Andrew Chrucky, Critique of Wilfrid Sellars' Materialism, 1990

THE OUTLINE

      As a guide for the reader, I will outline the presentation of my topics and the general forms of the arguments.

      The first chapter is concerned with classifying Sellars' position within the traditional epistemological and ontological rubrics. However, since the traditional rubrics are prone to ambiguity and vagueness I offer definitions for key classes. My claim is that Sellars is a Non-Reductive Scientific Materialist.

      The second chapter introduces the major problem for Sellars' Materialism. This can be seen from a global or a local perspective. The global problem is to reconcile two apparently incompatible conceptual frameworks: the Manifest and the Scientific Image. The local problem is to solve the mind-body problem. My objection at this level is that Sellars tends to write as if the Manifest Image were identical to a Common Sense Image. In writing reflectively about this, he does not make this conflation; but in his unreflective use of the Manifest Image he does tend to make the conflation. My reason for not identifying the two Images is that the Common Sense Image recognizes the existence of irreducible absolute processes, while the Manifest Image works with an Aristotelian substance ontology. I argue that Sellars' attempt to reduce "event" talk to "substance" talk fails in the case of absolute processes. Moreover, talk of unreduced absolute processes is needed as a model for understanding and explaining perceptions (a topic covered in chapter 9). So there is an apparent incoherence between Sellars' claim that talk of absolute processes can be reduced and his appeal to such talk as a model for understanding perception.

      In the third chapter I discuss the topic of ontological commitment. Two aspects of this discussion are important. The first is that Quine's criterion of ontological commitment as determined by the range of the variables is rejected by Sellars on the basis of how quantification is to be interpreted. Quine has what is called an objectual or referential interpretation of quantifiers, while Sellars has what is called a substitutional interpretation. The second point is probably best put in the following way. For Quine ontological com- mitment -- relative to some conceptual framework -- is determined by variables, while for Sellars by names.

      But there is a wider issue to be faced: which conceptual framework to adopt? Ontological commitment will then become relative to this wider concern.

      In the fourth chapter I distinguish the subproblems for the reconciliation of the global Manifest-Scientific Image distinction, and the local subproblems for the mind-body problem. For the global problem, I propose that we substitute for the Manifest Image a Common Sense Image which has a mixed ontology of events and substances. For the local problem, I note the distinction between the sensorium-body and the intentionality-body subproblems.

      In chapter five I focus on the intentionality-body problem. My main concern is to demarcate a conceptual from a non-conceptual intentionality. The source of this demarcation is in Sellars' own writings. I believe that a large portion of the polemics over intentionality -- and here I have in mind Sellars' polemics with Lewis, Chisholm, and Firth -- can be accounted for by a failure to demarcate non-conceptual from conceptual intentionality.

      In chapter six I try to locate Sellars' position in current philosophical psychology. Sellars defends both functionalism and introspection. He tries to give a theoretical account of our introspective knowledge of thoughts and sensations on a behavioristic basis. My conclusions are that his argument does not go through and that perhaps all non-overtly linguistic thoughts are non-conceptual.

      In the seventh chapter I offer a transcendental argument for a version of epistemological foundationalism. My main concern is to answer the most serious objections against foundationalism, such as those of Laurence Bonjour and Nelson Goodman.

      In the eight chapter I clarify the concept of the Given in Sellars. And I both defend and criticize his position on the Given. I defend Sellars' argument for the rejection of the Given from William Robinson's attack; but I defend C. I. Lewis' position on the Given from Sellars' attack. In the Lewis-Sellars case, the issue about the Given is muddled by a failure to make a distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual intentionality.

      In the ninth chapter I deal with the epistemological and the ontological problems of perception. The conclusion I reach on the epistemological problem is that sensa are given through a phenomenological reduction. The conclusion I reach on the ontological problem is that Sellars is correct in his view that sensa exist as causal mediatory absolute processes in perception.

      In the tenth, concluding chapter, I spell out the implications of my disagreement with Sellars on epistemology. The main implication is that there is an evolutionarily produced genetic make-up in those animals, at least, which rely on learning for survival such that they are endowed with innately structured intractable representational systems. I call this view Animal Realism. This view has the further implication of restricting the range of conceptual alteration -- a thesis which Sellars apparently denies.

      As concerns my overall assessment of Sellars' attempt at a synoptic system of philosophy, my conclusion, at best, is that Sellars' position appears to be incoherent in several places. I say "appears" rather than "is" with emphasis for two reasons. The first reason is that Sellars is a self-conscious dialectical writer in the Hegelian sense. It could very well be the case that the aspects of his system which I find to be incoherent should be seen, from a more sympathetic perspective, as the theses and antitheses which are yet to be overcome. If that is the case, then my conclusion will have to take the form that Sellars' system still needs to be pushed to a synthesis. The second reason for my saying that there is an appearance of incoherence rather than an actual incoherence is that even if (and this is a big "if") Sellars' himself does not recognize the need to reconcile the apparent incoherences, we, the readers, can. I would add that the incoherences can be reconciled by adding various qualifiers, such as a restriction to a particular language (conceptual framework), or a particular level of sentient life. I cite these kinds of qualifiers because they are the sorts of qualifiers Sellars himself uses, and it seems to me that these are the kinds of qualifiers which would in fact be needed to overcome the apparent incoherences which I find in Sellars.

      Having said this by way of introduction, the dissertation's main charge (see chapter 5) is that Sellars has been interpreted as arguing for the thesis that there is no awareness independently of a conceptual framework, a claim which is equivalent from Sellars' perspective to the claim that there is no awareness independently of a conventional language. However, in some of his more recent essays, Sellars argues for animal representational systems which are independent of conventional languages, and which are possessed by human beings. Now this distinction is no small point. The distinction throws into a new perspective the epistemological issue of whether empirical knowledge has foundations, and this, then, raises the need for a reinterpretation and a reassessment of Sellars' whole philosophy.

      This brings to the forefront something that I have been assuming about Sellars' philosophy, namely, that he has not changed his mind on his fundamental positions in the course of nearly 40 years of writing. If there is a decisive change of mind, it would be his Carus Lectures, delivered in 1978. Laurence Goldstein, for example, has written, "If I'm not much mistaken, these [Carus] Lectures represent a radical change in certain of Sellars's leading ideas, or at least a sharp quickening of their Heracleitean flux."{6} The suspicion that Sellars had changed his mind was well expressed by Jay Rosenberg who wrote: "'What have you done with the real Wilfrid Sellars?' asked a participant in a symposium at which Sellars presented portions of the Carus Lecture materials."{7} Rosenberg's own assessment is: "For while the story Sellars tells in the Carus Lectures is not, I think, radically new and different from that told in his earlier works, it is in those earlier works, I am tempted to say (Sellarsianly) only as the mature oak tree is in the acorn."{8}

      I am assuming that Rosenberg is right. This is to say that I have taken all of Sellars' writings as so many fragments of a philosophical system. There are only one or two places where Sellars has expressed a change of mind, and the fact that Sellars in his last writings reaffirms the position of his earliest writings suggests that at least in his own mind he considered all his writings to be elaborations of one system.


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