“Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”?
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Why is Sellars’s essay called “Empiricism and the philosophy of mind”? JOHN MCDOWELL ABSTRACT: ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ (EPM) is sometimes read as attacking empiricism in general. But Sellars's announced target is traditional empiricism. In traditional empiricism, experience yields knowledge in a way that does not presuppose other empirical knowledge, so that the knowledge provided by experience can serve as foundations, in a straightforward sense, for other empirical knowledge. To accept this conception is to fall into a form of the Myth of the Given. In EPM Sellars works out a different conception of experience, according to which it is a kind of inner episode that, in the best kind of case, yields knowledge, but in a way that presupposes other empirical knowledge. The knowledge provided by experience can still serve as foundations for other empirical knowledge, but now only in a nuanced sense. The article concludes that so far from rejecting empiricism altogether, EPM rehabilitates empiricism, but in a non-traditional form. KEYWORDS: Empirical Knowledge; Empiricism; Experience; Inner Episodes; Myth of the Given. ARTICLE HISTORY: Received: 22–April–2019 | Accepted: 8–July–2019. §1. I take my question from Robert Brandom, who remarks in his Study Guide (167): “The title of this essay is ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,’ but Sellars never comes right out and tells us what his attitude toward empiricism is.”1 Brandom goes on to discuss a passage that might seem to indicate a sympathy for empiricism on Sellars’s part, but he dismisses any 1 Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, with an introduction by Richard Rorty and a Study Guide by Robert Brandom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997). John McDowell (✉) ANALYSIS | Vol. 23, Nº 3 (2019), pp. 1-23 University of Pittsburgh, USA DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3333330 [email protected] ARTICULO © 2019 Analysis — REDESEP | ISSN: 2386-3994| Disponible en: http://analysis-rp.eu/analysis/vol23/mcdowell/ 2 | ROBERT B. BRANDOM such reading of it. (I shall come back to this.) He concludes: “Indeed, we can see at this point [he has reached §45] that one of the major tasks of the whole essay is to dismantle empiricism” (168). I am going to argue that this claim is quite wrong. To do Brandom justice, I should note that when he defends his claim, what he mentions is, specifically, traditional empiricism. But he nowhere contemplates a possibility left open by this more detailed (and correct) specification of Sellars’s target — the possibility that Sellars might be aiming to rescue a non-traditional empiricism from the wreckage of traditional empiricism, so that he can show us how to be good empiricists. I think that is exactly what Sellars aims to do in this essay. §2. Traditional empiricism, explicitly so described, is in Sellars’s sights in the pivotal part VIII of “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (henceforth EPM). Traditional empiricism answers the question “Does empirical knowledge have a foundation?”, which is the title of part VIII, with an unqualified “Yes”. Traditional empiricism is foundationalist in a sense Sellars spells out like this (§32): One of the forms taken by the Myth of the Given is the idea that there is, indeed must be, a structure of particular matter of fact such that (a) each fact can not only be noninferentially known to be the case, but presupposes no other knowledge either of particular matter of fact, or of general truths; and (b) … the noninferential knowledge of facts belonging to this structure constitutes the ultimate court of appeals for all factual claims — particular and general — about the world. This formulation is in abstract structural terms. It does not mention experience. But from the way part VIII flows, it is clear that what Sellars is rejecting when he rejects this form of the Myth is what he labels “traditional empiricism” at the part’s conclusion (§38). To make the connection, all we need is the obvious point that according to traditional empiricism, experience HEGEL AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY | 3 is our way of acquiring the knowledge that is supposed to be foundational in the sense Sellars explains in §32. In traditional empiricism, experience is taken to yield noninferential knowledge in a way that presupposes no knowledge of anything else. Sellars takes pains to draw our attention to this supposed freedom from presuppositions, the second sub-clause of clause (a) in his formulation of an unqualified foundationalism. §32 continues like this: It is important to note that I characterized the knowledge of fact belonging to this stratum as not only noninferential, but as presupposing no knowledge of other matters of fact, whether particular or general. It might be thought that this is a redundancy, that knowledge (not belief or conviction, but knowledge) which logically presupposes knowledge of other facts must be inferential. This, however, as I hope to show, is itself an episode in the Myth. When he rejects traditional empiricism at the end of part VIII, he is rejecting that sub-clause in particular. The rest of the affirmative answer to the question about foundations can stand. In §38 he says: If I reject the framework of traditional empiricism, it is not because I want to say that empirical knowledge has no foundation. For to put it in this way is to suggest that it is really “empirical knowledge so-called,” and to put it in a box with rumors and hoaxes. There is clearly some point to the picture of human knowledge as resting on a level of propositions — observation reports — which do not rest on other propositions in the same way as other propositions rest on them. On the other hand, I do wish to insist that the metaphor of “foundation” is misleading in that it keeps us from seeing that if there is a logical dimension in which other empirical propositions rest on observation reports, there is another logical dimension in which the latter rest on the former. Dependence in this second dimension is the presupposing missed by traditional empiricism. To recognize the second dimension is to accept that what is now — just for this reason — only misleadingly conceived as foundational knowledge presupposes knowledge of other matters of fact, knowledge that would have to belong to the structure that can now only 4 | ROBERT B. BRANDOM misleadingly be seen as built on those foundations. If we stayed with the metaphor of foundations, we would be implying that the foundations of a building can depend on the building. This passage characterizes a non-traditional empiricism. To make that explicit, we only need to register that it is experience that yields the knowledge expressed in observation reports. Recognizing the second dimension puts us in a position to understand observation reports properly. The knowledge they express is not inferentially grounded on other knowledge of matters of fact, but — in the crucial departure from traditional empiricism — it presupposes other knowledge of matters of fact. It is knowledge on which Sellars continues to hold that other empirical knowledge rests in the first dimension. By introducing an explicit mention of experience, we made it possible to see part VIII as beginning with a formulation of traditional empiricism, as we needed to do in order to make sense of how part VIII ends. The same move enables us to see that the position Sellars recommends at the end of part VIII, as a replacement for traditional empiricism, is a reformed empiricism. §3. That is still somewhat abstract. To fill out this specification of a reformed empiricism, we would need to give a detailed picture of experience, explaining how it can yield noninferential knowledge, but only in a way that presupposes other knowledge of matters of fact — in contrast with the presupposition-free knowledge-yielding powers that experience is credited with by traditional empiricism. And that is just what Sellars offers, starting in part III, “The Logic of ‘Looks’”. Experiences, Sellars tells us, contain propositional claims (§16). That is an initially promissory way (as Sellars insists) of crediting experiences with intentional content. He delivers on the promissory note in the first phase of the myth of Jones (part XV). The topic there is “thoughts” — inner episodes with intentional content — in general. But Sellars reverts to the intentional character of experiences in particular in a retrospective remark at the beginning of the next part, in §60. There he indicates, in effect, that he has finally put the verbal currency he issued in §16 on the gold standard. HEGEL AND ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY | 5 In §16 bis, Sellars says it is clear that a complete account of (visual) experience requires “something more”, over and above intentional content, namely “what philosophers have in mind when they speak of ‘visual impressions’ or ‘immediate visual experiences’”. (It can be questioned whether this is clear, or even correct, but since my aim is entirely exegetical I shall not consider that here.) When Sellars introduces this “something more”, he remarks that its “logical status … is a problem which will be with us for the remainder of this argument”. His final treatment of this topic comes at the end of the essay, in the second phase of the myth of Jones (part XVI). The myth of Jones offers an account of the non-dispositional mental in general. But in EPM it clearly has a more specific purpose as well: to complete the account of experience, in particular, that Sellars begins on in part III. The first phase vindicates his promissory talk of experiences as having intentional content, and the second deals with the “something more” he thinks is needed to accommodate their sensory character.