Wilfrid Sellars

Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989) was an American philosopher whose work on perception, language, and mind constitutes one of the most systematic and underread architectures in analytic philosophy. His 1956 essay Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind demolished the myth of the given — the foundationalist assumption that there are sense-data or perceptual episodes that are epistemically basic, pre-conceptual, and self-justifying. Sellars argued that nothing counts as knowing that one is in a perceptual state without already standing in inferential and conceptual relations to other beliefs. The given, if there were such a thing, would be epistemically inert: it could not justify anything, because justification is a normative, concept-governed relation.

His distinction between the manifest image (the commonsense framework of persons, intentions, and things) and the scientific image (the theoretical framework of particles, fields, and laws) has generated decades of debate about reduction, ontological priority, and the status of ordinary folk psychology. Sellars held that the two images are in tension but neither can simply be eliminated in favour of the other — a position that requires a theory of how ontological frameworks relate, which he called synoptic philosophy.

Sellars is a pivotal figure in the genealogy of inferentialism, which was developed most fully by Robert Brandom, and in the debates over phenomenal consciousness that continue in the philosophy of mind.