My view is that only existents have essential natures. — Andrew M

Right, but I don't believe that this is what is being called into question. What is in question is whether there is a real distinction between essence and existence within each existing thing.

Why would that imply an eternal existence? — Andrew M

Denying the real distinction between essence and existence within a being implies necessary existence. If the "what-ness" of something includes existence, then it exists simply in virtue of what it is. Such a being could not fail to exist insofar as it is what it is.

I notice that this specific issue seems to mark a point of departure for Aquinas from Aristotle. — Andrew M

Yes and no. Aristotle recognized the distinction between what a thing is and that a thing is: in fact, his entire scientific methodology (posterior analytics) is founded upon the distinction. It's true that Aristotle never explicitly elaborated a theory of existence apart from essence, but the beginnings of such a theory are implied by much of what he wrote. One could argue that the failure to elaborate such a theory is a gaping hole at the heart of Aristotle's overall system. After all, if form is act with respect to the potency of matter, then form must be the principle by which any individual substance is. Yet, for Aristotle, form has no being in and of itself. But how can something that has no being in itself be the principle by which anything is? It doesn't add up.

In my view, part of the essential nature of a lion is that it lives in the world that we inhabit, whereas a unicorn is a merely a fictional creature represented in books and pictures. So for someone to mistakenly talk about lions as if they were fictional entities would be for them to entirely misconceive the essential nature of lions. — Andrew M

If the essence of being a lion included its existence, then lions could never cease to exist. What you are arguing implies that lions have always existed and will always exist just in virtue of what they essentially are.

You might say that being consists in the act of being, and so it is ontologically distinct from the totality of beings in that sense. But I think of beings as acts of being, so being would equally be the totality of acts of being, that is one great act of being, and again there would be no ontological distinction. — Janus

Sorry for yet another delayed reply.

This is where the real distinction between essence and existence in the order of finite being again comes to the fore. In Thomistic philosophy, God is the one ultimate, unitary act of the existence - indeed, this is His very essence. For every other being, its essence, or its "what-ness", is other than its existence. As such, the very essence of me, you and every other finite being is radically distinct from what God essentially is, even as we would not exist without participating in His very being. All things are essentially other from God, and yet could not exist apart from God. We participate in God's essence via our very existence, but we are essentially distinct from God.

I still cannot see how you think being unaffected does not imply being indifferent. "Being good and loving" would seem to be meaningless without action, and action implies response, and response just is being affected. — Janus

I hear what your saying, but the response is going to be that God is the one infinitely and eternally good act of pure love and beauty. He never changes from being exactly that, because he never changes at all.

Given this, what does it mean to say that God could enter into a loving relationship with finite beings such as us? I think the answer here will be something along these lines: God sustains finite/temporal existence as ultimate cause via His unitary act of existence. Everything that unfolds temporally in our experience finds its genesis in that single, unitary act. As such, our experience of God will always manifest temporally/sequentially. On this account, it's as if God has weaved interactive manifestations/representations of Himself into the temporal fabric of finite reality through his unitary act of creation.

The potential that the first actualizer has to create other substances would be actualized by the first actualizer itself. — Andrew M

I read Feser's chapter and I was wrong: he is talking about the actualization of a substance's existence, not just the actualization of its potencies. Your response is to deny the dichotomy presented in proposition 9 and affirm the possibility of a substance that both exists necessarily and yet is a composite of act and potency. Feser will deny this possibility.

That's because Feser accepts the real distinction between essence and existence (Thomistic Proof) and also the contingency of composite substances (Neo-platonic Proof). In the Thomistic model, a being is necessary if only if its existence is identical with its essence. Not only is such a being absolutely simple (because there's no distinction between its existence and essence), but since existence is the purest and highest form of act, it is also pure act. As such, a being that is a composite of potency and act could not exist necessarily.

God is still natural; in fact God is nature, but he is not nature as we enciounter it via the senses. — Janus

That every being participates in Being does not imply that Being is identical with the totality of beings, nor that beings are "part of" (in the compositional sense) Being. It simply implies that beings would not be without Being. In other words, God and nature can still be understand as ontologically distinct. The key difference between Aquinas (Monotheism) and Spinoza (Pantheism) is going to be found in their contrasting definitions of substance.

That's true because according to that story God cannot be radically separate form creation. He must be affected by his creation or else he is utterly indifferent. — Janus

Unaffected does not imply indifferent. God can be immutable (unaffected) while also being good and loving, which implies nothing more than that God is always good and loving.

Which often amounts to what Thomas Nagel described as ‘the fear of religion’ in his essay ‘Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion’. — Wayfarer

In some cases, perhaps. In many cases people are legitimately perplexed by non-naturalist claims and genuinely don't see how they could possibly be true given everything they know from experience, science and philosophy.

As I asked Wayfarer earlier, how does considering God to be transcendent and supernatural (meaning radically separate and independent) help with explaining its role in creating and/or sustaining the world? — Janus

Mostly in that everything that we encounter via sensual experience is finite, changeable and essentially relative. One could say that the very nature of experience necessarily points the intellect in the direction of that which is infinite, immutable and absolute as ultimate ground. In the Thomistic tradition God is both radically immanent and radically transcendent. He is immanent in the sense that our very existence is God's own existence; literally our existence is "on loan" from God. And yet God is radically transcendent in that God's essence is radically different from any essence that we encounter via sense experience, including our own essence.

This view produces the problem of interaction which plagued the Cartesian picture. On the other hand an immanent (indwelling and natural) ideas about God's causal efficacy are easier to understand and elaborate, while remaining in the province of philosophy and metaphysics rather than science. — Janus

The problem of interaction is an artifact of casting God and nature as mutually exclusive in every way, but as we saw above the Thomistic tradition saw the point of overlap between God and world via the so-called "act of existence" itself. Everything finite is a composite of potency and act. Existence (Being itself) is the purest act. Apart from Being, nothing is. Therefore, apart from God (who is Being), nothing is. As pure act, God is necessarily the ultimate (but not proximate) causal ground of all that is. When cast in these terms, the interaction problem simply dissolves. Or so the story goes...

I'm curious as to how both of you think that what Aaron says here would differ from what naturalism allows. Or to put it another why I wonder whether both of you agree that naturalism would not allow mathematical objects to exist "as a nexus of relations etc...". I would also like to hear exactly why Wayfarer thinks that, and why Aaron does, if he does. Also I would like to know whether you think this applies to all possible forms of naturalism, or only to specific forms. — Janus

Sorry, Janus, I overlooked your reply somehow.

It's hard to answer your question because there are so many different forms of naturalism. I've encountered self-proclaimed naturalists who claim to believe in the existence of everything from numbers, to qualia to God. The common thread running through most versions of naturalism is the denial of transcendence, and often the word "natural" is cashed out in reference to the natural sciences. In that case, you end up with claims such as "nothing exists beyond what is posited by the natural sciences". But there's often disagreement regarding even what is and is not to be considered "officially" posited by the sciences.

I suppose that if a naturalist were willing to countenance the existence of sign relations they could attempt to make the case for a naturalistic theory of the intellect. At that point the argument will take its familiar turn into debates about the possibility/impossibility of explaining things such as qualia, semantic content, intentionality, etc. in "naturalistic" terms.

Agreed. So I reject the idea that the first actualizer has potential for its own existence which is why I've said that it necessarily exists. However it doesn't follow that it doesn't have potentials for the existence of other substances. — Andrew M

But in this case the potentials belong to the other substances, not to the unactualized actualizer. If the unactualized actualizer, even if it were to exist necessarily, had potencies of its own then it wouldn't truly be an unactualized actualizer because its potencies would require actualization from something more fundamental. See also the above comments regarding conservation and creation.

Basically it's not clear to me how anything else could come into existence if there weren't potential for them to exist in the first actualizer. — Andrew M

So I wonder if we're mixing up a couple of different concepts here: conservation and creation. My understanding is that Feser's argument concerns conservation. That is, we assume that the natural universe already exists and show that it depends on God's conservative act in order to remain in existence. It is in the act of conservation that God must play the role of the unactualized actualizer, whereby the changes occurring in the natural world find their causative ground in Him.

Creation is (perhaps) a different thing altogether in that it is ex nihilo. We have to remember that in the Aristotelian tradition potency has no reality apart from act. To create is not to draw actuality out of potentiality, but to cause something new to exist, along with its potentialities, where nothing existed previously. You might inquire as to how creation ex nihilo is possible, but I don't think that is the point of Feser's argument.

I just purchased Feser's book and have started reading the chapter in question. Interested to see where this goes.

In Aristotelean metaphysics matter is potency. Therefore, something that is purely actual is immaterial by definition. Furthermore, change is defined in that system as the transition from potency to actuality. So something that is purely actual is also immutable by definition.

That said, I would hazard to suggest that the argument as presented by Darth is not quite right (no offense Darth). For instance, I can't imagine that Feser would accept premise 6 as stated, because it implies that a purely actual substance cannot exist.

As others have noted, this argument is not about temporal causation. What Feser seems to be saying is that at any moment every substance is either dependent for its actualization on something else that is "lower" in the existential hierarchy, or it is not. A coffee cup could not exist as it does (i.e. "in act") without the molecules that make up the styrofoam existing in the way that they do, and those molecules could not exist without the atoms that make up the molecules, etc. He is arguing that there must be something purely actual at the "bottom" of this hierarchy that does not depend for its actuality on anything else, otherwise the hierarchical chain of existential dependency relations that are necessary for the actualization of being in each moment could never be "instantiated". In other words, "being" could never get off the ground if the actualizer at the bottom had any potency that needed to be actualized by something more fundamental.

That said, I haven't read the book, so my interpretation may be off. Perhaps Darth can point out how what I've said differs from Feser's intent.

Correct. Mathematical objects are not material substances. They exist only as a nexus of relations (i.e. signs) initially abstracted from sense perception and constructively elaborated by the intellect.

Now, where does that exist? Plainly, it exists nowhere - but it is nevertheless real. — Wayfarer

Per Aquinas, it exists as a product of the intellect, which is as real as anything else that exists.

Aquinas allows for substantial existence which is not a composite of potency and act. This is obvious in the case of God. — Metaphysician Undercover

God is the only exception.

So this doesn't make sense at all, to say that form plays the role of potency, because it is an obvious inconsistency. — Metaphysician Undercover

My understanding is that just as matter is potency with respect for form, so form is potency with respect esse, which is the act of existence bequeathed by God to every finite substance. Aquinas is quite clear that angels are composites of potency and act. See "Article 2: Reply to Objection 3" at the link below:

http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1050.htm#article2

Although there is no composition of matter and form in an angel, yet there is act and potentiality. [...] Hence the nature itself is related to its own existence as potentiality to act. Therefore if there be no matter, and supposing that the form itself subsists without matter, there nevertheless still remains the relation of the form to its very existence, as of potentiality to act. — Aquinas

When you say 'created by the human mind', that is modernist thinking - nearly every modern philosopher would agree with you. But the classical A-T (Aristotelian-Thomist) understanding is completely different. I don't think those philosophers would agree at all that the human mind 'creates' any such thing as a form; it receives sensations, and apprehends the form, which is an 'intelligible object'. — Wayfarer

Wayfarer, you are correct to assert that the A-T tradition accepts the mind-independent existence of forms, but only insofar as they are the immanent constituents of some substance. At the end of the day, particular substances are what exist, whether material or immaterial, and a substance is always a composite of potency and act. In the case of material substances, form is the principle of act and matter is the principle of potency, and neither can be said to exist in the absence of the other.

Interestingly, Thomism does allow for the existence of pure forms as a consequence of accepting the so-called "real distinction between essence and existence". Aquinas supposed that angels exist as pure forms, but still as composites of potency and act. In the case of angels, form plays the role of potency in relation to the pure act of existence ("esse") bequeathed via the direct creative power of God. But angels are here understood as intellectual agents that are capable of interaction with material existence, and not as Platonic "Ideas" subsisting in some independent realm of purely intelligible being.

In the case of mathematics things get a little more complicated. Aquinas maintained mathematical objects were abstractions produced via the agent intellect out of the contents of sense perception ("phantasiari") and, as such, consigned entirely to the realm of ens rationis (mind-dependent being). He did not deny the real, mind-independent existence of quantity in the material world (which is always manifest as an accident of some material substance, and therefore exists only in or through material substance), but he did deny that material quantity is identical to mathematical number. For Aquinas, to confuse mathematical number with material quantity is to mistake the map for the territory.

Lol....sorry. It just means "I agree".

Which philosophers turn God into an impersonal force? Do you include the scholastics and neo-scholastics in that assessment?

Ok, I think our conversation is going to dead end since you can’t seem to keep your claims straight. Did you not say just a few posts back that we can't have third person knowledge of experience? I believe your exact words were:

What I said was that experience 'can't be known in the third person' — Wayfarer

Seemed pretty clear, but maybe I misunderstood.

In regards the difference between experience and projectiles - sure it's true that you can throw me a ball but you can't throw me an experience. You also can't throw me the ideal gas law, but I think you'll have a hard time convincing folks that the ideal gas law can't be an object of cognition.

As for the Blackwell entry, this comes down to an exegetical dispute. I would argue that to identify the thinking self with the noumenal self renders Kant's philosophy blatantly self-contradictory. As such, I think such an identification should be avoided on the basis of the principle of charity. There's multiple places where Kant explicitly claims that that his transcendental psychology counts as knowledge and that transcendental arguments count as cognitions. Insofar as transcendental psychology gives a positive account of the faculties of the knowing subject, and insofar as we want to maintain that the knowing subject just is the transcendental subject, then the transcendental subject simply cannot be identified with the noumenal subject of metaphysical speculation, on pain of contradiction

As for the tie in with functionalism: you said that you disagree with that assessment because Kant was concerned with establishing the limits of knowledge, but these aren't mutually exclusive so there's no problem here. If you want to argue that Kant's account is not functional then you'll need to try to show that the various faculties and operations that he posits don't amount to functional transformations. That's going to be pretty hard considering that pretty much every operation that Kant describes takes the form of a function (i.e. they operate on well-defined inputs in order to produce well-defined outputs). Philosophers have been noting the functional nature of Kant's transcendental psychology for decades and to my knowledge, it's not really a controversial claim at this point. Consider this quote from the SEP article Kant's View of the Mind and Consciousness of the Self:

Three ideas define the basic shape (‘cognitive architecture’) of Kant's model and one its dominant method. They have all become part of the foundation of cognitive science.

1. The mind is complex set of abilities (functions). (As Meerbote 1989 and many others have observed, Kant held a functionalist view of the mind almost 200 years before functionalism was officially articulated in the 1960s by Hilary Putnam and others.)

2. The functions crucial for mental, knowledge-generating activity are spatio-temporal processing of, and application of concepts to, sensory inputs. Cognition requires concepts as well as percepts.

3. These functions are forms of what Kant called synthesis. Synthesis (and the unity in consciousness required for synthesis) are central to cognition.

These three ideas are fundamental to most thinking about cognition now. Kant's most important method, the transcendental method, is also at the heart of contemporary cognitive science. — SEP

But I don't think you really want to try to understand any of this, because it doesn't square with your notion that Kant's philosophy is a decisive ally in your holy war against naturalism. So I’ll leave it here.

@Wayfarer, you're not addressing the criticism that's being leveled at you. If you think that third person knowledge of experience is impossible then you need to explain how it's possible for you or anyone else to know (or say) anything about your (or anyone else's) experience. It won't do to simply assert that "the subject of experience is not the object of experience" because that just begs the question.

In regards to Kant, his philosophy implies only that the transcendental subject can't be an object of empirical cognition, not that it can't be an object of cognition tout court. Insofar as transcendental philosophy is itself the product of reason operating on judgment, it requires that the transcendental subject must be capable of becoming an object of cognition. Otherwise transcendental philosophy itself would not be possible.

Furthermore, it is striking the extent to which Kant's account of subjectivity is functional in nature. That is, it ultimately specifies what something must do in order to count as a subject of experience. To the extent that it does this, Kant's theory (and variations thereof) can be interpreted as providing a functional model of subjectivity, thus unwittingly legitimizing the notion that the problem of subjectivity is best approached as an engineering problem (per Dennett, et al). There's a very real sense in which Dennett and his ilk can be seen as legitimate heirs to the Kantian tradition. To be clear, I'm not saying that Kant would have condoned Dennett's philosophy, but it's pretty hard to deny that he planted the seeds of modern functionalism right below the surface.

What I said was that experience 'can't be known in the third person'. — Wayfarer

But that can't be right, can it? After all, the claim that experience can't be known in the third person is itself a third person claim about experience. Maybe you think that's a cheap parlor trick, so consider the fact that you can convey truths to me about your experience, and I can convey those truths to others. We can come to know many things about your experiences without actually having had those experiences ourselves. How is that possible if experience cannot be known in the third person?

Furthermore, we can also have third-person knowledge of the structure of experience in general. That's what Kant (who you seem fond of) was really after, wasn't it? He attempted to infer the structure of subjectivity via the transcendental method. By it's own lights, Kant's philosophy counts as knowledge only insofar as the structure of subjective experience can be objectified - that is, insofar as it can become the object of theoretical knowledge.

And that brings me to my point. Objectification is not naturalization. By conflating the two you are running aground the rocky shores of mysticism. Those shores are extremely hard to navigate and, honestly, I'm not convinced it can be done. But the very fact that you and I are having this conversation seems to entail that experience can be objectified - it really can become the object of third-person knowledge. Yet this doesn't entail that it is also "natural", whatever you happen to think "natural" means.

I think his mistake is to believe that 'experience' is something that can be known in the third person. In other words, experience is not an object of cognition, in the way that an electron or particle or other object can be. We don't know experiences, we have experiences; so any experience has an inescapably first-person element, that is, it is undergone by a subject. So we can't objectify 'the nature of experience' in the way we can the objects and forces that are analysed by the natural sciences. — Wayfarer

Hi Wayfarer. I’ve seen you write paragraphs like the above several times and am always struck by the ironic nature of the fact that in order for what you claim to have any force it must be possible to do the very thing you claim to be impossible – namely, objectify experience. If experience can’t be the object of knowledge, then you can’t make any claims about it. Full stop. There’s no middle ground here that I can see, but perhaps you could take a stab at explaining how your claims about experience are possible if experience literally can’t be known.

Perhaps an important distinction lies hidden here. Recalling Sellars' distinction between "sensing particulars" and "sensing facts", I might deny the claim that I can see my own impressions, but affirm the claim that I observe (the fact) that I have current impressions. Accordingly, we might say I observe the impressions, or say at least that I make observational judgments about the impressions, without "sensing" them. — Cabbage Farmer

In my opinion Reichenbach does not make clear what he means when he says he doesn’t “sense” his impressions. On the one hand he says that he never “sees” an impression, but on the other hand he seems to say that all seeing is mediated by impressions such that impressions provide the “sense- content” of all of our seeings. So there is clearly a sense in which it is correct to say that he sees his impressions since they literally provide the raw data out of which all of his perceptions are constructed.

Reichenbach's general belief that there are such things as impressions is part of a theory, or model, or discourse about perceptual experience -- a logos he picked up at second hand before kicking the tires himself. Say he confirms the theory to his own satisfaction, and thus acquires the general belief, by way of some inference, and thus ceases to "doubt the existence" of impressions in general, wherever there is perception like ours. It's the theory that positions him to make the inference, on any particular occasion:

If I am sensing right now, then there are impressions in me; and
I am sensing right now;

Therefore, there are impressions in me. — Cabbage Farmer

He posits impressions as part of a theory, but he posits them as the sensual basis of all experience. So there’s a bit of a tension here, in my opinion, because he wants to say that impressions are theoretical, inferentially mediated entities and yet the role that they play within his theory of perception makes them the direct object of sense perception, which then seems to imply that they are not inferentially mediated entities after all.

In fact, he doesn't have to bother making this inference on each separate occasion, once he's acquired the relevant general belief; much as I don't have to infer that gravity draws a glass to the floor when I drop it, or that the bright spot in the sky is a massive ball of gas. Inference may play a role in the initial formation of such beliefs, and in the formation of the concepts associated with the beliefs; but once the story is told, most of us who take it on, do so without bothering over what inferences and evidence informed the story in the beginning. — Cabbage Farmer

Sure. Once the inference becomes “automatic”, the entities postulated via that inference can become the object of direct observation claims. Sellars makes pretty much the same argument in a couple of his own papers (Scientific Realism or Irenic Instrumentalism and Is Scientific Realism Tenable).

We shouldn't suppose this mere distinction informs us about what sort of thing the "impression" is. For instance, we needn't suppose that, whenever there is an impression, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the impression and a physical thing of which it is an impression. — Cabbage Farmer

Right.

I suppose he doesn't mean: Usually there are physical things within me and impressions within me, but sometimes impressions only. — Cabbage Farmer

That’s my take as well.

It seems to me we need something like a distinction between sense-perception and imagination just to make sense of the fact that we dream, hallucinate, and imagine -- though how we conceptualize such phenomena, and what judgments we make in light of them, seems to vary from one person and one cultural context to another.

I have the impression that 20th-century analytic philosophers, especially in the shadow of the spooky behaviorist tendency we might trace through Ryle and Quine, tended to neglect such phenomena, and to perhaps quietly lump false judgments made on the basis of imaginings into the same account as false judgments made on the basis of misperceptions. In any case, it's often hard to tell how to map a term like Reichenbach's "impression" here onto a distinction like the one I draw between perceiving and imagining. — Cabbage Farmer

My sense is that Reichenbach would lump imaginings in with impressions.

Perhaps the neatest way is to say that imaginings are among our impressions. If I mistake my hallucination for perception, and judge that there's an apple on the table on the basis of that hallucination, the source of the confusion is that I have mistaken hallucinating for perceiving, or in other words, I have incorrectly taken an instance of hallucinating as an instance of perceiving. I may correct my own error when I move to the table and aim to fetch the apple; discover that nothing's there, though it still looks like there's an apple; and now correctly judge that I am and have been hallucinating, despite the persistent vision-like appearance of an apple on the table. — Cabbage Farmer

Well, this is where we run into that whole “sensing facts” vs. “sensing particulars” conundrum again. Are impressions the direct cause of our observation claims or the direct justification for those claims? According to Sellars, claiming that they’re both is to fall prey to the Myth.

Also, for Sellars, as we have seen, perceptions can be true or false. So my impression is that he would say that hallucinations are just false perceptions. Of course, he’s talking about hallucinations qua propositional content. Hallucinations qua sensual contents are sensa – that is, objective events occurring “in” the perceiver. A similar story could be told about imagination, although the structure of imagination qua propositional contents is different. The claim “this unicorn is white” is true enough while I imagine a white unicorn, though the fact that I wouldn’t put forward that claim as a claim in earnest about an actually existing animal in my immediate environment is what distinguishes the two.

Reichenbach, however, seems perhaps to speak as though the confusion is somehow or other contained in the impression, and now he slides from "impression" to "representation". — Cabbage Farmer

Right. Again, apparently eliding the distinction between the causal and epistemological dimensions sensory-perception.

But what sort of thing is the impression supposed to be, if the error in judgment is already contained in it? I can stare at a mirage for hours, and change my mind a thousand times while it remains the same mirage. It looks the same, the world appears to me in the same way, while I cycle through various judgments on the basis of that one appearance. The appearance doesn't tell me how to judge, and I don't tell it how to appear. The judging is up to me, and the appearing is up to the appearance, though I can turn my head and get past it. — Cabbage Farmer

Yep.

Along these lines, I make a three-part epistemological distinction: In the first place there is the fact of the matter, the way things are in the world in fact. In the second place there is the appearance, the fact of how things appear to me (e.g., how things "look to me"). In the third place there is the seeming, the fact of how I take things in fact to be, in part on the basis of appearances. In making active judgments about how things seem, in part on the basis of appearances, I change the seeming, but not the appearances. Normally I don't need to make such judgments in order for things to seem to me one way or another; ordinarily I resort to such judging only when salient features of my experience seem uncertain, confused, or otherwise inadequate to form the basis of a reasonable judgment I have some interest in making. The judgment amends or completes or suspends the seeming. — Cabbage Farmer

I’m turning into a broken record here, but again we seem to confront this ambiguity in the word “fact”. When we use the word “fact” are we referring to something that is propositionally structured? Or to ask the same question in a different way, are we referring to something that could serve as justification for our beliefs? Or are we referring to non-propositionally structured states of the world – that is, things that could cause our beliefs but not justify them?

Continuing on…

What shall we count as “adequate” evidential basis for claims about how things really are? I would argue along lines just indicated above, that the seeming-seeing of a seeming-apple does provide adequate evidential basis for claims about real apples, though not for claims that such claims are certain claims. In cases in which new evidence comes to light, that the seeming-apple was not in fact an apple, or that the seeming-seeing was not a seeing, we amend the record of discourse by adding new alleged facts (including claims about the seeming course of seemings) and revise or withdraw from our previous claim about what’s over there in the world where (it seems) it had seemed there was a seeming-apple. — Cabbage Farmer

Again, the evidence provided by “looks” claims seems to be parasitic upon more fundamental “is” claims. Jones’s “looks” claim is counted as evidence only because Jones’s reliability has already been established. You couldn’t establish that reliability on the basis of other “looks” claims alone because "reliable" in this case just means "an agreement between how things look and how things are".

Let’s not forget the role of expressions like “I thought I knew”. I thought there was an apple there, but it turned out to be a lump of wax. That doesn’t mean the initial claim was unjustified, unwarranted, and groundless -- only that it turned out to be incorrect; or rather that the speaker turned out to have reason to correct it. This new reason, or new judgment, is as fallible in principle as the first which it amends. But it seems such claims are correct when they happen to be so, and stand uncorrected until there’s reason for correction. — Cabbage Farmer

Yep, agreed.

Who’s doing the “moving” here, and for what purpose? Arguably neither route will get us more “certainty” in the claims we make about what’s “over there”. It’s true that ordinary speech for ordinary purposes tends to follow the more direct route, speaking about “what’s over there” without wasting time on appearance-talk except in special cases, as when one is prompted by events to revise his own considered view about “what he thought he knew.” — Cabbage Farmer

The rational agent is doing the “moving”, and for the purpose of avoiding full accountability for the “is” claim.

The efficiency of that fine custom of, as it were, directly addressing things in the world as they appear to us, and revising only when it matters -- instead of constantly referring to the mediations of experience and conceivable doubts of reason -- gives us no reason to suppose those mediations vanish whenever there’s harmony between the seeming and the fact. It seems rather that when they appear in agreement, ordinarily we focus on the main track, according to our purpose, only falling back on the other, and to the task of realignment, when they fall out of whack.


I don’t mean to imply, by speaking this way, that the “appearance” is something like a color patch in my head, ontologically isolable from the “causal chain” that is -- I want to say -- identical to that appearance.

We may analyze a causal chain into parts, or happen upon one link at a time, and then in ignorant conjecture or counterfactual hypothesis, characterize that one link as part of indefinitely many conceivable causal chains. Some such stories seem to line up with the facts better than others. Yet others seem entirely off base.

And the facts keep coming in, or so it seems. — Cabbage Farmer

I don’t think that Sellars would say that the mediations of experience and reason vanish when there is a harmony between seeming and fact. Sellars actually defended a version of the correspondence theory of truth based on something that he called a “picturing” relation, which he understood to be something like a homomorphism between physical events within the agent and other physical events not originating within the agent.

I strongly agree, objective claims about how things really are make good justifications for other objective claims about how things really are, and should be perhaps required in order to count such claims as “justified”. So far as I can make out, sophisticated theories about light and vision add little in this regard to a common-sense grasp of how seeing works.

Moreover, general knowledge about light and the historical reliability of judgments of color does not inform me of my present circumstances at all, unless experience informs me of my present circumstances in such a way as to warrant the application of thoughts about light and color discrimination to my thoughts about present circumstances. There’s no theory that tells me whether my eyes are open or closed right now, for instance, or whether it’s dark or light in here, or where the proximate light sources are in my vicinity of the world and what color of light they seem in my estimation to emit. Ordinarily I acquire such information noninferentially by using my eyes to see. It seems that any general theory of vision I may have acquired secondhand over the years, has accrued through centuries determined in part by processes involving the same sort of basis for judgment in others, who used their eyes in about the same way that I do on each particular occasion. — Cabbage Farmer

Right, theoretical knowledge is generally not a replacement for the deliverances of perception, but in cases where I suspect my perceptions to be in error my background knowledge about my current circumstances could inferentially justify a belief that directly contradicts my non-inferentially elicited observational beliefs. For instance, if I take myself to know that the room in which I am standing is currently drenched in blue light, I might come to suspect that my non-inferentially elicited judgment “this tie is purple” to be in error. I may come - on the basis of my theoretical knowledge of light, color and vision - to conclude “this tie is red” instead.

The main thrust of this point seems reasonable, but there’s arguably an unwarranted and undesirable implication, that “appearances” are not part of the empirical world, and that our accounts of appearances are not accounts of the empirical world. — Cabbage Farmer

Sellars believes in the existence of what he calls “sensa”, but he thinks that sensa are epistemically inert events that occur in the objective world. So there is a sense in which Sellars would allow that claims about sensa are indeed legitimate empirical claims. That said, sensa are conceived by Sellars to be the direct cause of our non-inferentially elicited beliefs, but not direct evidence for those beliefs. Again, this is Sellars’s attempt to avoid what he takes to be an illicit equivocation between the ontological and epistemological dimensions of perception.

I suggest, to the contrary, that “having an appearance” or “being appeared to” is a sort of knowledge of the empirical world -- a most fundamental sort -- that can be analyzed and expressed in terms of appearance-talk that coincides with matters of fact, whether or not the subject understands that or how the appearance coincides with other matters of fact.

The appearance is part of reality, that’s how it coincides. It is itself a matter of fact related to other matters of fact in the world. That’s how perceptual experience binds our thoughts to nature and opens the world to each perceiver. — Cabbage Farmer

Again, Sellars does not deny that we can have knowledge of appearances, or that appearances are part of the objective world. He only denies that such knowledge is epistemically “fundamental” for reasons already rehearsed above.

One concern I have with the view you’ve attributed to Sellars, is that it may leave a gap between general empirical beliefs and particular perceptual occasions. I mean specifically, with respect to handling claims about whether and how appearances can “provide an adequate evidential basis for claims about how things really are”; and about “the primary justificatory backdrop for our first-order observational claims”. To unpack such baggage the wrong way, may be to fall into some version of the “frictionless spinning in a void” associated with coherentism.

By my way of reckoning, it makes more sense to emphasize the cooperation on each occasion of general beliefs and beliefs based on current perception. The essential role of the more general beliefs, and the ordinary tendency to gloss over appearance-talk in happy cases, doesn’t mean there isn’t a deep layer of belief that’s analyzable or even best described in terms of appearance-talk, playing an equally essential role in our acquisition of noninferential knowledge of present circumstances. — Cabbage Farmer

Sellars maintains that non-inferentially elicited observation claims provide the foundation for empirical knowledge. However, he thinks that these are “is” claims (“x is F”), not “looks” claims (“x looks F to S”). Furthermore, he doesn’t think that these are indubitable. For Sellars, the non-inferentially elicited observation claims that make up the foundation of empirical knowledge can be overturned by inferentially elicited claims (see the example of the purple tie from above). He maintains that, in some cases, it is this very fact that makes the recognition of perceptual error possible.

Ok,stopping for a while.

Hi @Cabbage Farmer. You're putting me to shame here with the sheer volume of your replies. Sorry I'm not keeping up, but I'll go ahead pick up where I left off:

That doesn’t make it nonsense to speak about the epistemic role of that deep layer of belief based on appearances, which serves as a safety net for us to fall back on gracefully, precisely because it persists while we ignore it. — Cabbage Farmer

Sure, and I don’t think Sellars would say that it’s nonsense to talk about the epistemic role of such claims - in fact, that is exactly what he is interested in talking about!

It’s a withdrawal from claims about how things really are over there, where there seems to be a red apple. But this doesn’t entail another withdrawal, from all claims about how things really are in the world: For this appearance, and this seeming, may be said to be part of the world. And it’s not clear that it may be coherently denied that the appearance and seeming are part of the world. — Cabbage Farmer

Yes, and Sellars acknowledges that in making such claims we are still stating facts about the world – namely, facts of the form “x looks F to S”, etc. Sellars doesn’t deny that “appearances” exist per se, but he doesn’t think that sense-data exist. That is, he doesn’t think that appearances are little colored-and-shaped particulars nor that reality is fundamentally constructed out of such things.

Accordingly, the appearance and the seeming are among the “facts” we may aim to piece together in each case. For instance by asking: How is it the case, how does it happen, that things appear thus and so (to me, now)? — Cabbage Farmer

Sure, but we have to be careful in referring to appearances as “facts”, because the term is ambiguous.

By “fact”, we can mean something that has propositional form (e.g. “x is F”) or we can mean some kind of particular process or object in the world (e.g. trees, rocks, etc.). For Sellars, propositions are essentially functional roles in linguistic practice. In other words, whenever someone utters a claim, the abstract meaning of that claim is determined by the functional role that the claim plays within the “game of giving and asking for reasons”. In contrast, particulars such as trees and rocks are not essentially functional roles within our language games. Particular trees and rocks can certainly have roles within our language games, but neither their essence nor existence is dependent on those roles.

And that’s why Sellars harps on properly making a distinction between sensing particulars and sensing facts. Sellars maintains that we sense particulars, but perceive facts, and he thinks that sense-datum theories run into difficulties in part because they don’t properly distinguish between the two. Falling into the myth of the given is thinking that there is something that is sensed directly that is both an essentially extra-linguistic particular and an essentially linguistic entity such as a proposition. In Sellars book, this is illegitimate insofar as it posits something that is an instance of two incompatible types.

In ordinary, happy cases, one fair answer is: Because there’s an apple there, and your eyes are open and aimed that way. The frequency with which seeming-seeings of seeming-apples turn out to be, to all appearances and “to a practical certainty”, genuine seeings of genuine apples, also serves as justification for the belief that “There is an apple there”, and lets the seeming-seeing of a seeming-apple stand as a noninferentially acquired defeasible warrant for the latter belief.

A more developed variation on this theme could haul into the account an empirically grounded story about light and the light-relative properties of physical objects; about retinas and cones and optic nerves; about perceptual processes in cognition.

None of this amounts to absolute “theoretical certainty” that there really is a real apple there -- a certainty we never attain, even as we bite and chew and swallow. — Cabbage Farmer

So, my take on this is that Sellars wouldn’t deny that “looks” claims can provide evidence for “is” claims under the right circumstances. If 99.99% of the time that Jones utters claims of the form “x looks F” it turns out that the corresponding “x is F” claim is also true, then there’s a sense is which Jones's uttering “x looks F” can be considered as evidence for the claim “x is F”, ceteris paribus. But even in this case, the evidence provided by Jones’s “looks” claims is parasitic on the evidence provided by other more fundamental “is” claims. They only provide evidence insofar as Jones really is 99.99% accurate. And that’s really the point that I take Sellars to be making here - there’s no layer of “looks” claims that can serve as an independent evidential foundation (whether certain or probable) for all of our “is” claims.

I do not think that it is correct to exclude Aristotle from substance dualism. In his Categories he clearly defines primary and secondary substance, primary substance being material substance, and secondary substance formal. Material substance he implies, substantiates, or grounds, the logical system. But in his metaphysics, when he seeks to substantiate being itself, he turns to formal substance. — MU

I’m not sure I’d agree. My understanding is that Aristotle ultimately argues that substance is the unity of matter and form or, more generally, of dunamis and energeia. This unity is the necessary and sufficient condition of being. In that sense hylomorphism fundamentally differs from modern substance dualism, which explicitly dichotomizes thought and extension into mutually exclusive categories of being. In the modern approach a thinking substance can exist entirely apart from extended substance and vice versa.

Thanks and thanks!

My take on scholasticism:

1. Hylomorphic dualism provides an interesting and worthy counterpoint to the dichotomous substance dualism that undergirds the dialectic of modern philosophy since Descartes and Locke. Subdues the modern tension between realism and idealism by more-or-less eliminating the underlying cause of that tension.

2. Metaphysics as the systematic study of being qua being provides an interesting and worthy counterpoint to the contemporary view that metaphysics is nothing more than a collection of specific problematics concerning the existence of universals, free will, god, etc.

3. The analysis of modality along the categories of potency and act provides a fascinating alternative to the hot mess that is modern possible world semantics.

4. The four-fold analysis of causation arguably provides and more robust and intuitive framework for analyzing and explaining the behavior of biological systems than do models that focus solely on the material and efficient modes of causality as most frequently used in the analysis and explanation of physical and chemical systems.

5. The analysis of being into the categories of substance and accident, matter and form arguably provides the foundations of a more robust and intuitive framework for modeling the structure of biological systems than is provided by the process or event-based metaphysical models typically employed at the level of, say, fundamental physics.

6. Like you, I'm not a huge fan of how the scholastics welded Natural Law ethics to theology in order to provide justification for their faith-based ethical percepts. That said, I think that the main idea behind Natural Law theory (ethics in accord with the principles of natural reason) could possibly bear interesting philosophical fruit if allowed to develop unencumbered by the presuppositions of Christian theology. I'm sure there are probably some thinkers who have charted some territory in this domain, but I haven't taken the time to research it.

7. The work of Aquinas, the Conimbricenses and John Poinsot on the category of relational being laid the philosophical groundwork that culminated in C. S. Peirce's semiotic philosophy in the early 20th century, which is still bearing fruit in multiple fields of study to this day (linguistics, communication theory, biosemiotics, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, etc.).

All in all I think that scholastic philosophy is absolutely worthy of close study for anyone with a serious interest in philosophy. Many of the scholastic thinkers were simply brilliant. And while their unquestioning commitment to the truth of the Christian religion can get tiresome, and some the topics on which they deliberated are of little more than historical interest, if you're willing to look past all of that (or even try to appreciate it) then I think that scholastic philosophy can provide any student with a rich deposit of philosophical ore to mine.

Chipping away...

Would anyone care to say something about “anstoss logic”? What does this phrase mean? — Cabbage Farmer

The anstoss concept goes back to Fichte. The self posits the "not-self" in order to posit the "self". The anstoss is the spontaneous impulse that moves the self toward such a posit. The underlying logic is a variation on transcendental reasoning in general, where something is demonstrated to be a pre-condition for something else.

Similar reasoning undergirds Sellars's analysis of the looks/is distinction in EPM:

The point I wish to stress at this time, however, is that the concept of
looking green, the ability to recognize that something looks green,
presupposes the concept of being green, and that the latter concept involves
the ability to tell what colors objects have by looking at them -- which, in
turn, involves knowing in what circumstances to place an object if one
wishes to ascertain its color by looking at it. — Sellars

Understanding what it means to say that something merely looks green requires as a pre-condition understanding what it is to say that something really is green, or so Sellars argues.

Are such revisions in keeping with Price? Or would he deem the “seemings” redundant or inappropriate here, perhaps in keeping with a view that “the presence of a round red patch” is not the sort of thing that “seems”, and is instead in every respect immune to doubt? — Cabbage Farmer

I don't know that he addresses this specific question. Unfortunately, I no longer have access to Price's book and my notes don't mention anything about this.

There’s something intuitively plausible about this, once we massage it the right way. I don’t ordinarily justify my belief that I am seemingly seeing a seemingly red seeming object on any other grounds than that it appears so to me in the ordinary first-person point of view; ordinarily there are no other grounds available for such claims.

However, putting it the way Price has here, one might ask him, what justifies your belief that there are such things as “patches”? And it may turn out that this is only a loose manner of speaking. — Cabbage Farmer

Right, and that's essentially what Sellars is asking: what justifies your belief that there are such things as round red patches? Sellars doesn't believe that such patches exist, and EPM is essentially a critical examination of the notion that such things do exist, or perhaps more accurately, that such things are seen.

At the end of EPM he rehearses the myth of genius Jones, a fictional ancestor who explains perceptual mistakes on the model of "inner replicas" of physical objects. The main difference from sense-datum theory is that these replicas are understood to be "states" that are had by the observer rather than as particulars that are observed by the observer. In other words, there is nothing that is literally red and round in the world that is the object of observation when someone has an hallucination of an apple, but rather the observer comes to have an internal state that is "somehow analogous" to a red round patch.

The "somehow" is never explained in EPM, and Sellars actually ends up backing away from the notion that sense-impressions are internal states of the observer when he explicates his theory of absolute processes in the much later Carrus Lectures.

More thoughts:

This sounds perhaps more problematic. Does it mean that some "beliefs" about "given" colors are also "given"? I recall Sellars' distinction between sensing particulars and sensing facts. — Cabbage Farmer

Right. Both Lewis and Price (like Reichenbach) tend to elide the distinction between sensing particulars and sensing facts.

How and where does "inference" occur in their models? Surely not in experience: We don't run around the world ceaselessly making conscious inferential judgments about physical objects on the basis of given colors and shapes; but arguably we have (or many of us have) countlessly many "beliefs" about local physical objects on the basis of current perception.

If there's something like "inferential judgment" at play in all our perceptually grounded beliefs about physical objects in the environment, it must be a sort of "inference" that occurs behind the scenes of conscious awareness.

Perhaps this is one way to interpret, or to correct, strange old views in our tradition concerning "judgments of sensation": The synthesis of "objects" from the most basic elements of sensation is achieved primarily by nonconscious cognitive processes that inform conscious perceptual experience. The application of the language of "inference" and "judgment" to such nonconscious spontaneous processes, excusable in days gone by, is merely a sort of analogy. However, when nonconscious processes of sensory cognition result in perceptual experience, we may begin to speak of perceptual content, and this content is not only open to inferential judgment, but also arguably charged with meaning, with conceptual content, and thus full of implications.

Of course the conceptual content, the "beliefs", and the "implications" of perceptual content, would depend in part on the conceptual stance and character of the perceiver, as well as on what's "given" to perception by sensation. Particular conscious acts of inference on the basis of perception occur within this constant shifting context.

I suppose the hard problem of perceptual content, along these lines, is to clearly distinguish what's "given" to perception by sensation. — Cabbage Farmer

These are exactly the kinds of questions that Lewis and Price were wrestling with. For Lewis, the “given” was opposed primarily to the “concept”, and the hallmark of conceptuality was logical form. By implication, the given qua given has no logical form, it has no inferential implications and it does not constitute empirical knowledge. So Lewis’s epistemology is quite Kantian in nature. The mind applies concepts to the sensory given and it is the application of concepts that license inferences.

And yet, Lewis seems to recognize the tension that results from taking this kind of position. For what is the epistemic status of the given before concepts are applied, and what is the nature of the cognitive process by which concepts are applied to it? Is the given completely formless and ineffable, or does it exhibit some form of structure. If the latter, then how are we to understand the structure of the given if not in conceptual terms?

Here’s Lewis writing on the given in Chapter 2 of Mind and World Order

There is, in all experience, that element which we are aware that we do not create by thinking and cannot, in general, displace or alter. As a first approximation, we may designate it as "the sensuous."

[…]

At the moment, I have a fountain pen in my hand. When I so describe this item of my present experience, I make use of terms whose meaning I have learned. Correlatively I abstract this item from the total field of my present consciousness and relate it to what is not just now present in ways which I have learned and which reflect modes of action which I have acquired. […] what I refer to as "the given" in this experience is, in broad terms, qualitatively no different than it would be if I were an infant or an ignorant savage.

[…]

The distinction between this element of interpretation and the given is emphasized by the fact that the latter is what remains unaltered, no matter what our interests, no matter how we think or conceive.

[…]

While we can thus isolate the element of the given by these criteria of its unalterability and its character as sensuous feel or quality, we cannot describe any particular given as such , because in describing it, in whatever fashion, we qualify it by bringing it under some category or other, select from it, emphasize aspects of it, and relate it in particular and avoidable ways. — Lewis

The given is essentially being defined here as an “invariant” in experience – its structure does not change despite being emenable to multiple classifications dependent on the interests and background knowledge of the agent. The process by which concepts are applied is described as a process of “abstraction” and that’s where things start to get murky insofar as Lewis wants to claim that the structure of the given itself determines what classifications are or are not applicable in a given context:

I can apprehend this thing (given) as pen or rubber or cylinder, but I cannot, by taking thought, discover it as paper or soft or cubical. — Lewis

The underlying tension is becoming more apparent now. If the given is not conceptually structured, and if the application of concepts is solely the province of the agent, then how is it the case that the given can nonetheless constrain conceptual classification? How is the case that this non-conceptual given simply cannot be conceptually classified as "paper" or "soft" or "cubical"? How is that possible?

Reading through the chapter it becomes clear that Lewis wants the given to pull double-duty. He wants it to be non-conceptual and yet he wants it to have enough epistemic authority to act as a constraint on thought. He wants it to be the concrete basis of all experience, and yet also abstract enough to exhibit a repeatable structure.

And this is where (per Csalisbury) the Hegel connection comes into play. Sellars leverages aspects of Hegel’s dialectic in the Sense Certainty chapter to expose an ambiguity between the non-conceptuality of the act of sensation vs. the non-conceptuality of the content of sensation. Lewis elides the distinction by treating the given as the concrete correlate of direct apprehension while yet investing it with enough epistemic authority to act as a constraint on conceptual thought.

Sellars, like Hegel, essentially argues that insofar as the structure of the sensory “given” is determinate enough to warrant some classifications (“pen”, “cylinder”, etc.) but not others (“paper”, “soft”, etc.), it must be considered to be conceptual in nature for the simple reason that classifications have inferential implications. For instance, to say that some aspect of the given simply cannot be classified as “soft” implies that claims like “this object is soft” cannot be true and, by extension, that various other claims implied by that claim cannot be true (and so on).

So returning to your original question, inference plays an ambiguous role in Lewis’s epistemology insofar as the epistemic status of given is ambiguous. Does the “abstraction” process count as a form of inference? It almost seems like it has to insofar as it is a process by which certain classifications are determined to be applicable and others are not. But how can inference occur in the absence of concepts? It can’t, which seems to imply that the “given” is conceptually structured after all (or that there is no such thing as the given after all)

As a side note, some of the details of Price’s epistemology differ from Lewis’s, but many of the same of questions arise with regard to it.

There’s no way I can keep up with you @Cabbage Farmer, but here’s a start at some answers to your questions:

Quite a cast of characters. Which would you say figure most prominently in, or had most influence in the field in the decades preceding, EPM? Or, which if any are closest to the typical sense-datum theory Sellars takes aim at in the essay? — Cabbage Farmer

I’d say that C.I. Lewis and H.H. Price figured very prominently, though the others mentioned are not far behind. As an aside, it’s interesting to consider that Sellars studied under C.I. Lewis while completing graduate studies Harvard.

I'm not sure I've heard of Riechenbach. The view that it's physical objects, not sense-impressions, which are "seen" sounds remarkably fresh.

So he buries sense-impressions behind experience.... Are the impressions mere theoretical constructs for him, or do these constructs perhaps refer to terms that play some causal or functional role in the organization of experience, or does he reject all such theories.... — Cabbage Farmer

In Chapter 2 of Experience and Prediction Reichenbach writes:

I cannot admit that impressions have the character of observable facts. What I observe are things, not impressions. I see tables, and houses, and thermometers, and trees, and men, and the sun, and many other things in the sphere of crude physical objects; but I have never seen my impression of these things […] I do not say I doubt the existence of my impressions. I believe that there are impressions, but I have never sensed them. When I consider the question in an unprejudiced manner I find that I infer the existence of my impressions. — Reichenbach

How are they inferred? He claims that they are inferred in order to explain the difference between appearance and reality:

To explain this difference, I introduce the distinction between the physical thing and my impression of that thing. I say that usually there are both physical things and impressions within me but that sometimes there are impressions only […] we need this assumption to explain that in the case of the confused world one of the two worlds, the external world, is dropped. The distinction between the world of things and the world of impressions or representation is therefore the result of epistemological reflection. — Reichenbach

He goes on to talk about “the abstract character of impressions” as part and parcel of a “duplicity theory” of perception. And this is where, as seen through the lens of EPM, Reichenbach’s account starts to go off the rails. We can already see in the quotes above the seeds of an ambiguity between impressions qua objects and impressions qua facts. Reichenbach says that he doesn’t “see” his impressions and also says that impressions are “not observable facts”. And yet he’s invoking impressions in order to explain discrepancies in what is seen.

Things get really bad in chapter 3 where Reichenbach seems to firmly place impressions into the category of “immediate existence”:

Imagine we are taking a walk at dusk through a lonely moor; we see before us at some distance a man in the road […] we do not doubt the man’s reality. We walk farther and discover it is not a man but a juniper bush. […] We shall say that both the man and the bush have immediate existence at the moments we see them. — Reichenbach

So here we seem to have the paradigm case of an impression. We think we see a man, but it’s really just juniper bush so we invoke the concept of an impression to explain the mistake. The man is inferred to be an impression, but here we are told that the “man” also has immediate existence. So what’s immediate existence?

We may regard immediate existence as a concept known to everybody. If somebody does not understand us, we put him into a certain situation and pronounce the term, thus accustoming him to the term and the situation seen by him. […] If a child asks “what is a knife” we take a knife and show it to the child. — Reichenbach

In other words, immediate existence is the existence of whatever is directly apprehended or, if you will, known by acquaintance. But wait…this directly contradicts Reichenbach’s earlier claim that impressions are indirect, theoretical entities. These are exactly the kinds of confusions that Sellars was responding to in EPM.

...

Well, I didn't make much progress here, but (as usual) I'm out of time. I'll try to respond with more later.

Here’s an extended summary regarding Sellars's analysis of "Looks" talk. I don't spend much time justifying my interpretation or explicitly engaging with the text (and I gloss some things), but I'd be happy to dig deeper if anyone wants to.

I think it was @Calisbury who somewhere said that Sellars employs a kind-of "anstoss" logic in regards to the concept of veridicality, and that this under-girds his analysis of the “is/looks” distinction. I think that’s basically correct. In the “Looks” sections Sellars is responding to the Pricean line of argument that goes something like this (very roughly):

1. When I (ostensibly) see an apple, there are many things I can doubt about my experience, like that the object is really an apple, or that there is a material object present at all.

2. However, there are some things I can't doubt, such as that there is a round red patch present to my awareness.

3. The fact that I can't doubt these beliefs implies that they need not be justified on the basis of any other beliefs (e.g. they are not inferentially mediated).

4. Therefore, it is things like round red patches that are the direct objects of apprehension, and it is only my beliefs about such things (i.e. beliefs about how things "appear") that could (and should) serve as the indubitable foundational (non-inferential) basis of all empirical knowledge.

Sellars basically thinks that this gets things ass-backwards. He doesn’t exactly deny that beliefs about the appearance of round red patches in a person’s visual field can serve as evidence for the existence of, say, an apple on a desk, but he will claim that they provide (at most) very weak evidence when taken on their own, but that this is not their primary function anyway.

Sellars’s alternative analysis is basically this: the primary function of claims about the way things “appear” or “look” or “seem” is to provide a mechanism for withdrawing from claims about the way things really are. So to say “the object over there looks red”, or “It looks like there is a red object over there” is to withdraw further and further away from a claim about how things really are, namely, that “there is a red object over there”. The notion of “looking” or “appearing” (e.g. looks red) is conceptually dependent on the more fundamental notion of “being” (e.g. is red).

If we are inclined to agree with this analysis, then it becomes hard to deny that claims about appearances can't really provide an adequate evidential basis for claims about how things really are. That’s because each and every claim about how things appear is nothing more than the withdrawal from some companion claim about how things really are. As such, it’s a mistake to think that we do or ought to start from claims about how things appear and then inferentially move to claims about how things really are. Instead, we start from claims about how things really are, and then inferentially move to claims about how things merely “appear” only upon being confronted by evidence that suggests we were mistaken about how things really are.

So, if claims about appearances can’t serve as an adequate evidential basis for empirical knowledge of how things really are, then what can? For Sellars, the only adequate justification for such claims is to be found in other empirical claims about how things really are. In particular, claims about the context of observation ought to (and do) serve as the primary justificatory backdrop for our first-order observational claims. To justify a claim like “this necktie is green” we ought to appeal to facts about the situation in which we find ourselves – that is, to claims about our historical reliability at distinguishing colors, about the lighting conditions, about whether we are afflicted with color-blindness, about whether we are wearing green-tinted contact lenses, about whether we are currently on drugs that effect our ability to distinguish colors, about whether someone is likely to be playing a practical joke on us, etc. Again, the ultimate appeal to empirical claims as opposed to claims about appearances is hardly surprising given Sellars’s analysis of the looks/is distinction. For Sellars, to vacate all claims about what is the case is equivalent with vacating all claims to knowledge itself, and so a substratum consisting purely of beliefs about appearances is therefore simply not a viable starting point for empirical knowledge.

As an aside, it’s interesting to consider how Sellars ultimately deals with the charge of begging the question against skepticism (this is only cursorily covered in EPM. See the articles “More on Giveness and Explanatory Coherence” and “Kant’s Theory of Experience” for details). If empirical claims about what is the case are to be justified by other empirical claims about what is the case then it appears that we’re caught in a vicious circle. Sellars will make a Kantian-style transcendental argument to the effect that the linguistic practices that are the pre-condition for the formulation of the skeptic’s challenge (or any challenge) are only intelligible against the backdrop of the very empirical knowledge that the skeptic is challenging the legitimacy of. Not that this approach is original to Sellars (though he puts an interesting “linguistic” twist on it), but it is note-worthy in that he is one of the only philosophers in his milieu (outside of Strawson) to explicitly employ the machinery of transcendental argumentation in his work.

Thanks. I'm afraid it's a clumsy, discursive way of working through a text. But it's my favorite way of traversing the hermeneutic circle. — Cabbage Farmer

Nothing wrong with that. I imagine this is the way most people work through a difficult text, whether they realize or not.

You asked about historical context back on page 7 (I think), and so I wanted to add some historical notes that might be of interest:

EPM is probably best be understood as a response to theories put forward by the likes of William James, Bertrand Russell, C.D. Broad, C.I. Lewis, G.E. Moore, A.J. Ayer, H.H. Price, and Hans Reichenbach (among others) in the early part of the 20th century. He probably also had philosophers as diverse as Rudolph Carnap and Edmund Husserl in view as well.

There are obviously substantial theoretical differences in the positions of each of the aforementioned thinkers (insofar as it even makes sense to say that a philosopher ever has a stable position throughout the course of their careers). Riechenbach, for instance, argued that physical objects, not sense-impressions, are directly given in experience. According to Riechenbach, sense-impressions are mere abstracta that are never "seen" by anyone, much less seen directly (see Experience and Prediction, 1938). C.I. Lewis and H.H. Price, by contrast, tended to argue that it is colors, shapes, textures, etc. that are directly given in experience, and that beliefs about physical objects (and even physical objects themselves) are inferentially constructed out of these (See Lewis' Mind and World Order, and Price's Perception). Consider the following quotation from Price's Perception:

When I see a tomato there is much that I can doubt. I can doubt whether it is a tomato that I am seeing, and not a cleverly painted piece of wax. I can doubt whether there is any material thing there at all. [...] One thing however that I cannot doubt: that there exists a red patch of a round and somewhat bulgy shape [...] directly present to my consciousness. [...] And when I say that it is directly present to my consciousness, I mean that my consciousness of it is not reached by inference [...]. This peculiar and ultimate manner of being present to consciousness is called being given and that which is thus present is called a datum. — Price

Russel and Moore also tended to analyze physical objects as reducible to directly apprehended sense-data (e.g. secondary qualities).

William James was somewhat unique in maintaining that pretty much everything except the "entirety" or "totality" of experience is directly apprehended. In his view, sense-data (or "percepts") are no more or no less "given" than the relations (both causal and inferential) that bind them together (see A World of Pure Experience, 1904).

The common thread running through the diverse positions of all of these thinkers is this notion of a directly apprehended datum, or "given". EPM does not take issue with the concept of direct apprehension per se, but rather with that the way that the concept of direct apprehension is used to justify foundationalist epistemologies in which the objects or contents of direct apprehension are taken to be incorrigibly or indubitably known purely on the basis of their being directly apprehended.

I take this to mean that while it is a fact that the sense-content was sensed (in sensing act x and/or by senser y), this does not imply that the senser gained any knowledge about the sense content. If you like, it's a fact in-itself, but not (necessarily) a fact for anyone (any knower.) — csalisbury

I think this is spot on. My take is that he's ultimately pressing a distinction between two senses of "immediacy": the immediacy of the act of sensing from the immediacy of the content of what is sensed. Or, if you like, between the non-inferential nature of the act of sensing and the non-conceptuality of the content of what is sensed (ugh, there's got to be a better way of saying this).

Sellars' dialectic crescendos in the realization that immediacy of act does not imply immediacy of content, contra what the proponents of "giveness" would have us believe. Just because I know some content via a non-inferential act does not imply that the content thereby known is not inferentially related to other contents, espeially in the sense of being open to challenge for justification.

You've really analyzed the hell out of this paper. Nice work, man! Like Calisbury, I'm short on time otherwise I'd participate a little more.

With respect to (1), you're then saying that Sellars is agreeing with them that it doesn't make sense to speak of unveridical sensations? — Terrapin

Yes, Sellars will ultimately agree that claim, though in the context of the quote that you’ve been discussing he’s not mentioning it in order to agree or disagree with it.

Also, I'm curious if you'd say that Sellars is claiming that propositions are perceived in some sense. Or would he agree that "seeing <a proposition>" is a very loose, metaphorical way of speaking--that is, we're not literally seeing a proposition? — Terrapin

He’s saying that perception takes the form of a proposition.

For Sellars, raw sensory content is epistemologically inert – it has no propositional content and it has no inferential consequences. Sensory content consists of particular “things” – colors, shapes, etc. By contrast, perceptions add propositional content – they make claims about sensory contents.

So when Sellars talks about “seeing that X”, he is talking about perception insofar as X is a claim or proposition (e.g. "the table is green", etc.). The modality (hearing, tasting, etc.) is irrelevant.

What's the difference when we're talking about veridicality versus non-veridicality? — Terrapin Station

The difference is that sensations are not the kinds of things that can be veridical or non-veridical. Unlike beliefs (of which perceptions are a species), they have no normative import.

One of the main points of EPM is to show that sense-datum theorists fail to adequately distinguish between the causal and normative senses of "immediacy". They either simply assume that the one implies the other, or equivocate the two senses entirely. According to Sellars, once the distinction is properly understood it becomes clear that causal immediacy can't underwrite the kind of epistemic immediacy that sense-datum theorist would like it to - it simply isn't up to the task - and any brand of foundationalist epistemology that depends on that presumption is invalidated as a consequence.

That's my take, anyway.

I have come to have a very high regard for Sellars as a philosopher, and for Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind in particular. It's great to see people digging into his work on the forum. I've read most of the thread and have to say that you seem to have Sellars pegged, which is pretty impressive considering that you just started reading him a couple of weeks ago. So kudos for that. The only thing more impressive than your grasp of Sellars is your patience with Terrapin. 8-)

Fair enough, and I think I agree, for what it's worth. Brandom claims to be a prosententialist about truth (and he is with regard to the use of the phrase "is true"), but I think he is really an identity theorist when it comes down to it (in the same vein as McDowell). Identity theory is typically promoted as an alternative to correspondence, but I suppose it pretty much ends up leaving the main idea behind metaphysical realism intact.