Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores Wilfrid Sellars’s relation to the mostly forgotten Oxford philosopher John Cook Wilson. It argues that Rudolf Carnap’s failure to give a unified account of logical and empirical meaning leaves him with a deficient account of logical meaning. The book also explores Sellars’s place within the analytic tradition and discusses Sellars’s conception of philosophy and the sense in which it embodies characteristically analytical ideas. It explains classical pragmatist influences on Sellars’s views by discussing aspects of the intellectual background in which those views developed. The book also argues that the key to Sellars’s truth pluralism is his analysis of truth as “semantic assertability”, which is motivated by the same consideration that leads him to adopt truth relativism. It concludes with a critical question about Sellars’s distinction between imagining and sensing.