It's been a little while since I blogged on this topic: the last posting concerning it looked at the fourth section of the first chapter of Sellars' book Science and Metaphysics. That section uncovered the way in which Sellars' realist conception was distinct from that of contemporary physicalists and opened the way for delimitation of more characteristics of sense impressions. In this posting I want to look at the fifth section of the first chapter in which Sellars does not specifically refer to Kant.
This section opens with Sellars pointing out that, on the view set out in the fourth section, we can begin to understand the general temptation that exists to assimilate sense impressions to minimal conceptual representations due to the fact that the sense impression of something does not possess the typical qualities of that thing any more than a conceptual representation does. Having opened with this point Sellars rapidly proceeds to a distinct second one. This concerns the fact that "sense impressions" have only an analogical relationship to perceptible attributes of physical objects.
This point about the analogical relationship of the impression to the perceptible attribute is discussed in terms of the point that to speak of the impression "of" a red rectangle when the impression itself is neither red nor rectangular involves using the terms "red" and "rectangle" in an odd way. Sellars terms this use "adjectival". The point that he wishes to get at with this apparently purely verbal reference is that the general acceptance of the notion of "sense impressions" is as part of a causal story and in this causal story the sensory impression is taken to be a non-conceptual state which has a red and rectangular physical object as its standard cause. Sellars objects to this rendering of the sense of the "sense impression" as this requires it to be understood as a definite description through causal connections rather than as an analogical use of predicates and leads in the direction, once again, of "crude" (as Sellars now terms it) physicalism.
The third point that Sellars makes builds on this second one. Now Sellars points out that the causal story is also one that incorporates a kind of typical reference (what kind of cause could be expected) but that this is also odd in the case under consideration. After all, if the suggestion is that the sense impression of the red rectangle is, typically, produced by a physical surface that is red and rectangular then we reduce the description of the impression to a discussion of what it is that has produced it and, further, do so in a way that assumes that a certain feature of the physical surface can be basically identified with the sense impression (an odd assumption in many respects).
Sellars' fourth point is that when we say we have a conception "of" a red rectangle we are not making the same kind of reference to "physical object predicates" as we are when we speak about the sense impression "of" a red rectangle. This is followed by the fifth point that the temptation we are under when we conflate sense impressions with minimal conceptual episodes (something Sellars has consistently argued against in this chapter) is one relating to the impressions as if they were conceptual items of our "inner speech".
The final point of the fifth section concerns the fact that what is in common between "impression of" and "conception of" is that both are logically intensional as neither can lead to a direct inference that there are any objects of the sort "referred to" around. This intensional equivalence does not lead to an intentional connection as only the conception has intentionality. (This last point leads already to considerations that Sellars will take further in the second chapter of Science and Metaphysics.)
The last posting on this topic considered the third movement of the first chapter of Sellars' book Science and Metaphysics and concluded with a comparison of Sellars' view of Kantian intuition and that of Salomon Maimon. In this posting I am going to consider the fourth movement of the first chapter.
The fourth movement opens with a series of questions concerning the status of "sense impressions" considered as the content of "sheer receptivity". The basic question considers whether the "sense impressions" need to be considered as states of consciousness (albeit non-conceptual ones) that intervene between the causal impact of the external environment on the mind and the verbal expression indicating a referential relation to the environment. Rather than see the "sense impressions" this way it could be the case, as is suggested by contemporary physicalists, that all we need to discuss is physical states. In which case, the relationship of guidedness between the referential verbal report and the environment on which it reports would simply be carried out by the physical operations alone. Here, it is interesting to see how Sellars, whilst maintaining a framework of scientific realism, moves away from the standard responses of physicalists.
What the appeal to the notion of the "sense impression" involves is a kind of state that is neither conceptual nor physical and, in making this appeal, Sellars resists classical intellectualism on the one hand and brute physicalism on the other. (Here we see his intellectual kinship to Kant and why the Kantian reference is important to him.) The rationale for the "sense impressions" remains one of accounting for the appearance of conceptual representation within the general awareness of perceptions. Particularly, it is meant to help deal with what we might think of as "minimal conceptual representations" even though, as indicated in the third movement of the chapter, Sellars does not take it to be the case that all visual perception need involve these.
The basic question concerns one of a correlation between the physical objects on the one hand and the mental states that have a connection to them. This is expressed again, as was the case in the third movement, through an analytical response to the way that conceptual representations occur. So, the example is given that, under "normal" circumstances there are perceptions of a red and rectangular object in specific circumstances. The circumstances are when we are in some causal relationship to the object. Another situation in which the perception of this type occurs is an "abnormal" one where something else than the specific object is affecting us due to its possessing, in some sense, characteristics that are related to the object.
What Sellars wants to account for is not a set of behavioural characteristics such as are displayed when someone consistently shows they can distinguish between "red" and "blue" accurately. It is rather the ability to conceptualize the experience that is at issue. The basic problem is thus not one that concerns the second case mentioned in the last paragraph (the "abnormal" one) but the first case (the "normal" one). How is that the conceptual occurrence of the description of the datum is given when confronted with something that referentially matches said datum? In responding to this Sellars wishes to invoke the "sense impression" as what is at work in "guiding" the conscious state such that the "sense impression" immediately corresponds to the causal stimuli that brings it about. (This "immediate" element of the "sense impression" is also a connection of it to the Kantian sense of intuition.)
There has to be something about the "sense impression" that makes it, in a way that does not apply to the verbal conscious report, analogous to the causal stimuli that brings it about. Rather than invoke this notion Sellars mentions that we could have one of two alternatives that might seem to dispense with the need for it. We could, on the one hand, claim that the capacity in question, is innate. On the other hand, we could just deal with it, in quasi-Wittgensteinian terms, by speaking about induction into a language-game. Sellars does not attempt, however, to deal here with the rationalist appeal to innatism but simply leaves that suggestion aside.
Sellars' response to the quasi-Wittgensteinian view is more interesting. The point he makes here is that, in order for this induction into the language-game to work, there must already exist the possibility of some cues for connection between verbal reports and causal and physical stimuli which the story in question presupposes and cannot explain. The account is, in fact, part of a story of generational connection but not really one that makes clear how such connection can take place at all.
Going back to the question at issue Sellars distinguishes between the sense that there are impressions of red rectangles simpliciter and impressions that red rectangles are located in specific regions. The latter already requires something conceptual being added to the former and so the former is the real first point that needs accounting for. Similarly, in the first instance, we should not be thinking about the standard cause of the appearance of the impression as this will inevitably lead in the direction of Humean questions. The basic reason for that concerns the move, noted in the third movement, of minimizing the referential element when we become stuck on analysis of the occurrence in question in terms of a philosophical analysis that approximates to that of puzzlement of the ordinary perceiver.
I have been going through the first chapter of Wilfrid Sellars' Science and Metaphysics recently with the last posting on this topic discussing the second movement of the chapter and revealing how, in it, Sellars substantiated his conception of "sheer receptivity" and connected it to a revised account of "sense impressions". In this posting I will look at the third movement of the first chapter.
The third movement opens with what Sellars hopes is a relatively uncontentious claim to the effect that visual perception involves, in some sense, conceptual representations. If we do assume this to be so then it will follow that verbal reports made concerning what it is we are seeing will express a "conceptual episode" that contains the twin elements of perceptual capacity and a reference to how the general environment is causally affecting one. This point is then used to begin to explore the relationship between ordinary speech that refers to sense impressions and the philosophical analyses that have been undertaken of such. The contrast drawn is that, generally, people seem to have no compunction in referring to a general impression of a red book on a brown table but philosophical analysis of impressions rarely allows for the sense that what that phrase might report is a distinct sensory impression. The reason why philosophers appear to have been reluctant to analyse what is given in ordinary speech in a way that reflects the structure of that speech appears to have been that philosophical analysis of such impressions produces a thinner sense of what is given than ordinary speech appears to report.
However, there is a point at which philosophical analysis and ordinary speech get closer together and this is when ordinary speech reflects a problem in the speaker's response to the datum given. So, speakers become, for example, confused about what is given to them and then their speech reports become correspondingly thinner (and more like philosophical analysis). Sellars illustrates this with a progressive distinction between speakers concerning whether the datum they have given to them is "a red book over there" as opposed to "a rectangular physical object" or even it merely "looking like" there is a red book over there. The second claim would be a kind of minimal objective claim (much like philosophical analysis tends to give) whilst the last moves from a vocabulary that endorses something as given to one which places it in a merely "seeming" location. We can imagine the second claim relativised by also being put in a "seeming" manner.
If the second claim was so relativised then we have a kind of reflection on the statement in question. Now, in general situations the reason why this kind of reflection often appears required is, as first suggested, because of a kind of puzzlement about the datum given. It doesn't seem necessary to reflect otherwise. However, philosophical analysis has often operated as if the experience of the sense impression was typically like the one that ordinary speech only reflects in these cases of puzzlement. By contrast, what Sellars seems to aim at now is a distinction between the presence of minimal sense impressions and the necessity of minimal conceptual episodes like those given when we place the impression under the cover of a "seeming" notion.
However, rather than immediately directly arguing against the assumption that says a kind of minimal conceptual episode is required if there exist minimal sense impressions, Sellars first looks at what would have to be given in the minimal conceptual episode, if it existed. There would have to be, Sellars suggests, three distinct aspects of the visual perception. These would be: a) a purely physical aspect, however described; b) a primary mental aspect sufficient to produce the minimal conceptual episode; c) a "rich" conceptual episode that allows for reference to such things as "cabbages and kings and pigs in barnyards".
Sellars does not next instantly reject the division of the experience into the three elements in question. Nor does he reject the distinction between the "receptivity" of the sense and the "guidedness" of the sense by conceptual representation. The second is, in fact, taken to be required by Kantian analysis. For example, Kant refers to productive imagination "taking up" (A120) the manifold which implies, to Sellars, that the manifold is something independent. (See also, which Sellars does not cite, B145.)
However, whilst the latter point seems required for the Kantian analysis to work, this manifold should not be construed as belonging itself to the conceptual order but to be something non-conceptual. It is only if it is understood, in accord with the general pattern of Sellars' analysis, as so non-conceptual, that we have a notion that there is something "outside" the conceptual order, something that he takes to be a sense of "intuition", the sense at work in the uniqueness of perceptual judgment where the latter refers to some notion that there is something given, a particular this as such. This continued insistence on the understanding of intuition in this way is part of what makes Sellars' analysis so constantly reminiscent of that of Maimon whilst also distinguishing it from Maimon since the latter takes the consequence of this point to be that space and time are not really intuitions at all.
The general point that Sellars closes the third movement with is that the heterogeneity of the receptivity of sense (in the radical way required by the notion of "sheer receptivity") is what would be needed for Kant to escape the dialectic of German idealism that leads to Hegel. Without this heterogeneity we are well on the way to such idealism and the movement towards it seems, indeed, part of the effect of Maimon's analysis.
In my last posting on this topic I looked at the first movement of the first chapter of Wilfrid Sellars' book Science and Metaphysics whose argument culminated with a problem concerning the notion that space is the "form of outer sense". Today I want to reconstruct and assess some of the elements of the second movement of this first chapter.
Sellars opens the second movement by stating the up-shot of the first movement has been to suggest that representations of a manifold as a manifold, representations described by Kant as "intuitions", are a special class of representations of the understanding that belong to spontaneity, not to receptivity or at least not to "receptivity" in its "radical" or "sheer" sense. The "radical" or "sheer" sense of receptivity is, however, also now suggested to be a "postulate", albeit a transcendental one. The items which make up the manifold that belongs to the radical or sheer form of receptivity are, however, characterised by Sellars as "sense impressions" which ensures that what Sellars means by such impressions is somewhat different than the role they played in empiricist accounts.
Despite the fact that the place of "sense impressions" in Sellars' reconstruction of Kant is not equivalent to the role they play in empiricist accounts there is a consideration of how the role of this notion has often functioned within philosophy generally (and hence within empiricist accounts). The general account that follows focuses on the notion of an impression of a red rectangle which is analysed by Sellars as including three components. The first component is that what is meant by sensing this impression is that we are undergoing a conscious state. The second component concerns what is happening what this state is undergone which is that we are faced by a process in which this impression is, at least in "normal circumstances", brought about by physical objects that fit the appropriate description. The third component is that the impression in question represents the appropriate physical object.
Having analysed the experience in question through this discussion of its components Sellars goes on to discuss the understanding of the "state of consciousness". The phrase is itself described by him as "both ambiguous and obscure". The ambiguity is focused on first with the point initially made that such impressions, considered as states of consciousness, are often assimilated to bodily sensations and feelings. Sense impressions, in the broadest sense, are comprehended as "non-conceptual" and the impressions are understood as being not just "states" of consciousness but also as "objects" of it.
The question now arises as to whether the sense impressions are, as specific individuated "contents", themselves made objects of awareness (or, as Sellars puts it in more Kantian language, are "apperceived"). The point is made that once we grant the existence of such "impressions" it becomes almost impossible not to consider them as apperceived, particularly if we do not have care with our distinctions.
Cartesians, for example, have the possibility of saying that the specific, individuated, sense-impressions are objects of awareness but that they are things of which we are "inadequately" or only "obscurely" aware. Similar statements are made in a more recent vocabulary when philosophers suggest that we are not aware consciously of what the manifold of our senses "really" (physically, i.e., natural-scientifically) "represent". Sellars wishes to move away from such models precisely through his notion of "sheer receptivity" and its corresponding notion of "sense impression". So the point is that the classic uses of "sense impression" which develop this sense of "inadequacy" do so because they have not really distinguished the two senses of "receptivity".
In response, then, to the classic pictures of sense impressions we arrive now at a notion of them that allows for the possibility that such impressions are not specifically given to us as objects of awareness. In a sense, this fits, according to Sellars, with Kant's usage since he need not relate to any such manifold of "sheer receptivity" as something of which we are aware.
The second movement of the chapter appears, therefore, to consist mainly in developing and substantiating the concept of "sheer receptivity" and indicating the way in which it allows for a clarified sense of "sense impression" but Sellars, in this movement, does not yet fill out the place this will philosophically occupy for him in any serious detail and nor has he, as yet, returned fully to the way in which his renovation of the Kantian conception will both build on, and away from, Kant's own view.
