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Wilfrid Sellars' Anti–Descriptivism 0. Introduction

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Wilfrid Sellars' Anti–Descriptivism 0. Introduction Categories of Being: Essays on Metaphysics and Logic. Edited by Leila Haaparanta and Heikki Koskinen. Oxford University Press, 2012. Wilfrid Sellars’ Anti–Descriptivism Kevin Scharp The Ohio State University Fezzik: He’s got very good arms. Vizzini: He didn’t fall? Inconceivable! Inigo: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. —From The Princess Bride (1987) 0. Introduction In the late 1960s and early 1970s the work of Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, David Kaplan, and others issued in a revolution in metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. Their insights have been taken up and extended by a group of contemporary philosophers led by Scott Soames and Nathan Salmon. This tradition has come to be known as anti-descriptivism. It encompasses some of the most hotly debated topics in philosophy today, including semantic externalism, epistemological externalism, functionalism, direct reference, and the relation between conceivability and possibility.1 At the same time Kripke, Putnam, and Kaplan were presenting their groundbreaking views, another philosopher was busy working out his own philosophical system: Wilfrid Sellars. Sellars is rarely a topic of contemporary philosophical discussions, and when he is, he is usually mentioned either as an 1 See Kripke (1963, 1972, 1976, 1979), Putnam (1962a, 1971, 1973, 1975a, 1990), Kaplan (1979a, 1979b, 1989a, 1989b), Donnellan (1966, 1970) for the works of the early anti- descriptivists. See Soames (2002, 2003b, 2005) and Salman (1986, 1989) for contemporary anti-descriptivist views. Semantic externalism is the theory that the meanings of some words and the contents of some mental states are determined in part by their physical or social environment; see Putnam (1975), Burge (1979), and Davidson (1988) for discussion. Epistemological externalism is the theory that whether a belief is justified can depend in part on features of the believer’s physical or social environment; see BonJour (2002) for an overview. Functionalism is the view that mental states can be explained in terms of the way they function in a cognitive system; see Block (1980) for an overview. Direct reference is the theory that the meaning of proper names and some predicates are their referents (i.e., there is no distinction between meaning and reference for these expressions); see Salmon (1986), Kaplan (1989a), Recanati (1993) and Soames (2002) for discussion. For discussion of the relation between conceivability and possibility, see the introduction to and the papers contained in Hawthorne and Gendler (2001). Wilfrid Sellars’ Anti-Descriptivism Kevin Scharp early functionalist, as a staunch scientific realist, or for his attack on appeals to givenness in epistemology and philosophy of mind.2 Of course, Sellars’ philosophical corpus is not limited to these doctrines—he presented and defended a remarkable number of original claims. Indeed, some of Sellars’ claims bear a striking resemblance to the revolutionary conclusions drawn by Kripke, Putnam, and the other anti-descriptivists. I argue that when one focuses on these claims and their roles in Sellars’ large-scale accounts of language and the mind, one arrives at a reading of Sellars on which he is a member of the anti- descriptivist tradition. However, Sellars’ reasons for endorsing his anti- descriptivist conclusions are different from the reasons given by more familiar anti-descriptivists, and many of Sellars’ claims about related philosophical issues differ dramatically from those endorsed by the other anti-descriptivists; hence, Sellars’ anti-descriptivism is quite unique, and it represents an important alternative to the more familiar versions. My goal in this paper is to identify Sellars’ anti-descriptivist views, explain their place in his philosophical system, and compare and contrast them with more common anti-descriptivist theories. In the first section, I provide an overview of the anti-descriptivist tradition. In section two, I present an outline of Sellars’ account of language and the mind, and the role of his anti- descriptivist views in that account. Section three is more speculative; in it, I present what I take to be a Sellarsian analysis of an important anti-descriptivist issue: the relation between metaphysical modal notions (e.g., possibility) and epistemic modal notions (e.g., conceivability). The account I present involves extension of the strategy he uses to explain both the relation between physical object concepts (e.g., whiteness) and sensation concepts (e.g., the appearance of whiteness), and the relation between concepts that apply to linguistic activity (e.g., sentential meaning) and those that apply to conceptual activity (e.g., thought content).3 1. The Anti–Descriptivist Tradition4 2 For his views on functionalism, see Sellars (1954, 1964, 1974a). For his defense of scientific realism, see Sellars (1961, 1962a, 1965, 1976). For his attack on the myth of the given, see Sellars (1956, 1973, 1975a, 1979, 1981a). 3 Throughout this essay, I try to point the reader in the direction of the relevant texts by Sellars and other anti-descriptivists; however, I do not attempt to summarize or cite the relevant secondary literature on Sellars. 4 Scott Soames has recently published three excellent books on the anti-descriptivist tradition in philosophy; the overview I give in this section owes much to his exposition; see Soames (2002, 2003b, 2005). Of course, there is much in Soames’ presentation with which I take issue, but his account should serve my purposes; a full reconstruction of the anti- descriptivist tradition is beyond the scope of this paper. 2 Wilfrid Sellars’ Anti-Descriptivism Kevin Scharp As the name indicates, anti-descriptivism is characterized by a rejection of a certain philosophical doctrine—descriptivism—which was immensely influential in the first half of the twentieth century. Contemporary descriptivism originated in the work of Frege and Russell; in particular, it arose out of their solutions to several outstanding problems in the explanation of language. One of the most famous is how it can be that one identity claim (e.g., ‘Hesperous = Hesperous’) is uninformative and can be known apriori, while another identity claim that results from substituting a co-referring name in the first (e.g., ‘Hesperous = Phosperous’) is informative and is known aposteriori. Frege and Russell solved these puzzles by assuming that linguistic expressions have two semantically relevant features: meaning and reference. The meaning of a linguistic expression is what a speaker grasps when she understands that expression, while its reference is a relation between the expression and one or more objects. In the case of proper names (e.g., ‘London’), the meaning is identical to the meaning of a definite description (e.g., ‘the largest city in England’). If some unique object satisfies the description, then it is the referent of the name; otherwise, the name has a meaning, but no referent. One can give a similar analysis of natural kind terms (e.g., ‘cat’) and other predicates by treating their meanings as descriptive conditions (e.g., ‘domesticated feline’) that determine their extensions (e.g., the set of cats).5 When combined with other intuitive views on the nature of language and the mind, this account of the semantic features of linguistic expressions constitutes a powerful theory with far-reaching consequences. The resulting picture of language has come to be known as descriptivism. The following are five tenants of descriptivism as explicated by Soames: (i) One must distinguish between the meaning of a linguistic expression and its referent; for most any linguistic expression (including proper names), its meaning is given by a description, which determines its referent. (ii) Understanding a linguistic expression consists in mentally grasping its meaning and associating this meaning with the expression. (iii) Meaning is transparent; that is, if two linguistic expressions have the same meaning, then anyone who understands them can tell that this is the case. (Because anyone who understands an expression mentally grasps its meaning and associates that meaning with the expression, a person who understands two expressions can tell whether he has mentally grasped the same meaning and associated it with each of them.) (iv) The meaning of a linguistic expression and the content of a mental state it expresses are determined entirely by internal features of the person in question. (Because the meaning of an expression is something that is mentally grasped by someone who comprehends the language in question, a 5 See Frege (1892), Russell (1905, 1910); see Soames (2003a) for discussion. 3 Wilfrid Sellars’ Anti-Descriptivism Kevin Scharp person’s physical and social environments have no direct impact on the meanings of her expressions.) (v) A proposition is apriori if and only if it is necessary; both apriority and necessity are explained in terms of meaning. (Because the meaning of an expression is something that is mentally grasped by someone who comprehends the language in question, simply comprehending a language enables one to know certain truths that are grounded in the meanings of the expressions of that language.)6 Although descriptivists differ on the details of how these principles are to be worked out, and it is not the case that all descriptivists accept all of them, the general picture of how linguistic expressions function and how they relate to both the minds of those who comprehend them and the objects in the world was the received view in analytic philosophy from the beginning of the twentieth century until the late 1960s. Kripke is perhaps the most famous opponent of descriptivism—the force and clarity of his criticisms have been immensely influential. Kripke argues that if names had descriptive meanings, then sentences containing names (or the propositions expressed by them) would have modal and epistemic properties that are different from the ones they actually have. Moreover, he denies that the referent of a name is determined by a definite description (or cluster of definite descriptions).
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