Sellars's Metasemantics

This chapter offers a metasemantic reconstruction of Wilfrid Sellars’s philosophy of language. I argue that some of Sellars’s most important contributions are best understood as addressing three core metasemantic questions: the metaphysics of semantic values, the theory of meaning, and the grounds of semantic facts. His three central claims are that semantic values are functional roles played by expressions in a language; that ‘meaning’ is not a relation but functional classification; and that semantic facts are grounded in three forms of non-intentional yet non-accidental ‘pattern-governed behavior’, namely language-entry, intralinguistic, and language-exit transitions. I then reconstruct Sellars’s argument that material inferences are indispensable to natural languages and crucial to the meanings of non-logical expressions. Finally, I ask whether Sellars should be read as an inferentialist. I suggest that his position is more accurately characterized as a functionalist, use-based metasemantics in which inferential transitions play an important role but are not the sole grounds of meaning.