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Sellars on thoughts and beliefs

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Abstract

In this paper, I examine Wilfrid Sellars’ famous Myth of Jones. I argue the myth provides an ontologically austere account of thoughts and beliefs that makes sense of the full range of our folk psychological abilities. Sellars’ account draws on both Gilbert Ryle and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ryle provides Sellars with the resources to make thoughts metaphysically respectable and Wittgenstein the resources to make beliefs rationally criticisable. By combining these insights into a single account, Sellars is able to see reasons as causes and, hence, to respect the full range of our folk psychological generalisations. This is achieved by modelling folk psychological practice on theoretical reasoning. But despite frequent misinterpretation, Sellars does not claim that thoughts and beliefs are theoretical concepts. Thus, folk psychological explanation is not theoretical, and hence, it is not replaceable by scientific theory. Hence, scientific concepts will not eliminate folk psychological concepts. Thus, Sellars avoids eliminativism.

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Notes

  1. EPM was originally published in 1956 and reprinted in Science, Perception and Reality in 1963 with footnotes added.

  2. My interest is propositional attitudes generally. For ease of expression, I will use beliefs as shorthand for all positional attitudes. Similarly, I will use thoughts as shorthand for any occurent mental episode and eliminativism to stand for propositional attitude eliminativism.

  3. It may seem unusual to speak of normative explanations when what is at issue is a claim about how a person ought to behave. An explanation describes a state of affairs, whereas an ought claim prescribes a course of action. Nevertheless, Kantian rationalists see folk psychology as an essentially normative project that is used to explain and predict the behaviour of agents: Folk psychological generalisations are employed to explain why a rational subject holds certain beliefs or performs certain actions.

  4. I use the term theory broadly. Roughly, theoretical reasoning is involved in any situation in which unobservables are posited to explain and/or to predict observable behaviour. Theoretical concepts are to be contrasted with concepts that are immediately applicable, such as self-presenting Cartesian thoughts. The notion of theory will be tightened throughout. For now notice that knowledge based on theoretical reasoning is dubitable and theoretical concepts themselves are open to possible elimination.

  5. Of course, there have been more specific attempts to naturalise mental states. Consider, for example, teleosemantic accounts. In rough outline, teleosemantics is an attempt to provide a functional account of what determines the semantic content of inner representations, where the functions rest on historical relations. To have such a function—or, strictly, a teleofunction—is to have emerged from some selective history. For biological organisms, the selective history is evolutionary history, which is clearly naturalistic. Teleological accounts of content have been advanced by a number of scientific naturalists (e.g. Dretske 1995; Dennett 1987a, b; Papineau 1987; McGinn 1989; Neander 1991), but perhaps the most sophisticated is due to Ruth Millikan (see Millikan 1984, 1986, 1989a, b, 1993, 1999). Interestingly, Millikan (2005) explicitly traces her account back to Sellars. For Millikan, a teleofunctional account of inner representation is, if not a natural continuation of Sellars’ position, at least broadly consistent with it. Pursuing whether teleosemantics—or other specific attempts at naturalising mental content—are ultimately successful and/or consistent with the account present in EPM is well beyond the scope of this paper.

  6. The rationality at issue here is subjective rationality, i.e. what is rational given what one believes. Thus, the critical explanans is how the world is taken to be, not how the world actually is. This form of rationality is in contrast to objective rationality, i.e. what is rational given the real state of the world. The critical explanans here is the way the world really is, not the way it is taken to be. As my concern is explaining, predicting and rationalising behaviour, my sole focus is subjective rationality.

  7. Menzies (2008) also provides a compatibilist account. His account is based on model-theoretical reasoning. He argues that the underlying problem with both the rationalist and naturalist camps is a reliance on an outmoded understanding of the nature of theories. Both assume folk psychology needs to follow a deductive-nomological model of a theorising. The deductive-nomological characterisation of science holds that a theory aimed at prediction and/or explanation must contain exceptionless empirical generalisations. But this has long been recognised by philosophers of science to be too rigid a conception to depict actual scientific theorising (see, for example, Ronald Giere 1988, 1999, 2004). Menzies prefers a model-theoretical account of sciences that recognises the role of idealisation in explanation. Consider Newton’s laws of motion and gravitation. These laws are not literally true of any actual bodies in the universe. It would be possible for two bodies to satisfy Newton’s laws if they were the only two bodies and they existed in a unified gravitational field. But there are no such cases. Thus, at best, such laws describe idealised systems that are never physically realised. Central to folk psychological generalisations is a model of an ideally rational agent. This explains how folk psychological generalisations can operate as both rationalising and causal explanations. Model-theoretical explanations have two directions of fit: model to world and world to model. These two directions of fit provide the idealising model of a rational agent with two separate functions: a descriptive and prescriptive function. In their descriptive function, models describe the actions of actual people and hence provide the scientific naturalist’s predictive and causal explanations. In their prescriptive function, models inform us of how we should behave if we wish to be rational. Thus, we have an explanation of how reason-giving and causal relations both play central roles in individuating intentional mental states and how, despite their very different natures, these relations so often coincide in extension.

  8. Thus, the Cartesian tradition relies on a theory of the cause of our perceptual experiences to deliver us the external world. Thus by ‘demonstrating the dubitability and consequent theoretical nature of perceptual knowledge, Descartes convincingly undermines the Myth of the Givenness of the external world’ (Garfield 1989, 6). From this (somewhat anachronistic) perspective, The Myth of Jones is a completion of the Cartesian project (see Garfield 1989): an extension of Descartes’ insight on perceptual experience to introspection, from the external world to the internal world.

  9. Strictly, the Rylean language is a single language with three sets of resources. I have separated the resources into three languages for ease of expression. Nothing depends on this imaginary separation.

  10. It is important to note that my use of the terms ‘thought’ and ‘belief’, like Sellars’, is partially stipulative. The distinctions are real patterns in the world, but my usage does not and need not for our purposes coincide with common usage.

  11. In a sense, some beliefs are datable. It is legitimate to claim ‘For 2 days I believed I had won the lottery, until I re-checked my ticket.’ But this sense does not make beliefs clockable processes. The duration of beliefs references their existence as dispositions rather than their duration as processes. Often, as in the lottery case, the disposition can be extinguished by gaining further information that demonstrates that one is not epistemically entitled to the belief. This extra information may enter at a particular time and thereby lead to a temporally determinant end to the belief, but the belief, while it did persist, was not a clockable process in the same way as thought episodes are.

  12. As Rosenberg (2004) emphasises, this provides three dimensions—content, commitment and cause—along which thoughts and beliefs can interact.

  13. For more detail, see Rosenberg (2004). Notice also a similar story is available on the input side. That is, there are normative connections established between perceptions and beliefs such that having particular perceptions can provide reasons for holding particular beliefs.

  14. This is intended as a basic frame upon which particular eliminative arguments can be fleshed out.

  15. For a similar explication of Churchland’s specific form of eliminativism, see Garfield (1989).

  16. Also see deVries (2005, 178–179).

  17. For more details and an alternative formulation of the dis-analogies, see deVries (2005, 178–179).

  18. Such a Lockean model of introspection actually reintroduces the Myth of the Given (see Garfield 1989).

  19. Of course, given the time at which he was writing Sellars was unable to consider any serious empirical evidence in relation to our folk psychological abilities. As such, it is perhaps surprising to find modern accounts of these abilities based on the firmly Sellarsian foundations of language skill and social experience. For the most detailed account inspired by Sellars, see Garfield et al. (2001).

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Peter Menzies, Jay Garfield, Cynthia Townley, and Bruce Wilson; audience members at the New Zealand AAP, the Tasmanian School of Philosophy seminar series and the Rationality Workshop (Macquarie University); and two anonymous referees for some incredibly detailed and insightful comments.

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Parsell, M. Sellars on thoughts and beliefs. Phenom Cogn Sci 10, 261–275 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-010-9188-5

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