Wilfrid Sellars on Truth

This book offers an innovative defense of Wilfrid Sellar’s notion of ideal truth.

Sellars adopts two attractive ideas about truth: the pragmatist idea that the concept of truth cannot be understood independently from the norms and practices we find ourselves with and the realist idea that there is one ultimate truth about how the world is. Sellars is thus committed both to an immanent notion of truth and an ideal notion of truth. This book discusses these countervailing tendencies and tries to reconcile them. The author’s defense of Sellars’s notion of truth minimizes problematic commitments while still being recognizably rooted in Sellars’s texts. Additionally, the author defends several innovative claims with respect to Sellars’s thinking, for example, about the relative unimportance of his controversial concept of pictorial adequacy and about the neglected significance of considerations concerning context-sensitive expressions in his thought.

Wilfrid Sellars on Truth will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on Wilfrid Sellars, pragmatism, and questions about truth, naturalism, and scientific realism.