Categories and Noumena: Two Kantian Axes of Sellars’s Thought Part I: On the Way to a Theory of the Categories

being such that 2+2=4.

34^ The Philosophical Review 83 (1974), pp. 157-181. More recently, dispositionalist views are expounded and defended in Chakravartty, A., A Metaphysics for Scientific Realism: Knowing the Unobservable [Cambridge University Press, 2007], and Bird, A. Nature's Metaphysics: Laws and Properties, [Oxford University Press, 2007].

35^ Lewis, D. ‘Finkish Dispositions’, The Philosophical Quarterly 47 (1997): 143–158.

For a more recent survey: Fara, M. ‘Dispositions and Habituals’, Noûs 39 (2005): 43–82.

36^ It might seem that the modal realism of Chapter Five “Modal Expressivism and Modal Realism: Together Again,” and the conceptual realism I have endorsed elsewhere, must involve commitment to such a distinguished class of properties that are ‘natural.’ I do not think that it does. In any case, I take it that even if the idea of properties that are “written in Nature’s own language” were sustainable, such properties would not be modally insulated. If they were, we could not appeal to them to describe how things are.

37^ The issue here is not at all one of vagueness, but of mismatch of criteria of identity and individuation. The issues Wilson discusses in Wandering Significance are of much greater relevance than is classic sorites vagueness.

38^ I have bracketed concerns about Sellars’s commitments to a Peircean end-of-inquiry science, conceived of as the limit asymptotically approached by properly conducted empirical theorizing. In fact I think it is very difficult to make sense of this notion, for the same reasons I have offered in objecting to Crispin Wright’s similar appeal to ‘superassertibility’ as assertibility by current justificatory standards and evidence that is robust under arbitrary improvements in or additions to our information. Firmness under revisions by adding information is an epistemically valuable property (a characterization of something we ought to aim at) only if ‘information’ is restricted to true claims. If not, if it just means something like then-warranted, it will include lots of false claims. And there is no reason to esteem epistemically claims commitment to which would be robust under the addition of arbitrary false claims, even if warrantedly believed. Such accounts of what inquiry aims at seem bound to be either circular (because implicitly invoking notions of truth—perhaps in the guise of information—or improvement) or normatively unsatisfactory, because not specifying properties of our views we have reason to aspire to achieving.

39^ Reprinted in In the Space of Reasons [op. cit.].

40^ C. I. Lewis An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation [Open Court, 1950].

41^ "Phenomenalism" in In the Space of Reasons, ed. Kevin Scharp and Robert Brandom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 331.

42^ Synthese 28, pp. 97-115. 

43^ Putnam, H., 1975, "Philosophy and Our Mental Life", Chapter 14 of Putnam's Mind, Language and Reality: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. I have slightly altered the example.

44^ Mark Wilson Wandering Significance [Oxford University Press, 2008]. No-one who has thought about the wealth of examples Wilson presents will be tempted by the simple-minded picture of explanatory reductionism of the special sciences that I am joining the common contemporary philosophical wisdom in rejecting. For expository reasons I have regretfully indulged here in what Wilson properly excoriates as the “Theory T fallacy.”

45^ For instance in Kim, J. 1992 "Multiple Realizability and the Metaphysics of Reduction" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52, pp. 1-26. Reprinted in Kim's Supervenience and Mind, [Cambridge University Press, 1993] pp. 309-336.

46^ “Realism and the New Way of Words” (henceforth RNWW) pp. 454/83 in J. Sicha (ed) Pure Pragmatics and Possible Worlds: The Early Essays of Wilfrid Sellars (Ridgeview Publishing Co. 1980).

47^ A classic defense of this view is Terry Horgan’s “From Supervenience to Superdupervenience: Meeting the Demands of a Material World” Mind vol. 102.408 (1993) pp. 555-586.

48^ RNWW (op. cit.) 440/69.

49^ RNWW (p448/77): "It would be foolish for me to pretend that I have done more than grope in the right direction."

50^ Starting off in “Naturalism without Representationalism,” in Naturalism in Question, ed. David Macarthur and Mario de Caro [Harvard University Press, 2004], pp. 71-88, and more fully in his books Naturalism Without Mirrors [Oxford U. Press, 2011], and Expressivism, Pragmatism, and Representationalism [Cambridge U. Press, 2013].

51^ Frank Jackson From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis [Oxford University Press, 2000].

52^ As will be evident from what follows, Huw understakes two commitments I am not willing to undertake, one explicitly and one implicitly:

1. 
   The explicit one is to anti-representationalism as opposed to nonrepresentationalism. I think some expressions should be given a representationalist semantics. But not all should.
   
2. 
   The implicit commitment of his is to using a wholly naturalistic metalanguage to specify linguistic use, in a distinctive sense of ‘naturalistic’ that identifies it as a subset of descriptive vocabulary. I think normative vocabulary, too, is available. And I think normative vocabulary is categorial: it, like modal vocabulary, necessarily comes in play along with descriptive vocabulary, not that one must have it whenever one has descriptive vocabulary, but that one must have the phenomena that it makes explicit wherever one has descriptive vocabulary. My slogan here is: naturalism need not entail descriptivism—the view that only descriptive vocabulary is licit, that other expressive roles are second-class (though the categorial ones are, in a certain sense, parasitic on the descriptive).
   

53^ As Hartry Field does in Science Without Numbers [Princeton U. Press, 1980].

54^ In another early essay, “Epistemology and the New Way of Words,” Sellars says “philosophy is properly conceived as the pure theory of empirical languages,” observing that pure semantics is only a proper part of it (PPPW p. 645/31).

55^ CDCM §79.

56^ RNWW (p. 448/77):

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