ABSTRACT
It has become something of an orthodoxy amongst philosophers working in the wake of Sellars-especially Brandom and McDowell-that there is a fundamentally important distinction between sapience and sentience. Sapience concerns our ability to make assertions and other normatively governed speech acts with inferentially articulated propositional contents, and to entertain thoughts with analogous structure. By contrast, sentience concerns our ability to discriminate perceptually between motivationally salient stimuli and act in correspondingly appropriate ways. 1 At least in Sellars himself, both sentience and sapience are ‘transcendental’, in the following highly restricted sense. Transcendental reflection is an inventory of the most general kinds of cognitive capacities and incapacities necessary for the kind of cognitively significant experiences for beings such as ourselves or any being that we are capable of recognizing as being like ourselves. 2 (Those cognitive experiences include but are not limited to knowledge.) As a result of this reflective process, we are led to introduce the distinction between sentience and sapience. However, Sellars should also be read as having as a methodological principle that “transcendental structures must be realized in causal structures” (deVries 2011, pp. 61-62). That is, whatever structures and processes that we posit in transcendental inquiry must be causally implemented by structures and processes that are empirically confirmed and, to the extent possible, consistent with a scientific view of the world, however broadly conceived.
