Husserl and Sellars on the contents of perception

Daniel Guilhermino

The conceptualism-debate is a debate concerned with the nature of perception. Its central problem is the question on how perceptual experience can play a justificatory role in beliefs. This problem gave rise to the controversial conceptualist thesis in contemporary epistemology, which goes back to Sellars’ seminal critique on the Myth of the Given in his Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956) and achieves a dominant role in current epistemological debates due to McDowell’s influential conceptualist reading of Kant in Mind and World (1994). The conceptualist thesis can be roughly stated as follows: if empirical knowledge is to be possible, then perceptual experience must lie within the “space of reasons”, i.e. it must be a conceptual achievement. The thesis’ main preoccupation is to avoid both Davidsonian coherentism, which assures that “nothing can count as a reason for holding a belief except another belief” (Davidson 2001: 141), thus depicting our thinking as “rationally unconstrained, a frictionless spinning in a void” (McDowell 1994: 42), and the Myth of the Given, which although rightly recognizes the need for grounding our knowledge on some “external constraint”, fails to give an accurate account of this very fact.

The debate over conceptualism opened up a trend in Husserl scholarship concerning the character of his theory of perception. This theory, first presented in Logical Investigations (1900/1901) as theory of fulfillment, has undergone conceptualist and non-conceptualist interpretations. According to Cobb-Stevens (Cobb-Stevens, 1990: 152), Husserl extends understanding into sensuous intuition in order to take even simple perception depending upon understanding. According to Mulligan, on the contrary, there is a distinction at stake in Husserl’s theory between nominal and propositional seeing of state of affairs and simple and straightforward seeing of particulars: “to see particulars is not to mean, is not to exercise a concept, neither an individual nor a general concept” (Mulligan 1995: 170). This trend was followed by many commentators as Barber (2008), Hopp (2008), Leung (2010), Mooney (2010), Doyon (2011), Kidd (2017), just to name some, and it is still an open question.

My aim in this paper is to explore an issue I believe is a prerequisite for addressing Husserl’s theory in light of the conceptualism-debate, namely: the relationship between him and Sellars. As far as I can see this relation is often ignored in the secondary literature – exceptions made for Mohanty (1978), Sukale (1978), Soffer (2003a, 2003b) and Huemer (2004). In order to fulfill this task, I will concentrate myself in a paper read by Sellars at a symposium of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in 1978, in which he explicitly states that he has “conceived of philosophical analysis (and synthesis) as akin to phenomenology” (Sellars 1978: 170). Sellars starts his analysis of visual perception in this paper with a phenomenological reduction, which is, for him, a thinning out of a complex demonstrative perceptual statement of its pre-suppositions, leaving a bare demonstrative “This” plus a “somehow”. Thus, a statement like:

This cube of pink over there facing me edgewise.

Becomes, after the phenomenological reduction:

This somehow (cube of pink over there facing me edgewise).

In which the “this” of the reduced expression refers not to the cube of pink – since it can even not exist –, but still refers to somehow a cube of pink – since it is still a perception, and not, e.g., an imagination.

The reduced perceptual statement leaves open, in Sellars’ analysis, the possibility that the ultimate referent of perceptual takings is always a sensation. My task here is to reconstruct the reasonings that lead him to this polemic conclusion and then compare it with Husserl’s noematic analysis of perception.