Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind 1

Dispensing with the given– sense data first.

The project

• Sellars’ aim here is to sort out his philosophy of mind while retaining an empiricist epistemology.

• Issues: – The ‘given’: Sellars rejects the notion that anything is

immediately apprehended in propria persona– there is no ‘transparent’ awareness of anything.

– Sense-data talk and the relation between our use of ‘seems’ and ordinary observation reports.

– How induction can be used to justify our claims (as individuals) to be reliable observers.

– Relations between rationalism and empiricism in our philosophical tradition. Sellars wants to reconcile these, recognizing the importance of empirical evidence while also recognizing the crucial role concepts play in all knowledge.

The Given

• So what is the given?• Not just something that we observe directly, i.e. a claim

we accept without inferring it from other claims we’ve accepted.

• “Many things have been said to be given: sense contents, material objects, universals, propositions, real connections, first principles, even ‘givenness’ itself.”

• A ‘framework’ that is part of many different philosophical positions.

• Among the first forms to be criticized were intuited first principles, synthetic necessary connections.

• Sellars aims to root it out entirely, not just some particular forms of it.

Why attack the given?

• Cognitive psychology: our accounts of what and how we know need to fit with our natural understanding of what humans can learn to detect and discriminate.

• The ‘neo-Hobbesian’ picture of humans that ends “Phenomenalism” is incompatible with a view of knowledge involving an immediate link between a logically simple subject and some fact about the world.

• All knowledge is expressed in language, and language can shift and change in many ways.

• Our relation to the community and the conceptual capacities that arise through language instruction are indispensable elements in any knowledge we have, no matter how ‘direct’ (i.e. non-inferential) it is.

First target: Sense data

• “For x to be sensed is for it to be the object of an act.”• A sense content is a possible object for such an act.• Kinds of sensing may just reduce to the kinds of sense

content that are their objects.• The point of these acts is to serve as a starting point

(foundation) for empirical knowledge.• But sense contents are particulars, the objects of some

sensings (i.e. acts of sensing). • And knowledge is about facts, not particulars. (Broadly, it

needs a subject-predicate form: That this object is characterized in some particular way.)

The dilemma

• The SD theorist has to choose between:– Sense contents are particulars, and sensing is not knowing.– Sensing is a form of knowing; facts, not particulars, are sensed.

• Even if she adopts the first, she can still say that sensory knowledge is logically dependent on sensings.

• But SD theorists typically want to have their cake and eat it too.

• This can be done, with a little slippery move:– To sense a sense content is to sense it as having a certain

character.– When we sense a content as having a certain character, we

know that it has that character. – When we sense a sense content, we can say now that we know

it, without specifying the character we sense it as having.

Acquaintance

• This line gets comfort from the familiar fact that we often do speak of knowing particulars, as in: “I know Fred.”

• But the proposal before us links this to non-inferential knowledge by the brute force of a contextual definition: To know x (where x is a sense content) just is to know that x has some character.

• Sometimes this is ignored in accounts of the givenness of sense contents– but if sensings are analyzable, we can recover the link to knowledge if the analysis matches that of non-inferential knowledge of some ‘sensed’ fact about the sense content.

The given part

• Descriptive accounts of sense contents have to smuggle this link back in…Again, Sellars rejects any reduction of the normative to the descriptive.

• The main point here is that the sensing of sense contents is not taken to require any learning, setting up of associations, etc. It is a primitive epistemic capacity built into us at the outset.

• As primitive, it is the starting point for the rest of our knowledge: Knowledge is acquired first in this form, and then extended to wider sorts of knowledge…

But categorization is acquired

• There’s a strong tendency in the field to regard knowledge that x is Y requires learning to tell Y’s from non-Y’s, the acquisition of the concept of a Y, perhaps even the use of symbols for Yness & other components of this bit of knowledge.

• The triad: – A. x senses red sense content s entails x non-

inferentially knows s is red.– B. The ability to sense sense contents is unacquired.– C. The ability to know facts of the form x is is

acquired.

The SD theorist’s choices

• Give up the first (A). Sensings now can be involved in knowings, but they aren’t really knowledge themselves.

• Give up the second. Now sensings aren’t really an account of sensations, which we can have without learning…

• Give up the third. This is ‘to give up the nominalist proclivities of the empiricist tradition.’

The diagnosis

• Sensings look to be a ‘mongrel’ concept combining ideas about sensations (states that play a critical role in sensory knowledge and are ‘possible’ states for us from the outset, but are not knowings in themselves) with ideas about non-inferential knowings that are at the heart of our empirical knowledge about the world around us.

Sources of the confusion

• A scientific explanation of the facts of perception (and misperception) justifies the postulation of inner states that are normally brought about by objects with various sensible characters under normal conditions. But there is nothing epistemic about such states– their role, thus far, is causal.

Second source

• The argument from security: If our knowledge of particular matters of fact starts with the things we normally report as observations (this is red, that’s triangular, etc.) then it starts with commitments some of which are false; there is no ‘mark’ we can introspect that separates the veridical ones from the non-veridical. This seems to undermine the very idea of empirical knowledge.

The slide

• ‘looks’ or ‘seems’ talk has an apparent advantage here. If we want certainty, we can retreat (by degrees), getting:– There is an object over there that’s red and triangular

on the facing side.– There is an object over there that looks red and

triangulary on the facing side.– There looks to be an object over there that’s red and

triangular on the facing side.– Each is increasingly secure; the last seems almost

perfectly so.

Describing the ‘inner states’

• Now it becomes tempting to take the third of these as a description of one’s inner state (it’s the sort of state normally produced by objects that are red and triangular on the facing side).

• And this state is harder to be fooled about (it’s more intimately linked to our ‘faculty of judgment’ than the properties of an external object).

• Further, it just doesn’t make sense to talk about an ‘unveridical’ sensation.

• Here’s the key mis-step: This implies that they aren’t part of the space of reasons at all (they are causal- we simply have sensations, i.e. they occur ‘in’ us and that’ all). Making them the foundation of knowledge takes a position, rather than report what is ‘given’ to us.

• If we introduce sense datum talk as a ‘code’ for seems talk, we need to be very careful not to treat the ‘code’ as though it were a language with internal logical structure that we can ‘unpack’ to identify theoretical commitments.

• The inferences we make in a sense-datum code must follow those that are allowed when the code is translated back into the language it is code for.

• Theories are not just codes; they are proper languages, which add content to the assertions they are linked to by ‘bridge rules’.

The sense-datum code

A successful code

• If the illuminates our understanding of knowledge and ordinary things, it’s because it leads us to recognize that in fact we can ‘trade in’ talk of ordinary objects for ‘seems’ talk in its most non-commital sense: There ‘looks to be’…

• Then ordinary things turn out to be ‘constructions’ out of lookings or appearings.

• But this is untenable, says Sellars

The Logic of ‘looks’

• Is ‘looks’ a relation (between the subject, a thing and a quality in ‘x looks to s’)?

• Broad: something elliptical must be ‘before our minds’ when a round penny ‘looks’ elliptical. Sense data (which have the characters things look to have) are an explanation of such ‘appearings’.

• Some resist such analyses, though, saying that there need be nothing red involved when something looks red to someone.

• Sellars starts here with the point that, when we say something looks red, we seem to be using red in the familiar way, as a property of some external objects.

Logical priority

• For Sellars, being red is logically prior to looking red.

• So we can’t analyze ‘is red’ in terms of ‘looks-red’.

• But: ‘X is red iff X would look red to normal perceivers under normal conditions’ is necessarily true. If this isn’t an analysis of ‘is red’ in terms of ‘looks-red’, what is it?

• For Sellars, ‘looks’ is not a relation (or, it’s a relation if you like to say so, but we shouldn’t assumed the inferences that would follow with other relation words go through for ‘looks’).

The tie shop

• Another vivid example here, of how someone who has ordinary colour concepts can come to learn to use ‘looks’ talk.

• John learns to say ‘it looks green’ rather than ‘it is green’ (and ‘it looks to be blue’ rather than ‘it is blue’).

• But what he’s learned to report is not a new kind of fact about the world.

• What does ‘it looks green’ report?

Experiences and propositions

• When I report, I see that that is green, I don’t just report an experience– I commit to (endorse) a claim closely related to the experience.

• This is to apply the concept of ‘truth’ to the experience.• When I say, instead, I seem to see that that is green, I

report the experience but I withhold the commitment to truth.

• One experience can be a seeing that x is green; an intrisically similar experience can be merely a seeing that x looks green.

• ‘See that’ and ‘looks’ talk both make the issue of ‘endorsement’ explicit.

What looks come to

• To say that x looks green to s is to say that x is having an experience which, if endorsed, we would report by saying s sees x to be green.

• But this makes the difference between normal reports and ‘looks’ talk a matter of ‘backing away’ from commitments that would normally be associated with the experience being had.

• And it puts in doubt the view that ‘looks’ talk is a way of describing the experience itself.

Explaining the link

• Now we can explain the connection between looks talk and is talk.

• ‘X is iff X would look to standard observers in standard conditions’ is necessary because standard conditions are conditions under which things look as they are to standard observers.

• These conditions are only vaguely specified, but that’s the way it is with ordinary talk…

• This undermines logical atomism, the idea that basic concepts are all fundamentally independent of each other. On this view we need a lot of other concepts (pertaining to standard conditions, in particular) before we can have (e.g.) colour concepts.

Conditions for knowledge

• We don’t have even these very basic empirical concepts, for Sellars, unless we can not only report accurately (this is green, that is red, etc.) but are also aware of, and able to detect and report, the conditions under which such spontaneous reports are reliable.

• Logical atomists can move to sense data reports to defend their position. But their commitment to sense contents is not supported by anything in Sellars’ treatment of looks talk, so these folk will have to haul their own water if they want to defend this position.

Looking red

• Can we go from something’s ‘looking red’ to there being something red that we’re ‘aware of’?

• First challenge: Univocity. The red things look to have is the very red some things do have– so to say that it’s a ‘sense content’ that is red when something ‘looks red’ to us is peculiar– sense contents are very different from physical objects, but this line forces on them all the sensible properties we ordinarily attribute to physical things.

Explanations

• If we want to explain why x looks red to s, we can often do it by saying, well, s is in C circumstances, and x is orange, and in C circumstances orange things look red.

• But we can give other sorts of explanation, which bring us closer to the heart of sense content and sense data talk.

• Such an explanation would focus on sensations (the inner postulated entities Sellars has already accepted). But this makes the most non-theoretical items (for sense-data theorists) into theoretical items, driving the wedge too early.

A more sympathetic account

• Experiences can have ‘shared propositional contents’ that receive varying degrees of endorsement (full all the way to none at all).

• The shared content of all these is the ‘descriptive’ content of this account of an experience.

• But ‘looks’ talk only specifies this description of our experience indirectly (as in, if conds were standard, it would be a seeing that x is red).

• So we have an open question: What is the shared intrinsic character of these experiences?

Invoking ‘red’ talk

• The obvious trick here is to invoke talk of ‘red’ to describe this content.

• But we need to separate red from physical things to do this.

• Here we run into the familiar analogy Sellars has already invoked in other papers.

• The ‘red’ of experiences here is not the red of physical things, but it is analogous to it.

• Some try to avoid this by separating things from their surfaces, and invoking ‘wild’ surfaces in cases of ‘mere looking’.

• But we don’t really think things have ‘surfaces’ as this two-dimensional, detachable account proposes.

Impressions and Ideas– Logical Concerns

• ‘Ings’ and ‘eds’: An experience is often thought of as a process that occurs ‘in’ us– this is an experiencing, the having of an experience.

• But experiences are also thought of in terms of what is experienced in them (the object of the experience).

• Sellars is concerned here that we not move too quickly from a description of an experiencing to conclusions about what it is that is experienced in that experiencing.

• In particular, what he calls the ‘common (= shared) descriptive component’ of our descriptions of experiences may well not be what is experienced– for instance, if a red item is part of this CDC, we may not in fact have experienced anything red.

Names, labels etc.• So the question arises: Do we really have a name for such

experiences?• What about ‘of’ here? Can’t we describe these experiencings as

experiences of red? Can’t we add ‘sensation’ talk here, and talk about sensations of red?

• An objection: if ‘red’ is always properly read as a property of physical objects, an experience or sensation of red demands something red just as much as a red experience would.

• But the ‘of’ we use in talk of ideas, the intentional ‘of’, doesn’t imply the existence of the thing an idea is of (nor does ‘believes in’)

• This logical feature shared by ‘sensation of’ and ‘believes in’ does not require further parallels between sensation talk and intentional contexts.

• And this is despite the fact that historically the assimilation of sensations to ideas was widely endorsed.

Objective existence

• So for Descartes and many other early moderns, just as ‘red’ was said to have objective existence in the idea of a red triangle, it was also said to have objective existence in the sensation (or impression, in Hume’s terminology) of a red triangle.

• Sensations were simply thought of as more detailed and specific than the ‘abstract’ thoughts we form.

• But this is clearly a mistake, and the non-extensionality that makes it tempting does not give us any real argument for it.

Still looking

• So we’re still looking for an intrinsic description/label for these experiences.

• But historically many have taken the view that this is just wrong-headed: we know exactly what kind of experience this is, through our privileged inner awareness of it.

• This leads to the problem of other minds, of course.

• But it’s also a clear instance of the ‘given’– this time, what is said to be given is the ‘kinds’ to which our sensations belong.

Two questions

• How do we become aware of the ‘sorts’ that our experiences fall under?

• How do we communicate/share the categories each of us has for their experiences?

• The view Sellars is criticizing here thinks the ‘given’ is an answer to the first, and accepts that there is no answer to the second.

• This answer to the first assumes that our awareness of the sorts under which our experiences are to be classified is given, a feature of immediate experience.

• Recall here Sellars’ earlier invocation of the empiricist notion that all categorization of items under sorts requires learning.

Universals, repeatables and determinables

• For Sellars a universal is a repeatable (this is the std. view today).

• Thus even a very specific/determinate sort of experience (my current visual field’s character, for instance) can be a ‘universal’, since this arrangement of colours etc. can be repeated in a later experience.

• But the tradition (Locke et al.) thought of universals as ‘generic’, i.e. as abstracting from these details, and passed over the problem of repeatables to focus on the formation of such more general ideas. (Note the nice discussion of the need for both conjunctive and disjunctive ideas to cope with the phenomena here.)

The key point again• LBH all agree that merely by having sensations we have the idea of

determinate repeatables or sorts.• A nominalist alternative: suppose we think of the awareness of a

red sensation as the awareness of a red particular, rather than as the awareness of its being red.

• Then the formation of ideas of repeatables would proceed by the association of words (‘red’) with a range of ‘resembling particulars’.

• But the association needs to be handled carefully: If we think of it as grounded on a prior awareness of the particulars as resembling or even as red then the myth of the given rises again.

• If we instead reject these, and simply say that it is the group of particulars that is associated with the word, then we get a kind of nominalism– it is only from the later point of view, where we have a language in which to pick out classes of resembling particulars, that we are aware of their resemblance– before that, all we have are a range of patterns of response that we can be trained in.

The upshot

• This is not Sellars’ nominalism– it’s pretty crude, really.• But it does break the link between sensations and

thought-contents, freeing up the direct perception account according to which words are directly linked to the external world and its features, not to our sensations or impressions.

• The essential causal role of ‘red’ sensations is not undermined by this– but it is not an inferential role in which our awareness of the immediately available ‘redness’ of some sensations provides the facts and ideas out of which we somehow arrive at the idea of redness as a feature of physical things.

The logic of ‘means’

• The object here is to provide more material for Sellars’ psychological nominalism, the view that we have no awareness of ‘logical space’ prior to/independent of learning a language.

• But Sellars rejects the crudely associative view of how words are linked to the things they apply to.

• On this view, ‘red’ means what it does because it has the ‘syntax’ (grammar) of a predicate and is a response to red things.

• This isn’t nearly enough (it’s too atomistic) for Sellars.• But it wouldn’t even be tempting if it weren’t for the naïve

word-world view of ‘means’ contexts.

Recalling BBK

• Here we find points familiar from BBK: ‘means’ for Sellars invokes translation (and a rich normative parallel between the two items joined by ‘means’ as in “‘Rot’ (in German) means red.”)

• This covers the ground in a way that the more common view cannot, since it equates the force of ‘means’ in – ‘Und’ means and.– ‘Rot’ means red.

Simple association is not enough

• So the mere invocation of ‘means’ contexts does not generate a theory of how a word comes to play a role sufficiently similar to that of another for us to say that they have the same meaning.

• In fact, this standard is rich and flexible– translation is a complex art, and its demands vary with our communicative aims/concerns…

• In particular, understanding ‘red’ requires quite a bit more than the grammar of a predicate and an association with red things. Linguistic ‘thermometers’ are not enough to capture meanings.

Foundations

• A foundation for empirical knowledge, for Sellars, is a pretty specific thing.

• The myth requires that the foundation be facts that are – Non-inferentially known.– Such that knowledge of them presupposes no

other knowledge.– Such that all knowledge of empirical matters

of fact is ultimately ‘decided’ by reference to knowledge of these foundational facts.

Something emphasized

• Some argue that, if a piece of knowledge depends on having some other knowledge, it must in fact depend on inference in some way.

• For Sellars this is a mistake, and it’s part of the myth. The kind of dependence that his holism invokes does not make all our knowledge a product of inference.

• But it does make its content dependent on our grasping its inferential relations to other claims.

Details

• Observation reports seem to have authority, without being inferred from other claims we already believe.

• How shall we understand this authority?• One key is the link between reports and

circumstances. • This point turns on the distinction between

fact-stating uses of sentences and report-making uses.

Token-reflexives

• Words like ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘this’ or ‘that’ are token-reflexive– they link up to their circumstances of utterance in ways that lead the same sentence to make different assertions in different circumstances.

• Tensed verbs have much the same effect, since they are tied to times of utterance too.

• Reports regularly, though not necessarily, make use of these sorts of linguistic device to link the report made to the circumstances it is a report about.

• A report must have some kind of direct link to the circumstances it reports about

• Fact-stating doesn’t depend on circumstances in the same way.

Two sources of credibility

• Some sentence tokens are credible because they are tokens of a type all tokens of which have authority.

• But some sentence tokens are credible because of how they are linked to the circumstances in which a token is produced: The token came to be through a certain process under certain circumstances.

Authority for sentence types

• Sellars says some sentence types are intrinsically authoritative: some analytic sentences belong to this group.

• Some get authority by inferential links to others. • But empirical knowledge will not reduce (without

some residue) to these two groups. (No empirical sentence type has intrinsic authority, and inferential links to such won’t do the trick either.)

• So we need sentence types whose authority comes from tokens that are produced in the right way and in the right circumstances.

The flow of credibility

• These two sources of credibility flow in opposite directions:

• Credibility for analytic sentences flows from types to their tokens, and then via inference to some other sentence types.

• Credibility for observation sentences flows from tokens to types, and then again via inference to other sentence types.

Sellars on Empiricist Dogmas

• Conflating the authority of analytic and observational sentences: An attempt at a unified theory of credibility leads to trouble.

• The idea is to appeal to rules– just as the rules for ‘using’ the concepts in an analytic sentence ensure that it must be true, the rules for using the language involved in an observation report are such that, if they are followed when the report is made, the observation report is true.

Prefatory points

• Reports can be thought of as stripped of their ‘action’ and ‘interpersonal’ aspects—a mere, spontaneous thinking that p can be a report.

• But thinking of them as actions has influenced the tradition here, which construes the rightness of a report as a special case of the rightness of actions (under some system of rules).

• When we think of them this way, we have to construe them as deliberate followings of these rules (otherwise the ‘rule’ is a mere regularity).

• That is, we have to judge that the circumstances were such that the rule requires the report and make the report for that reason.

The given again

• This leads directly to the given again, since these observation-actions are correct only when they are made in the course of following a rule, which requires that we be able to judge that the circumstances are such that the rule requires/endorses the report.

• Such judgments depend on a primitive awareness of the matters of fact necessary to apply the rules for using these words.

• Recall that we are talking here about the foundational judgments that are at the root of all empirical knowledge– so there is no escape...

But is there a way out?

• Begin with mere reliable reporting– the thermometer account.

• Now, can we extend this to cover something more properly like knowledge?

• The key question is authority–but authority for what?

• Actions are not what we need here– mere behaviour of a type that it’s reasonable to endorse is enough (action presupposes too much deliberateness here).

Being a knower

• The key, however, is the subject’s own ability to recognize that she is in a position of authority with respect to such reports.

• That is, she must be in a position to recognize that she is a standard observer in standard conditions, so that her inclination to report ‘this is green’ is indeed reliable.

• This requires quite sophisticated conceptual grasp of the place of such reports in the world

• It also seems to require a kind of induction.

The threat of a regress

• The idea is that to make a report that expresses observational knowledge, one would have to know that such overt verbal performances are reliable indicators of the facts reported.

• And this means that all observational knowledge depends on a fair bit of knowledge that. In fact, we need to know things like: X is a reliable symptom of Y.

• So observations don’t ‘stand on their own feet’ individually.

• Worse, it seems to run counter to the empiricist notion that the sort of general knowledge we have when we know X is a reliable symptom of Y depends on having a lot of knowledge of particular cases where X is correlated with Y.

Responding to the regress

• This seems to be a regress- before we can actually know, by observation, that we have a case of Y, we need to know that X is a reliable symptom of Y.

• But we need to know cases of Y (and cases of X) to justify the claim that X is a reliable symptom of Y. OUCH!

• But when we classify an episode or event as a case of knowing, we are locating it in a normative space. It’s possible to establish the normative status of an episode retrospectively. The regress dissolves (p. 169).

Rejecting the foundation

• Sellars rejects the idea of observational responses that are both direct and immediate.

• Such observations would be ‘self-authenticating’, that is, they would stand on their own– but they are, at root, non-verbal, internal episodes.

• And this authority is transmitted to linguistic acts (reports) because of an awareness of ‘the rules’ governing how these episodes are to be characterized in words.

• Once we have the force of these episodes cast in linguistic terms, inference connects them to other sentences, so that these episodes become the ‘foundation’ for all our empirical knowledge.

Launching the constructive phase

• The point of the rest of the paper is to explain Sellar’s own views on the nature and role of inner episodes.

• The sense in which they are non-verbal does not (says Sellars) lend any support to the idea of the ‘given’.

• But Sellars’ rejection of this particular view of the ‘foundation’ of empirical knowledge is not a rejection of the broader idea that there are observation-reporting sentences that serve as the touchstone for empirical knowledge. It is aimed at the idea of the given (which is related to the demand that the foundation be ‘locked in’ and independent of any other knowledge).

• The active element of self-correction is crucial here.

Philosophy of science

• Sellars is concerned about the effects of specialization– in particular, the recognition of philosophy of science as a distinct specialization in philosophy.

• The worry seems to be that specialization may lead other philosophers to leave science to the philosophers of science, and lose track of the need for all philosophers to respond to the development of the scientific world view.

• Science is the ‘flowering’ of an aspect of discourse that is part of the ordinary world view, and which may be lost sight of if we don’t attend to science and how it works in our philosophical thinking.

Evaluation

• To evaluate features of our conceptual frameworks requires an appreciation of science as revealing standards of evaluation and alternative frameworks that may well do better in terms of those standards.

• This needs care: the tendency to say things like ‘physical objects are not really coloured’ is a confused way of recognizing that a framework that includes such objects has deficiencies that are put right in a different framework, now under construction in the scientific enterprise.

• On these questions, science is the measure.

The given as a barrier here

• If we take some aspect of the manifest image as ‘given’ then this kind of critique is blocked; a framework anchored in the given is one we’re stuck with (we can alter it in various ways, but the basics are fixed).

• This anchor is sometimes thought of as an ‘ostensive tie’ linking the concepts of the framework to a aspect of reality. But consider the oddity of the idea of an ‘inner ostension’.

• This goes with the idea that science is not a complete framework in its own right, but a mere ‘auxiliary’.

As if

• The suggestion is that the unquestionable nature of the ‘given’ locks us into any framework that it arises in.

• The upshot is that an alternative framework which outperforms the ‘given’ framework must be treated in terms of ‘as if’, that is, the things of the given framework can be thought of as behaving ‘as if’ some other framework were true– but we can never dispense with the given framework in favour of this new (and superior) one.

The other error

• The other barrier to what Sellars sees to a correct appreciation of the scientific framework is the reification of a methodological distinction between theoretical and non-theoretical discourse into a substantive distinction.

• The contrast: – Science as a peninsular offshoot of ordinary

discourse vs.– Science as an expression of a fundamental aspect of

discourse which is central and ultimately transformative.

Private episodes

• We still have no take on how it is that the experience that is a seeing that x over there is green is similar to one that is merely a seeing that x over there looks green.

• Two routes: – Introduce inner episodes as theoretical posits and

develop an account of the similarity within that theory.– Posit these similarities as ‘given’.

• The second is now ruled out, so we need to turn to the first, however peculiar it may seem.

Applying the critique of the given

• ‘red’ etc. apply to physical objects first, so while we tend to describe these experiences using such words, this use of those words cannot be univocal.

• If we just use these words to link the experiences to standard occasions on which such experiences occur, then we have a ‘definite description’ of such experiences that picks them out, but nothing to say about what they are really like.

• To be able to notice a certain kind of thing (as being of that kind) is already to have a concept of that kind of thing. (176)

• One central puzzle: The combination of privacy (only I can report my ‘inner’ states) with intersubjectivity (others can know about them in other ways/ inferentially). Sellars says we can have both!

• But before dealing with sensations, Sellars turns to consider thoughts.

Thoughts

• Even if we take the view that thoughts are linguistic, the number of cases where overt linguistic behaviour accompanies behaviour that it seems to explain is too few– the sorts of behaviour that we explain in terms of thoughts are often unaccompanied by any overt linguistic behaviour.

• And when that behaviour is not habitual (more or less automatic), we can hardly resist invoking thoughts to explain it.

• The classical account holds that there are inner episodes called thoughts, and linguistic behaviours are meaningful insofar as they express those thoughts. Further, these episodes are introspectible and even transparent (self- revealing/ known whenever they are had).

The core of the notion

• We each have a stream of these inner episodes.• We have privileged, but not infallible or

complete, access to them.• They occur, sometimes, without overt verbal

behaviour.• We don’t need a performance to be going on

that we ‘perceive inwardly’ here. • Thoughts are a sort of ‘linguistic episode’, that

is, they are modeled on over speech.

The Ryleans

• Here we imagine our ‘ancestors’, speaking a somewhat limited language.

• The language describes external objects in terms of their sensible features.

• Sellars also supposes that it has semantic concepts– so they can speak of ‘meanings’ (read in terms of the roles of words & phrases)

• The aim is to explore how a language like this can come to have the means to talk of inner episodes.

On semantics again

• The force of semantic talk includes implications about the typical causes and effects of certain utterances.

• But it is not exhausted by these implications. • More importantly here, having semantical talk allows us

to say a lot of things about utterances that are also commonly said about thoughts (that they are about, or refer to, something, etc.)

• We could try, then, to capture thoughts just by appeal to a conditional/hypothetical link to overt language and its semantics.

The Alternative?

• Inner episodes (rather than conditional/hypothetical speech).

• The classical notion also makes these episodes the primary vehicles of meaning– but Sellars will reject this aspect of the classical view.

• So the challenge is to combine a ‘speech first’ view of meaning with an account of thoughts as real inner episodes.

Theories and Models

• Here we encounter the philosophy of science again, which Sellars will draw on to explain his view of the status of these inner episodes.

• We typically develop a theory by positing certain entities and certain postulates about how they behave.

• These are then linked to some observable phenomena (regularities or empirical laws): in effect, we propose that the phenomena are as they are because they involve these items in a certain way.

• But in fact theories are typically developed in a very different way. • We generally draw on known behaviours of familiar objects (waves,

for example), and present these as a model of what is ‘going on’ with respect to some phenomena.

• Such models are qualified (we don’t propose that electromagnetic waves are just like waves in water, but that they are similar in some respects, while different in others….)

Continuity

• Further, common-sense is not limited to induction. (Unlike the idealized MI, it can invoke postulated entities too– and for Sellars, the MI does contain ‘fossilized’ posits, despite its limitation to inductive methods.)

• So our Ryleans will have the ability to develop postulational explanations for similarities and differences in the behaviour of physical things.

Behaviourism

• Note that this was a major influence in psychology when Sellars was writing EPM.

• Sellars rejects narrow forms of behaviourism, while being perfectly happy with methodological behaviourism.

• This does not require that psychological concepts be analyzable into behavioural terms, but only that assertions in our new, scientific psychological language be justified by behavioural evidence.

• So, while we introduce these concepts by means of their links to behaviour, we do not suppose that their meaning is exhausted by this link to behaviour– they can be fully

fledged theoretical concepts.

Expectations

• Of course we expect any such theory to link up to our physiological understanding of the nervous system and its role in behaviour.

• But this does not mean that the behaviourist’s concepts are physiological at the outset…

• It does mean that our concepts are both linked to behaviour and linked to our expectations of how they will fit in with other aspects of our understanding of the world.

Back to Jones

• Jones proposes a theory of inner episodes, modeled on overt speech.

• These explain intelligent behaviour that goes on even when no overt commentary accompanies it.

• The episodes carry the semantic force of the speech acts they are modeled on.

• And they are taken as the real, ‘proximate’ causes of intelligent behaviour, even when accompanied by an overt explanatory discourse.

• Think here of how we accompany demonstration with commentary when instructing people in how to do something…

More details

• The commentary follows, explaining the parallels between speech and thought and where the two differ.

• One important point: Nothing in the theory requires that we have thoughts first and language second– the ability to have thoughts may depend on learning a language.

• Another: The theory does not imply that thoughts are the ‘truly’ semantic items, with utterances only semantic in a derivative sense, as expressing certain thoughts.

• Finally, these inner episodes need not be construed as immediate experiences– no perceptual model of them is implied here.

Introspection

• Having been taught to use this theory, people find that they can sometimes report their thoughts without relying on the overt behavioural evidence others need to reach the same conclusion.

• Now the theoretical language has a reporting role, and it’s one that recognizes a kind of privileged access.

• But the concepts involved are still public, and their link to behaviour is still part of their meaning– so the ‘privacy’ involved here is not absolute or incorrigible.

Inner perceptual episodes

• Now we’re ready for Jones’ second theory: inner episodes modeled on the perceptible features of objects, which are invoked to explain illusions and related perceptual phenomena.

• This provides us with a theory in which we really do have a description of the inner episode that is the same when we see a red triangle, see a triangle that looks red, see something that looks like a red triangle and merely seem to see a red triangle.

• The price, of course, is to accept that these inner states are postulated, not ‘given’.

Details

• These are episodes (goings-on) not particulars.• They should not be construed in

perceptual/epistemological terms: The model is not, ‘a seeing of a red triangle’ but a red triangular surface.

• In general, we have the occurrence of ‘inner replicas’– a matter of a description of what’s going on in us, not normative matter at all.

• The terms the theory provides give us a substantive description of these states, rather than the mere definite descriptions used so far.

The content of the description

• The content of the description is a matter of the theoretical language and the inferences it supports.

• Thus we know that the relations of compatibility, incompatibility, etc. grounded in the ways objects’ sensible properties can be arranged are shared by these theoretical predicates describing our impressions/sensations.

• But the limits of the parallel are not clearly specified yet, and can be worked out/explored in a pretty open-ended way.

Contentless form?

• Sellars objects to the view that such concepts (characterized by their ‘internal’ inferential relations and by a ‘link’ to certain observational circumstances) are themselves contentless.

• For him they are no more contentless than any other theoretical predicate,

• And the view that all such predicates are formal/ contentless is a part of the myth of the given (according to which only the predicates that are part of the given have ‘real’ (ostensive) content.

Expectations

• What is the relation between these states of perceivers and physiological models of ourselves?

• In the long run we expect them to fit together, giving a physiological account of these states.

• But our present physiology does not have the resources to do this (homogeneity again).

• And Sellars doesn’t believe that the physics of non-living things has the resources either– something unique to organisms (ones sufficiently like us) needs to turn up…we need a micro theory of sentient organisms, he says, to find the micro-states corresponding to these posited molar states.

The tradition and the sequel

• The modern view that objects aren’t really coloured, and colour is in the mind of the perceiver, is a confusion of this scientific anticipation with a feature of the manifest image.

• The upshot of Jones’ work is that we have a notion of both thoughts and impressions that allows introspection (individuals are the ‘reporters’ for their own states) but also makes the link with observable behaviour (and thus training by our linguistic seniors as we grow up) part of the meaning of this language.

The order of things

• The language of impressions is no more the result of antecedent noticings of impressions than the language of molecules is the result of antecedent noticings of molecules.

• The phenomenologist, in describing these states, fails to recognize her own creative role:

• She takes herself to be analyzing human knowledge as it already was, when she is actually contributing to an entirely new body of knowledge whose projected links to a scientific micro-theory of sentient organisms point towards a unified science including impressions.