Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn (Key Contemporary Thinkers)
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 0745630030
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The work of the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars continues to have a significant impact on the contemporary philosophical scene. His writings have influenced major thinkers such as Rorty, McDowell, Brandom, and Dennett, and many of Sellars basic conceptions, such as the logical space of reasons, the myth of the given, and the manifest and scientific images, have become standard philosophical terms. Often, however, recent uses of these terms do not reflect the richness or the true sense of Sellars original ideas. This book gets to the heart of Sellars philosophy and provides students with a comprehensive critical introduction to his lifes work.
The book is structured around what Sellars himself regarded as the philosophers overarching task: to achieve a coherent vision of reality that will finally overcome the continuing clashes between the world as common sense takes it to be and the world as science reveals it to be. It provides a clear analysis of Sellars groundbreaking philosophy of mind, his novel theory of consciousness, his defense of scientific realism, and his thoroughgoing naturalism with a normative turn. Providing a lively examination of Sellars work through the central problem of what it means to be a human being in a scientific world, this book will be a valuable resource for all students of philosophy.
“Epiphenomenalism” does not posit a non-physical1 substantial entity but only nonmaterial “sense-particulars” traditionally called ‘sense-data’ or “sensa” (FMPP III.88). These particulars are ‘epiphenomenal’ insofar as they are conceived to be caused by physical2 brain processes but to cause nothing themselves. Finally, “Emergent (or Wholistic) Materialism” holds that sensing is a state (rather than a particular or an object) that “is correlated with, but not reducible to, a complex physical2
bites into the apple. On the other hand, if we reject all of the philosophically and scientifically problematic variations on soul–body dualism, how are we to explain the ultimate homogeneity of our sensory experiences, not to mention our capacities for rational thought and purposive action, compatibly with the materialistic scientific image of the world? Even if we should not be tempted down the road of soul–body dualism, Sellars contends that there are additional reasons beyond those canvassed
related philosophical attitudes.12) P. F. Strawson's characteristically admirable article, ‘Perception and its Objects’ (1979), is a clear and pertinent example of this general irenic strategy as applied to the overall clash between the manifest and scientific images. Strawson suggests that we should regard the common-sense and the scientific-theoretical accounts of the world, which he admits do ostensibly conflict with one another, as simply “two discrepant descriptions, each valid from its own
the fact that they are associated with (married to) classes of objects” (ITSA 314). To the contrary, Sellars contends, the resulting lists or pairings of linguistic and non-linguistic items in such model-theoretic accounts, while very useful for certain purposes in formal logic, give us as little insight into the nature of meaning and truth as a correct list of married couples would give us into the nature of a wedding ceremony or the matrimonial bond. For Sellars the crucial first step toward
all of Kripke's contentions) in his Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language that Noam Chomsky's conception of innate grammatical ‘competence’ does not by itself resolve the rule-following issue. For as Kripke remarks, “what is important here is that the notion of ‘competence’ is itself not a dispositional notion. It is normative, not descriptive,” and consequently “our understanding of the notion of ‘competence’ is dependent on our understanding of the idea of ‘following a rule’ ” (Kripke