Although what Brassier understands by conceptualization is not too clearly spelled out in the paper, it's safe to assume - given the passing references to Sellars and Brandom, as well as his work elsewhere (the video "How to Train an Animal that makes Inferences" in particular) - that to conceptualize is to be able to make an inferential move in a game of giving and asking for reasons. In other words, to know is to conceptualize, and to conceptualize is to be able to give reasons for a claim about this or that. But I can't help but feel - as do legions of others who have called Sellars out on this point - that this is an incredibly limited, if not debilitating account of what it means to know. I have no doubt that this is undoubtedly a kind, or a 'species' of knowing, but I cannot accede to the idea that it constitutes knowing tout court.
[...]
What in particular concerns me is the exact status of sensation and affect, and the way in which the sensible relates to the rational machinery of rational conception. — StreetlightX
To argue against the assumption of inter-conceptual difference is to argue for the assumption of extra-conceptual difference. The one rather straightforwardly entails the other. — StreetlightX
To argue against the assumption of inter-conceptual difference is to argue for the assumption of extra-conceptual difference. The one rather straightforwardly entails the other. — StreetlightX
It is also odd to posit ideas emerging from non-ideas. — schopenhauer1
It may seem "odd" just because we can 'back-form' no exhaustive conceptualization of the process. But that we can produce no conceptual back-formation is exactly what should be expected if ideas did emerge from physical process. — John
Here it is still assumed the idea or conceptual is the emerging state.The contradiction only appears because you aren't making the distinction between the object (existing states, which express the meaning of an idea) and the idea (logical expression). This is the error Brassier is trying to get past.Concept is object= (naive) realism = idea "emerges" out of objects. However, the connection of object to idea presupposes an idea was there to begin with. How idea can emerge de novo, out of nowhere, from object is seemingly impossible to explain. — schopenhauer1
Both are hard pills to swallow. Ideas being brute facts seem at odds with evolutionary biology and the notion that the world is interacting objects of nature following laws (i.e. thermodynamics). It is also odd to posit ideas emerging from non-ideas. Surely, physical matter can emerge into other variations of physical matter, but physical matter emerging into ideas has little to no explanatory power.
Here it is still assumed the idea or conceptual is the emerging state.The contradiction only appears because you aren't making the distinction between the object (existing states, which express the meaning of an idea) and the idea (logical expression). This is the error Brassier is trying to get past. — TheWillowOfDarkness
Here it is still assumed the idea or conceptual is the emerging state.The contradiction only appears because you aren't making the distinction between the object (existing states, which express the meaning of an idea) and the idea (logical expression). This is the error Brassier is trying to get past. — TheWillowOfDarkness
By making the distinction between the object (existing state) and concept (logic/meaning), these issues are resolved. Since ideas don't exist, they aren't brute facts. While states of consciousness, as they are states of existence, are material; objects which emerge and pass, another variation of physical matter, resulting out of the interactions of other states of existence.
The emergence of ideas is avoided. Physical matter is never suggested to emerge into ideas. — TheWillowOfDarkness
By making the distinction between the object (existing state) and concept (logic/meaning), these issues are resolved. Since ideas don't exist, they aren't brute facts. While states of consciousness, as they are states of existence, are material; objects which emerge and pass, another variation of physical matter, resulting out of the interactions of other states of existence.
The emergence of ideas is avoided. Physical matter is never suggested to emerge into ideas. — TheWillowOfDarkness
It's a mistake to confuse concepts with "ideas" in the classical sense. For Brassier - and Sellars from whom he draws these ideas from - concepts belong to the order of language, and language - on Sellars's account - can be explained as belonging wholly to the natural order without invoking any sort of spooky 'emergence'. This is because on Sellars's account, to employ language is simply to employ a certain kind of 'knowing-how' or embodied competence according to which we learn how to make the appropriate inferences within an inferential-economy which governs the consistency of our employment of concepts. It's all a little bit complex, but the point is that one of the acknowledged strengths of Sellars's understanding of language - and hence conceptuality - is that it is designed to be compatible with a naturalistic point of view. Without going too much into it, here's how Brassier put it elsewhere: — StreetlightX
It is self-encapsulated and there's your problem because you'll say.. X, Y, Z chemicals are doing 1,2,3 rules and 'wallah" interiority which does nothing to explain how x,y,z chemicals doing 1,2,3 rules is interiority just the correlation of the objects with this byproduct of subjective experience. — schopenhauer1
'Interiority' and 'subjectivity' have nothing to do with conceptuality, at least not in the way that Sellars employs it. May I suggest farmiliarizing yourself with the subject matter you aim to critique, rather than continue offering an opinion which is uninformed about what exactly it is attempting to address? Here is a nice talk that summerizes the point. If you demonstrate some measure of understanding in your next post, we can continue. Otherwise this is a waste of time. — StreetlightX
You're right, knowing the position you're critiquing is an incredibly elitist expectation. Give me a moment while I come down to earth in order to make things up as I go along. — StreetlightX
So I'm reading up more on Sellars, and I don't see how quale are addressed really. Rather, he seems to focus more on higher order thought whereby language shapes how we apperceive quale as it is entangled with rule-based languages and thus shapes how we make distinctions between objects, etc. The quale itself, still seems like a brute fact- even if ill-defined until language shapes it and enmeshes it with ever higher order concepts. — schopenhauer1
I'm glad AaronR has joined the discussion because one issue that may be a side-issue - but which trips me up here - is how the very idea of language that Sellars-Brassier are starting from is a 'scientific' idea of language. I got bogged down before in trying to understand 'objects' because of this problem: that Sellars-Brassier assume that the core basis of language is a kind of fact-finding, truth-seeking mission. That gives a certain shape to one's very notions of 'concept', 'language' and 'object' that I - coming from a lifetime of arts and communication - don't automatically share. I think of language as communication, story-weaving at its core. I realise that that way postmodernism (and possibly madness) lies, but I'm looking for the analytic route all the same :) I tend to think of this quasi-logical account of language as a subset of language as a whole, as one language-game among many, whereas they are treating the language of science as the exemplary basis of language, but making it look as if they're addressing language as a whole by using very simple examples about red and rot. (I hope I'm making sense in explaining this. )The problem that Sellars confronts is this: how do blind evolutionary contingencies generate purposeful rule-governed activity - i.e. conceptual rationality. This has to be explained. So how do human animals
learn to speak, use language, and therefore think? If concepts are rules, and rationality is the ability to follow rules, and concepts and linguistically instantiated function, then the key to understand the specificity of the human lies in understanding how an animal can follow rules. — Brassier quoted by StreetlightX
I got bogged down before in trying to understand 'objects' because of this problem: that Sellars-Brassier assume that the core basis of language is a kind of fact-finding, truth-seeking mission. That gives a certain shape to one's very notions of 'concept', 'language' and 'object' that I - coming from a lifetime of arts and communication - don't automatically share. I think of language as communication, story-weaving at its core. I realise that that way postmodernism (and possibly madness) lies, but I'm looking for the analytic route all the same :) I tend to think of this quasi-logical account of language as a subset of language as a whole, as one language-game among many, whereas they are treating the language of science as the exemplary basis of language, but making it look as if they're addressing language as a whole by using very simple examples about red and rot. — mcdoodle
Now, the kind of language you're after--of the story-telling variety--certainly presupposes our ability to experience things as red, and therefore presupposes that we already have in place a full-blooded system of language as thought for representing the world as it is. — Glahn
In what sense are objects supposed to be more primary to our concepts than these other notions, except to physically-based sciences? — mcdoodle
Yet, it seems, there are objects we don't know about all the time. How can there be meaningful objects outside experience when, it seems, meaning is only given in experience?
In taking objects as primary, we side-step this dilemma completely. Objects, since they are defined in themselves, no longer require a "present" concept (i.e. be experienced) to be. Perhaps more critically though, the infinite meaning of concepts is unattached from states of existence. — TheWillowOfDarkness
Wilfrid Sellars’s Argument that the given is a myth, from “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”.
1. A cognitive state is epistemically independent if it possesses its epistemic status independently of its being inferred or inferrable from some other cognitive state.
[Definition of epistemic independence]
2. A cognitive state is epistemically efficacious — is capable of epistemically supporting other cognitive states — if the epistemic status of those other states can be validly inferred (formally or materially) from its epistemic status.
[Definition of epistemic efficacy]
3. The doctrine of the given is that any empirical knowledge that p requires some (or is itself) basic, that is, epistemically independent, knowledge (that g, h, i, …) which is epistemically efficacious with respect to p.
[Definition of doctrine of the given]
4. Inferential relations are always between items with propositional form.
[By the nature of inference]
5. Therefore, non-propositional items (such as sense data) are epistemically inefficacious and cannot serve as what is given.
[From 2 and 4]
6. No inferentially acquired, propositionally structured mental state is epistemically independent.
[From 1]
7. Examination of multiple candidates for non-inferentially acquired, propositionally structured cognitive states indicates that their epistemic status presupposes the possession by the knowing subject of other empirical knowledge, both of particulars and of general empirical truths.
[From Sellars’s analyses of statements about sense-data and appearances in Parts 1-IV of EPM and his analysis of epistemic authority in Part VIII]
8. Presupposition is an epistemic and therefore an inferential relation.
[Assumed (See PRE)]
9. Non-inferentially acquired empirical knowledge that presupposes the possession by the knowing subject of other empirical knowledge is not epistemically independent.
[From 1, 7, and 8]
10. Any empirical, propositional cognition is acquired either inferentially or non-inferentially.
[Excluded middle]
11. Therefore, propositionally structured cognitions, whether inferentially or non-inferentially acquired, are never epistemically independent and cannot serve as the given.
[6, 9, 10, constructive dilemma]
12. Every cognition is either propositionally structured or not.
[Excluded middle]
13. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe that no item of empirical knowledge can serve the function of a given.
[5,11, 12, constructive dilemma] — SEP
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