Table Of ContentTHE PHiLOSOPHY OF WILFRID SELLARS:
QUERlES AND EXTENSIONS
PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES SERIES
IN PHILOSOPHY
Editors:
WILFRID SELLARS, University o[ Pittsburgh
KEITH LEHRER, University o[ Arizona
Board o[ Consulting Editors:
JONATHAN BENNETT, University o[ British Columbia
MAN GIBBARD, University o[ Pittsburgh
ROBERT STALNAKER, Cornell University
ROBERT G. TURNBULL, Ohio State University
VOLUME 12
WILFRID SELLARS
THE PHILOSOPHY OF
WILFRID SELLARS:
QUERIES AND EXTENSIONS
Papers Deriving from and Related to
a Workshop on the Philosophy 0/ Wilfrid Sellars
held at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
1976
Edited by
JOSEPH C. PITT
Department 01 Philosophy and Religion, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and
State University, Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A.
D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY
DORDRECHT: HOLLAND / BOSTON: U.S.A.
LONDON:ENGLAND
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under titIe:
The Philosophy of Wilfrid SelIars.
(Philosophical studies series in philosophy ; v. 12)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. SelIars, Wilfrid-Congresses. I. Pitt, Joseph C.
B945.s444P48 191 78-16544
ISBN-I3: 978-94-009-9850-6 e-ISBN-I3: 978-94-009-9848-3
DO I: 10.1007/978-94-009-9848-3
Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company,
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All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 1978 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
Softcover reprint ofthe hardcover I st edition 1978
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREFACE ~
JOSEPH C. PITI / Introduction: Through the Looking Glass 1
BRUCE AUNE / Sellars on Practical Inference 19
w. DAV ID SOLOMON / Sellars' Defense of Altruism 25
C.F. DELANEY / Basic Propositions, Empiricism and Science 41
JAMES W. CORNMAN./ Sellarsian Scientific Realism Without Sensa 57
THOMAS A. RUSSMAN / The Problem of the Two Images 73
GARY GUTIING /Scientific Realism 105
MICHAEL HOOKER / Peirce's Conception of Truth 129
WILLIAM A. ROTTSCHAEFER / Ordinary Knowledge and
Scientific Realism 135
AUSONIO MARRAS / Ru1es, Meaning and Behavior:
Reflections on Sellars' Philosophy of Language 163
JAY F. ROSENBERG / Linguistic Roles and Proper Names 189
KEITH LEHRER / Sellars on Proper Names and Belief Contexts 217
MICHAEL J. LOUX / Rules, Roles, and Ontological Commitment:
An Examination of Sellars' Analysis of Abstract Reference 229
JEFFREY SICHA / Logic: The Fundamentals of a Sellarsian Theory 257
BIBLIOGRAPHY 287
INDEX 293
vü
PREFACE
In early November 1976 a workshop on the Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars
was held at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacks
burg, Virginia. Sponsored by the Department of Philosophy and
Religion, the College of Arts and Sciences and the Research Division of
the University and organized by Professor Joseph C. Pitt, its aim was to
provide a forum in which views of Professor Sellars could be discussed by
a group of scholars fully acquainted with this work. Aside from the twelve
invited participants, the workshop was attended by interested parties
from as far away as Canada. The papers contained in the volume rep
resent the results of the discussions held that weekend. With two excep
tions the contents are extensively rewritten and revised versions of infor
mal talks and presentations. (Rosenberg's paper is here in its original
complete version. Rottschaefer was unable to attend.) This collection is
not then the proceedings but the final product derived from work initiated
that weekend. The papers reftect both the spirit of the workshop and the
work of Professor Sellars in that they represent the fruits of an intense and
multi-faceted dialogue. Professor Sellar~' presence and whole hearted
participation left us all with more than enough food for thought and a
deepened appreciation of both the man and his philosophy.
Special thanks are due Thomas Gilmer, Associate Dean of Research
for The College of Arts and Sciences and Randal M. Robertson, Dean of
Research for the University for their support; Mr. Thomas Adams for his
general assistance; Mrs. Betty Davis for clerical assistance; Keith Lehrer
for his enthusiasm; my wife, Donna for her patience; and especially Wil
frid Sellars.
Blacksburg
January, 1978
ix
JOSEPH C. PITT
INTRODUCTION: THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS
Wh at makes a philosophical system interesting? After all is said and
done, the answer seems quite simple and perhaps even trivial: it survives.
Survival in this context, however, involves becoming an integral part of
the dialectical interchange that constitutes the history of philosophy.
Such a system is one you can't ignore. It has become a permanent part of
the dialogue. It may do so, for example, by raising a problem that seem
ingly defies solution, as with Hume and the problem of induction. Or the
mann er of presentation, the style, if you will, may direct our attention not
only to a range of issues but also to the attempts to deal with them. In
these latter cases, no matter which way you turn that particular percep
tion of the situation forces you to take note of issues you otherwise
wouldn't. To construct such a system requires a rare talent.1 It not only
requires ftuency in the contemporary idiom and a thorough familiarity
with the history of the associated problems, but needs some means by
which to forge the varied and often conflicting dimensions into a unified
piece. Equally important is the ability of the system to withstand attacks
without collapsing into tautologies or retreating behind idiosyncratic jar
gon and still retain enough vitality to demand attention.
Needless to say, such systems are few. And given the subject matter of
this volume, it ought to be equally clear that a number of us believe that in
the work of Wilfrid Sellars we have something that approaches this ideal
type. In an important sense it is much too early to tell. History is the judge
here. But even if the philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars should come to little
more than a footnote to Plato for future generations, it is one of the most
invigorating features of the contemporary landscape.
Wilfrid Sellars' work ha<; captured the imagination of many of us for
diverse reasons. There is no doubt that SeIl ars is a modern thinker, fully
equipped with the tools of twentieth century philosophy. But he is also a
classical philosopher in the mode of Aristotle and Hegel; his work is not
just historically based but encyclopedic with allusions to both past and
present. For historians of philosophy much of his historically oriented
material smacks of heresy. This is primarily the case because they fail to
appreciate the fact that Sellars is actively engaging in conversation with
these giants of the past. He does not treat them merely as fossils to be
1
Joseph C. Pitt (ed.), The Philosophy ofWilfrid Sellars: Queries and Extensions, 1-18.
All Rights Reserved.
Copyright © 1978 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht. Holland.
2 JOSEPH C. PITT
carefully excavated, dusted and pieced together. And, if just one factor
had to be identified as the major source of attraction to Sellars, it might
weIl be this sense of the aliveness of all of the history of philosophy and its
relevance to contemporary problems. Sellars has given us back our sense
of fun and excitement in being Philosophers in the Grand Sense and not
just nit-pickers in a highly analytic tradition. But make no mistake, Sellars
is also an analytic philosopher of the most demanding kind. It is just that
his treatment of issues involves a refined sense of how it all hangs
together. With that sense comes the perspective which diCtates the choice
of the problems as weil as that one feature which causes so much frustra
tion for the single-problem-oriented philosopher, the promisory note.
But the notes have a way of being cashed in. Furthermore, they are
usually notes on details, not on the character or direction of the overall
scheme.2 The scheme itself is not just difficult to characterize, but some
might say impossible to capture simply, given its baroque structure. And
while the full blown system is still not complete, there are a few salient
features which stand out and through wh ich we can find fairly direct
access to the rest. The remainder of this discussion is a sketch of those
features I find to be of particular value in this way and an attempt to tie
them into that one basic aspect of his treatment that makes Sellars c1early
a philosoph er concerned with the conceptual problems of contemporary
man.
1. IMAGES
There appear to be two articles by Sellars that have served as fuIcra about
wh ich a large number of discussions of his work have turned. These are
'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind' [8] and 'Philosophy and the
Seien tificImage of Man' [11]. U nfortuna tely, in the course of concentra t
ing on the problems of intensionality in the former or the conflict between
the scientific and manifest images in the latter, the main problem, the one
at the heart of the arguments has been largely overlookerl. At best, it has
been quickly acknowledged and then ignored, it being unfashionable to
worry about the big question of the general character of man's relation to
the world. But that is the problem Sellars addresses there and elsewhere.3
It is the question for which all the rest constitutes the pieces of an answer.
Moreover, it is in his manner of conceiving the problem that we can iden
tify the device I alluded to earlier-the peculiarly distinctive aspect ofhis
system that not only provides the unity but commands our attention no
matter what the individual failings of his solutions to distinct problems
may be.
INTRODUCTION 3
Sellars is a contemporary man. He lives in a world dominated by sci
ence. The problem of coming to some accomodation with this world is not
merely one of leaming to live with what one sees and feels, but with those
things postulated by theorists in order to explain what we sense. In many
ways it is a much more complex world than that of Aristotle or even Kant,
for Sellars refuses to take the easy way out by denying'either the cognitive
significance of scientific inquiry or the uniqueness of man. And so the
problem is to reconcile them. And there is the rub. For to be honest in
one's commitment to the fruits of science, one must acknowledge that
man hirnself is a legitimate subject of scrutiny. Honesty also compels us to
admit that man as a natural phenomenon is not the whole story. For there
is an important sense in which there are more than cognitive considera
tions which guide man's decisions, Le. man is a moral agent as weH.
The unifying theme SeIl ars exploits is the simple expedient of seeing
man as a thinking agent who acts deliberately. The kinds of actions are
diverse in the extreme, but the manner of reasoning culminating in those
actions has a common structure.
One way to reconstruct Sellars' view is to take his theory of practical
reason as the starting point. Its basic princip1es are common to reasoning
in moral circumstances as well as scientific. But to take this approach
would require rewriting all of Sellars without his subtlety and, hence,
would not serve as an opening through which we might quickly gain
access to his views. Another approach, the one I will follow, is to see how
his theory of practical reason is intertwined with the example he con
stantly uses to discuss the development and elaboration of a conceptual
scheme, i.e. his account of science.
For Sellars, the development of science is a refinement of what he calls
"the framework in terms ofwhich, to use an existentialist turn ofphrase,
man first encountered himself-which is, of course, when he came to be
man." ([11], p. 6) In this original framework man described and ex
plained the world around hirn anthropomorphically. The refinem~nt of
this image consisted in the gradual depersonalization of nature on the one
hand, and, on the other, a systematizing of our empirical observations
into generalizations. This latter enterprise Sellars calls the empirical
refinement of the original image.
By empirical refinement, I me an the sort of refinement which operates within the broad
framework of the image and which, by approaching the world in terms of something like the
canons of statistical inference, adds to and subtracts from the contents of the world as
experienced in terms of this framework and from the correlations which are believed to
obtain between them. ([11], p. 7)
