Tom Swann How The Scientific Is Manifest

Sellars distinguishes the scientific from the manifest image of man in the world. (I’ll substitute ‘man’ with ‘humans’ - seems neutral enough on both PC and philosophical grounds.) The manifest image is the image in terms of which humans understand themselves ‘naturally’. The suggestive ambiguity is mine, but some such qualifier is needed to point to and pick out one from the many ways we can surely understand ourselves. The qualification could be tightened using Heidegger’s phrase “ordinarily and for the most part”, or by making some kind of appeal to phenomenology in the current sense of treating how things appear to us as object of study, rather than a particular philosophical project .

Caveats first. This is a clumsy distinction and problematic because of its formulation in terms of ‘images’. We can read the metaphor as pointing to something like ‘theory’ in the broadest sense of beliefs that we have and can be put to epistemic work by using them to justify other beliefs and about which we can ask about whether and how they themselves can be justified. The scientific image is then theoretical in this broad sense, as well as in the narrower sense of being something that must be constructed through hard problem-solving. But the manifest image is also in a sense the result of problem-solving, because it is subject to refinement of its furniture and ontology. Sellars seems to want to say both that we can and have made justified progress on problems posed about this image,

Yet ‘theory’ is not quite right. Sellars is quite explicit that his images are more like the genus of different kinds of particular theories. They are idealisations, representations of what he takes to be essential

, rather idealisations of different ways of seeing. We might say they