Abstract

In this article I examine Wilfrid Sellars’s account of linguistic rules and rule-following, with a special focus on how the topic emerges and develops in his earliest philosophical writings. In the first part of the article, I show how Sellars’s distinctively original approach to rules and rule-following is elaborated in the project of pure pragmatics in the late 1940s, through which he confronts Carnap’s idea of language as calculus and replaces it with the notion of an empirically meaningful language. The key point is the realization that a meaningful language cannot be reduced to a list of syntactic constraints supplemented by designation rules; it also requires conformation rules that reflect the material constraints of the world in which the language is embedded. This holistic, normative, nonrelational account of language and meaning anticipates Sellars’s later inferentialism, in which material rules of inference are constitutive of meaning. In the second part of the article, I address the wider problem of how rules can be embodied in behavior, which Sellars tackles from the point of view of the classic rule-following dilemma. The gist of his solution lies in the evolutionary-inspired notion of pattern-governed behaviour, which allows Sellars to show how it is possible for language learners to internalize rules in their practices without prior explicit cognitive awareness of them. Such account, refined in the interlacing of language-entry, intralinguistic, and language-exit transitions into a unified picture of concept acquisition, integrates the normative and natural dimension of linguistic activity.