Tom Swann Rosenberg On Quine And Sellars

##Sellars and Quine: Compare and contrast. in Fusing the Images

TDE and EPM both structured around a negative thesis, both reach holistic conclusion

TDE: against analytic/synthetic, for the corporate body of our statements facing the world together EPM: against empirical ‘giveness’, for there being a logical dimension in which observation reports depend on other empirical statements.

whinges about Quine being more influential, doubts long term influencethree differences.

Sellars is an expletive to read, demanding time and energy to unravel the layers. but Quine’s prose is silky smooth and his purposes explicit. (carrying reader past the difficulties…) Quine is ahistorical, Sellars moves within the perennial philosophy, reconstructed out of philosophical history. Quine’s arguments are typically primarily negative. “we can do without…” Sellars is a constructive philosopher.

where Quine rejects the statement as the unit of empirical significance, Sellars concerned with >>>rejects?<<< the identification of scientific explanation with logical derivation: explanation of singular facts by derivation from “inductively-established” empirical generalisations plus statements of initial conditions, and these laws derived from theoretical postulates and correspondence rules. >>>unclear what this is.<<<

Sellars thinks is misguided. P35 “No epistemologically autonomous stratum of empirical counterparts to theoretical laws, but that the empirical generalizations corresponding to theoretical laws become salient only from the theoretical perspective.” >>>a large paragraph here I don’t follow. Sellars’ Language of Theories.<<< “Postulational theories are not merely manageable second-class surrogates for more complicated and unwieldy stories about the behaviour of the”real” items that we can observe “directly”. Posited theoretical entities are themselves items whose reality we can properly acknowledge for good and sufficient theoretical, i.e., explantory, reasons” >>>isn’t this just to say that Sellars is a scientific realist? then what has all the stuff about the “levels” of scientific theory even got to do with it?<<<

no notion of explanation in Quine’s philosophy of science. theoretical posits introduced for “predicting future experience in the light of past experience.” “objects at the atomic level and beyond are posited to make the laws of macroscopic objects, and ultimately the laws of experience, simpler and more manageable.” (TDE 42) “it is only residual allegiance to the analytic-synthetic distinction that keeps us from recognising that class and number fall on a continuum with atom and electron, the difference being only matters of intra- systematic connections and remoteness from the sensory periphery.”

Sellars rejects the idea that physical objects are posits subserving our systematisation of sensations. Richer Kantian notion “an ostensible perceptual encounter with persisting and causally-interactive

objects in space and time”, our sensation concepts are analogically derivative from our object concepts. no “stratum of epistemologically autonomous sensory regularities” experiential regularities in Quine’s sense become ‘salient’ only from the perspective in which the

perceiver is viewed as “determinately situated in space and time and as entering into causal relationshiups with independently-real physical objects”.

rejects Quine’s rejection of categorials, that is placing them on a continuum with the rest. local reason: science has something to say about how we come into contact with its objects. nothing

analogous to say about abstract entities. global reason: the way he reads analyticity. agrees with Carnap’s notion of external questions relative to language systems, agrees with Quine’s claim that the same goes for normal scientific hypotheses. but diverges.

two kinds of empirical generalisation: narrowly empirical or inductive grounds, and expressing principles of postulational theories or explanatory grounds. allows him to distinguish three grades of “experiential involvement”. 1) statements reporting observations and general claims validated inductively by way of “observational backing”. 2) “constitutive posits of postulational theories, holistically validated by way of indirect explanatoryappeals to such observations and generalisations” 3) “purely formal claims, expressing necessary conditions for the formulation of scientific hypotheses in general”

Quine rejects Kant’s dichtomy, Sellars replaces it with two dichotomies. -logical v.s. empirical claims (analytic2 vs. synthetic2) -claims whose revision requires modification of the system of concepts in terms of which they are framed and claims revisable without such modification (analytic1 vs. synthetic1)

some claims are analytic1 and synthetic2 >>>differs from Carnap in that we adopt the framework on empirical grounds?<<< differs from Quine

Platonistic counter to Carnap’s nominalistic therapy: syntactic terms are role words, but we don’t specify the roles by specifying the role players. >>>even all possible role players<<< Platonistic route is to say there is a sui generis representing relation the alternative Carnapian route: the syntactic roles of categories are implicitly >>>contextually?<<<

defined in the formation rules of the calculus, just as the names of the pieces in chess are defined by

their featuring in the rules of chess.

“ordinary syntactic terms will resist reductive extensional definition by virtue of having normative import.”

nominalist anxieties.

meaning as functional classification causal (occaisioning) role with respect to sensory inputes, inferential transitions, behavioural outputs (language entries, intralinguistic moves, language-exits)

dot quotes as specifying those sharing the semantic role of the thing quoted star quotes specifying >>>morphological?<<< structural similarities.

German rot are Red.

‘means’ is a copula specialised for linguistic classification.

for Sellars talk about semantic properties and relations is talk of “norm-governed linguistic role players” ditto for abstract objects. so talk of properties is talk of norms governing linguistic correctness

redness = the Red.

triangularity is a property the Triangular. is a monadic predicate

“proposes to understand the talk ostensibly referring to abstract entities as a contrived idiom for communicating facts about the normative properties that shape >>>surely: constitute!<<< the use of expressions within natural languagues”

difficult to specify the roles. just the common hermeneutical difficulties.

Quine would find some problems. need an account of explanation if it’s not just logical derivation more needs to be said about the rules of language. Quine thought Carnaps appeals to semantic rules just pushed the unexplained notion of analyticity a further step back

keystone of Sellarsian thinking: irreducibility of norms to facts, ought to is. Quineans wont like this.

hard to see how anyone, including Quine, can do without the norm fact distinction

TDE on conflicting / cohering with experience. absent some notion of representative correctness,, what are we are meant to make of how we should change things? only an experience which in some way makes a claim can literally conflict with beliefs.

Quine makes analyticity a matter of being able to hold on to a statement, to preserve it in the light of a larger range of experiences, by making the right changes elsewhere. but this is like saying we can make any move in chess legal so long as we make the right changes to the rules. empirical thinking is not a game with codified rules. but it does have a point, even on Quine’s account. Sellarsians will question his account of it, that is in terms of predicting experience qua stimulus, but even this gives constraints of reasonableness. it will make sense to justify our holding on to certain things only in certain situations. >>>but even understanding this as a rational and not ‘merely’ causal process, how do we do that? by holding fixed certain other statements. but don’t we face the same issue for all statements? how to choose what to hold fixed? ~> Quine’s principle of minimal mutilation. ideally we would need to know how mutilated the web becomes under each possible permutation of holdings-fixed. but what measure of mutilation?<<<

the very notion of “matter-of-factual truth is itself conditioned by such considerations of reasonableness and the procedural constraints correlative to them.”

holding on is not holding true. Wittgenstein’s comment PI258 that correctness cannot just be correctness to me. >>>how related? sure there’s a difference between holding on with and without reason. but whenever I take myself holding on for some reason I am taking myself to be (likely) correct.<<<

the theme of normativity is a crucial divergence. Empiricism and Abstract Entities 433 “the question inevitably arises, Is it proper to ask of a decision

to accept a framework of entities [a form of language, a postulational theory] “is it reasonable?” “Can this decision by justified, and if so, how?” This is the crux of the matter…”

Quine’s philosophical vision as purely descriptive. defacto world, without oughts. no ‘we’ we can’t do without normativity