Wilfrid S. Sellars

1
Wilfrid S. Sellars

• Introductory Remarks Notes on Philosophy and the
  Scientific Image of Man

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A couple of pictures
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Topics

• Two images of the world Scientific and
  manifest.
• Objects and thoughts about them.
• Perception and the senses.
• Theoretical entities.
• The concept of mind.

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An overarching theme

• Untangling norm and description
• Since Hume and Kant, the divide between norm and
  description has been at the centre of
  philosophical reflections.
• What we say about the way things are and the way
  they ought to be reflect two very different forms
  of engagement with the world and with each other.
  
• Both seem indispensable to our self-understanding
  From a descriptive point of view, we are
  natural parts of a natural world. From a
  normative point of view, we are agents, pursuing
  goals, subject to norms and essentially social
  beings.

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PSIM

• Philosophy aims to understand how things hang
  together.
• A linguistic gloss on this we use language in
  many ways, for many sorts of purposes what we
  want to know is, how do these uses hang
  together?
• This is a question about coherence what are the
  relations between our talk of numbers and
  duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic
  experience and death? How do these ways of
  talking fit together in our lives?
• To answer this question, we need a reflective,
  articulate account of these relations no
  intellectual holds barred.

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Know how vs. Knowing that

• The contrast here is between doing and being able
  to describe whats done.
• Most human know how requires a fair bit of
  knowing that as well this is especially clear
  for the kind of reflective knowledge philosophy
  aims for.

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Subject matter

• Given this aim of philosophical activity, what
  can we say about the subject matter of
  philosophy?
• In a sense, there is none.
• If philosophy is about how the various
  disciplines do (or should) hang together, its
  a kind of meta-discipline, with a meta-subject
  matter.

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Being a real philosopher

• A specialist (physicist, historian etc.) who is
  concerned about how her field relates to others
  is properly said to be philosophically-minded.
• But a real philosopher must take a further step,
  reflecting not just on how the special fields are
  related, but on how philosophy can (and we hope
  does) explore and interpret those relations.

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Analysis

• Not an entirely bad metaphor for philosophy, but
  it suggests a certain myopia and even triviality
  in the business.
• Focus says more in favour of what philosophy
  can contribute. But it suggests that the
  specialist doesnt quite understand her own
  field, which just isnt so. It also suggests we
  already have an overall view of things, which is
  supposed to be the product of philosophy, not an
  initial input for it.

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How many pictures?

• Two in principle
• Many, in fact.
• A crucial duality/ call for stereoscopic
  vision.
• The manifest and scientific images (not
  presupposing here that either or both are
  illusions)
• Projections of man-(sic)in-the-world

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Idealizations

• Ideal gases
• Frictionless bodies
• Ideal types
• Illumination is the aim here, as scientific
  idealizations illuminate the development of
  physical systems
• These images have histories of their own, and the
  scientific image (at least) is still in the
  process of being developed.

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The manifest image

• The image in terms of which we first became aware
  of ourselves, i.e. the image within which (since
  self-awareness is the key step in our emergence
  as human beings) we first became human.
• This is linked to conceptual thinking
  conceptual thinking is a complex whole that is
  prior to its parts, i.e. its parts (as understood
  within the system) presume the existence of the
  system they are parts of.

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Norms

• Here a crucial point about conceptual thinking
  emerges
• It is a normative matter To be able to think is
  to be able to measure ones thoughts by standards
  of correctness, of relevance, of evidence.
• This makes the transition from pre-conceptual
  behaviour to conceptual thinking look like a
  holisticjump to a level of awareness which is
  irreducibly new

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A bold claim

• The attempt to understand this difference turns
  out to be part and parcel of the attempt to
  encompass in one view the two images of
  man-in-the-world which I have set out to
  describe. For, as we shall see, this difference
  in level appears as an irreducible discontinuity
  in the manifest image, but as, in a sense
  requiring careful analysis, a reducible
  difference in the scientific image. (p. 6)

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Distinguishing the images

• Empirical refinement and correlational science
  Mills methods the development of the manifest
  image.
• Postulation of entities is ruled out here by
  fiat these are taken to belong exclusively to
  the scientific image.
• In fact, of course, these two methods have
  interacted, so the division is somewhat
  artificial (but, for Sellars, illuminating).

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The perennial philosophy

• Casting a wide net This includes continental
  philosophy, but also Anglo-American work in the
  ordinary language (usage) tradition.
• The Platonic tradition as a label for these
  related views
• Key shared point The manifest image is endorsed
  as real in these philosophies.

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Aiming for a synthesis

• Sellars contrasts this monoscopic view of things
  with a monoscopic view on the other side
  (Spinoza), and presents his aim as a balanced,
  stereoscopic view of things, which will somehow
  combine both the scientific and the manifest
  image.
• First, though, he will explore/develop his
  account of the two images.

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Original Manifest

• The kinds of things the manifest framework
  recognizes persons, animals, lower forms of
  life and merely material things
• The primary objects here are persons.
• In the original image, all the objects are
  persons (p. 10)
• Gradual refinement de-personalized other
  objects.

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Interpretation

• This means that the sort of things that are said
  of objects in this framework are the sort of
  things that are said of persons.
• Important aside We shall see that the
  essential dualism in the manifest image is not
  that between mind and body as substances, but
  between two radically different ways in which the
  human individual is related to the world. (p.
  11)
• Range of activities What the objects of the
  original framework are and do are the things
  persons are and do.

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Behaviour and other Doings

• Two contrasts actions that express character
  vs. actions that do not habitual actions vs.
  deliberate actions.
• Action, whether impulsive, habitual or
  deliberate, requires the ability to deliberate.
  
• In character applies only to actions
  predictable on the basis of a persons past
  behaviour and beliefs about the circumstances.
• Other predictable behaviour can be a matter of
  ones nature rather than ones character.

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Original image again

• All objects of the original image are capable of
  the full range of personal behaviour, from
  impulsive to habitual to deliberate actions.
  (Links here to anthropology/ animistic belief
  systems)
• Pruning as the main process by which weve
  arrived at the refined categories of the manifest
  image.

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Another aside Cause vs. Prediction

• Roughly, caused applies first to actions that
  are only predictable when we include some kind of
  intervention or exceptional event in the
  circumstances.
• Thus we speak (in the pruned manifest image) of a
  cause for the change in course of one billiard
  ball (its collision with another) while never
  asking for the cause of its predictable
  continuation on its path when no collision or
  other intervention occurs.

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The objectivity of the Manifest Image

• This image is intersubjective, and so we can get
  it right or wrong.
• Some philosophical errors about the MI
• Objects are complexes of sensations
• Apples really arent coloured
• To say x is good is to say that one likes x
• Analytic philosophy is (on the way to) getting it
  right.

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Thought and object

• somehow the world is the cause of the
  individuals image of the world.
• The standard approach a direct causal
  influence of the world as intelligible on the
  individual mind (p. 16)
• The social element (anti-Robinson Crusoe)
  Hegels grasp of the social group as mediating
  factor in the development of thought.
• (T)here is no thinking apart from common
  standards of correctness and relevance, which
  relate what I do think to what anyone ought to
  think. (p. 17)

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The Game Metaphor

• We dont learn to think conceptually by being
  told the rules!
• Conceptual thought does what it does for us by
  providing the means for representing the world.
• The dependence on a group does not rule out
  isolated humans its that conceptual thought is
  inseparable from the idea of/ contrast between
  self and others.

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A gap in the manifest image

• While the MI is committed to the group as
  mediator, putting the individual (as she grows
  up) in touch with the intelligible order of
  the world (in the course of language learning),
  Sellars holds that it does not have the resources
  to explain how this mediation works.
• The scientific image, which has grown out of the
  MI, offers insight into this transition.

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Two kinds of causal impact

• Ordinary cases I fall out a window, or bump
  into something, or These causal impacts treat
  me as simply one thing among many in the natural
  world.
• The other side I look at a tree and conclude,
  theres a maple tree there. Here the world
  causes me to adopt a position in a normative
  system of claims and justifications. This cant
  be reduced to ordinary cases (holism, I think, is
  involved in this point).

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Survival of the MI

• The main question is re-put
• To what extent/ in what way does the MI survive
  the transition to a scientific view of how the
  world is to be described?
• That is, do humans as we conceive them survive
  the transition, and in what sense?
• More colourfully, does the shift to a synoptic
  view lead us out of, or into bondage?

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Strategy

• Sellars rejects a piecemeal approach to joining
  the SI and MI together.
• Instead, he favours developing each as thoroughly
  as possible, and then considering how each, as a
  full image of humans in the world, might be
  combined with the other into a stereoscopic image.

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The SI

• Is still in process of being built.
• Is (in principle, by fiat) distinguished from the
  MI by including items from postulational
  theorizing, rather than just a process of
  categorial/correlational refinement that began
  with the Original Image.

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The Many Sciences

• The SI itself is an idealization, conceived as an
  integrated image combining the views of the
  special sciences.
• Each special science is rooted in/supported by
  the MI.
• This dependence is methodological, but Sellars
  resists the suggestion that it leads to an
  in-principle dependence of SI categories on the
  categories of the MI The SI purports to be a
  rival to the MI, complete in its own terms.

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Uniting the Sciences

• Ontologically we may see the objects of one
  science as identical to combinations of the
  objects of another science.
• Of the sciences themselves this would requiring
  re-reading/ shifting all the methods and
  practices of one science in terms of another.
• Of the theoretical principles of two sciences
  This requires deriving the principles of one from
  those of the other.

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Behaviour

• Perceptible behaviour is already the only
  evidence for mental events in the MI.
• Behaviourism in this sense is mild as milk. No
  ruling out of non-behavioural states, so long as
  behavioural evidence rules
• Stronger form of Behaviourism No concepts aside
  from descriptions of behaviour, environment and
  their correlations.

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Limits of Behaviour

• The attempt to arrive at such a correlational
  science meets limits, in that only a small range
  of what an organism does under a small range of
  circumstances (standard conditions) really counts
  as behaviour.
• The iffiness of states in behavioural science.
  
• A hint at the special (linguistically modeled)
  iffy states of human beings during normal human
  behaviour.

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Inner speechlike processes

• An account of where the notion of thought comes
  from.
• A useful way of thinking of humans/interpreting
  their behaviour.
• Behavioural thinking breaks down when we get
  outside standard conditions in various ways.

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The scientific image of man

• the scientific image of man turns out to be
  that of a complex physical system.

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Back to some history

• Earlier efforts to connect scientific image to
  manifest image Descartes et al.
• The alternatives
• MI objects are (collections of) SI objects as
  forests are collections of trees.
• MI objects are real, SI objects are inventions
  useful in capturing/organizing facts about MI
  objects.
• MI objects are (mere) appearances, to humans, of
  what are in fact SI objects (systems of
  imperceptible particles).

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Eddingtons Table

• Sellars ice cube.
• The problem Every property of a system of
  objects consists of properties of and relations
  between its components.
• Given this claim, the ice cube is not just a
  collection of atoms arranged in a cube-like
  way, since its pinkness (as an MI object) does
  not reduce in this way.

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Rejecting a framework

• That MI objects have certain perceptible
  properties is an MI framework truth.
• But if were rejecting the MI framework as, in
  fact, false (a mere appearance), then this is not
  a fact that an opponent can hold against us.
• Similarly, responding to critiques of a framework
  from within its assumptions is inadequate
• The MI criticized here by contrasting it with a
  better image, the SI.

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Still to come

• Section V ends with a back and forth with
  Descartes over features of thoughts and ordinary
  MI objects and whether they can be reconciled
  with the SI view of human beings.
• The upshot is some insight into the temptation to
  refuse to allow that the SI is the real image
  of how things are.