The first of many lectures by Robert Brandom on Wilfred Sellars, delivered on September 2, 2009. It mainly talks about some ideas of Kant that influenced Sellars and introduces Sellars through a long series of quotes.
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:
Kant’s normative understanding of discursive practice2
How do we understand the difference between concept-using, sapient beings from mere responders to the natural environment? Here are two possible ways to think of it:
\(O\): An ontological distintion: knowers are an actually different kind of thing (perhaps there is a presence of ‘mind stuff’ or ‘spirit stuff’).
\(D\): A deontological distinction: we treat knowers differently from objects. There are things that the agents are in a distinctive sense responsible for 3.
Both sides treat \(D\) as true, but Team \(O\) furthermore believes \(O\) is true and that the order of explanation is \(O \implies D\). However, Team \(D\) takes \(D\) as essential and needs not make any claim about ontology.
Downstream of this are many of Kant’s innovations.
The minimum unit of awareness/experience is the judgment
this comes from taking \(D\) to be fundmental: it is the smallest thing we can be held responsible for
Everything else (particular concepts like Fido the dog, universal concepts like triangularity, logical concepts) has to be understood in terms of the function it plays with respect to judgment.
The subjective form of judgment (the “I think…” that can accompany all judgments)
Because it can accompany all representations, this is the emptiest form of judgment.
The mark of “who is responsible for the judgment”.
To say “I think it is raining now.” is to emphasize that I am responsible (e.g. subject to criticism if you go outside and don’t get wet).
The objective form of judgment (the “\(x\) is …” or “\(x\) = …” for some object \(x\)).
Mark of what you’ve made yourself responsible to.
When saying “That stone is 50 pounds.”, the stone has a certain authority over me (one looks to the stone to see whether I am right or wrong; it sets the standards of correctness). See the shopping list scenario.
Rousseau said “Obedience to a law that one has laid oneself is freedom.”
Kant turned this around to distinguish constraint by norms from constraint by power.
In addition to concepts whose principle expressive job is to describe/explain empirical goings-on, there are concepts whose principle expressive job it is to make explicit the framework that makes description possible.
These are known a priori framework-explicating concepts.
This is Kant’s response to Hume, for how we can understand the modal force of laws in virtue of their non-modal description.
The answer is in the description framework itself.
The fact that there are necessarily relations that concepts have among another makes description possible (a concept being contentful at all requires it to have some necessary relations to other concepts).
What Sellars means by ‘ushering philosphy from its Humean phase to its Kantian phase’ is putting categories front and center.
Trying to describe the modal structure of the world or describe the space of possible worlds is to try to assimilate modal language into descriptivism, rather than seeing them as playing a different expressive role
Sellars saw Kant as putting this other option on the table.
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.
The lecture finishes with some Sellars quotes on describing, explaining, and justifying.
He doesn’t begin with philosophically elaborated definition of describing, explaining, justifying. He takes these concepts as they come. He wants to do philosophy in a neutral / as close-to-practice way as possible.
Hegel was the ‘Great Bad’ of Anglophone philosophy↩︎
i.e. practice relating to concepts.↩︎
This point is shared by the later Wittgenstein. The \(\ref{childrens_game|puzzles|reference}\) that Wittgenstein offers us (along the way to trying to dissolve the presuppositions that make it puzzling) center around the normative significance of beliefs/desires/intentions.↩︎