Paraphrasing away properties with pluriverse counterfactuals

Himelright, Jack

doi:10.1007/s11229-020-02757-2

Cited by 3 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…Now, Sellars, unlike Brandom, is not ultimately going to want to eat the realist cake; he is not ultimately a realist about the "world" of properties. 21 Nevertheless, he is surely going to want to have a taste of the realist cake, if only to spit it out, since he must admit the apparent reality of the world of properties as constituting a crucial aspect of "the manifest image," (1962). Brandom's theory of properties as alethic correspondents to the norms governing the use of predicates provides the Sellarsian story with just the account of properties it needs here.…”

Section: Supplementing the Sellarsian Storymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…18 If we are being careful, we should quantify not just over any language actually containing •red•s and •green•s, but, rather, over any language into which •red•s and •green•s can be introduced (See Sellars 1979, 7-8 for a gesture at such a strategy). This modal qualifier is needed to respond to the worry, expressed by Himmelright (2020), that "Sellars' system cannot adequately handle cases where there are important properties without any corresponding inscriptions," (5). 19 Thus, Sellars says, "Only as a last resort would I consent to expunge discourse about attributes from my vocabulary," (1979,6).…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…It's just not true in virtue of expressing a true proposition (once again, because there is no such thing). 21 Genuine realism about this world, taking it to be ontologically on par with the world of objects that we are capable of bumping into would, for Sellars, amount to the "fallacy" of "projecting the rules of [our] language into the non-linguistic world," (1949). 22 One might think that this is a sort of slip by Sellars, not expressive of his official view on the identity of properties.…”

Section: Notesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…7-8 for a gesture at such a strategy). This modal qualifier is needed to respond to the worry, expressed by Himmelright (2020), that "Sellars' system cannot adequately handle cases where there are important properties without any corresponding inscriptions," (5).…”

Section: Endnotesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Sellars's ontological nominalism

Simonelli

2021

European J of Philosophy

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Wilfrid Sellars is widely known for two positions that he calls "nominalism." On the one hand, there is his "psychological nominalism," according to which any awareness one might have of abstract entities-be they properties, relations, or facts-is a thoroughly linguistic affair, and so cannot be presupposed in thinking about the process of learning a (first) language. On the other hand, there is his ontological nominalism, according to which the world, as it is in itself, is fundamentally a world of concrete particulars and so does not ultimately contain such things as properties, relations, or propositionally-structured facts. Sellars clearly takes these two sorts of "nominalism" to go together. However, one of the most influential inheritors of Sellars's philosophy, Robert Brandom, thinks that they do not. Brandom endorses the former, but denies that the latter "is in the end so much as intelligible." In this paper, I articulate the connection between Sellars's psychological and ontological nominalism and draw on Brandom's own development of Sellars's functional role semantics to argue, against Brandom, that Sellars's ontological nominalism not only harmonizes with the rest of his philosophical commitments, but is actually made fully intelligible by the very aspect of Sellars's theory that Brandom himself develops.

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Section: Supplementing the Sellarsian Storymentioning

confidence: 99%