On Sellars

Kant was not in favor within analytic philosophy when Sellars began, due to Kant’s connection to Hegel¹. However, this is ironic because Kant is incredibly analytical and science-driven.

Three ideas of Kant that mattered to Sellars:

• A difference between Humean thinking and Kantian thinking: for Kant, laws of nature are not ‘super-facts’ - they are not ‘describing the world’. Rather, they make explicit a rule of inference.

• Another Kantian idea: the distinction between phenomena and noumena:

  • Kant radicalized the distinction between:

    • primary qualities (properties that are truly there)

    • secondary qualities (properties that are due to us).

  • He challenges us to divide the labor:

    • what features is the world responsible for?

    • what features are we responsible for?

      • E.g. the fact our theories are expressed in German/English

  • This distinction lives in Sellars as the difference between:

    • the world in the narrow sense

    • the world in the wider sense

      • E.g. which includes norms that are only accessible from a participant’s perspective.

• ‘Mystery story’ style:

  • There’s a problem, and many competing potential explanations

  • These explanations engage each other dialectically

  • Only at the end would you learn the philosopher’s actual position

• ‘Journalistic’ style:

  • Tell them what you’re going to tell them

  • Tell them

  • Tell them what you told them

Sellars philosophical style is more the former.

Let an inference be a declaration of the form \(P \implies Q\)

• There, \(P\) and \(Q\) are logical variables. We can also put other things in their place:

  • Non-logical vocabulary, e.g. red, cat, or it’s raining outside

  • Logical connectives: and, or, etc.

We want to distinguish certain inferences as material inferences, as distinct from logically-valid inferences.

• Logically-valid inferences:

  • These are inferences that are true no matter what you plug in for the variables or substitute for the non-logical vocabulary.

  • E.g. \((A \land {\rm it's\ raining}) \lor C \implies (C \lor {\rm it's\ raining})\)

  • This is true, regardless of what we substitute for \(A\) and \(C\) (or swap “it’s raining” for anything, e.g. “I own two cats”).

  • Descriptive terms appear vacuously

• Material inferences:

  • These can be changed from a good material inference into a bad one by substituting some nonlogical vocabulary for different nonlogical vocabulary

  • E.g. the material inference “\(a\) is red” \(\implies\) “\(a\) is colored” will become false if we replace ‘colored’ with ‘square’.

  • Descriptive terms appear essentially

Linked by

• Concepts and Judgments: mentioned

Sellars has two good ideas associated with material inference:

1. There are some inferences that are good, not in virtue of their logical form.

2. Turn the above thought on its head and say: we can understand the content of these descriptive terms in terms of the materially good inferences they appear in (as premises or conclusions).

By this account, material proprieties of inference are more fundamental than / conceptually prior to logical validity. You have to start with the notion of a good inference in order to understand what a logically good inference is.

Linked by

• Inference and Meaning:

Aside: It took a while in the 20th century to realize that logic was not about logical truth but rather about validity of inference. In classical logic can you treat these interchangably, but not all (rough logics vs smooth logics - whether the consequence relation can be determined by the set of all theorems). Dummett has written about this issue.

What if we picked some other vocabulary (other than logical) to hold fixed? E.g. substituting non-theological vocabulary for non-theological vocabulary. “If justice is loved by the gods then justice is pious”. If no matter what we substitute for justice the inference is good, we might say the sentence is true in virtue of its theological form.

Philosophy of logic (See Quine’s and Putnam’s books both titled The Philosophy of Logic) has two classic questions:

1. a demarcation question: what makes something logical vocabulary?

   • Quine disallows second order quantifiers and the epilson of set theory, whereas Putnam allows them.

2. a correctness question: which logical consequence relation to use:

   • Classical? Intuitionistic? etc.

Sellars challenges this tradition (logical empiricism) by pointing out there is a concern conceptually prior in the order of explanation to philosophy of logic: materially good inferences.

• A main argument of Inference and Meaning is that any language that makes essential use of non-logical, descriptive vocabulary must be understood as having that vocabulary standing in materially good (rather than just logically good) inferences.

  • A slogan for this: “Concepts as involving laws (and inconceivable without them)”

    • This is actually the title of an unintelligible essay by Sellars

    • Luckily the title is the thesis, and that much is intelligible

  • Sellars claims logical vocabulary has the expressive job of making explicit the material proprieties of inference that articulate the content of non-logical concepts.

    • More specifically than ‘logical’, he means alethic modal vocabulary: i.e. what’s necessary and what’s possible.

    • Historical note: Frege is more explicit about this point than Sellars: that you can use this to distinguish logical vocabulary.

  • The Montaigne example) highlights the difference between the capacity to use material inferences vs making that inference explicit:

    • Dan Dennett argues that we have to take animals as grasping modus ponens because they treat some inferences as good and others as bad

    • Sellars objects, saying that you could make explicit the practical capacity the animal has via a statement of disjunctive syllogism

    • But what is the surplus value of invoking that explicit expression? (Over simply describing what is the dog can do).

  • Talking about following rules very quickly gets into the regress of rules.

    • There have to be some practical moves you’re just allowed to make without them having to take the form of explicit premises (see Tortoise and Achilles).

    • Sellars touches upon this in Reflections on Language Games.

      • He talks about free/auxillary positions that you’re always allowed to occupy.

      • We could have the auxillary position \(\forall x, \psi(x)\vdash \phi(x)\) which would license us to move from a position \(\psi(a)\) to a position \(\phi(a)\), but we could also encode this with position for each possible move (\(\psi(a)\vdash \phi(a)\), \(\psi(b)\vdash\phi(b)\), ...).

      • He ways that we could imagine replacing positions with moves, but it’s not possible to imagine all moves being replaced with positions (‘a game without moves is Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark’).

• Sellars is addressing tradition that wants some small set of explicit principles in accordance with which to reason. Any inference you think is good that isn’t derivable from that small set of principles (e.g. modus ponens) is actually an infamy (has some suppressed premises). This is early analytic philosophy’s embrace of the new logic. Sellar’s contrary view (radical at the time) is that actually the reasoning could be completely in order, just with material proprieties of reasoning. You can still give/ask for reasons and mean that \(p\), but what the logic does is give you meta-linguistic control to talk about what is a good inference and say that \(p \vdash q\) is a good inference.⁴

  • Example: \(A\vdash B\) where \(A\) is “she asked me to hand her the dish towel" and \(B\) is “I shall hand her the dish towel”. Traditional analytic philosophy will call this an infamy, since it does not explicitly state how her request engages my motivational structure. Sellars would want to say that this invocation of the desire makes explicit the endorsement of \(A \vdash B\) rather than referring to some item of the world.

• Brandom: logic is the organ of semantic self-consciousness. The set of concepts that lets us bring our endorsement of some inferences as good/bad (this endorsement as something that reasons can be given or asked for) into the game of giving/asking for reasons.

• Sellars complains about Carnap treating logical consequence as a syntactically definable relation between sentences. Just writing down the rules under a heading ‘rules’ instead of ‘axioms’ isn’t making explicit the normative force they have (it leaves out the rulishness - that a rule is a rule for doing something). This is a subtle point that doesn’t matter for many purposes, but Sellars believes it’s important if you want to understand what’s going on with reasoning. Again, strong connection between this point and Achilles and the Tortoise.

• “There’s an important difference between logical / modal / normative predicates on the one hand, and such predicates as ‘red’ on the other.” There’s nothing to the formal except their role in reasoning, indeed, their role and make as meta linguistics sort of making explicit something about the ground level. For the latter, he wants to argue that these predicates too are meaningful insofar as their role in reasoning, but it’s less obvious.

  • “Red is a quality”. This conveys the same information as the syntactical sentence “Red is a one place predicate.” See quote. What you’re doing in asserting that premise from which to reason (couched in modal vocabulary) is endorsing a principle in accordance with which to reason (couched in normative vocabulary).

  • We cannot completely identify modal and normative statements with each other. Their relation is characterized by the say/convey distinction.

WARNING: Jotted down hastily, not yet cleaned up or fit for consumption.

Regulism (conceptual norms as a matter of explicit rules) vs regularism (norms in terms of actual regularities). These are identified with empiricist and rationalist approaches. (Kris: I also see prescriptivism and descriptivism in linguistics)

One purpose: “I shall have a chief my present purpose if I’ve made plausible the idea that an organism might come to play a language game, that is to move from position to position, the system of moves and positions, and to do it because of the system without having to obey rules, and hence without having to be playing a meta language game.” (Section 18)

He doesn’t explicitly mention Wittgenstein (who is a pariah in philosophy). (Other times he uses astrices to censor his name). Thinking about language in terms of rules is Kantian. His notion of norms was juridical/jurisprudential. A rule that enjoins the doing of an action A is a sentence in some language, which requires more rules to interpret (regress - how do we deal with it?). Kant identified this regress (A132/B171) - “judgment is a peculiar talent that can be practiced only and not taught”. Which is using distinction between things that can be shown (by examples) vs taught. Wittgenstein addresses this regress in the late 100’s of PI.

Rejecting mere conformity: If we just consider conforming to a rule rather than obeying a rule, there’s no regress, but we lose the normativity.

“[Mere conformity people] claim that it’s raining therefore the streets will be wet (when it isn’t an infamatic abridgement of a formally valid argument) is merely the manifestation of a tendency to expect to see the wet streets when one finds it’s raining. In this latter case, it’s a manifestation of a process which at best can only simulate inference, since it’s a habitual transition, and as such not governed by a principle or rule by reference to which can be characterized as valid or invalid. That Hume dignified the activation of an association with the phrase ‘causal inference’ is about a minor flaw, they continue, in an otherwise brilliant analysis. It should, however, be immediately pointed out that before one has a right to say that what Hume calls ‘causal inference’ really is an inference at all, but merely a habitual transition from one thought to another. And contrast that with in this context, the genuine logical inferences which are, one must pay the price of showing just how logical inference is something more than a mere habitual transition empiricists in the human tradition have rarely paid this price, a fact which is proved most unfortunate for the following reason. An examination of the history of the subject shows that those who have held that causal inference only simulates inference proper have been led to do so as a result of the conviction that if it were a genuine inference, the laws of nature, things that govern this would be discovered to us by pure reason. As they’re thinking of what’s a good inference having to be something that’s transparent merely by introspection in the way that the laws of logic are.” (him making point about distinction of real inferences and mere associations. )

No distinction between correct and incorrect can be made by purely pointing to regularity - as Wittgenstein pointed out, you’ll always find some regularity (there’s some elegant rule that generates the sequence, for any arbitrary sequence). This is also called ‘disjunctiv-itis’ or ‘gerrymandering objections’. After a debate between Dretsky and Fodor: we’re trying to see what makes the word porcupine mean porcupine. When ‘porcupine’ is used in an observational way, it’s typically in response to porcupines. So can we use that regularity to understand what ‘porcupine’ means? No, because of counterfactuals. If it happened that the porcupines we saw were almost always male, would the word mean male porcupine? Or if we look at dispositions, if they’re disposed to also call echidnas porcupines (that’s the disjunction), why not say that ‘porcupine’ means porcupine or echidna?

“what’s denied is the playing a game logically involves obedience to the rules of the game. And hence the ability to use the language to play the language game in which the rules are formulated.” (page 29) Need a sense of playing the game stronger than conforming but weaker than having the rules in mind.

Metaphysicus suggests why not a non-linguistic awareness of the rules? This is its own regress.

“We’ve tacitly accepted so far and the dialectic dichotomy between merely conforming to the rules and obey. But surely this is a false dichotomy. Is there something in between, for it required us to suppose that the only way in which a complex system of activity can be involved in the explanation of the occurrence of a particular act is by the agent explicitly envisaging the system and intending its realization. And that’s as much as to say that unless the agent conceives of the system, the conformity of his behavior to the system must be accidental. ” So what’s needed he’s saying, is going to be something that says, look, there’s an explanation of why he conforms to the rules. That invokes the rules, but it doesn’t invoke them by him being aware of them. One example of this is teleosemantics. See bee waggles.

The essential thing for Kant was a distinction between what was between acting according to a rule and acting according to a conception of a rule, or a representation (Vorstellung) of a rule. So, ordinary natural objects act according to rules, the laws of nature, but we act according to representations of rules / to conceptions of rules.

The explanation as to why I use the word ‘purple’ for purple things, the rule plays a crucial part even if it is not in my head. It is in the teachers’ heads (they’re already in the language and can conceive of rules). So the rule is causally antecedent to my behavior, so I can be following the rule (without regress).

Related quesiton addressed here: Classical Behaviorism

How is it that I can apply a concept according to norms, to invoke a pre-linguistic awareness of universals, that’s going to be a given. And the key thing is, because that pre-linguistic awareness is conceived of as providing reasons for me to do this. It’s not just that I’ve been trained to respond to some physiological thing by doing it (that would be okay. That could be part of the the real explanation, the pattern governed explanation). It’s that that pre-linguistic awareness provides reasons. And the claim is reasons are always making a move in a game that’s making the inferential move. And the question is: what determines the norms that govern that? Then we’re off on the on the regress, again, so we’ve got to have some story that doesn’t have that form. The form of the argument against the myth of the given. It’s the idea that the awareness that givenness provides something that can serve as a reason, but is itself not dependent on our having learned a language, having a conceptual scheme, and so on.

To do: understand language entry transitions and language exit transitions.

There is debate (but it should be more of a bigger deal, in Brandom’s opinion) about what are the minimal features needed for one to have a discursive language practice. Brandom views logical language as optional (though the expressive power would be incredibly stunted, you could still give and ask for reasons). MacDowell and Sellars think otherwise, that there can’t be discourse without a meta-language.

Sellars needs the notion of language to be something that evolves over time (rather than an instantaneous collection of rules) because we want the decision to make a material move to occur with in a language (one is not doing redescription in another language).

WARNING: Jotted down hastily, not yet cleaned up or fit for consumption.

Sellars wants to give us a naturalistic account of intentionality.

Logical behaviorism / philosophical behaviorism Def: the view that one can analyze without remainder intentional vocabulary / intentional concepts into purely behavior characterizations / dispositions to publicly observable behavior (specified in a non-intentional vocabulary).

Introduced in Empiricism in the Philosophy of Mind (9 years earlier), distinct from what he here calls logical behaviorism. Logical behaviorism refers to a view he attributes to Ryle. JB Watson and BF Skinner promoted this in psychology. Sellars never endorsed this because he saw this as being an application of instrumentalism in the philosophy of science.

Observable things, at least we know they exist. Theoretical things, we’ve got to make risky inferences to get to them. But we can also make observational mistakes. Not just “I thought it was a fox but it was a dog", but categorical observational mistakes. We can give some concept an observational role (e.g. declare that we can observe X’s) yet no X’s exist, i.e. no thing has such no thing with such circumstances of application and consequences of application. E.g. we can have a theory of acids. "Anything that’s sour is an acid. And anything that’s an acid will turn litmus paper red." Well, then we have observational access to acids. If we eventually find something that tastes sour that turns litmus paper blue, then it turns out there are no acids, even though we could observe them (or: had every reason to believe we could). Likewise: being a witch was observable (even though there are no such things).

The Plasticity of Mind is about bad theories incorporating observational practices, i.e. "What do you mean there are no K’s. I can see K’s, there’s one right there!"

So again, this is a response to someone saying we can distinguish theoretical from observable entities by pointing to the fact that we can make mistakes about whole categories of theoretical entities.

Just because our evidence for attributing mental states comes from behavior does not mean, unless you are an instrumentalist, that you have to be able to define intentional concepts in terms of behavior. (This doesn’t mean that the intentional states are less real, just that we aren’t in a position to observe anything but the behavior)

• Digressions

  1. Semantics is a field with instrumentalist vs theoretical realist views. Michael Dummett is instrumentalist by observing the fact that meaning something is only understood through verbal behavior and concluding that any theory of meaning must be definable in terms of behavior. (A theoretical realist might postulate meanings as theoretical entities to explain verbal behavior and say our access to meanings is inferential and, if they are good theories, then verbal behavior gives us inferential access to something (meanings) that exist.)

  2. MacDowell and Sellars agree (and disagree with almost all others) that what you hear when someone talks to you is the words themselves, rather than hearing noises and (by some inferential process) constructing the words. You have to actually actively do some work to hear that mere noises. This is evidenced by how difficult it was to tell computers how to recognize a smile in a picture. (Some say it’s a contradiction to say that meanings are essentially normative yet, on the other hand, we sometimes can directly perceive them. But there’s nothing in principle unobservable about normative states of affairs - see Sellars’ criteria of observation below)

(Controversial) Criteria for observation:

1. You have the capacity to reliably and differentially respond to some normative state of affairs

2. You have to have the concept and which is a matter of inferential articulation and practical mastery of inferential proprieties, involving it. And then if you can hook the one up to the other, you’ve turned what was beforehand a theoretical concept for you into into the concept of an observable

Sellars wants to make sense of the notion of “language as a rule-governed enterprise" (as essentially involving norms). Sellars believes that if your account language doesn’t involven norms, you will be describing the vehicles by which we communicate, rather than what we’re saying/meaning.

Reminder that, due to the regress argument, that we need to broaden our notion of ‘rule’ from just explicit rules and need think of rules also as implicit in what we do. Sellars wants to better understand the relationship between implicit practical abilities and explicit representations of rules.

The question of whether meaning is a normative concept was brought to philosophical attention by Kripkenstein [3]. In present literature, Hattiangadi and Katherin Glüer have pushed back upon the idea that it is a normative concept, advanced by Brandom and MacDowell. Brandom feels it is because they haven’t learned lessons from Sellars, in particular thinking of norms purely in terms of explicit presecriptions and not making the distinction between ought-to-be’s and ought-to-do’s.

“You can define possibility in terms of not and necessity. You can define necessity in terms of not and possibility. I think it’s the beginning of wisdom to think of defining not in terms of the relationship between possibility and necessity, but I’m the only human being who thinks that."

Grice on non-natural meaning: reduces what a linguistic expression \(P\) means in terms of the meanings of thoughts and beliefs of those uttering \(P\). Sellars isn’t satisfied with this: the puzzling phenomena of meaning are common to both thought and language.

Sellars says “ought-to-be’s imply ought-to-do’s" but is not exact about what quantifier: all or some? Brandom thinks ‘some’ makes more sense, since there could be an ought-to-be requiring a state of affairs to change without telling us who has to do what to fix it (you need auxillary hypotheses to turn it into an ought-to-do). E.g. “all clocks should be in sync”.

With a trainer, someone with concepts/rules can condition language learners to shape their behavior (teach them ought-to-be’s). It’s important that it’s possible for the language enterprise get off the ground (i.e. without trainers). It’s possible for some sort of selection process to naturally reinforce ought-to-be’s (can be social but the conditioners need not be doing so intentionally).

We can deliberate making a distinction between ought-to-be’s in the context of humans vs nonliving/nonsentient beings (e.g. “plants ought to get enough water”). Ruth Millikan’s work relevant. Connects to the Aristotelian account.

Consider ought to be’s in the context of training animals: These rats ought to be in state \(\phi\) whenever \(\psi\).

• Could be just for rats, qua rats

  • they ought to be eating when they’re hungry, or something like that

• this could be something we want the rats to do

  • when they come to a branch in a maze, the rats go to the side that’s painted blue and not to the side that’s painted red.

  • That’s a regularity that ought to be not because we can read it off of the fundamental teleology of rats

  • The conformity of the rats in question to this rule does not require that they have a concept \(C\), e.g. of colors blue and red. We just require them to respond properly certain to differences emanating from \(C\). This doesn’t require even consciousness (photocells can respond differentially to colors).

“Recognitional capacity” gets systematically used in two fundamentally different senses (an ‘accordion word’)

• reliable, differential response

• applying a concept

Important for Sellars that following an ought-to-be requires only the former sense.

We should talk about learning a language as ‘coming into the language’ rather than ‘learning a language’. It’s more like the way one comes into a city. You come to be able to take part in an ongoing practice, as opposed to getting some intellectual insight.

Teaching the very young child to say ‘purple’ when showing her a purple lolipop is getting her to follow an ought-to-be just like the rat example. There is an ought-to-do for teachers of a language that they see to it that children produce the appropriate responses. This presupposes that the teachers do have a conceptual framework of ‘purple’ and of ‘vocalize‘ and what it is for an action to be called by a circumstance. The learner is not required to have any of these concepts. The ought-to-be is explicit in the teacher’s mind.

All of our evidence in science comes from empirical observation, so all of our concepts (and claims) must be translatable without remainder into observational vocabulary.

What warrant would there be for any conceptual excess beyond the language of our evidence?

There aren’t really any theoretical entities. We postulate them merely to characterize regularities of observable entities. Statements in the observational language are simply true or false, whereas statements in theoretical language are merely more or less useful.

This is a view that members of the Vienna Circle flirted with. A permanent temptation of the empiricist tradition.

The alternative is called theoretical realism. Sellars says this is a mistake (an example of "nothing-but-ism", along with emotivism in ethics), originating from thinking of the difference between observational vocabulary and theoretical vocabulary as an ontological difference in the objects referred to by those theories. But it’s not an ontological distinction, it’s a methodological distinction. Two different epistemic relations we can stand in to things that there are. Observable things are those that we come to know about by observation (non-inferential observation reports). Theoretical concepts are concepts that we can only be entitled to apply as a result of a process of inference. See Pluto example.

Linked by

• Language as thought and communication: Sellars

• A distinction fundamental for both ‘must’ in the alethic and doxastic modal senses.

• Sellars: You can’t understand either of these kinds of oughts without understanding both. In particular, if you try to do everything with ought-to-do’s:

  • one would fall into a kind of Cartesianism: we’d need to think of linguistic episodes as essentially the sort of thing brought about by an agent whose conceptualizing is not linguistic.

  • We’d be precluded from explaining what it means to have concepts in terms of the rules of the language. Ought to do’s have the form of “in circumstances \(C\), do \(A\)” - what language are \(C\) and \(A\) stated in? Regress of rules without ought-to-be’s.

• This is important because natural way to think of rules is exlusively in terms of Ought to Do (Sellars himself advocated this earlier: “A rule is always a rule for doing something"[1]).

• There is also an analogous distinction involving permission, rather than obligation.

You can’t understand what it is for somebody to be saying (and therefore thinking something) apart from the way they’re treated by some community. That’s a sense dependence: you can’t understand the one without the other.

It doesn’t follow that somebody who could do all of this wouldn’t have thoughts until/unless they were treated as having them; that would be reference dependence.

So just as an unconnected example, illustrating that distinction: suppose I defined ‘beautiful’ as “would cause pleasure in someone”. Now, then I’ve instituted a sense dependence between beauty and that sense and pleasure; if you can’t understand the concept of pleasure, you can’t understand the concept of beauty, which is a response dependent dependently defined consequence of it.

But now we ask, would there still be beauty if there were no pleasure? Were there beautiful sunset sunsets before there were any people to feel pleasure? That would be the reference dependence question. We say sure because they would have caused pleasure (if there were anyone there to feel it). And we can say, in a possible world in which there never were humans, it still could be that if there were, they would have responded to the sunsets with pleasure.

So, we could say there’s a sense dependence between these concepts, but there doesn’t need to be a reference dependence between doesn’t mean you can’t have the one without having the other it just means you can’t understand what one of them is without understanding the other.

So the claim would be that’s the relation between the thoughts and our normative attitudes are social attitudes. It’s not that the thoughts pop into existence at that point for them.

People with romantic views of language: Derrida and Nietzsche. These are compatible with Wittgenstein believing language has no downtown.

Sellars disagrees: the language-language inferential transitions are of the first importance among those because what makes the entries and exits language entries and exits is the way they connect to the inferential moves. And so he would say to Derrida, “yes, we do all of these other wonderful things with the language, but that’s all parasitic on the meanings that things are given because of the role they play in the space of reasons... now, once you’ve got that up and running, once you’ve got those meanings to work with, now you can start to do other playful things with it, e.g. use them metaphorically. All sorts of things become possible. But that’s in principle a superstructure on this structure."

Sellars story of how ‘the light dawns slowly over the whole’.

Both the infant and Koko the gorilla can be trained into a language (in the form of conforming to ought-to-be’s). At some point the human makes a jump - they have the concept and can be a trainer of others. What’s the nature of that jump?

For Sellars, this is a change in normative status, not a lightbulb that went off in one’s head. Like the change on your 21st birthday, when suddenly doing the very same thing, making the same pen scratches that you could have made the day before, would not be obliging yourself to pay the bank a certain amount of money every every month for the next 30 years. But after your 21st birthday, when you scratch your pen in exactly the same (physically descriptively, matter-of-factually) way, all of a sudden it has a hugely different normative significance because now you will be held responsible. You’ll be taken to have undertaken commitment in a way in which you were not eligible to undertake that commitment by doing the very same thing descriptively, the day before.

When you get good enough at the language game moves, you do get acknowledged by the community. We don’t characterize this physically-descriptively because we’re not describing someone / some matter-of-factual boundary that has been crossed. We’re not describing the child, we’re placing the child in the space of reasons.

It’s the difference between the one and a half year old, who toddles in to the living room. And as her first full sentence says, “Daddy, the house is on fire." Well, one doesn’t think that she has claimed that the house is on fire. She’s managed to put these words together, this is good. If the four year old comes into the living room and says “Daddy, the house was on fire", you hold her responsible, you say “how do you know? Did you smell smoke? And you know, what should we be doing? What follows if the house is on fire? What should we be doing?" You take her to have claimed this to have undertaken a commitment and you hold her responsible for it. The difference is not some light that’s going on. It’s a difference in normative status, ultimately a difference in social status.

This is the difference between just conforming to the pattern, and actually making claims. The radically anti-Cartesian aspect of Sellars is that this is also the the difference between conforming to the pattern and having thoughts at all.

However, as Dennett points out: you can treat any even inanimate object as an intentional system, e.g. this table as having the one desire that remain at the center of the universe. And the one belief that it is currently at the center of the universe, which is why it resists us moving it. (by extension, we treat our cats and dogs this way). So we should only treat things as thinking if we have to. Brandom takes an opposite view, that you should always treat something as talking if you can (note this is a very high bar).

The period prior to the child’s mastery and social status as a language speaker has some peculiarities. His verbal behavior would express his thoughts but, to put it paradoxically, the child could not express them. The child isn’t in a position to intentionally say that things are thus-and-so, even though it is in a position to say that things are thus-and-so. So there’s a question: which comes first, speaker’s meaning or semantic meaning?

Semantic meaning is a matter of what the words mean. No agent involved in that. In English, the word ‘molybdenum’ means the noble metal with 42 protons. Contrast with “When Humpty Dumpty says ‘glory’, he means a nice knockdown, drag-out fight”. Grice says speaker meaning comes first. Sellars says that is a Cartesian way of thinking about things, that the primary meaning is what words mean in the language process.

If I claim the notebook is made out of copper, I have (whether I know it or not), committed it to melting at 1084 oC and that it conducts electricity. My words mean those things, whether or not I mean to.

The kid produces vocal (not yet verbal) noises until he is a member of the language community (his verbal noises conform to enough ought-to-be’s).

As soon as he can say something, that’s the expression of a thought. To take him to be saying is to be taking him to be thinking out loud. It’s a further stage, when he can take expressing that thought as the object of an intention, and intentionally do as an action that say, before that, that’s just an act, it’s a performance, he can reliably produce appropriately, but not yet intentionally produce. An adult could be in this situation: Auction example. That’s the sort of position that the kid (who’s just crossed the line into being able to say something) is: she can produce a vocalization that will hold her responsible for, and which, accordingly, we take to express a thought. But she doesn’t yet have the concept. So, she can have the concept of its being red or the house being on fire. But not yet, the concept of endorsing something, or of making a claim that he’s saying can be a later development. And you need that concept in order to intend to be making a claim.

Important to make distinctions between different types of saying:

• mere utterance (position of 1 year old)

• saying that things are thus-and-so

  • having mastered the entries/exits/language-language moves, but no metalinguistic concepts

  • Could be called “merely thinking out loud”

  • Can perform speech acts.

  • Can express that something is read or even a desire for something (“I’m taking that’)

• intentionally saying (telling someone) that things are thus-and-so

  • need concepts of asserting/believing as well as concepts of thus-and-so

  • Can perform speech actions.

  • Self consciousness.

We need to think of the child as being able to give evidence without the concept of evidence. This is important in the story of how the language game gets off the ground with the early hominids. But we have real experience with this: when teaching logic, it’s helpful to teach students to have the practical mastery of writing proofs (prior to them having the concept of a proof). They first get familiar with the symbol pushing game. (proof is a strong form of evidence). This is very common in mathematics education.

Uses Principia Mathematica notation which takes some time to learn.

Goodman has let the formalism of classical extensional logic mislead him in thinking about counterfactuals. He thought we could build up to counterfactuals from extensional logical vocabulary. The kind that can be built up by extensional logical vocabulary Sellars calls subjunctive identicals.

Goodman is impressed in Fact fiction and Forecast, with the difference between the claim ‘All copper melts at 1084 oC’ and ‘all the coins in my pocket are copper’. The first supports counterfactual reasoning (“if this coin in my pocket were copper, it’d melt at 1084 oC") whereas if this nickel coin were in my pocket, it wouldn’t be made of copper. However we can do some limited form of counterfactual reasoning: “if I pulled a coin out of my pocket, it would be copper”. We can always rephrase such counterfactuals (accidental generalizations) as a statement about something identical to an actual object. (The distinction is less sharp between genuine counterfactuals and subjunctive identicals is less sharp than he thinks, according to Brandom)

Makes distinction.

Defines a disposition.

• Subjunctive conditional: if \(X\) were \(\psi\)’d, it would \(\phi\).

  • (example?)

• Counterfactual conditional: if \(X\) had been \(\psi\)’d, it would have \(\phi\)’d.

  • These are both counterfactuals but very different:

    • If Oswalt didn’t shoot Kennedy, then some one else did.

    • If Oswalt didn’t shoot Kennedy, then someone else would have.

Linked by

• Counterfactuals and dispositions: source

1. A kind term

   • More than a mere predicate: in addition to criteria of application, also have criteria of identity and individuation.

   • Two flavors: proper individuating terms as well as mass terms (which requires something like ’cup of’ to individuate)

2. Condition term

3. Intervention term

4. Result term

Canonical example: “If you put the sugar in water, it will dissolve.”

Distinct from a capacity claim: “Sugar has the capacity to dissolve" is a claim that there exists a condition and intervention such that the result obtain.

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• Counterfactuals and dispositions: source

Sellars first big idea: what was needed was a functional theory of concepts (especially alethic/normative modalities), which would make their role in reasoning, rather than their supposed origin and experience their primary feature. Sellars takes modal expressions to be inference licenses.

Jerry Fodor’s theory of semantic content in terms of nomological locking: can’t directly say anything about modality directly. Not alone: Dretske and other teleosemantic literature. Sellars wants to argue this program will never work.

An axial idea of Kant: the framework that makes description possible has features which we can express with words (words whose job is not to describe⁵ anything, but rather to make explicit features of the framework within which we can describe things).

The framework is often characterized with laws. With alethic modal vocabulary on the object side, normative vocabulary on the subject side.

Kant is concerned with features that are necessary conditions of the possibility of applying descriptive contents. How are statements like that sensibly thought of as true or false? (where the home language game is ordinary descriptive language) Kant says yes, in a sense, but have to be careful. If these kinds of claims are knowledge, what kind of justification is involved in it? Can we think of them as expressing even a kind of empirical knowledge? (after all, we learned laws of nature empirically, it seems). We have to think about the relationship between the framework and what you can say, in the framework, and what you can say about the framework. Kant was the first one worried about all that stuff. Sellars wants to find a meta framework for talking about the relations between talk within that framework of description, and talk about that framework of description.

Semantic nominalism was universally held until Kant. (philosophy today hasn’t yet graduated from its Humean to its Kantian phase)

If you could argue that standing in counterfactually, robust inferential relations to other descriptive terms, was an essential feature of the descriptive content of a concept (and you could argue that modal vocabularies had the expressive job of making those explicit), then you’d be in a position to argue for the Kant-Sellars thesis about modality. That would be to say that the expressive job of modal vocabulary is to make explicit the inferential relations between descriptive concepts (these are invisible to the empiricist).

Fork in road: Hume+Quine, or Kant+Sellars.

Labels are not descriptions. There’s more to describing than labeling.

Consider mere labels. Elements on a tray have red or blue dots. Have they been described? If so, what have they been described as? If we add things to the tray, we don’t know whether they deserve red or blue labels. At the very least, descriptions need a practice for applying to new cases. We can throw that in but still not have a description.

Suppose I’m trying to give you the concept of gleeb. I give you an infalliable gleebness tester. Do you have a description?

Sellars: “It’s only because the expressions in terms of which we describe objects, locate those objects in a space of implications that they describe it all rather than merely label.”

This is what a mere classifier have.

What’s the difference between me and a parrot who has been trained to say ‘red’ when presented a red object. The parrot isn’t describing, but I am because my noise is situated in a space of implications: something follows for me from classifying that thing is red (that it’s colored that it’s spatially extended, that if it’s a Macintosh Apple, it’s right). And furthermore, other things can be evidence for the claim that it Scarlet is evidence for it or that it’s a right Macintosh, Apple is evidence for it. And it excludes other classifications. That monochromatic patch is not green, if it’s red, and so on.

The classifier focuses only on the circumstances of application, not the consequences of application. A way to answer what the red and blue dots describe an element as is to say what follows from something having a blue or red dot (e.g. things labelled red are to be discarded). Now we have some descriptive content associated with the label.

Verificationism / classical american pragmatism focused purely on the consequences of application.

To say we need both circumstances and consequences is to say that the inferences the concept plays into is an essential part of a concept.

If the only inferences we could make were truth functional relations, then a gleeb detector like thing could be sufficient to capture the concept of gleeb fully; however, we care about counterfactually robust inferences.

You can’t count as understanding (i.e. grasp the meaning of) any descriptive expression / concept, unless you distinguish at least some of the inferences that it’s involved (i.e. some of the connections within that space of implications) as counterfactually robust (i.e. ones that would still obtain, even if something that is true wasn’t, or something that isn’t true was). The claim is not that there are particular counterfactual inferences you need, but that you need at least some to have the concept.

Examples:

• Chestnut trees produce chestnuts

  • Unless they’re immature / blighted

  • Whether or not it’s raining on them now wouldn’t affect the fact that chestnut trees produce chestnuts

• Dry, well-made matches light if you strike them

  • Not if there’s not enough oxygen

  • The position of a distant beetle on a tree that doesn’t affect whether this match lights

• The hungry lioness would chase the nearby Gazelle

  • Not if it were struck by lightning

  • But it would, whether or not the hyena were watching it

Q: do we have to have overlap in our distinctions we made to communicate about the same concept? A: The conceptual content itself is a norm that settles which inferences are correct and which are incorrect. Then, you and I may have different views about where that line is drawn. And what makes it possible for us to communicate (to agree or to disagree) is that we’ve bound ourselves by the same norm by using the same word. You may think the melting point of copper is different from what I think it is. But we can still be disagreeing about copper because there’s a fact of the matter about what you’re committed to, on that issue, when you use the word ‘copper’.

Q: Is this a counter-example? You are asked to bring a thing to your lab (it just landed from an alien planet - you can’t make any inferences about it). A: It’s complicated. Firstly, ‘thing’ or ‘object’ is not a sortal - you can’t count them (they’re pro-sortals, placeholders for sortals). If we supply one (e.g. place-occupying piece of mass - which would suffice give us some counterfactually robust inferences). If you don’t supply one, you haven’t thought about it. Related to Wittgenstein’s plate example.

Kant says concepts are rules for judgment we bind ourselves by. That doesn’t settle the question of how much of the law we need to know in order to bind ourselves by it. I don’t have to know much about molybdenum to refer to molybdenum.

Semantic paradigm is the “name-bearer” relationship. E.g. the ‘Fido’-Fido relation, between the name ‘Fido’ and the dog, Fido. Predicates/properties are just names that stick to the set.

If we stick together labels, we get descriptions (not a primitive name bearer relation, but one we can understand in terms of name-bearer relations). That’s what language lets us do. Describe/classify things (as falling under languages).

Sellars calls this descriptivism: what you do with language is describe things.

You find this not only in anglophone tradition but also in a pure form in Hussurl / semiotics. Derrida rejects Hussurl because there are some phenomena that can’t be related by sign-signified relations, but he addresses it by saying it’s all signs.

Kant found sentences special: you don’t describe things with them, you say things with them. Theory of judgment. The Tractatus has no room for statements of natural law. For normative statements, it retreats into mysticism.

Semantic nominalism is atomistic - the relation of a name and its bearer doesn’t turn on anything else.

Linked by

• From labels to descriptions: related to Sellars
• Hume's Predicament: related to Hume
• Related:
• Minimize ontology talk: referenced

From three premises:

1. what you need to move from labeling to describing is situation in a space of implications

2. space of implications must draw lines between implications that will between counterfactual circumstances under which the implication would still be good, and those in which wouldn’t

3. the expressive job, not in the first instance, a descriptive job that’s characteristic of modal vocabulary is to make explicit those range those implications and those ranges of counterfactual robustness

Put another way, suppose Sellars is right that modal expressions function as inference licenses. If it could be argued that those counterfactually robust inferences are essential to articulating the content of ordinary empirical descriptive concepts, then you’d have an argument to the effect that the capacity to use modal concepts what modal concepts make explicit is implicit already in the use even of ordinary empirical, descriptive, non modal concepts.

It’s explicit in Sellars, all but explicit in Kant. Some consequences:

• modal vocabulary is not something that you can casually add to ordinary descriptive vocabulary, like culinary vocabulary. Rather, the distinctive expressive job of modal vocabulary is to articulate the inferential connections among descriptive concepts in virtue of which they have the content that they do.

• just in being able to use ordinary empirical descriptive vocabulary, non modal vocabulary anyone already knows how to do everything they need to know how to do in order to use modal vocabulary. They merely make explicit what is implicit in non-modal concepts.

• One cannot be in the predicamant that Hume took himself to be in. We can teach you how to use modal vocabulary. You may not have a word for it yet. That’s what we’ll give you. But you already know how to do everything you need to know how to do to use that word to talk with ‘necessity’, ‘possibility’ and the subjunctive.

• Description and explanation are two sides of one coin.

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• Modal revolution in 20th century: relevance

Revolution in Anglophone philosophy, taking three phases:

1. Kripke’s possible-worlds semantics for modal logic (algebraic properties accessibility relation determine which modal system we’re in)

   1. Quine was a skeptic of modal talk, said that we didn’t know what we really meant when talking about it.

   2. His concerns became unpopular with this development, as Kripke’s semantics gave people the impression that we had a grasp on what we meant (in fact, alethic modal talk became the philosophical ground level for explaining other puzzling things (such as intentionality)).

   3. Quine thinks his objection is not yet satisfied; of course we can explain modal concepts in terms of other modal concepts - what do we mean by possible world? What do we mean by accessibility?

2. The previous development is only for modal logic, but Montague, David Kaplan, David Lewis, Stalnaker, etc. extended it to work for non-logical semantics as well. For example:

   • In Lewis’ General Semantics [5], if we decide to treat objects as semantic interpretant of our names, sets of possible worlds as the semantic interpretant of our sentences, then one-place predicates correspond to functions from objects to sets of possible worlds.

   • ‘walks’ is a function from objects to the worlds in which that object is walking.

   • adverbs, like ‘slowly’, is a function from one-place predicates to one-place predicates.

   • This apparatus gives us a way to talk precisely about certain distinctions that come up in philosophy language. E.g. adverbs come in two flavors:

     • Attributive: ‘walked slowly’ which implies one walked at all

     • Non-attributive: ‘walked in one’s imagination’

3. Kripke’s Naming and Necessity [6]

   • Introduced us to contingent a priori and metaphysical necessity

Brandom says: the second is the most important, but Quine’s objection was not addressed by Kripke’s semantics nor the fact that it’s useful in semantics to be able to use Kripke’s apparatus. The reason why we should have gained comfortablity with alethic modal language is actually the Kant-Sellars thesis, which dispels empiricist worries of modal concepts being unintelligible.

But hardly anyone knows about that argument. If they did, it would color our current focuses and interests. For the Kant-Sellars thesis pertains to causal/physical modalities. But nowadays, the center of philosophical thought worries about logical modalities and metaphysical modalities - causal modality is boring to them. “We’re distracted by the shiny, new playground that Kripke offered us and lost sight of the modality that’s philosophically most significant."

Sellars take the dialectic through many turns instead of just saying what he thinks. He pretends to be even-handed until deciding to focus on tweaking Mr E.’s theory to make it work.

Need to distinguish four related types of claims:

1. The practical endorsement of infering that things are \(B\)’s from their being \(A\)’s.

   • This is presupposed by the act of describing (Kant-Sellars thesis)

2. The explicit statement that one may infer the applicability of \(B\) from the applicability of \(A\)

   • This can be asserted without understanding the expressions \(A\) and \(B\)

   • I.e., it’s syntactic; just a statement about the use of language

   • Someone who doesn’t speak German can still say “If \(x\) is ‘rot’, then \(x\) is ‘farbig’."

3. The statement that \(A\) physically entails \(B\)

4. The statement that \(A\)’s are necessarily \(B\)’s.

Mr E was getting the content of modal statements wrong; they aren’t about language.

That some inference is ok is something that is conveyed by a modal claim, but it is not what is said. (Analogy: John says/asserts/means “The weather is good today”, but John conveys “John thinks the weather is good today” and John does not say “John thinks the weather is good today.”). Related to this quote.

What Sellars’ conclusion ought to be: what one is doing in making a modal assertion is endorsing a pattern of material inference. No need to take a stand on semantics. This is an expressivist view of modal vocabulary. Analogous to expressivism in ethics: what you are doing in saying someone ought to do \(X\) is endorsing doing \(X\). We can try to understand the semantic/descriptive content⁶ in terms of what one is doing when we use the expressions.

Sellars wants to say it is the correctness of inferences connecting descriptive terms that make modal claims. Simultaneously, modal claims do not say anything about inferences.

It’s important that notion of saying is wider than describing. This is the denial of semantic descriptivism.

The pragmatic force associated with the modal claim is endorsing a pattern of inference.

What one says is that being a \(B\) follows from being an \(A\). This is not a statement about inferences, it is a statement about a consequential relation. When one says “\(x\) being copper is incompatible with \(x\) being an insulator", one is making a claim about the world (even if it is not describing it in the narrow sense). These are facts about what follows from what in the world. Given the auxillary hypothesis that our word ‘copper’ means copper, there are things we can say about inferences, but the fact that we need that auxillary hypothesis is proof that the statement itself isn’t about inferences.

So modal claims are descriptive in the wide sense but not the narrow sense.

There are some serious concerns, though. Consider "There exist causal connections which have not yet been discovered". This is analogous to accepting the early emotivist line in ethics (thinking ‘ought’ is a perfectly good concept, though not a descriptive one ... such that ‘Everybody ought to keep promises’ contextually implies a wish, on the speaker’s part, that promise keeping were a universal practice), and was then confronted with such statements as “There are obligations which have not yet been recognized” and “Some of the things we think of as obligations are not obligations”

Quote: “It is therefore important to realize that the presence in the object language of the causal modalities (and of the logical modalities and of the deontic modalities) serves not only to express existing commitments, but also to provide the framework for the thinking by which 303 we reason our way (in a manner appropriate to the specific subject matter) into the making of new commitments and the abandoning of old. And since this framework essentially involves quantification over predicate variables, puzzles over the ‘existence of abstract entities’ are almost as responsible for the prevalence in the empiricist tradition of ‘nothing-but-ism’ in its various forms (emotivism, philosophical behaviorism, phenomenalism) as its tendency to assimilate all discourse to describing.”

If we are to take causal modalities, seriously / at face value, we’re going to have to worry about what abstract objects and what properties are.

Brandom thinks Sellars could have a simpler/more satisfying conclusion to the essay, but Sellars’ nominalism (denial of existence for abstract objects/properties) prevents him from doing so.

In Brandom’s view, material inferences are not monotonic. The job of some scientific languages is to find concepts where we can state monotonic consequence relations. We can do that in fundamental physics, but hardly ever in the special sciences.

Hegel says, “By conceptual, I mean, what’s articulated by relations of determinant negation⁷ and mediation⁸".⁹ He says, the objective world, as it is, independently of our activities, is conceptually articulated. It has a conceptual structure because he’s a modal realist about it.

He thinks there are laws of nature. He thinks some things really follow from other things. For instance, that if a body with finite mass is accelerated, then a force was applied to it. he thinks that’s a consequence, and the remaining relatively at rest, and having a force supplied you those are incompatible. Those are incompatible properties.

So he says, the objective world has a conceptual structure already that has nothing to do with our conceiving activity. We can see that as something else. Yes, our commitments can also stand in relations of material consequence and in compatibility, but the world, just as it comes, is already in conceptual shape.

Let ‘possible world’ mean a physically possible world¹⁰. This conceptual apparatus can be thought of simply as a way of expressing what it is for two properties to be incompatible or to stand in a material consequential relation.

So we can express (in the language of possible worlds) the fact that it follows from (as a consequence) something’s being copper that it melts at 1084 oC, for example.

David Lewis is presented as an example of misusing possible world semantics. He discards the connection between inference and the possible worlds. He takes the descriptivist position that all one can do is describe with language, but then says he is not an actualist (you can describe non-actual worlds in the same sense that you can describe the coin in your pocket as copper).

What is lost by merging description in the narrow sense and description in the wide sense? The connection to semantics. We’ve also gained an additional problem of justifying our claims to knowledge of the non-actual worlds.

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• Commentary: Referenced