There is a property which P-entails BBrandom9/23/09Sellars Week Four “Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities”The essay is (as Sellars says in its Introduction) in two parts. I’m not going to say anything about Part One, save for the following observations:1. Sellars uses Principia Mathematica dot notation in lieu of (most) parentheses, which makes itdifficult for us to read today. And his use of it is not flawless. (I think he leaves a dot out of the last formula in §43, for instance.) Bernard Linsky’s Stanford Encyclopedia article on the Notation of PM offers a good primer.2. He carefully distinguishes between subjunctive conditionals (“if x were [phi]d it would [psi]”) and counterfactual conditionals (“if x had been [phi]d it would have [psi]d”).3. His analysis of dispositional talk essentially involves distinguishing four kinds of expressions: thing-kinds (sortals, not just predicates, which typically do not take temporal qualifications), conditions (predicates which do take temporal qualifications), interventions ([phi]ing) and results ([psi]).4. He distinguishes between dispositions and capacities: capacity claims say that there is a condition and an intervention that will have a result, while disposition claims presuppose thatthe condition obtains.Plan for discussion of Part Two:1. Sellars’s motivation for his inferentialism (rationalism) concerns the meaning of modal vocabulary. 2. Kant’s insight about concepts that articulate features of the framework of empirical description and explanation.3. From labeling to describing, by placing labels in a “space of implications”.4. Those “implications” essentially, and not just accidentally, include material inferential relations that are counterfactually robust, and would be made explicit by the use of modal vocabulary. [From beginning of Ch. 4 of BSD.]5. The Kant-Sellars thesis about modality6. Causal vs. logical or metaphysical modalities. (3 waves of modal revolution)7. Sellars’s CDCM argument as retailed in PIMSAE1 tmp7z0ld7a_Brandom8. K-S Thesis Incompatible with Description in Wide Sense?9. Revision of the argument in terms of pragmatic metavocabularies and pragmatic dependences, MUDs, as in middle of Ch. 4 of BSD.10. Premises from which to reason vs. Principles in accordance with which to reason11. Closing sections of CDCM on conceptual change.1. Sellars:In an autobiographical sketch, Sellars dates his break with traditional empiricism to his Oxford days in the thirties. It was, he says, prompted by concern with understanding the sort of conceptual content that ought to be associated with “logical, causal, and deontological modalities.” Already at that point he says that he had the idea thatwhat was needed was a functional theory of concepts which would make theirrole in reasoning, rather than supposed origin in experience, their primary feature.1This telling passage introduces two of the master ideas that shape Sellars’s critique of empiricism. The first is that a key criterion of adequacy with respect to which its semantics will be found wanting concerns its treatment of modal concepts. The second is that the remedy for this inadequacy lies in an alternative broadly functional approach to the semantics of these concepts that focuses on their inferential roles—as it were, looking downstream to their subsequent use, as well as upstream to the circumstances that elicit their application. Somewhat more specifically, he sees modal locutions as tools used in the enterprise of…making explicit the rules we have adopted for thought and action…I shall be interpreting our judgments to the effect that A causally necessitates B as the expression of a rule governing our use of the terms 'A' and 'B'.2In fact, following Ryle3, he takes modal expressions to function as inference licenses, expressing our commitment to the goodness of counterfactually robust inferences from necessitating to necessitated conditions. If and insofar as it could be established that their involvement in such counterfactually robust inferences is essential to the contents of ordinary empirical concepts, then what is made explicit by modal vocabulary is implicit in the use of any such concepts. That is the claim I am calling the “Kant-Sellars thesis.” On this view, modal vocabulary does not just add to the use of ordinary empirical observational vocabulary a range of expressive power that is extraneous—as though one were adding, say, culinary to nautical vocabulary. Rather, the expressive job distinctive of modal vocabulary is to articulate just the kind of essential semantic connections among empirical concepts that Sellars (and Quine) point to, and whose existence semantic atomism is principally concerned to deny.2. Kant:At the center of Kant’s thought is the observation that what we might call the framework of empirical description—the commitments, practices, abilities, and procedures that form the 1 In Action, Knowledge, and Reality, H. N. Castaneda (ed.) [Indianapolis, Bobbs-Merrill, 1975] p 285.2 Sellars, "Language, Rules, and Behavior" footnote 2 to p. 136/296 in PPPW.3 Gilbert Ryle, “ ‘If’, ‘So’, and ‘Because’ ”, pp. 302-318 in Black, Max (ed.) Philosophical Analysis [Prentice Hall, 1950].2 tmp7z0ld7a_Brandomnecessary practical background within the horizon of which alone it is possible to engage in the theoretical activity of describing how things empirically are (how empirical things are)—essentially involves elements expressible in words that are not descriptions, that do not perform the function of describing (in the narrow sense) how things are. These include, on the objective side, what is made explicit as statements of laws, using alethic modal concepts to relate the concepts applied in descriptions. Kant addresses the question of how we should understand the semantic and cognitive status of those framework commitments: are they the sort of thing that can be assessed as true or false? If true, do they express knowledge? If they are knowledge, how do we come to know and justify the claims expressing these commitments? Arethey a kind of empirical knowledge? I think that the task of crafting a satisfying idiom for discussing these issues and addressing these questions is still largely with us, well into the third century after Kant first posed them.Now Kant already realized that the situation is much more complicated and difficult than is