Hegel and Sellars’ “Myth of Jones”: Can Sellars Have More in Common with Hegel than Rorty and Brandom Suggest?

Abstract

One characteristic shared by G. W. F. Hegel and Wilfrid Sellars is that both left behind follower-interpreters portrayed as aligned along a 'right-to-left' continuum, but one might be skeptical that there could be anything more substantive in common between them. Is not the German's absolute idealism the antithesis of the American's uncompromisingly scientific realism? Nevertheless, Sellars hinted at connections between his work and the philosophy of Hegel and a number of his followers have taken that hint seriously. From the Sellarsian side, the feature of his realism that leans him towards idealism is the combination of his critique of Cartesian and empiricist conceptions of the mind and the irreducible role given to social norms, especially those of linguistic communication, within an otherwise scientific realist ontology. 1 From the Hegelian side, recent interpreters who take Hegel's idealism as free of any commitment to cosmic minds and the like, and who stress Hegel's rejection of the very idea of some 'Platonic realm' that transcends the concrete spatio-temporal world, nudge Hegel in the direction of Sellarsian naturalism and realism. In this chapter I explore some features shared by Sellars and Hegel in an area where philosophies of mind and language intersect, arguing for a contrary account to that put forward in their names by Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom-two Sellarsians perhaps most associated with the Sellars-Hegel parallel. In particular, I examine Sellars' thesis of psychological nominalism, which informs his account of human mindedness found in the closing sections of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, the myth concerning the radical linguistic innovator 'Jones'. According to psychological nominalism, 'all awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., in short, all awareness of abstract entities-indeed, all awareness even of particulars-is a linguistic affair' (Sellars 1997, §29, p. 63). While Brandom, following Rorty and Dennett, interprets this as a form of psychological anti-realism, I argue that Sellars' own account is compatible with the kind of psychological realism found in Hegel. Psychological nominalism plays an important role in Sellars' critique of the 'myth of the given', which is commonly compared to Hegel's critique of the stance of 'sense-certainty' at the outset of The Phenomenology of Spirit (Hegel 1977, ch. 1). As with Hegel's critique, the 'givens' targeted by Sellars are purported particular entities (traditional 'sense impressions' or Russellian 'sense-data', for example) thought by 1 According to Robert Brandom, it was Richard Rorty who distinguished rightwing from left-wing Sellarsians on the basis of their leaning towards the normative or the naturalist dimensions of Sellars' position (Brandom 2015: 31).