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Sellars in Context: an Analysis of Wilfrid Sellars's Early Works Peter Jackson Olen University of South Florida, [email protected]

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Sellars in Context: an Analysis of Wilfrid Sellars's Early Works Peter Jackson Olen University of South Florida, Peterolen@Gmail.Com University of South Florida Scholar Commons Graduate Theses and Dissertations Graduate School January 2012 Sellars in Context: An Analysis of Wilfrid Sellars's Early Works Peter Jackson Olen University of South Florida, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd Part of the American Studies Commons, and the Philosophy of Science Commons Scholar Commons Citation Olen, Peter Jackson, "Sellars in Context: An Analysis of Wilfrid Sellars's Early Works" (2012). Graduate Theses and Dissertations. http://scholarcommons.usf.edu/etd/4191 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Sellars in Context: An Analysis of Wilfrid Sellars’s Early Works by Peter Olen A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Philosophy College of Arts and Sciences University of South Florida Co-Major Professor: Stephen Turner, Ph.D. Co-Major Professor: Richard Manning, Ph.D. Rebecca Kukla, Ph.D. Alexander Levine, Ph.D. Willem deVries, Ph.D. Date of Approval: March 20th, 2012 Keywords: Logical Positivism, History of Analytic Philosophy Copyright © 2012, Peter Olen DEDICATION I dedicate this dissertation to the faculty members and fellow graduate students who helped me along the way. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to thank Rebecca Kukla, Richard Manning, Stephen Turner, Willem deVries, Alex Levine, Roger Ariew, Eric Winsberg, Charles Guigon, Nancy Stanlick, Michael Strawser, and the myriad of faculty members who were instrumental in getting me to this point. Equally important was the strong graduate community I spent most of my time with. Specifically, though not exclusively, I am grateful to Andrea Pitts, Brian Mintey, Steve Burgess, Phil Scurderi, Nate Draluck, Paul Cudney, Jessica Williams, Liz Victor, and Emre Keskin. My apologies for those I have forgotten to list! TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract ii Introduction 1 Chapter One: American Philosophy and the Rise 8 of Logical Positivism I. Introduction 8 II. American Philosophy Prior to Logical Positivism 16 III. Allies or Foes? 37 IV. Conclusion 49 V. Wilfrid Sellars and American Philosophy 55 Chapter Two: Pure Pragmatics 58 I. Introduction 58 II. Carnap’s Semantics 64 III. The Reception History of Carnap’s Semantics 71 IV. The Project of Pure Pragmatics 86 V. Types, Tokens, and Formal Requirements 97 VI. Rules 110 VII. Worlds, Possible Worlds, and Formal Semantics 117 VIII. Languages, Language Proper, and Language Schema 125 IX. The Results of Pure Pragmatics: Expectations and Reception 132 X. Conclusion: After Pure Pragmatics 142 Chapter Three: From Formalism to Psychology 145 I. Introduction 145 II. Rules 157 III. Sellars’s Critique of Carnap 172 IV. Carnap’s Reply 186 V. The Road to a Strongly Normative Conception of Language 192 Chapter Four: Conclusion 195 Bibliography 202 I. Articles and Books 202 II. Correspondence 211 i ABSTRACT Although Wilfrid Sellars’s work holds a prominent place in recent analytic philosophy, little work has been done to situate his early approaches to normativity and the philosophy of language in their proper context. What little work has been done tends to emphasize Sellars’s connection to a then dominant logical empiricism at the expense of marginalizing other American philosophical schools. On top of this historical issue, most scholars attempting to explain Sellars’s systematic philosophy tend to ignore a developmental picture of Sellars’s positions and focus on explicating the systematic character of his thought. My dissertation attempts to correct both of these tendencies by offering a historically situated account of Sellars’s early papers that presents his views in relation to logical empiricism, the “Iowa School” of philosophy as embodied in Gustav Bergmann’s and Everett Hall’s writings, and some aspects of traditional American philosophy. By fleshing out the context of Sellars’s early papers, it becomes clear that the “strong” normativist project present in his later essays developed out of his shift from his attempt to fit “traditional” philosophical problems into a formalist approach to language. My thesis acts as a “correction” to the previous interpretive points by presenting a more complex characterization of the contextual influences on Sellars’s early papers and creating a foundation for a developmental account of Sellars’s later views. I do this by examining evidence from Sellars’s unpublished correspondence and works from a myriad of archival sources in conjunction with an analysis of his early publications. ii INTRODUCTION Wilfrid Sellars’s work has recently gained prominence in the work of analytic philosophers who are concerned with offering a particular account of the relationship between mind, language, and world. This “particular account” focuses on Sellars’s commitment to a normative conception of language and thought that turns on understanding linguistic rules and rule-following as concepts inherently bound to standards of correctness relating to patterns of behavior. Sellars’s contemporary influence is not limited to the topic of normativity; his critique of the given, his invocation of “the space of reasons”, and his functional role semantics have all been subject to lengthy discussions in the secondary literature. Despite the prominence of Sellars’s work in contemporary scholarship, little to no attention has been paid to Sellars in scholarship pertaining to the history of analytic philosophy. In fact, little effort has been made to offer a historically sensitive, developmental account of Sellars’s philosophical thought in general. Due to the fact that the history of analytic philosophy is a relatively new field of study, historians and philosophers alike have generally been mute when it comes to Sellars’s place in the canon. Recent scholarship has tended to focus on either the early Neo-Kantian roots of analytic philosophy, debates in England and Germany surrounding the work of Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Gottlob Frege, or on the emergence and development of logical positivism1. Although some2 recent scholarship 1 See Uebel 2007 and Hylton 1993. 1 has focused on the effect the rise of analytic philosophy had on the early American philosophical community, little attention has been paid to the period of philosophy that covers Sellars’s philosophical education and early publications. When scholars do address the American philosophical community from about the mid-1930s up until the early 1950s, Sellars’s name barely appears. When it does appear it is usually in reference to his seminal work “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” and critiques of the given in epistemology3. Sellars’s relationship to logical positivism, the rich connection between his philosophy and earlier trends in American philosophy (most notably Sellars’s connection to Critical Realism as embodied in his father’s place in the movement and to some strains of pragmatism as well) has been largely ignored in the secondary literature. Most, if not all, attempts at reconstructing Sellars’s systematic philosophy as a whole have taken the form of thematically organized collections that make little to no attempt to situate Sellars’s work within its historical context or account for shifts in his philosophical commitments.4 In all fairness to these collections, such historical concerns are not usually the point behind constructing an overview of one philosopher’s systematic thought. An accurate portrayal of any philosopher must be able to account for shifts in her thought as well as the influential debates and concerns surrounding her development. To ignore such contextual issues runs the risk of, at best, misconstruing the development of a philosopher and, at worst, misinterpreting a philosopher’s views. Historical accounts can help complete and correct the picture provided by thematically organized collections. 2 See especially Andrew Jewett’s article “Canonizing Dewey: Columbia Naturalism, Logical Empiricism, and the Idea of American Philosophy”. 3 For example, see Kuklick 2001. 4 It should be noted that this is not necessarily a critique of said texts. The point is simply that such overviews of Sellars’s thought do not offer, nor purport to offer, a historical account of his philosophical development. For example, see deVries 2005 and O’Shea 2007. 2 What little attempt has been made at the periodization of Sellars’s work tends to focus on the publication of his essay “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (hereafter EPM) as the center piece of Sellars’s philosophical development.5 Once this is established, Sellars’s career is generally divided into “before” and “after” periods centered on the publication of EPM. This is problematic for a number of reasons - at least two of which are particularly serious. First, such a periodization at least tacitly assumes that there are no significant shifts in Sellars’s views prior to the publication of EPM. This is to assume that one could clump the variety of publications from roughly 1947 – 1955 together without running roughshod over any significant conceptual changes in Sellars’s philosophical commitments. Such an assumption is problematic, I will argue, precisely because there are significant shifts in Sellars’s philosophical commitments prior to the publication of EPM. Second, such a centering of Sellars’s philosophical views on EPM also presupposes that the views expressed in EPM are different enough from Sellars’s previous positions to represent a significant shift in view. Although there is no denying that EPM is a standout work in Sellars’s published writings, a number of his own works (as well as works of his contemporaries and former professors)6 anticipate large sections of EPM. Certain ideas, especially Sellars’s commitment to psychological nominalism, occur earlier than EPM; Sellars’s 1954 article “Physical Realism” contains a number of themes and arguments found in EPM two years prior to its publication.
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