SELLARS, WILFRID
(1912–1989)

Wilfrid Stalker Sellars, an American philosopher and teacher, was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the son of Roy Wood Sellars, the American critical realist who taught at the University of Michigan. Wilfrid Sellars's early education took place in the United States and in France, where he attended the lycées Montaigne and Louis le Grand; it was continued at the University of Michigan (BA, 1933), the University of Buffalo (MA, 1934), and Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes scholar and received a BA with first-class honors in philosophy, politics, and economics. He received an MA from Oxford in 1940. After a year at Harvard University he began his career as a teacher of philosophy in 1938 at the University of Iowa. During the war he spent several years as an officer in the Naval Reserve, and in 1946 he went to the University of Minnesota, where he eventually became professor of philosophy, chairman of the philosophy department, founding co-editor of the journal Philosophical Studies, and a member of Herbert Feigl's Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science. In 1959 he joined the faculty of Yale University, and in 1963 he moved to the University of Pittsburgh, where he became University Professor of Philosophy and Research Professor of the Philosophy of Science. Apart from numerous interludes as a visiting professor at other institutions, he remained at Pittsburgh until his death.

Although Sellars became an extremely prolific writer, in the early years of his career he had great difficulty putting his ideas on paper. His first scholarly essay, third in his list of publications, was "Realism and the New Way of Words"; it underwent seventeen major revisions, Sellars said in his "Autobiographical Reflections" (1975), before it finally appeared in print. In spite of its striking originality, his early work was strongly influenced by the logical empiricist movement, particularly by the work of Rudolf Carnap; in one essay, "Epistemology and the New Way of Words," he declared that philosophy "is properly conceived as the pure theory of empirically meaningful languages." From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, perhaps the most significant of his early essays would be "Concepts as Involving Laws and Inconceivable without Them" (1948) and "A Semantical Solution of the Mind–Body Problem" (1953). Both show him to have been well ahead of his time in analytic philosophy. In the former he offered a clarification of necessity and natural law that anticipated the treatment of these notions in recent possible-world semantics, and in the latter he developed a distinctly functionalist view of intentional states. (The early essays discussed here are included in the volume Pure Pragmatics and Possible Worlds: The Early Essays of Wilfrid Sellars, edited by J. F. Sicha.)

Sellars's best-known philosophical work is the lengthy essay "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," included in Sellars' Science, Perception, and Reality. This essay originated in lectures that Sellars gave in 1956 attacking what he called "the myth of the given." The cluster of ideas making up this doctrine was, he thought, the source of important errors in both the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of mind;by exposing the doctrine as a myth, he hoped to lay the groundwork for an acceptable form of empiricism and for a proper understanding of mental and sensory phenomena. The basic epistemic error prompted by the myth was the idea that empirical knowledge rests on a foundation of certain truth that is simply given to the mind—that is, knowable without inference—and provides the ultimate evidence for anything knowable by inference. The root error in the philosophy of mind prompted by the myth was the conviction that, merely by having sensory experiences and conscious thoughts, people gain theoretically satisfactory conceptions of those experiences and thoughts. These corresponding errors are related by the belief, commonly held by those who accept the myth, that foundational empirical knowledge concerns the sensory and psychological items, the mere having of which supposedly results in their being adequately conceived of or understood.

In attacking the errors he saw in the myth Sellars defended the view that empirical knowledge cannot have a foundation—that the supposedly basic knowledge of psychological fact presumed by the myth cannot exist independently of general knowledge relating psychological experience to linguistic and other behavior—and that theoretically adequate conceptions of anything can be obtained only by a process of learning and can be known to be adequate only by reference to scientific theorizing about the sensory and cognitive capabilities of human beings. He argued that "empirical knowledge … is rational not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once" (1991, pp. 127–196). As for commonsense sensory and psychological concepts, he argued that it is illuminating to think of them as resulting from an attempt to explain intelligent, nonhabitual human behavior by postulating appropriate "inner episodes" in substantially the way that theoretical scientists explain facts about observable objects by postulating unobservable microcauses. In arguing this point he added that, when concepts of such inner episodes are developed, people can learn to use them in making first-person reports of what they are experiencing. Seen this way, psychological concepts are fundamentally intersubjective rather than private, and they are as subject to revision as any concept of theoretical science.

In "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" (1960), also included in Science, Perception, and Reality, Sellars developed the thesis that, although theoretical science is a natural development of commonsense thought about the world, it is not evidentially dependent upon it. Like David Hume, Sellars thought that scientific thinking yields a theoretical picture of humans in the world that is incompatible with the commonsense—or, as he called it, the "manifest"—image of the same reality. These clashing images are not on a par, he thought; in purely descriptive respects, the scientific image is an improvement upon the manifest image, containing "successor concepts" to commonsense counterparts. (Water, on this view, is not identical with H₂O; the technical concept of H₂O applies to a common ingredient in most puddles, wells, clouds, and seas—one that is not accurately singled out by any commonsense concept.) A philosophically adequate picture of humans in the world is not fully descriptive, however; it is partly normative. Working out such a picture is an important philosophical task that has yet to be accomplished: the scientific image is not yet complete, and serious problems exist about how some normative matters can be incorporated into a significantly different image.

In later writings Sellars worked out highly original ideas on most central fields of philosophy. He produced, as Johanna Seibt (1990) observed, a unique scheme of "full scope nominalism," which purports to demonstrate the expendability of abstract entities for all their supposed explanatory functions; he worked out (he was the first to do so) a sophisticated "conceptual role" semantics: he developed a neo-Kantian view of moral obligation and the moral point of view; and he had original things to say about central figures and issues in the history of philosophy. At a time when systematic philosophy was decidedly out of fashion, Sellars pursued the synoptic vision of humans in the world that Plato spoke of in the Republic. In parody of Kant he liked to tell his students that in philosophy analysis without synthesis must be blind.

See also Carnap, Rudolph; Empiricism; Functionalism; Philosophy of Mind.

Bibliography

works by sellars

"Autobiographical Reflections." In Action, Knowledge, and Reality: Critical Studies in Honor of Wilfrid Sellars, edited by H.-N. Castañeda. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975.

Philosophical Perspectives: History of Philosophy. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1977.

Philosophical Perspectives: Metaphysics and Epistemology. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1977.

Pure Pragmatics and Possible Worlds: The Early Essays of Wilfrid Sellars, edited by J. F. Sicha. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1980.

Science, Perception, and Reality. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1991.

Naturalism and Ontology. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1992.

Science and Metaphysics. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1992.

works on sellars

Delaney, C. F., et al. The Synoptic Vision: Essays on the Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame, 1977.

DeVries, Willem A., and Timm Triplett. Knowledge, Mind, and the Given: A Reading of Sellars' "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind." Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000.

Pitt, Joseph C., ed. The Philosophy of Wilfrid Sellars. Boston: Reidel 1978.

Seibt, J. Properties as Processes: A Synoptic Study of Sellars' Nominalism. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1990.

Bruce A. Aune (1996, 2005)