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1 2 From Empiricism to Expressivism 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 BBrandomrandom 11stst ppages.inddages.indd i 66/5/2014/5/2014 33:10:14:10:14 PPMM 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 BBrandomrandom 11stst ppages.inddages.indd iiii 66/5/2014/5/2014 33:10:26:10:26 PPMM 1 2 3 From Empiricism 4 5 6 to Expressivism 7 8 9 brandom reads sellars 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Robert B. Brandom 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England • 2014 37 BBrandomrandom 11stst ppages.inddages.indd iiiiii 66/5/2014/5/2014 33:10:26:10:26 PPMM 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College 28 All rights reserved 29 Printed in the United States of America 30 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 31 Brandom, Robert. 32 From empiricism to expressivism : Brandom reads Sellars / Robert B. Brandom. pages cm 33 Includes bibliographical references and index. 34 ISBN 978-0-674-18728-3 (alk. paper) 35 1. Sellars, Wilfrid. 2. Empiricism. 3. Pragmatism. 4. Expressivism (Ethics) I. Title. 36 B945.S444B73 2014 170'.42—dc23 2014008332 37 BBrandomrandom 11stst ppages.inddages.indd iivv 66/5/2014/5/2014 33:10:26:10:26 PPMM 1 2 3 Even without this explicit dedication, 4 it would be clear that this one is for Wilfi d. 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 BBrandomrandom 11stst ppages.inddages.indd v 66/5/2014/5/2014 33:10:26:10:26 PPMM 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 BBrandomrandom 11stst ppages.inddages.indd vvii 66/5/2014/5/2014 33:10:26:10:26 PPMM 1 2 Contents 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Title Abbreviations ix 12 13 Introduction 1 14 15 1 Categories and Noumena: Two Kantian Axes of Sellars’s Th ought 30 16 2 Th e Centrality of Sellars’s Two-Ply Account of Observation 17 to the Arguments of “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” 99 18 3 Pragmatism, Inferentialism, and Modality 19 in Sellars’s Arguments against Empiricism 120 20 4 Modality and Normativity: 21 From Hume and Quine to Kant and Sellars 145 22 23 5 Modal Expressivism and Modal Realism: Together Again 174 24 6 Sortals, Identity, and Modality: Th e Metaphysical 25 Signifi cance of the Modal Kant-Sellars Th esis 216 26 7 Sellars’s Metalinguistic Expressivist Nominalism 236 27 28 Credits 273 29 30 Index 275 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 BBrandomrandom 11stst ppages.inddages.indd vviiii 66/5/2014/5/2014 33:10:26:10:26 PPMM 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 BBrandomrandom 11stst ppages.inddages.indd vviiiiii 66/5/2014/5/2014 33:10:26:10:26 PPMM 1 2 Title Abbreviations 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 EPM Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind 12 PPPW Pure Pragmatics and Possible Worlds: Th e Early Essays of Wilfrid 13 Sellars 14 15 CDCM “Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities” 16 TTC “Toward a Th eory of the Categories” 17 RNWW “Realism and the New Way of Words” 18 GE “Grammar and Existence: A Preface to Ontology” 19 NS “Naming and Saying” 20 21 AE “Abstract Entities” 22 BSD Between Saying and Doing 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 BBrandomrandom 11stst ppages.inddages.indd iixx 66/5/2014/5/2014 33:10:26:10:26 PPMM 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 BBrandomrandom 11stst ppages.inddages.indd x 66/5/2014/5/2014 33:10:26:10:26 PPMM 1 2 From Empiricism to Expressivism 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 BBrandomrandom 11stst ppages.inddages.indd xxii 66/5/2014/5/2014 33:10:26:10:26 PPMM 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 BBrandomrandom 11stst ppages.inddages.indd xxiiii 66/5/2014/5/2014 33:10:26:10:26 PPMM 1 Introduction 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1. Kant, Pragmatism, and the “New Way of Words” 10 11 Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (1912–1989) was the greatest American philosopher of 12 the middle years of the twentieth century. Th e depth, originality, and range 13 of his philosophical thought earn him a place alongside Charles Sanders 14 Peirce, the greatest American philosopher of an earlier generation. From the 15 point of view of contemporary conventional opinion among Anglophone 16 philosophers, this assessment is somewhat eccentric—though not quite idio- 17 syncratic. Th ere is no question that other American philosophers of the time 18 were more infl uential than Sellars—of those with a large overlap of interests, 19 W. V. O. Quine (1908–2000) being preeminent among them. But one can 20 also gauge the importance of a philosopher by the wealth of ideas, connec- 21 tions, and projects he bequeaths, by their power and fecundity, their capac- 22 ity for further development, their potential for further illumination. Peirce’s 23 scattered, fi tful, frustrating writings remain a trove of mostly still-buried 24 treasures. I fi nd in Sellars’s more systematic, sustained, if sometimes equally 25 frustrating, writings correspondingly rich veins of philosophical ore. 26 It was obvious to his contemporaries that Sellars was not only an immensely 27 talented philosopher, but one distinguished from his fellow analysts of the 28 time both by his overtly systematic ambitions and by the self-consciously 29 historical roots of his thought. Although his range of historical reference was 30 very wide, the most important fi gure for Sellars always was Kant. Th e subtitle 31 of his most systematic work, his 1966 John Locke lectures, is “Variations on 32 Kantian Th emes.” Being avowedly interested in and infl uenced by Kant was 33 unusual among analytic philosophers during the period of Sellars’s fl oruit in 34 the late fi ft ies and early sixties. Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore had forged 35 the fi ghting faith of analytic philosophy in opposition to the then-dominant 36 37 BBrandomrandom 11stst ppages.inddages.indd 1 66/5/2014/5/2014 33:10:26:10:26 PPMM 2 FROM EMPIRICISM TO EXPRESSIVISM 1 British Idealism inspired by Hegel (the passion of their youth), which they 2 properly saw as developing themes already implicit in Kant’s transcendental 3 idealism. Th e recoil from Kant in Sellars’s philosophical culture circle was 4 not universal. Of those with most infl uence on Sellars, C. I. Lewis was a self- 5 professed neo-Kantian, who did more than anyone else to keep the teaching 6 of the fi rst Critique alive in American graduate schools of philosophy. And 7 Sellars was in an ideal position to see how deeply infl uenced by his neo-Kan- 8 tian background Rudolf Carnap was—perhaps better situated in this regard 9 than Carnap himself. 10 Th e eff orts in the late sixties of John Rawls in America and Peter Strawson 11 in Britain ensured that Kant would be recovered for later generations not 12 only for the Anglophone canon but as a party to contemporary philosophi- 13 cal conversation. Sellars’s development of Kantian ideas in application to 14 issues of current philosophical interest has yet to have its hearing, how- 15 ever. In Chapter 1 of this work, I talk about two major Kantian axes of 16 Sellars’s thought: his metalinguistic version of the Kantian idea of catego- 17 ries (“pure concepts of the Understanding”) and his scientifi c naturalism 18 as a version of Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena. On 19 the fi rst topic, following out clues he fi nds in Carnap, he gives a metalin- 20 guistic reading of Kant’s thought that, besides concepts used in empiri- 21 cal description and explanation, there are also concepts whose expressive 22 role it is to make explicit necessary features of the framework that makes 23 empirical description and explanation possible.