Brandom's Two-Ply Error

Abstract

Robert Brandom’s discussion of Sellars’s two-ply account of observation in his Tales of the Mighty Dead makes several crucial errors that would make Sellars’s analysis of “looks”-sentences incoherent. Brandom does not recognise the difference in “level” between observation reports concerning physical objects and “looks”-reports, and he denies that “looks”-sentences are reports or even make claims. We argue that a careful reading of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind does not support Brandom’s interpretation, and show how to read Sellars properly on the analysis of such sentences.