Abstract
Critical attention to Wilfrid Sellars’s “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (PSIM) has focused on the dubious Peircean optimism about scientific convergence that underwrites Sellars’s talk of “the” scientific image. Sellars’s ultimate Peircean ontology has led Willem deVries, for instance, to accuse him of being a naturalistic “monistic visionary.” But this complaint of monism misplays the status of the ideal end of science in Sellars’s thinking. I propose a novel reading of PSIM, foregrounding its opening methodological re ections. On this reading, the central point of the paper is to accuse figures like Wittgenstein and Strawson, whom I call “analytical quietists,” of taking the unity of intellectual endeavor as somehow given. Such unity as is forthcoming is, Sellars tells us, a task. I conclude by noting that a structurally similar accusation of too easily presumed unity emerges at the end of the paper, against a familiar sort of anti-relativistic moral theorizing. Thus, Sellars’s conception of the task of philosophy is, at least potentially, a point of surprising ethico-political significance as well.
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Notes
Joe Rouse, for instance, claims that “Sellars’s philosophical vision predominantly sets the terms in which naturalism is nowadays conceived and discussed” (2015, 8).
Sellars often invokes Eddington’s two tables: cf., PSIM 35; LT §33 (p. 118); PH 98. (Throughout I cite Sellars’s works by now standard abbreviations. Details can be found in the bibliography. I also never alter his italics.)
Brandom (2015, p. 85) detects a “unity-of-science view, championed by Neurath and Carnap among others, that sees the sciences as forming a reductive explanatory hierarchy” with physics at the bottom, and the sciences getting progressively “softer” as one goes up. It is worth noting that Neurath’s unity of science view was not hierarchical (Cartwright, et al. 1996, chap. 3); as Christias (2018) argues, Sellars’s view is non-hierarchical as well. See §6 below. (As I note there, deVries is more careful than Brandom in this regard.)
Indeed, deVries compares him to Hegel: where Hegel spiritualizes nature, he says, Sellars naturalizes spirit (deVries 2017b, p. 1653). This comparison, to which I return briefly in §8, is explicitly on the table in deVries’s earlier discussion as well.
See O’Shea (2012, p. 150): “Sellars succeeded in developing the problems in more detail than he did his own envisaged solutions to those problems,” and deVries (2005, p. 7): “There is not much direct argument in the paper, perhaps, but it is a compact presentation of the underlying framework that pervades his thought.” O’Shea refers to it as Sellars’s “flagship article” (2007, p. 178), and Brandom (2015) twice refers to it as a “manifesto” (18, 23). As all of these authors emphasize, Sellars is a systematic philosopher. A subtheme of my discussion will be that overemphasizing this familiar truth threatens to obscure the self-standing contributions of individual pieces to that whole. This has happened with PSIM: Sellars defends a crucial claim more explicitly here than anywhere else. Similar comments apply to Stefanie Dach’s heterodox (2018) treatment. Dach argues quite plausibly that orthodox readings take too seriously the dichotomy of scientific and manifest images; my reading, while differing in substantial ways from hers, does take them in something more like the spirit Dach would advise. But she also has systematic interests and so does not, so far as I can tell, try to identify the self-standing point of PSIM. (Though this is not directly relevant to my argument, emphasizing systematicity also threatens to efface changes in Sellars’s view over time. Peter Olen (e.g., 2016) highlights this difficulty.)
P. Kyle Stanford (2012, p. 31), an epistemologist of science with instrumentalist leanings, is flummoxed by this dialectical nonchalance. Elsewhere (cf., LT, TE, SRI, SRT), Sellars discusses both Ernest Nagel’s “irenic instrumentalism” and, later, Bas van Fraassen’s “constructive empiricism” (no doubt a species of instrumentalism) at length. But surely, if Sellars is defending scientific realism here, Stanford is right to see setting the instrumentalist aside as irresponsible. See §4 below for Stanford’s diagnosis of this oversight. I shall argue that Stanford’s complaint is really about pluralism (like deVries’s), and so his instrumentalism is incidental.
This identification “would be even more straightforward than the identification of the physical things in the manifest image with complex systems of physical particles” (34). At least in this discussion, there is no suggestion that, for instance, the normative status of conceptual thinking is not being accommodated to the scientific image. This is admittedly a fault line in Sellars’s thinking, and I am sympathetic to readings that would downplay his tendency to characterize as scientific his application of semantic theory to the philosophy of mind. (See my (2017) for argument that Sellars’s view is ultimately incoherent.)
Though Seibt (2016, p. 190) reminds us of CDCM §52: “The conception of the world as pure process [...] remains a regulative ideal [...] because science has not yet achieved the very concepts in terms of which such a picture might be formulated.” We should resist the temptation to see the hypothesis in question as a determinate, e.g., testable, thesis, as opposed to a programmatic suggestion.
Elsewhere, Sellars offers independent motivation for his metaphysics of pure process. Thus Seibt (2000) argues that the process ontology is the central thesis of the Carus lectures, with color-experience (merely) as a good exemplification of it. (On the alternative reading, the problem of color-experience is the central task of the lectures, which the process ontology is posited to solve. This lines up with Stanford’s understanding of PSIM.)
As deVries (2012) notes, the scientific image is supposed to be complete. Thus, the need for stereoscopic vision is apparently incompatible with the pretensions of the scientific image.
The echo of EPM in PSIM is noted by deVries (2012, p. 6). He does not draw out the implication I am stressing.
Olen and Turner (2016, p. 2072) note this as a problem for interpreting the status of normativity in Sellars. As they argue, the details of Sellars’s theory of meaning are irrelevant to this point. While the “irreducible core of the framework of persons” does not give way to scientific treatment, conceptual thinking does. Perhaps Sellars ought not to have thought this, but the sketch here is consistent with the view he had defended since the early ‘50s at least (i.e., SRLG), and which he continued to defend into the early ‘80s (BLM). For more on this see n. 31 below.
See, e.g., Tim Crane (2012, p. 21) for characteristic applause of Sellars’s catholic attitude.
SE 214. History is one of his examples. In The Notre Dame Lectures (pp. 178–181), he is recorded as making a series of fascinating comments on this score (in response to unrecorded questions, so the context isn’t always entirely clear). For instance: “I think that the true historian is one like Collingwood, who writes the history of Britain and writes about what it is to write the history of Britain! One who thinks about what it is to have evidence for a historical argument” (180).
My model is, e.g., Penelope Maddy’s (1997) “naturalistic” account of debates about realism.
A reviewer voices a (plausibly) Sellarsian thought, that the viability of a local instrumentalism is evidence of some distance from the end of inquiry. If this is right, it highlights the methodological irrelevance of considerations about the end of inquiry. (See the next section.)
Brandom (2015, esp. 74–81), for instance, urges that other Sellarsian insights undermine this identification, and deVries (2016, p. 12) argues that Brandom has missed an Hegelian alternative. (Christias (2018) offers a slightly different take, which he thinks might absolve Sellars of any complaint here.)
See Rouse (2015, 205 ff.) for this way of putting the point. Rouse claims that Sellars identifies a theory “with some position or set of positions within the space of reasons,” whereas practically construed scientific understanding is located in the “ongoing reconfiguration of the entire space” (206–7). But if the crucial contrast is between conceptually conservative and conceptually productive conceptions of science, Sellars is to be located on the productive side of that divide. (This is compatible with complaining, nevertheless, that he is not sufficiently attuned to the role practice plays in producing novel scientific concepts.)
See TE, esp. 152, for more on the contrast between identifying sciences and identifying their content.
In CE (his earlier paper on the concept of emergence co-authored with Paul Meehl), Sellars defended the logical possibility of emergence of just this sort.
See NO (esp. 109–111). Sellars notes that this has has been a permanent fixture of his thinking, and refers us to RNWW. I would also note his talk of “possible histories” in CIL. Possible histories replace possible worlds precisely because the latter tend to insinuate a putatively dubious substance ontology. Pressing on his transcendental argument leads, I suspect, back into the thicket of his process ontology, which is only barely canvassed in PSIM. If the argument of PSIM is good, I think, it ought to be independent of that controversial thesis. Anyway, the argument I am interested in is independent of it.
Compare Rouse (2015, pp. 340–341). Christias is able to finesse this point by emphasizing that Sellars is focused on the various scientific images of humanity in particular. But I take it the pluralist might see in the idea that there is a biochemical image of persons an instance of the problem.
Scientists have other “neutral” purposes too, notably of the broadly “engineering” sort—trying to figure out how to do things. The purposes of explanation are what Sellars and (following him) I am most interested in; even if more practical concerns are dominant, it doesn’t change the logic of the point I am making in the text.
A reviewer helpfully notes that such questions are liable to be answered by appeal to evolutionary theory. I certainly have no objection to that. The discussion in the text is a response to an objection the reviewer levels based on this observation.
This is perfectly consistent with the claim that it is “part of the business” of, for instance, the historian “to face and answer [e.g., methodological] questions which are not, themselves, in a primary sense historical questions” (2). This is why, even when the historian is not moved by some meta-level question, the philosopher is still well-served to attend carefully to his meta-historical reflections. This case also allows me to reiterate that the point in the text is not restricted to inter-disciplinary scientific research, in Sellars’s sense of the latter term.
Compare, e.g., Rorty (1970, 69–70): “By contrast [to Sellars], the Wittgensteinian tradition sees no clash, and sees the task of philosophy as dissolving the appearance of such a clash”; and Kolb (1978, p. 382): “A more Wittgensteinian approach might hold that the various kinds of talk need not be reconciled because they do not offer competing descriptions at all.” More recently, O’Shea connects the point to Stebbing and, as he puts it, “so-called ‘ordinary language’ philosophers,” who maintain that “simply properly distinguishing between these frameworks by itself resolves the crucial problems” (2007, 194, n. 6). One self-described quietist who I intentionally leave out of this comparison is John McDowell, whose Wittgenstein (and Wittgenstein-inspired quietism) is subtly different from the familiar line of thought I am blocking in. (See n. 30 for explanation.)
Later Sellars characterizes the “most basic form” of the myth of the Given as the view that if one “is directly aware of an item which has categorial status C, then the person is aware of it as having categorial status C” (FMPP 11, §44). Recalling that at the outset of EPM he had allowed that in addition to sensible objects, many other things (principles, etc.) could be characterized as given, we can reformulate the current point in the terms of this later definition. To have a take on what is a unified world does not mean one has a take on it as unified. Sellars’s quietist maintains that what unity the “world” has must figure in our conception of it already.
This is a view that Sellars repeats many places. In addition to PSIM, I have cited both SM and CE as places where pluralistic arguments are made (see, for instance, n. 21 and the text surrounding it above.)
See n. 22 above. John McDowell (2005, p. 99) notes that this is connected to Sellars’s Kantianism: the ultimate scientific image plays the role of Kant’s noumenal realm (as Sellars says, “the real or ‘noumenal’ world which supports the ‘world of appearances’ is not a metaphysical world of unknowable things in themselves, but simply the world as construed by scientific theory” (PH 97)). In his (1994, p. 40), McDowell famously insisted that “the faculty of spontaneity carries with it a standing obligation to reflect on the credentials of the putatively rational linkages that” govern one’s use of it—in my terminology, there is no reason to expect the problems that inspire intellectual curiosity to be exhausted: the obligation to reflect is perpetual. McDowell held up Peircean thinking as a way to “stop short of accepting that the obligation is perpetual.” Thus, McDowell’s self-styled quietism might be understood as a radicalization of Sellars’s criticism of quietism. Though I am not prepared to defend this claim in greater detail now, it explains why I do not mention McDowell above as a quietist in the sense of Sellars’s critique.
In BLM Sellars characterizes “the ‘language’ of bees” as “brought about by natural selection and transmitted genetically”; he references his early discussion of this point in SRLG (esp., §§13, 14), which in turn elaborates some suggestive remarks in LRB (e.g., n. 2, at 300/140: “most discussions in philosophical circles of the motivation of behavior stand to the scientific account (whatever its inadequacies) as the teleological conception of the adjustment of organisms to their environment stands to the evolutionary account”). Thus, Sellars took the explanatory paradigm initiated by Darwin to open up, for the first time, the possibility of a serious scientific account of conceptual thinking.
Nevertheless, something is amiss in deVries’s suggestion that what blinded Sellars here was his unwillingness to engage seriously with Hegel’s thought. Referencing Hegel, deVries observes, would not have been conducive to the conversations Sellars wanted to have. But given this, it is even more striking that Sellars’s (admittedly infrequent, and typically critical) citations locate Hegel towards the center of his self-conception. As deVries himself notes, in addition to the passage I am discussing in PSIM, there are no less than three crucial citations in EPM: the Hegelian image of the serpent represents the immediate alternative to the foundational imagery that underlies the version of mythical Givenness primarily at issue in that paper; a critical “interlocutor” accuses Sellars of incipient Hegelian meditations; and at the outset Hegel is, though the “great foe of immediacy,” nevertheless not “altogether free” of “the framework of givenness.” (It is worth wondering just what version of the myth of the Given Sellars thinks Hegel fell for.) And deVries also tells us that Sellars exhibited no surprise when he (deVries), while writing a dissertation on Hegel under Sellars, uncovered many parallels between the two. While this is not evidence of deep engagement with Hegel, it would make it surprising if, as deVries almost suggests, Sellars had simply failed to consider a possible Hegelian alternative. See n. 34 below for an alternative take.
Dach (2018, §5.3) suggests this problem is an artifact of the (inessential) rigidity of the two images, and so need not be foisted on Sellars himself. She notes (585) that elsewhere Sellars does seem to acknowledge the problem, though. She does not note that the tension she is concerned with arises within PSIM itself.
If I am right, Sellars has Hegel—understandably—falling foul of the version of the myth of the Given I said he attributed to the analytical quietist. Whether that is right or not, where deVries has Sellars treating Hegel as too intellectually foreign to merit careful engagement, as Hegel figures in PSIM at least, Sellars’s reading anticipates more recent “pragmatic” and otherwise not hyper-metaphysical readings. Sellars’s concern about Hegel is, in the same breath, one about Wittgensteinian philosophy.
He continues: “[...]suitably enriched by the dimension of practical discourse” and adds a Heideggerian footnote, that this “is illustrated by the practical dimension of such common sense concepts as that of what it is to be a hammer.” (In a round table discussion published in The Notre Dame Lectures, Sellars speaks of a “Heideggarian-Deweyian kind of point”, here about a functional characterization of tables (429).) This passage from SRI is the crucial hint motivating deVries’s very important (2005, 274 ff) discussion of “practical reality” in Sellars. See §10 below.
A.W. Carus (2004) wonders why Sellars won’t follow Carnap here in endorsing the more radical claim that “we can shrug off the weight of the past and create our own concepts. We can build our own human world, within the natural world that constrains it” (351). He sees Sellars wavering on a “radical-conservative” axis, where Carnap is near to the radical pole, and Wittgenstein the conservative pole. One reason Sellars is hesitant about the eliminativism we might associate with Carnapian radicalism is that it presupposes that we are ready to “shrug off the weight of the world.” But it is insightful of Carus to note that the contrast here is an ethical one. I return to this below (n. 41).
Not to mention his unself-conscious (and grating to contemporary political sensibilities) use of “man” in, e.g., the title of the paper and the discussion throughout of “man-in-the-world.” All of this language is easy to chalk up to the sexism of intellectual culture in the 1960s—perhaps Sellars is no worse than average here. But he is certainly no better.
The crucial question is how to reconcile this unhappy part of his thinking with the occasional Heideggerian aside (see n. 35 above).
Sellars himself registers a similar concern: cf., SM 226 on the difference between an epistemic and an ethical community.
Whether our moral realism should be “conservative” and commonsensical—like the inoffensive cosmopolitanism I am exploring—or a more radical product of Carnapian conceptual innovation is quite incidental to this point.
Even Solomon, who claims to be isolating an argument for altruism, notes that Sellars’s ethical theory “provides not so much a defense of this thesis as it does a context in which the thesis can be sprung on the reader” (1978, p. 25). Happily, I should note, Jeremy Koons’s (2019) book on Sellars’s ethics will make these dense writings more accessible to the philosophical community. Koons explains clearly why Solomon’s search for an argument for altruism is “the wrong way to conceptualize what Sellars is doing” (177). But on Koons’s analysis it is a mystery why Sellars struggles with the construction of the moral community (cf., esp. 288). Elsewhere I plan to spell out why, pace Koons, his treatment does not foreclose on the task I see Sellars setting us.
Olen and Turner (2016) comment on Sellars’s talk of a “decision procedure with respect to specific ethical statements” (SM 222), that it is “a result in principle only, and not merely a result that erects a moral standard that is not of this world, but a standard in a community not of this world” (2069). Insofar as this is intended to be a criticism, it corresponds to the familiar criticism that the Peircean end of (scientific) inquiry plays no normative role in our thinking. I can’t explore the details here, but suffice to say that my earlier attempt to reconstruct Sellars’s view without essential appeal to the end of inquiry should pay dividends on this question too (see n. 30 and the text surrounding it).
As he says (still overly optimistically): “interesting points remain to be made about the tribocentricity of moral judgments in the not too remote past, and on what it would be to change from speaking of a being as ‘it’ to speaking of it as one of ‘them’ in a sense which radically contrasts with ‘one of us’, and from there to speaking of the being as a member of the encompassing community” (SM 220n1).
A slightly different version of this passage concludes IIO (p. 212) as well.
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Acknowledgements
This paper owes its existence to a long conversation with Bill deVries (which he might since have forgotten) at the 2016 Pacific APA: his patient and very skeptical questioning convinced me that my interpretation of PSIM was both viable and novel, worth writing up. Thanks also to an audience at the 2017 meeting of the Society for the Study of the History of Analytic Philosophy, especially Griffin Klemick; my colleagues Pascal Massie, Gaile Pohlhaus Jr, and Keith Fennen; and Marius Stan, all of whom helped improve the paper in one way or another. Finally, the insightful and detailed comments of anonymous reviewers—from this journal and another—are reflected on almost every page.
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Hicks, M.R. Wilfrid Sellars and the task of philosophy. Synthese 198, 9373–9400 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02646-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02646-8