Dominik Robel
University of Warsaw
Wilfrid Sellars and Donald Davidson are usually thought of as philosophers of only superficial similarity. Recently however, scholarship on the former has led to a significant reappraisal of Sellars’ central idea called “”Psychological Nominalism”” (PN) [1]. Besides the line most famously associated with PN, that all awareness is a linguistic affair, its author has later supplied another reading which gives us a second thesis, meant to be mutually supporting with the first one. That is, that thinking never involves relations to abstract entities [2]. This opens the possibility of new, interesting comparisons with another great philosopher, Donald Davidson, whose philosophical enterprise has centered on freeing semantics from the burden of Fregean-like abstract senses [3]. I want to argue that the starting point of both projects is fairly similar, despite the vastly different ways in which they are carried out.
Both approaches seem to run contrary to the presently thriving enterprise of analysing “”propositional contents”” in terms of relations to possible (or sometimes impossible) worlds. I aim to explain their motivations and try to reconstruct arguments they give against conceiving of meaning as relations to entities. I will also ask whether Donald Davidson himself can be called a psychological nominalist.
[1] O’Shea, J. (2017). ‘Psychological Nominalism’ and the Given, From Abstract Entities to Animal Minds. In J. O’Shea (Ed.), In: Patrick J. Reider, ed., Wilfrid Sellars, Idealism and Realism: Understanding Psychological Nominalism (London and New York: Bloomsbury), 2017: Pp. 19?39 (pp. 19–39).
[2] Sellars, W. (1974). Empiricism and Abstract Entities. In: Essays in Philosophy and Its History. Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2291-0_12
[3] Davidson, D. (1967). Truth and Meaning. Synthese, 17(1), 304–323. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00485035
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SOPhiA 2026 