Appearances

[drc]

Brandom writes:

Because he [Sellars] thinks part of what one is doing in saying how
things merely appear is withholding a commitment to their actually
being that way, and because one cannot be understood as withholding
a commitment that one cannot undertake, Sellars concludes that one
cannot have the ability to say or think how things seem or appear
unless one also has the ability to make claims about how things
actually are. In effect, this Sellarsian pragmatist critique of the
phenomenalist form of empiricism consists in the claim that the
practices that are PV-sufficient for 'is'-φ talk are PP-necessary for
the
practices that are PV-sufficient for 'looks'-φ talk. That pragmatic
dependence of practices-or-abilities then induces a resultant
pragmatically mediated semantic relation between the vocabularies.
(Lecture 1, page 15)

How does Brandom/Sellars respond to the reply that one must
distinguish (1) the epistemic sense of 'appears', which withholds a
commitment, from (2) the phenomenological sense of `appears', which
refers to a first-person-accessible particular, an appearance? Do the
phenomenological and B-pragmatic approaches simply beg each other's
question, or is there common argumentative ground that B-pragmatism
can employ to challenge phenomenological appearances?

I assume that the first three chapters of *Making It Explicit* might
be relevant, but I can't dredge up anything, er, explicit. Is a
Wittgensteinian private-language argument to be employed? The alleged
phenomenological particulars can be referred to only within public
rules of an autonomous language game that includes rules about
committing and withholding. So the radical-empiricist project of
generating a publicly accessible world from a privately accessible
world of pure experience isn't going to work. The latter won't be
autonomous, but rather it will be parastic upon the autonomous, rule-
governed language-game of committing and withholding, etc., in a
public context.

Something like this? Or what?

[matthew...@gmail.com]

I think that the distinction DrC mentions is key:

one must distinguish (1) the epistemic sense of 'appears', which
withholds a commitment, from (2) the phenomenological sense of
`appears', which refers to a first-person-accessible particular, an

appearance.

The problem with radical empiricism is not that we don't actually
experience appearances. The problem is that any attempt to TALK about
those appearances in a discourse necessarily involves a linguistic
distortion. This distortion is not necessarily a bad thing, indeed it
is extremely useful for certain tasks. But nevertheless, TALK of
appearances is just as shot through with linguistic baggage as is talk
of the way things objectively are. In other words, the language of
subjectivity is just as entrenched in language games as is the
language of objectivity.

The reason why it's so hard to wrap your head around this is because
any attempt to formulate or describe accurately the so-called 'first-
person accessible particulars' fails as soon as it begins for the
reasons given above: the attempt to describe is a linguistic practice,
and therefore is subject to basic linguistic concepts. The situation
is has parralles in Zen liturature, wherein the meaning of the term
'Void' is gestured at. The problem with describing or even naming
'Void' is that as soon as you do that you miss it. All that is
possible is a vague, inadequate gesturing at possible meaning. What we
call 'appearances' in the sense of (2) in the distinction above is a
similar gesturing at meaning. It reminds me of the famous Wittgenstien
quote:

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

radical empiricism cannot 'speak' of appearances in the sense of (2),
only in the sense of (1). Therefore radical empiricism is untenable,
even though the kind of language it advocates using in science
ultimately works well.

[matthew...@gmail.com]

Another Wittgenstien quote to illustrate my point:

What can be shown, cannot be said.

[Patrick]

Can someone explain to me why we're committed to this distinction? Why
do we want to hold on to it? Or, to be more pragmatic, what use is
it?

To talk in a distinctly post-Kantian vein - in that there is no
effective difference in talking about "appearances" and "the way
things are in themselves". The distinction is a piece of metaphysical
baggage, that everyone from Kant to Nietzsche to Husserl have
eschewed. The claim one cannot talk about appearances unless one can
talk about the way things actually are, combined with the premise that
we talk about appearances, shows that we can talk about the way things
actually are. One then needs to take the further step and say that the
two are exactly the same thing.

[matthew...@gmail.com]

Good point Patrick. But I think another important point Brandom makes
is that phenomenalist vocabulary expresses something not made explicit
by realist vocabulary. They are not practically equivalent. What is
expressed by 'looks' talk constitutes extra information about the
sentence that cannot be equivalently conveyed with 'is' talk. Sellars
suggests that 'looks' talk amounts to an expression of confidence in
the reliability of the content of the statement. For example if you
and I are walking in the Sahara dessert, I see what 'appears' to be an
oasis, I do not tell you "hey, there is an oasis over there!" Rather,
in considering my socially consituted knowledge of the sahara and the
possibility of hallucination I ought to say "hey, there appears to be
an oasis over there."
Similarly, 'is' talk expresses information not expressible with
'appears' talk. This is the vocabulary of naturalism. And it has the
expressive power to allow one to articulate what it 'is' to use
'looks' talk.

That is my reading anyway. I must admit that I'm not that well read in
the post-Kantian literature, so I am unaware of arguments against
DrC's distinction made earlier, and I would be very interested to hear
them.

matt