Abstract

Wilfrid Sellars’ psychological nominalism is an account of the origin of linguistic meaning which is unacceptable to Roderick Chisholm, partly because of his Brantanian heritage. This being the ground for the dispute motivating their correspondence, a rigorous study of this exchange leads one to the realization that in spite of the merits of the Chisholmian position the actual strategy Chisholm employs in challenging psychological nominalism remains at the level of a mere statement of his position, rather than a direct confrontation with Sellars’ methodological behaviorism. In what is to follow, we shall trace how such a realization is attained by focusing on the main issues of the Sellars-Chisholm correspondence. This undertaking demands a presentation of the development of Sellars’ common-sensical methodological behaviorism through his anthropological “Myth of Jones.” Here the emphasis is on the common-sensical, mainly because this is the perspective relevant to the correspondence that does not touch on Sellars’ scientific realism. Thus even though the scientific perspective is to supplement the common-sensical one within the whole of Sellars’ philosophy of mind, Chisholm’s challenge and Sellars’ response is contextualized only within the latter perspective.