Abstract

Romane Clark has complained of the dissimilarity between Sellars’s treatment of conceptual thought and his treatment of sense impressions. For sense impressions are intrinsic to perceptions and, on Sellars’s view, both conceptual thought and perception are species of judgment. In the first section of this paper I want to raise a converse sort of complaint: Sellars offers an ‘adverbial’ theory of sense impressions and a similar account of conceptual thought. But this similarity of treatment is not justified by what Sellars says in its defence. If the adverbial theory of conceptual thought is true, as I believe it is, then a number of consequences, important for the philosophy of action, follow. Sellars traces some of these in his paper “Metaphysics and the Concept of a Person.” It would be desirable, therefore, if the adverbial theory of conceptual thought could be made secure. This is attempted in the second section and, in conclusion, the power of the theory is exhibited by directing it briefly at a long-standing problem in the philosophy of logic.