Experience and Sensation: Sellars and Dewey on the Non-cognitive Aspects of Mental Life

Experience and Sensation Sellars and Dewey on the Non­cognitive Aspects of Mental Life Teed Rockwell Sellars never used the word 'experience' as a technical term the way Dewey did, and to my knowledge never cited Dewey's epistemology when discussing his own. But they were both interested in coming up with an holistic alterna­ tive to the atomistic epistemology of Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and C. D. Broad. Sellars and Dewey each isolated and critiqued different aspects of this atomistic epistemol­ ogy by giving it a name: Dewey labeled his target Sensation­ alistic Empiricism, and Sellars called the object of his critique the Myth of the Given. The main theme of this paper will be the similarity and differences in their responses to this kind of philosophy, and how both responses can be clarified and strengthened by considering recent discoveries in Cognitive Neuroscience. Shortly after Dewey's death, it appeared that his critiques of Sensationalistic Empiricism had been unsuccessful (at least in the academic marketplace). The twentieth century empiri­ cism that called itself "Analytical Philosophy" eventually replaced Deweyan pragmatism in America, and various related theories of knowledge with names like "Sense datum theory," "Logical Positivism," and "Logical Empiricism" made an orthodoxy out of the view of knowledge that Dewey had tried so hard to defeat. Now, however, this kind of empiricism is in disrepute, thanks to critiques, made primarily by Quine and Sellars, of what Sellars called the Myth of the Given. Sellars' critique of sense datum theory in his "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," and Quine's critique of the empiricist dogma that it is possible to reduce all meaningful statements to inferences from directly given observation sentences, has made a new orthodoxy out of the belief that Sensationalistic Empiricism is a dead horse no longer worth beating. But does the defeat of sensationalistic empiricism imply a triumph for the alternative theory of experience that Dewey proposed in works like "Experience and Nature"? Quine, at least, speaks favorably of Deweyan pragmatism as the wave of the future, as do Rorty, Putnam and many others. But Rorty seems to express the modern attitude when he says that "the philosophers of today . . . tend to talk about sentences a lot but say very little about ideas or experiences" (Rorty 1994, p. 55). Quine certainly exemplifies this attitude when half way through "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," he decides to sidestep the questions of what an observation is, and concen­ trate instead on observation sentences. The fact that he proudly described himself as a behaviorist, and spent a great deal of time attacking anything that might be describable as mental, makes it highly unlikely that he would be sympathetic to any talk about something called "experience." But Sellars, although he refers to himself as a "Verbal Behaviorist," and considers knowledge to be primarily linguistic, has a fair amount to say about the non­linguistic aspects of experience. Unlike Quine, he emphasized that it was necessary to talk about inner events, not just behavior and language. Sellars and Sensations Sellars claimed that there were inner events he called "sensations" or "sensa," which seems to suggest a close kinship with sense data. But he also avoided many of the mistakes of sense datum theory by turning the concept of sensation on its head, making it a theoretical concept rather than something immediately given. Once the supposedly essential characteristic of givenness is removed from sensa­ tions, what is it that we have left, exactly? There are many indications that Sellars sometimes thought that sense data do exist, with almost all of the attributes that Broad, Moore and Russell ascribe to them except for givenness. I am sketching a view which hovers on the edge of the sense datum theory, and yet I believe it succeeds in avoiding falling into the abyss. (Sellars 1989, p. 103) For Sellars, sensations are non­cognitive, because having a sensation is distinct from knowing about it. They are also non­linguistic, because thinking "there is a pink ice cube" is phenomenologically different from sensing a pink ice cube. Sensations are described as "self­presenting" (ibid. p. 282), even though they must be accompanied by a cognitive men­ tal event...