On Sellars's Epistemology

Wilfrid Sellars,a renowned American philosopher,is known as one of the most insightful and systematic thinkers in the 20 th century.The dissertation is to bring Sellars' s metaphysics,ontology,philosophy of mind and philosophy of language into the vision of epistemology,and outline his synoptic,systematic,multi-faceted,cyclopaedic and unique philosophical framework based on his whole legacy.By analyzing his ideological origin and historical background,I have ascertained his positions of analytical philosophy,pragmatism,holism,anti-foundationalism and naturalism.With the standpoint of the world of human's life,subjectivity and intersubjectivity,the core of his epistemology is the jusitification of knowledge and the epistemic priority of “observation report”.As for Sellars,human's perception is on the premise of conceptual framework,which is his viewpoint for refuting “the Myth of the Given” and opposing the idea that the foundation of knowledge is based on what directly gives human.The conceptual framework of human includes the “manifest Image” and the “scientific image”,or the “observation frame” and the “theoretical frame”.The scientific image or the theoretical framework enjoys ontological and epistemological status;nevertheless,the manifest image or the observation frame enjoys methodological status.People construct the logical space of reasons,in which knowledge can be justified,by acquiring language and norms.There are so many semantic and theoretical discourse resources in the space that the observation report can obtain the explanatory function of the theory.Thus the non-inferential observational report,which can be regarded as the perceptual and introspective belief and the firm foundation of knowledge,is not justified by itself.The dissertation studies the conceptual holism,psychological nominalism,scientific realism,quasi-normative functionalism,the correspondence theory of truth and the moderate coherence theory of justification constructed by Sellars from epistemological perspective.Sellars has gained prominence for critiquing foundationalism,reductionism and logical empiricism by the conceptual holism and psychological nominalism.His notions of the scientific realism and the justification of knowledge aroused wide attention and debate among American and British philosophers.He has a great influence on Rorty,Brandom and McDowell,and has made great contributions to the development of epistemology,analytical philosophy and pragmatism.However,his solution to the problem of justification made epistemology fallen into “Sellars' s dilemma”.The coherence theory and the direct realism are supposed to be rational solutions to the dilemma.