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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
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
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
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
As Sellars sets up the exposition of visual perception, he draws our attention to the fact that
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
whereas perceiving is an intimate blend of sensing and imaging and conceptualization” (IKTE
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”.
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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
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
constrain the construction of image-models. The image-model of the perceiver‟s body and the
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-
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-
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
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
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
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
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
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
receptivity and the products of the productive imagination (which draws upon the
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
that sheer receptivity is a transcendental structure. Hence there must be some causal structure in
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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
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
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
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.
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
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
(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
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
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
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,
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”).
about sentience is that it suggests a response to Turner‟s (2002; 2010) objections to Brandom.
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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
because it neglects the structural coupling between sensorimotor abilities and environmental
some cognitive processes are partially constituted by embodiment, environment, or both. Far
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
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
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
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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
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
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
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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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
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
taking on board anti-representationalism about sentience through enactive cognition, and anti-
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
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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Works Cited
Chemero, A. Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009).
(2011): 47-63.
McDowell, J. “Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality” in Having the World In View (Cambridge, MA:
Routledge, 2012).
Murphey, M. C. I. Lewis: The Last Great Pragmatist (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005)
Noë, Alva. Action in Perception (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
and E. Rubinstein (eds.) Self, Language and World (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 2010), pp.
205-228
Rowlands, M. The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology
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Wolf and M. Lance (eds.) The Self-Correcting Enterprise (New York, NY: Rodopi, 2006),
pp. 173-196.
Sellars, W. “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” in Science, Perception and Reality
Sellars, W. “The Role of the Imagination in Kant‟s Theory of Experience” in J. Sicha (ed.)
Kant’s Transcendental Metaphysics (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Press, 2002), pp. 419-430.
Thompson, E. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge,
Press, 2014).
Varela, F., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and
Westphal, K. “Kant‟s Critique of Pure Reason and Analytic Philosophy” in P. Guyer (ed.) The
Cambridge Companion to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (New York, NY: Cambridge,
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