Cybernetics and Psychology in Sellars’ Scientific Image of Mind

Instructor: Carl Sachs Date & Time: Saturdays May 15, 22, 29, June 5 12:00 to 14:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: The long-neglected Wilfrid Sellars has been rediscovered thanks to the warm reception that his epigones, especially Robert Brandom and John McDowell, have received in both ‘analytic’ and “Continental’ philosophical audiences. Yet the recent Sellars renaissance neglects his profound debt to the “sciences of the mental” in the 1940s through 1960s. Without an appreciation of this side of Sellars’s thought, we run the risk of misinterpreting his most famous ideas, such as what he called “the Myth of the Given.” The two “sciences of the mental” that influenced Sellars were cybernetics and behaviorism – both of which need to be rescued from obscurity of their own. In cybernetics, the nascent science of information theory developed by Norbert Wiener and others, Sellars found the concept of a feedback loop. In behaviorism, especially the version developed by Edward Tolman, a positive role is found for cognition in the explanation of behavior. The cognitive behaviorist Tolman and the cybernetician Norbert Wiener were drawing deep on influences in American pragmatism: cognition and action cannot be theorized independently. These influences gave Sellars a theoretically important point of departure for his appropriation of his father, the critical realist Roy Wood Sellars, as well as of Carnap and Wittgenstein. In this Seminar we will examine how Sellars drew upon cognitive behaviorism and cybernetics to carry out his grand plan of “naturalizing idealism”: how to place the crucial philosophical insights of Kant and Hegel on the ‘gold standard’ of empirical scientific inquiry. We will examine how Sellars’s use of examples such as guided missiles and robots opened up a space of philosophical speculation that resonantes with recent developments in enactive cognitive science, ecological psychology, and the new rationalism of Brassier and Negarestani.

IMAGE: Luc Tuymans, Antichambre, 1985

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