ABSTRACT
This paper is about an exegetical puzzle about the early phase of Wilfrid Sellars’ philosophical work. Like many Sellars scholars, I find it helpful to think about the nine years between the publication of Sellars’ first essay “Pure Pragmatics and Epistemology” (PPE) 1 in 1947 and his 1956 London lectures on the Myth of the Given as a period of continuous philosophical development in which his overarching metaphilosophical and methodological commitments settle and the outlines of his philosophical system take shape. But on the face of it, there appears to be a deep rift between Sellars’ earliest three essays and the bulk of his work up to “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (EPM). At the heart of Sellars’ first three essays lies a staunch commitment to a clear-cut demarcation between philosophy and empirical science. PPE, “Epistemology and the New Way of Words” (ENNW), and “Realism and the New Way of Words” (RNWW) pursue the ambitious goal of laying the conceptual and methodological foundations for a genuinely non-factualistic approach to philosophical questions-an approach that avoids the pitfall of psychologism much more carefully than does, according to Sellars, the mainstream of Analytic Philosophy in the wake of Frege, Wittgenstein, and Carnap. Apparently, the very early Sellars sees the key to success in a bold extension of the formalistic ‘master strategy’ of the first phase of the analytic movement to all genuinely philosophical concepts: “A philosophical concept must be decidable on purely formal grounds” (PPE, pp. 13-14; italics omitted). To live up to this claim, Sellars sets out to sketch the outlines of a formal metatheoretical framework that is rich enough to clarify the notion of a language as used in a world. In rough outline, this is the gist of Sellars’ famous project of pure pragmatics.
