Wilfrid Sellars

Quick Facts

• Name: Wilfrid Sellars
• Lived: 1912-1989
• Place: United States; taught at Iowa, Minnesota, Yale, and Pittsburgh
• Main fields: epistemology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, metaphysics, and philosophy of science
• Main labels: analytic philosophy, Kantian philosophy, pragmatism, scientific realism
• Best known for: the "Myth of the Given," the "space of reasons," and the contrast between the manifest image and the scientific image
• Major works: Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man," Science, Perception and Reality, and Science and Metaphysics

The Big Question

How can experience give us knowledge without pretending that raw sensation justifies beliefs by itself?

Sellars also asks a second, larger question: how can we fit persons, reasons, meanings, and responsibility into the scientific picture of nature?

In One Minute

Sellars was an American philosopher who pushed analytic philosophy away from simple empiricism and toward a more Kantian picture of mind and language. He argued that knowledge is not built on bare inner items called "sense data." Seeing a red apple can cause you to say, "That is red," but the seeing does not count as knowledge unless you already have the concept red and know how to use it.

His slogan-like idea is the space of reasons. A belief is not just an event in the brain. It is something that can be supported, challenged, corrected, and used as a reason for other claims. Sellars also distinguished the manifest image, our ordinary picture of persons and things, from the scientific image, the picture built by physics, biology, and other sciences. He wanted a synoptic view: one picture in which science is taken seriously without erasing the human world of reasons.

What They Taught

Sellars taught that experience matters, but it is not a magic foundation. Old-style empiricism often pictured knowledge as resting on something simply given to the mind: a patch of red, a private sensation, a raw impression. The mind would supposedly know this item directly, then build more complicated beliefs on top of it.

Sellars calls that the Myth of the Given. The problem is that a bare sensation is not yet a reason. If light hits your eyes and causes a visual response, that is a causal event. To know "this is red," you need to classify what you see. You need the concept red, the ability to distinguish red from orange or green, and some grasp of when a red-report is appropriate. Knowledge belongs to a practice of judging, correcting, and giving reasons.

This is why Sellars says beliefs stand in the space of reasons. A cause explains why something happened. A reason supports a claim. If a loud bang makes you jump, the bang caused the jump. If you say, "The tire burst because I heard a bang and saw the car drop," those observations can be reasons for your belief. Sellars wants philosophy to stop confusing these two roles.

He also gives a social account of concepts. Concepts are not private labels attached to private inner objects. They are learned in public practices. A child learns "red" by being trained, corrected, and brought into a shared language. Later the child may report red things immediately, without consciously making an inference. But that immediacy is a trained ability inside a conceptual practice, not a pre-conceptual foundation.

This gives Sellars his inferential view of meaning. The meaning of a claim depends on its role in reasoning: what supports it, what follows from it, and what rules it out. "This is copper" supports "This conducts electricity under normal conditions." "This is red all over" rules out "This is green all over" at the same time and place. To understand a concept is to know how it works in such patterns.

Sellars is deeply Kantian, but in an analytic idiom. Immanuel Kant argued that the mind actively organizes experience through concepts. Sellars turns that into a theory of language, rules, and public reason-giving. Receptivity is our being affected by the world. Spontaneity is our active capacity to judge, classify, infer, and take responsibility for claims. For Sellars, perception involves both.

His philosophy of mind follows the same pattern. He does not deny inner episodes such as thoughts or sensations. He denies that knowledge of them is the starting point of all knowledge. In the "Myth of Jones," Sellars imagines a community that first explains people's behavior by postulating inner thoughts, much as science postulates unobservable entities. Over time, speakers learn to report their own inner episodes directly. First-person awareness is real, but it depends on a language and a learned conceptual scheme.

Sellars also tries to reconcile two pictures of reality. The manifest image is the everyday world of persons, tables, colors, intentions, promises, and reasons. The scientific image is the world described by mature theory: molecules, neurons, fields, evolutionary processes, and causal laws. Sellars thinks science has authority about what exists and how nature works. But he does not want to throw away the manifest image, because persons and reasons are the setting in which inquiry, science, and criticism make sense at all.

Key Ideas With Examples

• Myth of the Given: the mistaken idea that raw experience can justify a belief without concepts. Example: a baby or animal may react to red, but saying "this is red" as knowledge requires a learned concept and standards for correct use.
• Space of reasons: the realm where claims are justified, challenged, and connected. Example: "The road is wet" can be a reason to believe "It rained," while clouds and pressure systems are causes of the rain.
• Manifest image: the ordinary framework in which we understand ourselves as persons among things. Example: "She apologized because she broke a promise" belongs to the manifest image.
• Scientific image: the theoretical framework built by science. Example: an account of speech in terms of neurons, muscles, sound waves, and evolution belongs to the scientific image.
• Synoptic vision: Sellars's hoped-for joined view of reality. Example: pain can be studied scientifically while still being something a person reports, worries about, and asks others to relieve.
• Inferential role: the place a statement or concept has in reasoning. Example: "This is a triangle" supports "It has three sides" and rules out "It is a square."
• Psychological nominalism: the view that awareness of kinds, facts, and meanings depends on concepts learned in language. Example: seeing a bird as a finch requires more than eyesight; it requires a classificatory skill.
• Scientific realism: the view that successful science describes real features of the world, not just useful calculation tools. Example: electrons are not just convenient fictions if they are part of the best scientific explanation.
• Spontaneity: the active side of thought: judging, classifying, inferring, and taking responsibility. Example: when you decide that a track in the mud is a dog print, you are not just receiving an image; you are applying concepts.

Major Works

• Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956): Sellars's classic attack on the Myth of the Given. It argues that perception can give knowledge only within a conceptual practice, and it introduces the "Myth of Jones" to explain how talk about thoughts and sensations can arise without making private inner awareness the foundation of knowledge.
• "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man" (1962): Sellars's clearest statement of the manifest image and the scientific image. The essay asks how the everyday world of persons and reasons can be joined with the scientific world of theory and causal explanation.
• Science, Perception and Reality (1963): a collection that gathers major essays on perception, science, and realism. It shows Sellars trying to explain why common-sense perception is not the final picture of reality, while still taking perceptual reporting seriously.
• Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes (1968): Sellars's major Kantian book. It reworks themes from Critique of Pure Reason, especially the idea that experience depends on conceptual structure.
• Essays in Philosophy and Its History (1974): essays connecting Sellars's own systematic views with figures from the history of philosophy. The book shows how he reads past philosophers as partners in live problems, not just as historical exhibits.
• Naturalism and Ontology (1979): Sellars's later work on what kinds of things a scientific naturalist should recognize. It asks how language, abstract objects, and ontology fit with a broadly scientific worldview.

Why It Matters

Sellars changed the way many philosophers think about knowledge. After him, it became much harder to say that knowledge rests on private, self-certifying sensations. Even philosophers who reject his conclusions usually have to explain how experience can justify belief without falling back into the Given.

He also helped move analytic philosophy into a post-positivist phase. He kept the analytic demand for clarity, but joined it to Kantian questions about the conditions of experience and pragmatist questions about practice and use. This is why later thinkers could use Sellars to connect logic, language, mind, science, and German idealism.

His distinction between causes and reasons remains central. It matters whenever someone asks whether human thought can be fully explained by brain science, whether perception is already conceptual, or whether meaning is mainly reference, use, or inferential role.

Proponents, Critics, and Opponents

Robert Brandom is Sellars's most important later developer. Brandom turns the space of reasons into a detailed theory of commitments, entitlements, and inferential roles. John McDowell also works from Sellars, especially in debates about whether perceptual experience itself belongs inside the space of reasons.

Richard Rorty uses Sellars's attack on the Given, along with W. V. O. Quine's attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction, to reject the idea that philosophy is a special mirror of reality. But Rorty is less committed than Sellars to scientific realism. Sellars wants to save science and reasons together; Rorty is more suspicious of large philosophical systems.

Quine and Sellars are often paired because both criticize older empiricism. The difference is important. Quine pushes philosophy toward natural science. Sellars agrees that science matters, but insists that justification, meaning, and rule-following cannot be replaced by causal description alone.

Critics include foundationalists who think Sellars throws away too much of the justificatory role of experience. Some philosophers of perception think he makes experience too conceptual or too dependent on language. Some naturalists think his space of reasons leaves norms insufficiently explained. Sense-data theorists and traditional Cartesians reject his denial that private inner awareness is the secure starting point of knowledge.

Related Pages

• Immanuel Kant
• W. V. O. Quine
• Robert Brandom
• Richard Rorty
• Analytic Philosophy
• Pragmatism
• Empiricism
• Critique of Pure Reason