Online research in philosophy

On reading the grain argument as advanced by Meehl and Sellars, I find that there is not one but two grain arguments. According to one argument, mental events cannot be the same as neural events because mental events have a continuity that neural events do not have. The other argues for the same conclusion from the simplicity of experienced quality. I answer these arguments by claiming that these properties of experience are illusory. I detail a dual threshold theory of visual experience and show that given this model the mind-brain identity theory predicts the existence of these illusions.

This paper continues the dialogue between my right-wing-Sellars and James O’Shea’s middle-Sellars. In it, I reply to O’Shea’s middle-Sellars critique of my right-wing-Sellarsian criticism of his recent attempt (Wilfrid Sellars: Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn) to develop an understanding of Sellars’s overall view that avoids the problems of both right and left-wing-Sellarsians. In his contribution to this issue O’Shea argues that Sellars follows a middle way between left and right-wing-Sellarsians by advocating a refined Kantian naturalist account of human knowledge. In so doing he finds my right-wing interpretation of Sellars is not true to the real Sellars. Here I show that O’Shea’s critique of my right-wing-Sellars fails and that the real Sellars is a right-wing-Sellars, a scientific naturalist.

Studies in Wilfrid Sellars' philosophy: Aune, B. Sellars on practical reason.--Castañeda, H.-N. Some reflections on Wilfrid Sellars' theory of intentions.--Donagan, A. Determinism and freedom: Sellars and the reconciliationist thesis.--Robinson, W. S. The legend of the given.--Clark, R. The sensuous content of perception.--Grossmann, R. Perceptual objects, elementary particles, and emergent properties.--Rosenberg, J. F. The elusiveness of categories, the Archimedean dilemma, and the nature of man: a study in Sellarsian metaphysics.--Turnbull, R. G. Things, natures, and properties.--Wells, R. The indispensable word "now."--Van Fraassen, B. C. Theories and counterfactuals.--Harman, G. H. Wilfrid Sellars' Theory of induction.--Sellarsiana: Sellars, W. Autobiographical reflections.--Sellars, W. The structure of knowledge. Lecture I, perception. Lecture II, minds. Lecture III, epistemic principles.--Wilfrid Sellars' Philosophical bibliography. (p. 349-353).

Wilfrid Sellars has proposed a materialist account of sensation which relies in part on the postulation of special kinds of individuals. This postulational strategy appears to be analogous to the one that introduces such entities as electrons. After setting out Sellars' account, I focus on his application of the postulational strategy. I argue that this application requires the discovery of new effects for familiar properties; that this kind of discovery is disanalogous to what postulation usually does; and that this kind of discovery cannot really be arrived at by postulation. I conclude that Sellars has not provided a successful, materialist account of sensation.

In “Sellars and the ‘Myth of the Given,’” Alston argues against Sellars’s position in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (EPM) that there is no nonconceptual cognition. According to him, Sellars ignores phenomenal look-concepts that capture the phenomenal character of experience. I contend that the Sellarsian can agree that the phenomenal aspect of looks should be accommodated, but he is not thereby forced to concede a form of the nonconceptual Given. I examine some of Alston’s arguments, especially the Fineness of Grain Argument, for the view that the phenomenal character of experience is both nonconceptual and epistemic. I try to show that none of them can be said to have undermined Sellars’s position.