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This chapter explores the difficult question of the nature of the relationship between the natural and the normative as it was conceived by Sellars. Sellars's view represented an attempt to defend both the irreducibility of the normative space of reasons and yet, simultaneously and in another sense, its comprehensive reducibility from the perspective of an ideal scientific conception of the nature of reality and of the human being. An early distinction in Sellars between ‘logical’ vs. ‘causal’ reducibility is exploited to explain the relationship between the manifest and scientific images. There is a complex norm/nature presuppositional structure that runs throughout Sellars's views on the ‘Janus-faced’ nature of meaning, intentionality, knowledge, and truth. This interpretation makes it possible to reconcile some of the differences that have divided the so-called ‘left-wing’ and ‘right-wing’ Sellarsians.

This chapter distinguishes between epistemologically and metaphysically motivated forms of idealism. It then shows how Wilfrid Sellars systematically blocks the epistemological motivations for idealism popular in the empiricist tradition. It then argues that the metaphysical motivations for idealism common in the German tradition posed a more significant challenge to Sellars's realism and naturalism, and that it is in response to this challenge that he developed and defended his notion of picturing.

This chapter locates Sellars's discussion of perception in ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ within the context of his discussion of the myth of the given. It argues that his criticisms of the traditional sense datum theory are insightful but in some respects indecisive. It is further argued that Sellars's account of our thought about perception contains important insights in his treatment of looks-judgments, but that he mis-describes in a fundamental way our understanding of such talk, and that more mistakes creep into his account when he links our thought about perception to the second myth of Jones.

In ‘Empiricism of the Philosophical Mind’ (EPM) Sellars argues that mental contents as such cannot be caused, rejecting the empiricist notion of mental representation. In Sellars's view perceivers causally ‘picture’ their environment in perception: physical processes are causally correlated with the perceiver's neurophysiological processes that exhibit certain functional relationships and thus can be attributed content. This chapter argues that ‘picturing’, the link between the ‘causal order’ and the ‘logical space of reasons’, is best understood as non-linear processing in orientation systems with emergent levels of functionality and normativity. First, it is analyzed which process configurations ‘picture’, i.e., form an orientation system for agent navigation that does not involve predication. Second, it is discussed in which sense ‘pictured’ items can be said to be real, and Sellars's transcendental argument for scientific realism is briefly reconstructed. In conclusion, ‘picturing’ is related to recent work on natural functions and anti-representational accounts of cognition.

‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ (EPM) is sometimes read as attacking empiricism in general. But Sellars's announced target is traditional empiricism. In traditional empiricism, experience yields knowledge in a way that does not presuppose other empirical knowledge, so that the knowledge provided by experience can serve as foundations, in a straightforward sense, for other empirical knowledge. To accept this conception is to fall into a form of the Myth of the Given. In EPM Sellars works out a different conception of experience, according to which it is a kind of inner episode that, in the best kind of case, yields knowledge, but in a way that presupposes other empirical knowledge. The knowledge provided by experience can still serve as foundations for other empirical knowledge, but now only in a nuanced sense. The chapter concludes that so far from rejecting empiricism altogether, EPM rehabilitates empiricism, but in a non-traditional form.

In his Tales of the Mighty Dead, Robert B. Brandom's discussion of Sellars's two-ply account of observation and critique of Cartesian philosophies of mind makes several crucial errors that would render Sellars's analysis of ‘looks’-sentences incoherent. Brandom does not recognize the difference in ‘level’ between observation reports concerning physical objects and ‘looks’-reports, and he denies that ‘looks’-sentences are reports or even make claims. Furthermore, he does not recognize the importance of the nonconceptual content of experiential states. This chapter argues that a careful reading of ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ does not support Brandom's interpretation, and show how to read Sellars properly on the analysis of such sentences.

Of equal importance as the development of pragmatism and instrumentalism, although more narrowly and professionally focused, was the development of realism, a view that argued for the independent existence of the material world in space and time. This movement began in the first decade of the twentieth century led by Harvard's neo‐realist, Ralph Perry. It continued with the more significant Critical Realists of the second decade of the century—George Santayana, Arthur Lovejoy, and Roy Wood Sellars. C.I. Lewis, the most important inter‐war philosopher and another Harvard professor, known for his conceptual pragmatism, also embraced realistic ideas. In the second half of the century, Wilfrid Sellars influentially defended this point of view.

The hypothesis is that space‐time is what there is. W.V. Quine's ‘abstract objects’ are rejected. What exists should play some causal role (Graham Oddie's Eleatic Principle). The nature of space‐time is subject to scientific investigation (Wilfrid Sellars' distinction between the manifest and the scientific image of the world). Is there room for metaphysics? Yes, because a number of topic neutral notions (of which causality is an important instance) are contested by philosophers and scientists. As argued by C.B. Martin, metaphysics seeks a more abstract model of the world than that provided by science.

This chapter reviews Sellars's arguments for the ultimate ontological primacy of the ‘scientific image’ over the ‘manifest image’, despite the fact that the manifest image is essential to the constitution of humanity. In order better to understand the relation Sellars takes to hold between the objects of the manifest image and ‘theoretical’ postulates of the sciences, the fundamental conception of scientific explanation in Sellars's philosophy is taken into account. It is argued that ‘already within the manifest image, the epistemology of natural science is arguably best understood in Sellarsian terms as a systematic working out of an ontological dialectic of appearance vs. reality’. In Sellars's view, then, the ontological primacy of the scientific image is simply a consequence of commitments already present in the manifest image.

Frei's appeals to the "givenness" of revelation-the claim, for instance, that all doctrines or theological assertions are directly or indirectly grounded in faith, or that faith is rational in that it seeks understanding within a set of reasons afforded by God's revelatory activity in Scripture-incur charges of "revelational foundationalism." Chapter 6 employs recent treatments of epistemic foundationalism in order to dispel charges of "crypto-foundationalism" as well as answering the equally frequent charge that talk of "rationality intrinsic to faith" implicates Frei's thought in a type of fideism.

This chapter considers the subtle and complex epistemology developed by Wilfrid Sellars over the course of a long career. At the heart of the Myth of the Given, Sellars finds this claim: that in making observation reports we are guided by prelinguistic takings of the given, whose authority our reports inherit. Finding this unacceptably obscure, Sellars prefers a kind of reliabilism. What gives epistemic authority to an observational report is said to be rather this: its manifesting the speaker's tendency to issue such reports if and only if he then observes the state of affairs described by the report (given, presumably, that the issuing of a report on that question is then called for).

The positions of Brandom and Millikan are compared with respect to their common origins in the works of Wilfrid Sellars and Wittgenstein. Millikan takes more seriously the “picturing” themes from Sellars and Wittgenstein. Brandom follows Sellars more closely in deriving the normativity of language from social practice, although there are also hints of a possible derivation from evolutionary theory in Sellars. An important claim common to Brandom and Millikan is that there are no representations without function or “attitude”.

This chapter explores the location of John McDowell’s recipe for philosophical tranquility with respect to certain other positions in contemporary philosophy. It is argued that McDowell’s development of his quietism faces a dilemma. On the one hand, the way he distances himself from various other philosophical positions threatens to push him toward a position even more anti-theoretical than his own, a position from which distinctions McDowell himself wants to draw can’t be seen. To avoid this, however, McDowell must recognize the philosophical value of a ‘sideways’-on view of linguistic practice—albeit not a metaphysical sideways-on view. The argument proceeds in part via a discussion of Sellars’ views.

Starting from the perception that jurisprudence still predominantly but mostly unconsciously operates under the paradigm of logical empiricism, this chapter presents the following arguments: (i) logical empiricism is a doctrine that stands under fundamental tensions, namely between its logicistic and its empiristic tenets; (ii) Quine tried to solve this incompatibility by redefining the ambit of logicism and by saving empiricism in its redefined form of naturalism; (iii) Wilfrid Sellars, on the other hand, resolved the incoherence of logical empiricism by attacking its core thesis of empiricism as such; (iv) insight into Quine's arguments necessitate a move from legal positivism to legal naturalism; and (v) insight into Sellars' arguments necessitate a move from legal positivism to a non-empiricist theory of law of which so far we have only two (probably flawed) examples: Hegel's theory of Objective Spirit and Kelsen's Pure Theory of Law.

A long tradition in the philosophy of education identifies education’s most fundamental aim and ideal as that of the fostering or cultivating of rationality. This chapter relates this tradition in philosophy of education to recent work, inspired by Wilfrid Sellars, on “the space of reasons.” I briefly lay out Sellars’ notion and discuss its place in the work of some of those he influenced, especially John McDowell. I next address recent work in philosophy of education that suggests that there is a tension between Sellars’ notion and the traditional educational ideal, or that the Sellarsian view as developed by McDowell resolves outstanding difficulties with my version of the traditional view. I argue that there is less tension than some of my critics suggest, and that the Sellarsian notion is compatible with the traditional view, but that it leaves out an important aspect of that view that should not be lost.

This chapter defends a radically naturalistic metaphysics, which is motivated exclusively by attempts to unify hypotheses and theories that are taken seriously by contemporary science. For reasons to be explained, this chapter takes the view that no alternative kind of metaphysics can be regarded as a legitimate part of our collective attempt to model the structure of objective reality. One of the most distinguished predecessors in this attitude is Wilfrid Sellars, who expressed a naturalistic conception of soundly motivated metaphysics when he said that the philosopher's aim should be “knowing one's way around with respect to the subject matters of all the special [scientific] disciplines” and “building bridges” between them. This chapter focuses on a sense of “understanding” that is perhaps better characterized by the word “explanation”, where an explanation must be true (at least in its most general claims). It is argued that a given metaphysic's achievement of domestication furnishes no evidence at all that the metaphysic in question is true, and thus no reason for believing that it explains anything.

Chapter 8 employs insights from the work of pragmatist philosophers Wilfrid Sellars, Robert Brandom, Jeffrey Stout, and speech-act theory to further clarify, enrich, and expand Frei's account of literal reading and the plain sense of scripture. It aims to identify and sort out the several delicately interwoven strands of normative constraint in scriptural practices which easily become tangled in Frei's latest writings. Such tangles obscure the nuances of his claims and invite charges that Frei, for instance, merely offers cultural-linguistic correction of his earlier claims about realistic narrative, and that what inevitably ensues is a textual "warranted assertability" that collapses meaning into the community of readers' uses of the text.

A central premise in eliminativist arguments is that terms like “belief” and “desire” can be viewed as theoretical terms, in a tacit or unconscious theory of the mind, often called “folk psychology.” But the term “folk psychology” has been used as a label for a number of different sorts of things, and on some interpretations of the term, folk psychology could not turn out to be a false theory. Some philosophers, notably David Lewis, unpack the idea of folk psychology by appealing to the platitudes about the mind that everyone knows. Other philosophers unpack the idea by appeal to tacit principles that underlie the capacity to attribute mental states to other people and oneself. On this latter account, it could turn out that folk psychology consists entirely of procedural rules (as in a recipe or computer program), or that it is encoded in a connectionist network that does not map onto a set of propositions in a unique and well‐motivated way. If things do turn out this way, then eliminativist arguments will not work, because folk psychology does not make claims that can be true or false. The chapter begins with a brief history of the idea that ordinary claims about mental states – both our own and those of other people – are subserved by a tacit theory. The basic idea is traced to the work of Wilfred Sellars. Noam Chomsky's work in linguistics made it plausible that we could use a complex theory, without having any conscious access to the principles of the theory.