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Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind

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I have come back to this essay by Sellars again and again for over thirty years, and have never failed to impressed and inspired. Sellars can always get me to think at a deeper level than I'm used to. Second only perhaps to Wittgenstein in influence, Sellars is a philosopher's philosopher: understanding him requires a thorough grounding in the history of philosophy, and this essay in particular takes it for granted that you understand 20th century empricism and "sense data" theories pretty well. Even so, the writing style can be both dense and difficult, but reading it aloud can untangle any number of tricky passages. If you're not quite so well versed in history of philosophy, a similar critique can be found in J.L. Austin's "Sense and Sensibilia," which is more accessible but not nearly as profound. In the course of showing the futility of finding incorrigibile foundations for empirical knowledge in sense experience, Sellars simultaneously develops a strictly behavioristic psychology that legitimizes all the goodies, all the mental vocabulary, that folks like Skinner forbade. A tour de force unequalled in 80 years. Bob Brandom's explicatory essay is very helpful, and untwists several tricky knots in the text.

I do not understand why it is always said that Sellars' language was so difficult. I found his philosophical style quite straight-on. Unfortunately, Sellars' main work is punctuated by some passages of superficial and/or incorrect reasoning, at which passages some may assume that they do not understand Sellars' argumentation - though it "has to be profound" (because of Sellars' reputation). The most important issue in this essay is the impossibility of reporting sense impressions without using language (with all implications that come along with that), and the repercussions of this circumstance on the philosophy of logical empiricism in its early stage (though Sellars obviously thinks his ideas impact on all forms of empiricism, which is not true). Along that line, Sellars has many good points that should be considered in the philosophy of science and in common sense reasoning, yet his reputed final dismantling of the "myth" of the given never takes place; in Sellars intentions, maybe, but his arguments are a far cry from being a stringent refutation. They are simply too superficial and too colloquial for that. (Cf. Putnam's model-theoretic arguments against realism, for a contrast.) What is really unfortunate for Sellars' essay is that, in this edition, it is framed by Rorty and Brandom. The philosophical humorist Rorty has contributed a foreword in an attempt to assimilate Sellars serious philosophical project into his radical-relativist historicizing outlook of philosophy, thus completely misleading the unknowing reader. The bright, but misguided, Brandom offers a study guide, which is no study guide, but an attempt to direct the reader at those aspects of Sellars' essay, which Brandom's own inferentialist philosophy is supposed to stem from. Unfortunately, these aspects are exactly the most questionable. So, while Sellars' essay is a profitable classic of analytic philosophy, the reader should be warned to read Rorty's foreword and Brandom's study guide cautiously and critically and to thoroughly consider, if these really reflect Sellars' essay correctly.

"Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" is an essential epistemological text of the twentieth century. It is difficult: each sentence is difficult. Sellars is said to have shown the existence of a private language by writing in one. The guide by Brandom does not much clarify and simplify the argument of Sellars for two reasons. It is impossible to do this. And Brandom wants to and does contribute significantly to Sellars scholarship. Sellars writes for the professional philosopher. If you plan to be such, or if you want to encounter philosophy at its most profound, you should study the book.

There are two areas to comment on with regards to this printing of "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (EPM). The first is the presentation style and the second is the content. On the presentation: Rorty's introduction is very helpful in preparing one to read the book. The large print will be a welcome relief to anyone who has squinted at the pages of *Science, Perception and Reality* which also includes EPM. However, the omission of the footnotes Sellars added in 1963 is very odd. Also, the endnote markers are not superscripted but merely placed in parentheses which can be confusing since at other times a number in () is not referring to an endnote but rather to a numbered paragraph. Be forewarned that Brandom's study guide is not exegetical as one might hope. It is an interpretation of the work. On the content: This book is definitely not for beginners, and one can become quickly annoyed at Sellars' use of cliches as references to philosophical systems. Also, Sellars will make reference to specific philosophers without actually naming them, making it difficult to figure out just what specific advocation of a view he is rejecting (See for example Section 30). Other times, he will specifically mention who he has in mind, such as in Sections 8-9 when he brings up the name of A.J. Ayer. It should go without saying that the claims Sellars makes are by no means easy to grasp and they are even less easy to accept. A note on my low ranking of this book: I gave it a 4 mostly because of Sellars' difficult writing style, and not because of the shortcomings in presentation mentioned above.

The review is just on Sellars' essay. Rorty as usual hasn't said much about things. So if you know Sellars via Rorty, drop this one and read Derrida instead. Brandom is still quite interesting, but there are many others who want to talk about him.

From the first time I read the essay, I was wondering why Sellars's text is so ambiguous and incomprehensible. He studied mathematics before he came to study philosophy. But unlike Quine, you saw not even a vestige of mathematical elegance in his clumsy writing. His way of reasoning is just way too un-analytical. Soon I came to the conclusion that he knew very little of contemporary logic. Philosophy is a very funny discipline. Sometimes, the difficulty in understanding a philosophical argument points to the difficulty at the heart of the real philosophical problems and sometimes, it results from a confused way of thinking about matters. It takes time for readers to be able to determine from which the difficulty originates. Initially, I thought the difficulty in reading Sellars is a genuine one, but I found later that most of the time it wasn't.

In many cases, as one reviewer below says, he simply mis-reasons and in an awkward way. The way he construes regress argument in memory judgment is one such example.

Other times, he simply confuses himself or omits argument all together. In SS20 for example, after a long discussion on conceptual priority of the "is" over the "looks" , he proposes and defends conceptual holism against adverbial theory; which is a variant of epistemological foundationalism. Adverbialists such as Chisholm characteristically endorse the foundationalist thesis that there are some basic beliefs which justify all other non-basic empirical beliefs. They think perceptual beliefs of the kind "x looks R to me", "x appears R to me" are candidates for such basic beliefs. This thesis, problematic as it may sound too Cartesian, by itself doesn't lead them to commit to conceptual atomism. It only tells us that the belief statements of the form " x looks R" are justificatory prior to belief statement of the form " x is R". The thesis about epistemic justification doesn't tell us anything about the conceptual priority of one term over the other, so defending conceptual holism can be perfectly compatible with the position Sellars argues against. Sellars seems to conflate epistemological question with conceptual question here. There are mistakes of this kind here and there in this essay. In another place, he simply didn't argue well enough. He commits to a semantic thesis that a word's meaning is its functional role to defend his "psychological nominalism". This thesis which is now called "functional semantic theory" is itself a very controversial thesis and you need a book-length argument to just defend the view.( btw, which is what Brandom was trying to do in recent years) But Sellars simply sketched out the basic idea and did no defense on his claim.

Even though Sellars' original presentation is far from clear, the idea of "myth of the given" is quite interesting nontheless. The idea is roughly that any mental items (propositional or non-propositional) that play epistemically justificational role in justifying empirically significant statements couldn't be independently given. It depends for its justification on other propositions. No candidate of the given could serve the role it was meant to serve. So on this construal, not only sense-data can't be given, but judgments such as "it looks red to me" or "I have a pain in my stomach" can't be given as well. So his critique on the myth of the given is clearly broader than any arguments against sense-data theory and probably broader than private language argument. The problem is that it may be too broad. If you endorse Sellars' critique of MOG along with his psychological nominalism which states that any kind of awareness (conscious or unconscious) is linguistic affair, then you need to deny any awareness of pain on the part of creatures who don't use language-like systems like us. Not only that he also had to expel sensations all together from the realm of reasons, hence from objects of awareness. (he prefers to use the term "sense impression" or "direct experience" instead of sensation in this text) and thinks of it as "postulated" instead of "directly experienced". According to this view, then, phenomenal quality such as pain has obviously no place in our realm of reasons because it contains no propositional content, let alone linguistic content, but can we seriously claim that we are not even aware of them because all awareness is propositional in form?

Warning: The text doesn't include the footnotes Sellars added in 1960's. The added footnotes are significant enough for undertanding subsequent debates between Sellars and his critiques (Chisholm, Firth etc). If you want a full text of this essay with added footnotes, get "Science, Perception and Reality" instead.