Abstract
In this prelude, I give a brief overview of two main pillars of Sellars’ thought, the myth of the Given and his non-representationalist account of semantics, for better orienting the reader to the themes of the main text. I also highlight a fundamental tension between two deeply entrenched Sellarsian views: the ontological primacy of the scientific image and the view that meaning, justification and truth are determined from within the ‘space of reasons’.
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Notes
- 1.
A note here is in order for clarifying the use I will make throughout this book of the terms ‘diaphanous’ and ‘transparent’ as a characterization of the immediacy of contact between mind and world. An experiential or in general mental state is ‘diaphanous’ or ‘transparent’ if by just undergoing such an experience, its mode of being is thereby given in propria persona (as it really is), or, in other words, if by just having an experience one is thereby aware of its categorial status. I (and, for that matter, Sellars) do not deny that an experiential or mental state can be directly present to ‘consciousness’, in an unmediated manner. The sense of ‘diaphanous’ or ‘transparent’ access to these states that is in dispute is the further view that this kind of direct, unmediated awareness amounts to a direct awareness of the categorial status of that experiential, mental state, external world fact and so on.
- 2.
The ‘thermometer model’ compares non-inferential knowledge with a good thermometer. The temperature readings of a good thermometer reliably indicate the actual temperature. In a similar manner non-inferential knowledge is a matter of a belief reliably covarying with the environment irrespectively of whether the subject understands its content or has reasons for taking it as true. This ‘externalist’ view first came under attack in Sellars’ EPM (1956), as part of a general attack on the whole framework of Givenness.
- 3.
Note that in the case of the division between left-wing and right-wing Hegelians, it was the left-wingers that took science to be the key for knowledge and human emancipation. By contrast, the post-1960s cultural left has been increasingly skeptical of science’s ability to emancipate us through the provision of a more accurate knowledge of the physical and social world and instead highlights the dependence of the orientation and of the very content of scientific research to ‘external’ political and economic factors. While it is undeniable that twentieth-century science did not fulfill the promises of universal emancipation and became even more entangled with political and economic power relations, it is unfortunate that whatever emancipatory potential science still has to offer is not explored by the left but has been handed over to the right. There is no reason why this unfortunate political situation should be reproduced in theory. A corrective here can be provided by Sellars himself whose overall position, as we shall see in this book, is such as to transcend the divisions between his left- and right-wing followers, while preserving some of their more important and radical elements.
- 4.
As we shall see in Chap. 9, this Sellarsian view has the radical consequence that, contra McDowell and Brandom, the world, conceived as nothing other than the world of true thinkables, the set of conceptual contents, such that, if we think them, we think truly, though genuinely intersubjectively available, is ‘only’ phenomenal in the Kantian sense: it exists only as represented, not as it is in itself.
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Christias, D. (2023). Prelude: Sellars’ Project and Its Essential Tension. In: Normativity, Lifeworld, and Science in Sellars’ Synoptic Vision. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27026-0_2
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