My paper is concerned with the relation between ought-statements and intentions in Wilfrid Sellars’s philosophy. According to an entrenched view in Sellars scholarship, Sellars considers ought-statements as expressions of we-intentions. The aim of my paper is to question this reading and to propose an alternative. According to this alternative reading of Sellars, ought-statements are metalinguistic statements about the implication relations between intentions. I show that the entrenched understanding faces many unacknowledged problems and generates incompatibilities with Sellars’s commitments about intentions. I (...) argue that the alternative account can help to resolve these problems. A second reason in support of the alternative understanding of Sellars is provided by historical considerations. I argue that my alternative account can be discerned in Sellars’s most developed views about intentions and ought-statements. I also discuss problems and questions which the alternative reading itself faces. (shrink)

A close reading of Descartes’ works, particularly his Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii, calls into question the common interpretation of Peirce’s ‘Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man’ and ‘Some Consequences of Four Incapacities’ as being anti-Cartesian. In particular, Descartes’ conception of intuition differs from Peirce’s, and on one plausible reading of Descartes his intuitionism actually mirrors Peirce’s inferentialism in key respects. Given these similarities between Descartes and Peirce, the dogmatic status of the anti-Cartesian interpretation of Peirce becomes evident.

ABSTRACTSellars’s relationship with Hegel is complex and itself ‘dialectical‘ in interesting ways. Sellars follows Hegel in recognizing that the normativity essential to intentionality and conceptu...

In this paper I address G. C. Rota’s account of mathematical identity and I attempt to relate it with aspects of Frege as well as Husserl’s views on the issue. After a brief presentation of Rota’s distinction among mathematical facts and mathematical proofs, I highlight the phenomenological background of Rota’s claim that mathematical objects retain their identity through different kinds of axiomatization. In particular, I deal with Rota’s interpretation of the ontological status of mathematical objects in terms of ideality. Then (...) I detect certain similarities among Rota’s views and Frege’s account of the constitution of arithmetical identity on the grounds of 1–1 correspondence. I point out an epistemic as well as an ontological aspect of this issue. In the sequel, I attempt to deal with the problem of “mixed identities” in mathematics stated by Benacerraf by taking in account Rota’s use of the phenomenological notion “Fundierung”. (shrink)

This paper addresses the issue of stipulation in three cases of implicit definitions. It argues that the alleged implicit definitions do not have a purely stipulative status. Stipulation of the vehicles of the implicit definitions in question should end up with true postulates. However, those postulates should not be taken to be true only in virtue of stipulation since they have extra commitments. Horwich’s worry emerges in all three kinds of implicit definitions under consideration, since the existence of meanings so (...) that the alleged postulates are true depends on extra requirements that should be fulfilled. Moreover, if Ramseyfication method is applied to the three kinds of implicit definition, they are split up into two components from which the first one is broadly factual while the second one is purely stipulative. The paper argues that their definitional task in each case should be assigned to their second component i.e. their Carnap-conditional. (shrink)

I compare Sellars’s criticism of the ‘myth of the given’ with Quine’s criticism of the ‘two dogmas’ of empiricism, that is, the analytic–synthetic distinction and reductionism. In Sections I to III, I present Quine’s and Sellars’s views. In IV to X, I discuss similarities and differences in their views. In XI to XII, I show that Sellars’s arguments against the ‘myth of the given’ are incompatible with Quine’s rejection of the analytic–synthetic distinction.

Linguistic meaning has an essential normative dimension that prima facie cannot be reduced to descriptive, non-normative, terms. Taking this point for granted, this paper however aims at proposing a naturalist view of semantics - inspired by Wilfrid Sellars' original works - focused on the way the constitutive normative aspects of meaning might be properly explained and accounted for, rather than eliminated.

While Wilfrid Sellars’ philosophy is often depicted in an ahistorical fashion, this book explores the consequences of placing his work in its historical context. In order to show how Sellars’ early publications depend on contextual factors, Peter Olen reconstructs the conceptions of language, psychological, and social explanation that dominated American philosophy in the early 20th century. Because of Sellars’ differing explanations of language and behaviour, Olen argues that many of Sellars’ early commitments are incompatible with his later works. In the (...) course of doing so, Olen highlights problematic tensions between Sellars’ early and later conceptions of language, meta-philosophy, and normativity. Supplementing the main text is a collection of previously unpublished archival material from Wilfrid Sellars, Gustav Bergmann, Everett Hall, and other early 20th century philosophers. This text will be a useful resource to those with an interest in the history of American philosophy, the history of analytic philosophy, Wilfrid Sellars’ philosophy, and the myriad issues surrounding normativity and language. (shrink)

This paper shows that Husserl is not guilty of Sellars’ myth of the sensory given. I firstly show that Husserl’s account of ‘sensations’ or ‘sense data’ seems to possess some of the attributes Sellars’ myth critiques. In response I show that, just as Sellars thinks that our ‘conceptual capacities’ afford us an awareness of a logical perceptual space that has a propositional structure, Husserl thinks that ‘acts of apprehension’ structure sensations to afford us perception that is similarly propositionally structured. Not (...) only this, but there is much affinity and shared motivation between Husserl and Sellars accounts of the sensory stratum. Reflection on phenomenological considerations prevents Sellars from denying phenomenal non-conceptual content, whilst Husserlian ‘sense data’ are technical designations; dependant parts of perceptual experience grasped in abstraction, necessary for providing a reflective/philosophical account of empirical knowledge. I show that both Husserl and Sellars assert that the proper description of phenomenal content affords it the function of presenting properties of spatial objects during perception, and reiterate the well-known fact that Husserl thinks that perception is of ‘conceptually’ apprehended spatiotemporal objects. (shrink)

According to the dominant view, the later Wittgenstein identified the meaning of an expression with its use in the language and vehemently rejected any kind of mentalism or intentionalism about linguistic meaning. I argue that the dominant view is wrong. The textual evidence, which has either been misunderstood or overlooked, indicates that at least since the Blue Book Wittgenstein thought speakers' intentions determine the contents of linguistic utterances. His remarks on use are only intended to emphasize the heterogeneity of natural (...) language. Taking into account remarks written after he finished the Investigations, I show how Wittgenstein anticipated the basic tenets of Gricean intention-based semantics. These are, in particular, the distinction between ‘natural’ and ‘non-natural’ meaning and the distinction between what a speaker means by an utterance and what the expression uttered means in the speaker’s natural language. Importantly, Wittgenstein also believed that only the meaning of the speaker determined the content of ambiguous expressions, such as ‘bank’, on a particular occasion of utterance. (shrink)

An “inferentialist” semantic theory for some language L aims to account for the meanings of the sentences of L solely in terms of the inferential rules governing their use. A “hyper-inferentialist” theory admits into the semantics only “narrowly inferential” rules that normatively relate sentences of L to other sentences of L. A “strong inferentialist” theory also admits into the semantics “broadly inferential” rules that normatively relate perceptual states to sentences of L or sentences of L to intentional actions. It is (...) widely thought that only the latter of these two sorts of semantic theories is at all viable. I argue here that the opposite is so. Negatively, strong inferentialism is viciously circular: including rules into the semantic theory that relate perceptual states to sentences of the language requires us to appeal, in individuating those perceptual states, to the very meanings for which we are supposed to be inferentially accounting. Hyper-inferentialism does not face this problem because it does not appeal to any nonlinguistic states. Positively, though hyper-inferentialism is widely thought to be a theoretical non-starter, I argue here that it is a genuine theoretical possibility insofar as it essentially includes cross-perspectival inferences, inferences along the lines of the one from the sentences “The ball is in front of n,” “The ball is red,” and “The lighting is good” to the sentence “n sees that the ball is red.” I make the further exegetical claim that Robert Brandom, though unanimously taken to be a strong inferentialist, is in fact a hyper-inferentialist. (shrink)

Here I show that Sellars’ radicalization of the Kantian distinction between concepts and intuitions is vulnerable to a challenge grounded in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of embodiment. Sellars argues that Kant’s concept of ‘intuition’ is ambiguous between singular demonstrative phrases and sense-impressions. In light of the critique of the Myth of the Given, Sellars argues, in the ‘Myth of Jones’, that sense-impression are theoretical posits. I argue that Merleau-Ponty offers a way of understanding perceptual activity which successfully avoids both the Myth of (...) the Given and the Myth of Jones. I also argue that Merleau-Ponty’s approach provides an alternative to McDowell’s critique of Sellars. Merleau-Ponty shows, first, that perceptual activity can be characterized as having a unity and structure of its own which is importantly different from that of concepts; secondly, that the unity and structure of perception can be revealed phenomenologically rather than as a theoretical posit. (shrink)

On the surface, one of the main differences between John McDowell and Wilfrid Sellars when it comes to their conceptions of intentionality has to do with their respective accounts of meaning. McDowell advocates a relational account of meaning, whereas Sellars holds, on the contrary, that a correct view of intentionality is only possible through a non-relational account of meaning. According to McDowell, Sellars does not consider the possibility of his own relational view because he suffers from a ‘blind spot’. It (...) is implied that if Sellars saw this possibility, he would see the light and embrace something like McDowell’s own account. I would like to argue in this paper that the whole issue goes much deeper than that. Sellars does not suffer from a ‘blind spot’ and showing why this is the case should give us an idea of how far apart these two thinkers really are, appearances notwithstanding. It will also reveal that the heart of their disagreement does not consist in a dispute over whether the correct shape of an account of meaning should be relational or not. Sellars’s and McDowell’s respective outlooks on intentionality differ fundamentally with regards to the concept of objectivity. (shrink)

In his 1975 paper “The Meaning of ‘Meaning’”, Hilary Putnam famously argued for semantic externalism. Little attention has been paid, however, to the fact that already in 1973, Putnam had presented the idea of the linguistic division of labor and the Twin Earth thought experiment in his comment on Wilfrid Sellars’s “Meaning as Functional Classification” at a conference, and Sellars had replied to Putnam from a broadly inferentialist perspective. The first half of this paper aims to trace the development of (...) Putnam’s semantic externalism, situate his debate with Sellars in it, and reconstruct the two arguments he presented against Sellars. The second half of this paper aims to reconstruct how Sellars replied to Putnam. I argue that Sellars not only accepts the social character of language but also suggests how inferentialists can accommodate the contribution of the world. Sellars’s key idea is that substance terms have a “promissory note aspect” which is to be cashed out in a successor conceptual framework. I reconstruct Sellars’s position as ideal successor externalism, and compare it with temporal externalism. (shrink)

One of the still unsolved problems in liberal anarchism is a definition of social constituency in positive terms. Partially, this had been solved by the advancements of liberal discourse ethics. These approaches, built on praxeology as a universal framework for social formation, are detached from the need of any previous or external authority or rule for the discursive partners. However, the relationship between action, personal identity, and liberty within the process of a community becoming solely generated from the praxeological a (...) priori remains largely disputed. In order to develop a testable constitutional model, this study revises how the “ontological turn” was introduced into liberal theories and redefines the concept of liberty. Liberty is usually understood as a moral goal or measurement for just actions, as the generative principle of all social existence - individual and interpersonal. For this purpose, the function of performative contradiction within the mechanism of interpersonal “encounter”, as part of the co-generative process of the individual becoming and social formation was explored through the production of a game-based narrative historiography grounded on 19th century life writings. This narrative historiography was developed in the context of Swiss history, with a “design-based” research approach, and resulted in a prototype for networked storytelling through which the transformative learning process could be visible and the negotiation of competing individual visions of the future could be re-enacted. (shrink)

Che cosa vuol dire per le espressioni del nostro linguaggio avere un significato? Secondo un approccio oggi sostanzialmente standard in semantica, avere significato vuol dire prima di tutto avere un contenuto rappresentazionale, cioè poter rappresentare qualcosa. Secondo un inferenzialista come Robert Brandom, invece, le espressioni del nostro linguaggio hanno contenuto perché sono inserite in una rete di relazioni inferenziali, rispetto alla quale possono essere utilizzate per dare e richiedere ragioni. Il libro di Pietro Salis, Pratiche discorsive razionali, presenta e discute (...) alcuni degli aspetti più interessanti dell'inferenzialismo normativo di Brandom. Si tratta della seconda monografia in lingua italiana dedicata alla filosofia del linguaggio brandomiana dopo quella di Giovagnoli (2004). Per trovare elementi di paragone con il lavoro di Salis occorre allora guardare alle pubblicazioni in lingua inglese. Tra queste ci sono le raccolte di saggi curate da Stekeler-Weithofer (2008), Prien e Schweikard (2008), e Weiss e Wanderer (2010). Ma anche le introduzioni monografiche di Wanderer (2008) e Turbanti (2017). La prima di queste introduzioni, in particolare, è quella più simile al libro di Salis, soprattutto dal punto di vista tematico. (shrink)

Philosopher Wilfrid Sellars was one of the contemporary functionalism precursors when he conceived mental states as theoretical entities identified with functional states, conception defended mainly in his most relevant work Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, broadly discussed on the academic context of analytical tradition. On this book, Sellars introduces his explanation of mental, gathering on the same thesis private events, intententionality , a public language and a system based on rules defined intersubjectivity Therefore, this work intends to show how (...) much this author anticipated the functionalist project, particularly introducing, on the first part, Sellars’s proposal in the 50s and, later, characterize the following decade functionalism. Finally, we evaluate Sellars’s influence on the quoted theoretical functionalists e comment the range and importance of this author for the mind philosophy e current languages. © Cien. Cogn. 2009; Vol. 14 (3): 024-038. (shrink)

In “Psychopower and Ordinary Madness” my ambition, as it relates to Bernard Stiegler’s recent literature, was twofold: 1) critiquing Stiegler’s work on exosomatization and artefactual posthumanism—or, more specifically, nonhumanism—to problematize approaches to media archaeology that rely upon technical exteriorization; 2) challenging how Stiegler engages with Giuseppe Longo and Francis Bailly’s conception of negative entropy. These efforts were directed by a prevalent techno-cultural qualifier: the rise of Synthetic Intelligence (including neural nets, deep learning, predictive processing and Bayesian models of cognition). This (...) paper continues this project but first directs a critical analytic lens at the Derridean practice of the ontologization of grammatization from which Stiegler emerges while also distinguishing how metalanguages operate in relation to object-oriented environmental interaction by way of inferentialism. Stalking continental (Kapp, Simondon, Leroi-Gourhan, etc.) and analytic traditions (e.g., Carnap, Chalmers, Clark, Sutton, Novaes, etc.), we move from artefacts to AI and Predictive Processing so as to link theories related to technicity with philosophy of mind. Simultaneously drawing forth Robert Brandom’s conceptualization of the roles that commitments play in retrospectively reconstructing the social experiences that lead to our endorsement(s) of norms, we compliment this account with Reza Negarestani’s deprivatized account of intelligence while analyzing the equipollent role between language and media (both digital and analog). (shrink)

According to rationalists, synthetic a priori propositions convey new knowledge, whereas analytic propositions are non-informative or vacuous conceptual truths. However, as we argue in this article, each a priori proposition is necessarily true because of its semantic constituents and the way they are combined, and hence can be transformed into its equivalent analytic form. So each synthetic a priori proposition conveys only non-informative conceptual truths like analytic propositions.

The integration challenge for modality states that metaphysical theories of modality tend to fail in one of two ways: either they render the meanings of modal sentences mysterious, or they render modal knowledge mysterious. I argue that there are specific semantic and epistemic constraints on metaphysics implied by the integration challenge and that a plausible metaphysical theory of modality will satisfy both of them. I further argue that no popular metaphysical theory of modality simultaneously satisfies both of the constraints. Therefore, (...) a new metaphysical theory of modality is needed, one that can offer a clear response to the integration challenge. I attempt to supply the needed theory and show that it satisfies the constraints of the integration challenge. The overall result is an argument for a new and unique metaphysical theory of modality that I call constructionism. (shrink)