Claudia Cavaliere

Una delle lenti attraverso le quali è stato tematizzato il rapporto tra natura e cultura in Wittgenstein è quella che vede attribuirgli una certa forma di naturalismo, solitamente specificato come “naturalismo liberale”. Questa attribuzione viene giustificata sulla base della dimensione “naturalistica” di alcuni concetti centrali della seconda fase della sua riflessione (“gioco linguistico”, “forma di vita”, ma anche “disposizione naturale”, “storia naturale”, ecc.) i quali, ponendosi in continuità con la nostra natura biologica, attestano l’intreccio indissolubile tra dimensione naturale e simbolico-culturale tipica della forma di vita umana. In questo contributo contesto la legittimità di questa attribuzione sotto due diversi punti di vista. In primo luogo, argomenterò che Wittgenstein non ha offerto elementi sufficienti per giustificare la descrizione della sua filosofia come naturalista. Per sostenere questo punto mi soffermerò in particolare sul caso delle auto-ascrizioni psicologiche in prima persona, le quali, in virtù del loro legame con la dimensione delle reazioni fisiologico-naturali, dovrebbero fornire un caso privilegiato in cui il supposto naturalismo di Wittgenstein emergerebbe con forza (ma non lo fanno). In secondo luogo, sosterrò che la categoria del naturalismo non rappresenta una chiave di lettura adeguata a leggere il rapporto tra natura e cultura come pensato da Wittgenstein: nel caso migliore, la caratterizzazione che ne offre è semplicemente troppo vacua per risultare significativa; nel caso peggiore, rischia di condurre ad una semplificazione del rapporto tra i due (a scapito della seconda).

In this article I examine Wilfrid Sellars’s account of linguistic rules and rule-following, with a special focus on how the topic emerges and develops in his earliest philosophical writings. In the first part of the article, I show how Sellars’s distinctively original approach to rules and rule-following is elaborated in the project of pure pragmatics in the late 1940s, through which he confronts Carnap’s idea of language as calculus and replaces it with the notion of an empirically meaningful language. The key point is the realization that a meaningful language cannot be reduced to a list of syntactic constraints supplemented by designation rules; it also requires conformation rules that reflect the material constraints of the world in which the language is embedded. This holistic, normative, nonrelational account of language and meaning anticipates Sellars’s later inferentialism, in which material rules of inference are constitutive of meaning. In the second part of the article, I address the wider problem of how rules can be embodied in behavior, which Sellars tackles from the point of view of the classic rule-following dilemma. The gist of his solution lies in the evolutionary-inspired notion of pattern-governed behaviour, which allows Sellars to show how it is possible for language learners to internalize rules in their practices without prior explicit cognitive awareness of them. Such account, refined in the interlacing of language-entry, intralinguistic, and language-exit transitions into a unified picture of concept acquisition, integrates the normative and natural dimension of linguistic activity.

My dissertation is devoted to an analysis of the early writings of Wilfrid Sellars, which I take to span from 1947 to 1954. The topic has been chosen based on the disproportion between the ever-expanding stream of publications devoted to Sellars’ philosophy on the one hand, and the considerable lack of attention accorded to his so-called “early phase” on the other. In chapter 1, I focus on Sellars’ earliest project of pure pragmatics. Contrasting the only interpretation available in literature, I argue that pure pragmatics is consistent with Sellars’ later, better known and more successful philosophy, and I show how several themes that would characterize his later project have their roots in pure pragmatics. In chapter 2, I analyze the essays published after the apparent abandonment of pure pragmatics. I contextualize them by providing, for each of them, the more or less covert background from which Sellars drew. I show how in these years (1948-1950) the way is paved to the overcoming of relational theories of meaning through the development of Sellars’ nominalism. Chapter 3 is devoted to a series of long and sophisticated essays published at the end of the “early phase”. Here, functional role semantics is given a comprehensive exposition and some related problems are discussed. The adoption of a pragmatist stance towards conceptual frameworks grants Sellars’ philosophy with the ability to be responsive both to human interests in the broad sense, and to the ontologically grounded scientific advancements of any epoch. Finally, Sellars’ characteristic tension concerning the place of norms in nature is eased by combining his reflections on the “double life” of linguistic behavior with the formulation of the irreducibility-cum-reducibility principle.

At B19, Kant summarizes the general problem of pure reason in the problem of synthetic a priori judgments. The vicissitudes that have affected last century’s philosophy are, in this sense, a confirmation of its significance: the problem of synthetic a priori knowledge has indeed crossed all the major philosophical currents of the twentieth century, being treated in a wide variety of ways by phenomenologists, logical empiricists, and pragmatists. One of the most original treatments of the issue is that offered by the young Wilfrid Sellars between the late 1940s and the early 1950s, consisting of a hybridization of different traditions. In this paper I will present Sellars’ unique re-elaboration of the notion of the synthetic a priori as it is elaborated in his early writings, showing how his interweaving of themes from pragmatism, phenomenology and logical empiricism leads not just to what I believe is the only possible approach for a realist philosopher, but also to an unexpected Kantian solution in spirit.