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Thinkers

Wilfrid Sellars

Analytic · North America · 1912 to 1989

American philosopher who held that no knowledge is simply given by the senses. Every claim, he said, sits in a web of reasons.

What it is

Wilfrid Sellars (1912 to 1989) was an American philosopher. He was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the son of the philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, and he worked mostly on knowledge, language and the mind. He is best known for arguing that nothing in experience hands us knowledge ready-made, and for trying to fit everyday life and science into one picture.

He studied at the University of Michigan and at Buffalo, and then at Oriel College, Oxford, as a Rhodes scholar. He taught at Iowa, Minnesota and Yale, served in the war, and from 1963 taught at the University of Pittsburgh. He was a founder of the journal Philosophical Studies.

The main ideas

  • The Myth of the Given. A common picture says that a sensation, just by occurring, gives us knowledge of itself, and that other knowledge is built on it. Sellars called this a myth. Knowing something, on his view, means being able to place it among reasons, and a bare sensory event does not do that by itself.
  • Two images. He distinguished the manifest image, the world as people ordinarily find it, from the scientific image, the world as science describes it. His aim was a single, synoptic outlook that unites the two.
  • A naturalist who keeps the appearances. He wanted a realism guided by science that would still do justice to how things appear to us.
  • Meaning through role. He gave an account of meaning in which a word or sentence means what it does through the part it plays in language, including its links to other claims. This is often called inferentialism.
  • Thoughts as theoretical posits. Thoughts and sensations, he proposed, are introduced much as science introduces unobserved entities, to explain what people do and say. He told this as a story called the Myth of Jones.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine a child who points at a ripe tomato and says it is red. Sellars would ask what the child must already be able to do for that to count as knowing: tell red from other colours, know what to say if the light changes, take part in the talk of people around her. On his view the look of red alone does not teach her this. This is an illustration of his line of thought, not a passage from his writing.

Books and moments

  • The John Locke lectures, given in the mid-1960s, were published in 1968 as Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes.
  • Philosophical Studies is the journal he helped to found.
  • The Myth of Jones is the story through which he explained how talk of inner thoughts could arise from talk of behaviour.

Questions and criticism

  • Two images or one. It is fair to ask how the manifest and scientific images can both be kept if they sometimes conflict.
  • Private episodes. It is also fair to ask what is left of inner experience if knowing it depends on a public language.
  • A starting point. It is fair to ask whether a theory of knowledge can really do without any starting point that is not itself a claim.

Close neighbours

The page on Immanuel Kant lies behind much of Sellars's work. The pages on W. V. O. Quine and Rudolf Carnap show other twentieth-century views of knowledge and language.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced

  • John McDowell · He took up Sellars' attack on the myth of the given, and carried it in a new direction.

Influenced by

  • Immanuel Kant · He read Kant closely and took up his view that experience needs concepts.
  • Roy Wood Sellars · His father, Roy Wood Sellars, was a philosopher of naturalism, and shaped his early thought.

Other Analytic thinkers

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