studies in wilfrid sellars' philosophy || sellars and the scientific image

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Sellars and the Scientific Image Author(s): Robert Ackermann Source: Noûs, Vol. 7, No. 2, Studies in Wilfrid Sellars' Philosophy (May, 1973), pp. 138-151 Published by: Wiley Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2214488 . Accessed: 15/06/2014 20:37 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Wiley is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Noûs. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 91.229.248.202 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 20:37:58 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Studies in Wilfrid Sellars' Philosophy || Sellars and the Scientific Image

Sellars and the Scientific ImageAuthor(s): Robert AckermannSource: Noûs, Vol. 7, No. 2, Studies in Wilfrid Sellars' Philosophy (May, 1973), pp. 138-151Published by: WileyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2214488 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 20:37

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Wiley is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Noûs.

http://www.jstor.org

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NOTES

lThis derivation can be made using three theorems of the probability calculus: 0 < Pr(B, A) < 1; Pr(B, A) x Pr(C, A * B) = Pr(C, A) x Pr(B, A * C); and (B D C) D Pr(C, A) > Pr(B, A).

2 It surely seems that some physical-object terms are observation-terms and thus are reporting terms. For the definition of 'pure theoretical term', see [6]: 102.

3 I have discussed some of the problems involved in inferring reference claims from logical and quasi-logical claims in [4], esp. Chap. 3 and Part III.

4 A set of sentences is minimally adequate to explain something just in case the set is adequate to explain it but no proper subset is adequate to explain it.

5 I have discussed and attempted to resolve other problems facing a Berkeleyan phenomenalism in [5].

Sellars and the Scientific Image

ROBERT ACKERMANN

UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AT AMHERST

It is a cliche to say that academic philosophy in English speaking countries is in some kind of age of analysis in which synthetic philosophical systems are out of fashion. Like all cliches, this contains an interesting kernel of truth suggestive of the pos- sibility that the retrospective historical view of our period will single out certain systematic philosophies as continuing a proud intellectual heritage that has sometimes been called the Western Philosophical Tradition. The philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars is already a candidate in that it quite manifestly consists of an articulated and comprehensive set of positions that develops insights about the relationship of scientific epistemology and philosophy that continue a line of thought having obvious roots in Kant and Peirce. Sellars is eclectic in that he has picked and chosen from the views of his predecessors, but his eclecticism is not a trivial picking and choosing in that he has integrated these views into an outlook in which they are transformed and in which they have a new significance that heightens their original philo- sophical content. It seems to me neither an accident nor an act of hubris in this context that Sellars should have singled out Kant to acknowledge his major indebtedness to the past.

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We now turn to a less important cliche current among phi- losophers who have attempted to grapple with the complexity of Sellars' statement of his views. This cliche is that the statement of the philosophy is virtually incomprehensible. Isolated passages may be rich in historical insights and interesting polemics, but it is difficult to integrate these passages into a philosophical outlook that one can engage with, either by way of criticism or by way of leisurely exploration. Critics have complained that the apparent meaning of any passage one seizes on as a fixed point for attack is alleged by Sellarsians to be a rough statement of a more elaborate and subtle point of view argued for in detail elsewhere, and critics have tended to react to this protective move by feeling that there is a contradiction lurking somewhere in any system with such an alleged structure. Leisurely explorers have often been rebuffed by the same kind of observation and have been told that their friendly summaries are crude caricatures of subtler views that they have not, sufficiently grasped. Perhaps the critics and the friendly ex- plorers are both wrong in the sense that we can't outline the phi- losophy of Wilfrid Sellars (or the philosophy of Immanuel Kant) on a 3" by 5" card. There remains the problem of saying something about it true enough in its characterization to permit the uncom- mitted a reasonable estimate of whether full exploration is worth the cost in time and intellectual effort. It is my intention here, as a friendly, leisurely explorer, to attempt such a characterization in a manner that may provoke a more adequate (but not more complicated) characterization of Sellars' philosophy for the purpose of such a preliminary assessment.

The Manifest Image and the Scientific Image

It seems a reasonable datum that Kant and Peirce provide the context for the main thrust of Sellars' views. The break between them and Sellars seems to depend on Sellars' recognition that twentieth century science destroys- any hope of construing scientific truth as a more sophisticated version of everyday fact. Quantum theory alone assures us (as philosophers) that none of the classic reductive ontological programs can possibly be achieved. The exact nature of future quantum physics is not known, but enough is known about its nature to convince us that it will present a picture of the world representing a sharp break with the presuppositions of two thousand years of natural phi-

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losophy. Where it was possible for Kant and Peirce in their scientific milieu to regard ordinary language and scientific language as similar for epistemological purposes, we now know that the physics of the very large and the very small make this impossible. The major philosophical budget from this perspective is to find some interesting relationship between a culminating natural philosophy consistent with the presuppositions of ordinary language and an expected new scientific account of the world and man's place in it. The shape of the new account, however, precludes the possibility of currently finding either view foundational for some eliminative reductive analysis.

I believe the major thrust of Sellars' philosophy (as opposed to the issues with which it deals most frequently) is simply to tease out a coherent view of the universe and of man in the universe from the tradition of natural philosophy which will constitute an explanandum for shaping the coming natural philosophy based on the new physics. A model here would be the development of statistical mechanics as the ontological replacement for phenom- enological thermodynamics. Some claims about temperature will not go over into claims about molecules, so no outright reduction of one view to the other is possible. A clear statement of phenom- enological thermodynamics is nonetheless a prerequisite for the coherent development (conceptually) of statistical mechanics, even though statistical mechanics may (historically) replace phenom- enological thermodynamics as a scientific language. Sellars sees the possibility that the new natural philosophy may replace the old entirely, but his feel for scientific history is such that he sees our period as one in which the shape of the new is to be appro- priately guided by a careful exposition of the old. At the same time, of course, careful philosophical appraisal of the old must utilize some anticipated properties of the view which may replace it if it is to play an interesting historical role. Sellars' description of the role of systematic philosophy is certainly interesting and exciting when set against this background. Further, as Sellars expounds it, I think it will prove pivotal for forthcoming systematic philosophers in providing a useful key to self-conscious appraisal of their work.

The relevant Sellarsian metaphor is one of fusing two images into an interesting, three-dimensional picture. On this account, it is a temporal dimension that is added in the fusion. Sellars calls the image resulting from our traditions the manifest image and the image projected for the new physics the scientific image. (The images receive their fullest treatment in [2], Chapter I.) An easy

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mistake is to take the manifest image to be the image of common sense, and the scientific image to be what scientists will say when the new physics has been shaped by some forthcoming Newton. Unfortunately, Sellars often suggests this possibility by apparently careless slips in exposition. An example is the following:

Yet, according to the picture I have been sketching, the concepts in terms of which the objects of the common-sense or 'manifest' image are identified have 'successor' concepts in the scientific image, and, correspondingly, the individual concepts of the manifest image have counterparts in the scientific image which, however different in logical structure, can legitimately be regarded as their 'successors.' ([1]: 150)

Clearly, if Sellars is fusing a common sense image and a scientific image, he has done a terrible job. One finds almost no analysis of common sense views and only the most cursory allusions to actual scientific results. The fact is that Sellars is fusing a philosophical manifest image with a (projected) philosophical scientific image. For many, this will lessen the excitement of his project. It is, however, the only construal that will explain what Sellars is actually doing. Most of his actual accomplishment consists of the detailed working out of a philosophical manifest image compatible with the major insights of traditional philosophy and classical science that could be fused with a coming philosophical scientific image developing along lines adumbrated by Sellars.

The actual Sellarsian project is intensely philosophical and analytical. It may not be as exciting and comprehensive as fusing common sense and science, but it results in a sharper accomplish- ment that philosophers may criticize in an interesting way. One may object that Sellars' adumbration of the scientific image is wrong, hence opening the way to the construction of a different manifest image compatible with a divergent scientific image. Sellars' use of the definite description (the manifest image and the scientific image) suggests that he thinks the development of science will result in a fixed scientific image whose nature is specific enough to coerce our construal of the manifest image along certain lines. One might also object to the manifest image as drawn by Sellars, holding that some divergent image of man must be correct and hence that science cannot really develop along lines that it may seem to be following at present. A pertinent example is the nominalism of the manifest image. I take it that Sellars expects neurophysiology to eventually explain human thought along lines

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compatible with current physical theory and extensions of it. This seems to cut against the possible existence of abstract entities such as propositions or properties because they will not be locatible at a point in space-time accessible to various persons in a manner compatible with future physical theory. Therefore, the manifest image must be nominalistic (in ontology) in order to effect fusion with the scientific image, even though we accept the apparently non-nominalistic use of language in the manifest image as something we want to account for. The elaborate apparatus of dot quotes, Jumblese, etc., is simply the mechanism we must provide to work out a nominalistic manifest image that is fusible with the projected scientific image. With this in mind, it is not so much incumbent on Sellars to refute rival philosophical views (rival candidates for the manifest image) as it is for him to show that his manifest and scientific images are fusible and that his projected scientific image is reasonable. I believe Sellars has done this and that it is in itself a considerable achievement. Refutation seems to require the develop- ment and fusion of reasonable rival images or a reasoned rejection of Sellars' whole concept of the relation of philosophy to scientific knowledge. No comprehensive refutation will be attempted in the compass of this paper, but I do want to sketch some considerations suggesting that rival systematic philosophies challenging the details of the Sellarsian manifest and scientific images are possible. Furthermore, they seem quite reasonable to anticipate given what is currently known about the state of scientific knowledge. This means that Sellars cannot win against the field merely by having produced his images, no matter how finely detailed and plausible they may be in themselves and no matter that their fusion seems interesting.

Science and the Scientific Image

Sellars explicitly disavows a generalized reductionist position in sketching the outline of his systematic philosophy. In one important instance, he expects the logically singular subject persons of the manifest image to be replaced by a plurality of logical subjects in the scientific image in such a manner that the correct statements of the manifest image about persons will not go over into correct statements of the scientific image although the scientific image will contain statements explaining why persons behave as they are said to behave in the manifest image. Sellars is thus permitted a

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sophisticated solution to the mind-body identity problem in that a successor statement in brain theory can replace a statement in the manifest image without affirming an identity or even having corresponding truth conditions. When a person is said (adverbially) to behave in such-and-such a fashion (simpliciter) in a statement whose intensionality is irreducible in the manifest image, this may be replaced in the scientific image by a non-intensional state- ment concerning a number of scientific particulars and their rela- tionships.

In the remainder of this paper I will not be concerned with exposition nor with sketching a full alternative to Sellars. There are, however, some implicit views consequent to the general reading of Sellars that I have proposed which I find need comment and rebuttal if the main thread of the Sellarsian fusion of images is to proceed along the coercive lines he has laid out. I want to examine a few of these views in order to see whether further discussion enhances the attractiveness of the Sellarsian images as the only ones whose fusion philosophy should be attempting.

With respect to reduction, it is not clear to me why Sellars should deny reduction (in general) where an earlier theory is replaced by another but hold that the replacing scientific image in his fusion should satisfy some version of the unified science hypothesis. I take it as evidence for this among other things that the suggestion ([1]: 147) that singular statements in microphysics must picture the world (which Sellars admits is a severe difficulty consequent to his outline of the scientific image) is not clear in intent unless some form of unified science hypothesis lies in the background. Sellars' remarks about the scientific image and pic- turing of singular scientific statements invite the reading that he expects the scientific image of man to be spelled out at the molecular level, paying close attention to quantum phenomena and explicating in close detail the structure and function of the neural circuits of the brain. This seems to be the expectation that results if a philosopher or psychologist projects a reasonably traditional philosophy of science into the future of the science of man, but it's hardly compelling. Many quantum physicists have felt by contrast that difficulties with the quantum theory of measurement preclude any full scale reduction of physics to quantum physics, and they are content to use theories where they seem best to apply without worrying about a master theory designed to encompass all of scientific knowledge. In particular, one common interpretation of quantum measurement requires that for measurement to take

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place a mind must be involved with measuring apparatus where the mind has the sui generis property relative to quantum theory of being able to determine its own state. This picture of quantum measurement hardly forces a nominalistic manifest image. For many physicists, quantum theory is simply what you invoke to handle certain kinds of phenomena. One does not forget the peculiar truths of quantum theory in generalizing, so the scientific image must be compatible with quantum theory, but quantum theory is not necessarily a theory capable of explaining all physical phenomena. Psychologists influenced by cybernetic theory have in many cases also abandoned any easy reduction of psychological phenomena to quantum explanation. The interesting psychological properties of a human being seem in some sense to be shielded from quantum indeterminacy if their apparent reliability is accepted as a datum. An explanation of the human mind may rest on interesting functional properties (some of which may yet be discovered) not reducible in principle or in practice to a quantum physical explanation, although they may be traced to a macro-circuitry organized by a special structure perhaps not otherwise instanced in nature. A physical explanation will, of course, be in view when such a structure is discovered and understood no matter how novel it may be with respect to current computer cir- cuitry. In view of these considerations, which could be considerably elaborated, it is not clear to me that Sellars' sketch of the scientific image is compelling enough to constrain the argument for a nom- inalistic manifest image.

Now it might be argued that a replacing scientific image need not embrace a version of the unified science hypothesis, but if this position is accepted, it is not clear why eventual replacement rather than a series of interesting fusions of images should be seen as the eventual context in which philosophy would have to be attempted. Sellars at times takes concept change (roughly equivalent to theory change) to be explicable in an evolution of conceptual frameworks which could culminate in an ideal (Peircean) con- ceptual framework. This seems dubious from any post-Kuhnian viewpoint in which successor scientific conceptual frameworks are at least sometimes revolutionary with respect to the frameworks they replace. I think the fine-grain change in conceptual frame- works is probably evolutionary in Sellars' sense for the participants in scientific theory, but history over a period of time does show revolutionary changes in the properties ascribed to the world by theory. The level of philosophical fusion of images in order to

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achieve a systematic philosophical system that amounts to a coher- ent world view may have to deal with revolutionary change because of the speed and complexity of fine-grain scientific advances. My point is this. The history of scientific theories over the last three hundred years is full of conceptual shocks so great that after they occur past scientific literature is often seen as studded with unintelligible and downright false claims. On the other hand, we do have a dualistic, non-nominalistic tradition in Western Philosophy (not of course the only tradition) many of whose basic concepts have remained relatively stable for 2,000 years in the sense that we find the Greek philosophers on political theory (and other areas of philosophy dealing with human affairs) both largely intelligible and often instructive with respect to contemporary issues. It may be that the views associated with this tradition are largely independent of the special purpose views of scientific images which are possibly derivative conceptually from current scientific views in the sense that neither is ontologically or epistemologically reducible to the other, and it will remain a per- manent philosophical task to fuse the images into a coherent world view. If so, concepts like proposition, property, and mind may be primitive in any philosophical image in a sense which precludes their having successor concepts in any scientific image unless human nature and human character itself undergoes such a profound change that our descendents can't even make out what we were saying when we described our social arrangements, or unless the nature of scientific images themselves undergoes a sharp change due to a Kuhnian revolution in neurophysiology that brings an unexpected intensional dimension into the scientific image. This is not meant to be an expression of mysticism or even of some form of anti-materialism, only a suggestion that traditional philo- sophical (and common sense) notions about persons will continue to function in an explanatory role both in everyday discourse and in a scientific psychology, no matter how we imagine the scientific image to be filled in along current conceptual lines. The traditional concepts may continue to play such a role simply because of the facts about human behavior.

In order not to sound too mysterious about the prospects I am referring to, I think the philosophical points can be made in terms of a conceptual example. There is considerable evidence that some neural circuits respond to specific kinds of individuals in a field of vision (such as a wriggling point representing a fly in a frog's field of vision) in a manner obviously compatible with

5

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nominalism in the manifest image. There is also considerable evidence that some neural circuits respond to relationships or changes in a field of vision that do not depend on absolute values. A sufficient general darkening or lightening of the average illumina- tion in a field of vision may effect a search response or other reaction by an organism even though no individuals are recognized (at least at first) as responsible for the change in illumination. If neural circuits can respond directly to properties and relationships not (at least at first) attached to definite individuals, the validity of a non-nominalistic manifest image may turn out to be important in fusion with a scientific neurophysiology. To be sure, some materialistic explanation of the importance of the existence of properties and relationships and their detection will be available in an adequate scientific image, so the image will always be a physical one. My point is that the intent of a nominalistic image will be frustrated if the facts turn out this way, and the intent of a nQn-nominalistic image will achieve some kind of fruition. This is why the shape of the supposed replacing scientific image is not trivial even though we may agree that it will be a physical image. It requires much more argument than Sellars has (so far) provided to suggest on the basis of an adumbrated scientific image that a coherent manifest image must be nominalistic.

Common Sense and the Manifest Image

It is a cornerstone of the manifest image for Sellars that traditional abstract concepts required to explain language are exorcized away by the application of the Sellarsian construals of picturing and signifying. In neither case do we have an abstract entity standing in some weird philosophical relationship to a real thing. Rather, picturing is a kind of isomorphism of two things in the real world, and signifying is explained by the introduction of dot quotes as a kind of isomorphism between roles in two different languages, sometimes between the language of thought and the natural language that we speak, and sometimes between roles in two natural languages, depending on the circumstances requiring explanation. Thus, we use dot quotes surrounding a term in English as a distributive singular term denoting something that plays the role that the term plays in English, but which is played in other languages by terms of a different shape and sound. Instead of construing two terms in two languages as meaning the

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same thing (an abstract entity), we take them as playing the same role in the two languages, and abstract entities seem to vanish since we have no compulsion to reify roles in a philosophically misleading way. Ingenious as the Sellarsian construal of language is, and I think there is no doubt that it is an enduring contribution to the philosophy of language, it raises a number of puzzling philo- sophical issues. A rather comprehensive problem can be raised as to whether a language is not some sort of abstract entity on this reconstruction. For example, although people may know wide enough overlapping portions of a language to enable com- munication to take place, the total labyrinth of passageways and roles in a natural language seems to have roughly the same status with respect to any particular individual that the world of being has always been said to have by Platonic non-nominalists. Sellarsian nominalism seems simply to have achieved the circum- vention of a particular host of well worn puzzling entities in favor of ,a less puzzling entity (or set of entities) that seems suspiciously abstract.

The circumvention just described would be thoroughly grounded in a potential scientific image if there were better reasons to suppose that Sellars treats language as the kind of empirical construct offered recently by linguists. There are plenty of animad- versions against ostensive definition of concepts in Sellars but a curious receptivity to behaviorism suggesting that overt use of language can be (and is) established by stimulus-response con- ditioning. ([2]: 329.) For Sellars, ostensive definition would have to be wrong since if the meaning of all terms depended upon terms introduced by ostension, then scientific terms would have meanings reducible to ostensively given meanings. But the authority of science informs us that red objects (the ones pointed to in ostensive contexts) do not exist. Therefore ostension is literally incoherent from the viewpoint of the scientific image. We are left with the view that our bodies do stand in picturing relationships to objects in the world, perhaps as a result of the evolutionary development of our bodies, but that language is taught to us as part of the culture we inherit.

Why should a Sellarsian account of language learning be behavioristic and opposed to recent views of many linguists to the effect that no behavioristic account of language learning is possible? According to the linguistic views I have in mind, it is a manifest part of the data on language learning that children do not at first imitate the language they hear, but produce sentences

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according to a grammar that grows by sudden changes until it approaches the sophistication required by the grammar implicit in the speech of a native speaker. What seems apparent here is that speech and speaking aloud require some form of theoretically prior thought (unconscious for the most part) in the mind or brain of the speaker. Speech is merely the last step in the articulation of various thoughts in communication with others. Suppose this view is supported by the discovery of neural processes that are found (in later science) to correspond to thought processes under- lying speech and which are seen as an essential part of the brain structure that distinguishes human capacity for language use from that of other animals. It would then seem that the Jones myth underlying the internalization of speech as giving rise to thought would not be compatible with the scientific image. ([1]: 158-167.) On the Sellarsian view, thought is modelled on interior speech; thoughts are, so to speak, what might be uttered. But what is uttered can make sense and has reference without invoking thought. This fits much more neatly after suitable elaboration with behav- iorism in some form than it does with the views of those linguists who have repudiated behaviorism.

Now let us look more closely at the view that thought cor- responds to a language-language transition that might be uttered. There is an initial puzzle here because the Sellarsian account of thoughts as theoretical entities seems to require that they not be part of the manifest image which is said, in at least some places, to involve no theoretical entities:

There is, however, one type of scientific reasoning which it, by stipulation, does not include, namely that which involves the postulation of imperceptible entities, and principles pertaining to them, to explain the behavior of perceptible things. ([2]: 7.)

The myth of Jones hardly seems to be part of the process of fusion in that it is concerned to show how an obvious feature of common sense discourse about humans can be dealt with within the context of the manifest image.

Major difficulties with the myth seem to lie in the apparent complexity of thought considered as a scientific concept and the relative simplicity of a serial ordering of language-language transi- tions which might be internalized to produce thought. It is as though conscious reasoning were the only kind of thought worth analysis. In general, what we can say is probably a selection and representation by consciousness of a few items from a vast, hier-

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archical, and simultaneously active neural network. I believe this to be true and to be consonant with empirical psychology. If so, the whole Jones myth is ludicrously oversimplified as an account of representation in thought and has to be misleading even as a 'contract theory' of the intensionality of thoughts expressed in speech. When we simply internalize overt speech, we do not wind up with a very rich structure, and we certainly do not wind up with one that seems to entail the existence of consciousness as a phenomenon. When we confront our surroundings, I believe we are ready to act in a potentially denumerably infinite number of ways (at least as many as we could describe in language as what we might do) and that selection from this large potentiality is made, sometimes arbitrarily, but more typically, by selection based on some internal criteria related to attention, set, or desire, criteria which are not derived from immediate surroundings. The potential behavior of human beings is too rich to be modelled on internal speech, although actual behavior could always be explained as though a person somehow said (internally) "I will now do X" just before doing X in each case. What I am saying here is that psychol- ogy based on computer simulation of the brain seems to be heading toward a view of multi-layered complexity of computation which is at odds with the view that a mental state can be represented as a linguistically determinate position on a chessboard representing possible statements of a natural language.

The language difficulties I have been hinting at also seem present in the concept of a language entry transition. How specific must the rules be that govern semantic assertibility in a language entry situation ? The rules require much more than that a speaker utter something intelligible:

The account of this conceptual necessity I wish to recommend is that these equivalences 'follow' from the 'definition' of truth in that for a proposition to be true is for it to be assertible, where this means not capable of being asserted (which it must be to be a proposition at all) but correctly assertible; assertible, that is, in accordance with the relevant semantical rules, and on the basis of such additional, though unspecified, information as these rules may require. ([1]: 101.)

Such rules would have to be very strong-literally requiring that one make a language entry transition only where relevant semantical conditions insuring truth (in Sellars' sense, of course) were satisfied. It would be useful if Sellars could spell out such a rule even for a

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simple entry such as "I see a red object." A natural suspicion in the absence of any explicit statement of rules for at least some cases is that these rules cannot be satisfactorily stated without conflicting with the supposed independence of the signifying and picturing dimensions of language. If they can't be stated, perhaps the brain is a complex structure whose transition from state to state and from conceptual framework to conceptual framework cannot be traced by sentence to sentence transitions for sentences expressed in a natural language.

Sellars' semantical rules seem to require the truth of language entry transitions which seems to turn the relationship between observational fact and theory upside down both by comparison to Kant and to Quine. How can a person ever decide to change conceptual frameworks unless he holds one experimentally while he "tries out" the language-language moves and language entry and exit moves of the other, a process requiring a complex period of schizophrenia not amenable to Sellars' account of mental episodes in any straightforward way ? Indeed, how can the state of mind of a philosopher "fusing" the two images be represented since he is simultaneously dealing with incompatible (non-reducible) language entry picturing ? It seems clear that picturing can go on in many ways at once, but it is not clear how this can be ac- comodated without threatening the view that picturing and sig- nifying appear in independent dimensions of understanding human thought.

The problem recurs in chapter VII of Science and Metaphysics dealing with moral truth. Not surprisingly, Sellars here outlines an objective moral theory based on a common conceptual framework shared by moral agents. Objective results appear when "I want X" is uttered by different speakers, since the objectivity of some conditional of the form "If an agent wants X, then he ought to do Y" entails (by practical reason) that he ought-to do Y. It is not clear at this point what rules of semantic assertibility apply to want or desire claims because it seems patent that "I want X" is literally not connected strongly enough with semantic conditions (except in very special cases) to determine a truth property. (In saying this, I do not suppose that I have to defend some loose form of moral relativism.) On the traditional non-nominalistic views, the sources of wants, desires, hopes, etc. to be joined with beliefs in order to explain action were somewhere in a faculty of the mind called the will. Language entry from the world may determine belief, but language entry from the will would not be

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considered language entry from the world with attendant semantical restrictions. It is not at all clear that Sellars' way with moral agents provides a satisfactory resolution of the phenomenology of free will that underlies this traditional component of what would be rival manifest images.

Conclusion

The philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars provides a novel and ex- citing account of the intensionality of mental episodes geared to a fusion of images between a manifest image of man in which these episodes are also intentional and a scientific image in which they may have other properties as described by successor concepts. There are, however, other features of mental episodes perhaps not revealed in the intensional description of particular episodes that require some account, among them the features of apparent parallel processing of information and the apparently sui generis appearance of various internal states. Sellars' accounts of these features are constrained by an adumbration of the scientific image that he feels will one day carry authority with respect to matters about ontology. What I have been arguing at a general level is that there are reasons for expecting that rival possible scientific images may take on this authority, with the result that alternative manifest images and fusions with these images are viable philo- sophical programs. If these alternatives are possible, controversies about such philosophical matters as materialism and nominalism remain open in a manner not consistent with all of Sellars' claims. At the same time, thanks to Sellars' description of the project of fusing manifest and scientific images, these controversies will hopefully be conducted in a more sophisticated and scientifically enlightened setting.

REFERENCES

[1] Sellars, Wilfrid, Science and Metaphysics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968).

[2] Sellars, Wilfrid, Science, Perception, and Reality (New York: The Humanities Press, 1963).

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