Introduction

2The point of this paper is to discuss R. W. Sellars’ challenges to pragmatism, as embodied by Lewis’s form of “conceptual pragmatism,” in an effort to both trace where the two camps diverge and locate W. Sellars somewhere in the debate. By discussing R. W. Sellars’ criticisms of pragmatism, which center on issues surrounding immediate experience, perception, and meaning, we get a clearer picture of W. Sellars’ relationship to the pragmatist tradition. I conclude by arguing that R. W. Sellars’ critiques of the given and meaning are the same critiques offered by W. Sellars in the 1950s, and that recent attempts to place W. Sellars within the pragmatist tradition have largely ignored this line of influence.

3Of course, much of this argument turns on exactly what is meant by the ‘pragmatist tradition.’ As Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance have noted:

There are two large camps of philosophers who fly by the banner of pragmatism. […] First, there are philosopher who find their roots in the classic American Pragmatist such as Dewey, James, and Peirce, and often also in the early work of Heidegger and his French successors such as Pierre Bourdieu and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. […] Second, there is what we might call “Pittsburgh School Pragmatism.” […] These philosophers are committed to the principle that the best place from which to begin thinking about intentional phenomena such as meaningful speech acts and contentful mental states is with our practical interactions with the world and with others, and their normative structure. (Kukla & Lance 2009: 3-4)

4W. Sellars is clearly committed to, and the founder of, the latter sense of pragmatism, the kind that emphasizes our practical interactions and their normative structure as the starting point for philosophy. Classifying W. Sellars as a pragmatist in this sense is, at least for my purposes, unproblematic. Yet such concerns are not generally indicative of the kind of classic pragmatism found in the tradition that stretches from C. S. Peirce to C. I. Lewis. It is within the classic form of pragmatism that some commentators have placed W. Sellars. This historical classification is what I aim to correct.

Critical Realism and Pragmatism

6Although the later works of W. Sellars, specifically the Sellars one finds in Science and Metaphysics, is willing to concede some ground to the pragmatist tradition, I am primarily concerned with W. Sellars’ work leading up to the publication of Science and Metaphysics in 1968. When reflecting back on the early parts of his career, W. Sellars claimed that:

When I was coming to philosophical consciousness, the great battles between the systems which began the Twentieth Century were drawing to a close, although the lightning and the thunder were still impressive. I cut my teeth on issues dividing Idealist and Realist and, indeed, the various competing forms of upstart Realism. I saw them at the beginning through my father’s eyes, and perhaps for that reason never got into Pragmatism. He regarded it as shifty, ambiguous, and indecisive. One thinks in this connection of Lovejoy’s “thirteen varieties,” though that, my father thought, would make too tidy a picture. […] Pragmatism seemed all method and no results.
After striking out on my own, I spent my early years fighting in the war against Positivism – the last of the great metaphysical systems; always a realist, flirting with Oxford Aristotelianism, Platonism, Intuitionism, but somehow convinced, at the back of my mind, that something very much like Critical Realism and Evolutionary Naturalism was true.
Thus it wasn’t until my thought began to crystallize that I really encountered Dewey and began to study him. […] He caught me at a time when I was moving away from “the Myth of the Given” (antecedent reality?) and rediscovering the coherence theory of meaning. Thus it was Dewey’s Idealistic background which intrigued me the most. I found similar theme Royce and later in Peirce. I was astonished at what I had missed. (Sellars 1979: 7; emphasis added)

8While various issues divide critical realism and pragmatism, the most apparent influence on W. Sellars are debates between R. W. Sellars and Lewis over the proper analysis of perception and immediate awareness. A guiding commitment of both R. W. Sellars and W. Sellars is the idea that perception is an inherently mediated practice, one that does not presuppose immediate awareness of ‘bare’ presentations of sense. From the standpoint of critical realism, “perceptual knowing has its categories and is not the simple flux of sense-data and images which extreme empiricism wished to reduce it to” (Sellars 1932: 139). That is, “in even the elementary level of knowing called perceiving, the human mind is operating in terms of meaning and distinctions” (Sellars 1932: 69). What is indicative of perception is that it is a “thinking of things” are not simply a matter of bare receptivity.

10The critical realist turn is found in a conception of sensations as mediating entities, ones through which we gain knowledge of material objects and the external world. Perception yields knowledge or awareness of “independent and enduring things” and not just sensory presentations (Sellars 1932: 146). Mistakenly assuming that sensory experience yields knowledge of mere presentations or sensations, though not objects, leads to a rejection of what R. W. Sellars calls the “metaphysical veracity” of our perceptual abilities. That is, perception discloses the external world in such a way that epistemological considerations entail metaphysical commitments about the objective existence of the external world. Thus, our experience of seeing a slowly crawling sloth in our visual field should, ceteris paribus, lead to the knowledge or awareness of a real, slowly crawling sloth in the world.

11R. W. Sellars’ commitment to the metaphysical veracity of our perceptions is contrasted with Lewis’s explicit dismissal of the idea. For the Lewis-styled pragmatist, one starts from the pragmatic significance of experience, the fact that our perceptual apprehensions are significant insofar as they function in the “guidance of our actions and anticipation” of future consequences (Lewis 1946: 16). The knowledge of an objective external world holds metaphysical significance, if it holds any significance at all, as derivative from the pragmatic significance of given elements in experience (Lewis 1946: 16). The given elements of our experience simply yield conditional knowledge of actual and possible future experience. Even though such conditional knowledge is available for continued verification in our experience, it does not entail a metaphysical commitment to an objectively existing world. Thus, the experience of seeing a slowly crawling sloth, for example, might give us reason to expect the continued presence of the sloth in our visual field, but such experience and expectations do not entail that a slowly crawling sloth exists independent of our experience of it (simply that we ought to anticipate the continued visual sensation of a slowly crawling sloth).

12R. W. Sellars’ critique of Lewis is not a general indictment of pragmatism as a movement – insofar as pragmatism is willing to abandon its commitment to a problematic form of “extreme” empiricism (in favor, of course, of the metaphysical commitments and analysis of perception found in critical realism), it could be seen as a promising road to naturalism (Sellars 1932: 134). Yet Lewis’s version of pragmatism is interpreted by R. W. Sellars as inextricably wed to extreme empiricism, one which rejects anything like the existence of an external world and embraces a kind of Kantian approach to “constructing” the world out of phenomenal presentations of sense (Sellars 1932: 51). What is experienced are not objects or properties of objects, but sensations, appearances, or presentations. Although immediate awareness of the given elements in experience may not constitute knowledge of objects in an external world, our knowledge of objects are “built-up” from the interpretation or categorization of such experience (Lewis 1929: 37-8).

Some twelve years ago in a chapter I contributed to the book, Philosophy for the Future, I pointed out how realistic Lewis could sound. He affirms that we knew through and by means of presentations some objective thing or event. Is he, like Dewey, a naive realist with pragmatic intent or a phenomenalist? But I have the conviction that he regards these presentations as constituents of the object known. This fits in with ‘immediate perception’ and the rejection of critical realism. (Sellars 1968: 304)

14It is the connection between pragmatism and a kind of empiricism, one that classifies immediate sensory presentations or appearances as knowledge, that R. W. Sellars finds problematic. To classify sensory presentations in such a constitutive role locates Lewis in a Kantian/phenomenalist strand of thought that critical realism explicitly rejects.

15Despite R. W. Sellars’ claims, the role of immediate awareness and giveness in Lewis’s epistemology is an almost categorically misunderstood phenomena. As early as 1929, Lewis explicitly claims that it is objects, and not phenomenal presentations of sense, that we experience:

It is indeed the thick experience of the world of things, not the thin given of immediacy, which constitutes the datum of philosophical reflection. We do not see patches of color, but trees and houses; we hear, not indescribable sound, but voices and violins. What we most certainly know are objects and full-bodied facts about them which could be stated in propositions. […] Any Kantian “manifold” as a psychic datum or moment of experience, is probably a fiction, and the assumption of it as such is a methodological error. (Lewis 1929: 54-5)

16Here, as elsewhere, Lewis discusses the idea of “pure” giveness or receptivity as “an abstraction” or “fiction” from our actual experience of the world (Lewis 1929: 54). Even though Lewis’s later works (especially Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation) discuss our knowledge of objects in terms of actual and possible experiences, he argues that “there is nothing in this character of knowledge or in any consideration pertinent to it which justly should suggest that our knowledge, though partial, is not, so far as it extends, a knowledge of existents as they are in themselves” (Lewis 1955: 347; emphasis added).

Wilfrid Sellars

18W. Sellars explicated and endorsed his father’s position in 1954, mounting some of the same arguments against pragmatism, at least what was interpreted as Lewis’s form of pragmatism, as found in R. W. Sellars’ criticisms of Lewis. Thus, when characterizing his (and his father’s) realism, W. Sellars claims that

Perhaps the most useful answer is in terms of its contrast with ‘radical empiricism.’ For the approach of the naturalistic realist to the problems of knowledge and meaning is as unlike that of radical empiricism as an approach can be without renouncing all claim to the term ‘empiricism.’ And, indeed, we find that in The Philosophy of Physical Realism, my father points to the radical empiricism of C. I. Lewis as the most challenging formulation of the anti-realistic point of view. (Sellars 1954: 27)

19W. Sellars goes significantly further than his father in diagnosing the ills of pragmatism as embodied in Lewis’s epistemology. The issue is not just that pragmatists mistakenly connect perception with immediate awareness, but that this connection leads directly to a naive understanding of concepts and concept formation. The connection between immediate awareness and meaning leads pragmatists to claim that concepts are, in some sense, ‘about’ patterns of sensation or possible future experiences (Sellars 1954: 29). To grant the connection between immediate awareness and meaning is to mistake thinking that “common sense concepts of seeing a color, hearing a sound, or feeling a pain are concepts of sensuous immediacy” (Sellars 1954: 29). Indicative of his endorsement of critical realism, W. Sellars claims that perception is defined by the categorized, intentional awareness of objects and not patterns of sensation. The kind of Lockean empiricism that requires concepts to be ‘built-up’ from sensory patterns of awareness is de facto ruled-out on realistic grounds and such an empiricism, as indicated by the passage above, is explicitly connected to Lewis’s pragmatism in both father’s and son’s accounts of perception.

20Thus, one finds W. Sellars endorsing the main thesis of critical realism contra empiricism:

Thus, when Jones sees a chair, although his ‘perceptual experience’ is founded on, guided, and controlled by his sensations, there is nothing in the nature of aboutness or reference which requires us to say that his ‘experience is primarily about the sensations, and only about the chair in some more complicated or derived sense of ‘about.’ His perception is ‘mediated by’ the sensations, but his perception is not about the sensations. (Sellars 1954: 20)

21This endorsement comes to fruition two years later in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (hereafter EPM) where W. Sellars charges sense data theorists with the mistake of treating the occurrence of sensations as a cognitive or epistemic fact. Reminiscent of his father’s wording, W. Sellars argues that this is the mistake of assimilating “‘having a sensation of a red triangle’ to ‘thinking of a celestial city’ and to attribute to the former the epistemic character, the ‘intentionality’ of the latter” as one key instance in the myth of the given (Sellars 1956: 211).

23That being said, it is just as problematic to claim that W. Sellars’ anti-foundationalist arguments do not target, at least in part, the kind of empiricism that he read into traditional pragmatism. One finds this kind of reading in Misak:

Sellars explodes the myth of the given. He argues that there are no basic or pure kinds of knowledge – a belief can only be justified by another belief. Moreover, all beliefs have an inescapably conceptual element. To grasp even something as simple as a triangle requires the concept of triangle so that one can classify it as such. To become aware of something in the first place is to respond to it by applying a concept. Awareness – all of it – ‘is a linguistic affair.’ We have seen this very thought in Peirce, Lewis, and every other pragmatist. (Misak 2013: 221-2; emphasis added)

25This last point is crucial if we want to establish a historically sound connection between W. Sellars and the pragmatist tradition, but there is all the difference in the world between pragmatists’ rejection of giveness and W. Sellars’ recognition of this fact. While some pragmatists may have rejected giveness in some or all of its forms, it by no means follows that W. Sellars’ rejection of giveness was motivated by this particular tradition or that he was aware of this fact while constructing his own arguments against giveness. One could concede this point and thematically classify W. Sellars as a pragmatist, but this is not what Misak is claiming when she connects W. Sellars’ arguments against giveness with “Peirce, Lewis, and every other pragmatist.” Instead, she is making a historical claim about the actual antecedent causes and motivations behind W. Sellars’ rejection of giveness.

I would go further and say that only a philosophy which, like Physical Realism, has abandoned the dead end road of immediacy, while yet maintaining a broadly empirical orientation, can hope to combine a coherence theory of meaning (‘a concept is an intersection in a network of implications’) with the empiricist’s contention that it is always proper to ask for an ‘inductive’ justification of any proposal to revise the framework of law-like sentences (and, hence, of meanings) in terms of which we approach our environment. (Sellars 1954: 31-2)

27The solution to puzzling out perception and immediate awareness is found in a form of realism diametrically opposed to the kind of empiricism attributed to Lewis. Insofar as one is wed to a close relationship between immediacy and meaning, (the relationship both R. W. Sellars and W. Sellars argue characterizes pragmatism), then one cannot truly reject giveness and foundationalism.

Further Considerations

30Bernstein and Misak are two of the most recent philosopher to claim W. Sellars as part of the pragmatist tradition. While admitting that W. Sellars inherited much of his father’s philosophical commitments and attitudes, Misak claims that “there can be no doubt that Sellars belongs to the pragmatist tradition” (Misak 2013: 223). Her evidence for this is found in three main sources: W. Sellars’ reliance on supposedly pragmatist notions (at least notions traced to pragmatist origins), his early discussion of pragmatist accounts of language and behavior, and his later theory of truth. Although I have no qualms with Misak’s claims about Sellars’ later views on truth per se, there are strong reasons to doubt her characterization of W. Sellars’ early writings.

31Misak is right to claim that W. Sellars uses the type/token distinction (starting in his earliest publication), but it is hasty to read this as a direct influence from Peirce to W. Sellars (Misak 2013: 218). When W. Sellars credits Peirce with the type/token distinction, there is no further exploration of the connection between his own philosophy and Peirce’s work, no discussion of pragmatism and its approach to language, no adoption of explicitly pragmatist commitments, and no discussion of Peirce’s own philosophy. Misak is right to point out this connection, but there is not a substantive relationship to be found between W. Sellars’ employment of the type/token distinction and any aspect of Peirce’s philosophy. Even when W. Sellars does mention Peirce or Peirecian terminology, one could just as easily connect W. Sellars’ distinction between expressions types and tokens with Carnap’s distinction between sign designs and sign events.

33There is support for the idea that W. Sellars belongs in the pragmatist tradition; W. Sellars’ early praising of Dewey’s rejection of giveness, for example, might be read as W. Sellars identifying rationalist alternatives to empiricism with pragmatism (though, as we have seen, this is not the case). Crediting what he calls “the more sophisticated forms of pragmatism,” W. Sellars claims that the linguistic rules that characterize behavior must be decided pragmatically (Sellars 1949: 134). But it is important to keep in mind that most of these observations are made in the context of correcting what W. Sellars saw as an overly descriptivist or scientistic strand of thinking in traditional pragmatism:

But if I do not accuse the pragmatist as being a descriptivist as a matter of principle, I do contend that pragmatism has been characterized by a descriptivistic bias. Thus, while it has defended the important insight that to reject descriptivism in the philosophy of mathematics is not to embrace rationalism, it has committed itself to descriptivism in other areas of philosophy (e.g., in its interpretation of truth and moral obligation) with all the fervor of a Dutch boy defending the fertile lands of Naturalism against a threatening rationalistic flood. Now it will be my contention in this paper that a sound pragmatism must reject descriptivism in all areas of philosophy. (Sellars 1949: 118-9)

34While there is some commonality between W. Sellars and some pragmatists, what I have been arguing is that, historically speaking, thinking of W. Sellars as ‘essentially pragmatist’ is too narrow of a reading to be historically accurate. There are, somewhat clearly, shared sympathies and pragmatist themes that run through W. Sellars’ publications.

35This kind of ‘corrective’ reading of pragmatism is also found in W. Sellars’ short discussion of pragmatism in “Some Reflections on Language Games”:

Now I would argue that Pragmatism, with its stress on language (or the conceptual) as an instrument, has had hold of a most important insight – an insight, however, which the pragmatist has tended to misconceive as an analysis of ‘means’ and ‘is true.’ For it is a category mistake (in Ryle’s useful terminology) to offer a definition of ‘S means p’ or ‘S is true’ in terms of the role of S as an instrument in problem solving behavior. On the other hand, if the pragmatist’s claim is reformulated as the thesis that the language we use has a much more intimate connection with conduct than we have yet suggested, and that this connection is intrinsic to its structure as language, rather than a “use” to which it “happens” to be put, then Pragmatism assumes its proper stature as a revolutionary step in Western philosophy. (Sellars 1954/1963: 324; emphasis added)

36Much like his discussion of pragmatism in 1949, these later passages are indicative of W. Sellars’ corrective attitude towards pragmatism. While W. Sellars may have found something valuable in the ideas embodied in some pragmatist commitments, the ‘classical’ formulation of these ideas – if they are to be useful for then-contemporary philosophers – would need to be corrected in order to be useful.

37Despite all of this, one might still think there is a pragmatic dimension to W. Sellars’ philosophy. Those mainly interested in W. Sellars’ later work would have no problem finding passages in Science and Metaphysics, for example, which rely on the classical pragmatists (especially Peirce’s discussions of truth and inquiry). Misak claims that W. Sellars adoption of a modified form of “truth as assertability” is evidence of W. Sellars’ pragmatist leanings because he frames this position as one that supports as “Peirceian dimension of the concept of truth” (Sellars 1967/1992: 115). Misak takes to support the fact that, contra positivism, W. Sellars “makes the move from traditional empiricism to full pragmatism or naturalism” (Misak 2013: 222-3).

38Yet, as I have argued above, even these later claims could only be placed within the pragmatist tradition if one ignores the realist streak in W. Sellars’ thought. W. Sellars is clear that such considerations of warranted assertability should be understood within a realist account of semantical rules (Sellars 1967/1992: 115). Although W. Sellars’ account of different “identities” between conceptual frameworks need not clash with pragmatism per se (W. Sellars clearly thinks his later position is consistent with Peirce’s conception of truth and inquiry), the realist commitment is not consistent with Lewis and other pragmatists. While some of these passages could be read as W. Sellars’ later turning towards a more pragmatist-oriented philosophy, any claims of W. Sellars’ place in the pragmatist tradition need to be balanced with the realist and positivist dimensions inherited from a variety of differing sources.

When Rorty reads the later Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars, and Davidson as furthering the pragmatist agenda, or when Putnam raises the question “Was Wittgenstein a Pragmatist?,” neither is suggesting that the achievements of these philosophers are the result of direct influence of the classical pragmatists. […] My fundamental point is that philosophers, starting from the most diverse orientations and without being directly influenced by the classical pragmatists, have been articulating insights and developing theses that are not only congenial with a pragmatic orientation but also refine its philosophical import. (Bernstein 2010:14-5)

41While the thematically-based depiction of diverse philosophers converging on themes anticipated by the classic pragmatists is compelling, such a placement is simply not a historical one. Unless we are unnecessarily committed to a hardline historicist approach to philosophy (i.e., one claiming that anything but a historically and contextually-grounded account of philosophy is, at best, misleadingly anachronistic), we need not think that a historically-grounded account is the only acceptable characterization of philosophy. Yet, this kind of conceptual parsing only works if we clearly demarcate historical from thematic characterizations of philosophy. In the same breath that he is willing to claim no historical connection need exist between classical pragmatists and contemporary philosophers, Bernstein also argues that Rorty’s placement of contemporary analytic philosophers in conversation with the classical pragmatists, for example, does much to challenge “the standard narrative of the development of twentieth-century philosophy in America” (Bernstein 2010: 14). But how is this not a straightforwardly historical claim? Bernstein’s characterization of pragmatism simply cannot come from both directions. He is either offering a historical account of pragmatism’s legacy, one that stretches unbroken from the 19th century until today, or he is not. If not, then his thematic account of pragmatic ideas cannot ‘correct’ or ‘challenge’ historical narratives because, quite frankly, there is no reason to think thematic accounts are making or impacting historical claims. Such an account could be understood as offering an interesting comparative story of differing reactions to a common theme, but this is a far different claim than any historically sensitive account of a given time period.

42None of this entails that the pendulum should swing too far the other direction. Surely it would be wrong to claim that pragmatism plays no influential role in W. Sellars’ philosophical development, although I fail to see how such claims clarify his philosophical allegiances unless they appear alongside a carefully articulated historical context. Although there might be strong thematic reasons to group W. Sellars’ philosophy (e.g., his social articulation of reason, his later adoption of a form of warranted assertability, his rejection of giveness) within the pragmatist tradition, this is a wholly distinct concern from any specifically historical connection between W. Sellars and pragmatism. As I stated in the beginning of this paper, I do not think that we need to deny the importance of thematic accounts, we just need to ensure that such accounts are clearly separated from historical accounts.