ABSTRACT
Wilfrid Sellars's major impacts on twentieth-century philosophy have been in epistemology and philosophy of mind. In most post-Cartesian discussions, mind covers both intentional and sensory states. Discussions of the mind-body problem focus indifferently on pains and thoughts. A philosophical theory of mind needs to tell at least two stories: how mentalistic descriptions and explanations work, and how people are able to employ them. There are several different philosophical theories available in the tradition, most prominently the Aristotelian and the Cartesian theories, but the Cartesian theory was the dominant tradition against which Sellars had to fight. Sellars's dictum that attributing knowledge to someone is locating that person's state in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one says has become well-known of late. The attribution of any mental state presupposes that the subject is sensitive to the norms of reason and concerned with the proprieties governing behaviour and interaction.
