Carl Sachs
Marymount University, Philosophy, Faculty Member
- Wilfrid Sellars and post-Sellarsian philosophy, Pragmatism, Neurophenomenology, Richard Rorty, John McDowell, Robert Brandom, and 32 moreNaturalism and Normativity, Phenomenology of the body, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Donald Davidson, Philosophy Of Animals, Rudolf Carnap, Transcendental Arguments, Theodor Adorno, C. I. Lewis, Philosophy of Mind, Frankfurt School, Ray Brassier, Huw Price, Embodied and Enactive Cognition, Embodied Mind and Cognition, Pragmatism (Philosophy), Intentionality, Normativity, John Dewey, Naturalism, Embodied Cognition, Wittgenstein, Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Affordances, Enactivism, Non-Conceptual Content, Epistemic Injustice, Michael Tomasello, Teleology, Pragmatic realism, American Pragmatism, and Joseph Margolisedit
- My long-term project is reconciling liberal naturalism and scientific naturalism by showing that recent work in theor... moreMy long-term project is reconciling liberal naturalism and scientific naturalism by showing that recent work in theoretical biology and cognitive science vindicates the reality of teleology, intentionality, and normativity.edit
From the publisher: description of "Intentionality and the Myths of the Given," November 1, 2014.
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I argue that Sellars's proximity to pragmatism has been occluded by ignoring how close he is to C. I. Lewis. I argue that C. I. Lewis' conceptualistic pragmatism should be understood as a pragmatist alternative to Dewey's emphasis on the... more
I argue that Sellars's proximity to pragmatism has been occluded by ignoring how close he is to C. I. Lewis. I argue that C. I. Lewis' conceptualistic pragmatism should be understood as a pragmatist alternative to Dewey's emphasis on the organism-environment transaction. I then argue that Sellars's distinction between "signifying" and "picturing" is precisely the distinction that we need in order to reconcile Dewey and Lewis. Thus picturing, far from being the idea that bars pragmatists from accepting Sellars, is in fact a concept that pragmatists ought to embrace.
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I argue that "discursive intentionality" -- the kind of intelligibility at work in meanings structured by reason-giving -- is a form of embodied coping and not a rupture with it. I develop this view in terms of the Dreyfus-McDowell... more
I argue that "discursive intentionality" -- the kind of intelligibility at work in meanings structured by reason-giving -- is a form of embodied coping and not a rupture with it. I develop this view in terms of the Dreyfus-McDowell debate, and argue that Dreyfus is basically right about "sentience" whereas McDowell is basically right about "sapience". The question is how to accept both of those claims. Joe Rouse (2015) argues that we should recognize both that conceptual capacities are realized in discursive practices and that discursive practices are forms of embodied coping. Though Rouse’s account has much to recommend it, it can be nevertheless strengthened in significant ways that undermine Dreyfus’s stark contrast between the space of reasons and the space of motivations replacing it with a distinction between sapient intentionality and sentient intentionality.
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A summary of the major themes in the Pittsburgh School (Sellars, McDowell, and Brandom) and its historical significance.
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Philosophers working in the wake of Sellars, such as Brandom and McDowell, agree that there a fundamentally important distinction between sapience and sentience. At least in Sellars, both sentience and sapience are " transcendental "... more
Philosophers working in the wake of Sellars, such as Brandom and McDowell, agree that there a fundamentally important distinction between sapience and sentience. At least in Sellars, both sentience and sapience are " transcendental " structures – they are posited to explain our cognitively significant experience, including (but not limited to) empirical knowledge – but they must also be adequately reflected in, or realized in, causal structures. Sellars' critical realism, according to which sense-impressions causally mediate our perceptual encounters with object, is grounded the attempt to specify the causal structures in which the transcendental distinction between perceiving and thinking is reflected. Here I contrast critical realism with recent work in the enactivist approach to the philosophy of cognitive science, which conceives of direct realism in terms of the relations between sensorimotor abilities and features of the environment. The hybrid approach, " embodied critical realism " , treats sensorimotor abilities as taking the place of the productive imagination, such that the dynamic unfolding over time of the relation between sensorimotor abilities and environmental features explains how perceptual awareness of objects is explicated in terms of expectations and surprisals.
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I argue that Quentin Meillassoux's taxonomy of philosophical positions -- dogmatic metaphysics, strong correlationism, and speculative materialism -- does not account for Wilfrid Sellars's pragmatic naturalism. Sellars adopts a... more
I argue that Quentin Meillassoux's taxonomy of philosophical positions -- dogmatic metaphysics, strong correlationism, and speculative materialism -- does not account for Wilfrid Sellars's pragmatic naturalism. Sellars adopts a methodological interpretation of the principle of sufficient reason as a constraint on explanations, rather than as a ontological principle of justification.
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Introduction: Why a New Account of Intentionality? 1 Intentionality and the Problem of Transcendental Friction 2 The Epistemic Given and the Semantic Given in C I Lewis 3 Discursive Intentionality and 'Nonconceptual Content' in... more
Introduction: Why a New Account of Intentionality? 1 Intentionality and the Problem of Transcendental Friction 2 The Epistemic Given and the Semantic Given in C I Lewis 3 Discursive Intentionality and 'Nonconceptual Content' in Sellars 4 The Retreat from Nonconceptualism: Discourse and Experience in Brandom and McDowell 5 Somatic Intentionality and Habitual Normativity in Merleau-Ponty's Account of Lived Embodiment 6 The Possibilities and Problems of Bifurcated Intentionality Conclusion Appendix: Is Phenomenology Committed to the Myth of the Given?
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Recent accounts of teleological naturalism hold that organisms are intrinsically goal-directed entities. We argue that supporters and critics of this view have ignored the ways in which it is used to address quite different problems. One... more
Recent accounts of teleological naturalism hold that organisms are intrinsically goal-directed entities. We argue that supporters and critics of this view have ignored the ways in which it is used to address quite different problems. One problem is about biology and concerns whether an organism-centered account of teleological ascriptions would improve our descriptions and explanations of biological phenomena. This is different from the philosophical problem of how naturalized teleology would affect our conception of nature, and of ourselves as natural beings. The neglect of this metatheoretic distinction has made it difficult to understand the criteria we should use for evaluating proposals to naturalize teleology. We argue that a clearer distinction between scientific and philosophical contexts shows that we need more than one set of criteria for evaluating proposals to naturalize teleology, and that taking these into account might advance or dissolve recurring debates in the literature.
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The rise of mechanistic science in the 17 th century helped give rise to a heated debate about whether teleology-the appearance of purposive activity in life and in mind-could be naturalized. At issue here were both what is meant by... more
The rise of mechanistic science in the 17 th century helped give rise to a heated debate about whether teleology-the appearance of purposive activity in life and in mind-could be naturalized. At issue here were both what is meant by "teleology" as well as what is meant "nature". I shall examine a specific episode in the history of this debate in the 20 th century with the rise of cybernetics: the science of seemingly "self-controlled" systems. Against cybernetics, Hans Jonas argued that cybernetics failed as a naturalistic theory of teleology and that the reality of teleology is grounded in phenomenology, not in scientific explanations. I shall argue that Jonas was correct to criticize cybernetics but that contemporary work in biological organization succeeds where cybernetics failed. I will then turn to contemporary uses of Jonas's phenomenology in enactivism and argue that Jonas's phenomenology should be avoided by enactivism as a scientific research program, but that it remains open whether enactivism as a philosophy of nature should also avoid Jonas.
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The rise of mechanistic science in the 17 th century helped give rise to a heated debate about whether teleology-the appearance of purposive activity in life and in mind-could be naturalized. At issue here were both what is meant by... more
The rise of mechanistic science in the 17 th century helped give rise to a heated debate about whether teleology-the appearance of purposive activity in life and in mind-could be naturalized. At issue here were both what is meant by "teleology" as well as what is meant "nature". I shall examine a specific episode in the history of this debate in the 20 th century with the rise of cybernetics: the science of seemingly "self-controlled" systems. Against cybernetics, Hans Jonas argued that cybernetics failed as a naturalistic theory of teleology and that the reality of teleology is grounded in phenomenology, not in scientific explanations. I shall argue that Jonas was correct to criticize cybernetics but that contemporary work in biological organization succeeds where cybernetics failed. I will then turn to contemporary uses of Jonas's phenomenology in enactivism and argue that Jonas's phenomenology should be avoided by enactivism as a scientific research program, but that it remains open whether enactivism as a philosophy of nature should also avoid Jonas.
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Picturing is a poorly understood element of Sellars's philosophical project. We diagnose the problem with picturing as follows: on the one hand, it seems that it must be connected with action in order for it to do its job. On the... more
Picturing is a poorly understood element of Sellars's philosophical project. We diagnose the problem with picturing as follows: on the one hand, it seems that it must be connected with action in order for it to do its job. On the other hand, the representational states of a picturing system are characterized in descriptive and seemingly static terms. How can static terms be connected with action? To solve this problem, we adopt a concept from recent work in Sellarsian metaethics: the idea of a material practical inference, which (we argue) features centrally in how we picture. The key distinction is that the picturing of nonhuman animals involves only Humean material practical inference, in which representational states are corrected only by feedback from the environment and not from discursive interactions. The resulting view shows that Sellars's contributions to practical philosophy (especially theory of action and metaethics) cannot be separated from his contributions to philosophy of mind, language, and cognitive science. Further, the view makes it clear that picturing is neither a version of the Given, nor is it a fifth wheel to inferential role in explaining representation, but is essential to Sellars's model of how animalsincluding humans-represent their environment.
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Picturing is a poorly understood element of Sellars's philosophical project. We diagnose the problem with picturing as follows: on the one hand, it seems that it must be connected with action in order for it to do its job. On the other... more
Picturing is a poorly understood element of Sellars's philosophical project. We diagnose the problem with picturing as follows: on the one hand, it seems that it must be connected with action in order for it to do its job. On the other hand, the representational states of a picturing system are characterized in descriptive and seemingly static terms. How can static terms be connected with action? To solve this problem, we adopt a concept from recent work in Sellarsian metaethics: the idea of a material practical inference, which (we argue) features centrally in how we picture. The key distinction is that the picturing of nonhuman animals involves only Humean material practical inference, in which representational states are corrected only by feedback from the environment and not from discursive interactions. The resulting view shows that Sellars's contributions to practical philosophy (especially theory of action and metaethics) cannot be separated from his contributions to philosophy of mind, language, and cognitive science. Further, the view makes it clear that picturing is neither a version of the Given, nor is it a fifth wheel to inferential role in explaining representation, but is essential to Sellars's model of how animals including humans-represent their environment.
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The debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell turns on whether rationality is a rupture with absorbed bodily coping (Dreyfus) or a distinct form of it (McDowell). I argue that Dreyfus's position turns on a conflation between... more
The debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell turns on whether rationality is a rupture with absorbed bodily coping (Dreyfus) or a distinct form of it (McDowell). I argue that Dreyfus's position turns on a conflation between the distinction between sentience and sapience and the distinction between 'theoria' and 'praxis'. The origins of Dreyfus's problematic conflation are traced to how he reads phenomenology in light of C. I. Lewis and Sellars. McDowell's alternative has an insufficiently developed conception of embodiment. I then use recent work by Joe Rouse and Michael Tomasello to develop a more satisfactory distinction between sentient intentionality and sapient intentionality that avoids the problems of of both Dreyfus and McDowell. Sapience, or discursive intentionality, is a distinct kind of embodied coping.
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Philosophers working in the wake of Sellars, such as Brandom and McDowell, think that there a fundamentally important distinction between ‘sapience’ and ‘sentience.’ Both sentience and sapience are ‘transcendental’ structures – they are... more
Philosophers working in the wake of Sellars, such as Brandom and McDowell, think that there a fundamentally important distinction between ‘sapience’ and ‘sentience.’ Both sentience and sapience are ‘transcendental’ structures – they are posited to explain our cognitively significant experience, including (but not limited to) empirical knowledge – but they also must be adequately reflected in, or realized in, causal structures. Hence whatever structures and processes that we posit in the course of reflecting on the minimal necessary conditions for our cognitive capacities and incapacities must be correlated with structures and processes that are empirically confirmed and, to the extent possible, consistent with a scientific view of the world. Within this generally Sellarsian framework, I aim to criticize one key aspect of Sellars’s theory of perception concerning the role of sense-impressions (or sensations) as causally mediating our perceptual encounters with objects. More specifically, I shall argue that Sellars was right to argue that we need to posit what he calls “sheer receptivity” in the interests of transcendental philosophy, but wrong to argue that sense-impressions were the best candidates to implement sheer receptivity in rerum natura. I shall then turn to recent work in the enactivist approach to philosophy of cognitive science, which emphasizes the structural coupling between sensorimotor skills and environmental affordances. This structural coupling is a more promising candidate than sensations per se as the causal correlate of sheer receptivity. I conclude by comparing the possibility of synthesizing inferentialism and enactivism with Huw Price’s “new bifurcation thesis”, and suggest that my approach is a more promising candidate for 21st-century Sellarsian pragmatism.
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I argue that Quentin Meillassoux's taxonomy of philosophical positions -- dogmatic metaphysics, strong correlationism, and speculative materialism -- does not account for Wilfrid Sellars's pragmatic naturalism. Sellars... more
I argue that Quentin Meillassoux's taxonomy of philosophical positions -- dogmatic metaphysics, strong correlationism, and speculative materialism -- does not account for Wilfrid Sellars's pragmatic naturalism. Sellars adopts a methodological interpretation of the principle of sufficient reason as a constraint on explanations, rather than as a ontological principle of justification.
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In his most recent work, McDowell argues that the oscillation between the Myth of the Given and coherentism can be avoided only by an ‘equipoise’ between the objective and the subjective. However, I argue that Adorno’s ‘cognitive utopia’... more
In his most recent work, McDowell argues that the oscillation between the Myth of the Given and coherentism can be avoided only by an ‘equipoise’ between the objective and the subjective. However, I argue that Adorno’s ‘cognitive utopia’ is a genuine 4th option distinct from equipoise and from the oscillation between the Myth of the Given and coherentism. McDowell’s inability to acknowledge the cognitive utopia is traced to his overly abstract conception of the disenchantment of nature, in contrast to Adorno’s emphasis on the domination of nature. This difference is traced to their different interpretations of Hegel.
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I argue that Sellars’s distinction between signifying and picturing should be taken seriously by philosophers of mind, language, and cognition. I begin with interpretations of key Sellarsian texts in order to show that picturing is best... more
I argue that Sellars’s distinction between signifying and picturing should be taken seriously by philosophers of mind, language, and cognition. I begin with interpretations of key Sellarsian texts in order to show that picturing is best understood as a theory of non-linguistic cognitive representations through which animals navigate their environments. This is distinct from the kind of discursive cognition that Sellars called ‘signifying’ and which is best understood in terms of socio-linguistic inferences. I argue that picturing is required because reflection on signifying cannot adequately explain our need for cognitive friction. I then show how the idea of picturing is further developed by Paul Churchland, Ruth Garrett Millikan, and Huw Price. I finally turn to predictive processing as a theory of cognitive representation, and in particular Andy Clark’s ‘radical predictive processing’, to further characterize picturing. However, doing so has the cost of pushing picturing and signifying further apart than Sellars intended.
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Among the deeper strata of Rorty’s philosophy is what I call his aversion to normative violence. Normative violence occurs when some specific group presents itself as having a privileged relation to reality. The alternative to normative... more
Among the deeper strata of Rorty’s philosophy is what I call his aversion to normative violence. Normative violence occurs when some specific group presents itself as having a privileged relation to reality. The alternative to normative violence is recognizing that cultural politics has priority over ontology. I trace this Rortyan idea to its origins in Nietzsche and Sellars. Rorty’s contribution is to combine Nietzsche on the death of God and Sellars on the Myth of the Given. However, I conclude with a suggestion that Rorty ultimately goes too far in thinking that avoiding normative violence requires abstaining from metaphysics and epistemology as such.
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Abstract McDowell's contributions to epistemology and philosophy of mind turn centrally on his defense of the Aristotelian concept of a “rational animal”. I argue here that a clarification of how McDowell uses this concept can make... more
Abstract McDowell's contributions to epistemology and philosophy of mind turn centrally on his defense of the Aristotelian concept of a “rational animal”. I argue here that a clarification of how McDowell uses this concept can make more explicit his distance from Davidson regarding the nature of the minds of non-rational animals. Close examination of his responses to Davidson and to Dennett shows that McDowell is implicitly committed to avoiding the following “false trichotomy”: that animals are not bearers of semantic content at all, that they are bearers of content in the same sense we are, and that they are bearer of “as if” content. Avoiding the false trichotomy requires that we understand non-rational animals as having concepts but not as making judgments. Furthermore, we need to supplement McDowell's distinction between the logical spaces of reasons and of the realm of law with what Finkelstein calls “the logical space of animate life”. Though McDowell has taken some recent steps to embrace a view like this, I urge a more demanding conception than what McDowell has thus far suggested.
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Rorty regards himself as furthering the project of the Enlightenment by separating Enlightenment liberalism from Enlightenment rationalism. To do so, he rejects the very need for explicit metaphysical theorizing. Yet his commitments to... more
Rorty regards himself as furthering the project of the Enlightenment by separating Enlightenment liberalism from Enlightenment rationalism. To do so, he rejects the very need for explicit metaphysical theorizing. Yet his commitments to naturalism, nominalism, and the irreducibility of the normative come from the metaphysics of Wilfrid Sellars. Rorty's debt to Sellars is concealed by his use of Davidsonian arguments against the scheme/content distinction and the nonsemantic concept of truth. The Davidsonian arguments are used for Deweyan ends: to advance secularization and anti-authoritarianism. However, Rorty's conflation of theology and metaphysics conceals the possibility of post-theological metaphysics. The key distinction lies between “metaphysics” and “Metaphysics.” The former provisionally models the relations between different vocabularies; the latter continues theology by other means. Sellars shows how to do metaphysics without Metaphysics. This approach complements Rorty's prioritization of cultural politics over ontology and his vision of Enlightenment liberalism without Enlightenment rationalism.
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McDowell’s equipoise and
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I argue that both Sellars and Merleau-Ponty should be read as radicalizing, in quite different ways, Kant's rejection of the sensory-cognitive continuum". In Sellars, this radicalization leads him to posit "sheer... more
I argue that both Sellars and Merleau-Ponty should be read as radicalizing, in quite different ways, Kant's rejection of the sensory-cognitive continuum". In Sellars, this radicalization leads him to posit "sheer receptivity", as distinct from intuitive representations. In Merleau-Ponty, this radicalization leads him to describe "operative intentionality" or "motor intentionality" of the lived body. Hence we should distinguish between the kind of intentionality that does belong to the conceptual order (discursive intentionality) and the kind of intentionality that Merleau-Ponty examines (somatic intentionality). This distinction provides an alternative position to the debate between McDowell and contemporary Sellarsians (deVries, Rosenberg) if one rejects the assumption that intentionality belongs only to the conceptual order.
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Page 1. The acknowledgement of transcendence: Anti-theodicy in Adorno and Levinas Carl B. Sachs Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies, University of North Texas, USA Abstract It is generally recognized that Adorno ...
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... his concern with the limits of language. Foster reads the early Wittgenstein as concerned with a language in which ethics, aesthetics, and religiosity cannot be “said” or communicated. But instead of silence, Adorno wants to ...
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I argue that Sellars's distinction between signifying and picturing should be taken seriously by philosophers of mind, language, and cognition. I begin with interpretations of key Sellarsian texts in order to show that picturing is best... more
I argue that Sellars's distinction between signifying and picturing should be taken seriously by philosophers of mind, language, and cognition. I begin with interpretations of key Sellarsian texts in order to show that picturing is best understood as a theory of non-linguistic cognitive representations through which animals navigate their environments. This is distinct from the kind of discursive cognition that Sellars called 'signifying' and which is best understood in terms of socio-linguistic inferences. I argue that picturing is required because reflection on signifying cannot adequately explain our need for cognitive friction. I then show how the idea of picturing is further developed by Paul Churchland, Ruth Garrett Millikan, and Huw Price. I finally turn to predictive processing as a theory of cognitive representation, and in particular Andy Clark's 'radical predictive pro-cessing', to further characterize picturing. However, doing so has the cost of pushing picturing and signifying further apart than Sellars intended.
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Among the deeper strata of Rorty's philosophy is what I call his aversion to normative violence. Normative violence occurs when some specific group presents itself as having a privileged relation to reality. The alternative to normative... more
Among the deeper strata of Rorty's philosophy is what I call his aversion to normative violence. Normative violence occurs when some specific group presents itself as having a privileged relation to reality. The alternative to normative violence is recognizing that cultural politics has priority over ontology. I trace this Rortyan idea to its origins in Nietzsche and Sellars. Rorty's contribution is to combine Nietzsche on the death of God and Sellars on the Myth of the Given. However, I conclude with a suggestion that Rorty ultimately goes too far in thinking that avoiding normative violence requires abstaining from metaphysics and epistemology as such. Keywords Nietzsche – Sellars – Rorty – cultural politics – the Myth of the Given
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In his most recent work, McDowell argues that the oscillation between the Myth of the Given and coherentism can be avoided only by an ‘equipoise’ between the objective and the subjective. However, I argue that Adorno’s ‘cognitive utopia’... more
In his most recent work, McDowell argues that the oscillation between the Myth of the Given and coherentism can be avoided only by an ‘equipoise’ between the objective and the subjective. However, I argue that Adorno’s ‘cognitive utopia’ is a genuine 4th option distinct from equipoise and from the oscillation between the Myth of the Given and coherentism. McDowell’s inability to acknowledge the cognitive utopia is traced to his overly abstract conception of the disenchantment of nature, in contrast to Adorno’s emphasis on the domination of nature. This difference is traced to their different interpretations of Hegel.
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I argue that both Sellars and Merleau-Ponty should be read as radicalizing, in quite different ways, Kant's rejection of the sensory-cognitive continuum". In Sellars, this radicalization leads him to posit "sheer receptivity", as distinct... more
I argue that both Sellars and Merleau-Ponty should be read as radicalizing, in quite different ways, Kant's rejection of the sensory-cognitive continuum". In Sellars, this radicalization leads him to posit "sheer receptivity", as distinct from intuitive representations. In Merleau-Ponty, this radicalization leads him to describe "operative intentionality" or "motor intentionality" of the lived body. Hence we should distinguish between the kind of intentionality that does belong to the conceptual order (discursive intentionality) and the kind of intentionality that Merleau-Ponty examines (somatic intentionality). This distinction provides an alternative position to the debate between McDowell and contemporary Sellarsians (deVries, Rosenberg) if one rejects the assumption that intentionality belongs only to the conceptual order.
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I assess Rorty’s position as an Enlightenment figure by showing that his attitude towards metaphysics is more complicated than usually assumed. I argue that Rorty’s most fundamental metaphysical commitments are inherited from Wilfrid... more
I assess Rorty’s position as an Enlightenment figure by showing that his attitude towards metaphysics is more complicated than usually assumed. I argue that Rorty’s most fundamental metaphysical commitments are inherited from Wilfrid Sellars, but that Rorty’s debt to Sellars is concealed by Rorty’s use of Davidson’s theory of language. Rorty uses Davidsonian arguments to advance Deweyan ends: that is, to advance secularization and anti-authoritarianism. I raise the suggestion that Rorty misses an opportunity to distinguish between "metaphysics" and "Metaphysics", where only the latter attempts to escape from time and chance, whereas the former is precisely what we need once the latter has been abandoned.
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McDowell’s contributions to epistemology and philosophy of mind turn centrally on his defense of the Aristotelian concept of a “rational animal”. I argue here that a clarification of how McDowell uses this concept can make more explicit... more
McDowell’s contributions to epistemology and philosophy of mind turn centrally on his defense of the Aristotelian concept of a “rational animal”. I argue here that a clarification of how McDowell uses this concept can make more explicit his distance
from Davidson regarding the nature of the minds of non-rational animals. Close examination of his responses to Davidson and to Dennett shows that McDowell is implicitly committed to avoiding the following “false trichotomy”: that animals are not bearers
of semantic content at all, that they are bearers of content in the same sense we are, and that they are bearer of “as if” content. Avoiding the false trichotomy requires that we understand non-rational animals as having concepts but not as making judgments. Furthermore, we need to supplement McDowell’s distinction between the logical spaces of reasons and of the realm of law with what Finkelstein calls “the logical space of animate life”. Though McDowell has taken some recent steps to embrace a view like this, I urge a more demanding conception than what McDowell has thus far suggested.
from Davidson regarding the nature of the minds of non-rational animals. Close examination of his responses to Davidson and to Dennett shows that McDowell is implicitly committed to avoiding the following “false trichotomy”: that animals are not bearers
of semantic content at all, that they are bearers of content in the same sense we are, and that they are bearer of “as if” content. Avoiding the false trichotomy requires that we understand non-rational animals as having concepts but not as making judgments. Furthermore, we need to supplement McDowell’s distinction between the logical spaces of reasons and of the realm of law with what Finkelstein calls “the logical space of animate life”. Though McDowell has taken some recent steps to embrace a view like this, I urge a more demanding conception than what McDowell has thus far suggested.
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Carnap's article, "The Overcoming of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language" is well-known for its critique of Heidegger, but Carnap concludes with considerable praise for Nietzsche. I argue that what Carnap appreciated... more
Carnap's article, "The Overcoming of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language" is well-known for its critique of Heidegger, but Carnap concludes with considerable praise for Nietzsche. I argue that what Carnap appreciated about Nietzsche is the commitment to "modernism" which they both shared. In the case of Carnap, it is precisely his commitment to modernism which leads him to embrace "modern logic," and as a result of that commitment, to push his own expression of that commitment to the margins of his early texts.
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I distinguish between two phases of Rorty’s naturalism: “nonreductive physicalism” (NRP) and “pragmatic naturalism” (PN). NRP holds that the vocabulary of mental states is irreducible that of physical states, but this irreducibility does... more
I distinguish between two phases of Rorty’s naturalism: “nonreductive physicalism” (NRP) and “pragmatic naturalism” (PN). NRP holds that the vocabulary of mental states is irreducible that of physical states, but this irreducibility does not distinguish the mental from other irreducible vocabularies. PN differs by explicitly accepting a naturalistic argument for the transcendental status of the vocabulary of agency. Though I present some reasons for preferring PN over NRP, PN depends on whether ‘normativity’ can be ‘naturalized’.
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I contrast "transcendental descriptions" with "empirical explanations" in order to articulate and assess McDowell's attitude towards natural science, in particular cognitive science and evolutionary biology. I argue that it is only by... more
I contrast "transcendental descriptions" with "empirical explanations" in order to articulate and assess McDowell's attitude towards natural science, in particular cognitive science and evolutionary biology. I argue that it is only by taking this distinction seriously that we can understand why McDowell says what he does about natural science, and in particular, why he thinks that the questions that arise in evolutionary biology, about the emergence of rational animals, are the closest that a good question can come to the bad questions that he is trying to overcome.
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It is generally recognized that Adorno and Levinas should both be read as urging a rethinking of ethics in light of Auschwitz. This demand should be understood in terms of the acknowledgement of transcendence. A phenomenological account... more
It is generally recognized that Adorno and Levinas should both be read as urging a rethinking of ethics in light of Auschwitz. This demand should be understood in terms of the acknowledgement of transcendence. A phenomenological account of the event of Auschwitz developed by Todes motivates my use of Cavell’s distinction between acknowledgement and knowledge. Both Levinas and Adorno argue that an ethically adequate acknowledgement of transcendence requires that the traditional concept of transcendence as represented in theodicy must be rejected. This rejection takes the form of a rejection of theodicy (Levinas) and a negative theodicy (Adorno). I argue that Adorno’s response is superior because it is a response to the specificity and particularity of the event of Auschwitz as the destruction of, rather than merely the denial of, the humanity of both perpetrators and victims.
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Any interpretation of Nietzsche’s criticisms of morality must show whether or not Nietzsche is entitled both to deny free will and to be concerned with furthering human freedom. Here I will show that Nietzsche is entitled to both claims... more
Any interpretation of Nietzsche’s criticisms of morality must show whether or not Nietzsche is entitled both to deny free will and to be concerned with furthering human freedom. Here I will show that Nietzsche is entitled to both claims if his theory of freedom is set in the context of a naturalistic drive-psychology. The drive-psychology allows Nietzsche to develop a modified but recognizable account of freedom as autonomy. I situate this development in Nietzsche’s thought through a close reading of Daybreak (Morgenröte). In conclusion I contrast Nietzsche’s naturalistic account of autonomy with the transcendental account developed by Kant.
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In this article I examine the cognitive semantics of pragmatism by analyzing whether C. I. Lewis’ concept of ‘the given’ is vulnerable to Sellars’ criticisms of ‘the Myth of the Given’. I show that both Lewis’ commitment to the given and... more
In this article I examine the cognitive semantics of pragmatism by analyzing whether C. I. Lewis’ concept of ‘the given’ is vulnerable to Sellars’ criticisms of ‘the Myth of the Given’. I show that both Lewis’ commitment to the given and Sellars’ criticism of it are positions in cognitive semantics rather than in epistemology per se. Lewis’ commitment to the given as a cognitive semantic thesis (‘the semantic given’) is shown to be consistent with his rejection of epistemological foundationalism (‘the epistemic given’). I show that this position unifies Lewis’ work as a whole. I then show that Sellars’ criticisms of Lewis’ cognitive semantics are defensible and plausible, and that Sellars points us in the right direction for the cognitive semantics that pragmatism needs. I conclude by showing that one aspect of Lewis’ program, what I call ‘the transcendental given,’ does survive Sellars’ criticisms. However, Lewis did not articulate it adequately because he conflated the given with qualia. Sellars’ criticism of the semantic status of qualia refutes Lewis’ conception of the transcendental given but not the transcendental given as such. Accordingly, what is necessary is a ‘transcendental pragmatism’ that acknowledges the transcendental given while rejecting the epistemic given and the semantic given. In doing so I recover Lewis and Sellars from their relatively neglected place and help incorporate them into the pragmatist canon.
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Does neopragmatism succeed in showing that metaphysics can be overcome or rejected? The dominant version of this argument hinges on the anti-representationalism of Rorty, Brandom, and Rorty: language does not represent the world, so we... more
Does neopragmatism succeed in showing that metaphysics can be overcome or rejected? The dominant version of this argument hinges on the anti-representationalism of Rorty, Brandom, and Rorty: language does not represent the world, so we should not look for the correct representation of the world. In "Every Thing Must Go" (2007), Ladyman and Ross establish scientific metaphysics on the institutionalized procedures of scientific practice rather than on semantics. Therefore, their scientific metaphysics is not vulnerable to the neopragmatist critique. However, their project is vulnerable to a criticism based on a different kind of neopragmatism inspired by Kukla's interpretation of what Dennett calls a "stance".
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I argue that critical social epistemologists, such as Miranda Fricker and Charles Mills, should not adopt conceptualism about mental content. Specifically, I argue that Adorno's thesis of "the non-identity of concept and object" accounts... more
I argue that critical social epistemologists, such as Miranda Fricker and Charles Mills, should not adopt conceptualism about mental content. Specifically, I argue that Adorno's thesis of "the non-identity of concept and object" accounts for the tension between moral belief and moral perception that is necessary for critical social epistemology to be genuinely critical. Moreover, Adorno's nonvoluntaristic conception of agency and autonomy shows that overcoming what Fricker calls "hermeneutic injustice" is itself an expression of autonomy.
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Philosophers working in the wake of Sellars, such as Brandom and McDowell, think that there a fundamentally important distinction between ‘sapience’ and ‘sentience.’ Both sentience and sapience are ‘transcendental’ structures – they are... more
Philosophers working in the wake of Sellars, such as Brandom and McDowell, think that there a fundamentally important distinction between ‘sapience’ and ‘sentience.’ Both sentience and sapience are ‘transcendental’ structures – they are posited to explain our cognitively significant experience, including (but not limited to) empirical knowledge – but they also must be adequately reflected in, or realized in, causal structures. Hence whatever structures and processes that we posit in the course of reflecting on the minimal necessary conditions for our cognitive capacities and incapacities must be correlated with structures and processes that are empirically confirmed and, to the extent possible, consistent with a scientific view of the world. Within this generally Sellarsian framework, I aim to criticize one key aspect of Sellars’s theory of perception concerning the role of sense-impressions (or sensations) as causally mediating our perceptual encounters with objects. More specifically, I shall argue that Sellars was right to argue that we need to posit what he calls “sheer receptivity” in the interests of transcendental philosophy, but wrong to argue that sense-impressions were the best candidates to implement sheer receptivity in rerum natura. I shall then turn to recent work in the enactivist approach to philosophy of cognitive science, which emphasizes the structural coupling between sensorimotor skills and environmental affordances. This structural coupling is a more promising candidate than sensations per se as the causal correlate of sheer receptivity. I conclude by comparing the possibility of synthesizing inferentialism and enactivism with Huw Price’s “new bifurcation thesis”, and suggest that my approach is a more promising candidate for 21st-century Sellarsian pragmatism.
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I argue that a central theme in C. I. Lewis, W. Sellars, and John McDowell is the need to satisfy what I call "the demand for transcendental friction": that it must be possible, by reflecting on our basic cognitive capacities as manifest... more
I argue that a central theme in C. I. Lewis, W. Sellars, and John McDowell is the need to satisfy what I call "the demand for transcendental friction": that it must be possible, by reflecting on our basic cognitive capacities as manifest in first-person experience, to guarantee that we are in contact with a reality that we discover and do not create. I show how Lewis, Sellars, and McDowell each attempt to satisfy the Demand and argue that none of them do so adequately. The satisfaction of the Demand requires re-thinking our conception of what the Demand requires.
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I argue here that Huw Price's anti-representationalism should take more seriously the partial rehabilitation of representationalism undertaken by Sellars' distinction between signifying and picturing. Although signifying is not a... more
I argue here that Huw Price's anti-representationalism should take more seriously the partial rehabilitation of representationalism undertaken by Sellars' distinction between signifying and picturing. Although signifying is not a word-world relation, and as such, semantic notions such as "means," "refers to" cannot ground substantial metaphysical doctrines, Sellars' account of picturing is best interpreted as a version of transcendental naturalism, and as such, "overcomes" the Carnapian "overcoming" of metaphysics.
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In our experiences of nature, whether aesthetic, spiritual, or scientific, we find ways of making sense of nature. All these ways of making sense of nature presuppose that nature is intelligible to us. But when we ask, in the reflective... more
In our experiences of nature, whether aesthetic, spiritual, or scientific, we find ways of making sense of nature. All these ways of making sense of nature presuppose that nature is intelligible to us. But when we ask, in the reflective mood characteristic of philosophy, as to why nature is intelligible at all, we find ourselves, in a way also characteristic of philosophy, less sure of how to proceed. I begin examining the intelligibility of nature through Kant’s “problem of affinity”. I shall then discuss two alternatives, John Dewey’s evolutionary metaphysics and Theodor Adorno’s critical theory of society, and argue that each presupposes the other.
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I argue here that Sellars' "Myth of the Given" is usually misinterpreted as having less extensive scope than it usually does. On a sufficiently generic construal of the Myth, I argue that there is a distinctively phenomenological version... more
I argue here that Sellars' "Myth of the Given" is usually misinterpreted as having less extensive scope than it usually does. On a sufficiently generic construal of the Myth, I argue that there is a distinctively phenomenological version of the Myth, one that can be found in the early Husserl but that is absent from Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty's evasion of the phenomenological Myth bears directly on Robert Hanna's argument for Kantian Non-Conceptualism.
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Huw Price’s long-standing criticism of representationalism is partially mitigated by what he now calls “the new bifurcation thesis.” Central to this thesis is his distinction between “i-representations” and “e-representations”. He finds... more
Huw Price’s long-standing criticism of representationalism is partially mitigated by what he now calls “the new bifurcation thesis.” Central to this thesis is his distinction between “i-representations” and “e-representations”. He finds in Sellars’ distinction between “S-assertability” and “picturing” an anticipation of this distinction. I argue here that while Price correctly claims that Sellars anticipates the new bifurcation thesis, he neglects the role that Sellars assigns to picturing. I develop this aspect of Sellars’ thought by turning to Seibt’s interpretation of picturing, which she shows requires a distinction between high-grade, discursive and low-grade, biological normativity. Hence the new bifurcation thesis is best understood as a bifurcation between kinds of normativity, and not just between kinds of representation.
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Review of "Autonomy After Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity" " (Shuster). Forthcoming in International Journal of Philosophical Studies.
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... his concern with the limits of language. Foster reads the early Wittgenstein as concerned with a language in which ethics, aesthetics, and religiosity cannot be “said” or communicated. But instead of silence, Adorno wants to ...
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An open CFP for a critical volume on C. I. Lewis's philosophy to be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016.
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PowerPoint slides for a presentation on my general research program and past and current projects.
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This paper attempts to re-assess Gyorgy Lukacs's criticisms of Nietzsche in "The Destruction of Reason" in light of recent work in Nietzsche's epistemology, I argue that Lukacs's claim that Nietzsche is an "irrationalist" does not take... more
This paper attempts to re-assess Gyorgy Lukacs's criticisms of Nietzsche in "The Destruction of Reason" in light of recent work in Nietzsche's epistemology, I argue that Lukacs's claim that Nietzsche is an "irrationalist" does not take into account Nietzsche's mature skepticism or what Green (2002) calls his "global non-cognitivism". I conclude that Lukacs is right about the basic incompatibility of Nietzsche with Hegelian-Marxist thought, but not for the reasons he gave.
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I argue that Sellars's naturalization of Kant should be understood in terms of how he used behavioristic psychology and cybernetics. I first explore how Sellars used Edward Tolman's cognitive-behavioristic psychology to naturalize Kant in... more
I argue that Sellars's naturalization of Kant should be understood in terms of how he used behavioristic psychology and cybernetics. I first explore how Sellars used Edward Tolman's cognitive-behavioristic psychology to naturalize Kant in the early essay "Language, Rules, and Behavior". I then turn to Norbert Wiener's understanding of feedback loops and circular causality. On this basis I argue that Sellars's distinction between signifying and picturing, which he introduces in "Being and Being Known," can be understood in terms of what I call cybernetic behaviorism. I interpret picturing in terms of cycles of cybernetic behavior and signifying in terms of coordination between cybernetic behavior systems, or what I call triangulated cybernetic behavior. This leads to a formal, naturalistic understanding of personhood as the capacity to engage in triangulated cybernetic behavior. I conclude by showing that Sellars's thought has the resources, which he did not exploit, for introducing the concept of second-order cybernetics. This suggests that Sellars's philosophy of mind could be developed in the direction of autopoiesis and enactivism.
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I argue that Rorty's criticism of the role of picturing in Sellars's philosophy of mind has roots in Nietzsche's criticism of metaphysics. Rorty regards picturing and "CSP" as shadows of God, theological resides in Sellars's thought. I... more
I argue that Rorty's criticism of the role of picturing in Sellars's philosophy of mind has roots in Nietzsche's criticism of metaphysics. Rorty regards picturing and "CSP" as shadows of God, theological resides in Sellars's thought. I shall argue that this is in part a mistake, that rests on Rorty's misunderstanding of Kant. Sellars reads Kant as a Cartesian, and therefore sees Sellars as a naturalized Cartesian, where CSP inherits the role of Descartes's veracious God. Once this misunderstanding is corrected, we can see that Sellars is vulnerable to Rorty's Nietzschean objections.
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A response to Christias' "Somatic Intentionality Bifurcated: A Sellarisan Response to Sachs’s Merleau-Pontyian Account of Intentionality”.
Forthcoming in International Journal of Philosophical Studies
Forthcoming in International Journal of Philosophical Studies
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One of the most difficult concept in Sellars's philosophy of mind is what he called "picturing." I argue that Friedman's idea of "philosophy as meta-science" and argue that picturing is a meta-scientific concept in Friedman's sense: it is... more
One of the most difficult concept in Sellars's philosophy of mind is what he called "picturing." I argue that Friedman's idea of "philosophy as meta-science" and argue that picturing is a meta-scientific concept in Friedman's sense: it is the meta-scientific anticipation of cognitive science. After showing how this makes sense of relevant Sellarsian texts I then turn to predictive processing in cognitive science and suggest that picturing is basically a proto-scientific anticipation of predictive processing.
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According to a widespread conception, the history of American pragmatism is characterized as an “eclipse narrative”: American pragmatism underwent an initial period of growth and flourishing with Peirce, James, Dewey, and many others... more
According to a widespread conception, the history of American pragmatism is characterized as an “eclipse narrative”: American pragmatism underwent an initial period of growth and flourishing with Peirce, James, Dewey, and many others (“classical pragmatism”); it was then driven into marginal corners of the academy subsequent to the arrival of “analytic” philosophy until it was revived in the 1980s as “neopragmatism” (Rorty, Putnam, Brandom, Price etc.). Apart from the lack of historical veracity, this narrative obscures the roles played by prominent academic philosophers in bridging “classical pragmatism” and “neopragmatism” throughout the 1930s through 1970s. One of these philosophers is Wilfrid Sellars. Though Sellars is not unambiguously identified with pragmatism, I shall argue that much of Sellars’s philosophy is a critical revision of classical pragmatism. In particular, I shall argue that Sellars’s distinction between ‘picturing’ and ‘signifying’ – a distinction that poses many interpretative hurdles – can be put in a more satisfactory shape by understanding picturing as a theory of animal cognition. A full decade before the cognitive revolution against behaviorism had taken shape in the computational theory of mind, Sellars had already sketched the foundations of pragmatist cognitive science and illustrated its relation with the pragmatist epistemology he inherited from Peirce, Dewey, and above all the conceptual pragmatism of C. I. Lewis.
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Among the deeper strata of Rorty's philosophy is what I call his aversion to normative violence. Normative violence occurs when some specific group presents itself as having a privileged relation to reality. The alternative to normative... more
Among the deeper strata of Rorty's philosophy is what I call his aversion to normative violence. Normative violence occurs when some specific group presents itself as having a privileged relation to reality. The alternative to normative violence is recognizing that cultural politics has priority over ontology. I trace this Rortyian idea to its origins in Nietzsche and Sellars. Rorty's contribution is to combine Nietzsche on the death of God and Sellars on the Myth of the Given. However, I conclude with a suggestion that Rorty ultimately goes too far in thinking that avoiding normative violence requires abstaining from metaphysics and epistemology as such.