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published on July 30, 2014
Jeffrey F. Sicha
Defending the Unpopular Sellars
Picturing and “The Descriptive”
Wilfrid Sellars has been widely—though, I argue, largely mistakenly—criticized for his doctrine of picturing. I claim that a more thorough and accurate exposition of this doctrine shows that it does not suffer from alleged mistakes and, in addition, benefits Sellars’s general position by being the source for an “external” criterion of success for basic empirical truths, by providing a way to incorporate into his position the “mapping” processes of “animal representational systems,” and, finally, by being the philosophical piece in his “functional” account of meaning that allows it to deal with “names.”