In this article, we will attempt to understand Sellars’ puzzling notion of ‘adequate picturing’ and its relation to the Sellarsian ‘conceptual order’ through Spinoza’s intuitive knowledge. First, it will be suggested that there are important structural similarities between Sellarsian ‘adequate picturing’ and Spinoza’s intuitive knowledge which can illuminate some ‘dark’ and not so well understood features of Sellarsian picturing. However, there remain some deep differences between Sellars’ and Spinoza’s philosophy, especially with regard to their notion of ‘adequacy’ and the sense (...) in which an idea can be said to ‘correspond’ with its object. As a consequence of those differences it turns out that, from a Sellarsian viewpoint, Spinoza’s notion of intuitive knowledge is a version of the myth of the Given. However, Sellars’ own proposed way out of the Myth has problematic consequences by Sellars’ own lights: His sharp distinction between the ‘space of reasons’ level and the level of picturing makes the Sellarsian vision of the ‘stereoscopic fusion’ of those levels virtually unintelligible. Finally, it will be argued that a non-standard interpretation of Spinoza’s intuitive knowledge -proposed in Baltas -, combined with a Sellars-inspired bifurcated understanding of Dreyfusian expert knowledge, can provide the means 1) for constructing a notion of intuitive knowledge that evades the myth of the Given, and, 2) for making full sense of the claim that the ‘space of reasons’ dimension of understanding the world can in principle be fused with the ‘picturing’ dimension and provide us with a single complex coherent experience of reality and our place in it. (shrink)

In this paper, I develop an empirically-driven approach to the relationship between conceptual and non-conceptual representations. I begin by clarifying Wilfrid Sellars's distinction between a non-conceptual capacity to picture significant aspects of our world, and a capacity to stabilize semantic content in the form of conceptual representations that signify those aspects of the world that are relevant to our shared practices. I argue that this distinction helps to clarify the reason why cognition must be understood as embodied and situated. Drawing (...) on recent models of attention and valuation, I then argue that the human brain constructs a dynamic model of the world that it has encountered, encoding higher-level regularities in the form of linguistically structured representations. And I conclude by arguing that this approach to cognition provides a set of critical resources for understanding the situated nature of social cognition. (shrink)