Abstract
Despite the rapid appearance of publications in the late 1940s, Sellars’ strident insistence on a formalist meta-philosophy and a “pure” conception of philosophical concepts quietly disappeared from his articles by 1949–1950. Not only did his explicit pronouncements that “philosophy is pure formalism” disappear but also Sellars’ reliance on a strict demarcation between formal and factual concepts was no longer used to pick out the necessary features of specifically philosophical concepts. Beginning with “Language, Rules and Behavior” in 1949, Sellars’ exploration of linguistic rules and rule-regulated behavior presupposes psychological facts and explanations that would have been relegated to the factual, non-philosophical dimension of concepts within pure pragmatics. Given that Sellars previously asserted a strident distinction between what does and does not count as philosophy (with the psychological dimension of concepts and explanations clearly falling on the non-philosophical side), the change is particularly jarring. Because his formalist meta-philosophy plays such a crucial and prominent role in his early publications, its disappearance in subsequent articles gives rise to a host of questions surrounding the reception history of pure pragmatics. Whether Sellars’ early publications were poorly received because of technical errors or inconsistent terminology, or because his arguments were misunderstood makes a substantial difference when situating pure pragmatics among the rest of Sellars’ philosophy.
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Notes
- 1.
The timeline for Sellars’ publications is, of course, not this clean cut. Parts of what become “Language, Rules, and Behavior” are present in Sellars’ unpublished “Psychologism” paper (see Appendix), which was being written as early as 1946–1947, and some of the language present in pure pragmatics lingers throughout Sellars’ publications (though not found in the same form as his early publications). As I argue below, Sellars toyed with a formalist formulation of his views into the early 1950s (and some of these formalist concepts re-appear without formalist garb in his later works), yet the disappearance of this meta-philosophical commitment, combined with the inclusion of explanatory features contradictory to it, create a potentially devastating problem.
- 2.
You can find Sellars final attempt at fleshing out pure pragmatics in his unpublished 1950 conference paper “Outline of a Philosophy of Language”, which will appear in an upcoming collection of Sellars’ writings edited by Jim O’Shea (entitled “Fraught with Ought” through Harvard University Press).
- 3.
See Olen 2016.
- 4.
Internalist readings are generally found in depictions of Sellars’ work that gives primacy to the ‘systematic’ character of his thought over discontinuities and changes to his arguments or claims. The most prominent example of this might be found in the brief division of Sellars’ career into early, middle, and late periods in Rosenberg 2007.
- 5.
Sellars 1949b/2005.
- 6.
Sellars’ use of ‘formal’ is not the only terminological inconsistency present in pure pragmatics, but is the most explicit one. In Chap. 3 I pointed out an inconsistency in Sellars’ discussion of conformation rules, and Storer has cited numerous problems in Sellars’ use of quotations, variables, names, ‘token’, and his use of ‘meta-language’ in relation to ‘formal’ and ‘descriptive’. See Storer 1948a (also contained in the appendix).
- 7.
- 8.
Nagel mistakenly identifies Wilfrid Sellars as “Dr. Sellars”, even though Sellars never finished his doctorate.
- 9.
Reading pure pragmatics as exhibiting this kind of reasoning might lend support to the claim that Sellars is doing something like what he will later call “transcendental linguistics”. As discussed below, this interpretation—although tempting in light of Sellars’ later publications—cannot be rendered coherent. Given that Sellars locates pure pragmatics among pure syntax and pure semantics, such a reading would entail that he not only misread then-contemporary accounts of language but also had such a radically different project as to wholly misunderstand almost all then-current works in logic and semiotic.
- 10.
Brandom’s discussion of the “Modal Kant-Sellars Thesis” takes it as obvious that one victory found in Sellars’ philosophy is the idea that descriptive concepts must presuppose concepts and categories that are themselves not descriptive. While support for this claim can be found in Sellars’ later work, it is not at all clear that such a developed thesis is present in pure pragmatics (at least not in a form closely resembling Brandom’s Modal Kant-Sellars Thesis).
- 11.
See Austin 1939.
- 12.
It is an oddity that Sellars has received such little treatment in the history of analytic philosophy. Despite a veritable sea of work on Quine’s arguments against the analytic/synthetic distinction, for example, Sellars’ own treatment of synthetic a priori claims has been largely ignored (most recently addressed in Sachs 2014 and Westphal forthcoming). Especially in his role as editor and founder of Philosophical Studies, as well as co-editor of two influential anthologies (Sellars and Feigl 1949; Sellars and Hospers 1952), it is surprising that such a small amount of work acknowledges his role in shaping contemporary American analytic philosophy.
- 13.
See especially Sellars 1957.
- 14.
Whether Sellars’ post-pure pragmatics should be read as offering transcendental arguments or conditions of language is explored in Chap. 5.
- 15.
A non-factual naturalism seems somewhat difficult to square with Brandom’s claim that pure pragmatics is concerned with the use of language. At best, what’s happening here is that different inconsistent sets of historically situated definitions of ‘pragmatics’, ‘naturalism’, and ‘pure’ are simply being glossed over in an effort to connect pure pragmatics with Sellars’ so-called scientia mensura (i.e., the idea that in terms of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things).
- 16.
That being said, I am not sure why Brandom would want to articulate a conception of practices or abilities along ‘pure’ lines (assuming one could). Since we’re characterizing the use of sets of expressions in terms of agential capacities to use such expressions, a behavioral or psychological framework seems perfectly suited for such a project (surely capacities to speak in specific ways fit nicely into behavioral or psychological frameworks that account for linguistic practices).
- 17.
Toward here does not imply some kind of teleology when talking about Sellars’ philosophical development. Much as with any historical account, accounts of personal and philosophical development are not working toward some final and unified end. It is just as possible that Sellars’ “final” account of philosophy suffers from internal inconsistencies, successor concepts that fail to overcome past problems, and successor concepts that hold—at best—a tenuous connection to past notions. Even the phrase “philosophical development” can carry too much metaphysical baggage. I am resistant to the idea that there is any one position held by a philosopher that is somehow independent of historical framing and nuances. When discussing “philosophical development” I simply mean to depict a factual account of how a philosopher’s views changed over time, not how such views ought to have (or inevitably) changed.
- 18.
The fact that Sellars’ publications tend to overlap, at least concerning when they were written, makes it somewhat difficult to tell exactly when his reading of Carnap was corrected. When Sellars sent Carnap his ostensibly final draft of “Empiricism and Abstract Entities”, one can also find him repeating what looks like the Iowa misreading of pure semantics. See Sellars 1953/1963, p. 313.
- 19.
This is not to say that all vestiges of the Iowa reading disappeared. Sellars claims, for example, that Carnap has failed to think there is any other relationship between descriptive and pure accounts of language aside from that of interpretation (Sellars 1963, p. 462), but this terminology was amended in Introduction to Semantics. Sellars’ assertion and terminology here is still the same Syntax era framing used by both Bergmann and Hall.
- 20.
This early date can be found in Sellars’ draft of “Empiricism and Abstract Entities” that was sent to Carnap. Correspondence surrounding Carnap’s Library of Living Philosophers Volume (which contains the initial publication of Sellars 1963) can be found in the Rudolf Carnap Papers, 1905–1970, ASP.1974.01, Special Collections Department, University of Pittsburgh.
- 21.
We should draw a distinction between offering historical accounts of Sellars’ thought and working through some of the ideas attributed to Sellars. If our concern is to accurately represent Sellars’ thought, then the historical record matters. If we are only concerned with pursuing specific ideas attributed to Sellars, but nothing in their content or form need be traced back to Sellars’ specific formulation (e.g., arguments against giveness, non-conceptual content), then I am less inclined to insist on the necessity of a historically grounded account. Despite this, most philosophers writing about Sellars do, in fact, claim to accurately represent Sellars’ philosophy as his own. Otherwise, the connection to Sellars would be largely ceremonial.
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Olen, P. (2016). The Reception History of Pure Pragmatics. In: Wilfrid Sellars and the Foundations of Normativity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52717-2_4
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