Dufrenne, Mikel. "Comment on Wilfrid Sellars' Paper.

" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 29, 4

(1969): 528-535.
COMMENT ON WILFRID SELLARS' PAPER
MIKEL DUFRENNE
Professor Sellars presents us with a personal, subtle and nuanced mode of reflection. I
shall not attempt to discuss his paper in detail, or even to refute it, but shall rather try
to understand it: to repeat it in my own way by transposing it into a language which is
more familiar to me. For language is a means of communication--communication of a
thought--only if it is a common language, belonging to a community. And just as na-
tional communities are often divided into social classes possessing their own subcul-
ture or sub-language, the community of philosophers, or of scholars, is often divided
into different schools, each of which also has its language which must be translated in
order to be understood.
Sellars' reflection bears on language (le langage). We should be fully aware that it
does not deal with "tongue" (la langue) in the sense in which linguists understand this
term; Sellars treats speech (la parole), that is, speech behavior (le comportement par-
lant). It seems to me that the general intention animating this reflection is to posit and
then surpass the traditional duality of language and thought. Thought is defined as
conceptual actuality; Sellars examines it as act, not in its, product: he does not elabo-
rate a theory of concepts any more than a theory of conceptualization (and he does not
try to determine, for example, the way in which the concept is linked with the word
and the use of the word in certain statements). Conceptual activity is tentatively de-
fined as "recognitional capacity": "The concept of doing A and of being in C," which
is simply consciousness of a situation as calling for an action and of this action, which
can be an act of speech (une parole). Thought is therefore defined in terms of con-
sciousness.
Surpassing the language-thought duality is possible only if, with Sellars, one considers
speech or speech behavior. For if language is considered from the standpoint of lin-
guistics, that is, as tongue, one must conclude that it is exterior and anterior to, the
subject who learns it by interiorizing it. In other words, Sellars' enterprise presupposes
a subject capable of speech--one who knows how to speak. In this regard, if there is a
duality of tongue and subject, the subject surpasses this duality by appropriating the
tongue: his "mother tongue" understood both as the tongue of his mother and the
mother of his thought.
The language-thought duality remains in the behavior of this subject. How can it be
surpassed? How can the two terms be identified with one another in a relation which
at first opposes them? There arc several possible responses to this question. First, the
relation can be conceived dialectically as affirming the unity of contraries; but this
solution only poses the problem without solving it. Next, the relation can be seen as
one of reciprocal engendering: then it must be explained how thought and speech are
accomplished together in the act of expression stemming from a certain origin. This is
the standpoint of phenomenology, at least in Merleau-Ponty's conception: "Our view
of man will remain superficial so long as we fail to go back to this origin, so long as
we fail to find, beneath the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we
do not describe the gesture which breaks this silence."1 I would orient myself along
these lines, for this description of a primary speech, which is doubtless poetic speech,
might enable us to kill two birds with one stone: to clarify the common advent of con-
sciousness and speech and to throw some light on the origin of language as a system
of not wholly arbitrary signs. Professor Sellars proposes still another response; he dis-
cerns two relations between language and thought: that of identity and that of expres-
sion, depending on whether it can be said of linguistic behavior that it is "conceptual
activity" or that it expresses it. This is an apparently paradoxical solution: it is difficult
to say both that language is thought and that it is an instrument--a means of communi-
cation--serving thought. It is conceivable that the difficulty might be removed if lan-
guage were analyzed into speech and tongue into the language which I am and the
tongue I use in order to communicate. Yet the difficulty would not be removed, for
the tongue itself is not like, other instruments, which are exterior and simply available;
we do not say "I speak with French," but "I speak in French," or "I speak French."
The tongue becomes ours, adheres to us in the use we make of it; and this is precisely
because it is not foreign to thought, indeed because language is thought. Perhaps we
must both distinguish between these two relations of identity and expression, and sur-
pass this distinction: it may be the vocation of language to permit thought to take its
distance, to elect to be independent or pure, and capable of inventing new languages
or new symbolisms; but at the origin, thought is taken up in speech, and doubtless
never completely detaches itself from it.
Let us turn now to a closer look at Mr. Sellars' Wt. It consists of two apparently unre-
lated parts whose link is difficult to see: the first, which deals with linguistic rules,
specifies the notion of an identity of language and thought; the second proposes an
analysis of the notion of expression.
I
I must admit that I was at first quite surprised by the first part. Dealing with "linguistic
rules," Sellars manages the tour de force of not mentioning the word "grammar" (in
spite of an allusion to the rules of formation and transformation) nor the word "lex-
icon" (in spite of an allusion to the word "red"). But I was mistaken in my surprise, for
this is not a question of tongue, but of behavior, in which rules, instead of being stated,
are interiorized. If the behavior of the speaker submits to rules, it is no doubt because
the tongue itself consists of rules: it is an institution both arbitrary and binding, and it
can be defined as a system of laws. Yet Sellars is not interested in the nature of the
tongue as an object, but rather in the way in which it is spoken and in the relation of
discourse with thought: in the behavior of the individual who has this tongue at his
command.
Mr. Sellars does not examine the finality of this behavior (one speaks in order to say
something) or its freedom (one chooses to speak rather than be silent, and one
chooses one's words); although he does evoke the intention to communicate, what he
studies is the "rule-governed character" of this behavior. Here I should like to note in
passing that this character should perhaps be studied in relation to an activity which
continually produces new forms of discourse and which can always transgress the
1
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London, Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1962), p. 184.
laws of language, destroying the system. It is perhaps a rule to say "this is red" in the
presence of red objects in sunlight, but what is to prevent me from saying "this is
purple?" Who will prevent the poet from resorting to a metaphor? There is no law that
cannot be contorted or violated, and this privilege cannot be denied the speaking
subject.
What is the situation, then, concerning these rules? Mr. Sellars defines them as
"oughts" which are categorical, not hypothetical. These are obviously not moral du-
ties, in the sense of the German Sollen, but practical duties, stated in such propositions
as "One ought" or "You must." These duties do not involve a moral subject, and may
not apply to any subject at all. Sellars distinguishes, indeed, between "ought-todo's"
and "ought-to-be's." The former concern the activity of a subject who has something
to do in a given situation and who is conscious of this. The latter concern rather an
object, in which one looks for a certain state by reason of its nature or its function; for
example, clocks ought to tell time. But can one, in this second case, talk of a rule? I
would rather speak of "condition" in a broad sense; it is the condition (that is, the na-
ture) of a clock to tell time; or: a clock is only a clock on the condition that it tell time.
In other words, a law of essence--to use Husserl's term--is not a rule; a rule is always a
rule for an action and therefore always addresses itself to a subject capable of activity.
Yet Sellars insists on giving a place to the ought-to-be's alongside the ought-to-do's.
He first observes that the former can also involve a subject, for example when we say
that "one ought to feel sympathy for bereaved people"; translation: it is of the nature
of a decent soul to feel compassion for the bereaved. He then observes that ought-to-
be's can give rise to ought-to-do's: the clockmaker ought to build clocks which ought
to. tell time (at least if he wants to sell his clocks: here the imperative is hypothetical).
Such "rules of action" also apply to the trainer of those lower animals which constitute
the delight of behaviorism, or to the educator who deals with human subjects; e.g., in
order to teach them sympathy for the bereaved, or the correct use of language.
For language--or rather tongue--must be learned. Once learned, it constitutes a manner
of being for the subject, the property of a nature informed by culture. It is in this sense
that one can speak of being, and of ought-to-be's: in order to speak, you must (one
ought to) have been disposed to speech, just as a certain animal is disposed by training
to respond to a certain stimulus. We can see that the ought defines here a condition,
from which a practical rule, a rule of the social game, can be inferred: culture must be
transmitted, the child must be taught to speak, the rules of action which govern the use
of speech must be inscribed in his being in the form of knowledge (savoirs) or habits.
But perhaps this condition of speaking man, who has had to appropriate his native
tongue, is not entirely the effect of his socialization. For man to speak, he must be
originally capable of language, and no behaviorism will help a trainer to make an
animal speak. It is here, it seems to me, that Sellars separates himself from the ele-
mentary behaviorism according to which linguistic acts would be automatic (though
acquired) responses to stimuli--a behaviorism which contains echoes of logical atom-
ism, as the example "this is red" attests. What Sellars justly introduces to complicate
this overly simple schema is three-fold: the idea of consciousness: one must be con-
scious of things in order to speak about them; the idea of self-consciousness: "one
must have the concept of oneself as agent"; and the Aristotelian notion of disposition:
one must be disposed to speak in order to speak, one must master language in order to
have it at one's disposition. And what Sellars assembles under the term conceptual
activity, or more simply, thought, are these very traits of verbal behavior.
From this point on it can be said that speech is thought. But Sellars only identifies
these after having distinguished them. And perhaps one must ask oneself whether
they are not first mingled. Even a corrected behaviorism makes its task of posing the
most difficult problem too easy. It gives itself a world and a language which are al-
ready constituted--a world in which one knows that there is red, a language in which
one knows that there is the word "red," and in addition, a subject supposed capable of
using one to say the other. I wonder whether the true philosophical problem is not
once more that of foundation or origin (understood in a phenomenological, not a
chronological, sense); that is, whether reflection should not go back towards an un-
reflected prior to the distinction of subject and object, of world and language, in order
to try to show how the object (the red) is constituted simultaneously with the perceiv-
ing subject who becomes himself capable of thinking at the same time that he be-
comes capable of speaking (by re-inventing on his own the use of the word "red").
II
It is not in this direction that Wilfrid Sellars orients himself. He presupposes thought,
or the thinking subject, and in the second part of his paper, he asks himself how lan-
guage can express thought in order to communicate it. Within thought itself, he distin-
guishes form and content, and he first considers form alone, that is, belief; his strategy
consists of defining belief as disposition and his problem is to try to determine how
this disposition is expressed by language. The title of the second part (sections V-XII)
could be "Thought as Language" rather than "Language as Thought."
This further recourse to the notion of disposition (the disposition to think, not to
speak) leads Sellars into a dialectic: "My strategy," he says, "remains in a broad sense
dialectical." Yes, and even in a specific sense: this is the dialectic of the interior and
the exterior so often encountered in Hegel. For what is a potential which is not rea-
lized? A disposition to think must manifest itself by the fact of thinking, and this
thought must manifest itself as thought "out-loud." But here speech is not speaking,
but uttering: it is simply the means of giving body to thought, and not of communi-
cating it; discourse is neither a dialogue nor a monologue, it is only the manifestation
of an interior state.
We are once again in the behaviorist perspective; but Sellars is always on guard
against the reductionist element in behaviorism which is tempted to reduce thought to
the phenomenon of verbalization. To think out loud, Sellars observes, is still, or al-
ready, to think. And it is possible that this thought is also striving to communicate it-
self: language then becomes again the means of communication which permits me to
say, or also to dissimulate, what I think or what I believe, thus to be sincere or decep-
tive.
Hence Sellars fully recognizes the distinction between being and doing--a distinction
that seems to me to be more justified here than when it was used to define linguistic
rules. In one case, I am what I think; in the other, I say what I think. There result two
very different meanings of the word "expression" which are distinguished in terms of
the distance taken by thought in regard to language: in one instance, thought identifies
with language; in the other, thought uses language. In other words, sometimes expres-
sion is spontaneous and Sellars even says "involuntary" and sometimes it is premedi-
tated. In French, this distinction can be conveyed by the difference between "s'expri-
mer" (to express oneself) and "exprimer" (to express).
Sellars adds a third sense of the word "expression," terming it the "logical (or seman-
tical)"; this no longer takes into account the veracity of the speaker, but rather the ver-
ity of the statement: the statement must be correct in order to say truly what it means.
This analysis is assuredly interesting and necessary. And Sellars underpins it by
showing that the verbal behavior of the child is not immediately under his control: the
child expresses thoughts without knowing that he expresses them; or rather, he dis-
covers that he expresses them, and then learns to express them deliberately: "It is be-
cause the expression has a certain meaning that it can be effectively used to convey
the corresponding thought." Here again, Sellars complicates the behaviorist schema in
order to preserve the rights of the subject, that is, the interiority of mental acts: for the
subject, he says, expresses himself; i.e., thinks out loud, only if he in fact thinks
something and does not intend to keep his thoughts to himself. The whole debate be-
tween logical behaviorism and Professor Sellars bears on the exact sense of the syn-
tagma: to think out loud. To think out loud is indeed to think, and this presupposes a
disposition to think: it may be an act, but it presupposes a being.
I can only endorse the interest of these distinctions, whose importance Mr. Sellars
stresses in his introduction. But I wonder if the proper understanding of language does
not invite reflection to surpass them, or rather to locate itself just short of them, that is,
short of the old distinction between language and thought. If, as Sellars says so well,
"verbal behavior is already thinking in its own right," perhaps there is a common root
for the three senses of the word "express." To express is to be at once sinking and
speaking. For thought is nothing other than the possibility of putting oneself at a dis-
tance from things in order to name them and to possess them symbolically instead of
being taken up, and possessed, by them. This power is revealed--is expressed--in its
exercise, that is, through acts of speech in which the subject affirms himself as subject:
he is what he does. In other words, thought does not precede speech; it is nothing inte-
rior or internal. As Wittgenstein says, thought does not naturally lead us to conceive of
some "queer process."2 Thought exists entirely in behavior, the behavior of a concrete
individual--"Mr. X," as Wittgenstein says--that is. in linguistic operations: "The func-
tion must come out in operating with the word."3 In brief, speech expresses thought
because it is thought in act.
Yet just as language separates us from things, it can separate us from itself: it makes
possible a movement of reflection which introduces a gap between thought and its
expression, and which authorizes us to consider language as an instrument in the ser-
vice of thought: thus I can be silent or speak according to whether or not I wish to
communicate, and I can say or hide what I think. And I can also want to think some-
thing; I can will that my discourse have a sense, that it be neither absurd nor nonsen-
sical, and that it tell what is true. But perhaps the two norms of veracity and of verity,
2
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (London, MacMillan, 1961), par.
196; Wittgenstein underlines "process."
3
Ibid., par. 559; I underline "operating."
which jointly imply the dualism of thought--understood both as the intention animat-
ing speech and as the intellect controlling discourse--and of language are both already
proposed by the immediate experience of language. On the one hand (with respect to
the second sense of the word "express"), if thought is identified at the outset with
speech, an act of speech is immediately addressed to someone; it aims at the universal
and claims truth. Sellars indeed isolates "a language which does not function as a
means of communication," even from self to self; a language which is speaking and
not talking. But can one conceive of a speech which is so unreflected that it does not
reflect back (se reflechisse) on someone? How does one speak even in a low voice, or
even remaining silent, without hearing oneself speak? This hearing (entendre) is un-
derstanding (entendement); that is, thought. Language is a means of expressing one-
self which is inseparable from the consciousness of expressing oneself; it is in this that
it differs from all other spontaneous means of expression. Allow me to quote Witt-
genstein again: "A misleading parallel: the expression of pain is a cry--the expression
of thought, a proposition."4 Moreover, the monologue, even the interior monologue, is
always a latent social act: to express oneself is also to address oneself to an absent
other; a solitary discourse is not a solipsistic discourse. Even if the child coincides
with his speech, even if he does not have the thought that-p without thinking out loud
that-p, it is always to someone--to himself or to an imaginary interlocutor--that he says
"p".
By the same token, however, this thought, which at once constitutes itself and expe-
riences itself in speech, strives to be true. First, it wants to be heard by the other, by all
others: it assumes the form of universality, that is, the form of the true. Secondly,
speech always has a content. To say "this is red" is to think that this is red. Thought
can be true because language can say the world, thus installing us in truth: in a certain
commerce with the world according to which we are in the world as present to it, at
once blended with it and distinct from it.
Thus everything is given with language or with the fact of expression--all of the di-
mensions of thought: consciousness of the world, consciousness of self, consciousness
of others, and thought's claim to truth. But how is language itself given? Man gives it
to himself, but he has first to be man in order to give it to himself. I am grateful to Pro-
fessor Sellars for having shown that man has to be capable of language. If the devel-
opment of man and of culture is only understood through language, language in turn
is only understood through man. And the idea of disposition as the power of a
[human] nature should remain at the disposition of the philosopher.
But even if language itself is true, if it can say or express the world, and if this saying
is not the sovereign act of a Kantian subject imposing its laws on nature, then we must
also presume the world's disposition to be said (in very different ways; e.g., as logical
language accords with the logic of the world, or as the poetic word conjures up the
presence of the perceptible). The origin of language perhaps lies in this power of Phy-
sis (Nature). But Professor Sellars did not undertake a metaphysics of language; it
would thus be unjust and vain to op-pose to him a question which he does not himself
pose and which probably has no verifiable answer: "How is language possible?" *
4
Ibid., par. 317.
*
* Translated by Edward S. Casey.
UNIVERSITY OF PARIS, NANTERRE.