ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a modest account of Sellars’s concept of ideal truth, modest since it tries to minimize potentially problematic commitments on Sellars’s part. The first part of the chapter discusses Sellars’s understanding of conceptual change. It shows that statements about conceptual continuity are context-sensitive for Sellars and discusses the implications of this idea. The second part discusses Sellars’s regulative ideal of an ultimate conceptual scheme. It argues that the content of this ideal is provided by a set of norms that are always already effective in our conceptual practices since these norms are constitutive for any conceptual practice. The notion of an ultimate, Peircean conceptual scheme is the notion of a perfect realization of these norms and thus a notion we always already grasp as concept-users. The third part of the chapter examines the double role of the practical in Sellars’s account of ideal truth. What drives the adoption of new laws and theories, and thus conceptual change, for Sellars, is practical reasoning targeted at acquiring or maintaining the ability to do certain things. These are precisely the abilities demanded by the norms constituting Sellars’s regulative ideal.
