or practical elements”) with the issue of the content of the explanation itself, i.e. that of the existence of entities and processes that this explanation commits us to, which, in the case of the scientific image, are resolutely non-normative. Hence, pace deVries, the fact that no language could be purely descriptive independent of all normative, prescriptive, or practical elements does not necessarily commit us to a ‘prescriptive’ ontology.
The related reconceptualized descriptive and explanatory recourses would effect this change by providing a more adequate understanding of the antecedents and consequences of our actions and, more importantly, by expanding or enlarging the domain of genuine or concrete practical possibilities -which could serve as raw materials for deliberating about the desired or required course of action.
Notice that this fact makes O’Shea’s position problematic since it tends to blur the very distinction on which O’Shea’s alternative interpretation of Sellarsian normativity depends, namely that between the purely functional (conceptual) and contentual (explanatory) aspects of normativity.
By this I do not mean that the phenomenological qualities disclosed at the level of ‘ready-to-hand’ normativity are directly accessible to the first-personal level (i.e. to the subject of experience) in an empirical or psychological sense of the term. The phenomenological qualities in question are not ‘immediate contents of our consciousness’ in the above sense. It is only after careful and painstaking phenomenological analysis (e.g. of a Heideggerian stripe) that we can be in a position to have ‘direct access’, at a transcendental level, to the holistically, teleologically and relationally structured ‘quality space’ (the Heideggerian ‘totality of involvements’) that is formed by our interaction with everyday ready-to-hand entities. Still, as we shall see, the phenomenological character of ‘ready-to-hand’ normativity remains methodologically distinct from its contentual or ‘material’ aspect in that the nature and character of the latter cannot be understood just by means of careful phenomenological reflection on the essential structures of our ‘ready-to-hand normative experience’ (or ‘existence’) independently of scientific-image descriptions and explanations of the latter.
And, crucially, it remains so even after being subjected to careful phenomenological analysis.
Sellars does not make this distinction between two kinds or aspects (phenomenological and ‘contentual’) of what is ‘qualitatively present’ in our ‘ready-to-hand’ experience of normativity. Thus, the view put forward here is a development and extension of Sellars’ position. It is a proposal about what a Sellarsian should hold in order to overcome what I take to be the problematic features of both deVries’ and O’Shea’s interpretation of Sellars on normativity.
Sellars takes it that the scientific-image descriptions and explanations in terms of thing-kind generalizations and their causal and dispositional properties are not ultimate but instead point towards a more penetrating level of description and explanation in which the world is considered as ‘pure episode’ or ‘pure process’, i.e. as possessing qualitative properties that are purely occurrent and non-thing-like (Sellars 1957, §50-52). This is not the place to discuss Sellars’ peculiar version of the ideal scientific image. It would be sufficient for our purposes to show that even this radical version of the Sellarsian scientific image can be successfully fused with the ‘ready-to-hand’ character of our ‘lifeworld’.
My understanding of the ‘contentual’ aspect of ‘ready-to-hand’ normativity is modelled off Sellars’ account of the non-conceptual, sensory dimension of perceptual experience. As is well known, Sellars posits (on transcendental and theoretical-explanatory grounds) the existence of a radically non-conceptual and non-intentional sensory component of our perceptual experience which is still ‘within consciousness’ (where this consciousness is neither a consciousness of self nor a consciousness of objects) and guides -but does not directly justify- the formation of concepts most centrally involved in perceptual experience of the surrounding world (namely, the concepts of proper and common sensibles) (Sellars 1967a, pp. 9–18). Based on this Sellarsian view 1) I supplement the above Sellarsian account with a counterpart account of specifically affective experience (where the conceptually structured affective experience would be ontologically (yet not epistemically) dependent on a radically non-conceptual affective dimension, a non-conceptually structured ‘affective field’ of non-apperceived emotions, desires, drives and impulses) (see also n. 24, 25, 27), and 2) I argue that the ‘contentual’ aspect of ‘ready-to-hand’ experience of normativity should be understood as an intimate blend of those non-conceptual dimensions of sensory and affective experience.
But, again, one might wonder, if those non-conceptual (yet somehow ‘qualitatively present’) sensory and affective qualities play no direct epistemic or phenomenological role how do they relate to phenomenology and in what sense can they be considered as having ‘actual presence’ ‘within (non-apperceptive) consciousness’ (as opposed to being, e.g., expressions of a sub-personal activation of certain neurophysiological mechanisms related to perception, which are not, as such, present to consciousness)? A first response here could be that this -admittedly strange and hard to grasp- notion of something having ‘actual qualitative presence, within consciousness, which is not apperceived as such’ is posited for transcendental purposes, namely in order to account for the possibility of emergence and specific structure and content of our ‘lifeworldly’ concepts of proper and common sensible properties of outer (and inner) objects. To my mind, as a Sellarsian, this is part and parcel of the transcendental project of accounting for the objective purport of the perceptual (and affective) experiences of our ‘lifeworld’; that is, it is part and parcel of the transcendental project of accounting for the need of providing an external ‘transcategorial’ constraint from within experience (e.g. based on the scientific-image notion of ‘absolute processes’, which goes beyond the ‘subject-object’, ‘mental-physical’ and ‘real-illusory’ distinction) on the basic categorial structure and distinctions imposed on sensory and affective experiences by the descriptive and explanatory means of our ‘lifeworld’ (see also n. 20, 21 below).
That is to say, our ‘lifeworld’ concept of, say, ‘table’ is composed of two, inextricably entangled, elements: the table qua ready-to-hand object, essentially involving its character as an instrument we use to satisfy our purposes, and the table qua proper and common sensible properties (i.e. considered as an object of sensory and affective experience) (see also O’Shea 2009). Our Sellars-inspired move here is precisely to break our ordinary ‘lifeworld’ concepts in those two parts in order to highlight the fact that this latter component can be radically transformed by successor scientific-image concepts. Yet, a true Sellarsian’s ultimate purpose, as I understand it, would be to reunite ‘lifeworld’ concepts, preserving their phenomenological character while at the same time changing our conception of what this phenomenology really is about (by altering our conception about its material vehicles) and eventually incorporating it in the phenomenological level itself (i.e. to the way we conceive of ourselves as persons-in-the-world).
This is ultimately because ordinary describing of ‘lifeworld’ objects goes hand in hand with explaining, and it is this latter dimension of discourse that is reflected in the ‘descriptive ontology of everyday life’. Recall that, according to Sellars, a necessary condition for an expression having a descriptive role is being situated in a ‘space of implications’, which, moreover, for Sellars, must be counterfactually robust ones -that is, they must extend to possible cases; otherwise the putatively ‘descriptive’ term could not be applied to new cases. And an essential feature of ‘the space of counterfactually robust implications’ is that that the inferences involved therein are explanatory -that is, they can be appealed to, precisely due to their counterfactual structure, in explaining the applicability of one description on the basis of the applicability of another (see n. 2). In this sense, the ‘lifeworld’, the world in which we do our everyday living, includes, as an essential part of its very meaning, substantial (and scientifically open-ended) conceptions about the causal and dispositional -or, in general, modal- powers of its ‘objects’.
For example, exercising the empirical concept of a cat in experience is necessarily connected with seeing the cat as distinct from its background, as an animal that is capable of moving independently of other objects in the environment, and moving in ways distinctive of a cat. It is interesting, in this connection, to notice that accounting for the place of normativity within perceptual experience amounts to understanding the way in which the ‘material inferences’ that involve the concept of a ‘cat’ (which, according to Sellars, constitute the meaning or content of the concept of ‘cat’) are implicated in the very perceptual experience of a cat.
Another related aspect of this inextricable entanglement of normative elements in the content of perceptual experience is that if it is conceded, as it must be, that the back side of objects is bodily present in our perceptual experience (rather than being just the content of a belief or a thought about what is perceptually present) it seems plausible to further suggest that what is bodily present in perceptual experience is the (normative) fact that when I perceive an object, the latter is an object of perception not only from the point of view in which I happen to see it, but rather, from ‘everywhere’, as it were (i.e. from the sum-total of the points of view in which it can possibly be seen). This means that even our most elementary perceptual encounter with an object is an expression of a certain perceptual ideal to which our individual perceptual experiences ought to approximate (see also Kelly 2005).
Here it should be stressed that the fact that the productive imagination groups together proper and common sensibles into certain kinds of wholes does not imply that non-conceptual sense-impressions do not have any kind of form or unity (in the sense of pattern-governed structure). Indeed, Sellars insists that the proper and common sensibles as they are actually present in non-conceptual sense-impression have their own kind of (non-conceptual) unity, which cannot be reduced to any kind of conceptual unity or synthesis. To this end, Sellars introduces the concepts of σ-dimension and τ-dimension in an attempt to provide a characterization of our non-conceptual sensory representations of space and time. Non-conceptual representations of space (σ-dimension) should be understood as non-spatial complexes of extensionless and colourless impressions in contrast to intuitive conceptual representations of space which are to be understood as representing literally extended objects situated in an external and public space. Corresponding distinctions should also be made in the case of non-conceptual representations of time (τ-dimension): the latter should be understood as complexes of co-present impressions which do not themselves stand in relations of temporal succession, but which, nevertheless are related in a way which is isomorphic to and represents temporal succession. By contrast, intuitive conceptual representations of time are understood as directly representing relations of temporal succession between external and publicly identifiable objects (Sellars 1967a, p. 7, 28–29, 230–238). The bottom line of this analysis is that when the productive imagination creates perspectival image-models and ‘groups the proper and common sensibles together into certain kinds of wholes’ it is working upon an already radically non-conceptually structured (synthesized) level of actually existing proper and common sensibles. The qualitative difference that is brought about by the special synthetic power of the productive imagination upon the non-conceptually structured proper and common sensibles does not consist in any qualitative alteration of the properties of proper and common sensibles, but instead has to do with a novel ‘organisation’ (in imagination) of these properties which are perceived as belonging to a unified object (situated ‘out there’ in the external, public world) which stands over against a subject.
I take it that, interestingly enough, a parallel Sellarsian story can be told as regards the relation between dispositionalist and ‘occurrentist’ accounts of our affective or ‘appetitive’ experience. Both sensory and affective experiences belong to the wider category of non-conceptual ‘raw feels’ and they can be considered as having a similar structural role in Sellars’ overall philosophical system (see also Hurley 2000, pp. 299–301).
Again, this is not to say that the material content in question is irrelevant to the specification of the content of that to which we normatively respond or that in response to which we act in a ‘ready-to-hand’ manner.
The parallel case regarding affective experience would be the construction, by the productive imagination, of ‘inner’ objects with the analogous proper and common sensible ‘affective’ qualitative properties, i.e. of what are commonly called ‘memories’, ‘emotions’, ‘desires’, ‘drives’ and ‘impulses’. In this case kinaesthetic normativity would consist in the responsiveness of the perceiver’s ‘inner bodily awareness’ to the internal and external environment in accordance with the perceiver’s implicit expectations about the possible transformations of his affective experiences (at the non-conceptual level) that occur as a result of his actions, of changes in other affective experiences or of corresponding transformations of external objects and processes.
Here we must also stress that 1) the notion of ‘accessibility’ in our claim to the effect that ‘kinaesthetic presence’ is phenomenologically accessible should not be understood in an empirical or psychological sense, but rather in a more ‘impersonal’, transcendental sense (see also n. 14), and 2) what is thereby ‘phenomenologically accessible’ (and not reducible to scientific-image explanations) is a) that there is such a thing as a ‘kinaesthetically present normativity’ at work in perception, and b) the structural phenomenological fact that this kinaesthetic normativity is the ‘organizing or synthesizing principle’ (of the ‘productive imagination’) that binds the features of the proper and common sensibles together as features of this object and ‘directs’ them to an external world that is essentially connected to a perceiving subject while at the same time always ‘transcending’ the latter. Yet, the specific manner in which this ‘grouping’ is done and its ultimate categorial status in the ‘order of being’ are amenable to reconceptualization by scientific-image explanatory concepts. In this sense, I take it that the notion of ‘kinaesthetic normativity’, though phenomenologically infused, avoids falling prey to the pernicious Sellarsian myth of the categorial Given.
Interestingly enough, in this case, the scientific-image descriptive and explanatory resources in question would themselves have to be scientifically recategorized in order to be able to explain 1) the emergence -out of non-sentient nature- of sensory and affective qualitative ‘spaces’ which are causally implicated in the behaviour of sentient organisms, and 2) the ability of those qualitative spaces and corresponding image-models to appear as other than they really are, namely as features of a non-perspectival external world which stands over against a subject of experiences.
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Christias, D. Can ‘Ready-to-Hand’ Normativity be Reconciled with the Scientific Image?. Philosophia 44, 447–467 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9691-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9691-1