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Reviewed by:
  • In The Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars
  • Scott F. Aikin
Wilfrid Sellars. In The Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars. Edited by Kevin Scharp, Robert Brandom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. xxv + 491 pp.

With In the Space of Reasons Kevin Scharp and Robert Brandom have done many philosophers a service. Collections of Sellars’s essays existed until now only as binders filled with photocopies from various journals and conference proceedings. Working on Sellars is hard enough philosophically, and the paper-chase element was an unwelcome obstacle. Scharp and Brandom have placed the core essays of the Sellarsian project together and arranged them to present a systematic view on meaning, epistemology, and metaphysics. In addition, Scharp and Brandom close the volume with three of Sellars’s essays engaging Kant on the formal unity of judgment, the schematism, and the imagination. The result is a collection that, when combined with the now easily accessible “Empiricism and Philosophy of Mind,” lays out a complete philosophical program. Scharp and Brandom’s choices are exemplary, and their arrangement makes sense—essays on language and meaning in the first group, essays on metaphysics and epistemology follow. The broader theory is then applied with essays on science and reality and then further clarified with the essays engaging Kant. The crucial elements of the program arising from the progression are inferentialism (Brandom and Scharp’s favored term) with meaning, proceduralism (Jay Rosenberg’s term) in epistemology, direct realism with perception, nominalism in metaphysics, and scientific realism with reality. The order of presentation is important, since the elements, to use a Sellarsian phrase, “hang together” in a unique way: if inferentialism is true, then this has consequences in terms of not only how we know, but also what we know. If the objects of knowledge must be of a certain kind, then this must be reflected in the way we think reality is structured. Sellars, it may be said, was a linguistic philosopher par excellence. In addition, and surely because of Sellars’s unique and obtuse style, Scharp and Brandom provide a 25-page introduction with thumbnail overviews of each of their selections and roadmaps of the broader philosophical terrain covered. The result is a philosophically satisfying and thought-provoking volume. With [End Page 363] thought-provoking works, however, many thoughts provoked are critical. Three such critical thoughts will be aired in this review.

The first critical thought is not one directly about Sellars’s work, but rather about the reception it has received among pragmatist philosophers. A good number have taken the attitude that Sellars’s project is irreconcilable with naturalism (and hence, with pragmatism . . . making Sellars-style analytic pragmatism a contradiction). For example, Joseph Margolis has argued that the Rorty-Brandom trajectory of contemporary neopragmatism is not only “a bid to displace Dewey by Sellars” as the touchstone for contemporary pragmatism, but it also introduces an anti-naturalist outlook on intentionality and meaning. Sellars’s model for intentionality and meaning is that of language-use, and Margolis argues that this model “knocks out of play any Darwinian recovery of the continuity of the human with the animal.”1 Further, Tom Rockmore holds that the Sellarsian program, if it is consistent in its appropriations of Hegel’s models for reasoning, must be committed to idealism: “The path leading to Hegel was finally opened in Sellars’s massive borrowing of Hegelian arguments against traditional empiricism. . . . The problem can be put very simply. It makes no sense to accept Hegel but to reject idealism.”2 But these concerns with Sellars’s program are incorrect. First, Sellars is careful to explain that the pattern-governed behavior of language-speaking arises from organisms shaped by natural selective pressures. From this, language-training is the crucial element, since we must be taught to speak languages. Once language-speakers can talk about the language they speak, they have the conceptual abilities we are interested in analyzing for the sake of epistemology or philosophy of mind. The ability to use a meta-language, then, is Sellars’s criterion for possessing intentionality, which hardly seems idealistic or anti-naturalistic. Surely it is a restrictive criterion, but that...

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