Research

Both Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell reject Kant’s conclusion that the world is fundamentally unknowable, and on similar grounds: each invokes conceptual change, what I call the diachronic instability of a conceptual scheme. The similarities end there, though. It is important to Sellars that the world is only knowable at “the end of inquiry” – he rejects a commonsense realism like McDowell’s for its inability to fully appreciate diachronic instability. To evaluate this disagreement, I consider Timothy Williamson’s argument that the knowability thesis, as it rules out “elusive objects”, is problematically idealistic. I argue that McDowell’s insistence on diachronic instability suffices to address Williamson’s worry, and as such that his reply ought to be available to Sellars too. That Sellars would instead invoke the end of inquiry suggests it is he who underestimates the ineliminability of conceptual change.

Lucy O'Brien has argued that defenders of the object-dependence of singular thought should attend to mental agency.  A recent trend in action theory, towards what John Maier calls "agentive modality," suggests that we conceive agency in terms of the exercise of abilities, and this is how I propose to approach O'Brien's challenge. For Gareth Evans, an early defender of object-dependence, maintained that thinking is the exercise of a complex of abilities. The debate about object-dependence gives way to the question whether we have what I call dedicated singular mental abilities. In arguing that we do, I defend the thesis of object-dependence.

Luz Seiberth's interpretation of Sellars as a transcendental philosopher promises to change the way we read Sellars. Nonetheless, I dispute two of his central claims: that by depicting "picturing" as as a transcendental imposition we can see it as addressing a "vertical" constraint that Kant does not detect; and that Sellars's transcendental philosophy commits him to a Kantian "necessitarianism" about categorical structure. Ultimately, I conclude, Seiberth's focus on Sellars's relationship to Kant in particular distorts his understanding of Sellars's peculiar version of a transcendental methodology. 

Critical attention to Wilfrid Sellars’s “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (PSIM) has focused on the dubious Peircean optimism about scientific convergence that underwrites Sellars’s talk of “the” scientific image. Sellars’s ultimate Peircean ontology has led Willem deVries, for instance, to accuse him of being a naturalistic “monistic visionary.” But this complaint of monism misplays the status of the ideal end of science in Sellars’s thinking. I propose a novel reading of PSIM, foregrounding its opening methodological reflections. On this reading, the central point of the paper is to accuse figures like Wittgenstein and Strawson, whom I call “analytical quietists,” of taking the unity of intellectual endeavor as somehow given. Such unity as is forthcoming is, Sellars tells us, a task. I conclude by noting that a structurally similar accusation of too easily presumed unity emerges at the end of the paper, against a familiar sort of anti-relativistic moral theorizing. Thus, Sellars’s conception of the task of philosophy is, at least potentially, a point of surprising ethico-political significance as well.

Discussing Keith Donnellan's distinction between attributive and referential uses of descriptions, Gareth Evans considered a speaker he found it natural to describe as having "given expression to" a singular thought, though he insisted she was not referring to the person she has in mind. On accounts otherwise similar to Evans's, to express a singular thought just is to refer. Thus, as he does not explain why this speaker might speak this way, it is tempting to ignore this as a slip. On the contrary, I shall argue, Evans has good reason to deny that picture of reference. My interest, though, is in the case itself. It turns out it is a presentational use of descriptions: it provides its audience a cognitive ability they would otherwise lack. This characterization raises deep theoretical questions which I only begin to address here. My goal is to show that we ought to address those questions, for there is no better way of understanding examples like Evans's than to see them as presentational.

The traditional distinction between Millian and Fregean theories of names presupposes that what Mill calls “connotation” lines up with what Frege calls “sense.” This presupposition is false. Mill's talk of connotation is an attempt to bring into view the line of thought that crystallizes in Frege's distinction between concept and object. This latter is the semantic dualism of my title.

Wilfrid Sellars's "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (EPM) begins with an argument against sense-datum epistemology. There is some question about the validity of this attack, stemming in part from the assumption that Sellars is concerned with epistemic foundationalism. This paper recontextualizes Sellars's argument in two ways: by showing how the argument of EPM relates to Sellars's 1940s work, which does not concern foundationalism at all; and by considering the view of H.H. Price, Sellars's teacher at Oxford and the only classical sense-datum theorist to receive substantive comment in EPM. Timm Triplett has claimed that Sellars's discussion simply begs the question against Price, but this depends on the mistaken assumption that Sellars's concern is with foundationalism.  On the contrary, Sellars's argument concerns the assumption that the innate capacity for sensory experience counts as "thinking in presence" in the way needed for empiricist accounts of content acquisition. Price's distinction between noticing universals and being aware of them encapsulates the tensions empiricists face here.

It is a methodological presupposition of the pretense theory of fiction-directed thought that thought about fictional characters is special, and needs to be distinguished from ordinary world-directed thought. Fiction-directed thought arises from serious engagement with a kind of pretending. Many criticisms of the pretense theory focus on the methodological presupposition. In the first part of this paper, I defend the methodological claim, and thus the existence of the problem to which pretense is supposed to be a solution. In the second part, I elaborate and defend the pretense theory as a solution to this problem.

Evidentialism is the thesis that evidence or, more generally, epistemic reasons, exhausts the considerations relevant to whether one ought or ought not believe.  We defend conceptual evidentialism, the claim that this fact derives from the very concept of belief, from two strategies for showing that this is impossible.  The first attempts to show that evidentialism is unduly conservative, since it ignores pragmatic considerations that can sometimes justify a more liberal, or risky, doxastic strategy. The second aims to show that in the absence of pragmatic considerations, evidence alone underdetermines belief. After arguing that both strategies fail, we conclude that the pragmatic considerations highlighted by the anti-evidentialist are directed not at belief, but at related notions such as commitment.

Sellars characterizes his view as a "revised classical analysis" (EPM 178) of the mind.  It is classical in being non-"Rylean"--it involves covert mental episodes; the revision stresses, nonetheless, the "essentially social character of conceptual thinking" (PSIM 16).  In EPM, he attempts to thread this needle, in the first installment of his  "Myth of Jones," by stressing the social character of language.  In this paper, I focus on the claim that Jones is a Sellarsian scientist, using overt language as a model for the covert non-Rylean episodes he "discovers."  I argue that this cannot work: if the social character of meaning can be secured without appeal to non-Rylean episodes, the latter will be problematically private, if they exist at all.

Those who, like me, defend Kendall Walton's pretense account of fiction are obliged to explain how it might be that two people can count as understanding one another, when they cannot be described as having the same fictional character in mind---since there aren't fictional characters to have in mind.  In a brief note, I explain why this is no problem, but instead a virtue, of the pretense approach.

Can a naturalist can earn the right to talk of a shared empirical world? Hume famously thought not, and contemporary "stipulative" naturalists infer from this inability that the demand is somehow unnatural. The "critical" naturalist, by contrast, claims to earn that right. In this paper, I motivate critical naturalism, arguing first that stipulative naturalism is question begging, and second, that the pessimism it inherits from Hume about whether the problem can be solved is misplaced. Hume's mistake was to misidentify exemplary contexts of thought: thought is a kind of action, better exemplified at the backgammon table or the dinner party than in the study. By earning the right to this environment-involving conception of thought, the critical naturalist can address, rather than avoid, the explanatory problem Hume uncovered.

"Kripke's question," according to Jessica Pepp, concerns how speakers manage to use names to refer to individuals they have never encountered.  The question is pressing because of Kripke's putative refutation of the supposedly classic "satisfactionalist" description theory. According to Pepp, there are two anti-satisfactionalist ways of answering this question: linguistic and cognitive. 

In this paper I begin by noting that on the cognitive approach, the question Pepp attributes to Kripke is not the deepest question.  The more interesting question is how a subject could have an individual in mind if they have never encountered them.  The task for the cognitivist, then, is to answer this question without collapsing into either linguistic or satisfactional theories.  I argue that without  the presentational use of descriptions I uncovered in my paper of that title, this line cannot be walked.

Sellars's epistemology of science derives from his sustained engagement with a doctrine I'll call Carnap's conceptual voluntarism.  As Sellars understands it, Carnap's view makes it impossible to understand why language as we use it concerns the world in which we use it.  In his early work, Sellars thought that this could be addressed by affixing a theory of "pure pragmatics" to Carnap's syntactic theory, but his critique became more radical in time. Ultimately any "epistemological" account of the capacity of scientists to generate new theories of our world must abandon Carnap's voluntarism to recognize the sense in which, in Sellars's colorful phrase, rules are generalizations "written in flesh and blood, or nerve and sinew, rather than pen and ink." 

At the beginning of his career, Wilfrid Sellars self-identified as a logical empiricist, and in this paper I take that self-identification seriously.  When, at a crucial point in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," Sellars takes up the Vienna Circle's protocol sentence debate, his sympathies seem to lie more with Neurath than with Schlick. But methodologically, Sellars is more closely aligned with Schlick than Neurath; and revisionary work on the Vienna Circle has shown that the substantive disagreements between Neurath and Schlick derive from their methodological differences. I argue, then, that in EPM Sellars is attempting to highlight a (basically Schlickian) epistemological constraint that the Neurathian coherentist cannot so much as recognize, much less meet.   That Sellars rejects Schlick's own attempt to address this is no surprise: Schlick himself expresses doubts about the adequacy of his treatment.  Sellars's positive view, I argue, can be understood as (intended to be) an improvement on Schlick's treatment of Konstatierungen.

In her Presidential Address to the APA, Annette Baier described her "naturalist view of persons" as one according to which, "In virtue of our long and helpless infancy, persons, who all begin as small persons, are necessarily social beings, who first learn from older persons, by play, by imitation, by correction."  Baier's vision is fruitfully compared to what Huw Price has called "subject naturalism": Baier is offering a subject-naturalist view of persons.  Price argues that subject naturalists, unlike their "object naturalist" counterparts, can avoid the "placement problems" that bedevil and motivate reductive naturalistic programs. I argue that Price's approach cannot accommodate mental discourse in particular.  More generally, the subject naturalist is better off finding ways to demystify the objects of concern, so that placement problems do not seem pressing, rather than to evade them altogether.

There is a liberal use of "acquaintance" in play in some discussions of singular thought: to have an object in mind is to be acquainted with it.  Does this fall foul of Sellars's attack on the myth of the Given?  It depends on what that "myth" is.  In this paper, I explain Sellars's argument with an eye to contemporary discussions in the theory of reference.  While Sellars himself would have rejected the contemporary view, this is because of other commitments, connected especially to his epistemology of science.  Thus, at least in principle, contemporary acquaintance theory need not fall foul of the myth of the given.

In his pathbreaking book on Sellars's ethics, Jeremy Koons boggles at Sellars's distinction between epistemic and moral communities. In this paper I defend Sellars's belief that there is a problem.  Using Kafka's Red Peter, I show what such a distinction might look like, then argue that this could have been the kind of idea Sellars had. In particular, one who too quickly assumes that the presuppositions of an epistemic community and a moral community are one has not "plumbed the depths" of moral skepticism, as Sellars advises us in "Science and Ethics."