Overview of Wilfrid Sellars's philosophy.

I use a distinction between single-minded and indifferent choice attitudes, modeled across maximally determinate plans of action, as a basis for interpreting deontic claims – about what ought, ought not, and may be done – as expressing a mode of relation between mind and world that gives voice to the exercise of practical rationality. At the same time, I use maximally determinate possible worlds to model descriptive claims in order to understand them as involving a mode of relation between mind (...) and world that manifests our theoretical rationality. The result is of interest to both linguists looking for a formal treatment of deontic modality that captures the role prescriptive mental states play in our lives, and philosophers interested in substantive questions about action-guiding and representational mental states as exercises of practical and theoretical rationality. (shrink)

Volume 28, Issue 1, February 2020, Page 114-127.

Volume 28, Issue 1, February 2020, Page 114-127.

This paper discusses the account of alethic modality as presented by Wilfrid Sellars in his earlier work from 1947 to 1958. Its aim is twofold. First, I discuss Sellars' analysis by exploring its historical relationship to Carnap's account of modality. I argue that Carnap's early syntactic treatment of modality profoundly influenced Sellars' own so-called ‘regulist' account of modality in terms of rules of inference. Furthermore, it is suggested that Sellars' lesser-known possible worlds analysis was influenced by Carnap's later semantic account (...) of modality. The second aim of the paper is a critical one. I raise a number of objections to Sellars’ account of modality and argue that his account confronts some serious limitations. I also argue that Sellars does not provide a satisfying explanation of the relationship between his regulist account and his possible worlds analysis. I offer such an explanation by arguing that his regulist account should be understood as a pragmatic account of what is conveyed by the use of modal sentences, whereas his possible worlds analysis is a semantic account of the asserted content of modal statements. That is, the regulist account and the possible worlds analysis have different explanatory targets. (shrink)