Willem A. deVries

Some Forms of Trust

Three forms of trust: topic-focused trust, general trust, and personal trust are distinguished. Personal trust is argued to be the most fundamental form of trust, deeply connected with the construction of one’s self. Information technology has posed new problems for us in assessing and developing appropriate forms of the trust that is central to our personhood.

Naturalism, the Autonomy of Reason, and Pictures

Abstract Sellars was committed to the irreducibility of the semantic, the intentional, and the normative. Nevertheless, he was also committed to naturalism, which is prima facie at odds with his other theses. This paper argues that Sellars maintained his naturalism by being linguistically pluralistic but ontologically monistic. There are irreducibly distinct forms of discourse, because there is an array of distinguishable functions that language and thought perform, but we are not ontologically committed to the array of apparently non‐natural entities or relations mentioned in the metalanguage. However, there is an underlying relation between language and world presupposed by all empirically meaningful language. In his early work Sellars sought to describe this relation in linguistic terms as a form of ‘pure description’, but inadequacies in that notion drove him towards the naturalistic relation between language and world that he came to call ‘picturing’.

FOLK PSYCHOLOGY, THEORIES, AND THE SELLARSIAN ROOTS

Almost fifty years ago, Wilfrid Sellars first proposed that psychological concepts are like theoretical concepts. Since then, several different research programs have been based on this conjecture. This essay examines what his original claim really amounted to and what it was supposed to accomplish, and then uses that understanding of the original project to investigate the extent to which the later research projects expand on it or depart from it.

Does observational knowledge require metaknowledge? A dialogue on Sellars

Abstract In the following dialogue between TT – a foundationalist – and WdeV – a Sellarsian, we offer our differing assessments of the principle for observational knowledge proposed in Wilfrid Sellars’s ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’. Sellars writes: ‘For a Konstatierung “This is green” to “express observational knowledge”, not only must it be a symptom or sign of the presence of a green object in standard conditions, but the perceiver must know that tokens of “This is green” are symptoms of the presence of green objects in conditions which are standard for visual perception.’ In the ensuing dialogue, TT argues that it sets the bar too high when knowledge about perceptual conditions is required for ordinary observational knowledge – that young children, for example, are implausibly excluded as knowers given Sellars’s principle. WdeV defends Sellars’s metaknowledge requirement against these charges. Results from developmental psychology are surveyed for what they show about the actual capabilities of young children. The implications of these results for the success of Sellars’s principle are debated.

Meaning and Interpretation in History

In the past century, as is well known, there has been constant debate over the proper methodology in history. One side insists that methodologically history is akin to the physical sciences in that it must strive to formulate law-like generalizations and then test them empirically. The other side insists that the historian must strive to interpret and understand historical events, and that law-like generalizations have little or no central role in an interpretation. Just what an interpretation consists in, however, is not usually made very clear. In this paper I shall examine an aspect of the traditional notion of historical interpretation and try to clarify some of its presuppositions. I would like to focus on the relation between two important aspects of an interpretation as conceived by the classical interpretationists, Dilthey, Croce, and Collingwood. Despite their differences, all of these authors agree that: 1) Interpretations have to do with meanings-it is through interpretation that we come to know meanings. 2) Interpretation involves something like re-enacting or re-living in ones imagination the historical moment to be interpreted. Is there any relation between these theses? The interpretationists usually write as if these are two closely related points. I shall argue that there is a clear relationship between the two and a role for re-enactment in historical methodology only if one accepts certain theories of meaning. However, the sense of reenactment varies depending on what theory of meaning is held. I shall first claim that there are at least two theories of meaning that can provide motivation for a re-enactment methodology of history. I shall then argue that only one of these two, the translationist theory of meaning, gives us a plausible understanding of such re-enactment.

Just What is the Relation between the Manifest and the Scientific Images

Abstract Robert B. Brandom’s From Empiricism to Expressivism ranges widely over fundamental issues in metaphysics, with occasional forays into epistemology as well. The centerpiece is what Brandom calls ‘the Kant-Sellars thesis about modality’ (and a related thesis about normativity). This is ‘[t]he claim that in being able to use ordinary empirical descriptive vocabulary, one already knows how to do everything that one needs to know how to do, in principle, to use alethic modal vocabulary – in particular subjunctive conditionals’ (p. 26). (For the equivalent thesis about norms, simply substitute ‘normative’ for ‘alethic modal’ and drop the mention of subjunctives.) Despite claiming descent from Sellars, Brandom defends here a version of modal realism and tries hard to limit Sellarsian nominalism, all in the service of elaborating Brandom’s own version of pragmatism. The range of issues Brandom addresses defies adequate consideration in a critical notice, so I confine myself here to a single issue: What is the relation between the Manifest and Scientific Images? Brandom is very critical of Sellars’ treatment, but I do not think Brandom’s criticisms carry the day.

Is Sellars's Rylean hypothesis plausible? A dialogue

In order to provide an alternative to the Cartesian myth that knowledge of our thoughts and sensations is “given,” Sellars posits a community of “Rylean ancestors” – humans at an early stage of conceptual development who possess a language containing sophisticated concepts about the physical world and about their own language and behavior, but who lack any concepts of thoughts or sensations. Sellars’s presentation of this thought experiment leaves many important details sketchy. In the following dialogue, we offer our differing assessments of how well those details could be filled out. TT questions how the Rylean hypothesis could provide a plausible account of human thought and sensory experience at any stage of human conceptual development. WdeV responds to TT’s challenge by filling out the picture of what the Ryleans’ conceptual world would look like. TT and WdeV debate the merits and the plausibility of the resulting picture.