From Pragmatics to Semantics and Back. Wilfrid Sellars 1947-1954

My dissertation is devoted to an analysis of the early writings of Wilfrid Sellars, which I take to span from 1947 to 1954. The topic has been chosen based on the disproportion between the ever-expanding stream of publications devoted to Sellars’ philosophy on the one hand, and the considerable lack of attention accorded to his so-called “early phase” on the other. In chapter 1, I focus on Sellars’ earliest project of pure pragmatics. Contrasting the only interpretation available in literature, I argue that pure pragmatics is consistent with Sellars’ later, better known and more successful philosophy, and I show how several themes that would characterize his later project have their roots in pure pragmatics. In chapter 2, I analyze the essays published after the apparent abandonment of pure pragmatics. I contextualize them by providing, for each of them, the more or less covert background from which Sellars drew. I show how in these years (1948-1950) the way is paved to the overcoming of relational theories of meaning through the development of Sellars’ nominalism. Chapter 3 is devoted to a series of long and sophisticated essays published at the end of the “early phase”. Here, functional role semantics is given a comprehensive exposition and some related problems are discussed. The adoption of a pragmatist stance towards conceptual frameworks grants Sellars’ philosophy with the ability to be responsive both to human interests in the broad sense, and to the ontologically grounded scientific advancements of any epoch. Finally, Sellars’ characteristic tension concerning the place of norms in nature is eased by combining his reflections on the “double life” of linguistic behavior with the formulation of the irreducibility-cum-reducibility principle.