Pragmatism, Inferentialism, and Modality in Sellars’s Arguments against Empiricism

In this essay I want to place the arguments of “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” into a slightly less local context, by tracing further, into neighboring works, some strands of argumentation that intersect and are woven together in his critique of empiricism in its two principal then-extant forms: traditional, and 20 century logical empiricism. Sellars always accepted that observation reports resulting non-inferentially from the exercise of perceptual language-entry capacities play both the privileged epistemological role of being the ultimate court of appeal for the justification of empirical knowledge-claims and therefore (given his inferentialist semantics) an essential semantic role in determining the contents of the empirical concepts applied in such judgments. But in accord with his stated aspiration to “move analytic philosophy from its Humean into its Kantian phase,” he was severely and in principle critical of empiricist ambitions and programs in epistemology and (especially) semantics that go beyond this minimal, carefully circumscribed characterization of the cognitive significance of sense experience. Indeed, I think the lasting philosophical interest of Sellars’s thought lies primarily in the battery of original considerations and arguments he brings to bear against all weightier forms of empiricism. Some, but not all, of these are deployed in the opening critical portions of “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” where the ground is cleared and prepared for the constructive theorizing of the last half. But what is on offer there is only part of Sellars’s overall critique of empiricism. We accordingly court misunderstanding of what is there if we do not appreciate the shape of the larger enterprise to which it contributes. In an autobiographical sketch, Sellars dates his break with traditional empiricism to his Oxford days in the thirties. It was, he says, prompted by concern with understanding the sort of conceptual content that ought to be associated with “logical, causal, and deontological modalities.” Already at that point he says that he had the idea that