CHAPTER 2

THE MANIFEST AND THE SCIENTIFIC IMAGES

The aim of philosophy, Sellars tells us, "is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term."{1} This presupposes a relation of persons living in a world -- a relation which Sellars expresses by the phrase 'man-in-the-world', and which philosophers try to describe, analyze, and explain.

      What is this 'man-in-the-world'? Let me introduce the notion of an Alpha World to characterize the "common sense" world of any group of people, which includes various beliefs and modes of explanation. It includes beliefs in the hum-drum of the passing show and the beliefs in supernatural entities, and it includes mechanistic as well as teleological explanations.

      Since Sellars' interest is in philosophical self-reflection, the Alpha World which he is interested in is his own -- that means he is interested, at most, in the Alpha World of Western Civilization; instead of, let us say, the Alpha World of the Hopi Indians. Furthermore, Sellars shows no religious inclinations for a belief in supernatural entities, so his world is austerely limited to a core of restricted common sense. But Sellars also has faith in the power of science to get at the truth about the universe, and he specifically believes in the existence of postulated microentities. To carve out of the Alpha World those features which are to serve his particular interests -- and these as reflected in the dialectical history of philosophy -- Sellars introduces two regimented conceptual frameworks: the Manifest and the Scientific Images.

      He offers the Manifest Image as the regimented common sense conceptual framework from which we can begin to do philosophy, and he gives us three reasons for this. The first is that it is the core framework in which we live -- the Lebenswelt. It is the framework in which "man came to be aware of himself as man-in-the-world."{2} Second, it is the framework in which man tries to understand the universe and his place in it by correlational science. Third, it is the common root framework of the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition in Western philosophy based on the concept of substance. He also offers the Scientific Image as the framework of theoretical science which seems to compete with the Manifest Image for our allegiance. As Sellars presents it, it is intended to represent the asymptotic limit of theoretical scientific development, and for this reason, Sellars sometimes refers to it as the Peircean Image. The basic individuals of this developing image are the microentities of current microphysics, whereas the idealized basic individuals are non-Whiteheadian absolute processes.{3}

      The images are regimented according to the following assumptions. First, Sellars believes that there cannot be a conceptual framework without a language. So the origin of conceptual frameworks coincides with the origin of language. Second, Sellars believes that language is rooted to publicly observable features, so introspective and theoretical talk has a derivative status.

      These assumptions lead to the idea that the basic categories of the Manifest Image must be publicly observable things in spatial, temporal, and causal configurations with each other. And the mode of explanation is restricted to correlational induction. The basic individuals of this Image form the 'great chain of being' stretching from persons and other animate objects to various inanimate physical things. But reflecting on the findings of anthropologists and historians which point to a widespread human belief in animism (anthropomorphism), Sellars posits the existence of an Original Image in which all things are conceived to be persons. The Manifest Image is, then, from this perspective a historical truncation and categorial refinement of the Original Image through de-personalization.{4} And it is clear that pride of place must be given to the concept of a person in the Manifest Image.

      Sellars stipulates that the Manifest Image is to exclude all postulated entities. By contrast, the Scientific Image is by definition constituted by the introduction of postulated entities. The paradigms of posited entities are the microentities of contemporary science: the molecules and their atomic and sub-atomic constituents. The use of the term 'scientific' here may be misleading, suggesting that the Manifest Image does not include science. But this would be a wrong understanding. Perhaps the better way to look at the distinction between the Images is to think of both Images as species of a Super-Scientific Image. The Manifest Image is then that portion of the Super-Scientific Image which is restricted to the sort of science of correlational induction catalogued by J.S. Mill. And the Scientific Image is that portion which postulates new entities to account for the nomological anomalies of correlational induction. For example, the molecular theory of gas behavior is able to explain why gases follow statistical laws rather than deterministic ones.

      Scientific theory construction (in the postulated sense) develops from the Manifest Image model by analogical extensions. However both Images are based on a substance ontology. Their radical break occurs with the positing of absolute processes (events) rather than particles in the Scientific Image. Of course, as with the Manifest Image, Sellars prescribes the types of allowable scientific techniques in the workings of the Scientific Image; so that the posits of atoms by Leucippus and Democritus, for example, have little to commend them as a Scientific Image. Yet despite this, Sellars does believe that the positing of new entities for the purpose of explaining phenomena is a rudimentary groping for the Scientific Image.

      To get a better understanding of the Images, it is worth while to examine how Alan Donagan misconstrued the Manifest Image, especially since Sellars took the effort to correct him. Donagan mistakenly identified the Manifest Image with an Alpha World, and naturally argued that there are many 'Manifest Images' -- indeed as many as there are different beliefs about the makeup of the universe. With that presupposition, he went on to charge Sellars with a bad dichotomy: "This distinction between the Manifest and the Scientific Image of man seems to be drawn in the wrong place." {5} The reason he gave is this. Sellars stipulated that the Manifest Image is not to include the belief in posited entities; only the Scientific Image is to contain such beliefs. So the distinction between the Images seems to boil down to whether or not posited entities are included. But if the Manifest Image is equated with common sense (Alpha World) beliefs (as it is in Donagan's mind) than the exclusion of posited entities from the domain of common sense has counterexamples in the myriad religions which posit all types of supernatural beings. For this reason, in Donagan's estimate, the Manifest-Scientific Image distinction is badly drawn by Sellars.

      To understand how Donagan was misled, we must remember that each philosopher is free to define words and phrases as he wishes. Sellars uses the phrase "Manifest Image" in a technical sense. Donagan however took it in a non-technical manner. So the misunderstanding turns out to be linguistic. The problem Sellars' position raises concerns the place of such conceptual frameworks as exemplified by mythologies and religions, and also, I may add, by various pseudo-scientific and philosophical Weltanschauungen. The answer is that the Manifest and the Scientific Images -- by being idealizations -- are very selective. One of the purposes for these Images is to serve verisimilitude; that is why calling them species of a Super-Scientific Image is apt. And for Sellars the Manifest Image is to include only that segment of common sense that philosophers in the Platonic tradition have found to be plausible. And the same demand is made of the Scientific Image: only those techniques and results which contemporary science finds fruitful and plausible are included in the developing Scientific Image. And this means that all other explanatory schemes and categorial frameworks are, by stipulation, excluded both from the Manifest and the Scientific Images. In short, the place of mythologies and religions, which gave Alan Donagan a problem of placement, is in neither of the Images.{6} There are all sorts of beliefs and quasi-scientific theories which have room neither in the Manifest nor in the Scientific Image.

      What then is the purpose of introducing the technical terms Manifest Image and Scientific Image? The introduction of Images is in keeping with his philosophical method which, as he puts it, is to construct models by which to understand the many dimensions of experience. And because, as he thinks, models tend to be procrustean, the philosophical dialectic consists of improving models.

      When Sellars introduced the Manifest-Scientific Image distinction he was thinking of Weberian ideal types as offering a logical reconstruction of common sense and science. Max Weber meant by an ideal type an idealization, a fictitious concept which nothing in the world instantiates without qualifications. The reason for introducing such a concept is to aid the understanding and to help in explaining. In science the use of ideal types is represented by the various laws of science. None of them is instantiated without various qualifications. For example, laws of motion are true only in a vacuum, where there is no friction, no extraneous forces, etc. But despite the fact that laws are idealizations, they are useful, they work -- up to a degree. Sellars has a similar task in mind for the concepts of the Images. They are idealizations intended for explaining his own Lebenswelt, the dialectics of Western philosophy, and the progress of science. Sellars' use of the phrase 'Manifest Image' is a technical use of a metaphoric phrase. The word 'manifest' is used to suggest that the thing talked about is common, obvious, apparent, universally known; while the word 'Image', as Sellars explains, is purposefully used to suggest two meanings: first that an image is a copy of something, and not the original; and second that an image, if it is an accurate likeness, could be a true representation. So far there is nothing here to preclude us from identifying the Manifest Image with 'common sense', and it is a tempting identification to make. But it is a mistake which, as we will see, many of Sellars' critics have made; including Donagan and even Sellars himself at times.

      However, when Sellars is self-conscious about the meaning of 'Manifest Image', he is careful to stipulate how he wishes it to be understood. Sellars is interested in two kinds of systematic beliefs: a segment of common sense which is literally common, but explicitly expressed in the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition; and the findings and procedures of hard-core correlational science. He is interested in defining and critically examining these ideal types.

I. POLES TO THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

      Sellars' concern is to distinguish one sense of 'common sense' which will serve in understand the history of philosophy. He thinks the philosophical dialectics can be understood as a conflict or tension between what, as a first approximation can, be called common sense and science. He says the Manifest-Scientific Image distinction gives poles to the history of Western philosophy. It does. But this characterization, however, strikes me as biased: the Manifest-Scientific Image distinction is a tension within a Naturalistic philosophy. This becomes clear once we substitute for the 'Manifest Image' the phrase 'correlational science', and for 'Scientific Image' the phrase 'theoretical science'. The tension Sellars is talking about is the tension between correlational and theoretical science. The broader perspectives, I believe, are given by viewing the history of Western philosophy as a tension between a Naturalism and Supernaturalism; or as a tension between Mechanistic and Teleological Explanations; or as a tension between fact and value, as does John Dewey in his Quest for Certainty.{7}

      However, from a Sellarsian perspective, animistic and supernaturalistic beliefs, as well as teleological explanations can be understood as either retrogressions to the Original Image or as attempts to extend the use of the core category of a person either to the whole universe or a postulated part of it -- as is done in such religions as Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. So conceived, one could, indeed, view the history of Western philosophy as a conflict between the common sense view and science. But thus seen, the role of science could be taken to be a skeptical challenge to the overextension of the common sense categorial scheme. And though I think there is something to be said for this view of the history of Western philosophy, Sellars would assign the role of critic to the categorial refinement of the Manifest Image itself, and not to the Scientific Image.

      The history of philosophy, according to Sellars, has for the most part been a preoccupation with the category of substance -- both as descriptive of experiences and as prescriptive of posited entities. By stipulation, Sellars limits the Manifest Image to the use of the category of substance for descriptions of ordinary experience; and by this means he sidesteps the discussion of supernatural entities such as souls and gods. At most the positing of supernatural entities would fall into a pre-nascent Scientific Image; not into a Scientific Image because Sellars prescribes the sorts of explanations which fall into it, and which would exclude supernatural explanations. Teleological explanations of the sort envisioned by mythologies fall outside the scope of the Scientific Image. Therefore mythologies because they rely on teleological explanations, fall neither into the Manifest nor the Scientific Image.

      Sellars, however, sees the history of Western philosophy as a conflict between common sense and science. But the precise sense in which this is true is not clear from a superficial reading of Sellars. When one thinks of common sense as applied globally to groups of people, one's first thought is of the Weltanschauung of a people, which -- whatever else it may include -- minimally includes their beliefs concerning the 'furniture' of the universe and how this furniture is interconnected. This is how Donagan mistakenly interpreted the notion of the Manifest Image, taking the phrase as being synonymous with 'common sense' (understood as a Weltanschauung). But this interpretation of the Manifest Image is not what Sellars wants to differentiate in common sense. Sellars is not interested in mythologies or ideologies: he is interested in how philosophers have coped with giving a description and interpretation of their Weltanschauung. Sellars is interested in the systematic reconstructions of Weltanschauungen, i.e., with philosophies rooted in common sense. But if this were all there was to be said about Sellars' interests, then Homer's or Hesiod's poetry would qualify as a systematization of Greek mythology. But obviously this is not what Sellars is after. He is not thinking of a systematic mythology or a theology. The error of this line of thought is in thinking that common sense refers to some grouping of beliefs about the make up of the universe. He is not interested in systematizing beliefs. Rather, Sellars is trying to talk about those concepts and the principles which make any belief about the universe possible. To borrow a phrase from Collingwood, he is seeking the 'absolute presuppositions' of beliefs. Sellars assumes that there is an ideal set of absolute presuppositions (the Manifest Image) which is discovered or constructed (I am not sure which{7a}), and to which the categorizations of philosophers are approximations.

      The core of common sense is that there are physical things and persons which have properties and which enter into relations. The Manifest Image is not only to contain the categorial scheme of substances, properties, and relations (among other things), but also the canons of induction as codified by John Stuart Mill.{8} The Manifest Image is itself a scientific image -- a scientific image limited to a 'common sense' categorial scheme.

      These Images, for Sellars, provide the ideal poles for an understanding the history of Western philosophy. On the one hand, we have the Manifest Image built around the category of substance; on the other hand, we have the Scientific Image built around the category of absolute process (event).

II. DEVELOPMENT OF THE IMAGES

      Sellars attributes a history to both Images. The Manifest Image developed from an Original Image (in which all things are categorized as persons). He sees the refinement of the Manifest Image in the Platonic tradition; with Aristotle as the philosopher of the Image, and that Oxford-type philosophy as represented by Strawson is a contemporary embodiment of this Image. Philosophia perennis is construed to be the view endorsing the reality of the Manifest Image.

      Both the Manifest and the Scientific Images are being groped for in an intertwined manner in the history of philosophy. There is no temporal (historical) demarcation between the Images. In fact, Sellars thinks of the Scientific Image as arising out of the demands of the refined Manifest Image. Neither the Manifest nor the Scientific Image is a historically finished product: both are the idealizations of two developments. The Manifest Image is the idealized systematizations of a philosophical 'common sense', while the Scientific Image is the idealized asymptotic limit of scientific ontological development. Present science is still working with a problematic particle-wave ontology. It has not as yet penetrated to an absolute process (event) ontology. It may be said that Sellars is anticipating the development of microscience as tending towards an absolute process (event) ontology.

A. CATEGORY OF PERSONS

      The Manifest Image is ultimately built around the concept of a person. However, analyzing the concept of a person and specifically stating the relationship between a person and his or her body are difficult problems. Sellars thinks of the Manifest Image as itself having a history, and about which falsehoods can be believed. Being wrong in one's analysis of persons, according to Sellars, results in the Platonic and Cartesian dualism of substances, which any Materialism must avoid.

      An excellent formulation of the complexities involved in understanding the concept of a person is given in Sellars' article "Aristotelian Philosophies of Mind."{9} As I understand Sellars, the concept of a person (and how it is in the main understood by Aristotle) is the concept of a being endowed with a highly complex system of functions: a cluster of habits, dispositions, capacities and abilities expressing themselves in social linguistic communication. To have a mind is to have these functions. And the distinctive trait of these functions is their intentionality.

I shall without further ado state my agreement with the classical thesis (represented, among others, by Descartes and Brentano) that the distinguishing feature of mental facts is intentionality or aboutness.{10}

The word 'intentionality' is a technical philosophical term. It refers to the fact that psychological acts have two characteristics. The first characteristic is that psychological acts are transitive -- they are always directed at some propositional state. For example, 'I believe that it will rain'; or 'I want an apple' (which would be paraphrased by Sellars to 'I want it to be the case that I have an apple'). The second characteristic is that the propositional states may not be true. Thus, for me to believe that it will rain, does not require that it rain. Or, for me to want an apple, doesn't require that I get an apple, or even that there are apples.

      Intentionality, for Sellars, though explainable through a behavioristic model of language acquisition, is an unanalyzable feature of semantical language, whose role is to express functional classifications of linguistic tokens. And the language of intentions, though too explainable by behavioristic learning theory, is part of practical discourse which needs to be added to descriptive and explanatory discourse.

      For Sellars a person would be any material embodiment of certain functions; of which the primary is the ability to have conceptual thoughts: "conceptual thinking (which is the distinctive trait of man)."{11} Although we primarily call human beings 'persons', this practice is not long standing, nor does it have to continue. Primitive men and civilized men have believed that there are non-human persons; as is testified by the animistic conceptions of primitive men, and the more sophisticated beliefs of Christians who think of souls and God as persons. Our past practices testify that our concept of persons need not be limited to humans, and our more future oriented cyberneticians see nothing wrong with calling an ideal robot a person. In view of Sellars' regular appeal to computers as models for persons, he would agree the following sentiment expressed by Paul Churchland:

If machines do come to simulate all of our internal cognitive activities, to the last computational detail, to deny them the status of genuine persons would be nothing but a new form of racism.{12}

      It seems that the concept of a person is closely connected with certain types of behavior and functioning. Sellars is so concerned to emphasize the importance of cognitive functional attributes of persons -- to the extent that in "The Identity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem" he introduces the central nervous system as a 'core person'. A core person is understood as the primary subject, whereas the whole person is the derivative subject of conceptual functions.

      The ways we relate to persons presuppose that they have the ability at least to responding to praise, chastisement, advice, etc. In the primary sense we expect persons to be able to understand and to use a language. Once this presupposition is expressed, it is clear that, for Sellars, a human being lacking a language is at best a potential person. As Sellars put it, "the members of a linguistic community are first language learners and only potentially 'people'."{13} And all entities -- human or not-which are capable of using or understanding a conceptual language like ours are persons.

      Now if a person is characterized primarily by the ability to use language, the problem, of course, is to specify what a language is. In some senses the concept of a language is broader than that of a person. After all we sometimes attribute languages to animals, e.g., the language of bees or dolphins. Although we use the term 'language' to include the communication between animals, we are not ready also to call these animals persons. So if persons are to be distinguished from non-persons by the use of language, it must be a distinct type of language which demarcates us from animals. And of course the paradigm of this is the human language. But at the same time it is conceivable that a non-human could use a human language, and it is possible that a human cannot use a human language. I am thinking of a sophisticated robot for the former case, and a brain defective human for the latter. So I think that it is clear that the notion of a person is independent of the notion of a human being. Whether a non-human person would be admitted into our community of persons with all rights and privileges is a peripheral question. Whether someone is admitted into our community of persons depends on how similar that person is to us. "Thus, to recognize a featherless biped or dolphin or Martian as a person is to think of oneself and it as belonging to a community."{14}

      These considerations should disabuse us of identifying in any simple fashion both the Manifest Image with common sense and the Scientific Image with a scientific view. Yet these categories have been conflated by most of Sellars' critics -- producing a fundamental misunderstanding. I have clarified the notions of the Manifest and the Scientific Image by showing that they are philosophical idealizations in some respects of common sense and science, that Sellars introduces them to give dialectical poles to the history of, at least, Western philosophy.

      The notion of a Manifest Image is a hybrid product of trying to satisfy several demands. From his early period Sellars retains the idea that philosophy is normative. He wants to have a normative framework for the history of Western philosophy. And when Sellars introduced the Manifest-Scientific Image distinction in the "Scientific Image of Man", he was thinking of Weberian 'ideal types' as offering a logical reconstruction and a model of common sense and science as satisfying several constraints. These I have distinguished as the constraint of the primacy of a public language, the constraint of faithfulness to the categories of common sense, the constraint of giving poles to the history of Western philosophy, and finally the constraint of demarcating common sense from science at the natural joints for the sake of dialectically resolving their current incompatibility. His critics have, however, forgotten this -- partly because of Sellars' own lapses in his usage, but more probably because they failed to note that the way the distinction was formulated had both important consequences and that it rested on dubious assumptions. The crucial assumption is the constraint of a conventional public language which demands a priority for publicly identifiable material substances and persons. I am conscious both of the detrimental consequences to philosophy in Sellars' way of introducing sensa through the detour of the Manifest Image and of the behavioristic underpinning of this Image; consequently, I am concerned to spell out the bad ancestry of this Image which is the assumption that only a conventional public language is possible, and the bad consequences of accepting it which is a convoluted theory of perception.

      My major objection to the category of the Manifest Image is that it is procrustean in excluding the category of absolute processes (events) even as a dependent category. I believe we have a wider notion of common sense than captured by Sellars' Manifest Image which does include the category of absolute processes (events). I will explain how Sellars attempts to reduce events to substances, and why he fails.

III. THE MANIFEST IMAGE IS NOT THE COMMON SENSE IMAGE

      At the moment I want to characterize the Manifest Image and to dispel the assumption that the Manifest Image is to be identified with common sense.

      I want to distinguish the problems of (1) the phenomenology or description of common sense (which in Edmund Husserl is said to be, at least in intent, presuppositionless), (2) the regimentation of common sense (which works with presuppositions), (3) the explanation of features of phenomenological common sense, and (4) the explanation of features of regimented common sense.

      The self-conscious pursuit of (1) is that of the Scottish school of common sense, exemplified by Thomas Reid; the work of G. E. Moore and G. Ryle (to a large extent); the later Ludwig Wittgenstein who explicitly said that philosophy should be limited to descriptions and leave out explanations; the work of J.L. Austin who called his work a 'linguistic phenomenology'; and Husserl whose technique of bracketing was intended to isolate the descriptive component.

      Sellars is not a descriptive phenomenologist of common sense in this tradition; rather he is allied with the efforts of those in the second category who rectify common sense for some systematic ends and methodological presuppositions. When such methodological constraints play a role, the result is a regimentation program. This, I believe, is also the case with those whom P.F. Strawson in his Individuals calls "descriptive metaphysicians", despite his use of the word 'description'. Strawson, like Sellars, assumes the primacy of a public language. The constraint comes from the requirement of identification and re-identification of individuals in public communication.

      The mark of these philosophers is that they choose within the domain of common sense some primary types of individuals to which other types are reduced. With Strawson and Sellars these primary types are material substances and persons. Strawson sees Aristotle and Kant as within this tradition, and Sellars seems to agree. By rejecting the existence of non-material substances and adopting the linguistic perspective on philosophical problems, Sellars and Strawson become Ontological Materialists. Sellars falls within this rectifying tradition for two reasons. First, his ontology of the Manifest Image is self-consciously within the Aristotelian substance tradition, recognizing the primacy of material substances, living organisms, and persons. By this token, it is not strictly a phenomenological description (despite Sellars statements to the contrary). My specific reason for saying this is that Sellars does not include absolute processes as basic entities in the Manifest Image (though perhaps, as is suggested in Strawson's Individuals,{15} absolute processes may have a dependent status as far as identification is concerned).{16} Second, his ontology of the Manifest Image is committed to a physicalistic regimentation program, which could also be called Nominalism, Semantic Materialism, or Reism.{17}

      It is because Sellars' concept of the Manifest Image is rooted in the Aristotelian tradition and is committed to Semantical Materialism that it cannot be called a descriptive phenomenology.

      Sellars' position seems to be that the Manifest Image, and perhaps the reistic program generally, is to be understood as a corollary of the assumption of the methodological and conceptual priority of a conventional language. I will deny the validity of such a corollary.

      As to explanations, some, like Wittgenstein, believed that philosophy should be concerned with descriptions and leave explanations to the sciences. Sellars disagrees. Philosophers should be concerned with providing theoretical explanations in those areas of inquiry which are neglected by the sciences but which are necessary to epistemology and ontology, as he put it: "Philosophy may perhaps be the chaste muse of clarity, but it is also the mother of hypotheses."{18} This is specifically true about the psychology of the conceptual mental processes. I believe that Sellars is involved in a regimentation program; specifically, that he is providing explanations of regimented descriptions. He is doing (4) and not (3).

A. CONFUSION ABOUT THE MANIFEST IMAGE

      In keeping with his regimentation program, instead of talking about a common sense-science distinction, Sellars introduces a technical vocabulary of a Manifest Image and a Scientific Image. These are to be refined counterparts to common sense and a scientific view relativized to the history of philosophy. Curiously, however, most of Sellars' critics -- at times including Sellars himself -- flatly equate the Manifest Image with common sense. This is a mistake. There is a close affinity between common sense and the Manifest Image, but this affinity, as I have pointed out, is not one of identity.

      The confusion, as I see it, arises in the following way. Most readers of Sellars' philosophy learn about a Manifest-Scientific Image distinction, and because apparently nothing significant hinges on what at first sight seems just a neologistic labeling of a familiar distinction, it is henceforth wrongly associated with a pre-systematic common sense/scientific distinction. That such an identification is widespread is obvious from reading some of Sellars' commentators.{19} Not all commentators, however, endorse the equation.{20} The latter are, of course, correct in repudiating the equation. Though there is a close relationship between a common sense conceptual framework and the Manifest Image; still, as I have argued, it is wrong to equate the two.

      Let me pin-point the source of the conflation. Part of the explanation lies with Sellars' own carelessness in distinguishing the Manifest Image from the common sense framework. Since his earliest papers, he has been involved in analyzing a 'common sense' conception of the world as expressed in empirical languages. For example, before 1960 he tried to analyze the Aristotelian "common sense" view of the world in his "Aristotelian Philosophies of Mind." But when he tried to systematize such a view in "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man," where he introduced the phrase "Manifest Image", he self-consciously had departed from a descriptive phenomenology of the common sense world. He clearly stipulated that the Manifest Image was both an abstraction and an idealization of the common sense view.

      But in some of his post-1960 writing he is careless with the common sense-Manifest Image distinction; as, for example, in these extracts: "the concepts in terms of which the objects of the common-sense or 'manifest' image are identified;" {21} or, "In the course of the argument I defend with reservations, the thesis that the world of 'ordinary experience' (the 'manifest' image) is, in the Kantian sense, phenomenal."{22}

      It is this sliding between using 'common sense' and the 'Manifest Image' terminology in his post 1960 writings which partly accounts for the confusion of some of his critics. The real confusion however stems from the fact that the Manifest Image does in fact encompass a great deal of what we mean by common sense; after all, it was partly designed for this purpose.

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[Go to Chapter 3]

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