Sensation and Object-dependent Thought: Sellars and Mcdowell on the Possibility of Direct Realism

ionism. We must review this diagnosis of Kant because the nature of McDowell’s direct realism emerges from his providing a very different reading of Kant on this issue. To understand Sellars’ reading of Kant as espousing a form of the given we must again examine the relationship between intuition and the judgment. As we know, intuitive episodes can be entertained without one making judgments. However, as the product of the productive imagination working on behalf of the understanding, intuitions have a logical structure that is tailor-made to enter into judgments. They are tailor-made for judgment because their prepredicative logical structure is informed by the very same elements that are synthesized explicitly in a judgment of the understanding. Kant expresses this thought in a famous passage from ‘The Clue to the Discovery to All Pure Concepts of the Understanding’, a passage that Sellars often quotes. The same function which gives unity to the various representations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition; and this unity in its most general expression, we entitle the pure concepts of the understanding. The same understanding through the same operations by which in concepts, by means of analytical unity, it produces the logical form of judgment, also introduces a transcendental content into its representations, by means of the synthetic unity of the manifold in intuition in general. (B 104-105) Sellars rightly interprets this passage to mean that intuitions “contain the very same categories which can be found in the general concepts which we apply to these intuitions” (Sellars 2002: 406). Because of this, the categories that are implicitly found in the general concepts of the judgment “can be true of the subject of judgment, i.e., the object intuited” (Sellars 2002: 406). But Sellars interprets this Kantian notion in a peculiar way: general concepts can be applied to intuitions only because they have been derived, through a prior form of analytic thinking, from these self-same intuitions. In other words, Sellars interprets Kant to espouse a special form of abstractionism in which general concepts are formed, not by an abstraction from sheer sensibility (as it is for classical abstractionism), but from intuitions that are already conceptually shaped. On this interpretation, “the basic general concepts which we apply to the objects of experience are derived (by the analytic activity of the understanding) from the