Wilfrid Sellars is usually read as claiming that only the unobservable, theoretical objects which science would postulate at the ideal end of inquiry are real. Against this, Willem deVries has suggested that we can develop a notion of practical reality in the context of Sellars's philosophy which would pertain primarily to commonsense objects. I use deVries's suggestion as a foil to clarify Sellars's own commitments about the practical. I show that the notion of practical reality is not necessary to secure (...) the ultimate legitimacy of practical concepts. We can retreat to the less committed notion of practical truth. I argue that the notion of practical truth may not be sufficient to ensure that ultimately legitimate practical concepts are commonsense concepts in Sellars's framework. Nevertheless, deVries's suggestion highlights that Sellars's vision of an ultimate conceptual system may have been richer than is often thought. (shrink)

The article discusses two claims from Seiberth's book Intentionality in Sellars: A Transcendental Account of Finite Knowledge, both of which bear on the question of what it takes to be in touch with the world. Seiberth claims, first, that the philosophical method known as transcendental analysis, which Sellars adopts from Kant, is more basic than Sellars's other methodological commitments, including the method of providing a conceptual analysis of the manifest and the scientific image of man-in-the-world. I ask whether the results (...) of transcendental analysis should be applied to the manifest image. Does Sellars think that the manifest image fulfills the transcendental conditions for any conceptual system that is a) about the world of which it is a part and that b) allows those using it to gain knowledge of that world? On Seiberth's reading of Sellars, the answer seems to be negative. Second, Seiberth claims that there is only one kind of vertical relation between the conceptual and the real, the non-semantic relation Sellars calls picturing. I contest that claim, arguing that Seiberth gives too strong an interpretation of Sellars's denial that meaning statements are relational statements connecting a word with an independently existing object. This precludes Seiberth from seeing that Sellars, just like Kant, is an empirical realist in a robust sense. I also argue that picturing provides a meagre substitute for what in my reading of Sellars we might call vertical 'semantical' relations between words and things after all. (shrink)

In this article, I expound and defend an interpretation of Sellars as a metaethical quasi-realist. Sellars analyzes moral discourse in non-cognitivist terms: in particular, he analyzes “ought”-statements as expressions of collective intentions deriving from a collective commitment to provide for the general welfare. But he also endorses a functional-role theory of meaning, on which a statement’s meaning is grounded in its being governed by semantical rules concerning language entry, intra-linguistic, and language departure transitions, and a theory of truth as correct (...) assertibility relative to such semantical rules. On these non-representationalist theories, even though moral statements are expressions of intentions and not fundamentally descriptive, they nevertheless count as assertorically meaningful, and some count as positively true. I further argue that this interpretation is capable not only of explaining Sellars’ explicitly metaethical writings, but also of unifying his scientific realism with his commitment to the ineliminable and indispensable role of the language of intentions: if this linguistic framework does not play an explanatory role, but only an expressive role, this explains both why Sellars’ commitment to it does not contravene his naturalism, as well as why, given the necessity of such language for our practical engagement with the world, the scientific image of humans in the world will only be completed once such language supplements it to enable us to relate practically to it. (shrink)

Overview of Wilfrid Sellars's philosophy.