Wilfrid Sellars was one of the most prominent American philosophers of the 20th century, whose contributions are compared in importance and originality with those of C.S. Peirce. The recently published compilation of key articles written between 1953 and 1981 offers a comprehensive overview of Sellars' work in several major philosophical areas. His philosophical writing is complex and systematic, with recurring themes, intertwined and continually developing, almost organically integrated. Despite the editors' assurance that it collects some of the most accessible of Sellars' writings, the most suitable audience for this book is still comprised of professional philosophers and advanced students. Organizing Sellars' work into neatly defined categories is an impossible task, but the editors, K. Scharp and R. B. Brandom, manage to approximate it as well as one could hope for.  This is the best, most useful feature of the book, along with an illuminating, well-written Editors' Introduction.

The first part, titled "Language and Meaning", consists of four articles dealing with the concept of meaning and what it is for a linguistic expression to mean.  According to Sellars, users and learners of a language need not understand, be able to express, or even know the semantic rules of that language, in order to be able to speak it properly. The distinction between behavior that conforms to a rule and behavior that obeys a rule allows him to explain language-using behavior without falling into the Wittgensteinian conundrum of the infinite regress in having to explain how one learns the rules of following those first rules, and so on. Sellars takes a naturalistic approach to language use and language acquisition, according to which one learns and conforms to the semantic rules of the language-game in the same way a bee conforms to pattern-governed behavior without being able to identify the pattern.

The second part contains three articles and is titled "Abstract Entities". Here is where Sellars develops his nominalistic view, on the background of his account of meaning as functional classification. He introduces Jumbalese, an ideal language in which the roles of all syntactical elements are clearly defined, and in which predicative expressions are expendable. Abstract singular terms can be understood in terms of distributive singular terms, which, in their turn, can be related to physical objects. Any claim about abstract entities can be understood as a claim about linguistic expressions. This strategy, what Sellars calls "syntactical therapy", allows one to make use of abstract singular terms without being committed to the existence of abstract entities.

In the four articles grouped in the third part, "Mind, Language, and the World", Sellars develops his view of the non-conceptuality of sensation. He distinguishes between the "realm of the conceptual", in which the relation of signifying is primary, and the "realm of the real", in which the main relation is that of picturing, and argues that sensations belong in the latter. For him, there is an isomorphism between the knower and the known, but sensations, while being necessary for conceptual activity, are not part of the logical order. He gives his famous critique of the "myth of the given", arguing that there are no given elements in sense-impressions. Finally, he develops his theory of representational systems, based on his general theory of predication as a function of the role played by names in a particular language.

The next three articles form the section "Science and the Mind". After rejecting both the classical and the 'new" phenomenalism, Sellars adopts what the calls the "direct" phenomenalism, which stipulates that concepts initially applicable to physical objects are extended to apply to sense impressions. He wishes to reconcile direct phenomenalism with the bold idea that, strictly speaking, macrophysical objects do not exist – there are only microphysical entities and sense impressions. For this, he endorses a weak version of the mind-body identity theory, but shows it is still inadequate for explaining the "logical space" of "raw feels" in an account of human beings seen as neurological systems. For Sellars, there are two images of our place in nature: the manifest image, portraying people and macroscopic objects, interacting and behaving by habit, and the scientific image, depicting microscopic entities, conforming to natural laws. The scientific image emerged from the manifest image, and the task of philosophy is to reconcile them, clarifying their relation. 

"Kant", the final section of the book, comprises three articles, which offer both commentaries on various aspects of Kant's theory of experience and, on this background, Sellars' development of his own ideas with regard to perception, language, conceptual thought, and the role they play in our knowledge.

© 2007 Elisabeta Sarca

Elisabeta Sarca, ABD in philosophy at Boston University

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Categories: Philosophical