Stefan Brandt

John McDowell has criticized Wilfrid Sellars on several occasions and over a number of years for his ‘non-relational’ account of intentionality. This account is, according to McDowell, at least partly responsible for a ‘blind spot’ in Sellars's thinking: Sellars, allegedly, fails to see how objects or states of affairs in the external world can be essentially related to our perceptions and thereby become ‘immediately present’ to perceiving subjects. Furthermore, this blind spot, makes it, supposedly, impossible for Sellars to make sense of the ‘objective purport’ of empirical thought. i.e. its directedness at a genuinely independent reality. I argue against McDowell's criticism in essentially two steps. First, I try to show that his criticisms of Sellars are off-target and that there is a clear sense in which for Sellars objects are immediately present to perceiving subjects. Second, in what I take to be a novel argument against the disjunctive theory of perception, I show that McDowell's own essentially relational, disjunctive theory of perception fails to make intelligible the very thing it is supposed to explain, i.e. the ‘objective purport’ of empirical thought.

I compare Gilbert Ryle’s anti-intellectualist account of knowledge how with the influential intellectualist alternative defended by Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (in Stanley & Williamson, 2001 ). I argue that the contrast between these positions is not as clear as is commonly assumed. I trace this unclarity to a failure on the part of Stanley and Williamson to provide a clear and meaningful account of knowledge how. I attribute this failure to their approach to philosophical analysis, an approach Ryle shared earlier in his career but had abandoned at the time he wrote about knowledge how. I conclude with a few more general remarks about when the kind of philosophical analysis Stanley and Williamson are practicing is useful and when it is not.

This chapter discusses Wittgenstein's early account of intentionality in his Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus as a sophisticated attempt to avoid Sellars's dilemma for relationist theories of thought. Wittgenstein suggests that a picture also includes a “pictorial relationship” to what it depicts. This pictorial relationship “consists of the correlations of the picture's elements with things”. While the picture theory goes a long way towards providing a general account of intentionality in terms of linguistic representation and does so in a way that prima facie avoids both horns of Sellars's dilemma for relationist theories of thought, on closer scrutiny, the early Wittgenstein does not seem to be entirely successful at meeting either of these explanatory goals. The idea of a pictorial relationship between thought and language on the one hand and states of affairs on the other is an essential element of the Tractarian explanation of how thought and language reach “right out to reality”.

This collection features eleven original essays, divided into three thematic sections, which explore the work of Wilfrid Sellars in relation to other twentieth-century thinkers. Section I analyzes Sellars’s thought in light of some of his influential predecessors, specifically Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolf Carnap, John Cook Wilson, and Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz. The second group of essays explores from different perspectives Sellars’s place within the analytic tradition, including his relation with analytic Kantianism and analytic pragmatism. The book’s final section extracts some of the most significant lessons Sellars’s work has to offer for contemporary philosophy. These chapters address his views on inference, his views on truth and its connection to recent discussions about truth-relativism and truth-pluralism, his conception of self-knowledge, and his theory of perceptual experience.

In a recent article, John McDowell has criticised Warren Goldfarb for attributing an anti-realist conception of linguistic understanding to Wittgenstein. 1 I argue that McDowell is right to reject Goldfarb's anti- realism, but does so for the wrong reasons. I show that both Goldfarb's and McDowell's interpretations are vitiated by the fact that they do not pay attention to Wittgenstein's positive claims about understanding, in particular his claim that understanding is a kind of ability. The cause of this oversight lies in their endorsement of an excessively anti-systematic or “therapeutic” reading of Wittgenstein.