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Sentience and Sapience: The Place of Enactive Cognitive Science in Sellarsian Philosophy of

Mind

Carl Sachs
Department of Philosophy, Marymount University
csachs@marymount.edu

Abstract: Philosophers working in the wake of Sellars, such as Brandom and McDowell, think

that there a fundamentally important distinction between „sapience‟ and „sentience.‟ Both

sentience and sapience are „transcendental‟ structures – they are posited to explain our

cognitively significant experience, including (but not limited to) empirical knowledge – but they

also must be adequately reflected in, or realized in, causal structures. Hence whatever structures

and processes that we posit in the course of reflecting on the minimal necessary conditions for

our cognitive capacities and incapacities must be correlated with structures and processes that are

empirically confirmed and, to the extent possible, consistent with a scientific view of the world.

Within this generally Sellarsian framework, I aim to criticize one key aspect of Sellars‟s theory

of perception concerning the role of sense-impressions (or sensations) as causally mediating our

perceptual encounters with objects. More specifically, I shall argue that Sellars was right to

argue that we need to posit what he calls “sheer receptivity” in the interests of transcendental

philosophy, but wrong to argue that sense-impressions were the best candidates to implement

sheer receptivity in rerum natura. I shall then turn to recent work in the enactivist approach to

philosophy of cognitive science, which emphasizes the structural coupling between sensorimotor

skills and environmental affordances. This structural coupling is a more promising candidate

than sensations per se as the causal correlate of sheer receptivity. I conclude by comparing the

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possibility of synthesizing inferentialism and enactivism with Huw Price‟s “new bifurcation

thesis”, and suggest that my approach is a more promising candidate for 21st-century Sellarsian

pragmatism.

0. Introduction

It has become something of an orthodoxy amongst philosophers working in the wake of

Sellars that there is a fundamentally important distinction between „sapience‟ and „sentience.‟ As

I understand this distinction, both sentience and sapience are „transcendental‟ structures, in the

sense that we arrive at the concepts of sentience and of sapience by conducting an inventory of

the most general kinds of cognitive capacities and incapacities necessary for the kind of

cognitively significant experiences, including but not limited to knowledge, for beings such as

ourselves or any being that we are capable of recognizing as being like ourselves.1 However,

Sellars also adopts as a methodological principle that “transcendental structures must be realized

in causal structures” (deVries 2011, 61-62). That is, whatever structures and processes that we

posit in the course of reflecting on the minimal necessary conditions for our cognitive capacities

and incapacities must be correlated with structures and processes that are empirically confirmed

and, to the extent possible, consistent with a scientific view of the world.

Within this generally Sellarsian framework, I aim to criticize one key aspect of Sellars‟s

theory of perception concerning the role of sense-impressions (or sensations) as causally

mediating our perceptual encounters with objects. More specifically, I shall argue that Sellars

was right to argue that we need to posit what he calls “sheer receptivity” in the interests of

transcendental philosophy, but wrong to argue that sense-impressions were the best candidates to

1
For this understanding of „transcendental‟, and esp. of Sellars as a transcendental philosopher in this sense, see
Westphal (2010).

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implement sheer receptivity in rerum natura (§ 1). I shall then turn to recent work in the

enactivist approach to philosophy of cognitive science and show why enactive cognition is a far

more promising candidate for sheer receptivity (§ 2). Finally, I conclude by taking note of the

strengths of supplementing a broadly Sellarsian approach to mindedness with the methods and

results of enactive cognitive science (§ 3).

1. The Role of Embodiment in Sellars‟s Theory of Perception

While most discussions of Sellars‟s theory of perception have focused on either the role of

concepts or sense-impressions in the overall account – thereby generating much discussion over

how to read Sellars in light of the debate between conceptualism and nonconceptualism (see

esp.O‟Shea 2010) – relatively little attention has been given to Sellars‟s own understanding of

how concepts and sense-impressions are supposed to fit together. This part of the theory lies in

Sellars‟s late essay, “The Role of Imagination in Kant‟s Theory of Experience”, to which I now

turn. What role does “the productive imagination” play in Sellars‟s theory of perceptual

experience? What problems is it invoked to solve? What is the role of the perceiver‟s own body

in this theory? And how does the perceiver‟s body relate the constraining role of „sheer

receptivity‟ that sense-impressions play in perceptual takings?

As Sellars sets up the exposition of visual perception, he draws our attention to the fact that

our visual experience immediately appears to us as experience of objects – of three-dimensional

entities in space and time, causally interacting with other such objects – even though what we

immediately see of those objects is their facing sides. How, then, do we experience the interiors

of objects that do not immediately confront us in visual perception, or their non-facing sides?

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One answer that Sellars quickly rejects is the thought that unseen interiors or non-facing sides

are merely believed in, for this answer does not do justice to the phenomenology of visual

experience. To use Sellars‟s own example, when we see a red apple, we see it as containing a

volume of white, and also as juicy and cool, though the whiteness, juiciness, and coolness are not

seen of the apple; only the red facing surface is seen of the apple. As Sellars puts it, “[a]n actual

coolness is bodily present in the experience as is an actual volume of white” (IKTE II.20/KTM p.

422). This, in turn, raises the further question as to how that particular red facing surface is seen

as the red facing surface of the apple, since an apple is a physical object and not a surface.

Since the interior whiteness (and other occurrent sensible properties) of the apple are not

merely believed in, and they are not what is immediately seen of the apple, what is their mode of

presentation in perceptual consciousness? Sellars‟s answer is that they are present in perceptual

consciousness by virtue of being imagined. There is also room here for the role of concepts,

since the applehood of the apple is neither sensed nor imaged but conceived of. Thus Sellars

remarks that “[r]oughly imagining is an intimate blend of imaging and conceptualization,

whereas perceiving is an intimate blend of sensing and imaging and conceptualization” (IKTE

II.23/KTM pp. 422-423). To perceive an apple as an apple is to be perceptually aware,

simultaneously, of what is sensed (the red facing surface), what is imaged (the white interior, the

red non-facing side, the juiciness and coolness), and what is conceptualized (the apple qua

physical object with causal and modal properties). The synthesis of these three mental acts is

performed by what Sellars, here following Kant here quite closely, calls “the productive

imagination”.

The role of the productive imagination in perceptual consciousness involves “the

constructing of sense-image-models of external objects” (IKTE III.25/KTM p. 423; emphasis

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original). Two important features of image-models must be stressed, for they are intimately

related. Firstly, the image-model of an object is perspectival, whereas the concept of an object is

not; secondly, the construction of an image-model of an object necessarily involves the

construction of the image-model of the perceiver‟s own body. There is nothing essentially

perspectival to the concept of a dog, but the image-model of a dog (whether imagined or

perceived) is necessarily that of a dog as seen from a particular point of view, and that point of

view is essentially indexed to the position of the perceiver‟s body in relation to the dog as

imagined. Since “the construction is a unified process guided by a combination of sensory input

on the one hand and background beliefs, memories and expectations on the other” (IKTE

III.25/KTM p. 423), we should say that the role of sensory input – whether stimulation on the

retina, as in visual consciousness, or the triggering of any other sensory-receptors – is to guide or

constrain the construction of image-models. The image-model of the perceiver‟s body and the

image-models of the perceptual objects together transform the array of sense-impressions

(“stimulations of the retina”) into perspectives of a three-dimensional object that persists in

Space and Time.

In this way Sellars seems quite able to account for the role of embodiment in perception, and

thereby the intimate relation between action and perception that has long been stressed by

thinkers in the pragmatist tradition, as Sellars himself notes when he says, in a footnote to “Some

Remarks to Kant‟s Theory of Experience”, that the acquisition of knowledge by being affected

by objects “also involves action in relation to these objects – if only by changing one‟s relative

position – is a point to which he [Kant] pays less attention that it deserves. Compare C. I.

Lewis‟s treatment of this topic in the first chapter of An Analysis of Knowledge and Valuation”

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(KTE II.13n3/KTM p. 271).2 In other words, action is at work in perception by virtue of the

relations between the perceiving subject and perceived object captured by the respective image-

models of the perceiver‟s body and of the object as perceived.

We should, however, notice a hidden cost in Sellars‟s account of embodiment. Since

perception occurs only insofar as the productive imagination is guided by sensations, the

productive imagination itself functions in the same way in both perception and imagination in the

narrow sense (as when I dream, hallucinate, or deliberately construct a mental image). The

difference is that in veridical perception, the construction of image-models (both of the object

and of my own body) is guided by sensory input, and in non-veridical perception, it is not so

guided. As a result, our very embodiment is neutral to whether perception is veridical; the image-

model of my own body is constructed by my productive imagination, whether constrained by

sensory input or not. The body is present in perceptual consciousness as imagined, and is

constrained by the inputs of senses that are curiously disembodied, or at any rate not as fully

embodied as they are in earlier American pragmatists (esp. Dewey) and in certain figures in the

phenomenological tradition (e.g. Merleau-Ponty).

I now want to turn to Sellars‟s analysis of the role of sense-impressions in perception. In

keeping with the general strategy sketched by deVries – that “transcendental structures must be

realized in causal structures” – I want to distinguish between, on the one hand, the project of

reflecting on the necessity of external constraint on perception, and, on the other hand, any

specific account of the causal items that play this constraining role. To identify the necessity of

constraint Sellars introduces the concept of “sheer receptivity”, whereas Sellars thinks of “sense-

impressions” as the corresponding causal items that play this constraining role in rerum natura.

2
Though Lewis is not widely regarded as belonging to the tradition of pragmatism, there are signs that this is
beginning to change; see Murphey (2005), Rosenthal (2007), and Misak (2013).

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That is, we have a transcendental reflection on the nature of our cognitive activity which shows

that empirical knowledge – or empirical content generally – requires that the agent have the

capacity for sentience as well as sapience, and also a scientific (or quasi-scientific) account of

sense-impressions or sensa as items that are introduced, via theoretical postulation, as having the

right causal powers to realize the transcendental role.

The transcendental reflection that motivates the concept of sheer receptivity takes place

through Sellars‟s interpretation of the Kantian distinction between “intuitions” and “concepts”.

Sellars argues that in addition to intuitive conceptual representations – that is, conceptual

representations of particulars or of individuals, modeled on singular demonstrative phrases –

there is a different sense of “intuition” in the receptivity of the senses, which must be non-

conceptual in order to the requisite role of „guiding‟ thoughts. Thus, the productive imagination,

i.e. the understanding insofar as it is playing the role of guiding sensibility, produces „this white

cube‟ (an intuition) modeled off „this cube is white‟ (a judgment). But if intuitions, in one of

their roles, are already informed by the deployment of concepts, then we need an account of

„receptivity proper‟ to explain how our beliefs and judgments are answerable to a world that we

do not create, but discover. Resolving this ambiguity in Kant‟s concept of intuition is important

not only for understanding what Kant was trying to do, but also for understanding why

subsequent thinkers did not correctly understand Kant:

Indeed, it is only if Kant distinguishes the radically non-conceptual character of sense


from the conceptual character of the synthesis of apprehension in intuition … and
accordingly, the receptivity of sense from the guidedness of intuition that he can avoid
the dialectic which leads from Hegel‟s Phenomenology to nineteenth-century
idealism.(S&M, p. 16, I.40)

and, much more seriously:

Kant‟s failure to distinguish clearly between the „forms‟ of receptivity proper and the
„forms‟ of that which is represented by the intuitive conceptual representations which

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are „guided‟ by receptivity – a distinction which is demanded both by the thrust of his
argument, and by sound philosophy – had as its consequence that no sooner had he left
the scene than these particular waters were muddied by Hegel and the Mills, and
philosophy had to begin the slow climb „back to Kant‟ which is still underway. (S&M
p. 29; I.71)

That is, the distinction between the receptivity of sense and the guidedness of intuitions allow us

to recognize that intuitive conceptual representations are „guided‟ by something else – what he

calls „receptivity proper‟ or „sheer receptivity‟.3 When I perceptually take in how things are, my

productive imagination organizes perceptual experience so that I am suitably disposed to make a

claim about what I perceive. But this can be the case only if my sensory receptivity to the world

has just enough structure for it to guide the productive imagination. Receptivity proper must

have, Sellars concludes,representational purport, but to preserve the distinction between

receptivity and the products of the productive imagination (which draws upon the

understanding), we must distinguish between intuitive conceptual representations and radically

non-conceptual representations. The latter is how Sellars construes sensations as playing a causal

role, “neither epistemic nor physical” (EPM §7/SPR p. 133), but as causally efficacious states of

non-apperceptive consciousness that constrain the activity of the productive imagination4.

The proper status of sense-impressions in Sellars‟s thinking therefore turns on a

methodological principle and a transcendental result. It is a methodological principle that all

transcendental structures must be reflected in causal structures, and it is a transcendental result

that sheer receptivity is a transcendental structure. Hence there must be some causal structure in

which sheer receptivity is reflected; sense-impressions, as causally efficacious episodes of


3
Cf. „the pattern of Kant‟s thought stands out far more clearly if we interpret him as clear about the difference
between general conceptual representings (sortals and attributive), on the one hand, and on the other, intuition as a
special class of non-general conceptual representings, but add to this interpretation that he was not clear about the
difference between intuitions in this sense and sensations‟. „Some Remarks on Kant‟s Theory of Experience‟ (KTE
II.15/KTM p. 272).
4
For this interpretation of Sellars‟s treatment of sense-impressions, see O‟Shea (2010) and Schellenberg (2006).

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consciousness, are the right causal structures to reflect the transcendental structure of sheer

receptivity.5

Yet why not think that our own lived embodiment can play the requisite causal role here?

(Granted, it might seem more natural to pose this question if one has read Merleau-Ponty.) One

ready reply is that lived embodiment, precisely because of its intimate link with action (as Sellars

noted above), lacks the requisite passivity to count as sheer receptivity. Yet it is precisely here I

want to pose a challenge to Sellars‟s implicit commitment to empiricism. For it is an empiricist

conviction, retained by Kant and indeed by Sellars, that only that which is passive can count as

genuinely receptive. I shall now argue that this need not be so. To do so, I now want to turn to a

relatively new development in philosophy of cognitive science – a research program loosely

referred to as „enactivism‟ – in order to suggest that sheer receptivity is causally realized, not by

sensations, but by the sensorimotor skills displayed by the living organism. The alternative gives

us a much adequate account of sentience by reuniting sensation and action, which are

problematically torn asunder in Sellars‟s theory of perception.

2. Enactive Cognitive Science

In recent years, the major debate within cognitive science between symbolic or

computational models of the mind and connectionist models of the mind has been contested by

the rise of enactivism. The term “the enactive approach” was coined by Francisco Varela in The

Embodied Mind (Varela, Thompson, and Rosch 1991), which contrasts with computationalism

5
It is a further question as to how the distinction between sheer receptivity as transcendental structure and
sensations as the causal structures that reflect sheer receptivity would affect McDowell‟s criticism of Sellars‟s
treatment of sensations; see McDowell (2009).

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and connectionism by focusing on cognition as an ongoing process that links animals with

environments, rather than as an activity that transpires entirely (or even largely) within brains.

Accordingly, Rowlands (2010) refers to both computationalism and connectionism as “Cartesian

cognitive science” (pp. 2-3), in contrast with the focus on “4E cognitive science”, or mind as

“embodied, embedded, extended, and extended” (p. 3).6The enactive approach is further

developed in Noë (2004), Thompson (2007), and Chemero (2009).

As Thompson (2007) puts it, the key question lies in the best models for thinking about

mindedness. Whereas computationalism treats the mind as a digital computer, and connectionism

treats the mind as a neural network, enactivism treats the mind as an embodied dynamic system

(p. 4), such that “cognitive processes emerge from the nonlinear and circular causality of

continuous sensorimotor interactions involving the brain, body, and environment” (pp. 10-11).

Noë (2004) fleshes this out by emphasizing the crucial role of sensorimotor skills in perceptual

experience: “intuitions – patterns of stimulation – without knowledge of the sensorimotor

significance of these intuitions – is blind. Crucially, the knowledge in question is practical

knowledge; it is know-how. To perceive you must be possession of sensorimotor bodily skills”

(p. 11). Contra Sellars, it is not the productive imagination which imbues sensations with

cognitive significance and thereby constitutes perceptual experience; it is the sensorimotor skills

of a living animal which play this role, crucial to which is coming to understand the way in

which one‟s sensations co-vary or would co-vary with one‟s actual or possible movements (p.

15).

On this basis Noë gives a different account of Sellars‟s problem of perceptual presence: how

are the unperceived properties of perceived objects given to us? Whereas Sellars argues that the

6
However, Rowlands subsequently argues that non-Cartesian cognitive science requires only that the mind is
extended and embodied, not that it is also enacted.

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unperceived properties are bodily present in experience by virtue of being imagined, Noë

suggests that they are bodily present in experience by virtue of bodily know-how: it is the

accumulated store of implicit know-how of sensorimotor contingencies that allows us to

understand that the red apple contains a volume of white that is juicy and cool, because that is

how we would sense it if we were to cut it open or take a bite out of it. Though Sellars clearly

notes the role of the body-image in constructing the relevant image-models, Noë proposes a

much more intimate coordination of sensing and moving, which is why he emphasizes that the

relevant bodily skills are sensorimotor, not mere sensations that have to be taken up first and

then be synthesized with accordance with the concept of the perceiver‟s body and the concept of

the object. In short, Sellars‟s model is a “top-down” model – the concepts determine how the

sensations are synthesized – whereas Noë‟s model is a “bottom-up” model, according to which

sensorimotor skills constitute perceptual intelligibility independently of the Understanding, if the

Understanding is construed as the capacity to apply concepts as predicates of possible judgments.

The enactive approach stresses that to perceiveis not to judge.7

Two further points regarding the enactive approach must be emphasized. Firstly, the

enactive approach has close parallels with the ecological psychology developed from Gibson;

both Noë (2004) and Chemero (2009) stress this parallel. One important implication of this

parallel is that, according to enactivism, what an animal directly perceives are what Gibson calls

“affordances”: the possibilities of movement as strongly coupled with possibilities of sensing.

Thus enactivism is consistent with direct realism, but not a direct realism about objects that are

fully determined independently of any cognitive agent. Secondly, enactivism is justified, to the

extent that it is, by experiments in the psychology and neuroscience of perception; enactivism is

7
Cf. Merleau-Ponty: “to perceive in the full sense of the word (as the antithesis of imagining) is not to judge, but
rather to grasp, prior to all judgment, a sense immanent in the sensible” (2012), p. 36.

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not mere phenomenology. To the extent that we should take enactive cognitive science seriously,

it is because it gives us empirically confirmed causal explanations of perceptual phenomena, not

because it gives us correct subjective descriptions of perceptual phenomena.

3. Enactivism, Inferentialism, and Pragmatism

Whereas Sellars himself focuses on sensations per se, enactive cognitive science focuses on

the sensorimotor skills. It is these skills, I suggest, that play the requisite role of causally

reflecting the transcendental structure of sheer receptivity. They can do so precisely because they

are independent of the higher-order, discursive activity that underpins distinctively propositional

thought. Yet that is all that Sellars would require; receptivity proper, in the sense that contrasts

with spontaneity, assumes – with Kant – that spontaneity characterizes the Understanding, which

in turn is paradigmatically bound up with judgment, and with concepts as predicates of possible

judgment. Nothing in that conception of spontaneity – which gives receptivity its sense by way

of contrast – requires that receptivity be utterly devoid of activity of its own distinctive kind.

Indeed, nothing would be essentially lost in Sellars‟s contrast even if, as Noë argues,

sensorimotor skills were conceptual; all that would require is a distinction between two different

kinds of concepts, those at work in the deployment of sensorimotor skills and those at work in

propositional content available for premises in inferences (what Sellars calls “language-entry

transitions”) or as conclusions of practical inferences (the corresponding “language-exit

transitions”).

One important advantage of supplementing inferentialism about sapience with enactivism

about sentience is that it suggests a response to Turner‟s (2002; 2010) objections to Brandom.

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Turner objects that Brandom‟s account of normativity should be rejected because it is

incompatible with what we know about how the brain works (2002, pp. 120-141). However,

Turner‟s own conception of how the brain works is based on connectionism, which is itself – at

least from an enactivist perspective – deeply mired in neo-Cartesian assumptions, precisely

because it neglects the structural coupling between sensorimotor abilities and environmental

affordances as constituting cognitive processes. On an enactivist conception of mind, at least

some cognitive processes are partially constituted by embodiment, environment, or both. Far

from being an obstacle to a Brandomian account of higher-order, propositional thought, an

enactivist conception of bodily intentionality can serve as a naturalistic 'starting-point' for the

emergence of norms in the demanding sense, because we can think of bodily intentionality as

being the kind of intentionality that hominoids generally have. Normative practices emerge when

individual bodily intentionality, as explained by enactivist cognitive science, undergoes the two

steps suggested by Tomasello‟s (2014) theory of the evolution of normativity: (i) joint

intentionality and (ii) collective intentionality. This makes discursive practices look far less

mysterious and magical in rerum natura, as Turner worries.

In thinking of sensorimotor skills, rather than sensations per se, as causally reflecting sheer

receptivity, we are thereby led to a new conception of the relation between sentience and

sapience. Inferentialism as developed by Brandom (1996; 2000) explains propositional content

primarily in terms of its role in inference, rather than in representation; it is an anti-

representationalist theory of propositional content, though one which does purport to explain our

use of the term “representation.” Enactivism, especially in the version developed by Chemero

(2009), is emphatically and explicitly anti-representationalist.

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My suggestion that inferentialism (about propositional content) and enactivism (about

perceptual content) could be reconciled is the „evil‟ twin to Huw Price‟s (2013) “new bifurcation

thesis” with its distinction between i-representations and e-representations.8The former are

representations at work in semantic content, where the „i‟ can stand for „internal‟ or „inferential‟;

the latter are representations at work in co-varying with the environment, where the „e‟ can stand

for „external‟ or „environmental‟. Both are necessary, because an adequate semantical theory

requires both that we explain the content of our thoughts, beliefs, and assertions as well as

assuring that our thoughts are about the world.

Though he does not put the point quite this way, we should read Price as urging us to think of

our post-Sellarsian rejection of the Myth of the Given in terms of distinguishing between the

kind of cognitive capacities at work in discursive activities (what he calls “the Content

Assumption”) and the kind of cognitive capacities at work in tracking environmental regularities

(what he calls “the Correspondence Assumption"). He accepts a Brandomian account of the

priority of inference for propositional content but revives or returns to Sellars‟s theory of

picturing for the environmental-tracking kind of cognition, and this in turn licenses a partial

rehabilitation of representationalism in terms of “e-representations.” The thing to avoid is what

he calls Representationalism, with a big-R, where one and the same content plays both roles. The

point I want to make here is simply that enactive cognitive science removes the urge to smuggle

representations back into the account of sentience after they have been excised from the account

8
See esp. pp. 35-44 and pp. 186-194.

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of sapience. We can be antirepresentationalists about both sentience and sapience by accepting

enactivism about the former and inferentialism about the latter.9

I remarked at the beginning that post-Sellarsian philosophy of mind emphasizes the

distinction between sentience and sapience. We can now see why this is so, in light of Sellars‟s

well-known rejection of what he called “the Myth of the Given”: the Myth of the Given is a

confusion of two different kinds of cognitive capacities, sentience and sapience. The first

involves world-directedness of cognitive processes; the second involves intersubjective or

communal correction of cognitive processes. Both are individually necessary and jointly

sufficient for empirical content. The empiricist Myth of the Given lies in treating sentience as

necessary and sufficient for counting as a move in the game of giving and asking for reasons; the

less obvious rationalist Myth of the Given lies in treating sapience as necessary and sufficient for

determining world-directedness.

The difference between my solution and Price‟s is that Price avoids the Myth by

distinguishing between the representations of sentience (e-representations) and the

representations of sapience (i-representations), whereas I avoid both kinds of representations by

taking on board anti-representationalism about sentience through enactive cognition, and anti-

representationalism about sapience through inferentialist semantics. Insofar as pragmatism in the

tradition from Dewey to Rorty has long prided itself on its hostility to representationalism, but

has not always been clear on the distinction between sentience and sapience (and the necessity of

both for empirical content), the synthesis of inferentialism and enactivism is a viable possibility

for a Sellarisan pragmatism in the 21st century.

9
I do not think that comprehensive anti-representationalism is inconsistent with realism, though developing that
thought is far beyond the scope of the present essay. For preliminary considerations of how enactivism is consistent
with realism, see Chemero (2009), pp. 184-205 and Thompson (2007), pp. 417-441.

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