Scientific realism + Sellarsian Kantianism + picturing: do theoretical entities have ontological priority, does language picture the world in a second-order isomorphism beyond inferential semantics, and does the Cassirer Lectures' transcendental project complete the Sellarsian system?

Wilfrid Sellars, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Scientific realism: theoretical entities (electrons, fields, molecules, the microphysical structures that scientific theory postulates) are real items in the ultimate ontology, not useful fictions or instrumental constructs. The scientific image has ontological priority over the manifest image on the question of what exists. Sellarsian Kantianism: the transcendental project of Science and Metaphysics (1968) and the Cassirer Lectures (1975-76) investigates the conditions under which experience and knowledge are possible — the categorial structure of the conceptual framework, the relation of sensibility and understanding, the role of productive imagination in synthesizing experience.

Picturing: language pictures the world in a second-order isomorphism between linguistic patterns and worldly patterns. The picturing relation is the second dimension of the language- world relation beyond inferential semantics — what grounds reference and the application of conceptual frameworks to particular cases.1 Inferentialist semantics alone cannot do this work; the picturing apparatus is required for the full account.2

Sources

  1. For the statements which formulate this picturing relation are contaminated by the Pickwickian character, analysed above, of the reference to the micro-physical entities which serve as the non-linguistic terms of the picturing relation. 89. "Language entry" uniformities are, as we have noted, essential to the meaning and truth of singular statements in the common-sense or observational framework.
    Science and Metaphysics - Variations on Kantian Themes, p. 180
  2. For as long as the language of theoretical physics is used primarily at the level not of singular statements but at the level of the explanation of general truths, its role as depicting localized objects and events in Space and Time (if such a role is, as I have argued, appropriate) would remain potential, and actual depicting left to singular statements in the Strawsonian framework. 57.
    Science and Metaphysics - Variations on Kantian Themes, pp. 208–209

Where the argument is made

  • Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes (SM, 1968, the John Locke Lectures at Oxford 1965-66) — the canonical statement of the Sellarsian Kantianism and the picturing relation, especially Ch IV (the manifest and scientific images) and Ch V (the language of theories)
  • Naturalism and Ontology (NAO, 1980, the 1974 John Dewey Lectures) — the late synthesis on scientific realism and ontology
  • Kant's Transcendental Metaphysics: Sellars' Cassirer Lectures Notes and Other Essays (Sicha ed., 2002) — the 1975-76 Cassirer Lectures at Yale
  • Foundations for a Metaphysics of Pure Process (FMPP, the Carus Lectures 1981)
  • "Truth and 'Correspondence'" (TC, 1962)
  • "Towards a Theory of the Categories" (TTC, 1970)
  • "Ontology, the A Priori and Kant" (OAPK, 1970)
  • the Kant essays in Essays in Philosophy and Its History (1974)

How the argument was received

settled-as-articulated-with-active-late-debate