“Brandom correctly notes that Sellars was “distinguished from his fellow analysts of the time both by his overtly systematic ambitions and by the self-consciously historical roots of his thought.””
“The same can be said with equal justice of Brandom. Everything that he writes has a place within his system. And everything that he writes is informed by his learned, idiosyncratic, and sympathetic reading of the history of philosophy”
“The first idea, which Brandom wholeheartedly endorses, is essentially a twentieth century reworking of the Kantian notion that there are, in addition to empirical concepts, also an important class of special, non-empirical concepts, the categories”
“the second idea that Brandom thinks Sellars derived from Kant. This is the suggestion that the best way to understand the commitments entailed by a robust scientific realism is in terms of an updated version of Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena”
“Brandom’s argument for rejecting this Sellarsian version of Kant’s distinction is subtle and importantly relevant to contemporary issues that only indirectly relate to Kant or Sellars’ work”
“this subtle argument crucially depends upon a principle that performs multiple functions in this volume, including underpinning the other (from Brandom’s standpoint) good idea that Sellars derived from Kant”
“Brandom styles the ‘modal Kant-Sellars thesis’:
every empirical descriptive concept has modal consequences. That is, its correct application has necessary conditions that would be expressed explicitly using subjunctive conditionals, and hence depends on what is true in other possible worlds besides the one in which it is being applied. (p. 67)”
“a telling passage that Brandom quotes from Science and Metaphysics, Sellars explicitly lays out his own view regarding scientific realism:
As I see it . . . a consistent scientific realist must hold that the world of everyday experience is a phenomenal world in the Kantian sense, existing only as the contents of actual and obtainable conceptual representings, the obtainability of which is explained not, as for Kant, by things in themselves known only to God, but scientific objects about which, barring catastrophe, we shall know more and more as the years go by. (p. 56)”
“for Sellars, when we describe the world in the way in which it is manifest to us, as containing tables and chairs, lizards and persons, we are merely representing the world as it appears to us, and that we can describe the world in terms of such appearances is explained by the way in which the world really is, which is the way in which the world will be described in ideal science”
“This is the view of the world that Sellars famously expressed in the claim that “In the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not.””
“Sellars’ form of scientism extends the authority of science to existence claims: that which is, is that over which final science quantifies”
“if any individual, described in any way, exists, then that individual must be identical with individuals over which final science quantifies, because those individuals that exist are all and only those individuals over which final science quantifies”
“Brandom thinks that this is, simply, a bad idea”
“in intentional and modal contexts, substitutivity salva veritate fails”
“have led most contemporary philosophers to accept the doctrine that Brandom labels ‘extensionalism’”
"”identicals are indiscernible only with respect to extensional predicates/properties”
“The defining feature of extensional predicates/properties is that what they apply to in a given possible world, for instance, the actual world, depends only on what is true at that world. . . . They are in this sense modally insulated, in that their conditions of applicability (what they describe) are insulated from facts about what would happen if”
“Brandom argues, following Sellars following Kant, there are no modally isolated predicates and there are no modally isolated properties”
“if there are no modally isolated properties, then substitutivity salva veritate can’t be restricted to modally isolated predicates, for there are none, extensionalism must be false, and genuinely identical individuals must share all their properties in common, including their modal properties”
“individuals such as lizards have different identity conditions than any mereological sum of scientific micro-individuals, lizards, and every other individual countenanced by the manifest image, can’t be identical with any scientific individual. (“Nothing is identical to the mereological sum of things of other kinds.” (p. 78))”
“It just is not the case that everything we talk about in the manifest image that exists at all . . . is something specifiable in the language of an eventual natural science. The manifest image is not best thought of as an appearance, of which the world as described by science is the reality. (p. 87)”
“Lizards, whatever they are, are not appearances of complexes of scientifically countenanced micro-particles”
“Brandom rejects Sellars’ appropriation of the phenomena/noumena distinction in the name of his acceptance of another part of Sellars’ appropriation of Kant, the Kant-Sellars modal thesis”
“three fundamental insights”
“The first and most basic of these insights is that Sellars was profoundly Kantian, and, in particular, that much of his work can be profitably read as Sellars’ attempt to play the same role in relation to the logical empiricism of the twentieth century that Kant played in relation to Hume’s empiricism”
“But (and this is Brandom’s second fundamental insight into the aspect of the Sellarsian appropriation of Kant that he endorses) for Sellars this Kantian move was carried out in a linguistic key. Sellars was committed to a form of the ‘linguistic turn’ according to which “philosophy is properly conceived as the pure theory of empirically meaningful languages.” (p. 4)”
“for Sellars, Kantian claims regarding what is necessary for the possibility of experience become transposed into claims regarding what is necessary for the possibility of ordinary descriptive language”
“modal talk is metalinguistic in the sense that it expresses something about what is necessary for descriptive talk”
“the modal Kant-Sellars thesis”
“any descriptive assertion implies a set of counterfactual consequences, and those consequences are essential to the meaning of what is said in the assertion”
“according to Brandom’s Sellars, “what one is doing in using modal expressions is explaining, justifying, or endorsing an inference.” (p. 136)”
“it is easy to misunderstand the claim that modal talk is metalinguistic. In particular, according to Brandom it would be a mistake to understand the claim that what one is doing in using modal talk is endorsing an inference as implying either that (1) there could be no language that lacks modal and subjunctive vocabulary but in which it is possible to assert descriptions, or that (2) what one is saying when one uses modal language is that some inference is a good one”
“Brandom’s third fundamental insight, the insight that (mostly despite himself) Sellars’ thought is informed by a specific kind of pragmatism”
“When Brandom approaches Sellars’ distinction between saying and conveying from this pragmatic angle, what gets highlighted is that what I am doing in asserting ‘The sky is clear’ is making an assertion regarding the way the world is, even though what I am saying is ‘The sky is clear’”
“From the content of this assertion one can properly (but not formally validly) infer that it is not raining; from the fact that I am asserting this content one can properly (but not validly) infer that I believe that the sky is clear, and this is what is ‘conveyed’ by my asserting”
“Brandom is a modal realist even though he is also a modal expressivist, and “Modal realism says that modal vocabulary does describe the world, does say how things are.””
“The trick, of course, is in showing how these two views are compatible, that is, in showing how even though “the use of modal expressions is not in the first instance descriptive” it can nevertheless be the case that “modal vocabulary does describe the world, does say how things are.””
“He starts by reiterating, for modal vocabulary, the distinction between saying and doing. What one is doing when one makes a modal assertion is “endorsing an inference relating descriptive concepts as subjunctively (including counterfactually) robust.” (p. 205)”
“According to the modal Kant-Sellars thesis, that an agent is able to so endorse such inferences in some fashion is a necessary condition on that agent’s using descriptive language at all”
“what one is saying or claiming is that possession of one descriptive property is a consequence of, or incompatible with, possession of another such property”
“If this is all that expressivism about modal language amounts to, what is all the fuss about?”
“he attempts to reverse the order of explanation, and use modal expressivism to explain an essential aspect of modal realism. “Modal realism makes essential use of the concepts of fact and law, but does not by itself explain those concepts. Modal Expressivism does.” (p. 208)”
“a distinction that Brandom has used in other contexts, the distinction between ‘sense dependence’ and ‘reference dependence’. Brandom holds that the concepts of law and fact are sense dependent on the concepts asserting and inferring, but that facts and laws are not reference dependent on assertings and inferrings”
“one can only understand modal concepts if one understands concepts involved in the pragmatics of language, such as asserting and inferring, but that nevertheless there would be facts and laws even if, counterfactually, there are no present, past, or future assertings or inferrings”
“the conclusion that Brandom wants he must rely on the premises that “facts are essentially, and not just accidentally, something that can be asserted” and “laws are essentially, and not just accidentally, something that support subjunctively and counterfactually robust inferences.” (p. 208)”