Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature: Thirtieth-Anniversary Edition (Princeton Classics)

by Richard Rorty

This dilemma highlights the fact that traditional notions of givenness have run together raw feels and ability to discriminate, using the lack of the first to eliminate machines and include babies, and then using the presence of the second to make what babies have resemble propositional knowledge. The argument between Sellars and his critics on this point boils down to: Shall we take conceptualization as a matter of classification or of justification? Sellars can say that he will give up the term concept to those who wish to endow record-changers or their protoplasmic counterparts with concepts, as long as he can have some other term to indicate what we have when we can place classifications in relation to other classifications in the way language-users do when they argue about what class a given item should fall in. Once again, Sellars falls back on saying that justification is a matter of social practice, and that everything which is not a matter of social practice is no help in understanding the justification of human knowledge, no matter how helpful it may be in understanding its acquisition. The naturalistic and the genetic fallacies have, Sellars thinks, combined in traditional empiricism to produce the view that we would be in a better position to congratulate ourselves on accurately mirroring nature (or to lament our failure) if we could only bring to consciousness the stages of our childhood development. Confused by Descartes’s conflation of thought and feeling, b...

November 20, 2020. Page 187.