explores the connection between nominalism as a semantic thesis, naturalism as an epistemic thesis, and materialism as a methodological thesis. I will do so via the work of Wilfred Sellers. Again, Wilfred Sellers is a philosopher who is arguably the most significant American philosopher of the 20th century, not just in my opinion, but in the opinion of a whole generation of philosophers who he influenced and who are much more famous than he was. People like Richard Rorty, John McDowell, Robert Brandom, Daniel Dennett, Paul Churchland, Ruth Milliken,
etc. etc. In fact, Rorty predicted that the future of the 21st century philosophy could could be understood in terms of a conflict between left and right Szilardians, just as 19th century philosophy was shaped by the conflict between left and right Hegelians. So despite his lack of renown outside the academy, I mean, Szilard is not just this dusty, mid-20th century American analytic philosopher. He is, in my opinion, the greatest systematic philosopher of the 20th century. And it's worth emphasizing this because otherwise the difficulty of his work tends to get, the technicality of his work is
rebarbative and people feel that they need to have some kind of incentive to engage with it. So I hope to convince you of the worth of attempting to do so. So, I want to explain how his influential critique of the myth of the given determines his commitment to nominalism. And this will be followed by a brief explanation of Sellers' metalinguistic account of meaning. And lastly, I will discuss Sellers' account of the relation between language and reality in terms of what I will call methodological materialism. and briefly discuss its link to the metaphysics of absolute processes that he sketched out towards the end of his career. So first, first I want to begin by discussing the problem of a critical ontology, of a genuinely post-Kantian ontology,
an ontology that takes the measure of Kant's critique of dogmatic metaphysics. Ontology is an attempt to answer the question, what is there? But this cannot be answered by listing names of entities. Table, chair, tree, cypress, dante, aeroflot, etc. Table, chair and tree are common nouns, names for types of objects. Cypress, dante, aeroflot are names for particular objects. Listing nouns, whether names of types or names of particulars, is uninformative because it offers us names without explaining what a name is or how it is related to its nominata.
So if ontology is to take the measure of Kant's critique of dogmatic metaphysics, it cannot remain content with conjuring yet another more or less arbitrary account of what there is. It must explain how we know what there is. One of the implications of epistemic funitude is that we do not know the divine names of things. Human names for things are not necessarily linked to the things they name. The meaning of a name, therefore, is not the designation of an essence. But nevertheless, sellers will suggest that there is a sense in which nomination is at the basis of linguistic function. But this nominative dimension does not pertain to meaning or signification, but to material process.
The names in which linguistic signification finds its ultimate aboutness do not signify. They are material patterns. But Sellers' solution to the problem of reference is at once dialectical and materialist. It ensures the autonomy of signification by grounding it in non-signifying patterns. So, a critical ontology is obliged to explain first what a name is and how it relates to what it names. Secondly, why there is a difference between names and things or words and objects. And finally, what kinds of things there are, and indeed what kinds are, what a category is.
Thus the answer to the question, what is there, also implies a response to the question, what is a category? And in its simplest version, the controversy over the status of categories is whether they are mind-independent attributes of one or several substances, or mind-dependent concepts, such as Kant's pure concepts of the understanding or Heidegger's existentials. Sellers' suggestion is that they are neither. Categories, on his account, are meta-linguistic functions. But their meta-linguistic function is nevertheless a mode of representing reality. The determination of categorical status depends on the identification of conceptual place, identifying the proper conceptual role of a concept or category.
To specify an entity's category, therefore, will be to determine certain logical semantic features of representation which ensure that it is of that entity or of an entity. Nevertheless, representation itself is not a conceptual relation or a relation between concepts and things. It is this stress on the non-conceptual nature of representation that distinguishes Sellers' account from traditional conceptions of representation as a relation between thoughts and things. and it's this emphasis that renders his stance materialistic in a methodological rather than metaphysical sense or so I'd like to argue. So because categories do not represent or designate
any apparent feature of the world they are not phenomenologically intuitable. They cannot be read off the structure of language or of reality. And to assume otherwise is to fall prey to what Sellers calls the myth of the given. And this myth has two forms, epistemic and categorical. The myth of the epistemic given is crystallized in the following inconsistent triad of premises generated by imprisonment. And this should be the first excerpt on the handouts that I hope some people have. This inconsistent triad, it's the triad which empiricism or empiricist philosophers find themselves unwittingly committed to. It's internally
contradictory. Premise A is X senses red sense content S entails that X knows non-inferentially that s is red. Premise b is that the ability to sense sense contents is unacquired and premise c is the claim that the ability to know facts of the form x is phi is acquired. a and b together entail not c, b and c together entail not a, a and c together entail not b. Sellers' argument may be recapitulated as follows. Knowledge is of facts. To know something is to know a fact or a state of affairs. To know that something is the case. That something is thus and so.
Facts have propositional form, x is phi. Either the ability to know facts of the form, x is phi, is acquired, or it is unacquired. If it is acquired, then it cannot be a sensory capacity, since, by hypothesis, the ability to sense sense contents is unacquired. This is the premise. Therefore, the ability to know facts must be unacquired. But if it is unacquired, then the world must have propositional form. And this propositional form is mirrored directly by the mind. Since propositional form is tantamount to intelligible order, one must either invoke God to account for the isomorphy between the structure of the world and the structure of mind,
or leave it unexplained. So in other words, it's this postulate of a pre-established harmony between conceptual order and natural order that is a direct consequence of embracing the myth of the epistemic given. Now Sellers argues that premise A is false, premise A being the claim that to sense something, to sense a red sense content means that one the sensor knows non-inferentially that that sense datum is red or has some some property this is the the claim that must be abandoned must be jettisoned sensing a red sense content does not entail knowing non-inferentially
that s is red in other words sensory awareness alone does not constitute knowledge the non-inferential Non-inferential knowledge that X is fine, such as seeing that blood is red or hearing that the clock has struck 12, is a conceptually mediated perception, not a sensible intuition. In other words, the point is not to deny that we can know things about the world without making inferences. The claim is that this ability to engage in a non-inferential perception is itself mediated by this complex conceptual machinery that underpins sense perception. So there's a distinction between sensing and perceiving. Sensing is not knowing.
The perceptual immediacy of such knowledge is mediated by an elaborate conceptual framework of objects related in a publicly observable space and time. Moreover, it falls from this account that sensory awareness is not awareness as. To sense something is not to be aware of it as something. It's not to classify it. because to be aware of an item having categorical status F is not to be aware of it as F to sense something as F would be to deploy the concept of F and such deployment would have to be rule governed since Sellers follows Kant's in construing concepts as rules for connecting representations
but rule following is thinking which is an activity irreducible to sensing So in its most elementary form, the myth of the given consists in conflating thinking with sensing, or in Kantian parlance, concepts with intuitions. Thinking, the immediate consequence of this is that thinking cannot touch the real. It belongs to a different order. But as we shall see, this does not oblige us to deny that we can successfully think about the real, or deny that thinking is necessarily embedded within reality. So, sensation is of the real, but cannot be about it. Thinking is about the real, but cannot enter into direct contact with it.
In other words, the of-ness of thought and the of-ness of sensation are fundamentally different and cannot be fused together. This is the core of the myth of the given. Failure to distinguish between thinking and sensing leads straight to the second version of the myth. The myth of the categorical given according to which the categorical structure of reality, assuming it has one, impresses itself upon the mind the way a seal impresses itself upon wax. Sellers argues that this cannot be the case because thinking depends upon language and the structure of language does not simply reflect the structure of reality. But before we say something about how we ought to understand thinking once we've abandoned the myth of the given, we must explain why rejecting the myth does not entail skepticism.
And it's important to see that skepticism buys into the myth of the epistemic given. It has to assume that appearances are given with a determinate conceptual structure or with determinate characteristics, even as it questions whether there's any correspondence between the structure of appearance and the structure of reality. So skepticism unwittingly presupposes knowledge of appearances, even as it presumes to cast doubts upon their connection to reality. Moreover, it cannot explain why there are appearances, why appearances are given. For it cannot claim that appearances are mere appearances on pain of a problematic regress. It cannot answer the question, what is it that appears? But so to assume that determinately structured appearances are given is already to assume too much.
And once the myth of the epistemic given has been dispelled, it becomes necessary to admit that sensing as already presupposes knowledge of a structured domain of interrelated objects existing in a framework of space and time. This framework is the manifest image. The key thing being is that the manifest image is a collective cognitive achievement of the human species. The manifest image is not something, it's not some kind of innate conceptual structure. It's something that has been laboriously wrested from phenomena through millennia of cultural evolution. And one of the things I want to suggest here is that in fact it's important to understand
the indispensability of certain features of the manifest image in order to prosecute the project of categorical invention, or rather, and if one is interested in such a thing, in order to prosecute metaphysical speculation. So, now, this critique of the given must is directly connected to Sellers' account of what it is to think and what it is to have a mind, to be a minded being. It may sound platitudinous to reiterate once more the claim that the mind is not a private inner sanctum, that it is externalized in the world, and that this externalization is a consequence of its connection to linguistic activity, which is intrinsically social and collective.
Sellers shares Heidegger's and Wittgenstein's rejection of the Cartesian privacy of the mental. But unlike both of them, he situates this insight within a broader metaphysical account of the place of mind and nature. That thinking and language use are both essentially activities, forms of doing, will turn out to be crucial to this account. Thus the concepts of what Sellers calls an inner thought episode is modeled on publicly observable sayings out loud. This is a direct consequence of rejecting the myth of the epistemic given because the ability to aperceive our own mental states is acquired and not innate. Introspection is a corally of etrospection.
The ability to introspect and perceive that one is thinking X or that one is feeling Y presupposes conceptual capacities rooted in linguistic practice. Yet this is not to say that thinking is reducible to verbal dispositions. The claim that speaking is prior to thinking in the order of knowing that we understand what it is to have a thought or what thinking is by modeling it on our understanding of what it is to say something or to speak. This does not mean that thinking is merely some kind of fiction, you know, that mental states are merely some kind of heuristic fictions postulated to explain linguistic behavior. Although
speaking is prior to thinking in the order of knowing, thinking is prior to speaking in the order of being. The order in which you discover things about the world is not a clue to their ontological status. The things that you discover last about the world may be ontologically primary or fundamental. So the parallel here is with our understanding of manifest physical objects provides the basis for our understanding of microphysical, imperceptible microphysical objects. So manifest physical objects are primary in the order of knowing but not in the order of being because they are constituted by micro physical particles so therefore pre or non-verbal thought is perfectly real
thoughts you know imperceptible mental events are perfectly real but our ability to perceive ourselves thinking is linguistically mediated so says it is as much of a realist about inner thoughts as Descartes. His amendment to Cartesianism insists only that access to inner reality is just as mediated as access to so-called outer reality. He does not say that thoughts are necessarily public or even essentially publicizable. His claim is that our ability to understand what a thought is, or what it is to have a thought, is tributary to communally generated and publicly shared conceptual resources. And by the same token, Sellers' realism about internal thought
episodes does not commit him to the Cartesian claim that covert thought stands to overt speech as cause to effect. The claim that thinking is essentially related to the capacity for linguistic expression does not identify thinking with linguistic behaviour. Rather, it postulates that the former is constitutive of the latter, in the same sense in which molecules are constitutive of gases. Thoughts, therefore, are in language using animals in the same sense in which molecules are in gases. It is just as mistaken to construe thoughts as the cause of linguistic behavior as to construe molecules as the cause of gas volumes. The connection is one of constitution and not causation. So it's part of the definition of the
the currentness or the actuality, which means to say the being of thought acts, that they be expressible in sayings out loud, even if no saying occurs. So, finally, to wrap up this discussion of the implications of Selvius' critique of the myth of the given, empiricism and Cartesianism are not the only tributaries of the myth. One important kind of strand of phenomenology is also our understanding of thought is not just modeled on our understanding of language. The intentionality of thought derives from the intentionality of discourse. Thought is not the locus of an original intentionality that is subsequently transmitted to language.
Intentionality is primarily a property of candid public speech, established via the development of metalinguistic resources that allow us to talk about talk. In other words, to say that something is about something, that a word which is closely connected to the attempt to explain what meaning is, or what it means for a word to be about something, requires metalinguistic resources. reflexive conceptual achievement. So this rejection of the postulate of originary or transcendental intentionality, which is the postulate which underlies transcendental phenomenology, is another direct
consequence of abandoning the myth of the given. If intentionality is primarily a linguistic phenomenon, what does this imply for our understanding of meaning, not only as it pertains to mind, but also as it pertains to nature. So, now we have to kind of briefly understand Sellers' theory of meaning. So Sellers defends a metalinguistic version of normalism. Semantic statements such as, a semantic statement is a mean statement, when you say X means Y. A semantic statement such as rouge in French means red in English, quote a sign design in a foreign language and correlate its functioning in that language with its functioning in our own familiar language.
More generally, semantic operators such as means, designates, refers, or stands for, all these ways of cashing out means talk, are simply ways of correlating the functioning of unfamiliar words with the functioning of familiar words. the means operator in a semantic statement such as who means red is a special version of the copula on this account in other words it should be understood as is who is red it establishes a correlation between a distributive singular term and a meta linguistic sort of try to explain what that means. This is the second section on the handout. So Sellers wants to use what he
calls, he develops this kind of new technical notation which is called dot quoting. The dot quoting is simply the two black dots that border any kind of word token. It's a very particular way of quoting sign designs. He uses it to mark the exhibition of linguistic function. Dot quoting exhibits linguistic functioning. So in other words to say that dot quotation identifies the meanings of words in terms of their metalinguistic sortles where a sortle is a way of classifying a functional type.
So for instance in a claim such as rouge in French is a dot quote red in English this statement says that the mentioned sign design i.e. rouge plays the same linguistic role in French as red the sign design red does in English but Red here is not mentioned, but rather used in a special way. Not as it is ordinarily used in English, as meaning the color red, but as an illustrating circle in a metalinguistic assertion. All means talk is metalinguistic. And it is this peculiar status that the dot-coating device exhibits. So, again, in statements such as A Rouge, which is to say A Rouge sign design in French,
is a dot quote read in English, rouge functions as a distributive singular term and not as an abstract noun. In other words, it's a distributive singular term in the same way in which if we talk about, if we say the lion is tawny, we're not referring to some abstract entity called the lion, some abstract individual which exists independently of all these individual lines. References to the lion, the lion is tawny, the lion is ferocious, etc. can be explained in terms of references to, a distributive reference to individual lines existing in space and time.
That's what a distributive singular term is. So, Means Talk is about distributing a distributive singular term with a metalinguistic sort of. Distributive singular term is on the left. The metalinguistic sortle is on the right. So, this is why, and it's because of this distributive status, it's preferable to write hoosiers to pluralize the expression. Hoosiers are reds. The pluralization shows that they indicate particular linguistic tokenings rather than the name of an abstract linguistic type. tokenings are particular, you know, exemplifications or instantiations of words or graphic markers.
Were this not the case, if we didn't pluralize, we would simply be substituting reference to abstract linguistic entities for reference to abstract extra-linguistic entities. And we would simply be substituting one abstraction for another. So in order for the strategy to work, it's necessary to insist that only particular linguistic tokenings exist, not linguistic types. And this is what is shown by correlating the distributive singular terms rouge with the metalinguistic sortles dot quote red. So this metalinguistic strategy can also be used to explain why abstract singular terms should not be taken as designating abstract entities. So consider an abstract singular term such as redness.
Sellers insist it is a mistake to treat it as the name of an abstract entity. The meaning of statements involving redness can be reformulated without loss using the predicate red. So for example, A exemplifies redness is equivalent to A is red. To claim that it isn't is tantamount to claiming that the context exemplifies redness means something other than is red. But anyone who wants to follow this route would have to insist that exemplification is also the name of an abstract entity. The so-called exemplification nexus through which the object A is supposed to be connected to redness. Appending this metaphysical anex to ordinary usage invites a regress.
If we insist on explaining the meaning of relational expressions, the relationship between A and red, in terms of designation, we will always require another abstract relational term to explain the relation between the particular, the universal, and their relation. In other words, between A, redness, and exemplification, as what connects A and redness. And this is just a version of Plato's third man argument. There's an infinite regress of abstract entities. Okay, now, normalism is traditionally, in its empiricist form, normalism is an anti-realist position. If you're a normalist about something, you deny that something exists.
You say that there's no more to something than the words we use to talk about it. But Sellers, because of his critique of the given, first of all, Sellers subverts the basis for empiricism. Sellers is not an empiricist. He's a realist. And indeed, he's a transcendental realist. He's a realist about experienced transcendent entities. Things that go beyond the limits of our perceptual experience. So what needs to be explained is the connection between these metalinguistic sortles and extralinguistic reality. And the crux of Sellers' explanation is his theory of picturing. The metalinguistic properties of sign design tokens picture the non-linguistic properties of objects.
But picturing is not a semantic relation. The role of picturing, or the picturing correlation is not a correlation within the conceptual order, because the conceptual order is the order of signification. It's rather a non-conceptual correspondence which exists within the natural physical order. And it's therefore non-signifying. Picturing has got nothing to do with semantics or meaning. It is a non-signifying representation. And this is what Sellers means when he talks about representation. Representation is not a relation between concepts and objects,
but between objects and other objects. Indeed, between natural linguistic objects and natural objects, other natural objects. And these objects are spatiotemporal particulars. So, metalinguistic functioning is realized in the material properties of sign design tokens. This is what I want to try and explain, because this is kind of a tricky point. This is to say that the metalinguistic functioning of a sorple such as dot quote red is correlated with a real, i.e. non-linguistic, physical property.
But this property is not named by the sign design read. Instead, it is pictured by its syntactical role, the syntactical role of this sign design, this inscription. Thus, in an expression such as ready, where the property read is predicated of the object named a, The token red does not stand for or designate the property. Rather, it is a syntactical concatenation with the name A that ultimately explains its connection to this extralinguistic property. And this is where there's the quote from Sellers on the handout. It's a lengthy quote which I'll read out.
So Sellers writes, in general the nominalist holds that there is no thing which red stands for because it stands for red things and red things is not a thing. Now, it is a truism that the concatenation of red with A tells us that A is red. But is this fact illuminated by the idea that A is correlated, you know, that the token A is correlated with the object A and red with the object red things? I think not. To understand what is going on, we need a different perspective on the syntactical form of red A. I submit that it is properly viewed. It's not a concatenation of two referring expressions,
but rather it's as a name A, which has the character of being concatenated to the left with a case of the sign design red. Flattus vocus being the medieval term for meaning that this is an empty, you know, an empty signification. If we abbreviate the expression concatenated to the left with a red, this is a metalinguistic expression, by red asterisk, We can say, with respect to a token T of red A, that while superficially T is the inscription red concatenated to the right with the inscription A, i.e. a red concatenated with an A, its true form, its depth grammar, so to speak, is given by T is an A concatenated to the left with the sign design red.
So the claim here is that metalinguistic properties picture real properties via the syntactical configuration of sign design tokens. This is the crux of the theory of representation. And this is how metalinguistic operators are correlated with non-linguistic reality. The correlation is, in other words, you can show how a pattern of inscriptions, a pattern of marks, is correlated with a system of objects in extra-linguistic reality. reality. So more generally Sellers insists that the part played by relational expressions and
empirical predicates and linguistic statements can be reconstructed without hypothesizing them as abstract entities. In other words he he proposes to show that it's possible to eliminate predicates from a language and his chief inspiration here is Wittgenstein's claim in the Tractatus that we say that A or B or that A is related to B by placing the names A and B in a certain dyadic relation, i.e. by writing an R between them. This dyadic relation is a pattern of inscription and it is the inscription that shows how A and B are related by inserting the symbol R between the names A and B. But the relation itself is not an object. It's a mistake, once again,
to hypothesize the relation as an abstract object. And the token R that relates A and B is not a name. So what R does in the statement A, R, B could be done without using a symbol. Precisely because it's not a name, its role could be played, you can dispense with this symbol in a statement that would have the same meaning. So for instance, consider the statement A is larger than B. We could adopt a convention whereby the graphic properties of the inscriptions A and B say what the statement A is larger than B says. for example by writing a above b we could show that a is larger than b simply by
at the level of inscription by marking a above b and this inscription states what a is larger than b states without using the expression the relational expression is larger than but it is crucial on sellers account to insist that nothing in the above inscription in the inscribing of a above B plays the role allegedly played by the design is larger than. That B is below A is essential to the meaning of this statement, but this graphic feature does not correspond to the role played by the expression is larger than. Rather, in the inscription above, B's being below A plays the role played by A and B having
the inscription is larger than inserted between them. Thus, both the inscription is larger than and the inscription B is being below A, are functioning here as inscriptions, which is to say they are graphic objects rather than signifying expressions. So, Seles' basic critique of Wittgenstein is that, according to Wittgenstein, it is facts that pictures other facts. The world consists of facts, not things. And linguistic facts picture non-linguistic facts. Sellers' materialism says that, no, the world does not contain any facts. The world consists only of objects. So therefore, it is objects that picture other objects.
Linguistic objects picture non-linguistic objects. and so for instance if a is indeed larger than B if Bill is larger than Ben the inscription and if a and B are the names of Bill and Ben a above B says expresses this fact about the world but it And it shows it through the relationship of these linguistic objects. Okay, so, and what this... Sellers conjures up a kind of a fictitious language which he calls jumblies. A above B is a jumblies sentence. Jumblies is a language devoid of predicates.
that shows the characteristics of objects simply in terms of their graphic or phonematic features. So for instance, in Jumblies, the statement X is read, which means that object X has the property read, could simply be written as boldface X, which is the final example on the handout. Here, the way in which the name X is inscribed tells us what property the object X has. The inscription X, bold-faced X, has two relevant features. It features a token of the name X, which refers to object X, and it has a specific graphic characteristic. So, fundamentally, Selger's claim is that predicates do not play an independent role within linguistic expressions.
He insists on the primacy of sentential structure, and you cannot allocate an independent function to predicated expressions. They only function within sentential blocks. So therefore, Settles writes, not only are predicative expressions dispensable, the very function played by predicates is dispensable. So therefore it is a mistake to abstract the role played by predicates from the role of the expressions in which they occur. It is this abstraction of a fragment of function, of a fragment of linguistic function, that encourages the mistaken idea that predicates designate conceptual properties or metaphysical attributes.
The predicate of rule should not be reified and turned into an abstract entity called a property, which exists independently of sentential context. Still less should this conceptual property, supposedly expressed by the predicate, be hypostatised and turned into an ontological attribute that exists not only independently of language, as conceptual properties are alleged to, but independently of thought. As Sellers puts it, quote, the extra linguistic domain consists of objects, not facts. To put it bluntly, propositional form belongs only in the linguistic and conceptual orders. End quote. So in the final analysis, conceptual functions are linguistically incarnated in sign designs
whose material characteristics picture objects. Thus semantic functions are nothing independently of this incarnation, but crucially, picturing itself is not a semantic relation or function. Sellers describes it as a second order isomorphism between objects in the natural order. A second order isomorphism, it's a structure of structure. It's not simply a relational structure, it's a structure that relates to distinct systems of relations. The example he gives is the phonogram, a record, but a CD pictures a piece of music via complex transcoding of information from one physical medium into another.
into another. Picturing is a ubiquitous natural process. Objects in the world picture other objects in the world, our nervous systems and the sounds we make with our mouths and tongues and the marks we make with implements of various sorts picture objects, configurations of objects. So what lies at the core of Sellers' normalism is the idea that conceptual signification bottoms out in picturing. So, Sellers' rejection of the myth of a given does not lead to linguistic idealism and the claim that reality is a linguistic construct. Rather, it is the cornerstone of a critical ontology in
which language is embedded in non-linguistic, a signifying reality, a a reality devoid of conceptual structure. Thus Sellers' normalism is part and parcel of his embrace of naturalism and materialism. These are of course not equivalent. He's a naturalist because he claims that linguistic practice in which thinking is rooted is a variety of natural process, and natural science investigates these processes, but that linguistic activity is a distinct and possibly even a unique variety of natural process whose specifications should not be elided is part of Selger's Kantianism. Not all natural processes can be understood using the same conceptual resources
because the varieties of natural processes cannot be read off our available conceptual resources. This is the myth of the category you'll give them, to claim that there are these different kinds of things. we don't know what different kinds of things exist because we have to understand how our conceptual resources are themselves embedded and conditioned by material processes in our very attempt to understand what kinds of things exist or what processes really are. But Sellers is a materialist because of his insistence that the varieties of natural process extend well beyond those comprehended within the organic realm. To be a materialist is to refuse to organicize nature, to use the organism as an explanatory paradigm for the whole of reality.
So what makes Sellers a materialist without the non-metaphysical or non-dogmatic variety is his insistence that linguistic function is ultimately rooted in inorganic, as well as organic patterns. Sounds, marks, spacings, movements. These are what Sellerus calls natural linguistic objects. And natural linguistic objects are names that depict parts of reality. But they are names that are part of the natural order, only in so far as they are meaningless. So just as inference is not a semantic relation, representation is not an epistemic relation. It is a natural function. A general theory of representational systems will distinguish between sensate and insensate varieties of representational function.
This requires distinguishing propositional form from conceptual form. Animal representational systems, we are animals, animal representational systems are ubiquitous amongst multicellular life forms. We are animals, we have a certain kind of representational machinery upon which our linguistic and conceptual capacities supervenes. but these are two different levels. Representation is not conceptualization. Conceptualization is not representation. So animal representational systems operate through a propositional form that has both a referring and a
characterizing aspect and this is tied to the two aspects of Jumblies for instance in which all you need is you need a reference, you need a mark, an inscription to name an object, to register the presence of an object, and a way of characterizing that mark or that inscription. And in this regard, propositional form is non-conceptual. Thus the representation of an object's A's being read is carried out by the characterizing inscription of a symbol token A. Both the referring and characterizing aspects of elementary propositions are syntactically encapsulated. Syntactic form is realized in the neurobiological
properties of the nervous systems of sentient organisms. In this regard, propositional form is pre-linguistic and more fundamental than logical or conceptual form. Logical form is inaugurated once representational systems can represent relations of association, compatibility and incompatibility between representations. Meta-representation establishes inferential relations between propositions, but full-blown conceptual form is only achieved at the meta-representational level when propositional structures endowed with the rich predicative resources of a natural language are relayed. conceptual form supervenes on but is irreducible to the coding procedures of representational
systems okay so finally at its most elementary level linguistic practice is anchored in names that picture objects as being somehow this somehow-ness is shown not said by the manner in which names are uttered or inscribed. An utterance or inscription by itself is of course not a statement, it is a physical pattern, phonemic, graphic or gestural. So Sellers' suggestion is that conceptual properties do not designate attributes or ways of being but that they are nevertheless rooted in acts of representing that picture reality in ways that can be said from within the conceptual order to be more or less adequate. The criterion of pictorial
adequacy is formulated using our extant conceptual categories and as such is it is internal to our signifying scheme and dependent upon our available predictive resources. But still it can be used to track the correlation between conceptual order and real patterns. So conceptual categories are embedded in and conditioned by natural function even though they do not mirror the latter. Demonstrating this is the burden of Selger's philosophy. The demonstration requires distinguishing the propriety of conceptual function from any metaphysical correspondence between thoughts and things. Meaning is not a
a relation. Meaning statements establish metalinguistic correlations between words and other words, not a metaphysical relation between words and things. The basement level of language consists of pattern-governed connections between natural linguistic objects and other physical objects. So consequently, words do not depict reality because of what they mean, but because of physical connections between the semantic regularities obeyed by speakers or language users and the physical patterns in which these semantic regularities are embodied. This is another quote from from Serres. So therefore the real relation which underlies the fact that the token
man refers to men, must surely be a real relation between the word man and men, a relation to be formulated in terms of generalizations having subjunctive form, which specify uniformities in which expression tokens, including sentences containing the word man, and extra-linguistic objects, including men, are involved. These uniformities are incarnated in these phonetic, graphic or haptic patterns as well as behavioral ones. They are exhibited in the uniformities of linguistic performance that constitute pattern-governed linguistic behavior. But these patterns reflect espousals of principle, which is to say rules, the rules that tell you
how to use words, the proper way to connect representations, that constitute linguistic competence. Ultimately, categories are to be explained in terms of their metalinguistic role. Metalinguistic role is to be explained in terms of correct representing, and correct representing is to be explained in terms of picturing. So finally, to conclude, so to what extent then does SELSER system satisfy the demands of a critical ontology delineated at the outset. It proposes an answer to each of the questions I mentioned at the outset. The questions were, one, what is a name and how does it relate to what it names? Two, why is there
a difference between names and things? Three, what kinds of things exist and what are kinds? In answer to the first, a name is a sign design, i.e. a natural linguistic object with empirical characteristics phonematic or graphic whose tokenings are correlated with patterns of objects in accordance with what sellers calls ought to be rules the ought to be rules are the the the rules which must be obeyed by anyone being inducted into the linguistic or conceptual order those doing the inducting someone who is teaching someone a language or instructing someone how to use word
properly follows an ought to do rule ought to be rules are correlated with ought to do's but the ability once one has acquired competence of ought to be regularities one can therefore start obeying ought to do's and one becomes an autonomous or rational thinking agent. This is where conceptual rationality kicks in. In other words, with conceptual autonomy, when you don't need to be told what to do, because you know what to do. You can identify the proper rule to apply in this situation. In answer to the second, because names are equivocal entities operating in two distinct but intimately connected dimensions,
The difference between names and things falls from the fact that names are equivocal. They have a semantic dimension and a causal dimension. Names signify by virtue of their rule-governed linguistic role, but names are also a-signifying objects that picture other objects in the world through their sensible characteristics. Finally, the third question about what kinds of things exist and what kinds are must be answered in reverse. First, kinds are metalinguistic circles, and these in turn correspond to distinct patterns of rule-governed tokenings. As to what kinds really, or ultimately exist, which is the basic metaphysical question,
ultimate real kinds will be identified by the absolute picture of the world, which is the regulative ideal of empirical inquiry. we can gauge our current picture's degree of approximation to this ideal by measuring in Jay Rosenberg's words, Rosenberg is one of Sellers' most influential and gifted interpreters by measuring the absolute numerical magnitude of the correction factors which must be introduced into applications of the strict counterparts of predecessor laws to arrive at the values determined by the successor. This is not very helpful. The claim is simply that you can measure, the claim about measuring degrees of pictorial adequacy is not simply metaphorical.
You can identify a metric to gauge these degrees of pictorial adequacy. And this involves, this is the issue at the heart of debates about structural realism in the philosophy of science. The idea that what is preserved when one scientific theory supplants another is mathematical structure. The real preservation of the real incorporation from successor's theory to the successor's theory of the previous theory is at the level of mathematical form, not at the level of empirical content. But interestingly, Sellers defends a version of structural realism which does not degenerate into Pythagoreanism. It does not commit one to the claim that it's mathematical
structure all the way down because mathematical structure is actually simply a way of codifying this non mathematical these non mathematical processes we can orient our current picture towards this ideal by projecting categories into successor series of construction of analogical models with counterpart properties the outstanding question is how exactly predicate of roles are exhibited by the physical properties of the natural linguistic objects in which all linguistic functioning is ultimately anchored. Thus Sellers writes, for the perceptive nominalist the varieties of mapping i.e. picturing are as multiple as simple matter-of-factual qualities and
relations. Now this is important because what I really want to stress here is the indispensability of the manifest image for the process, for a commitment to scientific realism. The properties, you know, the graphic and acoustic properties of sign tokens that we use to discriminate the picturing relation are identified, they are manifest properties that they're identifying using our extant perceptual capacities. You need a level of phenomenal manifestation, you need a
manifest dimension. In other words you need appearances to rest your way to break through to an underlying noumenal reality. So I think this is part of This is Selser's Hegelianism. This is Selser's recoding of a Hegelian insight, which claims that being must appear. Being and appearances are dialectically indissociable. The concept of... If you try to flatten, if you try to dissolve the distinction between reality and appearances, in other words, in the ways in which some so-called flat ontology try to do, do you end up with a position which is conceptually incoherent it's
conceptually incoherent because you can no longer explain what it means for something to be the thing that it is and nor can you explain why there is a discrepancy between different systems of properties of objects in the world the The distinction between the manifest and the scientific image is the distinction between you know the phenomenal and the noumenal. But Seles's claim is that the boundary is methodological and is being constantly renegotiated by cognitive progress. In other words, it's a methodological distinction, not a metaphysical difference. This is the final, ultimate consequence of the myth of the given.
There is no absolute dimension of appearances. Nothing is absolutely given. Nothing is absolutely apparent. In order for something to appear, there must be something inapparent, encoded or embedded within it. In other words, every phenomenon has a noumenon embedded within it. And it's the noumenon that secures the reality of the phenomenon. It's a scientific image that establishes the reality of the manifest image. So why characterize this as a methodological materialism? Because the logic of Sellers' account implies that whatever conceptual properties are used to describe materiality remain provisional and subject to further adjustment and even
fundamental revision. This fallibilistic aspect of philosophical ontology, which is implicit in the theory of picturing, distinguishes Sellers' stance from that of more straightforwardly metaphysical or dogmatic materialism. Thank you.