> >
> > This account is based on the epistemology of Wilfrid Sellars, a
> > great
> > pragmatic realist who was influenced, among other things, by Engels.
>
>That account also looks a lot like Quine's. He among other things
>sought to reconcile the correspondence and coherence theories
>of truth together. Although, he was influenced most strongly
>by Rudolf Carnap, he has always liked to quote Otto Neurath
>who was a type of Marxist. BTW did Sellars consider
>himself to be a Marxist? And if so, did he write anything of
>consequence on Marxism?
It is a pragmatist account, and bears that kinship to Quine, and I sometimes describe myself as Quinean. The account is, however, Sellarsian. Sellars is a much more robust sort of realist, although not robust enough for me, in fact.
The "cohrerence" part of the story is the theory of warrant or justification, the epistemology. The correspondence part is the semantics, the theory of truth. Realists should keep these strictly seperate.
Quine's theory of truth is a sort of disquotationalism, that is, he thinks to thay that "p is true" is just to say p--take away the quotation marks, thus diusquotationalism. I do not see Quine as using either a correspondance or a coherence theory of truth, therefore.
Quine's basic epistemological insight, that any belief can be held true or abandonded if we are willing to make enough revisions elsewhere, if explicitly credited to Neurath, who was a Marxist and in fact a Communist, amde important discussions to the caluculation (planning-market) debate.
Sellars never took any political position in print. A friend who did his Ph.D with Sellars in the 1970s and 80s says that Sellars wasa personally very left wing, but ambivalent about Marxsim, fely he didn't know enough. In a written autobiography. Sellars credits a grad school reading of Engels' Dialectics of Nature with inspiring his basic pragmatist direction.
Incidentally, personal left wing politics kept to oneself are not necesasrily unusual in people of his generation. Richard Brandt, the great utilitarian philosopher and a teacher of mine, but no pragmatist! (he was an unapologetic old-fashioned empiricist) admitted to me that utilitarianism implied communism, because of the theory of diminishing marginal returns. Well, write it up, Dick, I said. Hew ouldn't though; he dodged doing it, I am convinced because of vivid memories of witch hunts.
--jks _____________________________________________________________________________________ Get more from the Web. FREE MSN Explorer download : http://explorer.msn.com