Wittgensteins, Heideggers, and Gadamers, Oh My!

Brandom develops Sellars’ position in interesting ways. First, he characterizes that sort of awareness common to non-language using animals as “sentience” in contrast to that available to language-users, which he calls “sapience.” This distinction allows for some sort of meaningful engagement in the world on the part of mere sentients while maintaining the Sellarsian conviction that language institutes distinctly new modes of meaning. Second, Brandom elucidates language’s relationship to praxis as follows. Language provides the capacity for speakers to make explicit meanings that are already implicit in their practices. The resulting explications would not have the meaning they do absent those already established implicit meanings, but they take on new roles not available to mere unspoken aspects of  practices. Most of all, linguistic explications can play normative roles, particularly as “tokens” in Sellarsian games of giving and asking for reasons — arguments and other practices of logic and reasoning.

However, Sellars’ rejection of the Myth of the Given complicates this arrangement. Put schematically, he proposes that conceptual understanding, including the understanding of perceptual phenomena, relies on training in what he calls “the game of giving and asking for reasons,” which allows the trainee entrance into “the space of reasons.” Sellars charges that a range of philosophical approaches, particularly those travelling under the heading “empiricism,” illicitly ascribe to non-language using humans capacities they could only possess after they have learned language. Thus language for Sellars is conceptually prior to perception, at least as we human adults perceive, and one can easily extend this line of thinking to contend that language is likewise prior to praxis. In strictly temporal terms some sort of perception and praxis must supercede human language acquisition, but these sorts must, per Sellars, be impoverished in concepts, and hence in meaning, relative to that experienced by language-users.

The 1997 edition of Wilfrid Sellars’ Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (originally published in 1956) includes an introduction by Richard Rorty and an extensive study guide by Robert Brandom. Rorty suggests early in his piece that Sellars’ text joins two other major works of the 1950s, Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empicism” and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, as the signposts on analytic philosophy’s road from early 20th century empiricism to late 20th century “post-positivism.” Whatever the merits of Rorty’s analysis here (and I see no reason to disagree), it is intriguing for a Wittgensteinian such as me to note Sellars’ frequent oblique references to his Austro-British contemporary, both affirmative and critical, many of which Brandom, as is his wont, makes explicit. In their commitment to a broadly pragmatic conception of language and meaning Wittgenstein and Sellars are clearly kindred spirits. In the details, however, lurk questions.  Sellarsian interpretations of Wittgenstein are common in the work of the Pittsburgh Hegelians, and since I am rather well disposed toward most of their exegetical claims and, as I stated in an earlier post, am more interested in the concept of primal praxis than in the matter of the extent to which Wittgenstein ever did or would have affirmed such a concept, I see no reason to quibble over exactly which paragraphs of the Philosophical Investigations reveal Ludwig’s truest intentions. Instead, let’s move on to Sellars’ attempted refutation of “The Myth of the Given” and to seeing how his arguments relate to the project as I’ve defined it thus far.

Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind is a critique of the widespread philosophical presupposition that pre-linguistic perception and experience are already meaningful in the way that language-influenced perception and experience are. What is allegedly given is conceptually formed awareness of objects and events, or what Brandom terms “sapience,” as contrasted with the non-conceptual awareness that travels under the heading “sentience.” Sellars contends that only by being initiated into and trained in the language games of giving and asking for reasons, as well as those further language games that presuppose such reasoning, does one enter “the space of reasons.” In this space one’s perceptions, actions, thoughts, and utterances have normative force. Without the requisite normative training one is actually merely sentient, engaging with the world not necessarily in a merely mechanical way, but yet not in a conceptual way. Conceptual awareness is not given. It must be achieved.

Sellars counters the Cartesian version of the Myth of the Given by challenging the supposed incorrigibility of “looks” language games. That is, to use an anachronistic framework, Descartes proposed that looks-talk was conceptually prior to is-talk. For example, I can be wrong about whether that apple is red, but I cannot be wrong about whether that apple looks red to me. Furthermore, Cartesianism was premised on the promise that my perception of the apple could ultimately, somehow, guarantee the fact of the apple’s actual redness. Whether or not this check ever gets cashed, however, Descartes would cling to the conviction that perception epistemologically precedes reality.

Strikingly, Sellars contends that Descartes had this relation precisely backward: reality epistemologically precedes perception. More precisely, is-talk is conceptually prior to looks-talk. “That apple looks red” makes no sense unless it would also make sense (whether the statement is correct or not) to say, “That apple is red.” As Brandom puts it, the former statement is just the latter statement absent a full endorsement. “That apple looks red” does commit me to the existence of the apple, but not to its redness, whereas “I think I see a red apple” would revoke even that commitment, and “That apple is red” would accept responsibility for all relevant implications. Somewhat amusingly, Brandom notes that an utterance such as “It seems to me that that apple looks red to me” is redundant because the cautious “it seems to me” has no work to do: the word “looks” has already withheld all there is to withhold here. These remarks clarify what it means to dwell in the space of reasons. When one does have the post-Cartesian courage to endorse one’s claims, one thus gains title to a potentially endless array of logical obligations and entitlements. To take a plausible example, if that apple is red then it is ripe, and would consequently make a good snack, and so I should pick it and take it to my hungry sister. Under the right circumstances I may take on this commitment whether I choose to accept it or not, and other language-users can take note of my commitment, simply by hearing me say, “That apple is red,” even if I do not. To be a language-user, to be sapient, is to live an inferential life.

Many have noted that Husserlian phenomenology reinforces the Myth of the Given.  The same would seem true as well of primal praxis. Here we return to the meaning of “meaning.” (Warning: the following sentence colorfully mixes at least two and maybe three or more philosophical idioms) If claiming that the language-free engagement with equipmental totalities can be meaningful entails presuming that Dasein can function sapiently absent appropriate training in language-games (particularly those of giving-and-asking-for-reasons), then primal praxis is guilty of the same crime as Husserl and other “empiricists.” If on the contrary languageless Dasein’s meaningful being-in-the-world amounts merely to an elaborate pre-conceptual sentience, no such crime has been committed. More precisely and thoroughly, something must give in one of three ways: either primal practioners are not sapient, primal praxis illicitly presumes a sapience it cannot found, or Sellars is wrong to tie sapience so tightly to language games.