| This dissertation is a study of Wilfrid Sellars’ philosophy mainly through his text.On the one hand,the present study internationally of Sellars’ philosophy involves in both its extensions and the text.On the other hand,the text study of his philosophy in domestic is still inadequate.And this dissertation is a trying to be a supplement in some major aspects for the domestic Sellars study,and a more comprehensive introduction to his thoughts;though,relative to the richness of his philosophy,this paper is still rather schematic.One of Sellars’ well-known views is his critique of the Myth of the Given,and it is the main content of the first chapter.He makes a general critique,by explicating such specific forms of the Myth as sense-datum theories,traditional empiricism,theories of appearing(including Firth’s psychology of children)and so on.The Myth,so to speak,is the notion that objects present themselves to us as being of a certain sort.It has as a distinctive character the immediacy,which means presupposing no such things a priori as conceptual capacities and learning processes.The Myth involves the wrong idea that human mind has a primitive pre-conceptual ability to notice something,which would be used to explain the acquisition of concepts.That notion,therefore,itself is essential to the mechanism of concept formation as well as to that of knowledge production or foundationist epistemology.However,as Sellars’ analysis shows by bringing out the inconsistency this line contains,it will not do as it stands,that is,it is a "Myth" in fact.For Sellars,the root of that notion consists in the confusion between the two types of inner episodes,one of which may be called sense impressions(or sensations or immediate experiences),and the other thoughts.He argues that they,though similar somehow,are quite different;the former is non-conceptual(or non-epistemic)and the latter conceptual(or epistemic).The Myth holds that only by the non-conceptual episodes could the conceptual episodes be got,or,in other words,the epistemic could be got directly by the non-epistemic,or the conceptual is reducible(or analyzable)to the non-conceptual.Sellars is making a point that such inner episodes do not make sense in cognition.An important component of the critique of the Myth,as Sellars sees,is to reveal the proper status of inner episodes.Sellars abandoned the inner episodes in the sense of dualism or metaphysics,but has never been led to the Rylean behaviorism.He commits himself to the reality of the inner episodes in some sense.And this commitment relies on his Scientific Realism,which is the main content of the second chapter.He does talk,with scientific realism,about science on the one hand,and essentially talks about language on the other.He focuses on the linguistic phenomenon of human beings,and points out that not only they speak of observable phenomena in observation language,ordinary language,but also in theoretical language that postulate unobservable entities.The concepts in the construct of theories in his sense about theoretical entities are those formed by analogy.This is another mechanism of concept formation,which differs from the formation mechanism of ordinary observation concepts,but depends on the concepts in the observation framework.However,the key,as Sellars notes,is that the dependence of theoretical framework on observation framework is merely methodologically rather than substantially;it does not give the absolute status of the observation framework.The observation and theoretical frameworks,or the manifest and scientific images,are competing,and the theoretical one with better reasons would be the criterion for what there is.The world of common sense is phenomenal in something like the Kantian sense,and the noumenal world is not a metaphysical world of unknowable things in themselves,but the world as construed by scientific theory.It is in this sense that theoretical entities exist and the observation objects do not.And it is also in this sense that impressions and thoughts exist,if they are theoretical entitles and the relevant theories are good.Sellars’ Scientific Realism makes it clear that the concepts of theoretical entities are derived from the intersubjective discourse;the concepts of inner episodes are analogical concepts by the observation framework.That is,the pre-conceptual impressions cannot be used to explain the conceptual capacities of mind,and,on the contrary,only minds that have had those capacities(i.e.have the observation framework and the relevant theoretical framework)could grasp impressions.Sellars’ Scientific Realism is intimately involved in his philosophy of language,which will come to the third chapter.One objection to Scientific Realism is that theoretical concepts are merely auxiliary symbols without sense meanings,and so they are not proper concepts.And the key is how we make of the meaning of a word.Sellars conceives of a new sense in which to see the traditional issue about the One and the Many,and uses it to the context of meaning.He proposes that the meaning of a word consists in a linguistic entity,not in an abstract one.Specifically,his analysis shows,the abstract singular term referring to an abstract entity is a distributive singular term,and the context of it is a special semantic case which classifies linguistic expressions.Sellars also examines the context of existential qualification and the logic of the predicate,and indicates that the context of existential qualification is not a proper existential context and also that the predicates which mean the abstract entites is in effect dispensable.Therefore,none of them has a commitment to the existence of abstract entities.Besides,he,by virtue of the discussion on the synthetic a priori,shows that it is wrong to draw the distinction between the linguistic and the sense meaning.It is a mistake depending on the concept empiricism,namely,the concepts of qualities and relations are formed by particulars,and there is no concept of universal without conformity to particular.Sellars points out its absurdity,and argues the conceptual meaning of a word does not consist in a certain abstract entity,but in the relevant rules of inference,material and formal.Chapter Four puts the issue of rules further,and relates it to that of actions.Sellars holds that the using of language is the human activity governed by rules.He distinguishes two types of rules,the rules of criticism and the rules of action,which,respectively,account for the pattern-governed behaviors and the rule-obeying behaviors.His idea is that human beings start their learning to use a language from the pattern-governed behaviors,and,at a stage of grasping enough concepts,could learn the rule-obeying behaviors,learn to act with their intentions.Sellars construct a theory that he calls it Verbal Behaviorism,and it is a crude explanation of the framework of mind,in which "thinking" could be equated with the "saying" governed by the rules of criticism.Sellars believes,though this explanation could be specified,it is conductive to resolve many issues of the philosophy of mind.With this doctrine,or,more precisely,with his philosophy of mind,Sellars makes his distinct contribution for the theory of the practical reasoning.He constructs a framework of intentions for the practical reasoning,in which not only the basic notions,the basic principle and the logic,and conceptual relation to actions of the practical reasoning are to be introduced,but also the ethic notions like desire,satisfaction,pleasure,and even the moral point of view,open to discussion. |
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