This article examines how Quine and Sellars develop informatively contrasting responses to a fundamental tension in Carnap’s semantics ca. 1950. Quine’s philosophy could well be styled ‘Essays in Radical Empiricism’; his assay of radical empiricism is invaluable for what it reveals about the inherent limits of empiricism. Careful examination shows that Quine’s criticism of Carnap’s semantics in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’ fails, that at its core Quine’s semantics is for two key reasons incoherent and that his hallmark Thesis of Extensionalism (...) is untenable. The tension in Carnap’s semantics together with Quine’s exposure of the severe limits of radical empiricism illuminate central features of Sellars’s philosophy: the fully general form of the myth of givenness, together with Sellars’s alternative Kantian characterisation of understanding; the full significance of Carnap’s distinction between conceptual analysis and conceptual explication, and its important methodological implications; the specifically pragmatic character of Sellars’s realism; and Sellars’s methodological reasons for holding that philosophy must be systematic and that systematic philosophy must be deeply historically and textually informed. This paper thus re-examines this recent episode of philosophical history for its philosophical benefits and systematic insights. (shrink)

Summary In recent years, the concept of simplicity in perception has acquired a leading role, above all thanks to scholars linked to Bayesian modeling and to theories like structural information theory derived from information theory. Unfortunately, two misleading ideas made their way into the discussion: that in perception, simplicity is equivalent to Prägnanz and that Occam’s razor plays a role in the simplicity of percepts. Here it is shown that in Gestalt theory, simplicity is only one of the factors of (...) Prägnanz and that the use of Occam’s razor is improper, because it applies only to the theories that generate, in this case, a percept, and not to the product of the theory. (shrink)