Language and Animal Rationality: A Critique of Sellars

Barbara Hannan
University of New Mexico

Wilfrid Sellars argues, in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, for a thesis he calls "psychological nominalism." According to psychological nominalism, there is no pre-linguistic awareness of particulars, properties, or facts; to live in a world at all, a creature must possess a language. I argue that this is obviously false, given what we know about cognition in non-linguistic animals, and given plausible speculations about how language might have evolved. Sellars weaves psychological nominalism together, in a confusing way, with old-fashioned sense-data foundationalism ("The Myth of the Given"). I argue that we can reject "The Myth of the Given" in its epistemologically pernicious sense without endorsing psychological nominalism.