ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a short reconstruction of an underlying tension between John Dewey and Clarence Irving Lewis as to what pragmatism involves before turning to an explication of Sellars's distinction between 'signifying' and 'picturing'. The title of this chapter is taken from Richard Rorty in which he began to distance himself, via criticism of Jay Rosenberg, from Wilfrid Sellars. Rorty was a committed Sellarsian for the first twenty years of his professional life, and his criticisms of Sellars led him to the remarkable Aufhebung of Sellars and W. V. O. Quine of 'Privileged Representations', in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. The chapter situates Sellars relative to the history of pragmatism, without simply assimilating Sellars to the pragmatist tradition, to demonstrate that Sellars's relationship to pragmatism is far closer than is widely assumed and that Rorty's rueful remark is misplaced. Sellars's proximity to the pragmatist tradition has been underappreciated partly because pragmatists still pay too little attention to Clarence Irving Lewis.
