What Jones Taught the Ryleans: Toward a Sellarsian Metaphysics of Thought

This optimism distinguishes Sellars from, for example, Quine, for whom anti-privacy arguments relegate talk of a mental life to “an essentially dramatic idiom” (1960, 219). Though Sellars shares Quine’s dissatisfaction with a traditional (“private”) conception of the mind, Sellars thinks privacy a mythical accretion, inessential to rightly conceiving the mind. This is part of what he means in characterizing his view as a “revised classical analysis” (EPM, 178).