Masters Thesis

An interpretation of emergence within Sellars' 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind'

The crux of Sellars’ 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind' is to call attention to what he calls the "Myth of the Given," which classical empiricism and foundationalist accounts of knowledge are dependent. Ruling out sense datum theories and other foundationalist accounts, Sellars argues impressions are of a non-propositional form and as such, cannot have a functional role to serve as a justification, which suggests sense experiences, in themselves, are epistemically inefficacious. Sellars refutes the whole framework of classical empirical knowledge and offers his own positive epistemology that takes what he believes to be correct in each account, while adjudicating it to be reasonable and consonant to good scientific practice, which is the basis of his scientific realism. Ultimately for Sellars, the epistemic cannot be derived from the non-propositional, which means knowledge cannot be derived from pre-conceptual sensa. I posit there is a possible interpretation for emergence within Sellars EPM that is derived from the necessary holistic parts needed to ascend to a fully-fledged normative knower. I argue that the ability to have conceptual representations and to know something, as X, could be considered a holistically emergent ability that aligns closer to the tenets of weak emergentism.

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