Of μ-Mesons and Oranges

Apel, Jochen; Bahrenberg, Simone; Köhne, Carolin; Prien, Bernd; Sandor, Christian

doi:10.1515/9783110326246.59

Cited by 3 publications

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“…Many find Brandom's account here counter-intuitive (e.g., Apel et al 2008), denying that sub-atomic particles can be observed. Indeed Sellars himself had expressed this latter view with an example involving the vapor trails of an overhead jet.…”

Section: A Rortian World Of Augmented Neo-ryleansmentioning

confidence: 92%

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

Wilfrid Sellars, Idealism, and Realism : Understanding Psychological Nominalism

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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).

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Section: A Rortian World Of Augmented Neo-ryleansmentioning

confidence: 92%

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

Wilfrid Sellars, Idealism, and Realism : Understanding Psychological Nominalism

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An Hegelian Solution to a Tangle of Problems Facing Brandom'S Analytic Pragmatism

Redding

2014

British Journal for the History of Philosophy

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The innovative and ambitious program of analytic pragmatism introduced by Robert Brandom in his 1994 Making It Explicit and developed in subsequent writings (Brandom 1994(Brandom , 2000(Brandom , 2002(Brandom , 2009(Brandom , 2010(Brandom , 2011 constitutes one of the most thoroughgoing recent reinterpretations of the nature of analytic philosophy and its place in the history of philosophy. Brandom's philosophy has its basis in a semantic theory, "inferentialism", that treats the meaning of a judgment as dependent upon those inferential relations to other possible judgments within which it stands.Moreover, on his account, not only are these inferential relations necessary for a judgment's meaningfulness, they are also sufficient. 1 This "strong" inferentialism reverses the traditional "representationalist" account of these issues that he sees as dominating philosophy since the seventeenth century. On the representationalist account, the capacity for representation is seen as intrinsic to mental states, with expressions deriving their conceptual contents from those states. In contrast, for Brandom the conceptual contents of the mental states are best regarded as determined by the contents of the linguistic acts giving expression to them-acts directed to and interpretable by others. This focus on the primacy of action constitutes a type of pragmatism, but in a move highly unusual in analytic philosophy, Brandom links this inferentialist, analytic version of pragmatism to the rationalist-idealist tradition by treating his strong inferentialism as continuous with Hegel's transformation of Kant's transcendental idealism.1 "The weak inferentialist thesis is that inferential articulation is necessary for specifically conceptual contents. The strong inferentialist thesis is that broadly inferential articulation is sufficient for specifically conceptual contentfulness-that is, that there is nothing more to conceptual content than its broadly inferential articulation" (Brandom 1994, 131).

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Deixis, Reference and Inference

Zarębski¹,

Kublikowski²

2021

ejpap

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Of μ-Mesons and Oranges

Cited by 3 publications

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

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

An Hegelian Solution to a Tangle of Problems Facing Brandom'S Analytic Pragmatism

Deixis, Reference and Inference

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