Pittsburgh School (Sellarsian Realism)
from 1956
Perception does not hand you a foundation. Even seeing something is already a move in a game of giving and asking for reasons.
- Active
- from 1956
- Where
- Pittsburgh
- Status
- living
- Tradition
- Anglo American
The claim
The Myth of the Given. Nothing can both be non-conceptual, and therefore innocent of interpretation, and also justify a belief. To count as a reason for anything, an experience must already have conceptual content.
What it held
Sellars' 1956 paper takes apart the assumption that had underwritten empiricism since Locke: that there is a layer of experience — sense-data, the given, raw feels — which is immediately known and can serve as the foundation for everything else.
His argument is a dilemma. If the given is non-conceptual, it is not the sort of thing that can stand in a justifying relation to a belief, since justification runs between things that can be true or false. If it does have conceptual content, it is not innocent — it involves the concepts of a learned language, and could be wrong. Either way it cannot do the job.
What replaces it is the space of reasons: knowing is not a matter of being caused by the world but of being able to defend a claim, which is a normative and social matter rather than a natural one.
McDowell and Brandom developed this in different directions — McDowell arguing that experience itself is conceptual all the way down, Brandom building a whole semantics out of the practice of giving and asking for reasons. Both read Hegel closely, which is why this school reconnected analytic philosophy to a tradition it had spent a century avoiding.
How it argued
Analytic argument informed by close reading of Kant and Hegel, aimed at diagnosing an assumption rather than answering a question.
What it was arguing against
Foundationalist empiricism in every form, and the assumption that the natural sciences give a complete account of knowing.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether experience is conceptual all the way down — McDowell says yes, Dreyfus and others say this leaves no room for embodied skill. How much Hegel the position requires.
Common misconceptions
That rejecting the given means rejecting realism. Sellars was a scientific realist who thought physics tells us what there is; his point is about justification, not existence.
How it began
Sellars' Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, delivered as lectures in 1956, described by Rorty as the beginning of the end for empiricism.
What became of it
Living and productive, and the main channel by which German idealism re-entered analytic philosophy.
Lasting influence
Contemporary epistemology and philosophy of mind. Brandom's inferentialism is a major position in philosophy of language.
Why it still matters
The debate about whether perception has conceptual content is central to current philosophy of mind and connects directly to work on machine perception.
Put another way
A witness statement, which is only evidence because it is the sort of thing that could be challenged.
Where to start
Sellars' paper with Brandom's study guide. Nobody should attempt it alone.
The surprising bit
Sellars' paper was so compressed that Rorty published it separately decades later with a book-length introduction by Brandom, on the grounds that nobody could get through it unaided.
In their own words
In characterising an episode as knowing, we are placing it in the logical space of reasons.
The given is a myth.
Connections
- Opposed by
- British Empiricism, Vienna Circle
The verdict
One paper that undid three centuries of empiricism, and a school that spent fifty years working out what follows.