McDowell, Sellars, and Sense Impressions

One of John McDowell’s central concerns is to understand the relation between mind and world, to understand intentionality. McDowell believes that ‘that there is no better way for us to approach an understanding of intentionality than by working toward understanding Kant’ (McDowell 1998: 432). McDowell also believes that this conviction is shared by Wilfrid Sellars and that ‘coming to terms with Sellars’s sustained attempt to be a Kantian is a fine way to begin appreciating Kant, and thereby—given the first belief—to become philosophically comfortable with intentionality’ (McDowell 1998: 432). But this is not to say either that Sellars makes understanding Kant easier or that Sellars is a fully adequate guide to the Kantian picture McDowell wants to endorse. Indeed, McDowell believes that ‘a fully Kantian vision of intentionality is inaccessible to Sellars, because of a deep structural feature of his philosophical outlook’ (McDowell 1998: 432). The reason it is profitable to think about Kant through Sellars’s flawed interpretation is that Sellars is straightforward and unembarrassed about his belief that, however brilliant and profound Kant is, he still needs correction, ‘rethinking his thought for ourselves and, if necessary, correcting him at points where we think we see more clearly than he did what he should have been doing’ (McDowell 1998: 431). Thus, McDowell hopes to reveal the truth about intentionality by coming to grips with Kant and his treatment of intentionality; and he hope to reveal the true Kantian vision of intentionality by using Sellars’s ‘corrections’ to highlight certain specific themes and moves in a generally Kantian picture of intentionality. A critique of Sellars’s corrected Kant, and in particular, the ‘deep structural feature of his philosophical outlook’, which infects his reading of Kant, will then help the true Kantian vision stand out all the more distinctly. McDowell’s methodology here, then, is quite complex: we are to get at intentionality indirectly through Kant, and to get at Kant indirectly through Sellars. It is, however, essential to McDowell’s methodology that his critique of Sellars’s corrected Kant have substantive philosophical bite. When we engage in the task of ‘reflecting on the difference between what Sellars knows Kant wrote and what Sellars thinks Kant should have written’ (McDowell 1998: 432), the objection that Sellars ignores or miscontrues Kant’s text holds little force. A corrected Kant cannot be a literal Kant. If we are going to see the true Kant through a critique of Sellars’s corrected Kant, then it will have to be the case that the critique of Sellars’s corrected Kant reveals substantive philosophical error that the true Kant can avoid. Since McDowell clearly implies that the faults in Sellars’s corrected Kant stem from the aforementioned ‘deep structural feature of