Abstract
In the present essay, we aim to develop and contrast three different positions toward Sellars’ distinction between the manifest and scientific images of man: Dennett’s philosophical reconstruction of neurocognitive science, contemporary phenomenology and psychoanalysis. We will suggest that these respective traditions and the substantial differences between them can be understood in terms of a ‘logic of appearance.’ Related to this are differing ideas about the rights and limits of the first-person perspective, the relation between conscious experience and belief, and the issue of naturalization. In the final part, we will try to specify, on the basis of a detailed reading of the disagreement between Dennett and phenomenology, in what way psychoanalytic theory could respond to these different issues.
Highlights
In his Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, Wilfrid Sellars offered a condensed diagnosis that seems to retain a certain validity with respect to our current philosophical, scientific and social predicament. Sellars (1991) famously talked about a discord fueled by the conflict between two apparently opposing “images” of man-in-the-world (1991, p.5): on the one hand, a manifest image which represents the tentative and provisional collection of ideas and assumptions we spontaneously adopt to characterize ourselves and the world we live in
For the past few decades, Dennett has been vehemently advocating against “the fantasy of first-person science” (Dennett, 2001), arguing, amongst other things, that there is no such thing as a ‘Cartesian theater’ where private things happen that are spontaneously revealed before a ‘mental I/eye’, one that, would form an unsurpassable source for self-knowledge from a first-person perspective
Dennett asks, should we give up our scientific abstinence when, compared to some other notorious fictive entities such as the phlogiston or élan vital, it comes to seemingly less exotic matters such as the ‘I’, ‘experience’ and ‘consciousness’? According to Dennett’s well-known proposal, we should treat these manifest testimonies in the same way we treat testimonies in court, that is, as provisional fictions (Dennett, 1991, p. 79), where after we can safely let cognitive neuroscience do its job in deciding if, and to what extent, there might be “truth in fiction.”
Summary
In his Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man, Wilfrid Sellars offered a condensed diagnosis that seems to retain a certain validity with respect to our current philosophical, scientific and social predicament. Sellars (1991) famously talked about a discord fueled by the conflict between two apparently opposing “images” of man-in-the-world (1991, p.5): on the one hand, a manifest image which represents the tentative and provisional collection of ideas and assumptions we spontaneously adopt to characterize ourselves and the world we live in. Sellars (1991) famously talked about a discord fueled by the conflict between two apparently opposing “images” of man-in-the-world (1991, p.5): on the one hand, a manifest image which represents the tentative and provisional collection of ideas and assumptions we spontaneously adopt to characterize ourselves and the world we live in. Chief among these are ideas closely related to our immediate self-understanding as subjects endowed with self-consciousness, a certain extent of freedom of choice, gifted with reason and desires, and so on. Dennett asks, should we give up our scientific abstinence when, compared to some other notorious fictive entities such as the phlogiston or élan vital, it comes to seemingly less exotic matters such as the ‘I’, ‘experience’ and ‘consciousness’? According to Dennett’s well-known proposal, we should treat these manifest testimonies in the same way we treat testimonies in court, that is, as provisional fictions (Dennett, 1991, p. 79), where after we can safely let cognitive neuroscience do its job in deciding if, and to what extent, there might be “truth in fiction.”
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