Brandom1/15/19Sellars Week 7 “Abstract Entities” Plan1. Intro: a) Our aim: Kant [A 314?] and Hegel on understanding a philosopher better than he understands himself. T.S. Eliot: “We know so much more than the dead authors.” “Yes, andthey are what we know.” (From “Tradition and the Individual Talent”).b) The 4 years (1959-1963) during which Sellars did this work, at the end of the magical period 1956-1963.c) Contemporary work on universals is mostly downstream from David Armstrong’s 1978 Universals and Scientific Realism and his 1989 Universals: An Opinionated Introduction, which does not discuss Sellars’s views (he is mentioned once, in passing). Contemporary trope theory reaches its acme with Mormann’s group in Munich, in their use of mathematical sheaf theory to formulate trope theory. (See John Bacon’s article in the Stanford Encyclopedia.) Sellars and his views are, as far as I can see, totally ignored in the contemporary discussions. An interesting enterprise would be to bring his apparatus to bear on the issues of universals as treated in contemporary analytic metaphysics.d) Plan: I) Setting; II) Abstraction; III) Existence; IV) Nominalism and Nominalization.2. Can think of the setting WS is working in in four parts (1,2,3,4), putting him in a position to do things the medieval could not do in the hundreds of years they devoted to this problem:a) 1: One overarching idea: Carnap’s from The Logical Syntax of Language (1934 in German, 1937 in English): to say that triangularity is a property is a way of saying in the material mode, the object language, what is said more perspicuously in the formal mode, in the metalanguage, as “‘triangularity’ is a monadic predicate.” Sellars will develop this into his metalinguistic expressivism (here, about sabstract objectss, but elsewhere about modality, logic, and—implicitly—normativity) a view with affinities to second-wave metaethical expressivism (an affinity which WS was not in a position to appreciate), but with the distinctive Carnapian metalinguistic turn that makes it quite different from affective or attitudinal expressivism.b) 2: Two great challenges or objections that that Carnapian idea faces: i. Statements about universals don’t mention linguistic expressions;ii. Just trade nonlinguistic universals for linguistic universals, so instead of a nominalism one gets a kind of linguistic idealism. c) 3: Three constructions Sellars will use to work out the idea, deal with the challenges, and address all the potentially problematic contexts (see (3) below):i. Jumbleseii. Dot quotesiii. Distributive singular terms.d) 4: Four kinds of contexts that must be addressed, each of which gives some reason to think we are committed to the existence of nonlinguistic universals (See the outline of GE from Week 6):i. Ordinary predications (discussed in NS) (If ‘Fa’ is perspicuously rendered as ‘a exemplifies F-ness.’)ii. Existential quantification over predicates (GE) (“There is something Tom and Timare: tall.”)tmpc0keqawr 1 1/15/2019Brandomiii. Semantic significance of predicates means there is something they stand for (GE)iv. Categorizing contexts (“triangularity is a quality”).3. Sellars introduces new machinery in order to do his analytic and constructive work. Prime among these are:a) Jumblese (which looks simple, until one i) extends it to the quantificational case (as in NS), ii) looks at metalanguages for Jumblese (in AE), and iii) looks at Jumblese metalanguages (in AE). Q: Jumblese sortals?b) Dot quotes—forming common nouns (sortals) such as -triangular- (something can bea -triangular-, as it can be a dog (but only something linguistic can be one of these—a point that matters a lot at the end of the essay).c) Distributive singular terms (DSTs). These are a distinctive kind of nominalization of common nouns: dogthe dog (e.g., is quadripedal). They can be formed from dot-quote common nouns (sortals): “the -triangular-”. This last is suggested as the perspicuous (not in the Bradley-regress-avoiding way) form of “triangularity”. Note that I have introduced/discovered/specified different parts of speech that seemed to be of particular philosophical interest: proform-forming operators, including specifically anaphorically indirect definite descriptions (as part of a botanization of kinds of anaphoric initiators and dependents) [MIE Ch. 5] and scare quotes (thought of as the converse of de re ascriptions of propositional attitude) [MIE Ch. 8].Later on I discuss the intimate relations between these three moves, especially the latter two. 4. I think that the introduction of dot-quotes satisfactorily deals with the first of the two overarching objections ((2-b-i) above). (Cf. (12) below.) So we will focus on whether the construal/construction of DST’s formed from the dot-quote common nouns (sortals), “the -triangular-”, satisfactorily deal with the other objection (about trading nonlinguistic universals for linguistic ones. Are the new kind of repeatables, which can indeed be distinguished from universals in a strict sense, OK from the point of view of the considerations that motivate metalinguistic expressivism (a kind of nominalism) about predicates (and, separate case, propositions)? Answering this question requires looking moreclosely at those motivations. I think the key here is Sellars’s remark at the end of Section I: (170) “Both the idea that qualities, relations, kinds, and classes are not reducible to manys and the idea that they are reducible to their instances or members are guilty of something analogous to the naturalistic fallacy.” This is not explicated there. I address this issue in (12) below.5. Abstraction in General:a) Generically: A process of introducing some singular terms on the basis of others.b) To have singular term, must have criteria of application, and criteria of identity and individuation.c) Abstraction requires an equivalence relation: reflexive, symmetric, and transitive.d) Frege’s example: lines plus paralleldirections.e) Abstract/concrete is on this account a relative distinction. Nothing is simply concrete. This is a way of introducing new terms (objects) relative to some antecedently introduced(available) ones, that count as ‘concrete’ relative to this process or procedure.tmpc0keqawr 2 1/15/2019Brandomf) The new objects inherit their criteria of application from the antecedent (more