Wilfrid S. Sellars

Introductory Remarks; Notes on Philosophy and the Scientific

Image of Man

A couple of pictures

Topics

• Two images of the world: Scientific and ‘manifest’.

• Objects and thoughts about them.

• Perception and the senses.

• Theoretical entities.

• The concept of mind.

An overarching theme

• Untangling norm and description:Since Hume and Kant, the divide between norm and

description has been at the centre of philosophical reflections.

What we say about the way things are and the way they ought to be reflect two very different forms of engagement with the world and with each other.

Both seem indispensable to our self-understanding: From a descriptive point of view, we are natural parts of a natural world. From a normative point of view, we are agents, pursuing goals, subject to norms and essentially social beings.

PSIM

• Philosophy aims to understand how things hang together.

• A linguistic gloss on this: we use language in many ways, for many sorts of purposes; what we want to know is, how do these uses ‘hang together’?

• This is a question about coherence: what are the relations between our talk of “numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death”? How do these ways of talking fit together in our lives?

• To answer this question, we need a reflective, articulate account of these relations: “no intellectual holds barred.”

Know how vs. Knowing that

• The contrast here is between doing and being able to describe what’s done.

• Most human know how requires a fair bit of knowing that as well; this is especially clear for the kind of reflective knowledge philosophy aims for.

Subject matter

• Given this aim of philosophical activity, what can we say about the subject matter of philosophy?

• In a sense, there is none.

• If philosophy is about how the various disciplines do (or should) ‘hang together’, it’s a kind of meta-discipline, with a meta-subject matter.

Being a real philosopher

• A specialist (physicist, historian etc.) who is concerned about how her field relates to others is properly said to be philosophically-minded.

• But a real philosopher must take a further step, reflecting not just on how the special fields are related, but on how philosophy can (and we hope does) explore and interpret those relations.

Analysis

• Not an entirely bad metaphor for philosophy, but it suggests a certain myopia and even triviality in the business.

• ‘Focus’ says more in favour of what philosophy can contribute. But it suggests that the specialist doesn’t quite understand her own field, which just isn’t so. It also suggests we already have an overall view of things, which is supposed to be the product of philosophy, not an initial input for it.

How many pictures?

• Two “in principle”;

• Many, “in fact”.

• A crucial duality/ call for ‘stereoscopic vision’.

• The manifest and scientific images (not presupposing here that either or both are illusions…)

• “Projections of man-(sic)in-the-world”

Idealizations

• Ideal gases• Frictionless bodies• Ideal types• Illumination is the aim here, “as scientific

idealizations illuminate the development of physical systems”

• These images have histories of their own, and the scientific image (at least) is still in the process of being developed.

The manifest image

• The image in terms of which we first became aware of ourselves, i.e. the image within which (since self-awareness is the key step in our emergence as human beings) we first became human.

• This is linked to conceptual thinking: conceptual thinking is a complex whole that is prior to its parts, i.e. its parts (as understood within the system) presume the existence of the system they are parts of.

Norms

• Here a crucial point about conceptual thinking emerges:

• It is a normative matter– “To be able to think is to be able to measure one’s thoughts by standards of correctness, of relevance, of evidence.”

• This makes the transition from pre-conceptual behaviour to conceptual thinking look like a “holistic…jump to a level of awareness which is irreducibly new”

A bold claim

• “The attempt to understand this difference turns out to be part and parcel of the attempt to encompass in one view the two images of man-in-the-world which I have set out to describe. For, as we shall see, this difference in level appears as an irreducible discontinuity in the manifest image, but as, in a sense requiring careful analysis, a reducible difference in the scientific image.” (p. 6)

Distinguishing the images

• Empirical refinement and correlational science: Mill’s methods & the development of the manifest image.

• Postulation of entities is ruled out here by fiat– these are taken to belong exclusively to the scientific image.

• In fact, of course, these two methods have interacted, so the division is somewhat artificial (but, for Sellars, illuminating).

The perennial philosophy

• Casting a wide net: This includes continental philosophy, but also Anglo-American work in the ‘ordinary language (usage)’ tradition.

• The ‘Platonic tradition’ as a label for these & related views:

• Key shared point: The manifest image is endorsed as real in these philosophies.

Aiming for a synthesis

• Sellars contrasts this monoscopic view of things with a monoscopic view on the other side (Spinoza), and presents his aim as a balanced, ‘stereoscopic’ view of things, which will somehow combine both the scientific and the manifest image.

• First, though, he will explore/develop his account of the two images.

Original & Manifest

• The kinds of things the manifest framework recognizes: “persons, animals, lower forms of life and ‘merely material’ things…”

• The primary objects here are persons. • In the original image, ‘all the objects are

persons’ (p. 10)• Gradual refinement ‘de-personalized’ other

objects.

Interpretation

• “This means that the sort of things that are said of objects in this framework are the sort of things that are said of persons.”

• Important aside: “We shall see that the essential dualism in the manifest image is not that between mind and body as substances, but between two radically different ways in which the human individual is related to the world.” (p. 11)

• Range of activities: What the objects of the original framework are and do are the things persons are and do.

Behaviour and other Doings

• Two contrasts: actions that express character vs. actions that do not; habitual actions vs. deliberate actions.

• Action, whether impulsive, habitual or deliberate, requires the ability to deliberate.

• ‘In character’ applies only to actions predictable on the basis of a person’s past behaviour and beliefs about the circumstances.

• Other predictable behaviour can be a matter of ones’ ‘nature’ rather than ones’ character.

Original image again

• All objects of the original image are capable of the full range of personal behaviour, from impulsive to habitual to deliberate actions. (Links here to anthropology/ animistic belief systems…)

• Pruning as the main process by which we’ve arrived at the refined categories of the manifest image.

Another aside: Cause vs. Prediction

• Roughly, ‘caused’ applies first to actions that are only predictable when we include some kind of intervention or exceptional event in the circumstances.

• Thus we speak (in the pruned manifest image) of a cause for the change in course of one billiard ball (its collision with another) while never asking for the cause of its predictable continuation on its path when no collision or other intervention occurs.

The objectivity of the Manifest Image

• This image is intersubjective, and so we can get it right or wrong.

• Some philosophical errors about the MI– Objects are ‘complexes of sensations’– Apples really aren’t coloured– To say ‘x is good’ is to say that one likes x

• Analytic philosophy is (on the way to) getting it right.

Thought and object

• “…somehow the world is the cause of the individual’s image of the world.”

• The standard approach: ‘a direct causal influence of the world as intelligible on the individual mind’ (p. 16)

• The social element (anti-Robinson Crusoe); Hegel’s grasp of the social group as mediating factor in the development of thought.

• “(T)here is no thinking apart from common standards of correctness and relevance, which relate what I do think to what anyone ought to think. (p. 17)

The Game Metaphor

• We don’t learn to think conceptually by being told the rules!

• Conceptual thought does what it does for us by providing the means for representing the world.

• The dependence on a group does not rule out isolated humans– it’s that conceptual thought is inseparable from the idea of/ contrast between self and others.

A gap in the manifest image

• While the MI is committed to the group as mediator, putting the individual (as she grows up) ‘in touch’ with the ‘intelligible order’ of the world (in the course of language learning…), Sellars holds that it does not have the resources to explain how this mediation works.

• The scientific image, which has grown out of the MI, offers insight into this transition.

Two kinds of causal impact

• Ordinary cases: I fall out a window, or bump into something, or… These causal impacts treat me as simply one thing among many in the natural world.

• The other side: I look at a tree and conclude, ‘there’s a maple tree there.’ Here the world causes me to adopt a position in a normative system of claims and justifications. This can’t be reduced to ordinary cases (holism, I think, is involved in this point).

Survival of the MI

The main question is re-put:• To what extent/ in what way does the MI

survive the transition to a scientific view of how the world is to be described?

• That is, do humans as we conceive them survive the transition, and in what sense?

• More colourfully, does the shift to a synoptic view lead us out of, or into bondage?

Strategy

• Sellars rejects a ‘piecemeal’ approach to joining the SI and MI together.

• Instead, he favours developing each as thoroughly as possible, and then considering how each, as a full image of humans in the world, might be combined with the other into a stereoscopic image.

The SI

• Is still in process of being built.

• Is (in principle, by fiat) distinguished from the MI by including items from postulational theorizing, rather than just a process of categorial/correlational refinement that began with the Original Image.

The Many Sciences

• The SI itself is an idealization, conceived as an integrated image combining the views of the special sciences.

• Each special science is rooted in/supported by the MI.

• This dependence is methodological, but Sellars resists the suggestion that it leads to an in-principle dependence of SI categories on the categories of the MI: The SI purports to be a rival to the MI, complete in its own terms.

Uniting the Sciences

• Ontologically: we may see the objects of one science as identical to combinations of the objects of another science.

• Of the sciences themselves: this would requiring re-reading/ shifting all the methods and practices of one science in terms of another.

• Of the theoretical principles of two sciences: This requires deriving the principles of one from those of the other.

Behaviour

• Perceptible behaviour is already the only evidence for mental events in the MI.

• Behaviourism in this sense is mild as milk. No ruling out of non-behavioural states, so long as behavioural evidence rules…

• Stronger form of Behaviourism: No concepts aside from descriptions of behaviour, environment and their correlations.

Limits of Behaviour

• The attempt to arrive at such a correlational science meets limits, in that only a small range of what an organism ‘does’ under a small range of circumstances (standard conditions) really counts as behaviour.

• The ‘iffiness’ of states in behavioural science. • A hint at the special (linguistically modeled) iffy

states of human beings during normal human behaviour.

Inner speechlike processes

• An account of where the notion of thought comes from.

• A useful way of thinking of humans/interpreting their behaviour.

• Behavioural thinking breaks down when we get outside standard conditions in various ways.

The scientific image of man

• ‘…the scientific image of man turns out to be that of a complex physical system.’

Back to some history

• Earlier efforts to connect scientific image to manifest image: Descartes et al.

The alternatives:• MI objects are (collections of) SI objects as

forests are collections of trees.• MI objects are real, SI objects are inventions

useful in capturing/organizing facts about MI objects.

• MI objects are (mere) appearances, to humans, of what are in fact SI objects (systems of imperceptible particles).

Eddington’s Table

• Sellar’s ice cube.

• The problem: Every property of a system of objects consists of properties of and relations between its components.

• Given this claim, the ice cube is not just a collection of atoms arranged in a ‘cube-like’ way, since its pinkness (as an MI object) does not reduce in this way.

Rejecting a framework

• That MI objects have certain perceptible properties is an MI framework truth.

• But if we’re rejecting the MI framework as, in fact, false (a mere appearance), then this is not a fact that an opponent can hold against us.

• Similarly, responding to critiques of a framework from within its assumptions is inadequate…

• The MI criticized here by contrasting it with a better image, the SI.

Still to come

• Section V ends with a back and forth with Descartes over features of thoughts and ordinary MI objects and whether they can be reconciled with the SI view of human beings.

• The upshot is some insight into the temptation to refuse to allow that the SI is the ‘real’ image of how things are.