This week I just want to ask a few clarificatory questions. Last class we were asked if we understood the project Sellars was embarking on and I certainly couldn't figure out what his goals were. The discussion which followed was illuminating and informative, and hopefully my following discussion about my confusions, in tandem with applying Sellars' approach and position to it will better elucidate his point. The place I would like to start is perhaps at the beginning: what precisely is 'sense data'. The concept itself seems confused to me. The empiricist originally, beginning all the way with Locke and his primary and secondary qualities, wanted to embed certain facts about objects within the objects themselves. The property of having a smell, a shape, a color, a density, a weight, a size, etc. were facts in the object or they were extensions that we gathered through our sense perceptions (if I am properly understanding Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities). Kant, while not an empiricist, certainly attempted to unify empiricist and rationalist ideas by using an approach which sought to bear out the properties of objects as impositions on our concepts through a 'unification' of a manifold which the 'thing in itself' impressed upon us. In this way, properties were simultaneously of the noumena and the phenomena. Throughout this two-hundred-year historical arc, it seems that most people of the nonidealist camp wanted to impress upon us that the objects which we perceive have these properties we experience in very real kinds of ways. Sellars seems to want to split this connection. Like Wittgenstein, Sellars seems to be putting this notion of objects and meaning on its head. While Wittgenstein was far more concerned with meaning and justification in general, Sellars seems primarily motivated to ground our sense perceptions themselves in a kind of justificatory practice. It seems that Sellars wants us to say that we sense particular facts and they generate knowledge if it is the case that we can justifiably believe these perceptions to be the case. '(If this is horribly incorrect please correct me immediately!)' My first question is, how does such a view hold up against Gettier-style problems of knowledge? It seems that our fallibility of perception would be in part due to our fallibility of knowing in general, and this seems to be something which Sellars takes quite seriously. But this leads me to my next point. Why do we want to attribute 'knowledge' to the act of sense perceptions in the first place? This might perhaps seem radical or ridiculous; I'm not aware of anyone who has suggested this. But it seems that in general we want knowledge to be a kind of immutable thing; we know 'facts' about the world - the things which we know cannot undergo revision because then it doesn't seem to be the case that we can be credited with knowledge at all. But sense perceptions are not about the world, but instead they are about our interactions with the world as it is. Take for instance, deer. There is a very good reason why they stare at your headlights when you're driving fifty miles an hour down the road and want them to move so you don't hit them: they perceive the speed of your car differently than you do. This is primarily due to the 'refresh rate' of their eyes; we see things at a different frequency than them (this is why, for instance, movies are always shot at 29.97 frames per second: it's the perfect frequency for our eyes; likewise why lights seem to not be flickering; they are, you just can't tell because it happens too fast for your eyes to pick up on). Mantis shrimp see far more colors than humans do; if we could see the microwave spectrum of light, we would see a very different world. What I guess I'm trying to say is that the world appears to us in particular kinds of ways not because the _world_ is a certain way, but because _we_ are a certain way. It isn't because we're limited or fallible or finite or whatever reason which has been put forward historically; it is because our bodies are built in a particular kind of way which makes the way we perceive 'the way we perceive'. We are not seeing the world as it is, much like Kant believed. We are seeing the world the way that _we_ see the world. Can we actually be credited of having sensory knowledge of the world if this is the case? It seems only than we can be charged with seeing the world how we see the world. ________________________________________________________________________________ Dilyn Corner (C) 2020-2022