ABSTRACT
This chapter develops the distinction between Lewis's conceptualistic pragmatism and Sellars's 'transcendental naturalism'. It begins with a historical overview of the relation between Lewis and Sellars, with some discussion of the exchanges between Lewis and Sellars's father, Roy Wood Sellars (RWS), in order to better appreciate how transcendental naturalism functions as a via media between conceptualistic pragmatism and physical realism. The chapter then reconstructs the details of Sellars's criticisms of Lewis, with particular emphasis on their differing uses of analyticity and apriority and Sellars's rejection of the distinction between linguistic meaning and sense meaning. The key to Sellars's strong inferentialism is that material inference rules, together with language-entry moves and language-exit moves allows Sellars to treat language itself as all the discursive intentionality that people need. Finally, the chapter shows how the criticism of 'nonconceptual content' turns on an ambiguity that shows how there is a defensible conception of 'nonconceptual content' that is not vulnerable to conceptualist criticisms.
