Wilfrid Sellarsʼs Disambiguation of Kantʼs " Intuition " and Its Relevance for Conceptions of Perceptual Content

In the opening pages of his 1966 Locke Lectures, Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes, Wilfrid Sellars alludes to what he takes to be the ambiguity or “Janus-faced” character of Kant’s notion of “intuition” as developed in the Critique of Pure Reason (Sellars, 1966, p. 2). Appealing first to the formal distinction between intuitions and concepts, he notes that in Kant’s taxonomy it is the generality of concepts “whether sortal or attributive, a priori or empirical” that distinguishes them from intuitions, since “Kant thinks of intuitions as representations of individuals” (ibid., p. 3). But this way of drawing the distinction, Sellars notes, opens up the possibility of thinking of intuitions, nevertheless, as types of concepts—that is, as “conceptual representations of individuals rather than conceptual representations of attributes or kinds” (ibid.). Not all conceptual ways of capturing an individual can be thought of as intuitional: the phrase “the individual which is perfectly round”, for example, doesn’t capture what is for Kant the other defining feature of intuitions, their immediacy (Sellars, 1966, p. 3). But in turn, the immediacy appealed to, Sellars thinks, could itself be understood in either of two ways. The immediacy of the relation of representation to object might be thought of such that the intuition is caused by the object, or it may be construed phenomenologically as a type of immediacy to consciousness of the intuited object thought of on the model of a demonstrative “this”. Although not rejecting the relevance of the former possibility in his reading of Kant, and noting that he will return to this theme later, Sellars takes the model of the demonstrative to be “on the whole, the correct interpretation” of Kant’s notion of an intuition (ibid.). But Sellars now directs our attention to Kant’s discussion of the shaping of intuition by the productive imagination in the B Deduction. That, as Kant makes clear, the productive imagination is