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22Brandom's two-ply errorIn Willem A. DeVries (ed.), Empiricism, Perceptual Knowledge, Normativity, and Realism: Essays on Wilfrid Sellars, Oxford University Press. 2009.Robert Brandom makes several mistakes in his discussion of Sellars's "Two-Ply" account of observation. Brandom does not recognize the difference in "level" between observation reports concerning physical objects and 'looks'-statements. He also denies that 'looks'-statements are reports or even make claims. They then demonstrate a more correct reading of Sellars on 'looks'-statements.
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97Ontology and the Completeness of Sellars’s Two ImagesHumana.Mente - Journal of Philosophical Studies 21 1-18. 2012.Sellars claims completeness for both the “manifest” and the “scientific images” in a way that tempts one to assume that they are independent of each other, while, in fact, they must share at least one common element: the language of individual and community intentions. I argue that this significantly muddies the waters concerning his claim of ontological primacy for the scientific image, though not in favor of the ontological primacy of the manifest image. The lesson I draw is that we need to r…Read more
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58Who sees with equal eye,... Atoms or systems into ruin hurl'd?Philosophical Studies 71 (2): 191-200. 1993.A comment the paper by Brian McLaughlin in the same volume, this paper raises questions about whether the classicism/connectionism debate is really well-formed.
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76Sellars' "Rylean myth"In Michael Bruce & Steven Barbone (eds.), Just the Arguments: 100 of the Most Important Arguments in Western Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. 2011.A summary of the "Rylean myth" (aka "the myth of Jones") from Wilfrid Sellars' classic article "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind." He uses this "myth" to motivate the idea that our concepts of mental states are like theoretical concepts, developed to fulfill an explanatory role, and not at all somehow 'given' to us by direct acquaintance with instances of mental states.
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3Reality, Knowledge, and the Good Life: A Historical Introduction to Philosophy (edited book)St. Martin's Press. 1991.An historical introduction to philosophy.
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26Hegel and SkepticismPhilosophical Review 101 (2): 401. 1992.This is a review of Forster's book.
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84Does observational knowledge require metaknowledge? A dialogue on SellarsInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 15 (1). 2007.In the following dialogue between TT - a foundationalist - and WdeV - a Sellarsian, we offer our differing assessments of the principle for observational knowledge proposed in Wilfrid Sellars's 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind'. Sellars writes: 'For a Konstatierung "This is green" to "express observational knowledge", not only must it be a symptom or sign of the presence of a green object in standard conditions, but the perceiver must know that tokens of "This is green" are symptoms of the…Read more
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90Hegel on reference and knowledgeJournal of the History of Philosophy 26 (2): 297-307. 1988.A refutation of claims by, e.g., Hamlyn or Soll, that Hegel denies our ability to refer to or knowledge individual objects.
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30The Metaphysics of Mind (review)Idealistic Studies 22 (3): 236-238. 1992.The Metaphysics of Mind is metaphysics in the logical-reconstruction-of-language mode. Tye claims the assertions of ordinary folk psychology are frequently true and attacks the idea that there are any mental events, but he is not, on the whole, concerned with what kinds of theories are best able to handle the empirical evidence we have. Rather, Tye’s central focus is an argument that the ontological commitments of psychological discourse in general are very minimal: just “persons and other senti…Read more
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105Sellars, Animals, and ThoughtProblems From Sellarsan examination of Wilfrid Sellars position of the mental capacities of non-human animals.
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124Just What is the Relation between the Manifest and the Scientific Images?International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (1): 112-128. 2016.Robert B. Brandom’s From Empiricism to Expressivism ranges widely over fundamental issues in metaphysics, with occasional forays into epistemology as well. The centerpiece is what Brandom calls ‘the Kant-Sellars thesis about modality’. This is ‘[t]he claim that in being able to use ordinary empirical descriptive vocabulary, one already knows how to do everything that one needs to know how to do, in principle, to use alethic modal vocabulary – in particular subjunctive conditionals’. Despite clai…Read more
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151Wilfrid SellarsStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2011.Overview of Wilfrid Sellars's philosophy.
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68Burgeoning skepticismErkenntnis 33 (2): 141-164. 1990.This paper shows that the resources mobilized by recent arguments against individualism in the philosophy of mind also suffice to construct a good argument against a Humean-style skepticism about our knowledge of extra-mental reality. The argument constructed, however, will not suffice to lay to rest the attacks of a truly global skeptic who rejects the idea that we usually know what our occurrent mental states are.
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147Sellars vs. McDowell on the Structure of Sensory ConsciousnessDiametros 27 47-63. 2011.I argue that John McDowell’s attempt to refute Wilfrid Sellars’s two-component analysis of perceptual experience and substitute for it a conception according to which perceptual experience is the “conceptual shaping of sensory consciousness” fails. McDowell does not recognize the subtle dialectic in Sellars’s thought between transcendental and empirical considerations in favor of a substantive conception of sense impressions, and McDowell’s own proposal seems to empty the notion of sensory consc…Read more
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42Review of Jay F. Rosenberg, Wilfrid Sellars: Fusing the Images (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2008 (6). 2008.
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20Hegel’s Dialectic and its Criticism (review)Philosophical Review 93 (3): 450. 1984.a book review of Hegel's Dialectic and its Criticism by Michael Rosen
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63Is Sellars's Rylean hypothesis plausible? A dialogueIn Michael P. Wolf & Mark Norris Lance (eds.), Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, Rodopi. pp. 85-114. 2006.A dialogue between someone who finds Sellars's Rylean myth in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" quite implausible and another who defends it.
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525Hegelian Spirits in Sellarsian BottlesPhilosophical Studies 1-12. 2016.Though Wilfrid Sellars portrayed himself as a latter-day Kantian, I argue here that he was at least as much a Hegelian. Several themes Sellars shares with Hegel are investigated: the sociality and normativity of the intentional, categorial change, the rejection of the given, and especially their denial of an unknowable thing-in-itself. They are also united by an emphasis on the unity of things—the belief that things do ‘‘hang together.’’ Hegel’s unity …Read more
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117Wilfrid SellarsMcgill-Queen's University Press. 2005.Wilfrid Sellars has been called "the most profound and systematic epistemological thinker of the twentieth century". He was in many respects ahead of his time, and many of his innovations have become widely acknowledged, for example, his attack on the "myth of the given", his functionalist treatment of intentional states, his proposal that psychological concepts are like theoretical concepts, and his suggestion that attributions of knowledge locate the knower "in the logical space of reasons". H…Read more
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8Sense-certainty and the 'this-such'In Dean Moyar & Michael Quante (eds.), Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Critical Guide, Cambridge University Press. 2008.This article shows how Hegel's 'Sense-Certainty' chapter fills in a gap in Kant's and Sellars's critique of empiricism by supplying an argument that even indexical reference presupposes and is mediated by a larger conceptual framework.
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23Meaning and Interpretation in HistoryHistory and Theory 22 (3): 253-263. 1983.The translationist theory of meaning can provide a plausible understanding of the reenactment methodology of history, although there are disanalogies. It takes as primitive our ability to recognize synonymy relations between linguistic episodes, either within the same language or other languages. In translating a complex linguistic object translators must possess an incredibly large stock of background knowledge about a culture and be sensitive and resourceful speakers of the language into which…Read more
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28Folk psychology, theories, and the Sellarsian rootsIn Michael P. Wolf (ed.), Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, Rodopi. pp. 53-84. 2006.Wilfrid Sellars has often be proclaimed the father of the "theory theory" of psychological knowledge. This article exposes what is true and and what is false in this claim.
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