The Art of the Possible

The chapter provides an examination of competing accounts of truthmakers for judgments concerning contingency, necessity, possibility, and for counterfactual and subjunctive conditionals. On the one side are the ‘Humeans’ who see the universe as modally bereft, in David Lewis’ words, it is ‘just one little thing and then another’. Lewis’ account of modal discourse posits myriad alternative universes. Modal judgments are recast as judgments concerning similarities. The resulting picture is found to make contingencies hard to come by: necessities, not contingencies, rule. An Aristotelian universe, in contrast, would be populated by interacting objects, and would appear to provide ample truthmakers for modal judgments. This impression does not survive scrutiny, however. Humeans and Aristotelians alike are obliged to reconstrue modal discourse in a way that reflects pressures arising in the manifest image, but leaves the modal texture of reality untouched.

Agency

Earlier chapters advanced the idea that the appearances (the manifest image) and reality (as revealed in the scientific image) are not in competition: the scientific image constitutes our best guess as to the nature of truthmakers for truths at home in the manifest image. Along the way, necessitarianism (everything is as it is of necessity) and monism repeatedly inserted themselves into the discussion. The thought that truths of the manifest image could survive intact, even when they appear deeply at odds with the scientific image could prove correct, however, even were the accompanying cosmology misguided. The problem of reconciling free will with the scientific image provides an illustrative test case. Just as truthmakers for truths about moving objects could turn out to include nothing that moves, truths about agents acting freely could be made true by wholly deterministic features of the universe. This is not ‘compatibilism’: a free action is not compatible with the action’s being determined. As in the case of motion, agents and their actions are respectable citizens of the manifest image, their standing not compromised by physics.

Metaphysics

A discussion of the inevitability of metaphysics centered on the question, how are the appearances related to reality? The universe as we encounter it in our everyday and scientific pursuits, what Wilfrid Sellars called the ‘manifest image’, presents itself as strikingly at odds with the ‘scientific image’, the universe as revealed by physics. Every reflective agent must eventually confront the problem of how the manifest and scientific images are related, how the appearances stand to reality. Three responses to the problem are discussed, and a fourth is introduced. A holistic conception of metaphysics—a ‘package deal’—is endorsed, two competing worldviews, ‘Aristotelianism’ and ‘Humeanism’ are set out, followed by brief chapter-by-chapter summaries of the book’s contents.

Reconciliation

The chapter explores the idea, implicit in earlier chapters, that the manifest and scientific images are ultimately unified. An Aristotelian cosmology of interacting objects facilitates our negotiation of the manifest image, but the scientific image could turn out to be better served by Humeanism. Efforts to reconcile the manifest and scientific image that regard one or the other as provisional or illusory, and those that depict the scientific image as accommodating the ‘fundamental’ things and the manifest image as applicable to less-than-fundamental, ‘higher-level’ things, are examined and found wanting. A fourth option is proposed: the scientific image gives us an account of what the manifest image is an image of. The nature of the truthmakers for truths embedded in our Aristotelian manifest image could turn out to be Humean. More dramatically, Hume and Spinoza might be seen to converge.

Emergence and Downward Causation

Emergence and downward causation are best understood in light of one another. Downward causation would occur when a whole, which includes various parts, influences the behavior of those parts. A whole, or a property of a whole, is emergent when it is capable of exercising downward causation. Although ‘emergence’ is by no means univocal, this would be one way to distinguish ‘weak’ or explanatory emergence from robust ‘ontological emergence’. The intelligibility of emergence in this sense is questioned, and it is noted that proponents of emergence appear to be committed ill-advisedly to a corpuscularian universe. This chapter foreshadows a theme running through the remaining chapters: the Aristotelian picture of objects interacting and influencing one another could turn out to be best suited to the manifest image.

Roots of Things

This chapter returns to idea that the manifest image concerns a higher-level reality, dependent on, but distinct from a more fundamental reality, the characterization of which falls to physics, noting that a more appealing option is available. Although the universe depicted by physics is apparently at odds with the Aristotelian character of the manifest image, the two images are not images of distinct realities, but different ways of depicting a single reality. The possibility that the scientific image is Humean in the manner of Lewis and Williams is explored and its implications for change and efficient causation discussed, setting the stage for Chapter 13, which concerns the reconciliation of the manifest and scientific images.

Finding Space in a Non-Spatial World

What is the relation between space in the manifest image of perceptual experience and in the scientific image of physics? I will argue that we have moved from spatial primitivism (on which space is understood as a primitive conception that we are acquainted with) to spatial functionalism (on which space is picked out by its functional role). I investigate different forms of spatial functionalism on which the relevant roles are experiential (involving effects on our experience) and non-experiential (involving patterns of causal interactions). I draw connections to functionalism in the philosophy of mind, to Cartesian skepticism, and to recent literature on spacetime functionalism and emergent spacetime.

Ist die Wissenschaft das Maß aller Dinge? Eine phänomenologische Kritik an Sellars’ Ansatz

In view of the incompatibility between scientific and manifest image one can either consider the scientific world as true and the sensuous world as merely subjective or consider the latter as true and the former as a subjective construction. Sellars holds the first position, namely scientific realism. By relying on Husserl, who holds the second position, I try to show that the first position has absurd consequences and is idealistic. For the measure of all things is not science, but perception.

The Clash of the Images - Why the Manifest Image and the Scientific Image Are Incompatible

In everyday life, we take there to be ordinary objects such as persons, tables, and stones bearing certain properties such as color and shape and standing in various causal relationships to each other. Basic convictions such as these form our everyday picture of the world: the manifest image. The scientific image, on the other hand, is a system of beliefs that is only based on scientific results. It contains many beliefs that are not contained in the manifest image. At first glance, this may not seem to be a problem. But Mulamustafić shows convincingly that this is a mistake: The world as it is in itself cannot be both the way the manifest image depicts it and the way the scientific image describes it to be.

The Early Modern Origins of Pragmatism

This paper considers the alleged pragmatism of Berkeley’s philosophy using the two Sellarsian categories of ‘manifest’ and ‘scientific’ images of the world and human beings. The ‘manifest’ image is regarded as a refinement of the ordinary way of conceiving things, and the scientific image is seen as a theoretical picture of the world provided by science. The paper argues that the so-called Berkeleian pragmatism was an effect of Berkeley’s work towards a synthesis of ‘manifest’ and ‘scientific’ images through the creation of one unified synoptic vision of the world and was a part of a new conceptual framework within which these two images could be combined.