Introduction to Sellars and Quine

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

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

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

4. 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

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

6. 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)

7. 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.)

8. THE END