| Name | Mr C | Mr E |
|---|---|---|
| Stands for | constant conjunction | entailment |
| Represents | empiricists | rationalists |
| Core of truth | statements of necessary connection do not describe matter of factual states of affairs | what you’re doing when you make a modal claim is endorsing the propriety of a pattern of material inference |
| Core mistake | the only thing you can do with language is describe matter of factual states of affairs (therefore, laws must be descriptions of regularities) | statements of necessity describe entailment (still a descriptivist POV) |
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:
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)
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’."
The statement that \(A\) physically entails \(B\)
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 content1 in terms of what one is doing when we use the expressions.
We cannot deny there is any descriptive content due to \(\ref{frege_geach|Frege-Geach argument|related to Sellars}\)↩︎