"Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man," Part 1

Philosophy as the Aspiration for the Synoptic View

I think of Wilfrid Sellars as a transparently enigmatic figure in contemporary philosophy. The Reason . . . has to do with Sellars’ being as passionately absorbed as he is with the question, How best to begin Philosophically? I therefore hazard the proposition that Sellars’ question is close to being the only question that matters in philosophy, if you construe it in Sellars’ terms, as pointedly featured in the paper, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man.”

— Joseph Margolis, “Reading Sellars’s ‘Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,’ with Robert Brandom at One’s Side”

This essay is the first in a series introducing the reader to the philosophy of mind by way of a close commentary on Wilfrid Sellars’s classic (1960) “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man.”¹ This paper is canonical for my own thinking about thinking², so returning to it in my maturity is a very useful exercise for me. I have no doubt that you might be worried whether the steep investment in following my admittedly self-indulgent (and even nostalgic) program will yield any dividends. That concern can be assuaged with two promises that Sellars’s paper holds. First, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man” (PSIM) is remarkably prescient. Sellars weaves for us something like a piece of historical fiction (or myth) of how philosophy of mind, in its distinctive 20th century Anglo-American variety, may have come about and how it might proceed in the future.³ Sellars’s speculative mythology has proven insightful, as it is quite easy to see in Sellars’s cast of characters, though they may not go by the the names we call them now, all of the major players in philosophy of mind as it has unfolded over the last sixty years. Thus, PSIM is far from outdated. Indeed, this pre-history of the philosophy of mind provides us with a topography for our thinking about thinking even today. Sellars’s essay is dense, but I am aware of no better introduction to the philosophy of mind.

Second, Sellars got something profoundly right about the point of philosophy of mind; he had a sense of what the core issue really is and why that issue is of grave importance for human self-understanding. Sellars’s take on the import of the philosophy of mind has, in my view, mostly been unheeded or forgotten. Specifically, popular discussions of philosophy of mind, along with a lot of textbooks in the field, are mostly exhausted by the debate over the mind-body problem, in particular whether dualist or materialist ontologies are better suited to address that issue. In this way, philosophy of mind often becomes yet another point of confrontation between naturalists and anti-naturalists, a bone of contention in the on-going struggle over the relative plausibility of theism and naturalism, with consequences for specific religious claims such as the immorality of the soul and human special creation. For Sellars, these metaphysical and ontological puzzles are really the surface symptoms of a deeper philosophical vexation. This more primordial concern is central to our very standing as distinctively human beings, whether or not our answers to the puzzle entail a supernatural explanation or the positing of an immaterial substance. In short, Sellars recognizes more fundamental questions in the philosophy of mind than the metaphysical-ontological obsessions that bring many of us to the field (though he certainly does not deny the significance of the metaphysical-ontological issues). Sellars is largely correct on this point, and he is likewise right to point out that failure to heed this diagnosis is likely to lead to confusion and superficial philosophizing.

My mention of diagnosis is crucial for our understanding of PSIM. Though he does at times put his argumentative foot down, Sellars’s main aims are genealogical or taxonomic, i.e., he lays out the options for dealing with the central problem of the philosophy of mind, and prognosticative, i.e, he speculates over the inherent virtues and vices of these options by predicting the likely dead ends in which many of them will idle (and here Sellars proves remarkably prescient). Of course, both the taxonomic and prognosticative treatment of these therapeutic endeavors presupposes a diagnosis of the ailment they are supposed to address. Thus, Sellars spends a good bit of the essay locating the itch that philosophy of mind is supposed to scratch. You will find, though Sellars does show his cards regarding the direction of the solution, he ultimately sees philosophy of mind as yet unresolved, or possibly open-ended entirely. Sellars tells us how philosophy of mind might go in the future or how it has gone in the Ur past, without bringing this history to an end. Indeed, Sellars’s use of historical figures (Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel) to interpret contemporary positions in the philosophy of mind leaves us with the impression that we are working through a repetition of a drama that has run its course many times before. The great historical forerunners in the history of philosophy seem to operate like mythical archetypes, i.e., we contemporaries are really rehearsing the script the heroes of the bygone age penned long ago. That sense of a recurring dialectic inherent to our thinking about thinking is, as I will try to show in the following commentary, part of what makes Sellars’s conclusions in PSIM a more profound comment on the human condition than what one might expect from in a dry and technical piece of analytic philosophy. The fact that the problem of the philosophy of mind is a vexation we cannot shed may itself be the most important datum to be considered by the philosopher of mind. That’s not necessarily a standard reading of Sellars, but I’ll be trying to make a case along these lines.

My plan for these essays is simply to follow the text of PSIM in a fairly pedestrian, section-by-section manner. So, I will begin at the beginning, as it were, with Sellars’s first section, “The Philosophical Quest.” Sellars gets us off the ground by making a case for his conception of philosophy. As our discussions unfold in this series of essays, we will see that Sellars’s meta-philosophy isn’t merely pedantic, but is integral to how he frames the philosophy of mind and, more importantly, the human condition itself (what Sellars’s calls "man-in-the-world”). He begins PSIM with his now famous definition of philosophy:

The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under 'things in the broadest possible sense' I include such radically different items as not only 'cabbages and kings', but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to 'know one's way around' with respect to all these things, not in that unreflective way in which the centipede of the story knew its way around before it faced the question, 'how do I walk?', but in that reflective way which means that no intellectual holds are barred. (p.1)

Notice straightaway that Sellars associates philosophy with explanatory unification. As he says above, philosophy wants to bring “things in the broadest possible sense,” i.e., everything, however diverse they seem (“cabbages and kings”) under a general account. This is not innovative, but quite archetypical. Already in Plato we have the notion that all explanation brings the many under the rubric of a one, e.g., the mark of scientific progress is to unify seemingly disparate experimental results under one covering law. I want to leave aside for the moment how Sellars distinguishes philosophy form other disciples, and focus on what he means by “know one’s way around.” Sellars does not have in mind the simple distinction between knowing how and knowing that. One can know that without knowing how, e.g., someone might know that pedaling is the cause of moving a bicycle forward or that the sequential steps in a proof follow an order of entailment, without knowing how to ride a bike or how to find the proof independently. Moreover, one can know how without knowing that, e.g., someone could know how to ride a bicycle or, in some sense, perform a proof in a rote fashion without being able to state explicitly what one does when doing so. That is, there is a logical gap between knowing how and knowing that. Notice, however, Sellars believes at a certain point this distinction breaks down:

However this may be, knowing how to do something at the level of characteristically human activity presupposes a great deal of knowledge that, and it is obvious that the reflective knowing one's way around in the scheme of things, which is the aim of philosophy, presupposes a great deal of reflective knowledge of truths. (pp. 1-2, Sellars’s emphasis)

This remark is central to understanding PSIM, and it carries great philosophical weight in general. Sellars claims that in “characteristically human activity” knowing how and knowing that become intwined, because knowing how as a mode of human knowing always presupposes knowing that.⁴ Whereas the centipede in the story knows how to walk without being able to answer the question “How does one walk?”, a human, acting as human, can stand up to such questioning about its walking. That is, humans “know their way around” in the sense that they are reflective regarding their activities, which for Sellars means that we can justify how we proceed in terms of what we, upon reflection, take to be true. In other words, we do not just “do what we do,” but we can offer reasons for our doings.⁵ We are encountering Sellars’s famous notion of the Space of Reasons: “. . . in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says” (Sellars, “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” p. 169). Thus, for Sellars, distinctively human activities are marked by the fact that we can place our doings in the Space of Reasons, i.e., we can give reasons for what we say and do. We humans, when acting humanly, can offer an explanation of our actions (which includes not just bodily activities, but also our speech, belief, and thinking) in terms of what we take to be true, which is to say that our knowing how is always, at least implicitly, a knowing that. Note well (for this will be important to have a sense of the really big prey Sellars is stalking in PSIM) that Sellars sees this ability to stand up to questioning (“Why are you doing that?!”) as constitutive of distinctive human being; “man-in-the world,” as Sellars puts it.

Surely, however, Sellars is not claiming that philosophers have monopolized distinctively human knowing. Hopefully, nobody is saying that other disciplines are not humanely reflective! What then distinguishes philosophy from other specialized sciences? The modifier “specialized” the clue:

What is characteristic of philosophy is not a special subject-matter, but the aim of knowing one's way around with respect to the subject-matters of all the special disciplines. (PSIM, p. 2)

What we must rather say is that the specialist knows his way around in his own neighbourhood, as his neighbourhood, but doesn't know his way around in it in the same way as a part of the landscape as a whole. (PSIM, p. 4)

Sellars does not doubt for a moment that the practitioner of a special science knows his or her way around in the distinctively human sense. A chemist, as chemist, or a historian, as historian, is a reflective denizen of the space of reasons regarding the subject matter of his or her science. Moreover, the scope of the reflective perspective of the practitioner of a special science is not limited to the bounds of that science: “the ideal practitioner of that discipline would see his special subject-matter and his thinking about it in the light of a reflective insight into the intellectual landscape as a whole” (PSIM, p. 2). That is, the chemist is a reflective reasons-giver within the methodological boundaries of chemistry, while also having some concern as to how chemistry fits into the big picture of our understanding of the world in all its aspects. The chemist should have a mind to situating the chemistry-space-of-reaons within the overall space of reasons encompassing all the sciences, at least that is the aspiration of the ideal practitioner. Notice, however, that the closer the scientific specialist approaches this ideal of reflectivity, the greater “he is said, properly, to be philosophically minded” (PSIM, p. 3). This philosophical mindedness in the chemist and the historian leads them to be less concerned about specific discoveries in their respective fields, and more concerned with a single common picture of the whole. That is, the chemist and the historian leave behind their specific disciplinary methods and commitments and take up the broader picture as such. As they are pushed to the extreme of looking at the picture as a whole, the chemist cum philosopher of chemistry and the historian cum philosopher of history begin to abandon the stances of their particular disciplines and take up a single stance oriented to the whole. This presupposes, at an ideal limit, that there is stance (a science or discipline) that is simply the perspective on the whole, and we call this philosophy. The task of philosophy is not directly to make a “substantive contribution to what we know,” i.e., philosophy does not discover new entities to add to our list of beings, but to “improve the manner in which we know” (PSIM, p,. 3). Philosophy is not a field of ontical discovery, but a stance that puts all such fields into a coherent whole. Sellars concludes, “it is therefore, the ‘eye on the whole’ which distinguishes the philosophical enterprise,” and note that Sellars believes that all truly human enterprises, as reflective enterprises, approach the philosophical perspective (PSIM, p, 3). The philosophical ideal, the aspiration for a stance that encompasses all stances, is baked into the cake of all distinctively human enterprises.

As an aside (though this will become important in subsequent sections of PSIM), consider how Sellars’s conception of philosophy expresses his historico-archetypical cast of mind. In Plato’s Republic we are given a vision of philosophy as a sort of ideal limit of science (as opposed to one more science among the various sciences) that encompasses all the other sciences, not because it adds some specific truth to the specialized disciplines, but because it provides the perspective on the whole. In "Book VII," Plato’s Socrates takes us through a dialectic of the various sciences, beginning in directly practical “know-how” activities (agriculture, navigation, accounting), and ascending to higher-levels of reflective generality (geometry, astronomy, number theory). At the top of the dialectical hierarchy sits the synthetic vision of the whole, The Good. Thus, the philosopher who leaves the cave understands The Good, which, like the sun, is not something seen specifically, but is the source of light by which all other things are seen. Plato's philosopher does not add another thing to our inventory of beings, but achieves a stance toward the whole that makes sense of all the parts. The vision of The Good is the unifying vision achieved by the philosopher.⁶

Notice, it is not only the perspectival scope that distinguishes philosophy. Philosophy approaches the ideal of completeness (the unified whole of the space of reasons), but also the ideal of reflectivity:

On the other hand, a philosopher could scarcely be said to have his eye on the whole in the relevant sense, unless he has reflected on the nature of philosophical thinking. It is this reflection on the place of philosophy itself in the scheme of things which is the distinctive trait of the philosopher as contrasted with the specialist and in absence of this critical reflection on the philosophical enterprise, one is at best but a potential philosopher. (PSIM, p. 3)

The point here is that reflectivity is not only categorizing enterprise, but also normative. That is, the reflective stance does not merely arrange or synthesize the disciplines, but takes a critical stance toward them. That normative stance, however, is not the stance done within the disciplines. The chemist, as chemist, does not question the methods or basic assumptions of chemistry, but instead puts them to work in finding specific chemical truths. To the degree that the chemist puts the methods and assumptions of chemistry into question (“Why is this the right way to do chemistry?”), she is moving toward the philosophy of chemistry. When acting as a chemist, the chemist is not questioning what it is to be a chemist, nor is she wondering whether what constitutes chemistry is even a very good thing in the first place. The chemist, as chemist, is busy being reflective about specific chemical truths, but not chemistry as such. The later is the task the philosophy of chemistry, not chemistry. Philosophy, as it attempts to put all the special spaces of reasons into an overall space of reasons, puts the various methods and assumptions of the special spaces of reasons into question. Philosophy is not only universal in scope, but maximally reflective.

Notice, however, that philosophy must then, unlike the special sciences, be uniquely self-critical. The philosopher puts philosophy under critical reflection. The chemist, inasmuch as she is critically reflective on chemistry, defers to the philosopher of chemistry (which might mean she herself takes up the philosophy of chemistry). The philosopher has no one to whom she can defer the task of reflectively criticizing philosophy; by definition there is no higher-order discipline, so philosophy is where the critical buck stops. Submission to critical reflection is intrinsic to human activities, which means that the philosopher is ever-involved in a sort of reflective cannibalism — philosophy always questions itself!

Probably not accidentally, Sellars is basically parroting Hegel’s definition of philosophy in terms of self-referential critical reflection:

Philosophy lacks the advantage from which alone the other sciences benefit, namely the ability to presuppose both its objects as immediately endorsed by representation of them and an acknowledged method of knowing, which would determine its starting point and progression. (Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, §1 – Brinknann and Dahlsrom translation)

Notice how Hegel maintains that philosophy can presuppose neither its method nor its object, where its object is the overall space of reasons encompassing all the special spaces of reasons. That is, the philosopher claims to consider the overall sense-making framework of the whole, but the primary philosophical question is whether there is indeed any such whole over which we can have a philosophical perspective. Philosophy assumes a perspective on the whole, but that presupposes that the philosophers puts into question whether there is indeed such a whole; otherwise the philosopher would be unreflective about her own activity.⁷ The philosopher cannot bluntly presume that there is a whole in which all the parts make sense without forfeiting the reflectivity necessary for any distinctively human activity. Philosophy must vindicate the very stance it must take in its enterprise. Sellars makes the very same point:

It implies that the essential change brought by philosophy is the standing out of detail within a picture which is grasped as a whole form the start. But, of course, to the extent that there is one picture to be grasped reflectively as a whole, the unity of the reflective vision is a task rather than an initial datum. (PSIM, p. 4, Sellars’s emphasis)

In other words, philosophy is the vision of the whole of the space of reasons, but whether there is such a whole is not a given, but something that philosophy must establish for itself. The task of philosophy is to establish whether there is what Sellars calls a “synoptic vision,” according to which the disparate spaces of reasons can be woven into a coherent whole, and the success of this project is not an assumption we can simply help ourselves to, as the we are “confronted not by one picture, but, in principle, by two and, in fact by many” (PSIM, p. 4; Sellars’s emphasis). The many Sellars believes the philosopher confronts is not the different spaces of reasons that are constituted by our reflective dealings with different aspects of experience, e.g, the question of how the partial visions provided by ethics, aesthetics, religion, the special sciences, etc. can be put into a single explanatory ordering. Such questions are philosophical questions, but they are not The Philosophical question. Rather,

the philosopher is confronted not by one complex many-dimensional picture, the unity of which, such as it is, he must come to appreciate; but by two pictures of essentially the same order of complexity, each of which purports to be a complete picture of man-in-the-world, and which, after separate scrutiny, he must fuse into one vision. (PSIM, p. 4; Sellars’s emphasis)

The philosopher’s concern is not first and foremost with the ordering of the various aspectual modes of sense-making, but to consider whether two totalizing visions of what it is to be a human being in the world (visions of not just the human, but the human’s place in the world), which prima facie appear to be at odds. Moreover, both of these visions seem to be un-give-up-able. Thus, on pain of suffering incoherence, the philosopher must complete the synoptic task of producing a “stereoscopic vision” according to which “differing perspectives on a landscape are fused into one coherent vision” (PSIM, p. 4). By establishing this synoptic whole, philosophy completes its own critical reflective task, i.e., philosophy provides its own justification by performing the primary philosophical act of establishing that there is a coherent stance that captures the stereoscopic whole.⁸ Sellars summarize all of this concisely we he says "The philosopher, then, is confronted by two conceptions, equally public, equally non-arbitrary, of man-in-the-world and he cannot shirk the attempt to see how they fall together in one stereoscopic view" (PSIM, p. 5).

Sellars calls these two totalizing visions, both of which are equally compelling (though, as we shall see, on very different grounds), the manifest image and the scientific image. He will spend the next two sections of PSIM explicating the manifest image and highlighting its development by and central role in classical philosophy, before he turns his attention to the scientific vision. When he later raises the seemingly intractable tension between these two images, we will follow a speculative ontogeny and phylogeny of the philosophy of mind.

Notice once again the archetypical character of Sellars’s understanding of the philosophical enterprise. In Phaedo, Plato has Socrates, the living archetype of the philosopher, cast his intellectual autobiography in terms of a dialectic between two fundamental visions of man-in-the-world. On the one hand, Socrates recounts that:

When I was a young man I was wonderfully keen on that wisdom which they call natural science, for I thought it splendid to know the causes of everything, and why it comes to be, why it perishes and why it exists. (Phaedo, 96a, Grube translation)

The mature Socrates, however, comes to believe that our understanding of ourselves and the world can only be given in terms of Mind:

I thought that if this were so, the directing Mind would direct everything and arrange each thing in a way that was best. If one wished to know the cause of each thing, why it comes to be or perishes or exists, one had to find what was the best way for it to be, or to be acted upon, or to act. On these premises then it befitted a man to investigate only, and about this and other things, what is best. (Phaedo, 97d, Grube translation)

Thus, in Phaedo, Plato’s Socrates situates himself in the midst of a tension between two totalizing images; an image of the world understood in terms of relations of physical necessity and an image of the world understood in terms of the teleological principles of cognition (Mind). As we shall see, the images Socrates confronts are more or less analogous to Sellars’s scientific and manifest images. Although in Phaedo Plato seems to have Socrates prefer one image (the manifest) over the other (the scientific)⁹, in his more considered view depicted in the later dialogues, Plato sees the philosopher as tasked with constructing a synoptic vision that holds together these two prima facie opposed visions in a unity. In Timaeus, Plato has Timaeus cast his likely myth (Sellars is not the first philosopher to work through speculative mythology) of cosmic and anthropological origins three times, i.e., the first in terms of the “work of reason,” the second in terms of the “work of necessity,” and the third in terms of “reason and necessity working together.”¹⁰ We can see in this movement how Plato takes us from the bald opposition of the scientific and manifest images Socrates faces in Phaedo, to Timaeus's proposal of a synoptic vision that holds them together in a complimentary unity. In other words, it seems that Sellars’s notion of philosophy is structurally the same as that proposed by founder of the discipline.¹¹ Interestingly, as we shall see, both Plato and Sellars see Mind, and its place in the vision of the whole, as the central issue of philosophy.

1. Unless otherwise noted, parenthetical references are to pages number in the 1991 collection of Sellars’s papers, Science, Perception, and Reality.

2. I wrote my master’s thesis on Sellars’s philosophy of mind at Kent State University under Kwansai Lee, who was a student of Sellars’s.

3. Sellars is a master of the use of speculative, abstract history to reconstruct the formation process of a conceptual framework as a way of shedding light on its nature. His most famous use of this trope is The “Myth of Jones and the Rylean Community” in his seminal “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.”

4. Note that Sellars does not deny that there are other modes of knowing wherein knowing how operates freely from knowing that. A more interesting question is whether there is anything in what Sellars says that denies that distinctively human knowing presupposes a prior, background of knowing how that cannot be captured in knowing that. The latter concern will be an important point for problems we will raise later.

5. Following Sellars here, we might conclude that someone who does the mathematical proof in a rote fashion is not really doing the proof, but only parroting doing so. Doing a proof is to do it reflectively, and unreflective proof-doing isn’t proof-doing at all. That seems correct in the case of mathematical performances, but what about riding a bicycle? Is riding a bicycle intrinsically reflective? Well, it certainly isn’t reflective all the way down, i.e., there is much going on necessary to bike-riding that the rider probably cannot make explicit. Moreover, the evidence that one knows his way around bicycle-riding is whether he can get on a bike and ride, whatever else he can or cannot say about it. Are we then to conclude that bicycle riding is not a distinctively human endeavor? Or, is it the case that even proof-doing is not itself a reflective activity all the way down? Maybe there is much to even mathematical activities that their agents cannot make explicit. Wittgenstein famously noted that the evidence that someone can perform even reflective mathematical maneuvers is that he or she “knows how to go on.” These considerations, though they are ancillary to this series of essays, are the point of departure for a fascinating critical debate (“The Dreyfus-McDowel Controversy”) that calls Sellars’s overall vision into question. In a future series I plan to take up this issue directly, so throughout these essays I will note were it has points of contact with the questions at hand.

6. For a discussion of Plato’s conception of philosophy, see this essay.

7. For more on Hegel’s conception of philosophy, see this essay.

8. The apparent circularity throughout this discussion is, in my view, something Sellars sees as a feature and not a but of his conception of philosophy. This is a point that will be come clear and plausible as we work our way through the next two sections of PSIM. There is something subtly Hegelian going on in this paper.

9. In Phaedo, Socrates is dismissive of the version of the manifest image (stemming from Anaxagoras) he is referring to in the quotation I provide above. He does, however, argue that something in this vicinity must have priority over the scientific image, and he develops his own “imperfect method” as his own version. Interestingly, Socrates seems to be well aware that his own version of the manifest image is itself deeply unsatisfactory, and this foreshadows Plato’s later suggest of a synoptic vision in the Timaeus.

10. These particular ways of articulating the structure of the dialogue are introduced by T.K. Johansen in his translation of Timaeus (Penguin, 1965)

11. We could draw similar comparisons between Sellars’s conception of philosophy and Kant’s antinomies and Hegel’s dialectical logic. Of course, all of these seem to be reiterations of the original problematic Plato highlights.