Intuitions, Transparency, and the Pictures of Thought: Kantianism in McDowell and Sellars

Rafeeq Hasan, University of Chicago This paper will explore John McDowells critique of Wilfrid Sellars. After sketching out the broadly Kantian background in which both philosophers operate, I will address McDowells criticism of Sellarss interpretation of what Kant calls an intuition. My aim is not only to develop and explicate McDowells critique, which will necessitate devoting some time to explaining Sellarss understanding of intuitions, but also to delineate these two thinkers conflicting ideas on what shape a philosophical account of objective constraintthat is, the constraint provided by the layout of reality on thoughtshould take. A guiding aim here is to sketch two fundamentally different ways of making sense of the Kantian revolution, i.e. two different ways of trying to figure out what role Kant and Kantianism ought to have in any contemporary account of the relation between mind and world. By the time I am done, I also hope to have gone some way towards elucidating two different pictures of the philosophical task. My ultimate claim is that, in the end, the debate between McDowell and Sellars is not one that can be adjudicated through the standard philosophical procedure, i.e. examining arguments, weighing the force of cogent examples, etc. Rather, in adjudicating between these two thinkers what we have to consider is no less than two perhaps irreconcilable images of where philosophy begins and where it ends, what we might call two different paradigms of the philosophical task. If I am right, the perhaps unsettling consequence is that what is at stake is a case of philosophical decision. The vindication of one of these pictures can only come after the fact: by what an adherence to them makes possible.

I. The Kantian Radicalization of Epistemology

Recently a number of philosophers have articulated the following insight about the Kantian project: Kant is not, in the first instance, seeking to answer traditional skeptical questions, questions like How do I know that my thoughts about the world are, in some sense, true to the way things really are? Rather, Kant poses a question that is by his lights more fundamental, not just in the sense of more important or more philosophically pressing, but in the sense that it asks after something that the first kind of question simply takes for granted: that thought of the objective world is so much as possible (so that one could know what it means for thought to be true to reality). In place of the skeptical question, Kant asks, How is it that I can so much as have representations of a world? What does it mean for the content of thought to be world-involving? As James Conant helpfully puts it, the contrast between modern skepticism, as traditionally conceived by Descartes and others, and the Kantian project is that Cartesian skepticism calls into question the veridicality of ones experience; Kantian skepticism calls into question the intelligibility of experience.1 Now Kant is not just stubbornly shifting the question, as though the skeptical puzzles were so insuperable that one had better give up trying to solve them and take up a new project instead. What Kant shows is that by answering the more fundamental question, by showing what it takes for thought to have intentional content, i.e. content that is constituted by (and depends for its truth upon) the way the world is, traditional skeptical questions lose much of their force. When we understand just how it is that thought can be about the world, we see that it does not make sense to consider a body of thought as consistently failing to be about the world. This does not mean that the possibility of error vanishes, only that it ceases to pose the kind of agonizing

philosophical question that professional philosophers have perennially obsessed about. The radicalization inherent at the heart of the Kantian projectthe move from questions about the conditions for thought to be true to questions about the very possibility of thought being about something at all (and so a potential candidate for truth or falsity)has been put in a number of different ways. It is, I believe, underlying P.F. Strawsons minimalist reading of Kantian philosophy as seeking to elucidate the bounds of sense, i.e. the fundamental structure of ideas in terms of which alone we can make intelligible to ourselves the idea of experience of the world.2 As I read Strawsons agenda, figuring out what kinds of concepts we need to make intelligible to ourselves the idea of experience of the world is a way to put what it means to figure out how thought can be world-involving, how the world can bear on thought. Elsewhere, Strawson writes, we ought to ask, not how it can be that on the basis of perceptual experience as it is, we come to have the beliefs [that we do], but how it is that perceptual experience is already such as to embody the beliefs in question; or, perhaps better, what it is for perceptual experience to be such as to embody the beliefs in question.3 Across the so-called Continental/Analytic divide, a version of the same thought finds an incredibly suggestive expression in Martin Heideggers reading of Kant. Heidegger writes: the Critique is concerned with ontology and not with epistemology, so that Kants Copernican revolution elucidates for the first time the possibility of access to objects themselves, 4 rather than merely taking the object-involving nature of thought for granted. Heideggers somewhat contentious idiom is actually quite elucidatory here. Kants project is more like an ontology of thoughtan account of what it is for thought to be thought, or, as Strawson writes in the passage just cited, what it is for perceptual experience to be such as to embody the beliefs in

questionthan it is an epistemology; it is radicalization as ontologization. Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell are two of the most notable Anglo-American philosophers whose work has been consistently oriented by the Kantian radicalization of epistemology. McDowell begins his John Locke Lectures (1991) by candidly stating, One of my main aims is to suggest that Kant should still have a central place in our discussion of the way thought bears on reality.5 And his Woodbridge Lectures (1997) begin by endorsing what he takes to be the Sellarsian conviction that no one has come closer than Kant to showing us how to find intentionality unproblematic.6 Sellars subtitled Science and Metaphysics, the selfprofessed sequel to Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Variations on Kantian Themes, and begins the former work by saying, I build my discussion of contemporary issues on a foundation of Kant exegesis and commentarybecause, as I see it, there are enough close parallels between the problems confronting himand the current situation and its demands.7 Both McDowell and Sellars have pursued the Kantian radicalization of epistemology less as a project in traditional Kant exegesis and more as a project of exposing the blindness and question-begging nature of quite a bit of the twentieth-century metaphysics of mindin this respect they are perhaps closer to Heidegger than one might suspect. It is instructive to look briefly at a few examples of their respective ways of engaging in the Kantian project. Right now I just want to give some determinate content to the idea that the Kantian radicalization can be conceived as an on-going project for what could be called theoretical/systematic rather than simply historical philosophy. For McDowell the difference between the Kantian question and traditional epistemological questions shows up in, among other places, Donald Davidsons isolation of the

dualism of scheme and content in Quines reconstructed empiricism.8 By McDowells lights, Davidson is right to hold that Quines neat separation of a conceptual-scheme, i.e. the series of rationally interlinked commitments about what is a justification for what, from content, figured in Quine as the raw, unconceptualized impingements of the world on our sensory receptors, poses huge difficulties for the empiricist project of seeing thought as rationally answerable to, i.e. justified by, how things are in the world. But according to McDowell Davidson symptomatically misdiagnoses the problem of the dualism as pointing to Quines susceptibility to traditional skepticismhis susceptibility to the charge that by founding knowledge on the testimony of the senses, which, as modern philosophers since Descartes have been so fond of pointing out, are markedly prone to error and deception, one leaves it open to question whether or not we are systematically deceived about the very nature of reality. On McDowells understanding, the problem is not that the dualism of scheme and content lapses into skepticism, but that it is simply incoherent (SCD, 91). By placing the minds experience of the world outside the domain of the conceptual, outside the network of inferential and justificatory linkages what McDowell, in a picturesque turn of phrase, calls the space within which thought moves9Quine makes it impossible to see how exercises of concepts could be rationally (and not merely causally) constrained by the world. McDowells strategy is not just to expose Quines argument as a species of what Sellars famously called the Myth of the Given, which for my current purposes can be provisionally glossed as the idea that nothing that is not structured like a concept can be available as a justification for thought (which is by its nature discursive)though one thing I hope to make clear in this paper is that there is a much deeper characterization of the Myth, one which sounds

a Kantian key and pertains to the very possibility of thoughts being contentful. 10 Rather, McDowells aim is to develop the Kantian insight that before one can ask about the conditions for thought to be true to the world, one has to ask about how thought can be of the world at all. On McDowells Kantian reading of the dualism, by removing experience of the world from the sphere of the conceptual, Quine has made it impossible to see how thought can have intentional content. Davidsons blindness to this problem can be seen as a result of his fixation on the preKantian space of epistemological problems. Similarly, the Kantian radicalization underlies the crucial but often-overlooked section of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind where Sellars discusses the history of early empiricist views on the status of mental awareness. Sellars compares the empiricist views on generic sorts or categories, i.e. concepts like red, with their views on awareness of determinate sorts such as crimson, or, to give an example of the latter that is more to the point for my discussion here, concepts like this particular shade of red, exploited in the presence of a colored physical object (EPM, 57-64). Sellars shows that the acknowledged problem for empiricists was always how to account for the awareness of generic sorts. The question they sought to address was, How do I get the general concept, e.g. Redness, from my specific experiences of determinate shades of red? According to Sellars, the empiricists simply assumed that there was no philosophical problem in understanding how one acquires awareness of determinate sorts. The idea was that we know about these just by virtue of having sensations. On one hand, it is clear that the empiricist views on determinate sorts belie a fairly deep commitment to the Myth. The empiricists assumed that merely by having sensations and images of determinates we are aware of them as determinates. As Sellars puts it, they assumed that the

human mind has an innate ability to be aware of certain determinate sortssimply by virtue of having sensations and images (EPM, 62). Clearly this view must be rejected if to reject the Myth of the Given is to reject the idea that the categorical structure of the worldimposes itself on the mind as a seal imposes itself on melted wax (Lever, 12). But Sellarss point can also be put as an insistence on the priority of the Kantian radicalization over the traditional epistemological problematic. The question that would be posed from within the latter is, Granted that we have simple thoughts (determinates), how do we get complex ones (determinables)? Asking a question like this leads, in turn, to a form of skepticism in the shape of the question, How do we know that the general concepts I get from my impressions correspond to the general concepts that you get from your impressions (EPM, 58)? How do I know that what I mean by red is what you mean by red? But in asking these sorts of questions the empiricists blithely bypassed the question, How do I so much as have awareness of simple concepts? And when we see that even to have simple, determinate concepts presupposes acquiring a whole arsenal of complex conceptswhen we see that the general concept of red and the specific concepts of shade are, as it were, given as a package11then we see that the skeptical problem disappears. If we only even have the ability to be aware of determinate sorts through the process of acquiring language, which involves initiation into a shared, communal network of conceptsthe view that Sellars calls psychological nominalism (EPM, 63)it ceases to be intelligible that my awareness of a determinate sort as something of that sort could, at the ground level, fail to correspond to your awareness of it as of that sort. Now, Sellarss view of awareness is undoubtedly much more complicated than this. As one set of commentators puts it, through the course of EPM Sellars eventually back[s] off this

hard-core linguisticism.12 But even this quick sketch of the one stage of EPM shows how a core Kantianism informs his procedure. It is of course true that much of what both Sellars and McDowell do is to expose the Myth of the Given in likely and unlikely places, but it is also true to say that what they do is to flesh out the Kantian radicalization. Yet despite the shared agreement between McDowell and Sellars on the importance of Kant to the project of understanding the relation between thought and the world, they diverge sharply not only in what the execution of the Kantian project ought to look like, but also on the extent to which Kant was successful in his endeavor, the extent to which he needs to be supplemented or corrected.

II. Kantian Intuitions and Objective Constraint

Figuring out what exactly Kant means by an intuition has become something of a cottage industry in historically and philologically oriented Kant scholarship. For anyone who has attempted to make his way through this literature, it becomes increasingly apparent that no reading of the text, no matter how close or careful, which operates in the absence of a larger philosophical understanding of Kants transcendental enterprise, and thus in the absence of a developed philosophy of mind, will be able to provide decisive evidence in favor of one interpretation rather than another. The following quotation from Henry Allison gives a good indication of the shape of the problems surrounding the Kantian intuition and the way in which many (Allison included) are blind to the kinds of substantive philosophical questions that must be asked if the problems are to find a solution: Kant defined an intuition as a singular representationand he contends that it refers immediately to its objectit is precisely in virtue of its immediacy, that is, its direct, nonconceptual mode of representing, that an intuition can present a singular object to the mind and, therefore, serve as a [singular representation].

[] Nevertheless, a tension, if not outright contradiction, has often been noted between the official definition of intuition as a singular representation, and the account of sensible intuition [that Kant provides]. The problem is that, according to Kants theory of sensibility, sensible intuition provides the mind with only the raw data for conceptualization, not with the determinate knowledge of objects. Such knowledge requires not only that the data be given to intuition, but also that it be taken under some general description or recognized in a concept. Only then can we speak of the representation of an object.13 The standard reading of Kant (under which Allisons falls) holds that an intuition refers to something nonconceptual. On this reading, it is only with the understanding, the faculty of what Kant calls spontaneity, that concepts come into play. But as Allison suggests, the standard reading runs into an obvious problem, for if having determinate knowledge of objects requires conceptual determination, how it can be that an intuition, which is supposedly preconceptual, gives us such knowledge? In straining to preserve the reading of an intuition as nonconceptual, Allisons recommends the following solution: The key to the resolution of this tension isthat a Kantian sensible intuition is only proleptically the awareness of a particular[A]lthough intuitions do not in fact present or refer to objects apart from being brought under concepts in a judgment, they can be brought under concepts, and when they are they do represent particular objects (KTI, 67-68) (emphasis in original). So the standard solution, as Allison represents it, is to argue that there are both nonconceptual intuitions, something like the raw data of sensibility that are not yet conceptually combined into a representation of an object, and conceptualized intuitions, where the understanding cooperates with sensibility to form a singular representation of an object. On this reading, Kants failure to distinguish between these two types of intuitions shows either that he was philosophically confused or that he was extremely bad at explaining his thought to the reader. The upshot of this

reading is that one needs to do a huge amount of reconstruction for Kants argument to make any sense. But the lack of textual charity is the least of the problems involved in readings like Allisons. Both Sellars and McDowell would hold that the very idea of a direct, nonconceptual mode of representing is a manifestation of the deepest level of the Myth, a manifestation of the idea that the mind could have an innate, nonconceptually acquired ability to classify something as something. If Kant thought it made sense to speak of nonconceptual representations, he would be nothing more than a closeted empiricist in rationalist clothing (rather than someone who ingeniously combined the truths of both positions while casting off their confusions). Sellars provides an alternate reading of Kantthe basic outlines of which McDowell wholeheartedly endorsesaccording to which intuitions are always-already conceptually structured. More specifically, Sellarss way of making sense of Kants statement that an intuition provides an immediate relation to an object is to argue that immediate relation ought to be construed on the model of the demonstrative this. So that, on the correct interpretation, intuitions would be representations of thises and would be conceptual in that particular way in which to represent something as a this is conceptual (SM, 3) (emphases in original). Ultimately, both Sellars and McDowell agree that it simply cannot be the case that Kant finds it intelligible to speak of direct, nonconceptual representationsat least if he is to be taken as an (perhaps the) exemplary philosopher of intentionality. Understanding intuitions as already shaped by conceptuality necessitates a reading of the organization and argument of the Critique that is radically different from the ones put forth by generations of Kant scholars (though not, interestingly enough, Heidegger). I cannot go into the details of the standard reading

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now.14 Yet while both McDowell and Sellars agree that Kant thought that intuitions were conceptually structured, they differ on just what to make of this. Sellars argues that this conception of intuitions does not provide an adequate account of the constraint on thought provided by the layout of reality. While he does not want to speak of proleptic intuitions, he does want to insist on a contrast between intuitions and sense impressions. (So in this sense his reading is a more self-aware, philosophically perspicuous version of the standard reading.) Sense impressions are the sheer impact of reality on us [that dont] declare anything; [they] just provide the occasion on which we proceed to construct [a representation] (KPKT, 84). Here we see a point of contact between Sellarss discussion of Kant and his analysis of inner experiences in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Recall that in that text Sellars distinguished perceptions, which are conceptually structured takings in of facts, from impressions, which are nothing more than the merely causal impingement of the world on our senses. Similarly, Sellars holds that in addition to Kants account of intuitions, which are propositionally structured, he needs an account of impressions, which are not.15 Sellars suggests that by failing to distinguishing intuitions from impressions, Kant fails to adequately secure the constraint of reality on thought, and thus risks falling into idealism. Thus, it is only if Kant distinguishes the radically nonconceptual character of sense [impressions] from the conceptual character ofintuitionand, accordingly, the receptivity of sense from the guidedness of intuition that he can avoid the dialectic which leads from Hegels Phenomenology to nineteenth-century idealism (SM, 16). Much of Sellarss later and notoriously obscure philosophical project is aimed at providing an account of how to think of what this passage calls

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receptivity (and what elsewhere Sellars refers to as sheer receptivity) (SM, 7) so as to distinguish it from the conceptually mediated receptivity operative in intuitions. For McDowell, on the other hand, if one appreciates all that is entailed by Sellarss fine reading of intuitions as conceptually structured demonstratives one finds ones way to countenancing all the objective constraint that one could possibly need to vindicate the bearing of the world on thought. Wanting any thing like a more fundamental, ultimate kind of constraint is inevitably to succumb to the Myth. By way of conclusion, I want to unpack McDowells alternate understanding of intuitions and constraint. This will allow me to give a brief account of the different attitudes toward the task of philosophy, and the different pictures of thought, underpinning the work of Sellars and McDowell. In Having the World in View McDowells basic aim is to show how perceptions/intuitionsi.e. cognitive takings-in of states of affairsprovide all the constraint necessary to vindicating the intentionality of thought. To show this, McDowell needs to show that the conceptual determination of an intuition and the claim-containing character of a perception are imposed or impressed on their subject (HWIV, 440), so that qua conceptual, they might be viewed as operations of receptivity rather than spontaneity. Taking up Kants claim that the paradigmatic form of conceptual spontaneity is judging, 16 i.e. actively deciding that things are thus-and-so, McDowell suggests that viewing perceptions as conceptually determined operations of receptivity allows one to see that having things look a certain way to one is not the same as judging that they are that way (HWIV, 339), in that only the latter involves exercises of spontaneity.

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The cornerstone of McDowells argument comes from a passage in a section of the Critique entitled The Clue to the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of the Understanding, where Kant writes: The same function which gives unity to the various representations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition (A79/B104105). McDowell takes this remark to suggest that as actualizations of conceptual capacities with the appropriate togetherness, the judgment and the ostensible seeing would be alike. They would differ only in the way in which the relevant conceptual capacities are actualized. In the judgment, there would be a free responsible exercise of the conceptual capacities; in the ostensible seeing, they would be involuntarily drawn into operation under ostensible necessitation from an ostensibly seen object (HWIV, 458). The remark from the Clue suggests that what is given (not Given) to the mind by the world is always in the form of conceptual contentits being the case, or looking to be the case, that things are thus-and-so. This same conceptual content can be incorporated into exercises of spontaneity; one can actively make up ones mind to take it that things are as they look to be. (Indeed, elsewhere McDowell suggests that exercises of receptivity presuppose the faculty of spontaneity, so that things can only look to us to be a certain way if we also have the capability to decide that things are that way.)17 The content given in an intuition is, as McDowell puts it, judgment shaped (HWIV, 461). McDowells reading of Kant allows us to see intuitions as transparent; in having an intuition something about the world is directly disclosed to one (in conceptual form). On the other hand, Sellarss reading of Kant locates the ultimate objective content of an intuition in an impression. It is impressions, not intuitions, which provide the constraining element of experience (SM, 9). To put it a bit loosely, on the Sellarsian account an intuition conceptually processes an impression in order to yield the content available to exercises of spontaneity. This

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makes intuitions opaque: in the absence of a story of how we get intuitions out of impressions, we cannot see how it could be that the content of an intuition is directly world-involving. This is what I take McDowell to have in mind when he counterposes his reading to Sellarss by saying that he (McDowell) wants to speak of intuitions as conceptual shapings of sensory consciousness (HWIV, 462). If McDowell is correct in his reading, Sellars would want to say something more like, intuitions are conceptual shapings of impressions, which are the result of something impinging on sensory consciousness. Sellarsian impressions function as intermediaries between conceptual content and the world. By contrast, McDowells view of receptivity involves a picture of constraint as exerted, in intuition, by objects themselves, the subject matter of the conceptual representations involved in perception (HWIV, 468). At one point, McDowell suggests the metaphor of voice: A seen object as it were invites one to take it to be as it visibly is. It speaks to oneSee me as I am, it (so to speak) says to one; namely, as characterized by these propertiesand it displays them (HWIV, 468). In passages like these, McDowell has, I think, the following picture in mind: experience only contains claims when we have acquired conceptual capacities, which is just to say, when we have been initiated into the space of reasons. As so initiated, the world impinges on us as propositionally structured states of affairs. As animals living within the space of reasons, we open our eyes to the world and simply see that, for example, this is a red apple. Our thought, this is a red apple, is constrained by the way in which the world made its claim on usnamely, by saying to us, this is a red apple. It is always up to us to revise our thought. Perhaps we are in non-standard lighting conditions, or we know that we have a hard time distinguishing real

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apples from holograms of apples. But even in these cases what our thought must be true to is our initial perception of a red apple. In the cases of perceptual anomaly or error, the worldly fact to which we think that our thought is beholdenwhat we are trying to explain by citing weird lighting or the existence of hologramsis the fact of its looking to us that the apple is red. So if one understands idealism as the thesis that the supposed objects ofconceptual shapings of consciousness can only be projections of our conceptual activity (HWIV, 489), an account like McDowells is not a species of idealism, primarily because it shows how the conceptual shapings of consciousness are operations of our conceptual passivity. Thus, to vindicate intentionality is to understand how our thought is constrained by the world. And if the same function which gives unity to the various representations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition, understanding the nature of conceptual activity and understanding how conceptual activity is constrained by the world are but two sides of the same coin. Contrast this story with Sellarss sense that without an account of nonconceptual impingements of the world on the mind the threat of idealism looms large. In his account of Kantian intuitions, Sellars uses images that are almost exactly like McDowells. He writes, To know the language of perception is to be in a position to let ones thoughts be guided by the world; In receptivity we do the same sort of thing we do inspontaneitybut we do it as receptive to guidance by objects we come to represent; and it is perceptual judgments themselves which are evoked by the action of objects in our perceptual capacities (KTE, 273). But Sellars thinks that these images are not enough, that they do not dissolve the threat of idealism. Why not?

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There are some quite specific aspects of Sellarss philosophy underlying his sense that the kind of constraint described in these passages is not enough. But many of these local, somewhat hermetic aspects of Sellarsianismmost notably, his thesis that elements in the conceptual order can stand in content-involving or semantical relations only to elements in the conceptual order, not to elements in the real order and his related account of picturingare but specific manifestations of a more underling frame of mind.18 In brief, this underlying frame of mind holds that philosophical vindication must happen from outside of the normative order. For Sellars, it is part and parcel of the task of philosophy to ask how it is that we so much as have the ability to form conceptual representations. He sees that Kant does not provide an answer to this questionindeed, that he does not even really ask it and takes this to be the fundamental flaw of his project. McDowell would not deny that figuring out how we have the ability to form the conceptual representations we do is a legitimate task for some mode of inquiryhe is not a reactionary about science. But he would deny that this is the task of philosophy. McDowell famously describes the view that philosophy ought to account for the normative order from a space outside of it (say, the space of natural science) as the desire for a view from sideways on (MW, 34 and passim). The question of how we form conceptual representations would, for McDowell, be a question only about the enabling capacities that allow human beings to be the discursive creatures that they are.19 For McDowell, the task of a philosophy of mind is to make intentional content look unmysterious, given the available concepts that we all use and share. It is to make explicit an understanding of how the mind relates to the world that he thinks traditional epistemology has

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made opaque. If this is the job of philosophy, the job of cognitive science may be to show how much architectural complexity at the level of the brain underlies this simplicity at the level of concepts. Sellars on the other hand thinks that philosophy ought to see how both viewsthe view from the level of the normative and the view from the level of the architecturalfall together in one stereoscopic view (PSIM, 5). While this desire may be legitimate in the abstractand I dont think McDowell would deny that at some stage of inquiry this is a laudable aspirationconflating these levels has led to so many bad views in philosophy that it seems that one ought, for the moment, to give up the quest for the stereoscopic view. What McDowells project shows us is that giving it up does not entail having to find it mysterious that thought can be answerable to the world.

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Notes

18

James Conant, Varieties of Skepticism (unpublished paper), p. 5. Conant notes that what he characterizes as Cartesian and Kantian strands of skepticism refer less to the actual discussions of skepticism in each of these philosophers writings and more to the larger shape of [their philosophical] problems (7). I thank Professor Conant for making this paper available to me. Much of what is hastily discussed in the first section of my paper is developed at length in Conants Varieties of Skepticism.
1

P.F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kants Critique of Pure Reason (New York: Routledge, 1966), p.15.
2

Strawson, Imagination and Perception, in Freedom and Resentment and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1974) (emphasis in original), p. 50.
3

Martin Heidegger, Phenomenological Interpretation of Kants Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp. 38, 46. Hereafter cited as PIKC. A similar thought, coming from this side of the divide, is expressed by Sellars: The core of Kants epistemological turn is the claim that the distinction between epistemic and ontological categories is an illusion. All so-called ontological categories are in fact epistemic. They are unified by the concept of empirical knowledge because they are simply constituent moments of this one complex concept, the articulation of which is the major task of the constructive part of the Critique. See Wilfrid Sellars, Some Remarks on Kants Theory of Experience, in Kants Transcendental Metaphysics: Sellars Cassirer Lecture Notes and Other Essays, ed. Jeffrey Sicha (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 2002), p. 270. Hereafter cited in text as KTE. At first glance, it would seem that Sellarss claim is actually the opposite of Heideggers, i.e. it would seem that Heidegger is claiming that Kants project is fundamentally an ontology while Sellarss is suggesting that it is fundamentally an epistemology. But, I take it, the point that both philosophers are trying to make is that Kants focus on intentional content undoes the putative distinction between the two domains of inquiry.
4

John McDowell, Mind and World, paperback edition with Introduction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 3. Hereafter cited as MW.
5

McDowell, Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 95 (September 1998): 431. Hereafter cited as HWIV.
6

Sellars, Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1967), p. 1. Hereafter cited as SM.
7

McDowell, Scheme-Content Dualism and Empiricism in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. Lewis Edwin Huhn (Chicago: Open Court, 1999), pp. 87-108. Hereafter cited as SCD. Similar points are made in Mind and World, particularly pages 129-161.
8

McDowell, Knowledge and the Internal, in Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 408. Hereafter cited as KI.
9

For an expression of this idea see Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 19. Hereafter cited as EPM. Later in his career, Sellars gives some succinct accounts of the Myth of the Given that operate at a much higher level of generality. He writes,
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The temptation to suppose that experience, even in its most primitive form, comes to us, as it were, as experiences of items as of a certain sort, this is what I have called the Myth of the Given in my paper Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind; that is exactly it. And: the [M]yth of the [G]iven, as I defined it in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, is the notion that objects present themselves to us [without a process of conceptual mediation] as being of a certain sort or as being of a certain kind. Sellars, Kant and Pre-Kantian Themes: Lectures by Wilfrid Sellars, ed. Pedro Amaral (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 2002), p. 35, 84. Hereafter cited as KPKT. In one of his last publications, he writes: To reject the Myth of the Given is to reject the idea that the categorical structure of the worldif it has a categorical structureimposes itself on the mind as a seal imposes itself on melted wax. Sellars, The Lever of Archimedes, The Monist, vol. 64 (1981): 12. Hereafter cited as Lever. Similarly general formulations of the Myth can also be found within Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, but so far as I know none of them are as lucidly or economically expressed as these. Unfortunately, showing how the various levels of the Myth fit together, particularly the level concerned with justification and the level concerned with the categorial nature of experience, is a task that is beyond the scope of a paper such as this one. I am convinced that ultimately all of the levels are simply different angles of vision on the same general problematic, and that understanding how this can be so is central to grasping Sellarss philosophical system. McDowell puts the basic idea like this: Nothing could be immediately present to ones senses unless one already had knowledge that goes beyond what is immediately present to the senses (KI, 411412). Once again, this is a deeply Kantian claim. At one point in his lecture course on the Critique of Pure Reason, Heidegger suggests to his students that it is absolutely key to understand Kants claim that the data of sensationprecisely do not account for the essence of sensibility (PIKC, 70). As Sellars might put it, the Kantian point at play in both of these passages is that sense impressions are passive. The world doesnt tell us what it is. It doesnt carry its cognitive heart on its sleeve (KPKT, 72).
11

William deVries and Timm Triplett, Knowledge, Mind, and the Given: Reading Wilfrid Sellarss Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000), p. 58.
12

Henry Allison, Kants Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and a Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), p. 67 (emphasis mine). Hereafter cited as KTI.
13

For an extremely detailed reading of the Transcendental Deduction that is very close in spirit to this Sellarsian understanding of Kant see, The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories: An Outline and Interpretation, by John Haugeland (in collaboration with Jim Conant and John McDowell (unpublished manuscript, 1997). Also see Robert Pippin chapter Kantian and Hegelian Idealism in Hegels Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 16-41, although there are aspects of Pippins way of casting the relationship between Kant and Hegel that are not congenial to McDowell, who discusses his differences from Pippin in Hegels Idealism as a Radicalization of Kant (unpublished manuscript) and in his reply to Pippins Leaving Nature Behind: Or, Two Cheers for Subjectivism. I am leaving the huge question of the proximity of Strawsons reading of Kant to Sellarss and McDowells for another time, as well as the even huger question of why it might be that Heideggers reading converges so markedly with this tradition. I hope to explore both of these questions in detail elsewhere.
14

Much of the last few paragraphs have been an attempt to make sense of the following passage from Sellars: It is often taken for granted that Kant was clear about the distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual mental states or representings. Empirical intuitions are interpreted as non-conceptual and construedas the epistemically more important members of the sensation family. Actually the pattern of Kants thought stands out far more clearly if we interpret him as clear about the difference between general conceptual representings (sortal and attributive), on the one hand, and, on the other, intuition as a special class of non-general conceptual representings, but add to this interpretation the idea that he was not clear about the difference between intuitions in this sense and sensations (KTE, 272) (emphases in original).
15

Kant writes: We can reduce all acts of understanding to judgments, and the understanding may therefore be represented as a faculty of judgment (B94) (emphases in original).
16

For instance, empirical intuitionsjust happen, outside the control of their subjects. But since they exemplify kinds of unity whose original home, so to speak, is judgment, they could not happen except in the lives of subjects who are capable of the free intellectual activity that judging is. McDowell, Hegels Idealism as a Radicalization of Kant, p. 4.
17

Sellars of course has other reasons as well for holding that there must be a deeper form of constraint. To give just a short list: there is his sense that only science can tell us what is truly real, his interest in understanding something like the nonconceptual aspect of experience (what McDowell would call the nonconceptual machinery which lies below experience), and his extraordinarily intricate reading of how to make the various parts of the Critique hang together. All I am suggesting is that all of these reasons are variations on a more underlying theme, a habit of thought that provides a justification for all the things just mentioned in my short list. The inseparability of local argument and underlying philosophical commitment comes out quite nicely in the following passage: Kants failure to distinguish clearly between the forms of receptivity proper and the forms of that which is represented by the intuitive conceptual representations which are guided be receptivitya distinction which is demanded both by the thrust of his argument, and by sound philosophyhad as its consequence that no sooner had he left the scene than these particular waters were muddied by Hegel (SM, 29) (emphasis mine). An equally careful reader of Kant committed to McDowells view would reply to a passage such as this by agreeing that Kant does not distinguish between these two forms of receptivity, but would add that in fact not distinguishing these is what is demanded both by the thrust of his argument, and by sound philosophy. And rather than see Hegel as the one who muddied the waters, such a reader would be committed to the view that Hegels genius lay in his fleshing out and radicalizing the idea of worldly constraint as coming from inside the space of the conceptual. So we see once again that it is impossible to factor out substantive philosophy from even something as seemingly local as exegesis of a concept from the history of philosophy.
18

I owe my understanding of enabling capacities to Fred Stoutland. The distinction between a capacity which allows us to possess a concept and our possession of that concept is, I take it, central to Wittgensteinian accounts of language learning, mathematics, etc.
19