Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (/ˈsɛlərz/; May 20, 1912 – July 2, 1989) was an American philosopher and prominent developer ofcritical realism[9] who "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States".[10] His work has had a profound impact in virtually all areas ofanalytic philosophy beginning in the latter half of the 20th century, including inepistemology,philosophy of language,philosophy of mind,philosophy of perception, andphilosophy of science. His most notable contributions include his critique of foundationalist epistemology (the "Myth of the Given"), asynoptic philosophy aiming to unite what he called themanifest and scientific images, and aninferentialist account of meaning.
His father was the Canadian-American philosopherRoy Wood Sellars, a leading American philosophical naturalist in the first half of the twentieth-century.[11] Wilfrid was educated at theUniversity of Michigan (BA, 1933), theUniversity at Buffalo, andOriel College, Oxford (1934–1937), where he was aRhodes Scholar, obtaining his highest earned degree, an MA, in 1940. During World War II, he served in military intelligence. He then taught at theUniversity of Iowa (1938–1946), theUniversity of Minnesota (1947–1958),Yale University (1958–1963), and from 1963 until his death, at theUniversity of Pittsburgh.[12] He served as president of theMetaphysical Society of America in 1977. He was a founder of the journalPhilosophical Studies.
Sellars is well known as a critic offoundationalistepistemology—the "Myth of the Given" as he called it.[7] However, his philosophical works are more generally directed toward the ultimate goal of reconciling intuitive ways of describing the world (both those of common sense and traditional philosophy) with a thoroughly naturalist, scientific account of reality. He is widely regarded both for great sophistication of argument and for his assimilation of many and diverse subjects in pursuit of asynoptic vision. Sellars was perhaps the first philosopher to synthesize elements of Americanpragmatism with elements of British and Americananalytic philosophy and Austrian and Germanlogical positivism. His work also reflects a sustained engagement withGerman idealism, most notably in his 1966John Locke Lectures, published two years later asScience and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes.
Sellars coined certain now-common idioms in philosophy, such as the "space of reasons". This idiom refers to two things. It:
Note: (2) corresponds in part to the distinction Sellars makes between the manifest image and the scientific image.
Sellars's most famous work is "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1956).[13] In it, he criticizes the view that knowledge of what we perceive can be independent of the conceptual processes which result in perception. He named this "The Myth of the Given," attributing it tosense-data theories of knowledge.
The work targets several theories at once, especiallyC. I. Lewis' Kantian pragmatism andRudolf Carnap's positivism. He draws out "The Myth of Jones," to defend the possibility of a strictbehaviorist world-view. The parable explains how thoughts, intelligent action, and even subjective inner experience can be attributed to people within a scientific model. Sellars used a fictional tribe, the "Ryleans," since he wanted to addressGilbert Ryle'sThe Concept of Mind.
Sellars's idea of "myth", heavily influenced byErnst Cassirer,[14] is not necessarily negative. He saw it as something that can be useful or otherwise, rather than true or false. He aimed to unite the conceptual behavior of the "space of reasons" with the concept of a subjectivesense experience. This was one of his most central goals, which his later work described asKantian.
In his paper "The Language of Theories“ (1961), Sellars introduces the concept ofKantian empiricism.Kantianempiricism features a distinction between (1) claims whose revision requires abandonment or modification of the system ofconcepts in terms of which they areframed (i.e., modification of thefallible set ofconstitutive principles underlying knowledge, otherwise known asframework-relativea priori truths) and (2) claims revisable on the basis of observations formulated in terms of a system of concepts which remained fixed throughout.[1]
In his "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" (1962), Sellars distinguishes between the "manifest image" and the "scientific image" of the world. It also includes his famous quote about "the aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated," being "to understand how things, in the broadest possible sense of the term, hang together, in the broadest possible sense of the term."
The manifest image includes intentions, thoughts, and appearances. Sellars allows that the manifest image may be refined through 'correlational induction', but he rules out appeal to imperceptible entities.
The scientific image describes the world in terms of the theoretical physical sciences. It includes notions such as causality and theories about particles and forces.
The two images sometimes complement one another, and sometimes conflict. For example, the manifest image includes practical or moral claims, whereas the scientific image does not. There is conflict, e.g. where science tells us that apparently solid objects are mostly empty space. Sellars favors a synoptic vision, wherein the scientific image takes ultimate precedence in cases of conflict, at least with respect to empirical descriptions and explanations.[15]
In "Meaning as Functional Classification" (1974) Sellars elaborated upon a version offunctional role semantics that he had previously defended in prior publications.[16][17][18] For Sellars, thoughts are analogous to linguistic utterances, and both thoughts and linguistic utterances gain their content through token thoughts or utterances standing in certain relations with other thoughts, stimuli, and responses.[19]
The son of a socialist,[20] Sellars was involved in left-wing politics. As a student at theUniversity of Michigan, Wilfrid Sellars was one of the founding members of the first North-Americancooperative house for university students, which was then called "Michigan Socialist House" (and which was later renamed "Michigan Cooperative House").[21] He also campaigned for the socialist candidateNorman Thomas of theSocialist Party of America.[22]
Robert Brandom, his junior colleague at Pittsburgh, named Sellars andWillard Van Orman Quine as the two most profound and important philosophers of their generation.[23] Sellars's goal of asynoptic philosophy that unites the everyday and scientific views of reality is the foundation and archetype of what is sometimes called thePittsburgh School, whose members include Brandom,John McDowell, andJohn Haugeland.[24] Especially Brandom introduced aHegelian variety of the Pittsburgh School, often calledanalytic Hegelianism.[25][26] Sellars himself viewed his work as moving analytic philosophy from itsHumean (i.e.logical positivist) to its Kantian phase, andRichard Rorty suggested that Brandom's work continues that movement into its Hegelian phase.[27]
Other philosophers strongly influenced by Sellars span the full spectrum of contemporary English-speaking philosophy, fromneopragmatism (Rorty) toeliminative materialism (Paul Churchland) torationalism (Laurence BonJour). Sellars's philosophical heirs also includeRuth Millikan,Daniel Dennett,Héctor-Neri Castañeda,Bruce Aune,Jay Rosenberg,Johanna Seibt,Matthew Burstein,Ray Brassier,Andrew Chrucky,Jeffrey Sicha, Pedro Amaral,Thomas Vinci,Willem A. de Vries,David Rosenthal,Ken Wilber andMichael Williams. Sellars's work has been drawn upon in feministstandpoint theory, for example in the work ofQuill Kukla.[28]
Sellars's death in 1989 was the result of long-term alcohol use.[29] A collection of essays devoted to 'Sellars and his Legacy' was published by Oxford University Press in 2016 (James O'Shea, ed.,Wilfrid Sellars and his Legacy), with contributions from Brandom, deVries, Kraut, Kukla, Lance, McDowell, Millikan, O'Shea, Rosenthal, Seibt, and Williams.
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