Abstract
Davidson’s anomalous monism is based on the assumption that a human being can be described or accounted for in two very different ways, using two very different and indeed incommensurable conceptual frameworks, namely the physicalistic vocabulary of science and the mentalistic vocabulary employed by the ‘theories’ we make about each other when we interact and communicate. Also Sellars maintains that we have two alternative pictures of the world and especially of us humans as its parts, namely the scientific image and the manifest image. At first sight, the views of the two philosophers may seem quite similar; however, the true extent of this apparent similarity is worth exploring. To that end, in this paper we tackle the following questions: Are Sellars’ reasons for claiming the irreducibility of his manifest image to the scientific image the same or similar to those that Davidson has for asserting the irreducibility of his mentalistic idiom to the scientific one? Is the normativity informing Sellars’ manifest image of the same kind as that informing Davidson’s mentalistic idiom? Do the notions of rationality considered by Sellars and Davidson coincide?
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Notes
This differentiation between the two kinds of understanding may be reminiscent of the discussions of the nature of the difference between “Naturwissenschaften” and “Geisteswissenschaften” in 18th and 19th century Germany, which adopted the term hermeneutics for the understanding in humanities. In fact, Davidson considered contemporary exponents of hermeneutics, especially Gadamer, as kindred spirits.
Sellars’ argumentation in this paper is discussed in detail by Christias (2015).
See Kolodny and Brunero (2015). (It is characteristic that the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy does have the entry “Instrumental rationality” but no entry for “Rationality”.)
Max Weber, for example, did famously propose other categories of rationality besides the instrumental one (Kalberg 1980).
See Hofmann (1995) for a detailed discussion of this aspect of Davidson’s teaching.
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Acknowledgements
Work on this paper was supported by the joint Lead-Agency research grant between the Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) and the Czech Science Foundation (GAČR), Inferentialism and Collective Intentionality, No. I 3068-G24.
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Peregrin, J. Davidson and Sellars on “Two Images”. Philosophia 46, 183–192 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9902-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-017-9902-4