The latest video in the Sophia “Dan & Massimo” series covered a philosopher you likely never heard of, and yet you should. We talked about Wilfrid Sellars (1912-1989), who had a big influence on Dan and who I discovered only relatively recently, to my delight.
Sellars is perhaps most famous for his distinction between what he called the “scientific image” and the “manifest image” of the world, meaning our understanding of how things are from, respectively, the scientific and the commonsense standpoints.
Sellars’ lifelong project was to articulate how we should see the relationship between these two “images” of the world, a project that may well be understood as one of the main ongoing goals of modern philosophy.
Sellars didn’t subordinate either standpoint to the other: that’s because while scientific knowledge is, in fact, more sophisticated than everyday knowledge at describing the world, it tells us relatively little about a lot of things we care about and can’t do without, like values and normativity.
In the end, Sellars said that we need to develop a kind of “stereoscopic” vision, being able to simultaneously hold the scientific and manifest images in front of us, integrating them in a way that makes sense for a human being. It is, of course, a compromise between scientism and irrationalism that I very much appreciate and have made — as readers of this blog know very well –my own major project in recent years.
Footnotes to Plato 
Hmm, I guess the two viewpoints might be reconciled if we accept that scientific study can be made of entities in the manifest image rather than in the scientific image. For instance anthropology can make a scientific study of normativity, something very much in the domain of the manifest image.
So perhaps “scientific image” is a misnomer. It’s more of a hard scientific image/manifest image distinction perhaps.
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I first “heard” of Sellars reading Rorty’s “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature” decades ago. He apparently is borrowed from frequently by pragmatist and neopragmatist philosophers.
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DM: As I said in the dialogue, I do think that there can be/are scientific social sciences, as does Sellars. But a lot of what passes for social science really belongs to the Manifest Image which, as Sellars explains — and which we also discuss in the dialogue — does not mean that the relevant accounts are not rigorous.
If you are asking me personally, I am of the view that much of the scientizing of the social sciences has been a mistake. I largely agree with Peter Winch’s Wittgensteinian approach in h is “On the Idea of a Social Science and It’s Relation to Philosophy.”
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.460.6731&rep=rep1&type=pdf
This is because I don’t believe that intentional explanations are compatible with scientific ones — primarily, because they don’t involve scientific notions of causality, but also because they are explanations that depend essentially on the point of view of the actor / that is, on how he represents the world and states of affairs in it. Intentional explanation is more about rendering peoples behavior intelligible in a certain way, rather than providing antecedent events sufficient for predicting subsequent events.
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Hi saphsin,
No, not really. The issue is that the line advanced in the video, quite explicity, wants to place all notions of human social interactions (and agency and meaning and values) outside of science and to say that science cannot deal with them.
That would mean (to echo DM’s example) that either psychology is not a science or that psychology does not deal with human social interactions and meaning and values — whereas those things are exactly what psychology is all about.
And yes it is a science, it’s part of the science of people. Only human exceptionalism wants to place humans outside the natural world. As DM says, Dan’s stance would reduce science to physics alone.
Dan,
I know you think that of me; just for the record it seems to me a better description of you. You seem to demand that any subject of interest to you may only be discussed within the narrow confines and blinkers of the approach to it that you yourself take.
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DM:
Scientific study can be made of some of what belongs to the manifest image. But mostly not. The manifest image consists prominently of persons and their extensions — i.e. institutions — and values, neither of which are scientifically scrutable. This is why Sellars introduced the distinction to begin with.
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Human motor movement is scientifically scrutable. Human action is not, despite the fact that it consists, partly of motor movements.
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I know you think that of me; just for the record it seems to me a better description of you. You seem to demand that any subject of interest to you may only be discussed within the narrow confines and blinkers of the approach to it that you yourself take.
= = =
What a load of nonsense. If I ever participate in a discussion about physics, cosmology, exoplanets, etc., I an all ears and no talk.
The trouble is that the same is not true with you, when it comes to philosophy. Which is what this discussion is about. The dialogue between Massimo and me about a philosophy paper by Wilfrid Sellars.
I
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Hi Dan,
I don’t think scientific study can be normative — it can’t tell us what is morally right or what is beautiful. But scientific can be made of what various cohorts of people regard as morally right or beautiful, it seems to me, and I don’t think there’s a problem with such study. Similarly I don’t see an issue with a scientific study of human institutions or of persons.
So of course I agree that there are modes of inquiry which are not scientific, and that these modes of inquiry are valid and indeed valuable. But I don’t think there is much that cannot be studied from a scientific mode of inquiry.
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Paint and canvas and brush strokes are also scientifically scrutable, though works of art are not, despite the fact that they consist in part of paint and canvas and brush strokes. That’s why we have subjects like the philosophy of art.
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DM: See my remarks re: motor movement/action and paint, canvas, brusthstrokes/art. There is plenty that cannot be studied from a scientific mode of inquiry. Indeed, most things that involve intentionality.
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American constitutional law cannot be studied from a scientific mode of inquiry. Shakespeare’s sonnets cannot be studied from a scientific mode of inquiry. My relationship with my wife cannot be studied from a scientific mode of inquiry. The menu at Nobu cannot be studied from scientific mode of inquiry. Etc., etc., etc.
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Hi Dan,
You’re focusing only on the physical, though. Scientific study can be made of all kinds of things related to art. How the market value of paintings goes up and down over time, trends in what kinds of subjects painters choose to depict, or studying patterns in how painters influence other painters. Etc etc. Science is not restricted to treating a painting as a physical object, in other words. It can lift entities from the manifest image and make a study of them. Whether this is always interesting or worthwhile is a matter of opinion. Perhaps not.
So of course there is a crucial place for a non-scientific philosophy of art. But it still seems to me that there is almost no domain where scientific study is ruled out.
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Dan,
But this topic is not just philosophy, it is also about science. When you say things like: “Human motor movement is scientifically scrutable. Human action is not, despite the fact that it consists, partly of motor movements”, that is a statement about science, about the nature of science and about the scope of science.
To my mind, your refusal to consider that those coming from a scientific perspective, and having had a lifetime in science developing a strong appreciation of science, could have anything to say about that sort of issue concerning science, is — to my mind — just as narrow-minded and blinkered as you accuse me of being.
As I see it, your view of science is just very narrow and wrong. You have very little appreciation of science as it is actually done by scientists. You seem to know science only as it is described by certain philosophers of science.
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DM: Art itself is not scientifically scrutable, DM. That’s the point. And the other things I listed, themselves are not scientifically scrutable.
Good grief.
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Just to take this for an example.
You could for example conduct a scientific analysis of how they evolve over time, e.g. frequency of certain words/phrases etc, and compare with other works of literature of the time and so hope to detect patterns of influence.
None of this of course replaces the importance of studying it from the point of view of the humanities, but I don’t see what rules them out as a domain of scientific inquiry also.
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Okay, Coel, whatever. As I said, if you keep going on like a broken record, I’m out of here.
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Hi Dan,
I think we’re just talking at cross purposes. To you, studing the things themselves means studying them from a non-scientific perspective. And I’m not denying the value of studying things from a non-scientific perspective. But scientific study can also be made of those things — but I guess in your language this would not be studying them in themselves, on which I’m not disagreeing with you because I’m choosing to interpret “in themselves” to mean “from a non-scientific perspective. I don’t know how else to interpret it.
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DM, I don’t even know what to say to that. It in no way contradicts anything I said. And the type of inquiry you describe as supposedly revealing “patterns of influence” itself shows zero understanding of how art history is done. Art history is another one of those things that is essentially non-scientific in nature, with one key exception: x-ray technology has been useful in not only identifying forgeries, but also in discovering things that are often painted underneath the final artwork. Still, I hope you can see how any such study is wildly tertiary to the main point.
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DM: I think we are going far beyond talking cross-purposes. The point is that with regard to all the things I listed, your examples of scientific investigation are highly tertiary to peoples’ primary interest in them.
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Hi Dan,
Good! Because I was trying to reconcile what you were saying with what Coel and I are saying, not contradict you.
Where did I say I was describing how art history is done? I was just saying that there’s nothing stopping anyone from conducting a scientific study of some aspect of Shakespeare’s sonnets. I didn’t mean to imply that this has anything to do with how art history is done. I’m happy to concede that art history is not a science.
Well, perhaps, but I think the point did need to be clarified, as from a certain perspective it seems ignorant to suggest that things such as poems or actions are outside the scope of valid scientific investigation. If we can be agreed that what you mean to say is that science cannot investigate these things “in themselves”, where to investigate them “in themselves” just means to investigate them non-scientifically but philosophically or aesthetically or what have you, then we should all be agreed.
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Hi Dan,
No, I think we are talking at cross-purposes because I agree with this. My point is not that such scientific study is useful or interesting, but that there’s nothing to prohibit it, whereas you seemed to be saying that scientific study of such things is impossible.
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Let’s take an example:
A chimpanzee knows that a termite mound contains yummy termites. It goes off looking for a long thin twig of the ideal suppleness. It has a plan. It then deliberately strips off the side twigs. Its intention is to make a tool to fish for termite. It then returns to the mound, pokes the fishing rod into the mound, and the termites run up it. The chimp pulls the twig our and runs its tongue along it, slurping up the termites. Wanting to fish for termites explains why the chimp went and made the fishing rod. That intention was the cause of the demise of 100 termites.
Does anyone think that anything in the above paragraph is outside science or a concept that science cannot cope with? If they do then they’re not talking about science as scientists understand it and do it, they’re talking about something else. Chsmience or p-science or whatever. Primatology is a science and, believe it or not, primatologists talk as above; they don’t talk in the language of particle physics.
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Human-based things like intentions and morals are studied by cognitive science (rather than social science), philosophy required for Ph.D.s [ http://www.cogsciphd.umn.edu/phd.shtml ].
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Your clarifications were helpful, DM. We do not disagree on this, then.
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Hi Coel,
Meh, you might be going a bit far with that. I don’t think a primatologist is interested in identifying intentions with physical causes. The primatologist would be speaking loosely and so are you.
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Coel: wrong sense of ‘intention’. Not what “intentionality” — and its linguistic cousin “intensionality — mean in philosophy.
Hence why it is actually important to be educated in the things you purport to talk about.
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“Intensional” means under a representation, which is why co-referential terms cannot be substituted in and out of intensional contexts, without a change in truth value.
Which is why Quine thought that scientific language can only be extensional. This actually dovetails with Sellars’ idea that the inclusion of persons and their points of view in the Manifest Image is a reason why things that involve persons and their points of view are not scientifically scrutable.
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Dan, I know it’s not the same thing, but how much, if at all, was Sellars’ division between the scientific and manifest images influenced by Kant’s noumenal vs phenomenal? Again, I know it’s not the same, but, at surface level, the parallelism seems HUGE.
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Daniel Kaufman
But is the distinction between the Manifest & Scientific Image the same distinction between Scientific & Philosophical Discourse? I don’t think it is (it seems Massimo disagrees? I wonder what he thinks of this) I think the former is more descriptive about elements of the world that we zero in to fit within a conceptual framework and the latter a particular human activity of dealing with those frameworks. For instance, I don’t think a lot of what consists of practicing philosophy of physics is dealing with the manifest image of the world.
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In extensional contexts, any co-referential term can be substituted for another with no change in the truth value of the sentence. In short, a language which includes only extensional contexts is one in which the world is described from no particular point of view. And I agree with Quine that this is a good way of describing the language of science. But most of human life and activity must also be described intensionally in order to fully understand it, in all its significance, and that means from the standpoint of various representations or points of view. Whether in the criminal law — victims and perpetrators — arts — artists and audiences — relationships — husband and wife — or what have you. To leave out this dimension is to leave out much if not most of what is significant about human life and activity. Which is why the purely scientific treatment of human subjects is both impoverished and unsatisfying.
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