Science, Perception and Reality

This book includes two series of lectures specifically designed to defend and illustrate Sellars’s conception of philosophy as an attempt to gain reflective knowledge of how the various dimensions of human conceptual activity fit together and relate to the world of physical things and events. The approach is broadly analytic, empiricist and naturalistic. A most distinctive feature is the use of the concept of a framework of theoretical entities to show a way between the horns of the dilemmas characteristic of perception theory, the problem of other minds, the unity of the person and the controversy over ‘ordinary language’. This is accompanied by a critique of certain other attempts to put this concept to philosophical use, including recent claims that the relation of the framework of physical objects to sense impressions is analogous to that of the ‘objects’ of a scientific theory to the observation framework it is designed to explain. 1, «Philosophy and the scientific image of man» : consists of two lectures given at the University of Pittsburgh in December, 1960, as part of a series of lectures in the history and philosophy of science by various contributors. It was printed in Frontiers of Science and Philosophy (Robert Colodny, editor) and published by the University of Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh : 1962); – 2, «Being and Being Known» : lecture given at the St. Louis meeting of The American Catholic Philosophical Association in April, 1960, and reprinted from the Proceedings of the Association; – 3, «Phenomenalism» : written in 1959 for inclusion in another volume, but was withdrawn and requires no acknowledgement; – 4, «The language of Theories» : read at the 1959 meeting of The American Association for the Advancement of Science (Section L), and printed in Current Issues in the Philosophy of Science (Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell, editors), published by Henry Holt, Rhinehart and Winston (New Yorl : 1961); – 5, «Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind» : lectures delivered at the University of London in March, 1956, under the title, «The Myth of the Given : Three Lectures on Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind», from : Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. I, The Foundations of Science and the Concepts of Psychology and Psychoanalysis, edited by Herbert Feigl and Michael Scriven. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. Copyright 1956 by the University of Minesota; – 6, «Truth and ‘Correspondence’» : opening paper in a symposium on Logic and Reality at the 1961 meeting of the Metaphysical Society. Printed in the Journal of Philosophy, 59, 1962; – 7, «Naming and Saying» : opening paper in a symposium on Reference and Use at the 1961 meeting of the American Philosophical Asociation (Western Division). Published in Philosophy of Science, 29, 1962; – 8, «Grammar and Existence : a Preface to Ontology» : consists of two lectures given at Yale University in March, 1958. Published in Mind, 69, 1960; – 9, «Particulars» : originally appeared in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 13, 1952; – 10, «Is there a Synthetic A priori» : revised version of a paper read at a symposium on this topic at the 1951 meeting of the American Philosophical Association (Eastern Division). Published in Philosophy of Science, 20, 1953. The present version appeared in American Philosophers at Work (Sidney Hook, editor), New York (Criterion Press, 1958); – 11, «Some Reflections on Language Games» : originally printed in Philosophy of Science, Vol. 21, 3 July 1954, pp. 204-228. Copyright © 1954 The Williams & Wilkins Co., Baltimore 2, Md., U.S.A. It appears here in a revised version prepared in 1955 for publication in Volume I of Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, but withdrawn to make room for «Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind». M.-M. V.