Linguistic Roles and Proper Names

Abstract

Sellars’ philosophy forms an extraordinarily complex and thoroughly interconnected systematic unity. If only tangentially, it touches every major concern of the philosophical community. On some of these concerns, Sellars has both thought long and written extensively; on others, while he has thought no less long, much of what he has to say he has so far said largely by implication. In this essay, I want to address a theme from the second group. Specifically, I want to try to develop an appropriately Sellarsian understanding of proper names, to locate and assess their place in the broader context of his semantic theories. In pursuing this goal, I shall presuppose enough acquaintance with his views and principles to justify my footnoting only explicit quotations and omitting more extensive citations. Most of what I say will be familiar enough to anyone familiar with Sellars’ work, and all of it is documentable from the four books which form the centerpiece of his current corpus.¹ To set my problematic, then, I shall begin by assembling a few reminders.