Sellars on the Rationality of Empirical Inquiry

source: Philosophical Overdose    2017年1月15日
Danielle Macbeth gives a talk at Amherst College on Wilfrid Sellars...
Given that the aim of inquiry is to discover what is so, as contrasted with, for example, what merely seems to be so or what one would like to be so, inquiry, whether or not empirical, is rational just in the case it answers to what is. But what is it to answer to what is? In particular, what is it to answer to what is in the case of empirical inquiry? In Mind and World, McDowell suggests that what it is for empirical inquiry to answer to what is is for it to answer to the tribunal of experience. For McDowell, the rationality of empirical inquiry lies in the fact that experience serves as a tribunal to which empirical inquiry answers. In “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” Sellars has a different idea insofar as he holds that "empirical knowledge...is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once” (EPM § 38). For Sellars, empirical inquiry is rational, answerable to what is, not because it answers to the tribunal of experience, but because it is self-correcting. Danielle Macbeth develops and defends this Sellarsian idea.

"If I reject the framework of traditional empiricism, it is not because I want to say that empirical knowledge has no foundation. For to put it this way is to suggest that it is really 'empirical knowledge so-called', and to put it in a box with rumors and hoaxes. There is clearly some point to the picture of human knowledge as resting on a level of propositions -- observation reports -- which do not rest on other propositions in the same way as other propositions rest on them. On the other hand, I do wish to insist that the metaphor of 'foundation' is misleading in that it keeps us from seeing that if there is a logical dimension in which other empirical propositions rest on observation reports, there is another logical dimension in which the latter rest on the former. Above all, the picture is misleading because of its static character. One seems forced to choose between the picture of an elephant which rests on a tortoise (What supports the tortoise?) and the picture of a great Hegelian serpent of knowledge with its tail in its mouth (Where does it begin?). Neither will do. For empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once."