Sellars Meillassoux and The Myth of The

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SELLARS, MEILLASSOUX, AND THE MYTH OF

THE CATEGORIAL GIVEN: A SELLARIAN CRITIQUE
OF “CORRELATIONISM” AND MEILASSOUX’S
“SPECULATIVE REALISM”
DIONYSIS CHRISTIAS
UNIVERSITY OF ATHENS
Abstract: The aim of this paper is threefold. First, we examine the Sellarsian
concept of the (myth of the) categorial Given, focus on its wide application and
suggest that it can be applied to those post-Kantian philosophical views, currently
fashionable in Continental philosophical circles, for which Quentin Meillassoux
coins the term “correlationism”: the view that mind and world are “always already”
given to us as essentially related to one another, and only subsequently can they
be thought of as being independently existing and meaningful “entities.” Second,
it is pointed out that Sellars uses an argument against the explanatory adequacy
of the manifest image (an image with essential “Givenist” elements in its descrip-
tive and explanatory dimension) that is exactly of the same form as Meillassoux’s
argument against correlationism, but, which, when combined with other crucial
Sellarsian views concerning the transcendental/empirical distinction, can avoid a
problematic feature of Meillassoux’s argument, and, in this way, constitute a better
philosophical weapon against correlationism. Finally, it is suggested that by not
drawing the transcendental/empirical distinction in the right (i.e., Sellarsian) way,
Meillassoux himself is exposed and, in the constructive (“speculative realist”) part
of his work, indeed succumbs to a version of the myth of the categorial Given.
The aim of this paper is threefold. First, we examine the Sellarsian concept of the
(myth of the) categorial Given, focus on its wide application and suggest that it can be
applied to those post-Kantian philosophical views, currently fashionable in Continental
philosophical circles, for which Quentin Meillassoux, Badiou’s protégé and a rising
star in French philosophy—although, unfortunately, not well known outside continental
philosophical circles—coins the term “correlationism”: the view that mind and world
are primordially or “always already” given to us as essentially related to one another,
and only subsequently can they be “objectified,” i.e., thought of as being independently
existing and meaningful “entities.” Second, it is pointed out that Sellars uses an argu-
ment against the explanatory adequacy of the manifest image (an image with essential
“Givenist” elements in its descriptive and explanatory dimension) that is exactly of the
2 DIONYSIS CHRISTIAS
same form as Meillassoux’s argument against correlationism, but, which, when

combined with other crucial Sellarsian views concerning the transcendental/empiri-
cal distinction, can avoid a problematic feature of Meillassoux’s argument, and, in
this way, constitute a better philosophical weapon against correlationism. Finally,
it is suggested that by not drawing the transcendental/empirical distinction in the
right (i.e., Sellarsian) way, Meillassoux himself is exposed and, in the constructive
(“speculative realist”) part of his work, indeed succumbs to a version of the myth
of the categorial Given.
I. SELLARS AND THE MYTH OF THE CATEGORIAL GIVEN

The Sellarsian concept of the myth of the Given has much wider application than
commonly thought. In the form of the “categorial Given” it can be applied not only
to extreme empiricist positions but also to much more sophisticated post-Kantian
philosophical traditions, such as phenomenology, hermeneutics, ordinary language
philosophy, etc. (O’Shea 2007, 115–116). The scope of the Sellarsian myth of the
categorial Given is indeed so wide that the fact that it has not received proper at-
tention in the literature1 is surely unfortunate.
But what exactly does the myth of the categorial Given consist in? According
to Sellars, it is the view according to which “if a person is directly aware of an item
which has categorial status C, then the person is aware of it as having categorial
status C” (Sellars 1981, I, §44), and, as Sellars immediately adds, “To reject the
Myth of the Given is to reject the idea that the categorial structure of the world—if
it has a categorial structure—imposes itself on the mind as a seal on melted wax”
(emphasis original) (Sellars 1981, I, § 45). Unfortunately, the fact that Sellars’s
target in his essay “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (EPM) (1956) was,
predominantly, the specifically empiricist version of the Given (with its emphasis on
a stratum of nonlingustic, nonconceptual awareness (e.g., of sense-data) that could
supposedly serve as evidence for the justification of ordinary observational beliefs
about external objects, and of empirical knowledge in general) tended to distract
attention from the real philosophical scope of the myth of the Given, which was not
at all limited to its empiricist versions, even in its EPM construal.2 In fact, as is obvi-
ous from the formulation of the categorial Given, a host of philosophical positions
can be characterized as being in effect versions of it, even if they resolutely reject
the empiricist Given, and construe the evidential relevance of perceptual experience
as being fully conceptual or intentional in nature. To see this, consider the claims
often made by phenomenologists or conceptual analysts (whether of Austinian or
Strawsonian stripe) to the effect that if an adequate (i.e., phenomenological, con-
ceptual analysis) account of perceptual experience shows that some experiential
phenomenon x has a specific character y, then x has indeed the character y (O’Shea
2012, 181–182). But that is just a version of the categorial Given, in spite of the
fact that the characteristic “y” which is ascribed to the perceptual experience as its
essential feature need not be considered as an evidentially relevant non-conceptual
or non-intentional element of experience. The myth of the categorial Given in its
most general form consists in the belief that the general sorts, kinds or properties of
things or the essential kinds or properties of human experience (be it perceptual or
SELLARS, MEILLASSOUX, AND THE MYTH OF THE CATEGORIAL GIVEN 3
non-perceptual—e.g., “logical,” “mathematical,” aesthetic, etc.) can be transparently

present to the human mind in propria persona (as they really are), independently
of any possible future reconceptualization—driven from the need of scientific-style
explanatory accommodation within our ongoing empirical inquiry—of what these
(worldly or experienceable) sorts, kinds or properties actually are. In that sense,
there can certainly be, e.g., transcendental (or phenomenological, hermeneutical
and many more) versions of the Given to the extent that they conceive their distinc-
tive (non-empirical) domain of inquiry as something that reveals a “primordial”
region of being, experience, or meaning that is epistemologically self-contained,
i.e., completely independent of the realm and methods (descriptive and explana-
tory resources and extensions) of empirical inquiry. One realizes here the radical
nature of Sellars’s claim: no philosophical method can guarantee any privileged
access to the real nature (however it construes the notion) of the categorial structure
of the world, the mind or of our perceptual experience, by the sole use of purely
non-empirical methods of description, explanation or analysis. It is always possible
that the real nature of any non-empirically (e.g., transcendentally or phenomeno-
logically) analyzed experience will be justifiably reconceptualized in the light of
empirical-scientific explanatory demands.
II. MEILLASSOUX’S DESCRIPTION OF

“CORRELATIONIST” PHILOSOPHICAL VIEWS
Let us now turn to Meillassoux and his examination of “correlationist” philo-
sophical views. Meillassoux’s attack on correlationism is of great philosophical
importance since it aims to reveal a serious metaphysical residue of a variety of
philosophical positions (currently in vogue in continental philosophy), the most
interesting feature of which is that, being self-proclaimed post-Kantians (i.e., anti-
metaphysical) in their philosophical orientation, they resolutely reject the myth
of the empirically Given (epistemically foundational sense-impressions) as well
as that of the rationalist Given (various forms of rational “insight” or “intuition,”
which allegedly offers epistemic access to non-empirical, metaphysically necessary
truths). In effect, according to Meillassoux, correlationism is “the idea according
to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being,
and never to either term considered apart from the other” (Meillassoux 2008, 5).
We can never grasp an object “in itself” in complete independence from its relation
to the subject, but at the same time, we cannot grasp a subject that would not be
always-already related to an object.
The origins of this correlationist thesis, which, as Meillassoux argues, has
become one of the central notions of modern philosophy, lie in Kant, and his fun-
damental insight to the effect that it is not the mind that conforms to (metaphysical)
worldly principles, but rather the world conforms to the mind, in the sense that
human experience is structured by a priori categories of understanding and forms
of intuition that alone provide the universal basis of all knowledge. Now, of course,
Kant’s notion of the “in itself,” which cannot be an object of knowledge in the above
sense, shows that Kant was not a correlationist all the way down. But a moment’s
reflection on the history of subsequent German Idealism (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel),
phenomenology (Husserl) and “fundamental ontology” (Heidegger), which, for all

their important differences, were united in completely rejecting the Kantian in-itself
on account of it being not only unknowable, but essentially meaningless, shows the
Kantian roots of correlationist thinking.3 With the resolute abolition of the Kantian
in-itself, correlationism first came to philosophical self-consciousness, as the way
was clear for the ungrudging recognition of the primacy of the correlation between
the subjective and the objective over the terms themselves. As the correlationist
slogan goes “the world is only world insofar as it appears to me as world, and the
self is only self insofar as it is face to face with the world, that for whom the world
discloses itself” (Huneman and Kulich 2007, 2).
It should be pointed out, though, that this correlationist thesis does not have
immediate and implausible idealist consequences. It does not entail the view that the
objective, external world does not exist if there are no human beings in it. And the
way to avoid this idealist trap is by making a classic Kantian move, i.e., by sharply
distinguishing between an empirical level of meaning in which the above realist
assertion about the independent existence of the world is perfectly meaningful, and
a different—irreducible to the empirical and more “originary”—transcendental
level in which the realist assertion has a different and more complicated meaning.
Roughly, this transcendental meaning of the statement “the world exists indepen-
dently of any correlation between mind and world” is the following: “the world
(or being) gives itself as existing before all correlation between mind and world.”
In this way correlationism tries not to fly in the face of our realist intuitions, while
at the same time holding fast to the thesis of the (transcendental) primacy of the
correlation over its terms (thought and being). The transcendental/empirical dis-
tinction enables correlationism to reconcile the chronological anteriority of being
over thought (world over mind) with the logical priority of the correlation itself
(in this case, of a correlationist understanding of temporality) over the “things”
that are correlated (Meillassoux 2008, 14–15).
Now, as was mentioned above, Meillassoux and Sellars argue forcefully
against correlationism and the myth of the Given respectively. This is not the place
to examine the whole battery of arguments they use for that purpose. Instead, we
will focus on a particular argument each thinker uses (which, interestingly enough,
in Sellars’s case has not been adequately appreciated in the literature) in order to
highlight the fact that they are essentially similar in form. Both Meillassoux and
Sellars aim to show that the views they oppose entail a paradoxical consequence
(in the explanatory sense of the term).
III. MEILASSOUX ON THE

PARADOXICAL CONSEQUENCES OF CORRELATIONISM
According to Meillassoux, the formulation of correlationist views is such that the
emergence of the very fact of the correlation itself within a world that originally
did not include it cannot (logically cannot) be accounted for by correlationist
conceptual resources. At this point, of course, the correlationist may invoke the
above-mentioned transcendental/empirical distinction, and accuse Meillassoux
of treating the correlation as a simple empirical fact, i.e., as any other empirical
object in the world (e.g., the human body) that comes and goes out of existence.
But, it will be said, the correlation between subject and object (thought and be-
ing) is not itself another physical-empirical object or subject in the world, but is
rather a transcendental subject: a set of conditions of the possibility of empirical-
scientific knowledge, which, therefore, cannot be properly said to exist in the world
(in chronological time). This does not, of course, mean that the correlation has
some kind of eternal existence (for this would be again to treat a transcendental
condition as an object, albeit a supernatural one), but rather that location in space
and existence or persistence in time is not relevant to the correlation’s identity
and individuation conditions. But, Meillassoux retorts, one such condition is that
the correlation (or, equally, the transcendental subject) takes place, i.e., that it is
indissociable from the notion of a point of view. The subject is transcendental only
insofar as it is positioned within the world, of which it can discover a finite aspect,
and can never “totalize” it (as it is epistemically “bounded” by the conditions that
determine its receptive (sensory) and cognitive powers). And this further means
that it cannot be separated from its incarnation in a body.4 But if this is so, if, that
is, the existence of the human body (in general) is a necessary condition of the
taking place of the transcendental, it follows that, pace correlationism, the ques-
tion of the possibility of emergence of the conditions for the taking place of the
transcendental makes perfect sense, is philosophically relevant and falls within the
scope of empirical-scientific investigation. Meillassoux concludes that correlation-
ism cannot even state meaningfully—let alone answer—the question of the pos-
sibility of the emergence of the correlation itself within an already existing world
(within an already existing non-correlationist temporality), and this fact reveals a
conceptual blind spot on its part.
IV. SELLARS ON THE PARADOXICAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE

MYTH OF THE GIVEN: THE EXPLANATORY PARADOX AT THE
HEART OF THE MANIFEST IMAGE OF MAN-IN-THE-WORLD
Now, interestingly enough, Sellars, raises a very similar question and reveals es-
sentially the same paradox with respect to the descriptive and explanatory adequacy
of the manifest image of man-in-the-world.
As is well known, in Sellars’s philosophy, the manifest image contrasts with
the scientific image. Both images are identified on the basis of the basic (i.e., not
further reducible) descriptive and explanatory concepts they use for comprehend-
ing the world and our place in it. The basic descriptive-explanatory concept of the
manifest image is that of a person, i.e., of a perceiving, thinking and acting subject,
which is logically and metaphysically unitary (not further reducible to more basic
explanatory concepts or objects within this framework) and has the ability to act
freely on the basis of reasons (though, of course, this ability need not always be
exercised).5 By way of contrast, within the scientific image the concept of a person
does not function as basic descriptively or explanatorily, that is, it is understood as
a composite object: as a coming together of simpler parts, which are not themselves
persons, and do not have the essential properties of persons. And this is due mainly
to the essentially postulational methods of explanation of the scientific image, i.e.,
the fact that, unlike the explanatory methods of the manifest image, which essen-
tially depend on the strictly perceptible characteristics of the behavior of worldly
objects or of persons (where, in this last case, the term ‘perceptible’ is used in
a normatively laden sense of the term), those of the scientific image explain the
behavior of persons and external objects by postulating imperceptible entities or
processes that are essentially non-conceptual and non-normative in nature (Sellars
1963b, 6–10, 18–20).
But why does Sellars think that if we grant descriptive and explanatory
sufficiency to the manifest image concepts alone, independently of the explana-
tory concepts and methods of the scientific image, we end up in an explanatory
paradox, which, what is more, is essentially the same as that of Meillassoux’s
correlationism? What follows if the manifest image (and its basic, non-reducible
descriptive-explanatory concept of a person) is granted ontological (descriptive
and explanatory) priority with respect to the categorial structure of the scientific
image (in which the concept of the person is not descriptively-explanatorily basic)?6
Sellars points out that the emergence of the manifest image itself as a categorial
structure with which “man first encountered himself” (which amounts to nothing
less than the emergence of our self-understanding as persons within a community
of persons) is something that cannot be itself accounted for in terms of its own
explanatory principles. Any such “explanation” would have to be conducted in
terms that already presuppose the above explananda, and this fact, which is not in
itself necessarily problematic, in this particular case leads to an explanatory blind
spot with respect to the very possibility of the emergence of the manifest image.
The paradox of the manifest image, Sellars says:
consists of the fact that man couldn’t be man until he encountered himself. It
is this paradox which supports the last stand of Special Creation. Its central
theme is the idea that anything which can properly called conceptual thinking
can occur only within a framework of conceptual thinking in terms of which
it can be criticized, supported, refuted, in short, evaluated. . . . In this sense a
diversified conceptual framework is a whole which, however sketchy, is prior
to its parts, and cannot be construed as a coming together of parts which are
already conceptual in character. The conclusion is difficult to avoid that the
transition from pre-conceptual patterns of behaviour to conceptual thinking
was a holistic one, a jump to a level of awareness which is irreducibly new, a
jump which was the coming into being of man. (Sellars 1963b, 6)
This paradox reveals an explanatory blind spot at the heart of the manifest
image (although Sellars also holds that there is a profound truth in this conception
of the radical difference in level between man and his precursors, which, obviously
means that this “radical difference in level” must not be understood as involving
different levels of explanation (ontology), but, as we shall see, different levels of
normative assessment). The solution (or, better, the form of the solution) to this
conundrum, according to Sellars, is to distinguish between the manifest and the
scientific image of man-in-the-world and realize that “this difference in level [e.g.,
from pre-conceptual patterns of behavior to conceptual thinking] appears as an
irreducible [explanatory] discontinuity in the manifest image, but as, in a sense
requiring careful analysis, a reducible difference in the scientific image” (Sellars
1963b, 6). Sellars suggests that the key to the proper understanding of the pos-
sibility of explaining the difference in the levels themselves (i.e., the emergence
and function of the manifest image as a system of representing the world from the
descriptive and explanatory standpoint of the scientific image7) is to focus on the
difference between the explanatorily basic principles of each framework (those of
the manifest image are irreducibly normative—revolving around the basic-explan-
atorily irreducible concept of a person and its basic properties—while those of the
scientific image are non-normative in content) and philosophically reconstruct this
difference so as not to be understood in directly ontological terms, but instead in
methodological or normative ones. This is effected by strictly distinguishing the
functions of normative and non-normative discourse (which is exactly what is not
done within the categorial framework of the manifest image as it stands): only the
second is descriptive-explanatory (carries ontological weight) whereas the first is
metalinguistic, classificatory and practical-prescriptive: normative discourse is about
the conceptual, not the real order, it classifies linguistic expressions with respect
to their function and, in this way, it ultimately serves as a “coordination device”
for our practical “orientation” within the conceptual-inferential “space” (see, e.g.,
Sellars 1949, 289–315, and 1963a, 621–671).8
Moreover—and this is of crucial importance for resolutely rejecting the
myth of the categorial Given—Sellars construes the Kantian categories (sub-
stance, causality etc.)—in terms of which, according to him, the manifest image
construes itself in an attempt to describe or “ground” itself philosophically—as
belonging to the normative, not the real order. The Kantian transcendental level,
according to Sellars, does not have (direct) ontological import. Instead, catego-
ries are second-order concepts that functionally classify what are the most basic
kinds of first-order concepts we possess, that is, what are the basic kinds of things
that exist in the world as conceived from within a specific conceptual framework
(O’Shea 2007, 115). In Sellars words, categories “are concepts of logical form,
where ‘logical’ is to be taken in a broad sense, roughly, equivalent to ‘epistemic,’”
and “to say of a judgement that it has a certain logical form is to classify it and its
constituents with respect to their epistemic powers” (Sellars 1967b, §23) where a
judgment’s epistemic powers include its being an appropriate perceptual response
to certain situations, being appropriate evidence for other judgments and having
implications for certain intentions (deVries 2005, 57–61). Sellars thinks that this
functional classification of the most generic kinds of concepts of a framework
with respect to their epistemic role is normative (practical-prescriptive), rather
than descriptive-explanatory, but, at the same time, like Kant, he contends that
this normative character of the categories is a necessary condition for the function
of empirical-scientific representation (i.e., description-explanation) of the world.
Therefore, as Sellars sees it, the transcendental level of discourse is necessary for
the descriptive and explanatory function of ordinary (and scientific) empirical
discourse about the world, but without being itself descriptive-explanatory (Sellars
1957, § 62, 80–83 and 103–108, see also Brandom 2012). And this is the key that
allows one to acknowledge the indispensability of the transcendental framework
for the description and explanation of the world by the empirical sciences, without
at the same reifying it, e.g., by considering it as a non-empirical level of being,

immune to empirical-scientific explanation (redescription and reconceptualization).
V. A SELLARSIAN CRITIQUE OF
MEILLASSOUX’S ARGUMENT AGAINST CORRELATIONISM
I suggest that the above Sellarsian strategy can be used to reveal and amend a
problematic feature of Meillassoux’s argument against correlationism. The plausi-
bility of this argument depends on the Sellarsian more fundamental, and resolutely
“anti-Givenist” thought about the relationships and functions of the transcendental
and the empirical level respectively. Specifically, Meillassoux’s argument against
correlationism depends on acknowledging that although transcendental conscious-
ness does not exist in the mode of empirical objects, it nevertheless does exist in
the world in its own distinctive way (as a “bodily” point of view of the world). It is
because of this fact (that the transcendental correlation is conceived as something
that exists in its own distinctive way, rather than as something having a status and
function altogether different from that of the entities and processes to which we
commit ontologically) that the correlationist is obliged to—and is, at the same
time, incapable of—explaining the possibility of the emergence in the world of
the correlation itself. But, from a Sellarsian point of view, this kind of argument,
although being in the right direction, is nonetheless problematic. And this is be-
cause, by not strictly distinguishing between the descriptive-explanatory function
of the empirical level and the non-descriptive/non-explanatory function of the
transcendental level, Meillassoux ends up construing the fact of the non-reducible
difference of the latter from the former (which Sellars also accepts) in ontological
terms (which Sellars firmly denies). His construal of transcendental consciousness
in terms of a “bodily way of being” (point of view) may indeed succeed in showing
that a necessary condition of its existence is its instantiation in a body; however, on
Meillassoux’s own terms, this does not seem to exclude a sense in which, strictly
speaking, the transcendental level is ontologically irreducible to the empirical
level. Notwithstanding the fact that this irreducibility (for the irreducibility of the
transcendental to the empirical is not abandoned by Meillassoux, and rightly so)
is construed in more “materialist,” bodily terms, it still follows that the sui generis
ontological character of the transcendental level cannot be described or explained
in empirical-scientific terms. Notice that even if Meillassoux’s argument against
correlationism is sound it only commits one to the possibility of empirical-scientific
description and explanation of the empirically necessary (i.e., “bodily”) condi-
tions of the possibility of the emergence of the transcendental subject. One is not
thereby committed to there being a sufficient description and explanation of the
emergence of the transcendental subject itself, of its peculiar mode of existence.
At this point it seems that Meillassoux’s description of the transcendental level
leads to an explanatory dead end: on the one hand the argument indeed shows that
the transcendental subject is something that is necessarily “incarnated” in a body
(empirical reality), while, on the other hand, this emergent transcendental level of
reality has what might be called a “surplus ontological content” with respect to
the empirical level (and its descriptive and explanatory conceptual resources) that
makes the latter constitutively incapable of providing a sufficient explanation of

the emergence of the transcendental level—i.e., an explanation that does justice
to the sui generis (“point-of-viewish”) mode of its existence. It seems, therefore,
that Meillassoux’s argument against correlationism does not succeed in removing
an element, the presence of which, by Meillassoux’s own admission, rendered
correlationism problematic as a philosophical position.
However, the Sellarsian construal of the irreducibility of the transcendental to
the empirical level in terms of a distinction between different modes of functioning
(not different modes of existence) can provide a diagnosis and, at the same time,
the form of the solution to this explanatory dead end, for, as regards the latter, it
is exactly the construal of the irreducibility of the transcendental to the empirical
in ontological (i.e., descriptive and explanatory) terms that produces the need for
explaining the ontological status of the transcendental and simultaneously prohibits
a scientific realist explanation of it (i.e., a non-sui generis, non-correlationist ac-
count of its mode of existence). Notice, however, that on the Sellarsian account the
irreducibility of the transcendental to the empirical is not compromised by the pos-
sibility of a scientific-style explanation of the former in terms of the latter. Instead,
it is fully preserved by being understood not as an explanatory irreducibility, but
rather, as an irreducibility concerning semantic function: transcendental discourse
functions prescriptively and this function is semantically/conceptually irreducible
to the descriptive and explanatory function of empirical discourse.9
VI. CORRELATIONISTS AND MEILLASSOUX ALIKE

FALL PREY TO THE MYTH OF THE CATEGORIAL GIVEN
A further, equally important, point to be made is that the failure to draw the spe-
cifically Sellarsian (i.e., non-ontological) distinction between the transcendental
and the empirical is intimately connected to the myth of the categorial Given.
If, for example, one construes the transcendental level as a sui generis level of
description-explanation, constitutively irreducible to the specifically empirical
descriptions-explanations of science, which is exactly what correlationists do, one
is thereby committed to there being a sui generis categorial structure (in the world,
the mind, or, in the case of correlationism, in the correlation itself, that constitutes
both mind and world as always-already co-ordinated “realities”) to which we have
a sui generis (i.e., non-empirical) epistemic access (through a special, decidedly
non-empirical, enquiry tailor-made for that purpose: “transcendental deduction,”
“phenomenological epoché,” “the analytic of Dasein,” etc.).10 And this view falls
squarely within the scope of the myth of the categorial Given. This means that
Meillassoux himself, the great foe of correlationism, by failing to draw the specific
Sellarsian (i.e., non-ontological) distinction between the transcendental and the
empirical, comes dangerously close—at least at this stage of his argument—to be-
ing committed to a version of the myth of the categorial Given, despite his avowed
intention to restore a non-dogmatic, i.e., non-metaphysical, speculative materialistic
realism, a goal which, at this abstract level, he shares with Sellars.
VII. MEILLASSOUX’S “SPECULATIVE REALISM” REINTRODUCES

A RATIONALIST FORM OF THE MYTH OF THE GIVEN
Further corroboration about this verdict of ours can be obtained if we focus our
attention on the “positive” strand of Meillassoux’s thought, the constructive,
“speculative realist” part which comes after his potentially devastating critique
of correlationism.11 According to this view, thought can indeed access reality as
it is in itself (not just reality as it is represented in human thought) through math-
ematical discourse, whose subject-matter is not the actual (empirical-“ontical”),
but the “possible” (Meillassoux 2008, 80–82). Meillassoux views mathematics as a
uniquely transparent, non-metaphysical discourse that simultaneously allows us to
absolutize statements about the world but that nevertheless remains irreducible to
the correlationist “circle.” And the reason why Meillassoux privileges mathematical
discourse is that (1) he takes it that the possibility of intentional “directedness” of
thought to the world as it is in itself is a transcendental condition of the very mean-
ing of scientific statements, i.e., statements whose content is precisely about the
world as it is in itself, as opposed to the world as it is represented by human beings
(Meillassoux 2008, 112–113), and (2) he contends that mathematical discourse is
uniquely privileged for the representation of the world as it is in itself due to the
fact that the essential characteristic of this “language,” which for Meillassoux is
the possibility of a formal repetition of otherwise meaningless signs (such that “it
is not the meaning of the sign which is the same in each sign, it is just the sign,
but grasped through its facticity, the pure arbitrary fact of the sign”12) exactly cor-
responds to the essential nature of the world as it is in itself, which for Meillassoux
is the necessity of its radical contingency (necessarily, everything can be otherwise
than it actually is or not exist at all, without any reason) (see also Meillassoux 2012,
and Gironi 2011, 39).
Now, if this privileged position of mathematical discourse means that it func-
tions not only as a (maybe even indispensable) means of representation, but also
as directly ontologically committal (i.e., as an indispensable explanatory tool),
Meillassoux would, by Sellarsian lights, indeed subscribe to a version of the myth:
that in which reality has a certain categorial form—the “necessary contingency”
of its entities, processes and natural laws, according to Meillassoux—that is given
to human thought in the form of a “mathematical ontology” or a “metaphysics of
mathematics,” a special “science” (domain of thought) which, by investigating
modal discourse, gains privileged access to the abstract categorial structure of all
possible worlds independently of any explanatorily driven categorial reconceptu-
alizations (redescriptions) of the structure of reality by the scientific image.
Yet, although Meillassoux does hold the bold view that mathematical dis-
course provides epistemic access to the structure of the world “as it is in itself”
(its modal—not actual/empirical—structure), and also accepts that there is such
a thing as a “mathematical explanation” that “describes” the “in itself” (Brassier,
Grant, Harman, and Meillassoux 2007, 329, emphasis mine)—a terminology which
certainly sounds ontologically committal (pointing to the existence of a domain
of special, non-empirical, facts)—he explicitly distances himself from the “neo-
Pythagorean” view according to which reality itself is mathematically structured,
with mathematical objects and relations as its very ingredients. That is, he rejects
the view according to which being depends for its existence on mathematics. He
distinguishes between the content (or sense) and the referent of mathematical state-
ments and contends that although the modal structure of mathematical statements
is necessary for the representation of the world as it is in itself, the latter, being
exactly the referent of the mathematical statement, need not be mathematical in its
very way of being (Meillassoux 2008, 12). Mathematical statements belong to the
ideal order (the order of signification or meaning), whereas their referents belong
to the “real order” (the order of being). With this theoretical move Meillassoux
seems able to evade the charge to the effect that by ontologizing mathematical
objects and relations and by positing a special epistemic power of “reason” (intel-
lectual intuition) that can provide epistemic access to the structure of the world as
it is in itself without recourse to empirical methods, he succumbs to the myth of
the categorial Given.
However, it seems that in Meillassoux’s system the content of the very distinc-
tion between the referent and the sense of a modal statement is effectively provided
not by any ordinary empirical or theoretical/scientific methods (or, at least, by the
“dialectical” interplay of scientific and philosophical methods), but, again, by the
Meillasouxian “intellectual intuition” of the “absolute” (i.e., by an independently
justified rational insight into the essence of modal concepts).13
But, how is that so and what is problematic about it? To see this, we shall
briefly mention the core of Meillassoux’s “positive” philosophical views, which
are a logical consequence of his anti-correlationist philosophy. According to Mei-
llassoux, when one works through the argumentative structure of correlationist
thought it appears that its inner logic undermines the correlationist thesis itself,
transforming it from a “negative” epistemological thesis—which points to a neces-
sary epistemological obstacle (“we can never have epistemic or meaningful access
to anything outside the [thought-being] correlation, but that does not mean that
nothing exists outside the correlation, since there is no necessity in this specific
[human, i.e., conceptual-perceptual] mode of correlation”)—to a “positive” onto-
logical thesis—an ontological insight into the structure of the world as it is in itself
(“everything that exists is contingent, but necessarily so”).14 The rational insight
involved in grasping this necessarily contingent structure of everything that exists
in the world in itself is provided by intellectual intuition that can directly grasp the
abstract “realm of pure possibility,” the structure of the logical space of the possible
as such (not this or that possible entity), and can thereby rationally demonstrate
truths not only about the modal status of every existing entity, process or natural
law (contingent), but also, and more interestingly, about the second-order modal
status (necessity) that is common to all these entities, processes or laws, and grounds
their first-order modal status (contingency).
Now, this realm of pure possibility, the “grasping” of which grounds (rationally
demonstrates) the necessity of the contingent status of every existent entity, belongs
to what we termed “ideal order” (corresponding to what we might call the content
(sense) of our modal statements), whereas the actual entities that (contingently)
populate the world as it is described by mathematical physics (i.e., by the use of
mathematical explanatory methods that make essential use of the causal modalities)
belong to the “real order,” corresponding to the referents of modal statements. Yet,
to use a familiar Heideggerian idiom that expresses Meillassoux’s own view at this
point, these worldly referents of modal statements (which are not mathematically/
conceptually structured) exist solely at the “ontic” (empirical), not at the “ontologi-
cal” level—in which alone is the essential nature of the real order revealed. But
this means that the crucial Meillassouxian anti-correlationist distinction between
the independently existing “real order,” which belongs to what might be called “the
realm of reference,” and the conceptually structured “ideal order,” which belongs
to “the realm of sense,” only holds when the real order is viewed from an empiri-
cal/ontic level (i.e., as something actually existing). By way of contrast, when the
same real order is conceived in a more “originary” way, as what is essential to any
possible real order (which may or may not actually exist) the distinction between
the “realm of reference” (real order) and “the realm of sense” (ideal order) can no
longer be upheld and simply collapses. The “real order” in this latter, non-empirical
(non-actual) sense, belongs itself entirely in the ‘ideal/conceptual order, not in the
real order understood in the actualist sense of the term. And this equivocation about
what the “real order” really designates in effect compromises its independence
from thought at the transcendental level—resembling in that respect the Kantian
“solution” that acknowledges the independent existence of the external world at
the empirical level, only on condition that an essentially idealist element (e.g.,
the “synthetic” activity of the mind) is reintroduced at the transcendental level to
account for the description of the empirical level itself—and creates an unbridge-
able explanatory gap between the transcendental and the merely empirical level
of existence exactly of the same sort as that which we diagnosed in Meillassoux’s
opening argument against correlationism (section V) and for the same reason: a
tacit adherence to a form of the categorial Given. The Meillassouxian world is
transcendentally structured so as to be always already “populated” with a “domain
of pure (essential) possibilities” that, having the same (transcendental) categorial
form with thought, are patiently waiting to be discovered by human thought (though,
at the empirical level, this discovery is a purely contingent fact, as is thought itself
considered as an actual process of thinking that comes and goes out of existence).
But, evidently, this is a rationalist form of the Sellarsian Categorial Given, in which
what is Given in “intellectual intuition” is an abstract logical space of “pure [i.e.,
non-empirical] possibilities.”15
VIII. THE PROPER CONSTRUAL OF THE TRANSENDENTAL/

EMPIRICAL DISTINCTION IS THE KEY TO A RESOLUTELY ANTI-
CORRELATIONIST PHILOSOPHY
Meillassoux, in essence, seems to rejuvenate the classical Kantian distinction
between matter—which is contingent and empirical—and form—which is “neces-
sary” and is grasped in an epistemologically transparent way by “transcendental
subjects”16—trying to put it in the service of anti-metaphysical and radically mate-
rialist (non-correlationist) thinking. We saw above how he wittingly tried to refute
the Kantian distinction between the thing in itself and the phenomena (the way
the world is represented in our minds) by immanently transforming a seemingly
“negative” epistemological thesis—which points to a necessary epistemological

obstacle (“we can never have epistemic or meaningful access to anything outside
the (thought-being) correlation, but that does not mean that nothing exists outside
the correlation, since there is no necessity in this specific (human, i.e., conceptual-
perceptual) mode of correlation”)—to a “positive” ontological thesis—an ontologi-
cal insight into the structure of the world as it is in itself (“everything that exists
is contingent, but necessarily so”). The facticity (non-necessity) of the transcen-
dental forms of representation that, for Kant, alone implied that we cannot have
any positive knowledge of the in-itself, was shown by Meillassoux to be nothing
other than the thing in itself—in all its radical, but necessary and demonstrable,
contingency. But, we suggest, what remained intact in this impressive Meillas-
souxian non-metaphysical ontologization of Kant was exactly the spurious deeper
Kantian distinction between matter (contingent, empirical, “worldly” content) and
form (necessary, non-empirical space of logical possibilities): it is just this deeply
embedded (in otherwise radically different philosophical systems) and dangerously
picturesque distinction that needs to be questioned if one wants to be completely
insulated from the idealist overtones of Kantian transcendentalism, which, as
Meillassoux himself rightly observes, has plagued post-Kantian philosophy in
the form of correlationism. Even if Meillassoux, given the way he defines corre-
lationism, is in a position to avoid being a correlationist in disguise, it seems that
he cannot escape being a correlationist in a deeper Sellarsian sense of the term,
according to which one who succumbs to the myth of the Categorial Given is at
once dogmatic—i.e., foundationalist—in epistemology (by postulating absolutely
transparent epistemic relations holding between mind and world at the transcen-
dental level), non-materialist in ontology (by compromising the independence of
the world at the transcendental level), and inflationist in metaphysics (by being a
realist about modal discourse17).
We suggest that, according to Sellars, the root error of correlationism, which
is not identified as such by Meillassoux, is the construal of the irreducibility of
the transcendental to the empirical level in descriptive/explanatory terms instead
of metalinguistic, practical and normative ones. From the Sellarsian perspective
adopted in this paper, the fact that Meillassoux does not find the former construal
of the transcendental-empirical distinction philosophically problematic has serious
consequences as regards his understanding of where the essential problem lies with
correlationism (in accounting for the possibility of understanding the “facticity”
of the correlation between thought and being) and how it should be positively
overcome (by absolutising facticity itself).
To see this, notice, for example, that Meillassoux takes it that the only way
correlationism can be refuted is by using its own argumentative weapons (against
itself). According to Meillassoux, correlationism, in its most rigorous form, makes
use of an argumentative form that can be only overcome from within: that of
showing every putative non-correlationist (e.g., realist) position to be condemned
to a performative contradiction, due to the fact that (supposedly) whenever, say, a
realist claims to be able to think that which is independent of thought the very fact
of her thinking it makes it a correlate of her thought (Brassier et al. 2007, 409).
Meillassoux thinks that this argument is so powerful that it can only be refuted by
showing that the correlationist herself (in her most rigorous, anti-absolutist, version)
falls victim to it (thus, by showing that correlationism itself does not live up to the
standards of its own most powerful and essentially cogent argument against naïve
realism).18 But, to say that I can think of something existing independently of my
thought need not be contradictory in any sense once we distinguish the claim that
my thoughts cannot exist independently of my mind (for their meaning/sense is
obviously mind-dependent) from the claim that what my thoughts are about (what
they refer to) cannot exist independently of my mind (Brassier 2011, 63). Conceptual
existence is, of course, mind-dependent, but once it is distinguished—as it is surely
has to be—from real existence it does not at all follow—unless one is already a
conceptual idealist for independent reasons—that the latter can be ontologically
reduced to the former, either with respect to its content (ontological idealism) or as
regards its form (formal/transcendental idealism). Thus, pace Meillassoux, realist
philosophical positions can straightforwardly refute the correlationist argument, and
need not utilize correlationism’s own argumentative methods (against correlation-
ism itself) in order to be philosophically cogent. Furthermore, to turn an invalid
argument against itself, as Meillassoux does in his refutation of correlationism, is
of no argumentative value, for it does not—and cannot—reach to the deeper source
that makes correlationist thinking philosophically problematic.
An interesting fact in this connection is that the above critique can be seen as the
consequence of the specifically Sellarsian critique against Meillassoux developed in
the first half of this paper. As was shown above, the correlationist argument against
realism (the “performative contradiction” argument) depends for its plausibility
on the failure of properly distinguishing between the conceptual existence (sense,
meaning) and real existence (which can be what it is independently of its possibility
of being conceptually articulated). And this confusion is, in turn, a consequence
of a further confusion, this time about the reason why transcendental discourse is
irreducible to empirical discourse. This mistake, that is, the construal of the irreduc-
ibility of the transcendental to the empirical in (overtly or covertly) ontological/
explanatory terms, is precisely the reason why correlationists (and those who are
impressed by their argument, like Meillassoux, who believes that realists cannot
maintain that it is possible to have access to a non-posited reality, except by adopt-
ing his own “positive” view—of the necessary contingency of everything known
with demonstrable certainty by means of “intellectual intuition”) cannot discern the
evident and radical difference between conceptual and real existence—or, in other
words, between the conditions that determine the sense of a proposition and those
that determine the existence of what this proposition refers to.19 The ontological (or
explanatory) insulation of the transcendental level—i.e., the fact that its irreduc-
ibility to the empirical level is construed as pointing to a sui generis ontological/
explanatory level of reality—is precisely what renders plausible the—in the last
analysis, conceptual idealist—assumption that the conditions that determine our
conceptual access to a worldly object also determine what this object essentially
(really) is.20 Moreover, the Meillassouxian view to the effect that at this explanatorily
insulated transcendental level we can intellectually intuit the essence of conscious
activity (absolutely independently of empirical/scientific considerations) can be
seen as a necessary corollary to the above conceptually idealist assumption, as the
positing of intellectual intuition of the absolute is in fact the only way in which the
correlationist argument against realism can be turned against itself—i.e., count as
an argument in favor of Meillassouxian speculative realism—without putting into
question the cogency of the “performative contradiction” argument that is supposed
to be the kernel of truth of correlationism (see also note 18).
IX. CONCLUDING REMARKS

As Ray Brassier, in another context (concerning the relations between concepts
and extra-conceptual objects), neatly observes, echoing Sellars:
The same critical considerations that undermine dogmatism about the es-
sence and existence of objects also vitiate dogmatism about the essence and
existence of concepts. . . . Thus, it is not clear why our access to the structure
of concepts should be considered as less in need of critical legitimation than
our access to the structure of objects. To assume privileged access to the
structure of conception is to assume intellectual intuition. But this is to make
a metaphysical claim about the essential nature of conception; an assump-
tion every bit as dogmatic as any allegedly metaphysical assertion about the
essential nature of objects. (Brassier 2011, 56)
To recapitulate, we could add, in a Sellarsian spirit, critical of Meillassoux’s
tendency to hypostasize our modal concepts by subsuming, in their case, every
first-order difference between conceptual and real existence to a second-order
conceptual difference (which, in the last analysis, cannot but be a broadly idealist
move), that the myth to the effect that the nature of concepts is given—either in
the correlationist “transcendental consciousness” or in the Meillassouxian “intel-
lectual intuition”—needs to be challenged as much as the myth that the nature of
objects is given. And a proper—i.e., in our view, Sellarsian—construal of the rela-
tion between the transcendental and the empirical level of discourse is the key to
the formulation of a resolutely anti-Givenist and anti-correlationist philosophy.21
ENDNOTES
1. With the important exceptions of O’Shea 2012, 175–204, and Sachs 2012.
2. For example, notice one of the most famous characterizations of the myth of the Given
in EPM, that of a capacity to be aware of items (in the world or in the mind) as belonging
to kinds or resembling classes of particulars independently of any initiation in language
and its categorial structure (§30). This construal of the Given is wider in scope than its
specifically empiricist versions, since it obviously includes more than the capacity of a
direct, pre-linguistic awareness of the categorial structure of our immediate experience. For
instance, a capacity of a direct extra- (not non- or pre-) linguistic awareness of the categorial
structure of our “intentional” experience, or of certain “rational” objects or relations in the
world or the mind (through some kind of categorial or intellectual intuition of essences),
would equally qualify as a—in this case rationalist—version of the myth of the Given.
3. See also Braver 2007, about the way in which the post-Kantians gradually abandoned a
full-fledged “old-fashioned” Kantianism, based on sharp distinction between “phenomena”
and “noumena,” and gradually moved to philosophical positions that are in effect variations
of Meillassouxian correlationism (especially in continental philosophical circles). Braver,

in fact, describes this post-Kantian philosophical tendency as the progressive “erosion of
the noumena” (79).
4. The notion of ‘incarnation’ should not be understood on the model of an exemplification
in the empirical world of a self-subsistent Platonic realm of Ideas, but rather on the model
of instantiation, where something is said to be instantiated by an individual when it does
not exist apart from its individuation (Meillassoux 2008, 25).
5. This, by the way, does not mean that the concept of the person is the only descriptive-
explanatory concept of the manifest image—the latter, for example, includes the concepts of
“inanimate object” and “living organism” among its basic categorial features. By highlighting
the explanatory primacy of the concept of the person in the manifest image Sellars wants to
draw attention to the fact that within the manifest image the concept of a person cannot be
adequately described or explained with reference to “simpler parts” that are not themselves
persons—or do not have the essential properties of persons.
6. Notice, by the way, that from this construal of the manifest image—i.e., its conception
as a self-sufficient descriptive-explanatory framework for comprehending the world and
ourselves—it follows that its basic descriptive-explanatory categories (that of a person and
its essential properties) function as a—categorical—Given. This is because if the basic
categorial concepts of the manifest image framework are understood (not only as logically
or conceptually irreducible but also) as descriptively and explanatorily (i.e., ontologically)
irreducible to the categorial concepts of the scientific image, and given that man is es-
sentially that being that conceives of itself in the categorial terms of the manifest image,
it follows that the contents of those categorial concepts can be transparently present to the
human mind in propria persona (as they really are), independently of any possible recon-
ceptualization or recategorization—driven from the need of scientific-style explanatory
accommodation within our ongoing empirical inquiry. But this is just the basic version of
the categorial Given. However, it must be also stressed that Sellars uses the term ‘manifest
image’ in another sense or from another standpoint (that of correct philosophical analysis),
from which it is seen as a framework capable of being stereoscopically fused (rather than
just being in permanent ontological conflict) with the scientific image. In this latter sense,
in which, as we shall see in what follows, discourse about the normative is understood as
having a prescriptive-classificatory function rather than a descriptive and explanatory role,
a philosophically elucidated manifest image can indeed survive the myth of the Categorial
Given and need not be seen as necessarily involving an explanatory paradox (since, properly
elucidated, it is no longer considered to be in the business of describing and explaining the
world).
7. Sellars thinks that this explanation of the difference between the levels themselves
essentially involves accounting for the fact that the manifest image represents itself as a
group phenomenon and contends that this phenomenon will turn out to have an evolutionary
explanation. As he puts it:
The manifest image must . . . be construed as containing a conception of itself as
a group phenomenon, the group mediating between the individual and the intelli-
gible order. But any attempt to explain this mediation within the framework of the
manifest image was bound to fail, for the manifest image contains the resources for
such an attempt only in the sense that it provides the foundation on which scientific
theory can build an explanatory framework; and while conceptual structures of this
framework are built on the manifest image, they are not definable within it. . . . It
is in the scientific image of man in the world that we begin to see the main outlines
of the way in which man came to have an image of himself-in-the-world. For we

begin to see this as a matter of evolutionary development as a group phenomenon, a
process which is illustrated at a simpler level by the evolutionary development which
explains the correspondence between the dancing of a worker bee and the location,
relative to the sun, of the flower from which he comes. This correspondence, like
the relation between man’s ‘original’ image and the world, is incapable of explana-
tion in terms of a direct conditioning impact of the environment on the individual
as such. (Sellars 1963b, 17–18)
It should be noted that this evolutionary explanation cannot be completely successful un-
less it also explains why the emerging level of representation that essentially “contains a
conception of itself as a group phenomenon” misrepresents itself (maybe, necessarily so)
as being wholly autonomous, i.e., completely impervious to reconceptualization according
to scientific descriptive and explanatory principles. Notice, moreover, that the explanatory
methods of the scientific image, unlike those of the manifest image, are in principle sufficient
to account not only for the emergence of the manifest image, but also for the emergence and
development of the scientific image itself.
8. One reason that this form of solution is favored by Sellars is that it enables him to
reconcile two seemingly irreconcilable basic tenets of his philosophy, namely the scientia
mensura principle (according to which “in the dimension of describing and explaining the
world, science is the measure of all things, of those that are that they are and of those that
are not that they are not” [Sellars 1997, § 41]) and the famous “space of reasons” thesis (“in
characterizing an episode or state as that of knowing [or perceiving, meaning, intending,
acting, believing] we do not give an empirical description of that episode or state; we are
placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and being able to justify what one
says” [Sellars 1997, § 36]). For example, if Sellars construed the irreducibility of the norma-
tive to the non-normative in terms of a sui generis domain of (normative) explanations and
(related) descriptions that could not be reduced in principle to non-normative explanations
and descriptions, he would have to abandon the scientia mensura principle (since in this
case it could not be applied to the description and explanation of the behavior of persons.)
Notice, moreover, that Sellars (in his scientia mensura principle and in many other places)
intimately connects the descriptive role of a proposition with its explanatory role. Specifi-
cally, he argues that no description is possible except in a context in which explanation is
also possible. Descriptive vocabulary has an ineliminable explanatory use (otherwise it could
not serve its very descriptive function). As Sellars himself observes “although describing
and explaining (predicting, retrodicting, understanding) are distinguishable, they are also,
in an important sense, inseparable. It is only because the expressions in terms of which we
describe objects, even such basic expressions as words for the perceptible characteristics of
molar objects locate these objects in a space of implications that they describe at all, rather
than merely label. The descriptive and the explanatory resources of language advance hand
in hand” (Sellars 1957, §108). A necessary condition for an expression having a descriptive
role in language is being situated in a “space of implications,” which, moreover, for Sel-
lars, must be counterfactually robust ones—that is, they must extend to possible cases (for
otherwise the putatively “descriptive” term could not be applied to new cases). And it is an
essential feature of this “space of (counterfactually robust) implications” that to endorse an
inference in that space is something that can be appealed to in explaining the applicability
of one description on the basis of the applicability of another (e.g., “the tomatoes are red
because they are ripe”) (see e.g., Brandom 2011, 8–9).
As was mentioned, it is a basic Sellarsian tenet that the conceptual resources of the scien-
tific image (at least in its ideal form) supersede those of the manifest image in the dimensions
of describing and explaining the world. In Sellars’s terms, the “postulational” methods of
description-explanation of the scientific image supersede the manifest image’s essentially
“correlational” methods of description-explanation (Sellars 1963b, 19). Thus, insofar as
the manifest image makes use of normative categories for describing and explaining the
world and ourselves (which, as we saw, is unperspicuous if taken as a correct philosophi-
cal clarification of the function of normative concepts) it is bound to be replaced, in this
dimension of discourse, by more adequate scientific descriptive and explanatory concepts
(notice that the basic categorial concept of the manifest image, namely that of a person, is
not excluded from this process of replacement in the dimension of describing and explain-
ing the world—although, it is, of course, indispensable and irreducible in dimensions or
practices other than describing and explaining ourselves and the world).
9. Here, it could be objected that for Sellars, although the normative is not for describing
the world or ourselves, it nevertheless does exist in the world, for example, in a person’s
thinking (or saying) “I ought to keep my promises” or “it is not correct that pawns move on
the diagonal.” This does not, of course mean that in this way additional “entities and pro-
cesses” are produced (since, e.g., a pawn may be a piece of ivory or wood, or an automobile
(in Texas chess), and there are many empirical ways of having an obligation, say, of paying
your debt). But, the objection goes, our world, even our planet, once contained nothing that
was a debtor and nothing that was a pawn. Although this was true for billions of years on
our planet, something changed; now there are debtors and pawns. So, it seems that there
is something that needs an explanation. But, according to this line of thought, Sellars does
not think that such “explanations” would be reductive. That is, he does not think that such
explanations will reduce the appropriate explananda to something in the physical sciences
or to neurophysiological items. They will simply answer (in a non-reductive manner) a
question of anthropology: what happened that produced beings that can think, reason, and,
above all, do things like distinguish the normative from the descriptive? There may well be
no more “entities and processes” in the world than those science requires for its explanatory
purposes, but that does not mean that there can be no worldly properties over and above
scientifically describable ones.
Now, if this is Sellars’s position about the mode of existence of normativity (and, by
implication, of the transcendental, since the latter is a proper subset of the normative) then
what precludes Meillassoux from embracing this Sellarsian position as sketched above? I
think that the proper answer to this objection is to accept that if Sellars held the above posi-
tion about the normative then it could not be used against Meillassoux’s conception of the
transcendental, but to question the claim that this is indeed an accurate description of Sellars’s
position. Notice, for example, that the above sketched view about the normative cannot be
reconciled with one of Sellars’s fundamental tenets, namely the scientia mensura principle
(see note 8). Correlatively, this interpretation of Sellars’s position here is in direct conflict
with one of his most central views about the relation between the conceptual and the non-
conceptual level, namely his conviction that “this difference in level [from pre-conceptual
patterns of behavior to conceptual thinking] appears as an irreducible discontinuity in the
manifest image, but as, in a sense requiring careful analysis, a reducible difference in the
scientific image” (Sellars 1963b, 6).
In my view, according to Sellars, normative facts or properties certainly are real (in the
sense that they can be true or false and known to be so on the basis of intersubjectively
reasonable and universally applicable criteria) and are irreducible to non-normative facts or
properties, but this does not mean that they demand explanation in sui generis, non-scientific,
“normative” terms. Normative facts or properties are conceptually or logically irreducible
to non-normative properties but not explanatorily irreducible to the latter. If we agree with
Sellars that to be (in the strict sense of the term) is to have the power to act and to be acted
upon (i.e., to be causally efficacious) and that explanation, strictly speaking, explains what
needs to be explained by positing a causally efficacious explanans, it follows that, accord-
ing to Sellars, normative properties or facts need not play a (direct) role in explanations
of changes in worldly states or events, since what changes with the emergence and use of
normative discourse is the epistemic status of empirical properties, i.e., not something that
is in itself a causally efficacious change. In other words, when a complex of empirical facts
and properties acquires the status of being a “pawn” or a “debtor” the change involved is
not a special kind of causal change in the empirical facts and properties involved (suppos-
edly irreducible to scientifically describable causal change) that creates emergent causally
efficacious normative properties capable of causally affecting, as the normative facts they
are, non-normative properties of the world. Of course, as has been emphasized throughout
this paper, what was said above does not compromise the irreducibility of the normative to
the non-normative, but is just an attempt to clarify its sense: the irreducibility in question is
due to the prescriptive role of normative discourse, not to its allegedly sui generis explana-
tory role with respect to descriptive discourse.
10. Notice that this does not entail that the correlationist must view reality (“what really
exists”) as something commensurable to the mind-world correlation. One may well be com-
pletely agnostic about ultimate ontological questions, pointing to the non-necessity of the
correlation itself and contending that, although one cannot attach any meaning to a thought
about a world as it is in itself, independent of its correlation to the mind, this does not neces-
sarily mean that such a world cannot or does not exist. Still, even this anti-absolutist kind
of correlationism is committed to a version of the myth of the categorial given as regards
the categorial features of the correlation between mind and world (i.e., to the extent that
the latter can be meaningfully characterized at all).
11. It must be noted here that Meillassoux’s most important argument against correlation-
ism is different from the one we mentioned above (which was selected due to its structural
similarity to Sellars’s argument against the explanatory self-sufficiency of the manifest
image). Meillassoux’s central argument will be mentioned in note 14 below. The reason
why Meillassoux’s central argument against correlationism does not receive the expected
theoretical attention in this paper is that according to our proposed (Sellarsian) diagnosis
of what is philosophically problematic in Meillassoux’s opposition to correlationism (a)
this problematic element is already manifested in his opening argument, and (b) it is not
essentially removed in his central argument against correlationism (although there the term
‘correlationism’ is used in a somewhat different sense), nor is it absent from the constructive
part of his philosophy. In the remainder of this paper we shall try to show that his speculative
materialistic realism is in fact a (rather peculiar) version of the myth of the categorial Given;
and if this is true, then the importance of Meillassoux’s central argument against correlation-
ism is put into question since, as we shall see, the constructive part of his philosophy is a
logical consequence of this latter argument (rather than just an added extra, externally related
to it). Moreover, if correlationism is problematic for the Sellarsian reasons highlighted in
this paper, then it cannot be that the only way to refute correlationism is by “radicalizing it
from within,” as Meillassoux suggests (Brassier et al. 2007, 409, 426–432).
12. See Meillassoux, Hecker, and MacKay 2010, 8.
13. Before we proceed to an analysis and critique of Meillassoux’s distinction between the
sense and the referent of modal statements, it should be stressed that his use of the concept
of intellectual intuition in this context is already problematic since he seems to understand
it in a way that directly commits him to the myth of the categorial Given. As was mentioned
above, Meillassoux attempts to rehabilitate thought’s access to the “absolute” in the form
of (an allegedly non-metaphysical variety of) “intellectual intuition” that provides us direct
access to the realm of pure possibility. As he puts it: “we must project unreason [i.e., the
denial of the principle of sufficient reason] into things themselves, and discover in our grasp
of facticity the veritable intellectual intuition of the absolute [whose “purely intelligible”—but
at the same time “worldly”—content is that everything is necessarily contingent]. ‘Intuition,’
since it is actually in what is that we discover a contingency with no limit other than itself;
‘intellectual,’ since this contingency is neither visible not perceptible in things: only thought
is capable of accessing it as it accesses the Chaos that underlies the apparent continuity of
the phenomena” (Meillassoux 2008, 82). Now, this characterization of intellectual intuition
is a version of the myth of the categorial Given since according to it pure thought (which is
constrained only by the requirement of non-contradiction) can have transparent access to
the essential features of the world (in this case, to the necessary contingency of its entities,
their essential “facticity”) in complete independence from sensory, “receptive” faculties or
from empirical, “ontic,” inquiry (in the widest sense of the term) into the nature of reality.
This intellectual intuition is exactly the place where the logical powers of the faculty of
reason and the categorial structure of the world at its most fundamental level (what is es-
sential in any possible world) make immediate epistemic contact in a transparent, rationally
demonstrable manner.
14. More specifically, according to Meillassoux, correlationism not only leads to an explana-
tory dead end as regards its own emergence as a “transcendental” point of view within an
already existing reality, but, what is more, in the last analysis, it is a self-undermining posi-
tion. This stems from the fact that, according to Meillassoux, correlationism is, in essence
(not only an anti-realist, but also) an anti-absolutist philosophy (Meillassoux 2012, 2). Thus
the philosophical target of correlationism is not only the metaphysical realist, but also the
absolute idealist (à la Hegel, who absolutizes the correlation itself). In its effort to refute the
latter, correlationism stresses not only the correlation between thought and being, but also
the facticity of the correlation, i.e., the fact that the correlation is not a necessary feature of
being as such (although our knowledge of being, or, even more radically, our very mean-
ingful access to it is always a function of the correlation). According to this line of thought
(congenial, e.g., to existential phenomenologists), there can certainly be certain structural
invariants necessary for the minimal organisation of representation (e.g., the laws of logic,
the law of causality, forms of perception), but they can only be described, not justified or
founded. There is no further reason why the correlational structure is one way rather than
another. In this way, correlationism professes to establish the impossibility of gaining any
kind of knowledge of a “wholly other” (i.e., the world “as it is in itself,” independently of
our means of access to it) while, at the same time, admitting that nothing can be said to be
impossible in an absolute sense, not even the unthinkable. But, Meillassoux shows that the
above correlationist argument against absolute idealism—which is essentially based on the
denial of the identity of the in-itself and the for-us—only works if thought is able to know
absolutely that everything could be otherwise (including thought—or the correlation—itself),
i.e., only if the facticity of the correlation is thought of as an absolute necessity, rather than
just an “absolute necessity” for us, which would turn it into another correlate of thought
(Meillassoux 2008, 38–41, 52–59, and Harman 2011, 25–31). In this way, correlationism
leads by its own inner logic to what Meillassoux terms ‘speculative materialism,’ according
to which we can indeed know the real structure of the world, and necessarily so, but this
structure is just that of the radical contingency of everything.
15. At this point, a Meillassouxian could retort that this “logical space” or “realm” of possi-
bility is essentially untotalizable, and therefore, not “Given,” since, as we know from Cantor,
the infinity of the possible cannot be equated with its exhaustion (i.e., every infinite set has a
determinate cardinality, which another infinity is always capable of exceeding) (Meillassoux
2011, 231). However, from this anti-metaphysical Meillassouxian conception of the realm
of possibility it does not at all follow that he can escape falling victim to a rationalist form
of the myth of the Categorial Given. The latter is an epistemological view about the mind’s
access to reality, not (at least, not directly) an ontological view about its structure. As such,
it is fully consistent with more than one view about the ontology of the “possible,” includ-
ing the Meillassouxian thesis of the essential non-totalizability of the realm of possibility.
It is Meillassoux’s epistemological realism with respect to the status of the “possible” that
makes him vulnerable to the Sellarsian critique. Notice, for example, that, according to
Meillassoux, the human mind can have full (i.e., epistemically “diaphanous”) access to
this non-totalizable structure of the logical space of possibility, independently of any kind
of ontic (empirical or scientific) investigation. This Meillassouxian philosophical picture
of an epistemically transparent “realm of possibilities,” which is completely impervious to
scientific investigation (i.e., to explanatory reconceptualization with the use of the scientific
image’s conceptual tools) is what would be deemed an objectionable crypto-idealist thesis
from a Sellarsian point of view.
16. Notice that what is problematic, according to the Sellarsian line of thought developed
in this paper, is not the distinction between what is contingent and what is necessary (or
between the empirical and the transcendental), but rather the construal of this distinction in
terms of that between matter and form.
17. Meillassoux, being an heir of rationalism in this respect, is a realist about the status of
modal discourse (the realm of “pure possibility”). The realm of possibilities is “out there,”
existing in a non-actual but still real order, independently of its relations to perceptual expe-
rience and impervious to any kind of scientific investigation—since any such investigation
already presupposes that this “realm of pure possibilities” is in place. Yet, this space of logical
possibilities is such that it can be grasped as such by human rational thought (intellectual
intuition), and demonstrably so. Indeed, in this respect, Meillassoux’s position resembles
Frege’s view about the status of mathematical objects, concepts and the inferential laws
governing them, at least according to Weiner’s deflationist interpretation (see Weiner 1995,
366 and 370–371). According to this line of thought, Frege’s view of objectivity involves
a strong, but peculiar (not directly Platonistic) realism about the objects, concepts and
thoughts we can discover in our inquiries: they must be already there, prior to any scientific
investigation, though not as actualities, but rather in the realm of logical possibilities. (For
the crypto-idealist assumptions of the above line of thought as regards the logical essence
of thought and language see Medina 2002, 98–100.) And, as we saw, a parallel point can
be made with respect to Meillassoux’s construal of intellectual intuition as an epistemic
means that provides absolute, though allegedly non-metaphysical and non-dogmatic, access
to the modal structure of reality. Of course, Meillassoux, contra Frege, holds that the realm
of the possible is essentially untotalizable. But, as was shown in footnote 15, by Sellarsian
lights, this feature of the necessary untotalizability of the logical space of possibilities does
not suffice, all by itself, for the formulation of a resolutely anti-metaphysical materialistic
realism, since it is compatible with a version of the myth of the Categorial Given.
18. Meillassoux describes this refutation of correlationism “from within” as follows: “The
thesis of correlationism is that I can’t know what the reality would be without me, without
us, without thinking, without thought. According to the correlationist, if I remove myself
from the world, I can’t know the residue. But this reasoning supposes that we have access
to an absolute possibility: the possibility that the in-itself could be different from the for-us.
And this absolute possibility is grounded in turn on the absolute facticity of the correlation.
It is because I can conceive the non-being of the correlation that I can conceive the pos-
sibility of an in-itself essentially different from the world as correlated to human subjectiv-
ity. Consequently, I can refute the correlationist refutation of realism, grounded as it is on

the accusation of pragmatic contradiction, because I discover in correlational reasoning a
pragmatic contradiction: the correlationist’s fundamental notions—for-us and in-itself—are
grounded on an implicit absolutisation: the absolutisation of facticity. Everything can be
conceived as contingent, dependent on human tropism—everything except contingency
itself. Contingency, and only contingency, is absolutely necessary. Facticity, and only factic-
ity, is not factual, but eternal. Facticity is not a fact, it is not “one more” fact in the world”
(Brassier et al. 2007, 431–432). In this way, correlationism leads by its own inner logic
to Meillassouxian “speculative materialism,” according to which we can indeed know the
real structure of the world, and necessarily so, but this structure is just that of the radical
contingency of everything. Notice, importantly, that the pragmatic contradiction that Meil-
lassoux finds in correlationist reasoning consists in the fact that, despite its protestations to
the contrary, the correlationist’s own radical distinction between the for-us and the in-itself
(which is crucial for her argument against realism) depends for its intelligibility (and for its
argumentative use against realism and speculative or absolute idealism alike) on thought’s
ability to know absolutely that everything could be otherwise. In this way, Meillassouxian
“intellectual intuition” of the absolute emerges as a profound truth hidden in correlationist
thought, which, when made explicit, transforms correlationism into Meillassouxian specula-
tive realism. Thus, the reason why Meillassoux expresses his admiration for the “performative
contradiction” argument of his correlationist opponent is that, properly worked through, it
leads directly to his rationalistic realism of the intellectual intuition of the absolute. And the
Sellarsian philosophical standpoint as developed above not only helps us identify what goes
wrong with the correlationist’s argument and its corresponding aufhebung in Meillassouxian
speculative realism, but it also provides us with a framework that points towards a “positive”
solution that at a very abstract level Meillassoux also finds philosophically desirable: the
delineation of a speculative materialistic realism that incorporates the important insights of
both rationalism and idealism, without collapsing to their respective correlationist versions.
19. Notice that to talk about “the existence of what a proposition refers to” is not neces-
sarily equivalent with talk about the referent of this proposition. One may well distinguish
between them by holding that the referent of a proposition is not some non-conceptually
existing worldly entity that (supposedly) provides a direct semantical connection between
the material, non-normative reality and the (normative) space of reasons. Thus, for example,
one can hold that reference is a word-word, not a word-world relation, and maintain that it
belongs to the conceptual realm, while also asserting that talk of worldly existence should
be reserved to non-semantical (non-intentional, non-conceptual) events and relations in the
spatiotemporal world. In fact, this is exactly Sellars’s position on that matter (Sellars 1967a,
111–128).
20. Some philosophers (see, e.g., Padui 2011, 89–101) maintain that the very fact that tran-
scendental philosophy is not in the business of describing worldly (empirical, ontically exist-
ing) objects is sufficient to ensure that its claims are not metaphysically inflated. However,
from a Sellarsian perspective, whether the transcendental level of discourse is metaphysically
inflationary or not depends on how one understands its semantic function. Is this function
descriptive and explanatory (of a sui generis domain of facts) or is it normative, practical
and prescriptive (evaluation of our behavior according to rules, effected at the metalinguistic
level of discourse)? (Notice that the fact that transcendental discourse is not directly about
worldly objects does not settle the above issue. For example, Meillassoux himself—a fact
that is overlooked by Padui—accepts the view that transcendental discourse is not a straight-
forwardly ontic discourse about empirical objects, but this does not rationally oblige him to
treat transcendental talk as not being about modes of existence at all. Instead, he construes
this level of discourse as something thta points to a sui generis, “point-of-viewish” mode
of existence, radically different from our ordinary, ontic mode of existence.) According to
Sellars, if transcendental discourse is considered as descriptive and explanatory, it cannot
avoid being metaphysically inflationary even if it explicitly rejects metaphysics. The very
theoretical move by which this kind of transcendental philosophy attempts to critically
disengage itself from metaphysical inflationism, i.e., its explanatory insulation from any
actual or possible empirical/scientific explanatory considerations about—and potential
reconceptualization of—its specific content, is, ironically, the very reason why it cannot,
in the end, avoid being metaphysically inflated. In this way, this kind of transcendentalism
falls prey to the myth of the categorial Given, being, in effect, unable to account for its own
emergence and (sui generis, non-causal) efficacy in the world.
21. I would like to thank two anonymous referees of this journal for helpful comments, objec-
tions and suggestions. Thanks to Costas Markou and Miltiades Theodosiou for discussing
an early draft of this paper with me.
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© Philosophy Documentation Center ISSN: 1053-8364

SELLARS, MEILLASSOUX, AND THE MYTH OF

same form as Meillassoux’s argument against correlationism, but, which, when

I. SELLARS AND THE MYTH OF THE CATEGORIAL GIVEN

non-perceptual—e.g., “logical,” “mathematical,” aesthetic, etc.) can be transparently

II. MEILLASSOUX’S DESCRIPTION OF

phenomenology (Husserl) and “fundamental ontology” (Heidegger), which, for all

III. MEILASSOUX ON THE

IV. SELLARS ON THE PARADOXICAL CONSEQUENCES OF THE

at the same reifying it, e.g., by considering it as a non-empirical level of being,

makes the latter constitutively incapable of providing a sufficient explanation of

VI. CORRELATIONISTS AND MEILLASSOUX ALIKE

VII. MEILLASSOUX’S “SPECULATIVE REALISM” REINTRODUCES

VIII. THE PROPER CONSTRUAL OF THE TRANSENDENTAL/

“negative” epistemological thesis—which points to a necessary epistemological

IX. CONCLUDING REMARKS

of Meillassouxian correlationism (especially in continental philosophical circles). Braver,

of the way in which man came to have an image of himself-in-the-world. For we

ity. Consequently, I can refute the correlationist refutation of realism, grounded as it is on

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