08/15/2008
London Review of Books, June 19 2008
This is a review of two books collecting the works of Wilfrid Sellars. Author describes the three main points to Sellars' systematic philosophy. The first is that science is the descriptor of reality. The problem with this claim is that we don't live in the world described by science; we live in a world of a manifest image. Instead of denying this is a problem, Sellars confronted it with his second main point: the meaning of a word can be expressed by what correct inferences you can make in its usage. Author contrasts this with Frege, who considered meaning to be referring a property to an object.
The final discussion by the author is Sellars' work on qualia, or 'the myth of the given', which highlights his third main point: 'all awareness is a linguistic affair', including inner thoughts being construed instead as inner speech. Author is unconvinced on this point, since Sellars seems to embrace an emergent feature of our brains.
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