Introduction to Sellars and Quine Pete Mandik Chairman

Introduction to Sellars and Quine Pete Mandik Chairman, Department of Philosophy Coordinator, Cognitive Science Laboratory William Paterson University, New Jersey USA

Two Giants Wilfrid Sellars 1912 -1989 Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956) Willard van Orman Quine 1908 -2000 Word and Object (1960) 2

Sellars and Quine vs. Positivism Both revolutionized analytic philosophy by opposing Logical Positivism aka Logical Empiricism 3

Logical Positivism “…restated the foundationalist epistemology of British empiricism…” (EPM p. 2) Verifiability Principle- All truths are either analytic (logical tautologies) or synthetic (knowable through sensory perception) Sense Datum Theory- Everything known by the senses is reducible to constructions of sense data 4

Quine Attacked the Verifiability Principle by attacking the Analytic/synthetic distinction 5

Sellars Attacked Sense Datum Theory by attacking the “Myth of the Given” and the “bad philosophical habit which the British empiricists took over from Descartes--the habit of asking whether the mind ever succeeds in making unmediated contact with [the] world, and remaining skeptical about the status of knowledge-claims until such contact can be shown to exist” (EPM p. 9) 6

Sellars and the Myth “Intuitions without concepts are blind. ” (EPM p. 3) “All awareness…is a linguistic affair” (EPM p. 4) “Locke, Berkeley, and Hume were wrong in thinking that we are ‘aware…simply by having sensations and images’. ” (ibid. ) “in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical desription of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says” (ibid. ) 7

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