Introduction to "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" by Wilfrid Sellars

The kind of philosophy we now call “analytic” started out as a form of empiricism. It developed out of the work of Bertrand Russell, Rudolf Carnap, and others – the work summarized and put in canonical, easily teachable , form by A.J. Ayer in his Language, Truth and Logic (1936). In that book, Ayer put forward the ideas which make up what we now call “logical positivism” or “logical empiricism” – ideas which restated the foundationalist epistemology of British empiricism in linguistic, as opposed to psychological, terms. These ideas are very different from those which underlie what is sometimes called “post-positivistic” analytic philosophy – a brand of philosophy which is sometimes said to be “beyond” empiricism and rationalism.
The shift from the earlier to the later form of analytic philosophy, a shift which began around 1950 and was complete by around 1970, was a result of many complexly interacting forces, the pattern of which is hard to trace. Nevertheless, any historian of this shift would do well to focus on three seminal works: Willard van Orman Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism” (1951), Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosphical Investigations (1954), and Wilfrid Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (1956).
Of these three, Sellars’s long, complicated, and very rich essay is the latest known and discussed.  Historians of recent Anglo-American philosophy have emphasized the importance of Quine’s essay in raising doubts about the notion of “analytic truth” AND THUS ABOUT THE Carnapian-Russellian notion that philosophy should be “the logical analysis of language.” They have also emphasized the importance of the work of the later Wittgenstein – especially what Strawson called his “hostility to immediacy,” his distrust of traditional empiricist explanations of the acquisition of knowledge. They have not, for the most part, given much weight to Sellars’s role in bringing about the collapse of sense-data empiricism. This is a pity, since Sellars’s attack on “the Myth of the Given” was, in America (thought not in Britain), very influential in persuading philosophers that there was something deeply wrong with the sort of phenomenalism Ayer had advocated.
Wilfrid Sellars was born in 1912 and died in 1989. He taught philosophy at Minnesota, Yale, and finally at Pittsburgh. He published a great many essays, as well as one monograph, Science and Metaphysics (his Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1967). His work was often criticized for its obscurity. This obscurity was partially a result of Sellars’s idiosyncratic style, but some of it was in the eye of the beholder. For Sellars was unusual among prominent American philosophers of the post-World War II period, and quite different from Quine and Wittgenstein, in having a wide and deep acquaintance with the history of philosophy. This knowledge of previous philosophers kept intruding into his work (as in the two rather cryptic chapters on Kant which open Science and Metaphysics), and helped to make his writings seem difficult for analytic philosophers whose education had been less historically oriented than Sellars’s. Sellars believed that “philosophy without the history of philosophy is, if not blind, at least dumb,” but this view seemed merely perverse to much of his audience.
Of all Sellars’s writings, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” is the most widely read and the most accessible. Indeed, this essay is all that most analytic philosophers know of Sellars. But it is almost enough, since it is epitome of an entire philosophical system. It covers most of the aspects of Sellars’s overall project – the project he described as an attempt to usher analytic philosophy out of its Humean and into its Kantian stage.
The fundamental thought which runs through this essay is Kant’s: “intuitions without concepts are blind.” Having a sense-impression is, by itself, an example neither of knowledge nor of conscious experience. Sellars, like the later Wittgenstein but unlike Kant, identified the possession of a concept with the mastery of the use of a word. So for him, mastery of a language is prerequisite of conscious experience. As he says in sect. 29: “all awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts etc., in short all awareness of abstract entities – indeed, all awareness even of particulars – is a linguistic affair.” This doctrine, which he called “phychological nominalism,” entails that Locke, Berkley, and Hume were wrong in thinking that we are “aware of certain determinate sorts ... simply by virtue of having sensations and images” (sect. 28).
Sellars’s  argument for phychological nominalism is based on claim which spells out the moral of many of the aphorisms of Philosophical Investigations: “The essential point is that in characterizing an episode or a state as that of  knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or justifying and being able to justify what one says” (sect. 36). In other words, knowledge is inseparable from a social practice – the practice of justifying one’s assertions to one’s fellow-humans. It is not presupposed by this practice, but comes into being along with it.
So we cannot do what some logical positivists hoped to do: analyze epistemic facts without remainder “into non-epistemic facts, whether phenomenal or behavioural, public or private, with no matter how lavish a sprinkling of subjunctives and hypotheticals” (sect. 5). In particular, we cannot perform such an analysis by discovering the “foundation” of empirical knowledge in the objects of “direct acquaintance,” objects which are “immediately before the mind.” We cannot privilege reports that, for example, there is something red in the neighborhood  as “reports of the immediately given.” For such reports are no less mediated by language, and thus by social practice, than reports that there are cows or electrons in the neighborhood. The whole idea of “foundations” of knowledge, basic to both empiricism and rationalism, disappears once we become phychological nominalists.
Whereas Quine’s “Two Dogmas” had helped destroy the rationalist form of foundationalism by attacking the distinction between analytic and synthetic truths, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” helped destroy the empiricist form of foundationalism by attacking the distinction between what is “given to the mind” and what is “added by the mind.” Sellars’s attack on the Myth of the Given was a decisive move in turning analytic philosophy away from the foundationalist motives of the logical empiricists. It raised doubts about the very idea of “epistemology,” about the reality of the problems which philosophers had discussed under that heading. One of the most quoted sentences in the essay occurs in sect. 38: “... empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once.” This sentence suggests that rationality is a matter not of obedience to standards (which epistemologists might hope to codify), but rather of give-and-take participation in a cooperative social project.
An elaboration and defense of the presuppositions and implications of psychological nominalism, however, is not all there is to “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” Sections 48-63 contain Sellars’s “Myth of Jones” – a story which explains why we can be naturalists without being behaviourists, why we can accept Wittgeinstein’s doubts about what Sellars calls “self-authenticatin non-verbal episodes” without sharing Ryle’s doubts about the existence of such mental entities as thoughts and sense-impressions.
At the time at which Sellars was writing, this was a vexed issue. For the appearance of Ryle’s The Concept of Mind (1949) shortly before that of the Philosophical Investigations (1954) had made Wittgensteinian opposition to the idea of a “private language,” and to that of “entities capable of being known by only one person,” seem inseparable from Ryle’s polemic against “the ghost in the machine.” Sellars’s account of inner episodes as having originally been postulated, rather than observed, entities, together with his account of how speakers might then come to make introspective reports (sect. 59) of such episodes, made clear how one could be Wittgensteinian without being Rylean. Sellars  showed how one could give a non-reductive account of “mental event” while nevertheless eschewing, with Wittgenstein, the picture of the eye of the mind witnessing these events in a sort of immaterial inner theater.
Sellars’s treatment of the distinction between mind and body has been followed up by many philosophers of mind in subsequent decades. He may have been the first philosopher to insist that we see “mind” as a sort of hypostatization of language. He argued that the intentionality of beliefs is a reflection of the intentionality of sentences, rather than conversely. This reversal makes it possible to understand mind as gradually entering the universe by and through the gradual development of language, as part of a naturalistically explicable evolutionary process, rather than seeing language as the outward manifestation of something inward and mysterious which humans have and animals lack.  As Sellars sees it, if you can explain how the social practices we call “using language” came into existence, you have already explained all that needs to be explained about the relation between mind and world.
A recent book by Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit, offers the first systematic and comprehensive attempt to follow up on Sellars’s thought. More specifically, it offers a “semantic explanatory strategy which takes inference as its basic concept,” as opposed to the alternative strategy “dominant since the Enlightenment, which takes representation as its basic concept.” Brandom’s work can usefully be seen as an attempt to usher analytic philosophy from its Kantian to its Hegelian stage – an attempt foreshadowed in Sellars’s wry description of “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” as “incipient Meditations Hegelienes” (sect. 20) and his reference to Hegel as “that great foe of ‘immediacy’” (sect. 1).
From Hegel’s point of view, taking Kant’s point that intuitions without concepts are blind is the first step toward abandoning a bad philosophical habit which the British empiricists took over from Descartes – the habit of asking whether mind ever succeeds in making unmediated contact with world, and remaining sceptical about the status of knowledge-claims until such contact can be shown to exist. That habit is characteristic of philosophers who, in Brandom’s terms, are “prepresentationalist” (like Descartes and Locke) rather then “inferentialist” (like Leibniz, Kant, Frege, the later Wittgenstein, and Sellars). The former take concepts to be representations (or putative representations) of reality rather than, as Kant did, rules which specify how something is to be done. Kant’s fundamental insight, Brandom says, “is that judgements and actions are to be understood to begin with in terms of the special way in which we are responsible for them.”
Following out this side of Kant’s thought, rather than the side which led him to the sceptical conclusion that we could have no knowledge of thing as they are in themselves, means emphasizing the passages in Kant which anticipate Hegel, Marx, Dewey, and Habermas, as opposed to those which connect Kant with his predecessors. This is the side of the Critique of Pure Reason which links up with Kant’s “Project for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Intent,” rather than with Leibniz and Hme.
I once took the liberty of asking Sellars, “If a man chooses to bind the spirit of Hegel in the fetters of Carnap, how shall he find readers?” My question was prompted by the final section of “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” one of the few places where Sellars let himself go. In that section he offers a brief, but synoptic, vision of world history:
I have use a myth [of Jones] to kill a myth – the Myth of the Given. But is my myth really a myth? Or does the reader not recognize Jones as Man himself in the middle of his journey from the grunts and groans of the cave to the subtle and polydimensional discourse of the drawing room, the laboratory, and the study, the language of Henry and William James, of Einstein and of he philosophers who, in their efforts to break out of discourse to an arche beyond discourse, have provided the most curious dimension of all? (sect. 63)
This questions serves to link the Myth of Jones to Hegel’s account, in the Phenomenology, of the transition from sense-perception to consciousness to self-consciousness – and, more generally, from Nature to Spirit – and also to Darwin’s amendments to that account. Sellars’s inclusion of Herny James as well as of Einstein remind us of his justified suspicion of the science-worship which afflicted the early stages of analytic philosophy. The final clause serves as a rebuke to all those philosophers, from Plato to Ayer, who hoped to “break out of discourse,” and as a reminder that the moral of the essay as a whole is that, though there is no such arche, we are none the worse for that.
Brandom begins, so to speak, where Sellars’s essay leaves off. His book makes good on a lot of what Sellars called his “promissory notes,” and it ends with a description of “the  complete and explicit interpretive equilibrium exhibited  by a community whose members adopt the explicit discursive stance toward each other” – an equilibrium Brandom identifies with “social self-consciousness.” Brandom offers a vision of all language-users forming “one great Community comprising members of all particular communities – the Community of those who say ‘we’ with and to someone, whether the members of those different particular communities recognize each other or not.”