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Was Sellars an error theorist?

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Abstract

Wilfrid Sellars described the moral syllogism that supports the inference “I ought to do x” from “Everyone ought to do x” as a “syntactical disguise” which embodies a “mistake.” He nevertheless regarded this form of reasoning as constitutive of the moral point of view. Durkheim was the source of much of this reasoning, and this context illuminates Sellars’ unusual philosophical reconstruction of the moral point of view in terms of the collective intentions of an ideal community of rational members for which the syllogism is empirically valid. The reconstruction also sheds light on the question of the status of common sense and normativity in Sellars’ naturalistic metaphysics.

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Notes

  1. Sellars (1952, p. 515).

  2. See Beiser (2009) for one version of this genealogy.

  3. Sellars (1956a, p. 266).

  4. Sellars “Obligation and Motivation,” p. 517.

  5. More recent interpreters of Sellars’ conception of the “manifest and scientific images” tend to argue that normative discourse is both a concept located within the manifest or common sense framework of explanation and that it somehow functions as an ineliminable explanatory device (despite its omission from the scientific picture of the world). For example, see DeVries (2005, chap. 10), O’Shea (2007, chap. 7).

  6. “In other words, ‘I ought to do X’ rests on ‘Everybody doing X’, and ‘Everybody do X’ rests on ‘I ought to do X.”’ ... (Sellars “Obligation and Motivation,” pp. 514–515).

  7. Prichard (1912).

  8. Sellars “Obligation and Motivation,” p. 517.

  9. Sellars “Obligation and Motivation.”

  10. Sellars (1980 [1949]). http://www.ditext.com/sellars/lrb.html.

  11. See Stevenson (1963, pp. 142–143).

  12. Sellars, “Obligation and Motivation,” p. 516. Or here, “the epistemological and metaphysical commitments of ethical intuitionism precluded it from understanding [the?] logical connection between thinking that one ought and being moved to do, thus forcing it to make a mystery of the conduct-guiding role of moral discourse, and a mystery of the uniqueness of prescriptive discourse which it had so happily emphasized” (Sellars, “Imperatives, Intentions, and the Logic of ‘Ought’,” p. 230).

  13. e.g., Prichard, “Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?”

  14. One attempted solution to these paired inadequacies can be found in R. M. Hare’s imperativist account of moral discourse (Hare 1952). Sellars recognized this, and engaged in an extended correspondence with Hare on these issues. For Hare, the general form of a moral claim was an imperative, and the personal form was an instance of the general one. This is the kind of logical relation that Sellars is concerned to deny. The relevant psychological fact for Hare was assent to the relevant imperatives. Sellars’ objection was this: assent lacks the immediate connection to motivation of intuitionism. Notoriously, we can assent to imperatives that we are not motivated to act on. So the relation between assent and action seems to be empirical and contingent, that is to say a fact of psychology or behavioral science.

  15. Sellars, “Obligation and Motivation,” p. 515.

  16. Sellars, “Obligation and Motivation,” p. 515.

  17. Sellars, “Obligation and Motivation,” p. 515.

  18. Sellars, “Obligation and Motivation,” p. 516.

  19. Sellars, “Obligation and Motivation,” pp. 514–515.

  20. Sellars, “Obligation and Motivation,” p. 516.

  21. Sellars, “Obligation and Motivation,” p. 515.

  22. For another example of myth and illusion in Sellars, see Kukla (2000).

  23. Sellars (1992 [1967], p. 189, para 37).

  24. Sellars (1992 [1967], p. 222, para 133).

  25. Sellars (1992 [1967], p. 189, para 37).

  26. This phrase has been obscured in the later discussions of collective intentionality, which in the hands of Tuomela, Gilbert, and Bratman has focused on joint activities which are intentional rather than on collective attitudes (Tuomela 2005; Gilbert 2000 [1997]; Bratman 1999). This has led to the charge, by John Searle, that these accounts of collective intentionality are circular: collective intentions are simply defined in terms of the explanandum, the joint action itself (Searle 1990, p. 405). Sellars’ account is free of this problem, because for him the collective attitude, the “we disapprove,” is detached from the personal attitude in a manner consistent with the account he gives of the disguise: The relationship that is disguised is one between motivational tendencies in which the collective attitude only tends to produce the explanandum action.

  27. Sellars (1963 [1956], p. 203).

  28. Sellars (1992 [1967], p. 222, para 133).

  29. Sellars (1992 [1967], p. 222, para 133).

  30. Sellars, “Obligation and Motivation,” p. 516.

  31. Sellars, “Obligation and Motivation,” p. 513.

  32. This is the point Sellars illustrates with his fragmentary discussion of the sentence “We disapprove of women smoking, but I don’t.” See Sellars, “Imperatives, Intentions, and the Logic of ‘Ought’,” p. 203.

  33. Sellars (1974, p. 422).

  34. Bouglé (1926).

  35. Durkheim and Mauss (1963 [1903]).

  36. Bouglé, The Evolution of Values, p. 29; Sellars’ marginal note.

  37. See Schmaus (2004).

  38. Durkheim (1974, pp. 81–82).

  39. Bouglé, The Evolution of Values, p. 15; underlined by Wilfrid Sellars.

  40. Bouglé, The Evolution of Values, p. 16; underlined by Wilfrid Sellars.

  41. Bouglé, The Evolution of Values, p. 16; underlined by Wilfrid Sellars.

  42. Roy Wood Sellars in Bouglé, The Evolution of Values, xxxii; underlined by Wilfrid Sellars.

  43. Roy Wood Sellars in Bouglé, The Evolution of Values, x.

  44. That W. Sellars is interested in saving rationalism qua transcendentalism is not surprising. See DeVries (2011).

  45. We do address this issue in Olen and Turner (2015).

  46. Sellars emphasizes, and underlines this emphasis by using special typographical devices, that he is not using these terms in their ordinary sense, but in a special “technical sense,” a restricted sense designed to capture the logic of the relevant conceptual relations. Sellars (1992 [1967], p. 188, para 34).

  47. Sellars (1992 [1967], pp. 184–187).

  48. Sellars, “Imperatives, Intentions, and the Logic of ‘Ought’,” p. 204.

  49. Sellars, “Obligation and Motivation,” pp. 514–515.

  50. Sellars, “Obligation and Motivation,” p. 516.

  51. Sellars, “Obligation and Motivation,” p. 516.

  52. Sellars, “Imperatives, Intentions, and the Logic of ‘Ought’,” p. 204.

  53. For a longer exploration of the differing senses of normativity, see Olen (forthcoming).

  54. Sellars, “Obligation and Motivation,” p. 513.

  55. Sellars (1992 [1967], p. 187).

  56. Sellars (1992 [1967], p. 208, para 87).

  57. Sellars (1992 [1967], p. 210, para 93).

  58. Sellars (1992 [1967], p. 210, para 93); emphasis in the original.

  59. Sellars (1992 [1967], p. 210, para 93).

  60. Sellars (1992 [1967], p. 220, para 124); emphasis in the original.

  61. Sellars, “Imperatives, Intentions, and the Logic of ‘Ought’” (1963, p. 210).

  62. Sellars, “Imperatives, Intentions, and the Logic of ‘Ought’” (1963, p. 210).

  63. Sellars, “Imperatives, Intentions, and the Logic of ‘Ought’” (1963, p. 210).

  64. Sellars (1992 [1967], p. 223, para 135).

  65. Sellars (1956b).

  66. DeVries (2005), O’Shea (2007).

  67. Sellars (1992 [1967], p. 146, para 90).

  68. James O’Shea, Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn, p. 189.

  69. One might wonder whether the category of the “physical” would survive the meshing of common sense and scientific frameworks at the idealized end of inquiry. One might think that physical facts, at least in the recognizable terms we currently find them, may just be one more hangover from our common sense explanations. See Montero (2001).

  70. Sellars seems more than willing to characterize both the manifest and scientific images as errors. By constructing both frameworks as images, Sellars explicitly leaves open the possibility that “an ‘image’ is something imagined, and that which is imagined may well not exist, although the imagining of it does” (Sellars, “Obligation and Motivation,” p. 5).

  71. Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” pp. 16–17.

  72. Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” p. 17.

  73. Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” p. 8.

  74. Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” p. 40.

  75. Sellars (1980 [1953], p. 194, para 21).

  76. By analogy, such frameworks would function in the same way prior ethical and social frameworks allow us to articulate historically sensitive accounts of values no longer held (e.g., we can make sense of what counted as good reasons to reject atomic theory in the nineteenth century, given specific values and evidential standards then currently held in physics, etc...).

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  1. Lake Sumter State College, Leesburg, FL, USA

    Peter Olen

  2. University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA

    Stephen P. Turner

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Olen, P., Turner, S.P. Was Sellars an error theorist?. Synthese 193, 2053–2075 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0829-7

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