Pragmatic Concerns and Images of the World

Abstract

I defend a pragmatist reinterpretation of Sellars's famous manifest-scientific distinction. I claim that in order to do justice to this important distinction we must first recognize, despite what philosophers-including, arguably, Sellars-often make of it, that the distinction does not draw an epistemological or metaphysical boundary between different kinds of objects and events, but a pragmatic boundary between different ways in which we interact with objects and events. Put differently, I argue that the manifest-scientific distinction, in my view, can be best understood, not as a metaphysical distinction between apparent and real objects and events, or an epistemological distinction between perceptible and imperceptible objects and events, but rather as a distinction, which is not necessarily rigid over time, between distinct ways in which we collectively deal, in practice, with objects and events. © 2010 The Author(s).