ABSTRACT
I make three points critical of Sellars. (i) His use of the phrase “immediate experience” to refer to sense impressions in “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” is very misleading and engendered misinterpretations among his critics. (ii) I examine the claim that shows up in some fairly late Sellars articles, namely, that perceptual claims are almost universally wrong in that we take what is in fact a sensory state of ourselves, a sensation, to be some aspect of a physical object or event. Thus, our perceptual beliefs are almost universally mis-takings. I have difficulty reconciling this claim with Sellarsian epistemology, however compatible it might be with Sellarsian metaphysics. (iii) My third and last correction of Sellars is this: Sellars improperly succumbs to the dominance of the visual in his worrying about how in one’s experience of a pink ice cube both its pinkness and its coolth are present. My parting shot is a question: in Sellars’ view, given his development of the notion of a “sense-image model”, just how do imaging and sensing differ?
