ABSTRACT
In his classic 1956 article, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (EPM), Sellars was concerned primarily with epistemological and metaphysical issues surrounding what he called the Myth of the Given, the original title of those London lectures. Sellars argues in EPM that such perceptual knowings, despite being noninferential, are nonetheless not instances of the alleged presuppositionless given, on both semantic and epistemological grounds. It is one of the virtues of Peregrin's writings that he attempts to tackle the naturalistic questions raised by normative inferentialism, particularly in relation to questions concerning the evolutionary origins of our rule-following, pattern-governed linguistic behavior. Sellars' own way of framing this general approach to the natural and the normative was thus to argue that, seen in this light, the normative dimensions of our thought and agency are conceptually irreducible but causally reducible to what would be an adequate, purely naturalistic, extensional, scientific description of the same phenomena.
