Wilfrid Sellars

Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (May 20, 1912 – July 2, 1989) was an American philosopher and prominent developer of critical realism, who "revolutionized both the content and the method of philosophy in the United States".

His father was the Canadian-American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, a leading American philosophical naturalist in the first half of the twentieth-century.

Wilfrid was educated at the University of Michigan (BA, 1933), the University at Buffalo, and Oriel College, Oxford (1934–1937), where he was a Rhodes Scholar, obtaining his highest earned degree, an MA, in 1940.

During World War II, he served in military intelligence.

He then taught at the University of Iowa (1938–1946), the University of Minnesota (1947–1958), Yale University (1958–1963), and from 1963 until his death, at the University of Pittsburgh.

Sellars's most famous work is "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (1956).

In it, he criticizes the view that knowledge of what we perceive can be independent of the conceptual processes which result in perception.

He named this "The Myth of the Given," attributing it to sense-data theories of knowledge.

The work targets several theories at once, especially C. I. Lewis' Kantian pragmatism and Rudolf Carnap's positivism.

He draws out "The Myth of Jones," to defend the possibility of a strict behaviorist world-view.

The parable explains how thoughts, intelligent action, and even subjective inner experience can be attributed to people within a scientific model.

Sellars used a fictional tribe, the "Ryleans," since he wanted to address Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind.

Sellars's idea of "myth", heavily influenced by Ernst Cassirer, is not necessarily negative.

He saw it as something that can be useful or otherwise, rather than true or false.

He aimed to unite the conceptual behavior of the "space of reasons" with the concept of a subjective sense experience.

This was one of his most central goals, which his later work described as Kantian.

In his paper "The Language of Theories“ (1961), Sellars introduces the concept of Kantian empiricism. Kantian empiricism features a distinction between (1) claims whose revision requires abandonment or modification of the system of concepts in terms of which they are framed (i.e., modification of the fallible set of constitutive principles underlying knowledge, otherwise known as framework-relative a priori truths) and (2) claims revisable on the basis of observations formulated in terms of a system of concepts which remained fixed throughout.

In his "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" (1962), Sellars distinguishes between the "manifest image" and the "scientific image" of the world.

The manifest image includes intentions, thoughts, and appearances.

Sellars allows that the manifest image may be refined through 'correlational induction', but he rules out appeal to imperceptible entities.

The scientific image describes the world in terms of the theoretical physical sciences.

It includes notions such as causality and theories about particles and forces.

The two images sometimes complement one another, and sometimes conflict.

For example, the manifest image includes practical or moral claims, whereas the scientific image does not.

There is conflict, e.g. where science tells us that apparently solid objects are mostly empty space.

Sellars favors a synoptic vision, wherein the scientific image takes ultimate precedence in cases of conflict, at least with respect to empirical descriptions and explanations.

In "Meaning as Functional Classification" (1974) Sellars elaborated upon a version of functional role semantics that he had previously defended in prior publications.

For Sellars, thoughts are analogous to linguistic utterances, and both thoughts and linguistic utterances gain their content through token thoughts or utterances standing in certain relations with other thoughts, stimuli, and responses.

The son of a socialist, Sellars was involved in left-wing politics.

He served as president of the Metaphysical Society of America in 1977.

He was a founder of the journal Philosophical Studies.

Sellars is well known as a critic of foundationalist epistemology—the "Myth of the Given" as he called it.

However, his philosophical works are more generally directed toward the ultimate goal of reconciling intuitive ways of describing the world (both those of common sense and traditional philosophy) with a thoroughly naturalist, scientific account of reality.

He is widely regarded both for great sophistication of argument and for his assimilation of many and diverse subjects in pursuit of a synoptic vision.

Sellars was perhaps the first philosopher to synthesize elements of American pragmatism with elements of British and American analytic philosophy and Austrian and German logical positivism.

His work also reflects a sustained engagement with the German tradition of transcendental idealism, most obviously in his book Science and Metaphysics: Kantian Variations.

Sellars coined certain now-common idioms in philosophy, such as the "space of reasons".

This idiom refers to two things.

It:

Note: (2) corresponds in part to the distinction Sellars makes between the manifest image and the scientific image.